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The Night Comes For Us (Movie) Review

The Night Comes For Us (Directed by Timo Tjahjanto, Netflix, 2018)

This Indonesian martial arts movie is very much a throwback. Our unstoppable hero punches his way through hordes of endless mooks, each one of which is polite enough to attack solo before meeting their gory finish. The rest are content to wait their turn for a grisly demise, or to run around menacingly in the background for no reason. Except to look cool and pay homage to John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13.

The homages come frequently and the heightened gore and quick dispatch of nameless extras reminds me a lot of Sonny Chiba's The Street Fighter series. Which for those unaware should be taken as a warning. The Street Fighter was rated X when it was released in the US and The Night Comes For Us is cut from the same cloth. This isn't just a violent movie, it's a hard-R violent movie with buckets of blood and horrible deaths. Meat hooks are prominently featured in more than one scene.

The plot is bare bones but what do you want from a martial arts movie? An elite triad assassin has a crisis of conscience and saves a little girl after massacring everyone else in her village for stealing from his crime lord boss. This act of defiance can not be tolerated and the triad declares all out war, sending a battalion of their most-expendable henchmen after the traitorous Ito (The Raid alumnus Joe Taslim). Once the henchmen are dispatched in ignominious single combat, the field is cleared for the elite assassins (who actually have some personality) to arrive.

These include the younger, hipper version of Ito, his conflicted childhood friend Arian (The Raid 2 alumnus Iko Uwais) and a trio of female assassins who dispense with all the brooding and really vamp it up. The Operative (The Raid 2's Julie Estelle) steals the show and appears to be on loan from the Marvel Universe as a graduate of the Black Widow program.

It's not a great movie. It's very retro and that extends to a lot of the fight choreography. There are a few memorable scenes and fatalities, but none of the non-stop razzle dazzle you'd get from The Raid or vintage Jackie Chan. But for a bit of action movie nostalgia there are worse ways to spend two hours.

Notes

• The final fight between Ito and Arian borrows a lot from Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series, by which I mean Warner Brothers cartoons

• I'd like to give props to Ito's gang buddies who bravely join his fight, but *spoiler alert* none of them appeared in The Raid movies. Fortunately they are fun while they last and each gets the kind of cool last stand that guys fantasize about having.

• For some reason I accept this universe's treatment of guns. Guns exist, people use them, they are not dishonorable. They just don't get used much. People are really into stabbing.

• Speaking of which, if you get stabbed? You shouldn't pull out the knife. It's keeping the blood in. Also, walking into the knife so you can punch your opponent at closer range? Not a good idea.

• Fortunately nobody worries about blood because bleeding out isn't a thing. You can get stabbed twenty, thirty times and as long as you have an artfully ripped t-shirt to soak up the blood? You'll be fine.

• One last shout out? To Reina (Asha Bermudez) as the little girl who didn't sign up for any of this. She wakes up, pets her cat, helps mom with breakfast, goes to school. Then everyone she knows is murdered by gunmen, her village is burnt to the ground, and she's kidnapped by an angst-ridden psycho. Her next few days are filled with crazed murderers dying in brutal hand-to-hand combat interspersed with the occasional car chase and everybody is yelling all the time. The kid is going to need either years of therapy or a sequel where she appears as a kick-ass vigilante out for revenge.

Super Genii

 “Is Root smarter than Finch?”

It's a simple question about Person of Interest that unpacks a lot of thought. What do we mean by smarter? Encyclopedic recall? Perception and pattern recognition? The ability to make a lie detector out of coconuts?

Psychiatrists are still trying to figure out whether general intelligence (aka IQ) is a thing and if so how it should be measured. Typical eggheads. Fortunately pop-culture has all the answers, or at least the answers that reflect the way our society thinks it works.

I started out by doing a quick Kagi search to see if it was better than Google. It is, but I'm not sure it's $5/month better. Fortunately what I was looking for wasn't obscure and a half-dozen websites yielded up their lists of the smartest characters in popular fiction. Between the lists, comments from the peanut galleries and my own entries we wound up with 152 nominees which resolved to 77 unique characters dubbed geniuses..

From which we learn:

• Geniuses are overwhelmingly male. Only 17.1 percent of the characters dubbed genius were of the fairer sex.
• They fight crime! A first stab at professions had a detective of some sort as the most popular job with 30.7 percent of our geniuses working for The Man. The second most popular choice was, ironically, being a criminal at 18.7 percent.
• Being a genius is serious business. Only 22.7 of the nominated geniuses appeared in a comedy, the other 77.3 percent appeared in dramas.
• Things are less serious if you are in a comedy. Geniuses in comedies are ridiculously lacking in grace, humility or a non-sesquipedalian vocabulary a whopping 58 percent of the time, while those in dramas suffer from such stereotypes at half that rate.
• Child prodigies are the minority. Only one in five of our geniuses was under the age of 18. Interestingly if you are a child genius the chances of being a woman doubled to 35.7 percent.
• We like our geniuses credentialed. Almost one in three (29.3 percent) of our geniuses had some sort of PhD, MD or law degree, which compares favorably to the US total of 5.5 percent.
• PhDs are the way to go with 45.4 percent of our credentialed geniuses having one or more, with MDs coming in second at 36.4 percent.
• Lawyers and “professors” rounded out the roll call at 9.1 percent each.
• Only one of our geniuses, Michael Scofield of Prison Break, decided that a master's degree was the sweet spot for higher education.
• It was impossible to determine the educational attainment of four geniuses. Three of them were beings from another planet, but Walter White of Breaking Bad was a human enigma. His degree is never mentioned on the show, but it was revealed he did original research in chemistry at CalTech. That suggests some kind of post-graduate degree but we don't know what kind. Perhaps it's fitting that a man who chose the alias Heisenberg resists categorization.

• The most nominated genius was Sherlock Holmes whose adventures have been continuously retold since the character debuted in 1887. If nobody is doing a Holmes homage on Tik-Tok, the bit where he reveals everything about someone he just met should fit into a 30 second video pretty easily. Ironically Sherlock is canonically not the brightest person in his own stories. His brother Mycroft is unquestionably smarter, Irene Adler outwitted the Great Detective at his own game and Moriarity ran a criminal empire under Sherlock's nose for decades. Plus their final battle ended in a tie, until audience demand resurrected Sherlock from the grave.
• Pop culture has a short memory. With few exceptions most of the listed geniuses had a show that debuted or was still airing new episodes in the last ten years. In fact the only character that received more than one nomination that did not appear in TV or movies during the 21st century was... Urkel from Family Matters.

With a list of geniuses the logical next step is to set up a bracket, have them face off and determine the winner. But how? Sherlock Holmes would probably bomb an IQ test since he doesn't know or care about things that don't concern him, like the basic movement of the planets. Adrian Monk can't compete in a Jeopardy tournament because the buzzer would be too unsanitary to pick up. The Professor from Gilligan's Island would dominate any inventing contest as long as he had access to palm fronds, while any kind of murder mystery party with the likes of Rick Sanchez, Frasier Crane and Hannibal Lecter is going to end up in actual murder before the night is out.

Still, I'm not done playing around with this spreadsheet, which I'll have to post once I figure out the best format, so I may revisit this topic. It was a lot easier figuring out which cereal mascot would win back in the day.

Oh, and while Root is clearly more dangerous than Finch, she's only a menace as long as she's an unknown. Once aware that she and people like her exist he'll come up with a devious plan worthy of Harold Finch/Benjamin Linus/Michael Emerson. It's a pity he's American because if you were looking for a character to play Doctor Who's nemesis, The Master? He'd be perfect. Audiences love watching that guy scheme.

Squid Game (TV Show) Review

Squid Game (Season One, Nine Episodes, Netflix, 2021) 

I'm obviously late to the party on this one, but I finally got around to watching South Korea's entry into the Battle Royale genre. It definitely deserved the hype as I can't remember the last series I watched which played with my emotions and intellect as much as this one did.

By Battle Royale, I'm referring to the 1999 book by Kōshun Takami which invented the now-popular “Let's all murder each other for prizes!” genre. Notable entries include the 2000 movie of the same name, the Hunger Game series (first published in 2008), and Squid Game in 2021. So if you are looking for a shockingly violent critique of society seen through the lens of a murder competition? We can expect a new one to arrive about every ten years or so.

Squid Game takes the formula and puts a reality show spin on things, with the characters signing up to play a series of children's games with deadly consequences. Teams, alliances, secret challenges and all the other tropes of the reality genre make their appearance but fortunately the show aims higher than a simple Survivor satire. Instead it takes it's audience and characters through a series of gut-punching twists and turns that feels surprisingly packed even at eight hours split up over nine episodes. If I was to compare it to anything it would be early Lost before the ever growing cast and mysteries turned it from compelling to frustrating

Unlike Lost, Squid Game actually answers the questions that the audience raises. Why don't the players do X? What about Y? Why are the game-masters doing Z? The creators thought of these things as well and rather than paper them over with more, distracting mysteries they actually answer them. And after doing that they pile on more plot twists, but all of them make sense in the context of the show, unlike some of the “OH COME ON!” twists in say... Money Heist or late-season Heroes and Westworld.

If I'm comparing Squid Game to a lot of other shows? That's because Squid Game shines in comparison. It's a thriller done right. And if that's all it did it, it would deserve all the praise heaped upon it. But, it's also a Battle Royale show and that is it's own special thing. The audience is compelled to wonder not only how they would handle the physical challenges, but the moral ones as well. It's a crucible where character is revealed, and Squid Game has some great characters.

Our initial viewpoint character, Gi-hun (played by Lee Jung-jae who I won't pretend I've seen before) does almost too good a job in the first episode portraying the sort of degenerate gambler who could easily vanish and not have the authorities concerned about his disappearance. It's actually a brilliant choice and without giving too much away while his arc may not be classically heroic? It's still a journey and we learn this man is just that. A fallible person who found life's circumstances more than they could handle. After the first episode you might decide you'll never root for him, and you might not, but you will understand him better as the series goes on.

The contestants are quickly whittled down but I do have to give shout-outs to Il-nam, the old man with no other place to go (played by Oh Yeong-Su), Deok-su, the gangster with a heart of poison (played deliciously and increasingly over-the-top by Heo Sung-tae) and Jun-ho, Republic of Korea's Super Action Police Agent Number One! (played by Wi Ha-joon). There's really not a bad performance in the bunch, and if you think there is? Just wait 15 minutes.

Speaking of which, this show is violent. Not John Wick violent or Kurosawa violent or John Woo violent with cartwheels and squibs and fountains of blood, but disturbingly close to the real world violent. Lots of people die in this show and it is depicted graphically on camera. People get shot in the head a lot and they don't die nobly. They plead and cry and beg for their lives and that's the point. The Squid Game (which by the way is named after a Korean schoolyard game whose closest equivalent was homophobically called “Smear the Queer” in my youth) takes advantage of people in bad circumstances and shows them no mercy. It makes sense since series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk had to hock his laptop to pay his bills while writing this script, then spent ten years getting rejection, after rejection while trying to get it made. When Battle Royale came out it was considered disturbing, controversial and horrific. Now we are grading the genre on how well they criticize modern society without falling into parody.

(Gore warning. Gore is plentiful but brief, and unlike the real world? Bullets are wands of instant death. You won't be subjected to endless screaming as participants bleed out and/or choke on their own blood. I guess that's something we can look forward to when the next Battle Royale drops in 2030 or so?)

For those into non-gore visuals? You are in for a treat. Some impressive design choices upfront are honestly like few things we've seen before. The bland contestant costumes, the inhuman outfits of the game-masters and the innocent, pastel sets for the deadly children's games add up to a gripping mix of beauty, dread and shocking violence. The terrible threat of violence elevates even the most mundane activities into terrifying situations and the recurring use of certain motifs might change your opinion of certain classical themes forever. Time will tell, but Squid Game has a good chance of claiming Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz away from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And switching back, not to say it's all horrific. There's plenty of twists and turns and thrilling victories, and to be honest? There are certain creators whose work clicks with me and I know we both read the same kind of stuff growing up. Squid Game, above and beyond it's social criticism, includes masked villains, secret islands, uniformed henchmen, frogmen, secret passages, even a monologue about how the bad guys are just trying to create a better world. Here's hoping that with his Squid Game success that creator Dong-hyuk can stretch his wings, because I am totally down for that kind of swashbuckling, comic-book action.

A second season is promised and while sequels rarely improve on the original I'm cautiously optimistic. There is a larger world to explore and while the games will undoubtedly return they don't have to be the whole focus. There is also an actual game show being worked on, which will somehow make the inspiration which focused on the horrific murder of desperate people for the entertainment of others wholesome and family friendly. Call me skeptical. But who am I to judge?

Additional notes:

• There's a surprising amount of competence porn going on, as in people who know what they are doing and doing it well. It's worth watching for that alone. And if you are into that? Watch Travelers, also on Netflix. Trust me on this one.
• If you are the least bit intimidated by the fact that this is a South Korean show? Relax. Dubbing has come a long way since 1970s Kung-Fu flicks. Besides you are probably old and watching with subtitles on anyway.
• You don't have to google exchange rates during the show. 1,000 Republic of Korea won is about a dollar. So 10,000 won is $10 USD, and one billion won is about one million USD. You can probably double that because things are cheaper over there. Or so I'm guessing from the price of a bus ticket mentioned on the show.

The Batman (Movie) Review

The Batman (Directed by Matt Reeves, Warner Brothers, 2022)

Finally got around to watching this on Amazon Prime. In terms of the Batman films (that I've seen) I'd probably put it in the top-half, but I'm not very enthusiastic about it.

For starters at 177 minutes this film is nearly three hours long and it absolutely did not need to be. Avengers: Endgame ran slightly longer at 181 minutes, but that movie was wrapping up story-lines, references and jokes that had been set up in 21 previous movies released over the course of a decade. The Batman was juggling four different villains in barely related plots and rule number one of superhero movies? The more villains you stuff into a film the worse it is going to be.

Despite suffering from villain bloat, the film has a lot going for it including a star-studded cast. Robert Pattinson channels his rage at the Twilight movies into his angry, young Bruce Wayne. Jeffrey Wright (Daniel Craig's CIA buddy in the James Bond films) is fun as always and gets some zingers in as Batman's police buddy Jim Gordon. Zoe Kravitz, Paul Dano, John Turturro and an almost unrecognizable Colin Farrell round out the Whitman's sampler of villains. Farrell deserves extra credit for clearly relishing his role as The Penguin who he plays as a snarling, Coppola-style gangster.

Which is where my other objection comes in. I get that modern directors want to pay homage to the films that influenced them. Lucas and Spielberg wanted to remake 1930s serial films giving us iconic series like Star Wars and Indiana Jones. 

For some reason the secret password to getting your Scorsese-homage filmed is to jump on the superhero bandwagon as seen in The Joker (2019) by Todd Phillips.The Batman follows the same title scheme and despite being set in the present day it's heart is clearly in the 1970s. From the stark opening credits to its depiction of Gotham as graffiti-covered and overrun by hoodlums it is clear what era Reeves is longing to direct in. Even the Batmobile harkens back to the age of Serpico being based on the chassis of a late-60s Dodge Charger.

The film captures the atmosphere beautifully and the cinematography is top-notch, but we've seen decaying Gotham City before, along with the constant arguing about whether it can be saved or deserves to be saved. Meanwhile cities in the real world have survived AIDS, crack, personal autos, suburban migration, reckless demolition, double-digit interest rates plus a host of other challenges and emerged stronger than ever. The skyline of today's New York resembles the futuristic towers of Metropolis more than the gritty hell-scape seen in early Al Pacino films.

Also, if Gotham is such a hell-hole, why would anyone live there? New York, even at the worst of times, was the place to be if you wanted to work in finance, fashion, advertising, theater or publishing. It was the Greatest City in the World and it's inhabitants never let you forget that, even if a garbage strike had let six weeks of trash pile up during the summer. That's the Gotham I want to see, not one consumed with self-doubt and morose musings about whether there's still room for hope in the world.

Batman and his supporting cast are a plastic bunch and while I've loved the more grounded take on a billionaire ninja who fights crime with a rocket car? It's starting to become stale. We don't have to go full Adam West, but let's see more knight and less dark.

Finally, while the film was respectful of the source material, something early superhero films often lacked, there were two little bits that struck me as off.

** SPOILERS BELOW **

There's a subplot where it's suggested that Thomas Wayne, Batman's dad, reached out to a mobster to do some dirty work for him. Making Thomas Wayne corrupt is part of that “grit fatigue” trend I mentioned earlier, but why would he reach out to a mobster? He's got Alfred the Butler (played by Andy Serkis aka Gollum from the Lord of the Rings) to do his dirty work. And Alfred is not a dude you want to mess with.

There's a related plot about a reporter working on a story about Martha Wayne, Batman's mom, who in this film was born Martha Arkham. The story was going to reveal that Martha and her family had a history of mental illness. And yes, that would be the Arkham family, of the Gotham Arkhams, the founders of Arkham Asylum, which was inspired by the insanity-filled tales of HP Lovecraft who was haunted by his own history of family madness

I did love Pattinson's reaction to this news and realizing that maybe he wasn't processing his grief in a healthy way, But the Arkham family has always been depicted as nuttier than a five pound fruitcake. Telling the gossipy citizens of Gotham (where Bruce Wayne is recognized on sight by everyone) that the Arkhams are a few sandwiches short of a picnic is like me telling the people of Boston that the Kennedy family has some acquaintanceship with tragedy.

How Heavy Is Your Hill Giant? - Part Two

Some of my future plans for this website include the use of javascript calculators to make things fun and easy. To test the waters I whipped up a short calculator illustrating how you can use the BMI equation to find out other things and am including it below. When in doubt, just hit Clear All and start from scratch but it should be pretty easy to figure out.

Height-Weight-BMI Calculator

Height (cm)

Weight (kg)

BMI (19 to 24 is healthy)

 

Looks like the javascript insert is working well, so now to include a link to the downloadable file. 

Height-Weight-BMI Calculator.htm

This will give you an HTML file that you can launch in your browser that will duplicate the script embedded here. The only non-local resource is a link to a stylesheet hosted on Bootstrap.

How Heavy Is Your Hill Giant?

Sometimes when I'm off on a weird tangent I have to use a Standard Reference Human when crunching numbers. What's the average person's weight, height, surface area, volume? That sort of thing. The answer for all of these is that it depends on sex, age, ethnicity and a multitude of other factors that I ignore to make calculations easier.

It turns out that defining a Standard Reference Human is actually serious business done by various national and international organizations for safety, engineering and ergonomic requirements. It's also semi-controversial since standards that work great for a 6'0" man might not be so great for a 5'0" woman. Fortunately I can ignore all of that, grab whatever values show up in my search results and then round them off to make calculations easier.

So without further ado, my Standard Reference Human is below. All values are in metric because have you tried doing math in the Imperial system? Actual values are taken from a variety of sources.

Key	My Value	Actual Value	Notes
Height	200 cm	170 cm	At 6'7" my value is grotesquely inflated, but two meters is a nice easy figure to work with.
Weight	100 kg	70 kg	Again my value is high, making our giant dude slightly overweight.
Volume	100 liters	66 liters	This number is not only easy to work with, it is also consistent with my previous two figures
Density	1.01 kg per liter	1.01 kg per liter	Life is basically self-directed seawater. A handful of other chemicals in a mix of 99% H20.
Surface Area	2 square meters	1.5 to 2 square meters	You can find anything on the internet, including skin area calculators. My number is a bit low for 200cm, but reasonable. Source: https://www.calculator.net/body-surface-area-calculator.html

One advantage of using my larger values, besides ease of calculation, is having a built in safety margin. So if you need to calculate something that will work for the pro-wrestler sized numbers above you know that it will absolutely work with regular people.

So that's great when you want to estimate how much material you'll need to make uniforms for 10,000 soldiers or something equally wacky. But while working on another project I found myself asking “How tall would a human shaped object be if it had to contain 3 square meters?”

You could just assume a spherical human and call it a day. I find it easier to work with cubes and there you could quarter the depth, quadruple the height and get a rough rectangle shape. That could work. But luckily for us there's an equation out there that works perfectly for calculating human heights and weights.

The Body Mass Index or BMI. Scourge of power-lifters and middle-aged men getting physicals alike, this formula divides your weight by your height to get a measure of how obese you are. A range of 19 to 24 is considered healthy with figures above and below that indicating how underweight or overweight you are.

BMI = Weight (kg) divided by Height (meters) squared

Using our Standard Reference Human above we use the following equation: Take the weight in kilograms and divide it by the height in meters squared (BMI=w(kg)/h(m)^2) or 100 kg/ (2 meters)^2 → 100/4 = 25 for a slightly overweight individual.

The fun thing about equations though is that you can flip them around and use them to solve for things you aren't supposed to. And if right now you want to bolt from this website and never come back I feel you. The way they teach math in our schools is an abomination and traumatizes millions of kids every year. Math isn't about mindless calculation and rote formulas. It's a set of lock picks for opening up the secrets of the universe. It's a damn shame it's not taught that way.

So, we can take our BMI equation and flip it around. I'd walk you through the steps but it's been decades since I did it and I was never good at it. But I know it can be done so I had WolframAlpha.com do it for me giving us the two equations below.

Height (meters) = Square Root of Weight (kg) divided by the Square Root of BMI.

Weight (kg) = BMI times the Height (meters) squared.

For our purposes we'll make the Standard Reference BMI 25, which is a bit unhealthy but is a lot easier to work with since the square root is 5. So now we can answer all sorts of silly questions, like how much does a hill giant weigh? According to Dungeons and Dragons they are 5 meters tall, so we square that to get 25, multiply that by our reference BMI of 25 and get 625 kg or about 1,400 lbs.

What about shapeshifters? Let's say you are looking for were-bears amongst the populace and despite living in a world of magic and wonder assume that conservation of mass still applies. According to Wikipedia the average weight of an adult brown bears is 217 kg, so let's solve for height. We take the square root of 217, which is around 15, and divide that by the square root of our reference BMI of 25, which is a nice easy 5 and we get 15 / 5 = 3 meters. So to find the hidden were-bears keep an eye out for any adult males who are 9'10" tall.

Feel free to play with the numbers if you want to figure out the stats for runway model were-bears or hill giants who have really let themselves go. Also a fun fact, in metric a kilogram of water is equal to a liter in size, so you if you have the weight of a person you have the volume as well within one percent.