As I type this, I’m in the lounge of a Subaru dealership, getting my car’s oil changed. It’s been a rough week for a plethora of reasons, but I’ll refrain from going into specifics since it’s all but guaranteed that this website will come up when future employers do background checks on me and I don’t want them thinking I’m a sad sack.
Christmas weekend went well enough, though. On Saturday, as I mentioned, I played Pathfinder with my friends- and that campaign ended in a fittingly Kafkaesque way. I was reminded of the ending to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Adams, 1980), or a classic Who serial. Christmas itself went well enough, too; I spent time with both sides of my family, although I wasn’t able to see my cousins, and as is known my older brother migrated to be with his flock (hipsters) in their promised land (Seattle).
It was after Christmas that everything started going to crap. Again, avoiding specifics, I felt like a husk, and only had the energy to do that which was expected of me as a son (my dad had surgery on Wednesday, thankfully there are no complications I know of) and nothing beyond that. Somehow, the second conlang post I drafted has ballooned beyond control, yet very little of that is actual, tangible progress.
Anyway, since half of these diary entries double as film reviews (or more accurately disjointed rambles), it is well known that when I’m at my lowest, the things I enjoy become unenjoyable. They remind me of happier days, but when I’m in the pit it feels more like mockery than reassurance? But I have to drown out my thoughts, and unfortunately I have the good sense to be teetotal, so I opt to experience the profoundly unpleasant instead. Harsh noise is usually the most effective, I’m particularly fond of Hijokaidan. However, I had heard Zack Snyder’s “Rebel Moon” was bad, so I just had to see it.
“Rebel Moon” did the impossible, pulling a Christmas… anti-miracle(?), I guess? I’d need to check a thesaurus, but what I mean is that it’s an incredibly improbable, yet horrible, event. Like the guy who got hit by both the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, for an extreme example. Anyway, I’m not some angry rant YouTuber, Rebel Moon is nowhere near as bad as nuclear weapons usage. But it still managed to dethrone Napoleon (dir. Ridley Scott, 2023) as the worst film of 2023 at the last minute.
It’s said that George Lucas, when making “A New Hope”, took a rough plot outline of “The Hidden Fortress” (dir Akira Kurosawa, 1958) and applied the trappings of Flash Gordon. I’ve heard people comparing “Rebel Moon” to Star Wars, but that isn’t quite right. To oversimplify quite a bit, Snyder took a rough plot outline of “Seven Samurai” and applied the trappings of Warhammer 40k. Which sounds awesome; as much as I’m ashamed to admit it, I like Snyder, at least in the abstract. Style over substance can work, especially in a visual medium like film. But there has to be at least a minimum of substance or else the film becomes unwatchable. “Rebel Moon” is unwatchable, less watchable than Scott’s “Napoleon”. “Napoleon” made me angrier, sure, but that’s because I had higher expectations going in- “Rebel Moon” is a slog to get through. I should have just listened to Hijokaidan.
Sierpinski Tetrahedron 