More on the firefly funhouse

After having watched WrestleMania (largely free of spoilers), I started reading some of the online reactions to the matches, especially the godawful Boneyard and brilliant Firefly Funhouse matches. I was intrigued!

Alfred Konuwa of Forbes decided the Boneyard match was:

…immediately lauded as a masterpiece, the likes of which will be lionized in WWE history…

Alfred Konuwa

Surprising, right? I’ll see if I can find an actual review he did of what was essentially an ego trip squash match wherein a 55 year old part timer pretty much ended the careers of younger, better workers, filmed like a Z-movie. I’d love to understand the rationale that led to such a conclusion.

There’s something in Konuwa saying the online reaction was positive. USA Today seemed to like it, in a write-up that as nothing if not concise. Death Valley Driver, the message board I used to go to (a lot) in my early 20s also – generally – liked it. This was because they like schlocky “so bad it’s good” stuff like Walker, Texas Ranger and Sharknado rather than thinking it was anything approaching a “masterpiece”.

At least Konuwa decided the Firefly Funhouse match was “arguably the best of the show“. Phew!

In fact, the latter was not only incredibly enjoyable to view, but begat at least as much entertainment again for me in reading the analysis. Konuwa decided the segment recalling WCW’s New World Order era suggested this was a parallel world in which WCW beat WWF in the ratings war. Maybe, but I prefer the idea that this segment was Wyatt telling Cena that the next step in his emulation of Hulk Hogan was to turn heel, as nobody took him seriously as either a hero or an underdog anymore.

Post Wrestling has an insightful piece suggesting exactly that. Well worth a read.

In this vision, Cena has completed a fateful transformation into his childhood idol. Hogan, a man often criticized for overstaying his time in the spotlight at the expense of underprivileged talents, managed to prolong his oppressive dominance for multiple generations by tapping into his own dark side as part of the nWo.

Wai Ting

But I think the best article I’ve read about the match – certainly the most detailed – is from Uproxx. They break down every element and spell it out, maybe a little heavy handedly, but you can’t fault their painstaking approach to analysis. I think this says it all in terms of their approach:

We begin with Cena’s creation. This is represented by Cena standing in a dark room, surrounded by nothingness, while a heart beats in the background. This is John before “John Cena.” His persona only exists in a dark void, waiting to be created. And who created him?

Brandon Stroud

Devs episode 1

Ooh, FX, you’re a decent channel. After bringing us the likes of Fargo, Atlanta and What We Do in the Shadows (as well as stuff I want to see, like Snowfall and American Crime Story), we now have the bewitching Devs, which UK people can watch on BBC 2 or the iPlayer.

Devs seems to be somewhere between a science fiction show and a socio-cultural analysis both of Big Tech and how life is changing in the Bay Area. We witness the daily life and work of Sergei (Karl Glusman) and Lily (Sonoya Mizuno), who both get bussed out from their ultra-modern (if dim and modest) home, saying goodbye to their friendly homeless guy on the way out, to work at the ultra-high-tech Amaya campus, which is dominated by forest and an unsettlingly giant statue of a little girl. Once there, they are managed/mentored by Forest (Nick Offerman), who is bearded and maned in contrast to the young couple’s short hair and high cheekbones. Sergei and Lily are as minimalist as their apartment, and you wonder if Forest has had his shaggy individuality bestowed upon him with seniority and experience.

Did anyone else get flashbacks to Akira when they saw this?

I work in the general area of data/technology/Agile development, so Silicon Valley generally and this show specifically intrigue and entertain me. Silicon Valley is clearly the apex of achievement (and power) for people who work in my sector, and its ambition, modernity and endless money mean Devs may be a fantasy or eerily close to reality. I think that’s why it works.

Take the cloister in which the titular and mentioned-in-hushed-tones devs work: the lead Faraday shield, the 13 yard thick concrete shell, the gold mesh, the eight yard vacuum seal… It’s just like when I was product owner for my old place’s model office project, and we were testing out the physical environment! Yep, just like that. I jest, but the screens of code offer a passing familiarity to anyone who’s used VIsual Studio or R Studio in dark mode.

There is an utter serenity to the TV show for the first half of the episode. The setting is predictably beautiful and futuristic, partly due to being in northern California, and partly to communicate the sci-fi Mammon nature of Silicon Valley. Conversations take place at levels just over whisper; the incidental music ambiently relaxing: even the lighting is soothing. This makes for a show that is a tad unsettling in its ethereal-cum-somnambulist atmosphere, but one which has some very clever and beautiful sequences, such as the “hall of mirrors” style conversation among the golden pillars in the header photo.

As Sergei and his pals demo some AI to Forest, I am struck by the beauty of the lighting on this shot.

All beautiful and relaxing, that is, until Sergei breaks down, and the soundtrack grows a touch more discordant and shrill. Everything changes. It’s night, and Sergei is stressed out. He’s been promoted from AI to Devs, and the pressure is on. He starts crying as the enormity of his assignment becomes clear (again, like model office). Crying and puking into a perfect Silicon Valley toilet. He then does something with his Seiko watch that I don’t realise until Forest tells us while confronting Sergei. If you don’t mind spoilers, he uses his watch to film the code that’s scrolling up his screen, and is then suffocated – Prisoner style – by campus security.

Okay, so he’s not the main character any more.

The rest of the episode is understandably darker, as Sergei’s girlfriend Lily tres to find out what happened to him while seemingly being led down the garden path by Forest and the Amaya massive.

But why is everyone so chilled out? As I mentioned earlier, there is a serenity: the show is almost meditative. As well as the relaxing lighting and (for the most part) music, nobody raises their voice. Not even when Lily seeks out an ex she’s not spoken to for two years and asks him to help her current beau. He tells her to eff off in a shockingly measured manner. (Maybe he’d spent the last two years planning for just that moment, and decided to play it cool.)

I mentioned disinformation. While we know that Amaya staff have killed Sergei, we – and Lily – see CCTV footage in two sections. The first is as he walks with purpose off campus. The next as he pours petrol on himself and self-immolates, Thic Quang Duc-style, back on campus. Assuming this is a very clever graphical simulation thanks to Amaya tech, one wonders why the former employer would portray Sergei’s alleged suicide in such a demonstrative way. I guess it is effective visual storytelling if nothing else.

In a sense, the 50 minutes of near-whispering and ambient music pays off when Lily sees the footage and primally roars in grief, shattering the dreamlike atmosphere of the show. Episode ends when she rushes to see Sergei’s charred corpse for confirmation; one assumes Amaya did this after the suffocation.

I’m definitely intrigued as to where we go from here. I’ve not seen any of Garland’s work thus far, but Devs episode 1 is stylish, compelling and unsettlingly beautiful.

Knives Out

Dir: Rian Johnson, 2019

I wasn’t sure what to make of this one, before I saw it. It looked like fun, and a friend whose opinion I respect recommended it. But it looked a bit period-y, and I’ve never been that into Agatha Christie.

I was wrong: it’s not period-y at all. In fact, it’s pretty much modern day, and falls into the Hail, Caesar! and Grand Budapest Hotel ensemble semi-farce category that I spend so much of my time enjoying, these days.

So what the eff is it? Well, Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) – a very successful, very old author – is dead. And he’s got a big, financially hungry family. And some staff. So how did this come about? Yes, it’s a modern “who did it?” film. That’s right – a whodidit. Maybe he did it. But why is there a private investigator in addition to the standard cops?

Knives Out was written and directed by Rian Johnson. The name looked familiar, so I looked him up. He’s done at least three films that I think are great, so he’s now on my watchlist. Well, three including this. He’s also got Brick and Looper, which I really enjoyed, and Star Wars: the Last Jedi, which I am not sure my memory can differentiate from any other new Star Wars film, but which I am sure I reasonably enjoyed at the time.

This kind of film essentially stands or falls on the quality of the cast (and the writing of course, but you really need a big cast like this to pull its weight). As you can see from my tags, we’ve got some big hitters here, and they are all great, despite (or because of) Daniel Craig’s accent which I think is supposed to be New Orleans but does go round the houses a bit. Craig plays Benoit Blanc, the aforementioned PI, and it’s a role we can see him ageing into after he finally turns Bond down once and for all. Most of the cast, though, constitute the remaining Thrombey family, and they’re like the Royal Tenenbaums but with a story to hold them together. A story of inheritance! Oh, and how their dear dad perished.

I don’t know about you, but I regularly get confused by sleuth films and heist films. Knives Out is reasonably easy to follow (no spoilers) for the most part, and I can’t really think of any plot holes beyond the occasional coincidence. Don’t ask me to name them now, as I can’t remember: I just remember thinking “hmm, how convenient that the thing did the thing at that time”. Nowhere near as beautifully confusing as, say Logan Lucky (which incidentally has my favourite Daniel Craig performance outside Our Friends in the North).

I know certain sectors of the audience enjoy Chris Evans, especially considering he’s approached the opportunity to play a bad boy with some gusto. And he is good. But he’s nowhere near as raspily charismatic as the giant-headed acting savant that is Michael Shannon. From his role as on-the-edge Bureau of Prohibition agent George Mueller in Boardwalk Empire to his noble attempts to save Man of Steel by playing the life out of General Zod, Shannon is the best actor in everything he’s in. (Honestly, if you don’t believe me, please watch My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done; or Midnight Special; or Little Drummer Girl; or The Runaways; or The Iceman; or Shotgun Stories; or The Shape of Water. I’ve not even seen Take Shelter.)

Shannon actually doesn’t play a pivotal role, but he is great when sharing scenes with protagonist Marta Cabrera (played by Ana de Armas), the late Harlan Thrombey’s nurse and the centre of the intrigue. This is the first I’ve seen of de Armas, but she plays the caring, somewhat discombobulated Cabrera very well. There is also a great detail, possibly a statement about White America’s view on immigrants, that whenever a family member mentions where she is from, it is always a different South American country.

Rest assured: the story is excellent, and it finishes satisfactorily. What does intrigue me is the fact that this $40m budget film has so far made over $300m worldwide. So we’re getting a Knives Out 2 (Electric Boogaloo)! Quite what it will be about I don’t know. What happens next with Marta and the Thrombeys, or will it be a Fargo (TV series)-style thematic sequel with no direct ties. Given the way cinema is going, with its conveyor belt approach to film-making, the studio will fear the latter would confuse everyone. But if Johnson remains at the helm, it should be high quality nevertheless.

WrestleMania 36 (night 1)

This was always going to be a weird one. I’ll admit, I haven’t watched a full WrestleMania since number 20, back in 2004. To be honest, the only reason I was watching up until that point was the insane physicality (strength, agility and that absurd physique) of Brock Lesnar. When he left, I did. And with Randy Couture and Mike Van Arsdale in UFC at that time, real fights actually had better wrestling content than WWE did.

But I’ve been watching for the last few months, with some interest. The matches are not great, but the TV is pretty compelling. And with no actual sport happening, WWE (and their superior rival AEW) have the market pretty much to themselves. They just have no audience in person.

So this was always going to be a weird one because, instead of the stadium shows they usually have for this event, this year’s WrestleMania took place in their own Performance Center (sic), with no audience. The test, therefore, was in making this seem like the annual epic flagship show rather than some local broadcast. Also, as all the commentators had to constantly remind us:

THIS IS TOO BIG FOR JUST ONE NIGHT

The first match did a pretty good job as an opener. The general rule is you want to open a show with an exciting, fast paced match that won’t be so epic as to upstage the main event(s). Here, we had a women’s tag team title match between Kabuki Warriors (Kairi Sane and the brilliant Asuka) and Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross. And it really did the job. The heels (bad guys) had some very good sections of offence on one of the babyfaces (good guys).

The idea is you want the other babyface to tag in and get some revenge on the heels, so it’s all about building that anticipation, with jerk moves, near tags and things like that. Asuka and Sane are such great heels that this worked really well, especially with plucky Alexa Bliss playing the underdog so well. I was a little surprised that the heels didn’t successfully defend, as they are awesome, but the “hot tag” was had, there were some pretty high impact moves leading to the finish, and if there had been an audience, they’d have been satisfied by the outcome. I just like the bad guys, what can I say.

Then things went a bit weird, and there was a sequence of what should have been grudge matches that felt slightly flat. Perhaps this is where a really hot crowd would have picked things up, both in generating atmosphere for the audience at home, and giving something for the TV audience to feed off.

So there was Elias vs. King Corbin, which was thrown together by Rob Gronkowski of all people. It was supposed to be a grudge match, but all I could garner from it was Elias plays annoying songs as his gimmick, Corbin won King of the Ring and is a bit arrogant, and they don’t like each other. The match itself was a bit back and forth, and Corbin won it with a roll-up. I’d actually forgotten that finish a few hours later, and had to look it up for this write-up.

There was Becky Lynch vs. Shayna Baszler, which was supposed to be an uber grudge match, given that Baszler kept attacking Becky, was the first woman (or person?) ever to eliminate everyone else in Elimination Chamber, and was positioned as the greatest threat ever to this distaff Hulk Hogan. Match was okay, and the ending was clever, as Becky countered Baszler’s rear naked choke – with which she’d been putting everyone to sleep – into a pin. It surprised Baszler enough to get the three-count. Surprisingly technical end to what was largely a brawl, and was pretty much another roll-up.

Next was a disappointment between Daniel Bryan and Sami Zayn. This should have been great, but was just Zayn playing chickenshit heel and stalling while Bryan tried wrestling. Decent finish, as Zayn kicked Bryan out of the air as he came off the top turnbuckle, but otherwise not much of a thing.

There was a bizarre ladder match, the exposition of which I seem to have missed. My bad. It was for the SmackDown! men’s tag team championship, but only one member of each team was in the thing. (Oh, Miz of the defending champs fell ill, so it was one from each team.) Again, it wasn’t an epic, but again there was a clever finish. See, to win a ladder match, you need to incapacitate your opponent(s) to a degree sufficient that you can climb a ladder and grab the belt(s) dangling above the ring.

The conclusion of this one saw all three men climb ladders and all grab the belt or the ring it was hanging from. The two babyfaces smacked the heel (John Morrison, the non-Miz half of the defending champions) in unison, sending him flying – but he was holding the belt! Even though he was pretty much unconscious, ridiculously ripped body dangling limply on a horizontal ladder, Morrison retained the titles for his team. Shawn Michaels vs. Razor Ramon or Edge and Christian vs. The Hardy Boyz this most definitely was not.*

Kevin Owens (kind of the people’s wrestler, as he’s a bit softer-built than most) vs. Seth Rollins (annoying pretty boy who’s actually well cast as the pompous “Monday Night Messiah”) was another grudge match. Because they started with big moves, after about two minutes, both wrestlers were in “I’m dead” mode.

Rollins got disqualified after hitting Owens with the ring bell, so Owens got the match restarted as a no disqualification one. As is usually the case with no DQ matches, we had one massive shot, a lot of lying about, rinse and repeat. Again a touch anticlimactic, as they followed up a very impressive elbowdrop from the top of the stage decoration with a bit of mucking about where “KO” dragged Rollins into the ring, hit him with a stunner and pinned him. It would have been more impressive if they’d made a call that falls count anywhere and the pin came after the big spot.

I almost forgot about this one (sorry, this is a long post): Goldberg vs. Braun Strowman. Strowman, like Dolph Ziggler, Jack Swagger and Brodus Clay, has one of those awful made-up names that is neither a real name like Brock Lesnar or Kurt Angle, nor a proper “wrestling” name like Randy Savage or the Ultimate Warrior. Oh well.

This one came about because Goldberg – two decades past his prime – inexplicably beat the Fiend (Bray Wyatt) for the universal title, so named because I guess that’s more impressive than a world title, and his challenger Roman Reigns dropped out because of self isolation. So Strowman stepped in because reasons. The match itself was embarrassing. Goldberg hit a few spears which Strowman kicked out of, and then Strowman hit Goldberg with a few powerslams, which he failed to kick out of. Great.

The night finished with an absolutely pathetic match between two legends: The Undertaker and AJ Styles. Anyone who knows wrestling knows that these two have been awesome. Styles carried the TNA (ugh, actually stood for Total Nonstop Action until they rebranded as Impact Wrestling) brand almost singlehandedly since about 2002. And Undertaker has been one of the most iconic WWF (then WWE) wrestlers since his 1990 debut.

But for whatever reason, the ageing (aged?) Undertaker was in need of an ego trip. So their “boneyard match” was an embarrassing pre-taped Z-movie fight scene in which Undertaker not only destroyed (wrestling lingo for ruining someone’s career is “burying” them. In this one, Undertaker literally buried Styles. In a grave) Styles, but he also embarrased Styles’ crew and – when a bunch of hooded figures appeared – he beat them all up too. Because, you know, he’s a tough guy!

I don’t know if this was an “epic” way for Styles to retire (shot like an episode of Dog: The Bounty Hunter), or if he somehow has to continue his career after this humiliation, in which he was beaten, bloodied and begging. I’m intrigued to see what happens next, as Undertaker clearly isn’t a full time wrestler anymore.

So excited for night two, right?

* I know we shouldn’t mention the guy who killed his family, but if we’re talking ladder matches, the best one ever is, gulp, Chris Jericho vs. He Who Must Not Be Named from Royal Rumble 2001