Jean-Claude Van Johnson

JCVD WTF LOL

Jean-Claude Van Damme, erstwhile action star, is retired. Really retired, 'not Nicholas Cage retired'. Despite this, a chance run in with an old flame lures him out from a life of segways and coconut water showers, and back to what he does best: Making shitty movies as cover for his work as an international freelance black-ops badass, codenamed Johnson.

Yes. Really.

The central conceit of this Amazon pilot is that all those cheap action movies shot in Eastern Europe are cover for their 'stars' to operate as deniable secret agents. Johnson's back up is provided by his ex, on-set hairdresser and sniper Vanessa, and the make-up guy Luis, a former child soldier with a literally unspeakable past (when asked about it he gets flashes of horrifying images and screaming, then dismisses it as 'not that interesting' in what is surely intended to be a running gag if the series is picked up,) and his mission to plant a tracker in a shipment of HK - heroin cut with ketamine, apparently - although the latter is less important than that he gets to go in disguise through a factory thanks to a coincidental resemblance to one of the actual workers, Filip (played by 'Filip Van Damme', IMDb tells me), fail to convince Filip that he is himself from the future thanks to the logic of Timecop trumping that of Looper because it is a million times better, get beaned in the head when he fails his own trademark splits, then fight an army of security guys.

JCVD is made up for an action reimagining of Huckleberry Finn which has to
be seen to be believed.

Jean-Claude Van Johnson is a staggeringly audacious project and the latest installment in JCVD's highly public process of self-deconstruction. In places it is reminiscent of 2008's remorselessly downbeat JCVD, but with way more action and humour. The jokes actually come thick and fast, from the films JCVD is offered - action reimaginings of 'Rikki Tiki Tavi', 'Anne of Green Gables' and 'Huckleberry Finn' - to the skewering of celebrity life and hipster fashion - he visits a pop-up restaurant called Dri Ramen, which serves only dry ramen noodles - and commentary on the changing style of action movies. In the final fight the guards start to rush JCVD en masse and their leader holds them back, ordering: "No, no! One at a time. We'll run into each other. It'll get confusing."

Again, I want to see this get picked up, if only because 'Johnson' replaces another agent called Brown, noted for his extreme methods. We later learn that Brown has threatened vengeance, and I kind of want to know which aging action star Brown would turn out to be.

The Tick

If the sight of a big, blue butt is a deal-breaker, switch off now.

It's Amazon pilot season, which means it's time to get random.

The Tick began life as a logo, became a comic book character, obtained perhaps his greatest success in an inimitable animated series. His live action incarnation was... less successful. More costumed sitcom than action adventure, thanks to budgetary concerns, it was a witty romp with a strong awareness of the world of superheroes it was parodying. The Tick's complete and repeated inability to penetrate a jerky Superman expy's 'glasses and hairdo' disguise even when he sees him take the glasses off was priceless, and the line 'you killed the Immortal' surely deserves some place in media history.

But that was then and this is now, and with the genre riding high it's apparently time for another live action reinvention. This time it's Peter Serafinowicz donning the blues, with Griffin Newman as his sidekick Arthur. The pilot hits a lot of familiar beats, including the Tick trashing Arthur's apartment looking for his hidden HQ, but there's a darker edge here. Arthur first appears in civilian clothes - something that never happened in either the animated or previous live action shows - and only acquires a very techno-looking incarnation of his moth suit in the closing seconds. His history is also tragically expanded, having been obsessed with tracking the supposedly deceased supervillain the Terror since his father became collateral damage in the defeat of the City's former superteam, the Flag Five. There is even a hint that the nigh invulnerable Tick, with the reflexes of an Olympic level jungle cat and the strength of a bus stop full of men, is a manifestation of Arthur's subconscious, although his pummeling of villains is real enough.

There's actually something almost sinister about the Tick's grin in the face of
Arthur's more gritty origin storyline.

For all its familiarity, The Tick is a new beast, and where its live-action forerunner eschewed one-off mayhem for sitcom, this version is front-loaded with arc plots and even mythology, opening with the arrival of the world's first superhero, possibly from space. Jackie Earle Hayley, fresh from being a creepy bastard on Preacher brings a potentially recurring creepy bastard presence to The Tick as the supposedly deceased Terror. It is also a very beautifully made series, with some truly sumptuous cityscapes serving to make the City itself more of a presence.

There is some significant tonal dissonance between the Tick's trademark superheroic nonsense - "You're standing there, in your way, but you're a better door than you are a window, so open yourself up, step through yourself and join me over here." - and Arthur's tragic history and mental illness (in the animated series his sister Dot worried that he wasn't dating; here she's worried that he's skipping his meds and might be involuntarily confined by the police.) That this is deliberate is clear from the juxtaposition of a radio discussion of the Flag Five being 'blinded with weaponised syphilis and then shot to death', and a later flashback to the brutal reality of the scene as it plays out in front of the young Arthur. The question, I guess, is whether that dissonance would be the series' hallmark or its undoing. In a more crowded superhero market, the creators are clearly going for something in a darker line of satire. It's a risky bid with the Tick, but could work. I do find myself hoping that we get a chance to find out.

Ask the Storybots

Hahahaha. Storybots.

Ask the Storybots is a frankly surreal educational TV series premiering on Netflix, in which a group of five storybots - beings that live in computers and answer children's questions via the educational apps the series is based on - set out each episode to provide the solution to a head scratching puzzle, like 'how do airplanes fly?' or 'where do French fries come from?'

Typically featuring a false start and then a trail of increasingly accurate answers, the main 'plot' of each episode is interspersed with learning songs and strange interludes with the easily amused storybot functionaries at HQ, who giggle at everything like Minions sensing a double entendre ("Hahahaha. Ninja.*") In addition to a number of jokes aimed largely at parents - the Storybots are introduced to the 'Underground' where potatoes grow by Molepheus, a mole in a black trenchcoat and little round glasses - each episode features a guest appearance, such as Jay Leno as King Yardstick (the ruler) and Kevin Smith as Super Mega Awesome Ultra Dude, a TV superhero who can't fly, but encourages the audience to "stay in school. That way when you grow up you can play awesome make believe in front of a green screen."

And it's taught Arya exactly why she needs to brush her teeth, so that's a result.

* Also, N is for Ninja now.

Beat Bugs

I find myself wondering which of them will be known to history as 'the fifth
Beat Bug.'

In an ordinary garden - well, ordinary apart from its terrifying, tentacle flailing purple octopus sprinkler of death - live five invertebrate chums. Rainbow Dash expy Jay, inventor and engineer Crick, eager young Buzz, optimistic slug Walter Walrus, and Kumi, who is kind of the normal one, although she does sometimes design things for Crick to build. Each episode, these alleged insects (and a slug) face the kinds of rudimentary friendship problems that microequines would scoff at, but then the dilemmas of life are really just vehicles in this series, the central purpose of which is simply and solely to introduce young children to the music of The Beatles.

I am not even joking.

Each episode features a particular song reinterpreted by the cast, and the plot is mostly built around the lyrics. So in 'Help!' Jay acts all cool and independent, then gets stuck in a jam jar and finds that he does need help, while in 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' Buzz is so scared by a story Zumi tells that they have to call on the assistance of a dragonfly sleep therapist named Lucy, who has kaleidoscope eyes and a really unhelpful visiting address. And is voiced by P!nk.

Perhaps the oddest thing is the way that the lyrics have been trimmed to a) fit the plot, b) be less about drugs and getting old, and c) not require parents to try to explain what 'pornographic priestess' means; at least until they play them the original tracks. On that front, it definitely seems to be doing its job, and Arya is delighted to listen to and sing along with The Beatles in the car now, so props to creator Josh Wakely for following through on his vision, getting the rights to so much of the catalogue and achieving his goal. Hell, it's introducing us to Beatles songs we don't know.

Killjoys - 'Schooled'

Ah. Kids.

As our favourite team of space bounty hunters settle back into their routines and the show teases the shippers with a bit of Dutch and D'av wrestling, they get word on the destination of a last signal beamed from Red 17 before it was burned.

Prodigy is a super-school for the smartest Westerlian kids, so Turin gets Dutch an escort warrant to bring the latest round of gifted and talented to school. This means we get to go back to the isolated Old Town, where Pre is maintaining the Royale as a defiant hub of vibrant society. Learning of Pawter's escape and subsequent abduction, Johnny heads off to rescue her, while D'av and Dutch learn where to look for some of their escortees from Pre's bartender Sabine, who is aggressively blonde and frankly suspiciously clean. Frankly, I don't trust her.

Pawter arm-wrestles her way to freedom and Johnny starts a bar fight to get her out of a threatened arranged marriage, and agrees to bunk on Lucy while she figures out how best to fight the company's plans to wall off every Westerley city and maintain their servile underclass. Dutch touches base with Alvis, but there's no big movement on the story of Arkyn. Dutch also confesses to D'av that she's worried John will lose focus worrying about Pawter, but D'av reminds her that they make such a good team because 'you lead, I shoot and John gives a shit.' Coupled with D'av's admittedly double-edged beatdown of a father for bullying his son (issues much) this reiterates a central theme of Killjoys: As in Camelot, violence is not strength and compassion is not weakness.Our heroes' lives are complicated by caring instead of shooting any problem in the ace, but also enriched.

I admit, I'm not wild about the more romantic direction of this relationship -
see elsewhere on this blog for my lauding of strong, platonic relationships - but
fair play, these two are pretty adorable.

The crew take the designated kids to school, and D'av bonds with one of them, Jake - he of the hitty father - whose brother is at the school. He assures him that a brother will always be there for him, and John reminds him about that time D'av stabbed him. Still, it's a sweet bonding moment while Dutch avoids the 'small people'. Unfortunately on arrival they find nothing but empty classrooms, a set of empty cryopods and Delle Sayah, the representative of the Nine with the spiky relationship with Dutch (Dutch flippantly explains her presence by claiming that she 'missed our hate-flirting,) and as it turns out a chequered history with fellow pretty princess Pawter. She gets in a dig at Pawter needing to use drugs to get through her exams, a neat reminder that our redhead is deeply flawed, which is important as a sexy doctor from practical royalty working as a doctor in a slum could easily become an unbearable Mary Sue.

Anyway, it turns out that the kids were killed when their cryopods - fitted out as part of a secret 'seed bank' programme to turn the kids into living repositories of Qreshi culture in case of... reasons - malfunctioned. At first it looks as if the killer was the teacher, but it turns out that she was also killed, and her appearances the result of Jake's brother Olan messing with them using holograms. Olan tries to steal Lucy and turns off the life support, forcing Dutch and Delle Sayah to work together to switch it back on. The system uses breath-based biometrics, which is basically an excuse for a kiss, but whatever gets a bisexual lead past the network, I guess. Delle Sayah also admits that she and Khlyen were working together for, again, reasons. The implication that Delle Sayah might have had Khlyen for a 'tutor' as well is strong.

John talks Olan down, and it's interesting that he is able to reach Olan for much the same reason D'av connects with Jake. D'av is an older brother, and Jake needs that; John is a younger brother, and that's the only thing that can get through to Olan. Poor Olan is seriously messed up, because Khlyen's message ripped through the school systems, frying the cryopods and lodging in his brain, but they drop him off with Alvis to help extract the message less forcefully than Delle Sayah might do.

Elsewhere, Fancy releases Khlyen and they head for Telen, home of Chez Jaquobis, to work out why D'av might be goo-proof.

"Must be Qreshi."
"How can you tell?"
"She hasn't got shit all over her."

The plot, as they say, thickens. Khlyen is still a colossal ass and unapologetic nerd-murderer, but definitely more towards the Operative end of things than the diabolical mastermind he initially appeared to be. He and Delle Sayah are clearly Up To Something(TM), but their Something is looking more likely to be a callously pragmatic response to an altogether more apocalyptic Something planned by the Black Root than the apocalypse itself. As Dutch points out, Delle Sayer's 'seed bank' only makes sense if she's expecting a war or a winter, so clearly their faction is anticipating the imminent need of some serious hatch battening.

On the personal level, I hope to not see Dutch/D'av kick off again. It wasn't all that interesting and D'av has had much more interesting character work since it ended. There was some tease of future developments with bartender Sabine, but I don't trust her commitment to personal grooming under occupation. On the other end, I'm enjoying Dutch's hate flirting with Delle Sayah, but I don't want that to come to anything big either. I like that Dutch's core relationships are pseudo-familial and that she doesn't need a man, or a woman, to complete her, so much as she needs a solid sense of self after what Khlyen put her through. Similarly, while I have mixed feelings about the move of John/Pawter towards more romantic territory, I do like that it's something that is emerging from friendship, and that Pawter seems always more in need of a lift than a rescue.

Actually, I can't think of a single character in this show who needs a partner to 'complete them'. Both of the main female characters are more about resolving their past, and the Jaqobis brothers are more seriously invested in the brother thing. Any sexual or romantic pairings have taken a distinct back seat to friendship and family, and I dig that.

Dark Matter - 'Stuff to Steal, People to Kill'

"It's like looking in the mirror... then punching your reflection and stealing
their badass coat."

As we tip over the midpoint of Dark Matter's 13 episode second season, the Raza crashes into an alternate universe thanks to a malfunctioning blink drive, and are almost immediately captured by the Mikkei Combine, who have been hunting the murderous mercenaries aboard this universe's Raza, who have been making hay with their own fully functional blink drive. Cue an attempt to steal the alternate Raza's jump drive and out-doublecross Mikkei's Commander Truffault, who of course wants the working drive for herself and is not shy of murdering a few people to get it.

Cue lots of fun with Two and Three pretending to be Portia Lin and Marcus Boon, while fending off a mutiny by guylinered swine Jace Corso and Wellick and Tash, a couple of mercenaries from the big heist episode of Season 1 whose main universe versions were both killed by Two. The fight between Two and Tash is much closer this time, however, as Two suffers a bout of the shakes. The AU Android is unexpectedly helpful, confiding that - in addition to a duty to protect the crew, even from each other, she feels especially indebted to Portia, for making her who she is, hinting that Lin was the one who changed her programming.

Back in the prime universe, Devon has vanished, so I guess no-one got him to A&E. An obscured resolution to a vague character. Then Two collapses.

Season 2 is definitely toning down Two's superhuman qualities, and her collapses would seem to be a sign of her nanites failing. I'd say this is because characters with vulnerabilities are more interesting, but then they bring in Nyx...

Mr Robot - 'eps1.3_da3m0ns.mp4', 'eps1.4_3xpl0its.wmv' and 'eps1.5_br4ve-trave1er.asf'

The effortless cool of Christian Slater masks a lot, but not all, of Mr Robot's
extremely dickish tendencies. If he is imaginary, then like Tyler Durden he's
the Elliot that Elliot wants to be, without actually being a better version.

I'm still watching Mr Robot, and it's still good, so why aren't I reviewing it?

In part, it's because it's so dense. I know that my usual semi-recap approach would miss things, and so be necessarily incomplete. Also, I'm running behind - again, the denseness of the narrative and the unsettling visual style make it hard to binge - which always makes it feel more apt to review a season at a time.

That doesn't mean that I have nothing to say about the show, however. It's one of the most unique things on television at present, and there's a lot to talk about. This not-a-review loosely covers episodes 5, 6 and 7; 'Daemons', 'Exploits' and 'Brave Travelers', to abandon the archly stylised file-name titles for ease of recall.

'Daemons' revolves around Elliot's assumption of tactical authority within fsociety, and the collapse resulting from eliminating his drug supply to protect Shayla from her dealer/boyfriend/abuser. Much of the episode takes the form of Elliot's internal narrative, as hallucinations and delirium take hold, but honestly when is that not the case? I'm still pretty sure that Mr Robot is only in Elliot's mind, and at least half-convinced that everyone else is as well. As Elliot hallucinates proposing to Angela with a key, the 'real' Angela has a soul-searching night on the tiles with Shayla, culminating with a drunken make-out session. Real, or part of Elliot's fantasy? It seems to affect Angela and drive her to upload the hacker's disc at E-Sure, but contains such obvious elements of male fantasy that the question remains. Elliot certainly thinks he's insane enough, periodically noting that his running narration is effectively talking to imaginary people.

'Exploits' follows the Steel Mountain job, and reveals the dark heart of fsociety as Elliot brutally manipulates low-level employees to gain access to the facility, and f-society plan to fake a text from a manager's pregnant wife to get her out of the way. This leads Elliot to a confrontation with Tyrell, who literally views people as insects and dismisses Elliot's infiltration as meaningless. This is proved to be true, as despite his success, the Dark Army decline to come through on the Chinese backups and the whole plan is blown (as would any other have been.) Tyrell is on an upswing, however, as he and his wife launch a social assault on the new CTO and his wife which is essentially a colder and more ruthless implementation of the same methods fsociety have used.

'Exploits' is also notable for several scenes which cast doubts on my theories of Mr Robot's Durdenity, as he speaks to Darleen and the other hackers on their own. Of course, if it's all in Elliot's head, no big change.

Shot from low down, everything in the frame looks huge, making Angela
look like a child in the principle's office. This kind of visual storytelling is
bread and butter for this show.

The sudden kidnapping of Shayla launches into 'Brave Traveler', as Vera blackmails Elliot into hacking him out of prison in 24 hours. This impossible task brings Darleen face to face with someone she can't shout down and forces Elliot to launch a series of desperate social hacks on the fly. Mr Robot warns him that it's a zero-sum game; the best case scenario is that only Shayla ends up dead. He's right, and despite a tour de force effort by Elliot and Vera's escape along with the rest of the prison population, it turns out that Shayla was already dead. This is a gut punch for Elliot, and the audience, and the scene drags out the reveal to maximise the effect. Did we ever believe that Elliot could be an island? We don't now. He may not make any big reaction, but Malek sells the abject pain of the discovery.

Meanwhile, Tyrell's scheming hits a roadblock as the CTO shoots him down cold, and Angela seeks justice for those killed by Evil Corp's negligence in what are practically separate plots. There is a brief meeting of roads as Angela talks to Elliot for guidance and innocently asks after Shayla, but for now they are almost unrelated stories. This disconnection, however, is par for the course with Mr Robot, a series that is pathologically reluctant to use a two-shot when a series of alternating, awkwardly framed singles could better convey the distance between two people talking face to face.

Mr Robot has no grand landscapes or baroque architectures, no special effects to speak of, but it is still visually stunning. Using unconventional framing and blocking to heighten the sense not just of separation, but of a person or people out of alignment with the world, the camera emphasises the core themes of the outsider, of power relationships, and of missed or crossed communications. When Angela comes to Elliot they speak on the sidewalk - because his apartment is full of gangsters - and the camera frames each in turn, almost never together, as well as putting each one low in the corner of their shot. It sometimes feels that the camera is almost an intruder; perhaps the us that Elliot is talking to when he narrates.

Well written, well acted and brilliantly composed, Mr Robot is a genuine original.