'It was going to be a place where only the things you wanted to happen would happen.'
All the movies I've seen since the last time I wrote about movies I'd seen. Unless you count last night, when I wrote about these same movies, and lj erased it. Bleh.
(Cuts for moderate spoilers. Where possible, I try to spoil with a light hand, but I find it impossible to be entirely vague).
Julie and Julia
I saw this months ago. For serious. But I still say: Shouldn't there have come a time, say, halfway through filming when someone noticed how special Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci are in their roles and said, 'We have got to do something to make the other half of this movie keep pace'? I like Amy Adams just fine, and I think she has a modicum of chemistry with the actor who plays her husband. But Meryl Streep as Julia Child (and Stanley Tucci as her husband, and Sue from Glee as her sister) are outright magic - open-hearted, madcap magic - and the non-Julia Child half of 'Julie and Julia' winds up looking unpalatable by comparison.
That, and sort of senseless. The 'Julie' half of the story tells us that the titular young woman became rich and famous and published a book and inspired a movie, all because she wrote a blog. A blog where she cooked her way through Julia Child's famous Mastering the Art of French Cooking and wrote, like, 'such and such was yummy,' 'such and such was hard to make,' and 'I'm a big meanie-head and nobody likes me.' This blog somehow attracted the attention of the New York Times, giving Julie a chance for a big interview in which she said things like, 'I just really feel like Julia Child is right here in the kitchen, cooking with me!' and 'I just really feel like Julia Child saved my life!' By which Julie seems to have meant 'put a strain on my marriage and my finances, gave me an excuse to be a big ol' narcissist, and occasionally left me crying in a heap in the middle of the kitchen floor.'
I exaggerate slightly, of course. Heh. But to judge by the movie - which I think Julie herself wrote - the blog in question had very little to offer by way of either prose or insight. It's perfectly all right with me if you want to be boring, uninspired or self-involved on the internet (I certainly am!), but since when does it entitle you to steal half of Julia Child's otherwise excellent movie??? It got to where every time the movie changed the channel from Julia to Julie, I was like, 'Nooo! This must be what that Time Traveler's Wife feels like! Come back, come back, movie that I actually want to see!'
In conclusion, if you were to make a list, in priority order, of all the things that interested me about 'Julie and Julia,' it would look something like this:
1. All the Julia Child parts.
2. One pretty terrific scene written for Julie's long-suffering husband.
3. The fact that Julie's cat looks like a real cat but tends to move his head around like a puppet. (I barely know what I mean by that, but somehow it's true!)
And, 4. One scene toward the end of the film where a reporter tells Julie that Julia Child, in fact, hates her blog. The film never follows up on this claim, but it sure threw me for a loop. In all likelihood, the reporter is just trying to stir up trouble, right? I mean, what about Julie's perfunctory little blog could make the resplendent Julia Child care one way or the other? If the movie gets Julia right at all, one seriously doubts Julie's best theory - that Julia objects to her use of the 'F' word - holds much water.
Whip It
If anyone could use a reminder that there are interesting female actors out there working right now - and that sometimes they even let more than one of them into the same movie at the same time! - you could do worse than 'Whip It.' It was pretty great just to see Ellen Page and Alia Shawkat (Maeby from Arrested Development) share the screen and be their awesome young actress selves, and I surprised myself by enjoying Kristen Wiig about ten times more in a dramaticomic role than I ever have enjoyed her on SNL. (Which, I'll admit, I rarely watch).
'Whip It' made me want a new pair of roller skates, like, right this minute, but it did not make me want to bash my teeth out on some kind of railing or something. So, sad to say, I shall be unlikely to be joining a roller derby league any time soon. Not even if I think of a killer name for myself. 'Whip It' filled me with appreciation for the spirit and joie de vivre of counter-culture, but also with relief that I have no actual teenage daughters to stop from wandering around downtown Austin at night alone, and/or with secret boyfriends who look significantly older than seventeen (raising uncomfortable questions about statutory rape. Egads! Just because you're quirky hipster teenagers does not make statutory rape cute. Though it's always possible, if unlikely, that the guy is meant to be exactly the protagonist's own age; we're never told).
Still, to my mind, 'Whip It' is a generally a warm, well-rounded and thoughtful movie, for all that it follows the formula for one of Them Thar Sports Movies so closely (right down to the Big Game and the Unavoidable Parental Conflict falling on the very same day), and without overmuch inspiration with respect to the actual sports. By which I mean: as sports movies go, I find it a little suspect. Some of the stratagems employed by the roller derby team smack of the Might Ducks and their improbable 'flying vee,' and I don't think the movie ever quite gave me a feel for the proper place of aggression in the sport of roller derby. The women are clearly all cah-raazy, but the movie tends to show them being aggressive when it's (fun but) against the rules. Coordinated chaos must be butt-hard to plan and film, but I still wish 'Whip It' had really made me feel what it's like to be jostling and speeding and speeding and jostling, all at the same time.
Of course, given the choice between a great sports movie and a great people movie, I will choose the latter every time, and few sports movies I can recall have made room for anything so honest as the scene between Bliss (Ellen Page) and her mom on the kitchen floor. 'Whip It' wins me over by giving all its characters - including the (over?)protective parents - brains, flaws, human connections, valid perspectives and enough screen time to explore them all. Not a bad job, Drew Barrymore. And I enjoyed watching your character playfully punch her fiance in the nuts. Just sayin'.
Lingering point of bafflement, however? What was up with Jimmy Fallon's character? How can the emcee of a badass women's roller derby league get away with sexually harrassing the athletes night after night without winding up losing a limb? Are we supposed to think his behavior is actually empowering to women? ('I thump my chest and notice your sexiness! Be thou empowered, woman! I empower thee!') Or is it just that the movie thinks the audience will be weirded out by watching female athletes sweat and compete without a man publicly reassuring us he still wants to sleep with them?
Where the Wild Things Are
Roger Ebert tends to grant high points to any movie that transports him to a place he's never seen before. 'Where the Wild Things Are' certainly wins those points from me. Even the opening scenes, which take place on an ordinary street in an ordinary neighborhood, have a certain distinctive color and feel to them. Having seen the movie just once, I really think you could show me a still from any point, and I would know exactly what movie it came from, regardless of who or what was in the frame. (It may be worth noting, however, that some of the unique feel is achieved by frequent recourse to a hand-held camera, which started to give me a headache before very long).
Even more notable than the visual particularity of the film, however, is the unshakeable impression of reality one gets from its fantastic settings and characters. CGI must have been necessary for facial expressions at the very least, but the monsters - egad, they just look so touchable and real and right here with you. The bulk! The tangled, wind-blown fur and feathers! The hidden scratches on their faces and the subtly runny noses! Add this movie to the list of movies which leave me yearning for my very own great big giant monster to hug. (Oh please, oh please, Santa?)
But if you are going to have your very own great big giant monster to hug, shouldn't you first make sure that it will be tame and unflappably loyal, not capricious and unstable, prone to the same destructive impulses that you are, yourself? Shouldn't you first make sure that you will be able to control it? The reality of each titular Wild Thing, see, does not stop with his or her all-too-huggable appearance. The monsters are like children on a grand scale: bright, creative and readily loving, but also temperamental, vulnerable and destructive.
Scenes of destruction reach rarified heights of enthusiasm in WtWTA, that's for sure. (Forget scenery chewing, these characters are scenery decimating). A part of me found the film's wild abandon cathartic and thrilling, but there was another part of me simultaneously inclined to scrunch down in my seat and shout 'Is this strictly necessary?!' over the din. It makes me think that if 'Wild Things' has the staying power to become anything like a classic, it will be enjoyed by many, but cherished by a certain kind of kid and the adults who once used to be that certain kind of kid - the kind of kid (like one of the little fellows I babysit, for example), who wants to behave but who lashes out time and again, because his stubborn little body so often proves insufficient to contain all his anger at once. In short, a kid with no impulse control. (I was not that kind of kid. I was totally a bad kid, but not that particular brand of bad, to my recollection). Max, the protagonist of the movie, wants to be good. He doesn't want to be the family bad guy, the one who is always getting into trouble, the one who is always ruining everyone's happy moments - but when he's hurting... no impulse control. WtWTA takes Max's heart, flips it inside out, unfolds it, and opens it up into the strange, wonderful, treacherous, fearsome, sympathetic landscape of the film.
Final note? It sure looks like Catherine Keener (as Max's mom) does the whole movie wearing almost no makeup, and she looks a) like a grown and naturally aging woman, and b) gorgeous and brilliant, just like always.
Astro Boy
Yes, I saw 'Astro Boy.' It's kind of hard for me to remember now why I originally wanted to, but before the film had gone on very long it had already given me reason to think the desire a fairly worthwhile one. For starters, considering the animators could very easily have cranked out a few slam-bang action sequences and called it a day, the movie boasts a surprising excess of beauty. Colors and textures are uniformly lovely. There is a scene throughout which pink cherry blossoms drift across the screen, for no obvious reason other than the beauty of the blossoms. There is a scene in which Astro Boy does something exceptional and wondrous with his father's copy of Descartes Before The Horse. There is a scene in which Astro Boy must escape from some tractor beam thingies that resemble long ropes of green goo, and even these goo-ropes struck me as unnecessarily grand. Meanwhile, Astro Boy himself is lovingly animated to suggest both a suppleness and a solid heft entirely right for a soulful robot boy questioning his personhood and his place in the world. (You can just about believe he is made of metal, but it may not stop you from wanting to snuggle him!) Through seams in his soft-looking skin, we can sometimes see a filigree of exquisitely detailed circuitry.
If I was surprised by the beauty of 'Astro Boy,' however, I was even more surprised by its profound sadness. It seems to me that there are a number of superheroish stories where a character 'dies' after a fashion, only to come back with powers more awesome than ever before. (Even if Inspector Gadget is the only example that springs readily to mind, LOL). Existential angst is kept to a minimum. We're rarely encouraged to worry whether the resurrected individual is still a human person, or is still the same human person that he or she was before 'dying.' I mean, gee - rocket feet, indestructo skin, and cannons for hands? Sign me up!
But 'Astro Boy' is a superhero movie about the death of a child that actually admits it. When his son Toby dies in a terrible accident, renowned roboticist (or whatever) Dr. Tenma builds a new, robotic body to replace his son's and imbues this body with his son's memories. With curious maturity, the story chooses not to treat Tenma's project as an ingenious solution to the problem of a father's grief (and thereby the means to an indestructible jet-pack protector of the city, tra-la!), but rather as a dangerous, selfish, delusional effort, all-too-likely to bring about as much harm as good. And, in fact, when the grieving Tenma discovers that the new Toby does not comfort him, he wishes the boy had never been created. Rejected by his father, a confused and wounded Toby is left to grapple with questions about his identity (along with a host of physical dangers) on his own.
I make it sound rather dreary, don't I? Which it isn't quite. Melancholy, certainly. But there are touches of real humor, and Toby's nature is of a hopeful, helpful sort, so his adventures tend toward the redemptive, despite his sorrows. His courage takes the form of a single-minded nobility that appeals dearly to my old-fashioned side. (One is weirdly inclined to compare Toby to Saul Tigh, if only in that both resolve, upon learning the truth about their natures, to carry on doing what their supposed selves would do, regardless of who or what it turns out that they really are).
I don't know the first thing about the source material for 'Astro Boy' - well, unless, knowing that the film derives from a highly influential manga and anime popular during the fifties and sixties counts as a first thing - so for all I know, the movie may make a mockery of everything the original Astro Boy stood for. It's also true that having thoroughly exceeded my initial expectations, the movie taught me to expect so much more from it that by the time we reached the end, it left me wanting... something. (Certainly there were factual questions that went unanswered, but as much as I would have liked to see these questions addressed, they weren't central to the story, and I doubt they form the core of my dissatisfaction). I think, for one, I could have done with less emphasis on 'fitting in,' as if that alone could be the solution to a derelict robot boy's problems, LOL. Then again, I suppose it is meant to be a kids' movie, and kids care about these sorts of things.
On the other hand, if 'Astro Boy' is actually meant for kids then, egad, lets hope the kids today aren't as sensitive and easily traumatized as I think I was back when.* 'Astro Boy' is, in sum, nothing like a perfect movie, but it sure is a heck of a lot more movie than I expected, going in.
*For the parents: I have in mind the trauma of a father turning against his child (er, robot-child; for the sake of argument I treat Toby as a person, since he treats himself as a person). I think watching Tenma reject poor Toby would have been deeply upsetting to a littler me, though it's far from true that every child is so easily shaken. 'Astro Boy' is not grotesque after the fashion of, say, Steven Spielberg's similar 'A.I.' - which, to this day, turns my stomach with its graphic android violence.
.
(Cuts for moderate spoilers. Where possible, I try to spoil with a light hand, but I find it impossible to be entirely vague).
Julie and Julia
I saw this months ago. For serious. But I still say: Shouldn't there have come a time, say, halfway through filming when someone noticed how special Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci are in their roles and said, 'We have got to do something to make the other half of this movie keep pace'? I like Amy Adams just fine, and I think she has a modicum of chemistry with the actor who plays her husband. But Meryl Streep as Julia Child (and Stanley Tucci as her husband, and Sue from Glee as her sister) are outright magic - open-hearted, madcap magic - and the non-Julia Child half of 'Julie and Julia' winds up looking unpalatable by comparison.
That, and sort of senseless. The 'Julie' half of the story tells us that the titular young woman became rich and famous and published a book and inspired a movie, all because she wrote a blog. A blog where she cooked her way through Julia Child's famous Mastering the Art of French Cooking and wrote, like, 'such and such was yummy,' 'such and such was hard to make,' and 'I'm a big meanie-head and nobody likes me.' This blog somehow attracted the attention of the New York Times, giving Julie a chance for a big interview in which she said things like, 'I just really feel like Julia Child is right here in the kitchen, cooking with me!' and 'I just really feel like Julia Child saved my life!' By which Julie seems to have meant 'put a strain on my marriage and my finances, gave me an excuse to be a big ol' narcissist, and occasionally left me crying in a heap in the middle of the kitchen floor.'
I exaggerate slightly, of course. Heh. But to judge by the movie - which I think Julie herself wrote - the blog in question had very little to offer by way of either prose or insight. It's perfectly all right with me if you want to be boring, uninspired or self-involved on the internet (I certainly am!), but since when does it entitle you to steal half of Julia Child's otherwise excellent movie??? It got to where every time the movie changed the channel from Julia to Julie, I was like, 'Nooo! This must be what that Time Traveler's Wife feels like! Come back, come back, movie that I actually want to see!'
In conclusion, if you were to make a list, in priority order, of all the things that interested me about 'Julie and Julia,' it would look something like this:
1. All the Julia Child parts.
2. One pretty terrific scene written for Julie's long-suffering husband.
3. The fact that Julie's cat looks like a real cat but tends to move his head around like a puppet. (I barely know what I mean by that, but somehow it's true!)
And, 4. One scene toward the end of the film where a reporter tells Julie that Julia Child, in fact, hates her blog. The film never follows up on this claim, but it sure threw me for a loop. In all likelihood, the reporter is just trying to stir up trouble, right? I mean, what about Julie's perfunctory little blog could make the resplendent Julia Child care one way or the other? If the movie gets Julia right at all, one seriously doubts Julie's best theory - that Julia objects to her use of the 'F' word - holds much water.
Whip It
If anyone could use a reminder that there are interesting female actors out there working right now - and that sometimes they even let more than one of them into the same movie at the same time! - you could do worse than 'Whip It.' It was pretty great just to see Ellen Page and Alia Shawkat (Maeby from Arrested Development) share the screen and be their awesome young actress selves, and I surprised myself by enjoying Kristen Wiig about ten times more in a dramaticomic role than I ever have enjoyed her on SNL. (Which, I'll admit, I rarely watch).
'Whip It' made me want a new pair of roller skates, like, right this minute, but it did not make me want to bash my teeth out on some kind of railing or something. So, sad to say, I shall be unlikely to be joining a roller derby league any time soon. Not even if I think of a killer name for myself. 'Whip It' filled me with appreciation for the spirit and joie de vivre of counter-culture, but also with relief that I have no actual teenage daughters to stop from wandering around downtown Austin at night alone, and/or with secret boyfriends who look significantly older than seventeen (raising uncomfortable questions about statutory rape. Egads! Just because you're quirky hipster teenagers does not make statutory rape cute. Though it's always possible, if unlikely, that the guy is meant to be exactly the protagonist's own age; we're never told).
Still, to my mind, 'Whip It' is a generally a warm, well-rounded and thoughtful movie, for all that it follows the formula for one of Them Thar Sports Movies so closely (right down to the Big Game and the Unavoidable Parental Conflict falling on the very same day), and without overmuch inspiration with respect to the actual sports. By which I mean: as sports movies go, I find it a little suspect. Some of the stratagems employed by the roller derby team smack of the Might Ducks and their improbable 'flying vee,' and I don't think the movie ever quite gave me a feel for the proper place of aggression in the sport of roller derby. The women are clearly all cah-raazy, but the movie tends to show them being aggressive when it's (fun but) against the rules. Coordinated chaos must be butt-hard to plan and film, but I still wish 'Whip It' had really made me feel what it's like to be jostling and speeding and speeding and jostling, all at the same time.
Of course, given the choice between a great sports movie and a great people movie, I will choose the latter every time, and few sports movies I can recall have made room for anything so honest as the scene between Bliss (Ellen Page) and her mom on the kitchen floor. 'Whip It' wins me over by giving all its characters - including the (over?)protective parents - brains, flaws, human connections, valid perspectives and enough screen time to explore them all. Not a bad job, Drew Barrymore. And I enjoyed watching your character playfully punch her fiance in the nuts. Just sayin'.
Lingering point of bafflement, however? What was up with Jimmy Fallon's character? How can the emcee of a badass women's roller derby league get away with sexually harrassing the athletes night after night without winding up losing a limb? Are we supposed to think his behavior is actually empowering to women? ('I thump my chest and notice your sexiness! Be thou empowered, woman! I empower thee!') Or is it just that the movie thinks the audience will be weirded out by watching female athletes sweat and compete without a man publicly reassuring us he still wants to sleep with them?
Where the Wild Things Are
Roger Ebert tends to grant high points to any movie that transports him to a place he's never seen before. 'Where the Wild Things Are' certainly wins those points from me. Even the opening scenes, which take place on an ordinary street in an ordinary neighborhood, have a certain distinctive color and feel to them. Having seen the movie just once, I really think you could show me a still from any point, and I would know exactly what movie it came from, regardless of who or what was in the frame. (It may be worth noting, however, that some of the unique feel is achieved by frequent recourse to a hand-held camera, which started to give me a headache before very long).
Even more notable than the visual particularity of the film, however, is the unshakeable impression of reality one gets from its fantastic settings and characters. CGI must have been necessary for facial expressions at the very least, but the monsters - egad, they just look so touchable and real and right here with you. The bulk! The tangled, wind-blown fur and feathers! The hidden scratches on their faces and the subtly runny noses! Add this movie to the list of movies which leave me yearning for my very own great big giant monster to hug. (Oh please, oh please, Santa?)
But if you are going to have your very own great big giant monster to hug, shouldn't you first make sure that it will be tame and unflappably loyal, not capricious and unstable, prone to the same destructive impulses that you are, yourself? Shouldn't you first make sure that you will be able to control it? The reality of each titular Wild Thing, see, does not stop with his or her all-too-huggable appearance. The monsters are like children on a grand scale: bright, creative and readily loving, but also temperamental, vulnerable and destructive.
Scenes of destruction reach rarified heights of enthusiasm in WtWTA, that's for sure. (Forget scenery chewing, these characters are scenery decimating). A part of me found the film's wild abandon cathartic and thrilling, but there was another part of me simultaneously inclined to scrunch down in my seat and shout 'Is this strictly necessary?!' over the din. It makes me think that if 'Wild Things' has the staying power to become anything like a classic, it will be enjoyed by many, but cherished by a certain kind of kid and the adults who once used to be that certain kind of kid - the kind of kid (like one of the little fellows I babysit, for example), who wants to behave but who lashes out time and again, because his stubborn little body so often proves insufficient to contain all his anger at once. In short, a kid with no impulse control. (I was not that kind of kid. I was totally a bad kid, but not that particular brand of bad, to my recollection). Max, the protagonist of the movie, wants to be good. He doesn't want to be the family bad guy, the one who is always getting into trouble, the one who is always ruining everyone's happy moments - but when he's hurting... no impulse control. WtWTA takes Max's heart, flips it inside out, unfolds it, and opens it up into the strange, wonderful, treacherous, fearsome, sympathetic landscape of the film.
Final note? It sure looks like Catherine Keener (as Max's mom) does the whole movie wearing almost no makeup, and she looks a) like a grown and naturally aging woman, and b) gorgeous and brilliant, just like always.
Astro Boy
Yes, I saw 'Astro Boy.' It's kind of hard for me to remember now why I originally wanted to, but before the film had gone on very long it had already given me reason to think the desire a fairly worthwhile one. For starters, considering the animators could very easily have cranked out a few slam-bang action sequences and called it a day, the movie boasts a surprising excess of beauty. Colors and textures are uniformly lovely. There is a scene throughout which pink cherry blossoms drift across the screen, for no obvious reason other than the beauty of the blossoms. There is a scene in which Astro Boy does something exceptional and wondrous with his father's copy of Descartes Before The Horse. There is a scene in which Astro Boy must escape from some tractor beam thingies that resemble long ropes of green goo, and even these goo-ropes struck me as unnecessarily grand. Meanwhile, Astro Boy himself is lovingly animated to suggest both a suppleness and a solid heft entirely right for a soulful robot boy questioning his personhood and his place in the world. (You can just about believe he is made of metal, but it may not stop you from wanting to snuggle him!) Through seams in his soft-looking skin, we can sometimes see a filigree of exquisitely detailed circuitry.
If I was surprised by the beauty of 'Astro Boy,' however, I was even more surprised by its profound sadness. It seems to me that there are a number of superheroish stories where a character 'dies' after a fashion, only to come back with powers more awesome than ever before. (Even if Inspector Gadget is the only example that springs readily to mind, LOL). Existential angst is kept to a minimum. We're rarely encouraged to worry whether the resurrected individual is still a human person, or is still the same human person that he or she was before 'dying.' I mean, gee - rocket feet, indestructo skin, and cannons for hands? Sign me up!
But 'Astro Boy' is a superhero movie about the death of a child that actually admits it. When his son Toby dies in a terrible accident, renowned roboticist (or whatever) Dr. Tenma builds a new, robotic body to replace his son's and imbues this body with his son's memories. With curious maturity, the story chooses not to treat Tenma's project as an ingenious solution to the problem of a father's grief (and thereby the means to an indestructible jet-pack protector of the city, tra-la!), but rather as a dangerous, selfish, delusional effort, all-too-likely to bring about as much harm as good. And, in fact, when the grieving Tenma discovers that the new Toby does not comfort him, he wishes the boy had never been created. Rejected by his father, a confused and wounded Toby is left to grapple with questions about his identity (along with a host of physical dangers) on his own.
I make it sound rather dreary, don't I? Which it isn't quite. Melancholy, certainly. But there are touches of real humor, and Toby's nature is of a hopeful, helpful sort, so his adventures tend toward the redemptive, despite his sorrows. His courage takes the form of a single-minded nobility that appeals dearly to my old-fashioned side. (One is weirdly inclined to compare Toby to Saul Tigh, if only in that both resolve, upon learning the truth about their natures, to carry on doing what their supposed selves would do, regardless of who or what it turns out that they really are).
I don't know the first thing about the source material for 'Astro Boy' - well, unless, knowing that the film derives from a highly influential manga and anime popular during the fifties and sixties counts as a first thing - so for all I know, the movie may make a mockery of everything the original Astro Boy stood for. It's also true that having thoroughly exceeded my initial expectations, the movie taught me to expect so much more from it that by the time we reached the end, it left me wanting... something. (Certainly there were factual questions that went unanswered, but as much as I would have liked to see these questions addressed, they weren't central to the story, and I doubt they form the core of my dissatisfaction). I think, for one, I could have done with less emphasis on 'fitting in,' as if that alone could be the solution to a derelict robot boy's problems, LOL. Then again, I suppose it is meant to be a kids' movie, and kids care about these sorts of things.
On the other hand, if 'Astro Boy' is actually meant for kids then, egad, lets hope the kids today aren't as sensitive and easily traumatized as I think I was back when.* 'Astro Boy' is, in sum, nothing like a perfect movie, but it sure is a heck of a lot more movie than I expected, going in.
*For the parents: I have in mind the trauma of a father turning against his child (er, robot-child; for the sake of argument I treat Toby as a person, since he treats himself as a person). I think watching Tenma reject poor Toby would have been deeply upsetting to a littler me, though it's far from true that every child is so easily shaken. 'Astro Boy' is not grotesque after the fashion of, say, Steven Spielberg's similar 'A.I.' - which, to this day, turns my stomach with its graphic android violence.
.