In what can only be described as a colossal marketing oversight, The Reaping is coming out just a little too late for Passover. From the trailer, I gather that the movie is about some poor town in a swampland (somewhere in Florida?) getting pummelled by the Ten Plagues in Full CGI. No doubt The Reaping‘s effects will blow the effects of the original Ten Commandments out of the water, although to be fair, it takes a really long time to render even a simple firestorm scene on a UNIVAC.

Much more interesting is this movie’s theological implications. God sent the Ten Plagues — the gold standard for divine wrath — in order to force the Egyptians to let the Hebrews go. So after three thousand years, the next people to be punished in this horrific manner turns out to be… some poor backwoods community in the swamps? What on earth could these folks have done? Heck, the Nazis didn’t get even so much as Frogs. The movie’s tagline says, “What Hath God Wrought?” but that’s got to be a red herring. My bet is that these new Ten Plagues turn out to actually be Satan’s fault, although that just raises more questions about what Satan is empowered to do, what Satan’s relationship with God might be, and so on. No doubt The Reaping will explore all these issues with great care and insight, in between blowing shit up.

In related news, my sister the rabbinical student moonlights as a teacher at a Jewish high school. To close out a class about Passover, she asked her students to do a short exercise: imagine what the Ten Plagues might be if translated into modern times. My sister was expecting some somber responses, perhaps derived from global warming, nuclear holocaust, prions, etc. Instead, from one group of teenage girls, she got:

• Boils = OMG Acne!
• Slaying of the First Born (Males) = OMG what if all the cute boys suddenly died!
• Hailstorms = well, we’ll keep that one as-is, because OMG frizzy hair!

I think this is proof that the kids are gonna be all right. Happy Pesach!

• AR-10 service rifle
• AK-74 assault rifle (!)
• Winchester rifle (!)
• Colt Peacemaker (!)
• Uzi submachine gun (!!)
• BB gun
• Derringer
• Walther P99
• Blunderbuss
• Mortar (weapon)
• Howitzer
• Paris Gun
• Greek fire
• Arming sword (!)
• Junkers Ju 87 “Stuka”
• Yorktown class aircraft carrier
• LGM-118A Peacekeeper

Last night I went up to San Francisco to see a showing of The Czech Dream, a documentary about two young state-sponsored filmmakers who hired and persuaded professional advertisers to help them promote and launch a fake supermarket. The students covered the the marketing campaign from the inside, and then filmed the reaction of the thousands of people who showed up on opening day.
This stunt caused a nationwide scandal and led to a political backlash against the government and its pro-EU marketing campaign — which just so happened to be sponsored by the same ad company portrayed in the film.

The basic theme of the The Czech Dream is unremarkable. “Consumerism is bad”, “modern marketing sure is gosh darn powerful”, i.e. nothing particularly radical or interesting for any Westerner over the age of twelve. There is also a strange disconnect between the magnitude of reaction and the rather low-wattage of the stunt itself. The victims of the hoax cheerfully berated themselves for being “idiots”, but they were being awfully hard on themselves. After all, this sort of trick pales in comparison to what goes on in reality TV, where producers consistently manipulate people into doing much more embarrassing things than showing up to a fake supermarket opening.

On the plus side, the movie did have many genuinely funny bits: the composing of the marketing jingle, the crowd’s reactions, the bewildered looks of the filmmakers. It was also interesting to get an inside look at the thought processes of the marketeers, who were good at their work, proud of it, and just as young and hip and well-educated as the filmmakers themselves. (At one point, one of them argues that advertisers never lie, it’s the filmmakers who do.) The filmmakers also did something really clever in the trailer for the film, which includes a scene with an angry mob chasing and beating them up. Although that scene was completely fake, it does a fine job of raising the stakes of the film. It also hoaxes the audience a bit, which seems only fair.

But by far the most interesting aspect of The Czech Dream was not the film itself, but the reaction of the San Francisco audience. At various points in the film, Czechs from different socio-economic backgrounds would observe that shopping made them feel happy. Each statement along these lines provoked howls of laughter from the audience. Not garden-variety patronizing chuckles from We Sophisticated Western [Hyper-/Anti-/Meta-]Consumers, mind you… no, these were actual howls, the kind of noise ordinarily reserved for particularly awful pundits or politicians.

It’s hard to say whether the filmmakers intended this, but The Czech Dream manages to portray the Czech people in a fairly positive light. Some were annoyed, some were bemused, some were clever, many were funny, all were humanized. Coming away from the film, you get the feeling that the Czechs are basically all right. My fellow Americans, though, not so much.

Although my job has been great so far, there are a few minor issues. I once thought that the greatest danger was fellow employees who can’t park. But now a new threat has reared its ugly head — spiders!

Admittedly, the common California garden spider isn’t quite up to the standards of the horror show that we refer to as “Australian wildlife”. But they sure look wicked, and there are lots of them. Most of them have freaky markings on the legs, and all of them have bloated, distorted abdomens. I’m not sure why the spiders around my neighborhood look nothing like the spiders down at work, but I’m guessing that the latter are benefiting from their proximity to the marsh, and an abundant food source. Moths, flies, butterflies, small joggers… you name it.

Last year the spiders were bad, but this year, they’re getting organized. Walking around the trails behind campus, I’ve found shrubs and reeds completely cobwebbed, with a dozen or more spiders all sharing the same web. I didn’t think spiders could do that. A few weeks ago I brought my concerns to my coworkers at lunch:

Me: So in conclusion, there are tons of giant spiders out there in the marsh, living communally. Aren’t you a little freaked out by that?

Coworker #1: Oh wow, so you mean that we’re surrounded by Communist giant spiders?

Coworker #2: Jeez, what could possibly be worse than Communist giant spiders?

(pause)

Coworker #3: Married gay giant spiders?

Incidentally, I’ve heard that over the last couple of years, gay marriage has been polling very well in the spider community, among males at least…

Random web page #1: “Bait and Switch” by Jennifer Ouellette (via “You are Not Lloyd Dobler” by Chad Orzel):

Come to think of it, rent Say Anything for your date, and chances are you’ll win major points. Most women of my era consider Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack’s character in the film) to be the archetypal Romantic Ideal; we still get teary remembering that scene where he holds up the boombox outside his true love’s bedroom window, playing Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” in order to win her back. *sniff*^[1]

Random web page #2: “Women Love Gadgets, Survey Shows“, Yahoo! News UK

The research reveals that despite our supposed “best friend” relationship with diamond, most women (77 per cent) would rather have a big-screen plasma TV than a solitaire necklace. Slightly less surprisingly, a weekend away in Florida also lost out to the prospect of a new plasma TV, with 56 per cent saying they’d go for the goggle box, given the chance.

What can we conclude from this? If you want to patch things up with your girlfriend these days, you need to show up at her house with… an iPod Nano pre-loaded with Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”?

1. Chad Orzel’s rejoinder: “Absolutely under no circumstances should you rent Say Anything, or any John Cusack movie from the 80’s, for one simple reason: You are not Lloyd Dobler. And you can’t hope to compete with Lloyd Dobler, so don’t even let it come up.”

Finally after our long wait, the Category IV bad movie! We’ve covered the run-of-the-mill bad movie, the so bad it’s funny bad movie, and the soul-crushingly awful bad movie. What could possibly be left? Ah, the rare but fascinating Category IV. Category IVs are unique in that unlike their cousins, they can in fact have good dialogue, talented actors, interesting plots. But they suffer from one fatal flaw…

• Type: Category IV
• Also known as: the “morally inverted” movie
• Example: Four Weddings and a Funeral
• Circumstances for watching: by the time you realize what you’re watching, it’s too late

Whoa, whoa, WHOA! I hear you cry. “Morally inverted? What the hell does that mean?” Here you thought I was a nice Reform Jewish boy from California, and before your eyes I’ve transformed into some kind of spittle-flecked Post-Millenial Dispensationalist or something.^[1] Wait! Don’t click that back button! Let me explain what I mean first. Actually, it might be easier to start out by explaining what “morally inverted” is not. A morally inverted movie is not a movie where:

• the bad guys are cooler than the good guys
• the bad guys win and the good guys get punished
• the protagonists are the bad guys
• the bad guys are portrayed sympathetically
• everyone is a bad guy
• the whole damn point that there is no such thing as a “bad guy” or “good guy”

Et cetera. Trust me, shades of gray in film are great. I’m a big fan.

No, by “morally inverted”, what I mean is that two things must hold true. First, the filmmaker must construct their universe such that certain characters are obviously meant to be the Good Guys. And second, as the film progresses, it must becomes clearer that despite the filmmaker’s express intentions, the “good guys” are actually horrible people and the viewpoint of “bad guys” is the more sympathetic one. Again, I don’t mean movies that intentionally throw you a moral curveball — I mean movies where the filmmaker is oblivious to the inverted message.

You might have thought my citation of Four Weddings and a Funeral was a weird example, so let’s take a closer look. It’s got good lines, a good cast, it’s visually attractive, and so on. The first time I saw it, I thought exactly what I was meant to think — how charming! How funny! What a cute couple Andie MacDowell and Hugh Grant make!

Then a year later I saw it again. And about halfway through I came to the sinking realization that everything Andie MacDowell’s completely self-centered character did in that movie was calculated to manipulate and crush poor, hapless Hugh Grant. Anyone with sense should be shouting at him, “Run! RUN!! Run away with Kristin Scott Thomas! She’s the one who actually doesn’t hate you!!” At that point the movie fell into the Category IV zone, which is sort of like being forced to watch multiple slow motion car wrecks, each caused by a drunk driver, where each drunk driver gets out of their car, waves cheerfully at the camera, and bounds off.

Romantic comedies are a rich source of Category IVs and near-Category IVs, simply because the genre tends to promote behavior that in real life would be considered psychotic and possibly even criminal. One movie that came awfully close to being a classic Category IV was the Julia Roberts vehicle My Best Friend’s Wedding. You all remember this one: Julia Roberts and her best friend Dermot Something-or-Other make a pact in college that if they both aren’t married by the unimaginably old age of 30, then they’ll marry each other, ha ha ha. Well, Dermot gets engaged to Cameron Diaz,^[2] and that shocks Roberts into realizing that she actually loooves Dermot. So being a logical and sensible Romantic Comedy Character, Roberts cries a few tears, dries her eyes, and heads off to the wedding to give her best friend all the support she can muster. No, I’m just kidding. Actually she pretends to be Diaz’s friend, and then tries to pry them apart so that she can take Dermot for herself. Wacky hijinks ensue.

Until — oops! She actually succeeds. And then? Well, there’s a great scene right after Roberts’s “victory”. She’s squatting in a hotel corridor teary-eyed, smoking a cigarette illegally, and telling a bellboy in a shaking voice, “I’m an evil person. I do bad things to perfectly nice people.” By acknowledging that Roberts’s amusing behavior was actually, err, insane, the movie recovered and crossed over into actually-pretty-good territory. Not that the movie had to have a happy ending, mind you. But what would have been unacceptable would have been if Julia had never realized her mistake, and had stolen Dermot What’s-His-Name, and the two of them live happily ever after (but not Diaz). Because after all, Roberts deserves him! Because! She’s the heroine! Anyway.

You might think that many action movies would fall into Category IV, but actually, I think this is relatively rare. A complex action movie takes the effort to acknowledge that the “bad guys” are human beings, war is hell. Now, in a simple action movie, yes, the good guys are mowing down the bad guys without remorse… but really, the bad guys (and the good guys) are really just cartoons. These sorts of movies have the same moral force as the Roadrunner tricking Wile E. Coyote into falling off a cliff to his “death”.

But this is not to say that there aren’t some Category IV action movies out there. The Last Samurai is beautifully shot, has some fine actors (crippled by mediocre dialogue), and some good fight scenes (including Ninja vs. Samurai. Awesome!) Except that the movie takes the lamentable position that the Samurai symbolize the better, braver, Romantic side of Japan, and the businessmen in the capital are all evil cowards. When in fact the Samurai were vicious feudal warlords who would happily cut off the head of any peasant who forgot to bow when they passed. Keep in mind that I’m not arguing that any movie that had heroic Samurai (or their Western equivalent, the feudal knight) is necessarily a Category IV. You can certainly have individual Samurai^[3] who are good eggs. It’s just that The Last Samurai spends all its time bemoaning the loss of the Samurai class, which is another thing entirely.

Another Category IV action movie is The Patriot, which had such a laughably one-sided portrayal of the Brits (so evil! so prissy!) that it actually made me embarrassed to be a supporter of the American Revolution. That movie also earned extra Evil points for the subplot involving the mute daughter. See, our hero, Mel Gibson, has this adorable little blond daughter who has never spoken a word. Daddy goes off to war for a couple of years, and she still refuses to speak to him — and in fact, she won’t even hug him, because she’s so mad about his absence. Finally, there’s a scene near the end of the movie where he’s about to leave for war again, and the cutest-little-girl-on-earth runs to him crying, speaking her first words, “Don’t go, Daddy, please don’t go!” And God help me, my eyes got watery, even though I knew that sequence was just about the most crassly manipulative thing ever put to film. That’s when my burning hatred for Mel Gibson really got started.

1. Don’t you hate when that happens? There’s some blogger you’ve reading a few weeks or months, and you’re liking their stuff, and then out of nowhere they write something that makes you think, “My God, this person is a foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic.” Just makes your stomach flip, doesn’t it?

2. Bastard.

3. Or even Seven individual Samurai.

On to the Category III bad movie. Now we’re cooking with gas! While it is possible to endure the Category I, possible to find perverse enjoyment in the Category II, the Category III takes things to the next level: it’s the movie that is too painful to watch under any circumstances.

• Type: Category III
• Also known as: the “walk out of the theater” movie
• Example: Ultraviolet
• Circumstances for watching: you have advanced amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and you’ve managed to really piss off your caretakers

It’s easy to differentiate Category IIIs from Category IIs: if there exists some mental state where you might find amusement watching the movie, it’s a Category II. By definition, watching a Category III is a joyless experience.

But differentiating the Category III from the Category I is trickier. The typical Category III might at first appear to be a Category I, but soon the realization dawns that the movie is not just mediocre or bad in all aspects, but so awful across the board that all the bad stuff must have been done on purpose. Just having, say, awful acting is not enough — the movie needs to utterly fail on all levels.^[1] If you’re having trouble telling the difference, the Category III rule of thumb is that the Category I stems from laziness, incompetence, or cynicism, while the Category III stems from sheer malice. This rule breaks down for some special cases (mentioned below), but in general, if the filmmaker doesn’t care about the audience, it’s a Category I; if the filmmaker clearly hates the audience, it’s a Category III.

One easy path to Category III status is to create an adaptation that desecrates its source subject. The bonus points accrued for destroying something the audience loves are often enough to push a movie over the Category III line. For example, director Uwe Boll‘s films usually earn Category III status in no small part due to the hatred he induces in the video gamer community. (It’s okay video gamers, Uwe hates you right back.) Another example would be the infamous Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, Part One — ordinarily a solid Category I, but for many Tolkien fans, an atrocity. Interestingly, Bakshi’s film violates our rule of thumb about Category IIIs and malice: as far as I know, Bakshi didn’t necessarily hate his audience or subject matter, he just ran out of money. (Although the wretchedness of his film is hard to explain by just that.) Likewise, Courtney Solomon doesn’t hate his fellow roleplaying game enthusiasts — it’s just that his film makes it appear that he does.

Next time, we cover the last and most complex case, the Category IV. Don’t miss it! Errr, that is, don’t miss the journal entry. The movies, eh, those you can miss.

1. Although I suppose there is the theoretical possibility of a Category III having only one or two bad characteristics. For example, there might be a movie out there where the awful soundtrack or motion-sickness-inducing camera work is enough. Suggestions for candidates welcome!

The last entry covered the Category I bad movie, also known as the run-of-the-mill bad movie. Today we discuss the Category II bad movie, which pushes past the mediocre-bad barrier all the way through to funny-bad:

• Type: Category II
• Also known as: The “so bad it’s funny” movie
• Example: Hercules in New York
• Circumstances for watching: Inebriation, being in college, watching MST3K (preferably all three)

If Category I movies are the cinematic equivalent of background noise, the Category II movie represents one of those awesome and rare moments when you discover that the noise is the signal. As in, oh my God, that’s not pigeon shit — that’s the temperature of the universe! Now in the case of the Cosmic Background Radiation, it takes specialized equipment to tease out the structure behind the noise, such as SIS junction mixers and sub-1K pumped liquid helium refrigeration systems. Likewise, Category IIs are best observed with specialized instrumentation: namely, a healthy supply of mind-altering drugs.

In other words, a Category II is bad enough that it actually might have some merit, although not, perhaps, the merit that the filmmakers intended. Category IIs are usually worse than the typical Category I by most criteria: the acting is worse, the dialogue lamer, the plot more preposterous, the special effects cheaper, and so on. And yet when viewed in a certain light, the Category II can become more than the sum of its parts.^[1] This is not to say that Category Is can’t have Category II-like moments. The key difference is that watching a Category I movie deadens your soul, while watching a Category II movie merely deadens your brain.

Because they have the potential to be entertaining, Category IIs might at first glance seem to be “better” than Category Is. But that’s the insidious thing about the Category IIs; they’re really just better at suckering you into watching fundamentally piss-poor entertainment. My attitude towards Category IIs has evolved over the years, but right now it’s summed up by the classic Onion article, “Aging Gen-Xer Doesn’t Find Bad Movies Funny Anymore“:

“I used to be able to take great pleasure in not enjoying things,” Erdman said. “But these days, the only things I like are things I like.”

Given that our fellow human beings have produced so many great works of art, and a nearly unlimited number of really good ones, why bother with the stuff that sucks? A little cheesiness never hurt anyone, but when you get right down to it, life is waaay too short to waste watching truly bad movies.^[2] 😉

1. Category IIs are good candidates to become “cult” movies, although this is not to say that all cult movies are Category IIs.

2. Notice how I cleverly buried the key point of this entire series of essays right in the middle of the text? You journalists out there can take your inverted pyramid style and suck it!

Yesterday I mentioned that, inspired by the movie Ultraviolet, I had developed a unified theory of bad movies, complete with a four-category classification system. We’ll start with the Category I bad movie. The Category I movie is the cinematic embodiment of Sturgeon’s Revelation: “90% of everything is crap.”

• Type: Category I
• Also known as: “extruded Hollywood product” (h/t Charles Stross)
• Example: The Karate Kid, Part III
• Circumstances for watching: Insomnia, long airplane trips, waiting in a lobby of some sort, friend or relative worked on the film

Although Category I movies represent the vast majority of films made, this is not meant to be pointed criticism of Hollywood per se. Sturgeon’s Revelation is ironclad, and applies to all works of art produced throughout history. If we could wave a magic wand and double the raw talent of everyone in Hollywood on both the creative and business sides, we might see the percentage of Category I movies dropping to 88% or so. No matter what you do in the art world, there’s a lot chaff that gets in the way.

Nor do I mean to suggest that Category I movies only come from Michael Bay and his ilk. Some movies are born Category Is; others might have solid acting, dialogue, editing, and so on while still managing to be far less than the sum of their parts. For example, take Woody Allen’s recent Match Point. “Allen’s best in ten years,” the critics said. “London has revitalized him,” the critics said. I actually emerged from the theater sorta kinda liking Match Point, until my friend quite sensibly pointed out that the only reason the plot slogged forward was because every character was necessarily A) an idiot, B) despicable, or in almost all cases, C) both.

Of course, a movie’s Category I-ness varies in the eye of the beholder. For example, I suspect most people think of Armageddon as a classic Category I: stupid, bombastic, bad dialogue, the whole package. But for me it nearly crosses over into Category III, because the bad physics is just so, so offensive. On the other hand, I thought Starship Troopers was a run-of-the mill Category I, and even had some parts that were enjoyable.^[1] But Sammy felt nothing but burning hatred for that movie. The stupid tactics, the ineffective weaponry,^[2] the total absence of the Mobile Infantry’s powered armor suits. There’s a brief scene where a squadron of space fighters swoop through a canyon, firebombing everything below them. Sammy: “Where the hell were those guys before? Why weren’t they doing that all the time?” For yet another data point, Sammy and I saw Mystery Men and literally fell forward out of our seats, crying laughing at the “Limousine Attack” scene. Everyone else in the sparsely-populated theater was stone silent. So to each their own.

While creating a Category I movie is easy, Category II, III, and IV movies are special cases. Creating a Category II+ movie takes special drive, talent… possibly even malice. So on that note, it’s on from the merely mediocre to the truly wretched! Join me, won’t you?

1. I particularly liked the subversive thread running through the Starship Troopers movie: that the humans probably started the war and were almost certainly the bad guys. The hilarious propaganda newsreels, dressing the commissioned officers like the Nazi SS, and so on. Plus it had plenty of eye candy, if you disregard Jake Busey.

2. Seriously, if each enemy warrior bug takes ten seconds of concentrated fire from several marines to take down, you shouldn’t even be bothering with ground operations. Contrast Starship Troopers with the far superior Aliens: the Space Marines in Aliens had the weaponry for the job, they were just badly outnumbered or otherwise constrained. (“So, if they fire their weapons in there, won’t they rupture the cooling system?”) Additionally, the Space Marines were able to reassess their situation and come to entirely sensible conclusions. (“I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” Yes! Exactly right! A bit too late, though.)

Earlier this year, I saw Ultraviolet.^[1] After stumbling out of the theater in a daze, my buddy and I came to the conclusion that Ultraviolet might very well be the worst movie we’ve ever seen. Or at least in contention, along with, say, Yor, Hunter from the Future. You can’t use “worst movie ever” lightly, but wow, Ultraviolet was a failure on every artistic level I can think of:

• Emotional Content: Every scene provoked the opposite emotion intended. All action scenes provoked boredom. All dramatic scenes provoked cringing. All tear-jerking scenes provoked laughter (Ex: the merry-go-round scene).
• Dialogue: Beyond stupid.
• Logic: Bad guys from several different factions appeared out of nowhere as the plot required. Violet had the supernatural ability to kill as many bad guys as required. People betrayed each other for no particular reason. Chase scenes were impossible to follow: Violet would be running through one futuristic corridor, then we’d cut to a scene of bad guys running after her through some other futuristic building, then we’d cut back to Violet running through yet a third futuristic building…
• Bad Guy: An action movie lives and dies by the dark charisma of the Big Bad Evil Guy. Star Wars had Darth Vader. Die Hard had Hans Gruber. Ultraviolet had some guy who liked to taunt his enemies with, “Are you mental?” He also wore nose plugs.^[2]
• Sex Appeal: No tension at all between Violet and anyone, least of all her wimpy vampire scientist buddy (William Fichtner, who usually rises above material like this). Fellow red-blooded males should note that the uninterrupted view of Milla Jovovich’s sculpted midriff got boring about ten minutes in.
• Action: Violet defeated about 60% of the bad guys by whirling her torso around in “bullet time” and letting her enemies shoot or slice up their own buddies to death.
• Visual Style: The architecture was scrubbed clean and inhospitable to all life. The bad guys were faceless helmeted interchangeable fascists. The rebels wore tight leather and had swords and mirrorshades. Et cetera. The only really innovative element was the nose plugs.
• Music: Every action scene pulsated with loud, grindingly awful techno music. (Over the years, I’ve actually learned to like loud techno music, so I can only imagine what people who don’t like techno thought.)
• CGI: Without a doubt, the worst I’ve ever seen. Particles didn’t pretend to fly out right. Perspectives looked skewed. Fiery explosions looked patched in from consumer-grade movie editing software. And whenever a heavy CGI scene occurred, the camera would go blurry and glossy to cover up the dirt-cheap effects. It looked like someone had smeared petroleum jelly on the camera lens — like a Barbara Walters interview, or NBC’s much-maligned athlete retrospectives during the 2000 Summer Olympics.
• Languages: There’s a scene where Violet runs onto the roof of a building and is suddenly surrounded by dozens of Asian gangsters. A frank, subtitled exchange ensues between Violet and the Head Gangster, followed by Violet dispatching all the gangsters with the technique described in “Action”, above. Just a run-of-the-mill bad scene, right? Well, a couple of days another friend of mine reported that he had actually understood half the conversation. The gangster was speaking fluent Vietnamese, but Violet was speaking… some other Asian language! Mandarin, maybe? Japanese? Random syllables? Who knows? As long as it’s Asian and stuff. Ultraviolet is so bad, it has layers of badness that require specialized knowledge to unlock.

I bring all this up not to warn people about seeing Ultraviolet — too late for that! — but to ponder the idea of bad movies in general. So stay tuned as we dive in to my brand-new Official Four-Category Bad Movie Classification System! (I tried to come up with a Category V, but to no avail.)

1. There’s a medium-length story that explains why we chose to see Ultraviolet and stick through to the bitter end, but it’s really not very interesting.

2. Special hint for aspiring screenwriters! Nose plugs do not make your villain look tougher or smarter.