Why I Quit Destiny and You Should Too

WHY I QUIT DESTINY AND YOU SHOULD TOO

Or Why I Wanted to Get the Bungie Off My Back

After hitting level 20 for the second time, I realized something about Destiny: This game can go suck a lemon.

Despite all of the minds and the money behind it, Destiny is a mindless slog with no point and seemingly no end. It is somehow the apex and the nadir of all of gaming history. And, most importantly, it's a game that basically asks its players to act like junkies to make it work. There's a reason Jeff Gerstmann is already nominating this as  2014's Most Disappointing Game of the Year.

Meet your new dealer.

My basic problem is how Destiny handles it's loot system. "Loot," for those of you who do not know, is what the game gives you for completing certain tasks. Kill a guy? Maybe you'll get some loot. Finish a dungeon? Maybe you'll get some more loot. And so on. The game revolves around it. A lot of games do. World of Warcraft is a billion dollar industry built around it. The Borderlands series has entire algorithms built in support of loot. More recently, the critical hit Diablo III was based around the game dropping loot at your feet. Loot hunts can work. My problem is not that Destiny has loot, it is how it treats its loot system and, in turn, how it treats its players.

I've heard terms like hitting the “pleasure center” of the brain and “serotonin bump.” It's a conversation that doesn't sit very far from other terms like “loot lust” and another favorite neologism “binge watching.” Whether these people meant it or not, they've described the mechanisms of chemical addiction. That was the exact moment that I realized that I need to quit Destiny. I needed to get clean.

The biology of addiction is a funny thing. There's a lot of holier-than-thou pontificating that say that addiction isn't a disease and that it's "a choice." These people, you understand, are assholes. While we all have choices in our lives and sometimes we really wiff them (like buying a hundred dollar version of a Bungie game, for example), the fact is that addiction has real chemical effects on the brain. On a certain level, you aren't making choices, you're responding to evolutionary triggers. 

While I won't bore you with the details (nor do I remember most of them), the long and short of it is, if you have the right genetics and the right behaviors, after a certain point your brain will be unable to distinguish between healthy behaviors that it should reward and detrimental behaviors.

And, like I said, it's a funny thing. This isn't a bad thing. Your brain is engineered to work this way for a reason. Your lizard brain, when you, say, eat something or have sex or run away from a predator, the pleasure center of your brain gives you a bump. It's biology's little way of saying “Hey, good work, buddy. We didn't get eaten by a leopard today Here's a little something special.”

Pictured: Destiny players collecting
precious "Light."

What I've just described is the exact mechanic that Destiny needs to make the game work. It doesn't reward you emotionally or intellectually. It doesn't tell a stimulating story, it doesn't pluck at your heart strings. It depends entirely upon you cranking away at the same levels over and over again in the vain hope of scoring a proper high-- or in this case, some sweet Legendaries. Except that the Legendaries never come. Ever, meaning that Destiny is a drug, it's a bad drug.

When Destiny came out, I heard a quote, I'm pretty sure it was from Leigh Alexander (but I can't for the life of me find it on twitter), which was that the game doesn't have a heart*. She's right. Destiny has not heart. Most theaters of operation do not have hearts. It's a movie set. A false backdrop. The only thing that grips you is this fake reward loop that they've half-baked into the game. Once you see how hollow and sad that is, the only thing you're left with is hulking, anodyne work of art. Destiny has all of the life shooting gallery in an empty burn ward.

I'm also reminded of a scene in The Simpsons episode "Homer's Enemy." In the scene Martin shows off his fancy model of a nuclear power plant. Mr. Burns is not impressed.

MARTIN

Behold, the power plant of the future, today!

BURNS
Yuck. Too cold and sterile. Where's the heart?

MARTIN
But it really generates power. It, it's lighting this room right now.

He turns a knob, dimming the auditorium lights.

BURNS
You lose. Get off my property.

Destiny could have used some racing stripes.

But I think about other games? Aren't they all inherently empty? Are not all games just “games?” No they aren't. What are you, dense?

When I quit Destiny, I shifted my focus back to the first game I picked up for my PS4: The Last of Us. Without going into a review in a review, I'll say that it's awesome and leave it at that (but also it has just about the best stealth system of this generation). It's a very different game than Destiny and it is going after different goals, but, just as a game, The Last of Us is so much more rewarding.

What makes The Last of Us different? Well, first off, it just is, damnit**.

More substantially, it's a real experience, one punctuated by great characters, a fully realized world, and great game play. While Destiny shares the same kind of tight character control and wonderful art direction, it game falls short because none of it fits together. Instead it relies on the most base, thoughtless nature of its player. A coma patient could have as much energy invested in Destiny as I do. The same can't be said about The Last of Us because, well, that sequence where you're Ellie in the town is really hard and I'd like to see a coma patient pull that one off on Hard!

Goddamn that game is good.

But, anyways. . .

If you enjoy chasing the dragon on your next gen console of choice, I'm glad for you. I'm glad somebody is having fun around around. As for me, I have things to do. Important things to do. Things like reading, writing, socializing, and maybe, just maybe, abusing actual, real life drugs, ones that actually fucking work. I want more than what Destiny provides. Or maybe I'm just looking for something that doesn't think of me as a mark. Whatever the case may be, I am reminded of a quote from The Wire, that other great epic on the drug war, that sums up my feelings:

“You cannot lose if you do not play.”

*She cites Fallout: New Vegas as a game that, if messy, had heart out the whazoo, and goddamnit I want to play that game right now.

**Come this year's crop of Game of the Year awards I doubt Destiny will collect anywhere near the amount of accolades that The Last of Us did. If it does then there is no God and we deserve all of the calamities we having coming to us.

James Kislingbury writes, podcasts, and is 20 days clean from Destiny.

Donnybrook: No Longer Just the Misremembered Name of a Country Singer

Donnybrook isn't a good book. Go read Crimes in Southern Indiana instead. If I had stopped there, I would have been a happier man and I wouldn't have to write this screed. But that is a road not taken. Here I am. Angry. Bitter. And with the knowledge of so much wasted time burning at the back of my skull.

Donnybrook is never seemed like a book that would suffer from being too classy. It certainly begins with a fine impression. When we first meet each of the principle characters (a desperate, if well meaning good ol' boy-cum-family man, a troubled cop with a tragic past that doesn't matter, and a guy named 'Chainsaw'), we meet them doing what they do best. They are robbing, shooting, and cooking their way off of the page and into our hearts. The lives of these men is a hard-scrabble life at best. Life was never easy for these folks, especially not in this economy (a fact, I feel like we were told more than once, but maybe I am just misremembering my own questionable works of fiction). As a beginning, it's strong.



This all sour as soon as the plot begins in earnest. That is to say, it goes sour as soon as the lack of a plot develops. Because Donnybrook is not so much a story as it is a series of scenes cut at their most interesting point and inserted somewhere else. It is a technique that reminds me of the kind of movies we got in the 90's after Pulp Fiction had its moment in the sun. And like that great glut of movies, this story is found lacking. Instead we are reminded of better stories-- stories like the kind that made up Frank Bill's last book.

As a story, Donnybrook is nothing but smoke and mirrors. We bounce from scene to scene before we can get bored or notice that this scene makes no sense. Smoke and mirrors posing as a structure can still hold an audience captive, but the the bits between the smoke and the mirrors have to be interesting. Unfortunately, in this case, they are not. Instead we are given men named Chainsaw and a Chinese man named Fu, who might be the only named character of color in the entire book (though, luckily, minorities are spared the vomit-coated brush that Bill paints all of his white characters with). The Chinese man is named Fu. Do you want to guess what he is an expert in? I'll give you a hint: He doesn't own a restaurant and he doesn't run a laundry.

It is that special combination of gritty and trite that eventually tipped me over from mild boredom to full blown anger. I cannot pin point when this happened. It might have been when the back-country soothsayer was introduced. It might have been when I said "Fuck you" into the book. The two events might have been related. Of this I cannot be sure.

As a target of my annoyance, I eventually fixated on how taudry the book is, on how fascinated it seems to be with the most ugly things in the world. I became annoyed because it put a spotlight on these things not to tell a story or to make a point, but to show them because it could. These things are there to get a rise out of me for lack of anything better.

We couldn't get characters that we can have empathy for or enjoy the company of. Instead, like some smelly, drunken Richard Stark charicature, we get action after stupid, crap-slick action. An attempted rape? Sure. A racist cripple? Yeah, okay. Haven't seen that in a while. Another scene in a bar? I've never been to Indiana before, but I am willing to believe that it is made up solely of bars. Children literally biting the ankles of a terrible cop? Go on. What about underage prostitution? Toss that in there too! Secret incest family? Sure. What the hell!  It worked for that broad who wrote The Flowers in the Attic and she got at least two movies out of the deal!

Towards the end of the book there's a description of prize fighters huffing spray paint and I had to wonder, with so many other drugs readily available, why they would bother with such lame high school shit? Are they art major drop outs? Is Frank Bill including these scenes because he's playing a game of white trash bingo with himself? Do I actually care?

In black and white, as a list, these things all sound kind of cool. Even making fun of it, I have this thought in the back of my head that I missed how cool they really were. There is no reason that these horrible thing can't be fun ("fun" being, perhaps a relative term. . .).  We want to read about crankheads and bare knuckle boxers, to be enticed by a story, and to believe it if only for the beauty of the prose.

Writers like Cormac McCarthy, Jason Aaron, Garth Ennis, and sometimes even Nick Cave understand how to do this. These are men who write about violence, often in the same kind of back country that Bill sets this story in. They are different from Bill because they know how to forge these horrors into a story. Frank Bill puts forth these ideas like your cat puts forth a dead rat. There is no poetry to it.

Again: The problem is not the inclusion of these things. The problem is that all of this dope snorting, face punching, bear-trap snapping nonsense isn't attached to anything worthwhile. It's just stuff. It's just an ugly pile of stuff. It's a drunk man showing up at your door with a sack full of broken glass saying that he brought you a new window. It's exactly that.


The reason for all of this praise is likely down to Frank Bill being an example of the American dream. He's a guy who came out of nowhere, with his own voice, who wrote a book that, despite its flaws, does violently clip the reality of modern America. He is also a guy who seems like he would drive straight to Missouri and kick Daniel Woodrell's ass if he didn't get a good blurb out of the man.


Crimes in Southern Indiana might not be a great book, but it is a good one. It's solid as a rock. It has a unique voice and does suffer from the kind of sawed-off fragment sentences that litter Donnybrook ("Butted the hot barrel through Dote's hand" and "Released the man's arm. Listened to him grunt and thud into timber" are the kinds of sentences that seem to exist solely as a bloody-minded challenge to any copy-editor who will take them on).

Each chapter in Crimes is not so much a short story as it is a sharp slice through a brutal America. There is something tangible about those stories. And even if you don't quite believe them, they do not overstay their welcome. They are notable for being good stories about brutish things.

Donnybrook has all of the same energy as Bill's first book, yet this energy is going in all of the wrong directions. Instead of taking the kinds of scenes that made Crimes stick out and building a bigger world out of them, they are chopped up, tossed around, and garnished with a sprig of pubic hair. Its length, like its violence, exists merely to exist. It's a shame, because any writer that is this fascinated with having people step on fox traps is a guy who should be actively encouraged to write more. He seems like he should be my kind of writer.

All of this made me think of Mr. Rogers. Besides his impeccible sense of style, he a man who exists as a complete contrast to modern America. He is quiet and kind and has a kind of unimpunable sincerity that I find utterly baffling. Writing this review made me think of this quote:

I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger — much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. - See more at: http://www.current.org/1969/05/i-give-an-expression-of-care-every-day-to-each-child/#sthash.Gf56XCaO.dpuf

I think it is much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger-- Much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire.

I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger — much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. - See more at: http://www.current.org/1969/05/i-give-an-expression-of-care-every-day-to-each-child/#sthash.Gf56XCaO.dpuf

I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger — much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. - See more at: http://www.current.org/1969/05/i-give-an-expression-of-care-every-day-to-each-child/#sthash.Gf56XCaO.dpuf

Mr. Rogers wrote a perfect review of this book before Frank Bill was even born.



FUCK YOU HERE COMES THE AD CANNON BETTER GRAB YOUR BUTT

I wrote some comics! I have two stories and they are collected in both Old College Comics Presents and The Freshman Fifteen (You can buy them here). They're all made by a collection of friends who like writing, who like comics, and do not have a patience for waiting for somebody else to publish their work. We're a little indy upstart and every single purchase lets us know that we're doing something right.

I also do a podcast called White Guys, Square Glasses. This one don't cost you anything but time. Which, to be fair, is something that you can't get back, so I don't blame you for not wanting to spend an hour or so listening to two dingbats ramble on about The Hunt for Red October or Danny Trejo's upcoming (fictional) magnum opus.

And while you're at it, why not follow my twitter?

Child of Gluck: A mediocre review of a mediocre movie

Remember this poster? Well, this is at least better than The Savages.

Cormac McCarthy stories are almost guaranteed to bum you out in some way. From main characters being brutally murdered to people losing their innocence, his stories don't tend to comfort. In his universe hope is something to be extinguished. This is no less true of The Counselor, crime film that has more in common with a Greek tragedy than it does with film noir. Of course, that's the shame of it. It isn't trashy enough for noir and it isn't finely tuned enough for tragedy.

I went into this with no little anticipation. McCarthy is my favorite author and Ridley Scott is high in the running for my favorite director (despite his recent run of middle of the road features). Toss in an excellent cast on top of that and you have every reason to believe that this is going to be one of the best movies of the year. How could it not? As it turns out this particular Cormac McCarthy story bummed me out in a new and terrible way.

Sorry. I was just sighing there. Give me a moment. Alright. Let's get to it.

"Congrats! We get paid for this no matter what our Fresh Rating is!"

It's a film of interesting parts and interesting people that is somehow less than the sum of its parts. Somehow throwing all of these people together does not add up in any positive way. We look at McCarthy's name and Fassbender's face and we're only reminded of how much this film lacks. This collection of talent only mockingly reminds us of what could have been.


As much as The Counselor is a reflection on Classical tragedies or maybe the Drug Wars or maybe even the human soul. Or maybe it's just a bunch of assholes hoping that if they talk long enough they'll get to the point. In Blood Meridian this works. In No Country For Old Men this works. And even in Blade Runner you get the sense that somebody, somewhere, either on screen or off has something of note to say.

The film makers don't seem to know what the film is about, so how is the audience supposed to know? In opaque thrillers like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, we're given insight into a world that is completely unknowable to us, yet retains a dramatic spark because somebody in the play does. We're invited to discover what is happening along with the characters. In this case I don't even think the characters know what they had for breakfast. But they sure as hell want you to think that they know.

Maybe the problem isn't that the characters don't know what is going on. It's not their fault that they have no clue what is going on, it's the film makers. They want to make this work of high tragedy with all of the markings of trash pulp and, in the end, it doesn't end up satisfying either genre. Then again, looking at the talent, maybe they did know and they went ahead with it anyways. Now that's a scary thought. . .

All of these concerns aside, the problem real problem of the film is that The Counselor, if it is about anything, it is a movie about furniture.

With every new scene we are treated to a new set, impeccibly shot and designed and with every scene we're treated to another piece of the Herman-Miller collection. Or a French press. Or a computer. Or a cool bar. Or something that you're paying attention to instead of the story. And, oh hey, is that a motorcycle? Cool.


And that isn't a metaphor for the vacuousness of these people's lives. It isn't some sign of their misgotten gains. It isn't a plot point. It isn't mis en scene, for God's sake. It's the movie. It's a series of chairs and tables occasionally broken up by some fool whining endlessly about whatever new nonsense has kinked up their life. And then it goes on for two hours like that and then it ends and you realize that Cameron Diaz must have photos of somebody somewhere.

The movie's fixation with mid-century modern, while laudable is a sign of the film failing on just about every other level. Furniture shouldn't be something I am staring at. Characters should be something I am staring at. Unless I'm autistic and, in that case, that's just how my brain works. In this case I'm just bored. And a little bit angry.

Blade Runner is a movie that I can watch endlessly and, even having seen it probably twenty times, is a movie that still yields little details hiding in the background. It's the perfect example of a world that is fully realized, a world that feeds into the story as the story feeds into it. There isn't a hard line where the plot starts and the set begins, it is all a part of a piece and, like I said with Gravity, that is an incredible sight to see. When it works it is amazing. When it doesn't, it's Avatar.

Ridley Scott, at his best, can design these worlds and make them real in a way that George Lucas once knew how to do and Stanley Kubrick went insane attempting. Even in his less successful films (Kingdom of Heaven leaps to mind), he creates a world with real weight and texture.

A vision of a much better movie.

This isn't even Ridley Scott at his worst. I don't know what this is. It is polished mush. Not a turd, it isn't terrible. Despite how hilarious a scathing review can be, it isn't bad. It's worse than that. It's a shining, grey mess that the man who directed Black Hawk Down and Alien and Thelma and Louise should not be capable of creating.

After doing my time with The Counselor, I feel as though I've picked this movie clean of any hidden detail. And the details I've found are unremarkable in all aspects except for how unremarkable they are.


I have the Mark Kermode go-to line about a movie of this nature. That "There's a good 90 minute exploitation movie in there" and as much as I think there's truth in that line, I don't think there is in this case. There is something fundamentally wrong with this film and it cannot be solved by trimming it down. It was perhaps rotten at birth and should have been drowned at the earliest possibility. A lot of heartache and dollars could have been saved that way. Instead we have a fully grown monstrosity to deal with and we have to wonder to ourselves "How could this have gone so bad?"

The Counselor doesn't sadden me because it's awful or because of a widespread series of failures. It saddens me that the collective talents of Cormac McCarthy and Sir Ridley Scott and many others made a work of art that merits the phrase "It's alright."

Who saw that coming?



SIDE NOTES:

This was made for 25 million dollars? Alright. I am slightly more okay with this movie now. Slightly. Guardedly. Shamefully.

After walking out of this, I was left wanting a new, good McCarthy movie that I almost want to see Child of God. You hear that? Jesus Lord. The Counselor has wanted me to seek comfort in the arms of a necrophiliac tone poem adapted by a guy who could barely read a cue card at an awards show.

I'm still going to buy the screenplay. I have a collection to keep up. At the very least, it's always nice to have a cautionary tale that is concrete.

Maybe someone out there will pull a reverse No Country For Old Men and take an average movie and adapt it into a good book. SD Perry, you still working? I think we got a job for you.

I hate Salon, but this review is a delight.

THE AD ZONE: 

I just had a comic printed! It's 40 page comic that features a new, 22-page story, along with a ten pager that came out last year in the Freshman Fifteen. It's cheap. It's easy. It's fun and it keep me from dialing that assisted suicide guy that I found on Tor for one more month. It's not on Graphically yet (the old one is), but, in the mean time, think about it, won't you?


I also do a podcast with my friend Cruz (and, formerly, my friend Joe). It's called White Guys, Square Glasses and it's a lot of fun. I think so, anyways. If you like laughter and ribaldry and dirtbags sounding off about movies and stuff, maybe give it a listen? Or at least subscribe to it on iTunes and never listen to it. Either way, we win.

"More fuck-up than shoot out" sound about right. . .

I rented Savages because I was really in the mood to see some good, old fashioned brutal violence. I wasn't looking for intellectual stimulaiton or anything that would risk stirring my emotions. I just wanted to see some cartels-- OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WITH JON TRAVOLTA'S HEAD

Savages is a movie that doesn't know what it is supposed to be. On the one hand it seems to want to position itself as a kind of light, poppy caper and on the other hand it wants to be a movie about doing business with professional decapitators. These are two completely different tones and in this case the film makers have failed to mix them together properly. It's not pulpy enough to be fun and it isn't serious enough to hit you where it hurts. This is made worse by the fact that the high school, drug culture jerk-off fantasy works about as well as the gritty level narco-drama.

Traffic this ain't.

This poster is by far and away the coolest thing about the movie.

If there's a line that universally measures the tone and pitch of a movie, on the one end it would have The Hudsucker Proxy and on the other hand there is No Country for Old Men. If Savages had to fall somewhere near No Country for Old Men. Then it would do a pump fake, make a run for Hudsucker, then trip right before it got to comedy, but then doubled-back, lost its nerve ten yards short of the goal line, and then have a seizure. At that point you wouldn't be able to figure out if this is serious and you should get help or if it's just part of the movie or if you should care at all.

Anyways, the point is that the Coen Brothers are very good at directing different kinds of movies and they're very good at mixing things together in a way that feels both new and, somehow, classic. They have a wide range of interests and skills and even when they stumble with a movie like Burn After Reading, at least it's interesting. At least they're swinging for the fences.  At least they have a clue what they're doing.

Other movies I should have watched instead include: Days of Heaven, The Sand Pebbles, and Lolita.

Then the movie references the ultimate version of this film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which is a reference that only serves to remind you of a much better film.Envoke a superior film at ye peril. I mean, Prometheus does this, a movie with some profound problems, but it only illicits the memory of Lawrence of Arabia, a movie that is so completely different from Prometheus that it almost (almost) doesn't matter. Then again maybe Oliver Stone thinks that kids today don't know what Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is and he thinks he's showing off. He seems to think that's the case with Iraq.

Butch Cassidy et al. is the exact sort of film that you shouldn't bring up in your film. Ever. Especially when what you're doing is a lesser version of the film you're quoting. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the movie that Savages wishes it was. We all know and love that movie.  It's a movie with an incredible lightness of touch. With the exception of the bicycle scene, it never brings you out of the world it has set-up. It is one of the great pieces of cinema and even forty years later, it still feels and fresh and original as it ever did.

The problem is that Oliver Stone has the lightness of touch of a gorilla that has recently discovered needle drugs. He can't combine comedy and action or grit and froth. It's not what he does. Subtlety is not one of his strong suits. He's a director that goes loud and in one direction. For better or for worse that is what he does. Except that with Savages, the direction he has gone in is a grandpa trying to understand what Justin Bieber is and why she has a Twitter.

Besides Stone's disconnect with classic films, he doesn't seem to understand the modern world, either.
There's just something that uncompelling and sad about a famous leftist filmmaker trying to a movie about contemporary issues, especially when you consider the things he seems to be commenting on were old news five years ago. I mean, for fuck's sake, he's got a scene that involves Mexican gangsters watching The Hills.

Then the movie also throws in a rape for no reason and it has an ending that revolves around multiple suicides (that really isn't a spoiler). For those keeping track at home, rape and suicide are just about the laziest thing a writer can do to give a story weight. Then there's the fact that it is just plain leery.

If you want to write about rape and/or suicide, let me give you some advice: Don't. Please.

BEHOLD! The face of evil!

The most compelling thing about the movie is its view on evil. It doesn't exist as a preening Scarface-type. Instead, evil presents itself as either in a workman-like manner (as in Benecio Del Toro's character) or in the form of Salam Hayak's evil Anna Wintour. The movies view is that despite all of the drugs and the exoticism still bases its villains in a world that is incredibly mundane. They worry about their family and getting their job done and keeping their world together. They aren't out to hit the city with Joker gas or make a Bond villain speech in the war room. Sure it's a real world three or four steps removed from the realities of Mexico's current war on drugs, but it is one familiar to Americans.

It's odd, because Del Toro's character seems like he might exist somewhere on the planet Earth, which is something that cannot be said about anyone or anything else in this movie.

Then again, it goes out of its way to set our white boy drug dealers as real nice guys. They're positioned as a combination of Robin Hood and Bob Marley. Sure, they're drug dealers, but they're good guys, so it's okay to like them! I don't want to like them. What I want is to see a good movie. Do you ever think that Billy Wilder ever worried about whether somebody was going to like one of his charaters? Or John Huston? Or anyone who knows what they're doing? What a waste of energy. If they're worth liking, the audience will like them, they don't need to be told that they're good guys first. The same goes for the bad guys. That's what works the best in the movie: The bad things.

Over a thousand words and I didn't mention these fucking dreads once.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS:

*Blake Lively is a great set of skin and hair and not much else.

*"No, waiter, I'm sorry, I ordered the Hollywood Movie Star, this is Taylor Kitsch. Please send it back."

*I really want to watch Way of the Gun right now. Wash the taste of this Savages out of my mouth. Also, that is another movie that quotes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid that isn't completely overshadowed by it.

*The word isn't "IED," the word is "bomb." All bombs are improvised. We've been using that word for a long time and nobody ever got confused as to what a bomb was. We were doing just fine without a goofy acronym. Further more, what kind of a fucking Navy SEAL says "We'll set up a few IEDs?" No Navy SEAL, that's who. Actually, no human. Even terrorists or insurgents wouldn't use the phrase "IED" while planting an IED.

*Nobody seems to live in any of the houses in this movie. I have never seen 20-something stoner's love den that well kept. I've seen model houses that are bigger messes than the places in this movie.

*A coked up lawyer making sushi at home? Does Oliver Stone think it's still 1985? Does he have that thing Liz Lemon's brother has?

*"There's a reason it's called a highjacking." Fuck you.

*"I get orgasms, he gets wargasms." Fuck you.

*"Every business has an origin story." Fuck you. EVERYTHING has an origin story. That is a nothing statement.

*"Just because I'm telling you this story, that I'm alive at the end. Yeah. It's that kind of a story." Fuck you. What does that even mean? Alright. I'm calm. Now imagine an alternate world where William Holden was forced to say that and now feel bad for everything in the world.

*"My ex-wife used to call me 'Sushi.' Cold fish." Fuck y-- Oh, wait, wrong monologue.

*"Savages." Fuck you to Hell.