Category: Entertainment

Wonka review: Willy was never meant to be the hero – Polygon

As a prequel to the ’71 movie — and specifically not an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book, for rights reasons — Wonka uses a healthy serving of musical numbers to tell the tale of how and why its quirky chocolatier became a renowned confectioner. In Wonka’s world — a whimsical, unnamed European town — the chocolate biz is dominated by three stodgy companies who collaborate as a secret cartel, fixing prices, paying off cops, and selling inferior product to a public with no other local candy options.

Source: Wonka review: Willy was never meant to be the hero – Polygon

So it’s an allegory about late-stage Capitalism. Got it.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all there for that.

The Oracle in the Matrix movies, explained before Resurrections – Polygon

The Oracle is, according to the Architect, the “mother” of the Matrix. She is an intuitive program originally designed to study the human psyche who proposed a solution by creating a simulated reality that would offer humanity a choice to mistrust the very nature of that reality, if only on an unconscious level. This solution more or less worked, with the exception that every iteration of this model of the Matrix inadvertently resulted in an anomaly known as “The One” — a human being with inexplicable power to bend the nature of the Matrix to their will. If left unchecked, both The One and the growing human resistance would pose a threat to the stability of The Matrix. To correct for this error, the Architect and the Oracle created a process by which the Matrix would be rebooted, one that would allow the system to continue to exist by assimilating the inevitability of human resistance itself as a crucial component in service of its continued existence. By the time Neo has awakened in the first Matrix movie, the Matrix has already been rebooted five times, with each version having been facilitated by the destruction of Zion, the last human city on Earth, and with it the death of any human being with knowledge of that previous version of the Matrix.

Source: The Oracle in the Matrix movies, explained before Resurrections – Polygon

Swing and a miss. Rather than think that The One is an unavoidable outcome of the programming of the Matrix, it makes a lot more sense if you understand that the Architect intentionally programmed the function of The One into the simulation, in order to give those who reject it a standard to rally around. Everyone who gets freed from the Matrix joins the rebellion, comes to Zion, believes in the “religion” of Morpheus, and comes to center their efforts on a hope in their savior, Neo. It just makes it all easier to control, right? This way, the Architect can efficiently gather up all the people who reject the Matrix — that problem with the natural consequence of at-least subconscious choice — eliminate them before they become a real threat, and then start the process of removing and eliminating those that reject the sim all over again. I feel that this was all pretty clear in the second movie, so I don’t know why this article sums it up in the way that it does.

Pee Wee Herman: SubGenius

So I was reminiscing, and watched the opening theme song from Pee Wee’s Playhouse, as one does, and noticed something interesting.

Very clearly, we see J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, of the Church of the SubGenius. A search turns up this retrospective, and they note:

Somehow, against all odds, the Church of the SubGenius became a real thing, if not exactly a real religion. It spread well beyond Dallas, capturing the imaginations of a number of important counterculture figures of the era. Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh, actor Paul Reubens (known for his role as Pee-wee Herman), Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, cartoonist R. Crumb, gonzo bluesman Mojo Nixon, and more all claimed a SubGenius affiliation. All of them sought Slack, an unspecified philosophical state that the church maintained as its answer to enlightenment.

So I guess it’s not a curious random thing. Apparently there was an actual connection. But this only makes me wonder about the picture in the upper right of the photo. Who is that? What was the connection there?

I also note that a standard, half-hour show in the US is 22 minutes of air time, allowing for commercials. The intro and outro takes up 3:43, leaving just 18 minutes of programming time. No wonder I was always surprised and sad when the show would jump cut — apropos of nothing, since it was stock — to the scooter ending.

Loki and Portal

A long time ago, Valve released a little indie game called Portal, and took the gaming world by surprise. They followed it up with a sequel that expanded the world in awesome ways. I mean, it had J. K. Simmons voicing “Cave Johnson,” a legendary video game character with some truly memorable lines. Anyway, the game was filled with stick figures, like this:

In a small way, they actually helped you understand what was going on, by giving you a little expectation of what was coming in the chamber signs, once you understood the “language”:

Now there’s a new MCU series about Loki on Disney+. It introduces the Time Variance Authority to the universe, which was, in fact, a thing in the print comics, which I was never exposed to. The TVA uses a retro-futuristic style that has elements that look like Portal’s stick figure man.

It’s so similar, I wonder if Disney has had to pay Valve for the rights.

Anyway, I am absolutely loving Loki. It has even more promise than Wandavision, and that’s saying something.