Colored Life

I like comic books. There I said it. I know what you’re thinking, “Sam likes comics? Why that certainly doesn’t make any sense, he’s just the guy who makes bad comic strips on the Internet that I don’t understand. He surly must hate the medium so much that he is waging a one man crusade against it, who only hopes to one day strike that final death blow into its fragile skull with the sick anticipation of that oh so inevitable brain leak on the ground that you know that the sick son of a bitch will devilishly lap up like some sort of thirsty stray on the street.” Now based on your way too detailed thoughts I’m going have to reply with only sick wonderment at you. Seriously who would come up with that stray cat part? You’re the sick son of a bitch.

Anyway the point of all this isn’t how appalling you are, (which don’t get me wrong you are quite appalling) this is about the comic book Invincible written by Robert Kirkman, who by all means is one hell of a writer. For those of you out of the loop Invincible is probably the best comic on the stands, when it comes out that is. Invincible chronicles the adventures of a collage aged superhero that has to deal with all the standard superhero bullshit. Super villains, yeah he fights them, angst ridden young adult drama, check-a-roo, massive government conspiracy, you guessed it. All par for the course, though Kirkman writes it with a style and grace that many other writers just seem to lack. Perhaps it’s because it’s his book about charters he created and knows who they are inside and out, I don’t know, he’s just awesome at this shit. Now with this said and considering the understated nature of my description of the actual story of Invincible this may come as a surprise when I say that this comic book prompted me to do something I’ve never done in the nearly seventeen years I’ve been reading comics, I wrote in to the letters page. Yes now that I’m in my twenties I suddenly felt the urge to live out my dream from ten years ago, I’m awesome like that. The reason I wrote in wasn’t to speculate about where the story is going, I rather like just sitting on the edge of my seat and just watch it happen, after all I have no influence over the outcome any way so why pretend like I do. I also didn’t write in to ask any number of inane questions, though those are Kirkman’s favorite types as he has gone on the record saying as much many times. No I wrote in because one of my personal industry heroes had just finished his last book in the series. Was it the artist? On average people love artists more than writers anyway so was I forlorn over the loss of the reason I bought the book in the first place? Sarcasm aside, nope. While Ryan Ottley is a god damned G he’s still on the book. Was it that driving force behind why Invincible is awesome, Robert Kirkman himself left the book to go on to different things? Nope that’s not going to happen. Did the letterer leave the book because no one normally cares about the letterer? Nah. All of these would have been good guesses though. No the real culprit was the colorist, Bill Crabtree who had gone on to do things that I’ll never read.

Now ever since I started reading this particular book I have loved the coloring, it was simple understated and fluid. The complexity of it all was all in the simplicity of his colors; despite how easy and simple it looked I couldn’t even begin to recreate Crabtree’s style if I tried. At first glance it could look like the book might have been colored in flats but after a few seconds you realize just how subtle and seamless all of the shadows and highlights were and at that moment if the reader of the comic has a heart it should be wormed straight to the pulmonary artery. Though if the reader does in fact lack this essential piece of the human puzzle they simply just stare blankly at the colored page until someone realizes that they are in fact dead and calls the mortician, and possibly the police to report heart thieves on the loose.

I thought my letter was awesome. Ok that’s a bullshit lie. It was merely okay. Hell I was attempting to achieve one of my childhood goals ten years too late, so basically I felt like a twelve year old while writing it. Despite this possibly subconscious tactical ploy, some how some way it was deemed not suitable for print by someone in the bullshit bureaucracy and the letter never saw the light of day, until now, so without further ado here is the letter I sent in only to have it stymied:

Robert,

As a pretend armature colorist who aspires to one day become a pretend professional colorist it saddened me to see Bill Crabtree leave the book. Over the course of the last fifty issues Mr. Crabtree has grown to be my favorite colorist, mostly because you made sure I knew his name by telling everyone how awesome a job he did on whatever issue I was reading. By the same token, Rus Wooton is the only letterer I even know the name of, making him the best in the industry by default. I guess this leads into my numbered question:

1) Why can’t everyone in comics be as magnanimous as you are?

Anyway whoever this Fco Plascencia is they better have the ability to blow my brains straight to Mars because Bill Crabtree is going to be on hell of an act to follow.

-Sam

Nothing offensive, right? Oh well good thing I have my own pseudo publishing outlet to circumvent the legal red tape that stood in the way of this letters greatness. Now to address this Fco Plascencia person, first how the hell do you even pronounce that name? Second off Ole Fco here is no Bill Crabtree. The elegance that was once a staple of the book no longer exists and it kind of saddens me, hopefully he/she/it will get better in the upcoming issues but as of this writing I’m not impressed.

The Rational Mumblings of a Madman

“I believe that these extra-terrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets, which are a little more technically advanced than we are here on earth.”

Excerpt from a letter written by
Gordon Cooper to the United Nations

Who in the hell is Gordon Cooper? Why should you care about what some nut job writes to the U.N.? All very good questions and will be answered in due time.


To get to the bottom of all of what should seem like nonsense to any normal person who didn’t just spend the last couple of days doing research in the loosest way possible, I need to start with July 23 2008. You see on July 23red something happened that made the child lurking inside of me giddy as a little girl, Edgar Mitchell did an interview on British radio station Kerrang! 105.2, a station that according to the universal database that is the Wikipedia is ‘a specialist rock music radio station,’ and proceeded to proclaim for all to hear that, “I happened to be privileged enough to have, uhh, be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet and the U.F.O. phenomenon is real...”

Holy shit. Did I just hear that right? Some asshole just went on the radio and told me that aliens do exist? Well I could have done that, well maybe not the whole British radio part but you get my point. So now we have two unknown assholes just going on and on about how aliens are real and have in fact visited planet earth. Crazy people say crazy thing eh? These two trucker-cap and wife beater wearing hillbillies should just shut their gaping maws and enrich the world with their golden silence, right amigos? Well if I had just painted these men in any kind of true light I would have to agree but the problem is that both of these men are real life American heroes, the last of a dying breed and some of the first of there kind, not the first but close enough, these men are both retired astronauts. Gordon Cooper was the final member of the Mercury space program to orbit the earth, Dr. Edgar Mitchell on the other hand stepped out of the hatch of Apollo 14 right after Alan Shepard and took a merry little jaunt across the surface of the moon. So when these guys talk it seems to add a little bit of weight to an argument about space related things in my opinion.


Through out the interview Mitchell talked about several things that seemed quite interesting to be coming out of the mouth of an astronaut, such as validating the Roswell New Mexico flying saucer crash of 1947 and other things. Shortly after I listened to the stream of the radio broadcast, I had two prevailing thoughts on my mind the first was, “God damn it, this almost adds a bit of validity to the shitty story of Indiana Jones 4,” this was quickly followed by, “I should really tell someone about this.” The funny thing about this is that no one else seemed to be interested in the fact that the sixth man on the moon was walking around talking about how the earth has been visited by extra-terrestrials, my father even went so far as to say “It’s good to know that they’re letting crazies walk on the moon now.” Not that I really think that Mitchell’s claim proves that aliens exist or even that I really think that we have been visited by little green men in flying saucers, it just seemed so interesting that Mitchell would so boldly state this and no one would find even raise an eyebrow. So in a fit of needing confirmation that this happened was in fact interesting I set fourth on my mission for validation.

What I found though wasn’t quite what I expected. You see the radio show I listened to had a host who had never in a million years imagined that when he sat down to interview an astronaut that the bombshell that the truth is out there would be cast down upon his head, which was much the same reaction that I had. Fuck Mitchell was the sixth man on the moon, up until this point in my life I only knew who first, second and fifth men on the moon were to me, for all intents and purposes Edgar Mitchell was birthed into existence when he conducted this interview.


After some research I learned that this wasn’t the tectonic plate shattering announcement that I once thought it was, no my new hero seems to have a history of confirming the existence of aliens and the reality of the Roswell incident. This was a little jarring to me that the guys at Kerrang! radio would have over looked this history with Mitchell, that or this was the reason that he was invited on to the show. Just think of all of the publicity that they have gotten out of this, I didn’t know that Kerrang! existed until this point and I feel safe assuming that until you read this you didn’t know about them either, I think that these guys decided to brew up a storm in teacup to up there notoriety with the public. I can see it now, in a quaint little coffee shop located in Wakefield England two young people are sitting down smoking there cigarettes and sipping on there fancy coffees when one mentions, “Ey you hear about how Kerrang! had some space man on the show and said that little green men exist?” shit everyone in ear shot just got hit by word of mouth advertisement. Though England might not be quite like that it’s how I would like to imagine that scenario going down. But this still doesn’t seem to answer my question, why is Mitchell going around talking about these facts so bluntly and not caring if people label him a crazy?

Well upon further research I learned that Mitchell once lived in the Roswell area. He explained that some of his incontrovertible evidence came straight from the horses mouths, he has talked extensively with the old timers of the area, ranging from ranch owners to people that he claims to have researched were in fact the military personal who responded to the saucers crash back in forty seven. After learning this I walked away from everything with a whole new perspective, I don’t think it matters too much to Mitchell that he knows that aliens exist and is on some sort of Fox Mulder crusade to rip the veil from of the eyes which the general public proudly wears. No I think that the true intention may be to keep the original lore of the night of July 7, 1947 in Roswell New Mexico alive. If he convinces a couple of people along the way it’s probably a plus but at least in this time when any damned fool, not unlike myself, can go on the internet and say and thing they want, he is keeping the tale alive the way stories have sense the first story was told.

Now for my entire life I have liked the idea of visitors from space, I have never cared if they were the hippy technology giving verity or the bad ass we are going to rape your planet kind, I just kind of wanted the fantastic to come real and spice up what is a fairly repetitive history log that us humans have. Do I think that what Mitchell says is true? Not really but I appreciate what he has done to help keep some bullshit childhood fantasy of mine alive.

Cathode Poisoning

Well here I am blogging along through the universe on a collision course that I cannot even begin to fathom. I’ve pretty much felt the cold steel of determination pressed against my throat to post something rather meaningful to my personal being, a topic that I hold pretty dear to my heart, yet I’m having quite the time trying to articulate how I want to go about talking about it. I think its rather funny how I can spend hours on end imagining the various points of what I want to write about and how I’m going to link each point to the next yet the second I sit down I feel some sort of primal need to do everything conceivable that isn’t writing. I’m no longer in school and I don’t have a job that has deadlines so why the hell am I procrastinating? I’ve found myself watching TV shows for the first time in years. Now I’m not talking about the DVD sets of Arrested Development that I’ve watched time after time. No nothing as good as that I’ve ended up watching some trite bullshit and have felt quite opiated about the entire experience, which is quite a shocking feeling because I have tended to hate television for sometime now. The numbness of not having to exercise my mind is somehow comforting, the best way to help the understanding process is via simile: “Watching television is like running into that person that you knew in high school that was always kind of cool but after hanging out with them for an hour or two you remembered why you actively decided not to keep in touch.”

All of that said, I fucking hate TV. I’ve recently watched a show that many of my peers have told me was amazing called The Venture Brothers and while at times humorous at the most basic levels I realize that its fucking stupid. I enjoyed the first two novels in the Dexter series yet the television show just pissed me off, big time. Yet I sat through entire seasons of both of these shows within the last month. What the fuck is wrong with me? I have felt no mind expansion or anything like that from those precious hours stolen from me, yet I keep crawling back for more like some kind of cathode ray tube junkie who is just begging for his next fix. Pretty fucking sad if you ask me. The worst part of all this is that I’m most likely just going to go back to watching contrive bullshit after I post this.

Sorry for the lack of pictures and I’m going to sit down and write the real article in the next 24 hours, its about aliens and my time traveling future self from tomorrow told me its fan-fucking-tastic.

Welcome to the New Blog

Well here I am, a blogger. A real one. Hey look at me I have a blog! Writing a comic apparently isn’t enough for me so I decided to start this blog up as a side project. I’m hoping to have at least something posted once a week, a modest goal if I do say so myself. Anyhow if you scroll down you’ll see some of the stuff I’ve written recently so if you’ve already read it on the comic or on the myspace you don’t need to read it again. I assure you it hasn’t changed. Anyway for future posts I hope to include pictures and stuff because I’ve noticed that those blocks of text down there look like hell with nothing there to break them up.

Anyway I’ll probably put something new up on here in the next few days so you can be on the look out for that if you want.

Your Friend,
Sam

(Soft) Science and Honor

Today I'm going to talk about my intense hatred of Abraham Maslow. The level of hatred I have for this man can only be described as "intensity in ten cities" I truly feel that this man has lead to a decline in the way of life in western civilization. We are talking about a man who didn't know a god damned thing about anything. Okay that may be a hasty generalization but as far as the one big thing that he is known for, "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs," is complete shit. That may be to slight a phrase for what the Hierarchy is, so let me try again, "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs," is the single most destructive force that this or any other generation has ever seen. Well what about the atomic bomb? To this I reply, "What about the god damned atomic bomb?" I laugh at the atomic bomb like a child laughs at a inflatable punching bag the first time it pops back up at him, compared to the Hierarchy, the atom bomb is like fending off a hoard of blood-thirsty kill-bots with an aged paper football and you can be damned sure that the kill-bot wont hold its hands up in the faux goal post position. So enough describing my awesome levels of hate for Maslow's Hierarchy, on to the meat and potatoes as they say. For complete comprehension of what the Hierarchy is I'm going to have to give a slight run down on what exactly "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs" is.

The Hierarchy is oft times depicted as a pyramid with five blocks which build upon each other meaning you have to have the block that precedes it in order to continue up the pyramid (if you know the Hierarchy you may skip down to the next paragraph). The first block and the base of is that of "Physiological needs" which are air, water, food, exercise and so fourth. Next comes "Safety needs" such as security from crime, financial stability, and a securely maintained level of the vaguely defined health. Then comes "Social needs" which is pretty common sense and you can gather what its about from the name. The penultimate block is that of "Esteem needs", which is the basic human need for confidence, achievement, and respect, respect from others and yourself. Lastly is "Self-actualization" the top of the pyramid, the thing all people strive for, its the lack of prejudice and the ability to spontaneously be the great moral compass, creative mastermind, and problem solver all in one, a point of note is that only like the top five percent, or some small number lat that, of humans will reach this level on the Hierarchy.

So upon first glance this looks like a pretty good little psychological diagram for what each and every human needs and strives for at the basic levels. Well no fucking shit, you don't need to be the goddamn Batman to figure that out. In Maslow's defense, this thing was published in 1954 when psychology was still reeling from Freud's "each has obsessions of incestual feelings towards ones own mother" 'nonsense' (I'm not here attacking Freudian psychology and I'm just speaking of closed minded opinion that you still hear to this day) and the "Witchcraft" of Franz Mesmer a hundred and forty years prior. Maslow needed to post stupid things that the common man could grasp so he wouldn't be laughed out of town. I mean if you forget the work of people like B.F. Skinner and Pavlov along with others who had mad psychology almost an excepted form of soft science by that point.

So by this point you must be wondering where the hell am I going with all of this for lack of a better term: "Bullshit"? Well I will gleefully tell you:

"Abraham Lincoln and The Curious Case of the Emo Children"

For you to understand that phrase that I have presented to you I need to give you a couple of pieces of information. First Maslow used our sixteenth President of the United States of America, and one of my personal favorite presidents, as one of the top percentage of humanity who reached this silver unicorn on his Hierarchy. The second tid-bit of info I'm going to divulge is all opinion baby, This isn't any sort of formal scholarly paper so you can take the criticisms of opinion not being fact and shove it in your corn cob pipe and smoke it! Anyway secondly I fucking hate "Self-Esteem". So with that little dose of 1-800-GOOG-411 tucked into your lapel pocket we shall proceed.

So Ole' Honest Abe was the top percent of humanity who had no problems? I find this quite hard to believe considering the well-documented accounts of his severe depression and several attempts on his own life. Fact: during the Civil War Lincoln wasn't allowed to carry his pocketknife because his wife (go figure…) was afraid that he was going to use it to kill himself on long train rides. So how the hell did this man end up being the poster boy for self-actualization? Don't get me wrong Lincoln was a damned G by all respects but I would hardly count him as being the ideal mesomorph by any means. Before you even ask I don't even want to get into William Sheldon's bullshit somatotype theory, though it was useful for my purposes now, this marks the first time that I have ever used it in any context other than to call it bullshit. I digress, the point I am making here is that if your not able to come up an example of what your diagram is depicting as what humanity strives for what good is it. That's like saying that at the top block of the "Sam Morgan Hierarchy of Needs" is mans ability to fly unassisted, then I go and say that Charlie Chaplin was the ideal human, my shit doesn't hold water just like Maslow's doesn't.

As you just read, with Lincoln I attacked the upper echelon of the Hierarchy and now with "The curious case of the Emo Children" I'm going to take just one quick step down to the next platform on the pyramid and talk about my intense hatred for this particular level. As a matter of fact I probably wouldn't have a problem at all with Maslow if it weren't for this next level down, I would have seen his Abraham Lincoln example as some sort of clerical error that he had no hand in but because of the fallout and repercussions that this particular platform has had on society as a whole I refuse to give that son of a bitch and wiggle room on anything, or even believe anything he has had to say ever. Hell his ghost could pop up in front of me today, right now as I type this in fact and say: "The sky is most definitely blue." And after hearing this I would have no other choice than to think that the sky was a nice shade of crimson, despite all evidence to the contrary.

My core problem with this esteem needs block is the fact that if it didn't exist that many people would be much happier people. You see it's of my belief that without the pop culture catch phrase self-esteem people wouldn't realize they had a self-esteem and well shit I bet ninety percent of the anti-depressant companies would be making something else, like milk. I mean I'm going to assume we've all known someone who has flat out said to you at some point "I have a low self-esteem" WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT SHIT!? Seriously who the fuck goes around saying that kind of nonsense? That's the kind of jack-assery that you say about people you don't like. "Oh man, see that guy over there in the rascal scooter? The one who must weigh five hundred pounds? Yeah he totally has a low self esteem." I mean that shit is nasty. I relate someone saying that they have a low self esteem to them saying that they fuck sheep for fun.

Now imagine the utopia we could be living in where people weren't so preoccupied with how low there self worth is and actually went out and just did something. I bet the American economy wouldn't be in such a bind if we didn't have this generation of deadbeat wasteoids sitting around crying about how much they aren't worth. Shit if we got rid of the concept of Esteem needs we would lose the entire "emo" genre and about half of the "country" music ever written. I'm not joking when I say utopia. If Carl Marx was an American and not such a god damned commie and lived today and someone else had wrote The Communist Manifesto 1848 causing the cold war to still happen, well I'm sure he would have written a much better article than this one about how utopian like the world would be with out the concept of self esteem, also he would have a beard, something I lack so I don't get half the respect that Modern Day Carl Marx gets.

In conclusion I would like to point out that the introduction to this article was at a much more grand scale than it should have been, I can only relate it to that trailer you once saw making the movie look awesome when it was only ok. That and I hate Abraham Maslow.

My Hatred Of Robots

I am a somewhat regular customer at the Ann Arbor Denny's and by somewhat regular customer I mean that I go there a couple of Saturday's a month, though I once was there most every Saturday but that's a tale of days gone past. Now why I bring this up is that this particular Denny's recently "upgraded" there restroom, much to my dismay. Now some may wonder how the modernization of the facilities could cause me to spiral into some sort of emotional distress. The reasoning for this should be rather easy to comprehend for most though I feel that the rest of you will need to read on as to understand the rage that hatched out of the proverbial egg, which symbolized my depression. You see when they renovated the bathroom they decided that the leavers on the commodes should be replaced by "sensors" which I'm sure we all know is just the vision unit of a robot. Now in theory once this eye, if you will, is done seeing that you're standing there it flushes the toilet. If this injustice wasn't enough, once you go to wash your hands the soap dispenser is set on a motion trip and if memory serves right I do believe that the faucet is as well. The point of all this is once Skynet goes up sanitation is going right out the fucking window.

Now I'm personally a moderate "germaphobe" not to the extent that I could lie and tell people that I have OCD or anything it's just that I like to wash my hands after I use the bathroom, do the dishes, finish yard work, clean the kitchen, and various other tasks. So if you don't have this problem you're in the clear, right? Well anyone who has ever read anything warning you of emanate danger knows that any statement that ends with a comma, the word 'right', and a question mark will instantly know that the answer in the next sentence will consist of a single five letter word, which is 'wrong'. You see many other common everyday things that we take for granted are only taken for granted because some ass-hat entrusted the job to a fucking robot.

Now for your reading pleasure here is a list of some of the things that will go down ruining your life:

Stop lights, this will cause immediate anarchy. Bank Accounts, I hope you hate having money because it will all be gone. Manufacturing plants, well I guess that this won't matter because they probably already laid you off… I could go on and on about these things but I hate lists so I wont. I just hope that illustrated my point a little more than my Denny's example. All I'm saying is that we are becoming more reliant on the aid of the enemy of the future than I personally would like and I would like to think that others feel the same way about this as I do. Here is a scenario I would like you to consider: So, you're sitting in your favorite easy chair puffing away on your favorite pipe wearing your most comfortable slippers reading the paper after a long day of work. Junior then runs into the room ecstatic because he just won the schools spelling bee and he's moving on to the county finals. Suddenly you hear a sharp rap upon your front door, you ponder who would be visiting? You mentally check your mental roll-a-dex and have no recollection of making any appointments for this time or day and resolve that it must be the neighbors because Fido got into there garbage once again. Distraught you stand up and walk to the door and answer it, fully expecting to see Mrs. Smith standing angrily on your porch, but once the door is open you suddenly know that it's not Mrs. Smith standing on your porch. No instead it's a small posse of small white shotgun toting robots, who then quickly remove life from you body. Then proceed into your house and decide that Junior needs the same gift. Your lovely wife or husband? You got, it double barreled injustice has be served up on a steaming plate of falsely placed trust. When you think about it how long will it be until you hear a knock on your door and are answering to the ASIMO firing squid? Ponder that one for a while.

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull

• Well, I took less than two weeks to update so that is something. It's just been sooo nice outside lately that I'm having a hard time wanting to spend time inside on the computer, maybe there will be more updates when it gets shitty out again. Any way on to the comic.
  
• First things first, I love Indiana Jones. Seriously he's probably one of the best fictitious characters ever. I've owned wide brim hats in the past just so I could see if that was what made him cool, incidentally that turned out poorly. But regardless of my cool level shortcomings Indiana Jones is the baddest mother fucker ever, if you have ever seen his wallet it's the one with another wallet printed on it which has the phrase "Bad Mother Fucker" inscribed on that one. Indiana Jones once met the devil and beat him in a damned fiddle duel, and he had never touched one before that moment. In short he is the closest thing to God man shall ever know… Or at lest he was up until the point that The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out.
  
• I mean there were parts to this film that I really wanted to like, I did. I swear I tried to like it. I didn't even hate the fact that they introduced his "Kid Sidekick" slash son. I could live with that. Seriously I could have. But once Indy climbed into a refrigerator to escape a nuclear test AND LIVED I knew that the movie wasn't going to be anything like what an Indiana Jones movie should be. I mean that scene would have been fucking awesome in almost any other movie, its silly, its over the top, and it should have been fun. The problem though is while the Indy series is known for silly, over the top fun, its always been grounded in a little thing I like to call reality. I went into this film with my belief suspension meter set to five on a ten point scale, knowing I would see things that would never happen in the real world, the movie though really wanted to have your belief suspension meter set on eleven. Vine swinging monkey fight. I needed to say it, that total was crap. My father has a firm theory concerning television shows and I think that it rings true with movie franchises as well it goes something like this: "The second a T.V. show has a "Monkey Episode" you know that it will never be funny again. This movie was literally the "Monkey Episode" in the Indiana Jones series. But I think the thing that burns my ass the most is the way that they wasted what could have been an epic adventure with Indiana Jones in El Dorado by filling it with Trans-dimensional aliens. I mean how bad could a film with a title like: "Indiana Jones and the City of Gold" have been, shit I almost would still see that, pending that George Lucas didn't fucking write it at this point. Perhaps they would need to subtitle it with "There are no aliens in this film" but then we would have to hope someone like James didn't put that tag line on the poster. God damn. I mean the "Last Crusade" was a good enough film that I just accepted that Lancelot had been waiting with the Holy Grail for a few hundred years for someone to try and use it, but aliens? ALIENS? Even James fucking Cameron couldn't have made this movie work and we sure as fuck know Spielberg couldn't. What I think is the most disappointing aspect though (which is different from ass burning) is the way the film had been marketed, I really wanted to see a fun film where Indy fights communism, I wanted to sit down and watch a film that would have come out in the 1970's, it could have been campy and over the top on patriotism and I would have loved every second of the film, but the Commies were regulated to second rate villains that could have been replaced by villainous trope in the hat. I guess I have digi-vented long enough so I'm going to wrap this up now. God damn…