The Returned

This is the state I find the country in upon my return? Trump. Jon Stewart retired. Lemmy, Bowie, and Prince dead. Trump.

What were you guys doing while I was gone? Come on, I go away for just... fifty-nine weeks? Wow. That's a long time. Okay, maybe we've all been letting each other down a little.

There's a lot to catch up on, most of it stupid. But in the interest of being excellent to each other, I'm going to try for a quick wrap-up of some of the easier to digest bits from the last several months. (Not the election, though--not yet. I still can't manage to keep that down.)

Batman v Superman/DC on Film  
I gave most of my thoughts on this on the podcast. But just to sum up: Affleck was fantastic (cautious optimism pays off!), Gadot was damn-near a revelation, while Superman (and most everything else) was... Snyder-ific. I don't know how Zack Snyder got that job. More importantly, I still don't know how DC/WB subs him out for Affleck, who can bring more to a film than interesting action choreography. Your ambition to be the smarter Marvel is a perfectly fine one, DC--if you can pull it off. But thirty minutes of interesting thematic building cannot give way to a punch-fest that is pointless, devoid of character, and unjustified even within the scope of a thin story.

Zack Snyder as a child. Also as an adult.

The up-shot is that DC/WB has too much invested to pull out now, so they'll get a couple of shots to do it right. Suicide Squad later this year and Wonder Woman next year, followed by Aquaman. You can read a lot of negatives into the reshoots and the insistences that future movies will be more fun: desperation, for example. But the first step toward fixing a problem is admitting there is one. And I choose to believe that, somewhere, a tiny voice is shouting at DC/WB execs, urging them to right their ship.

Keep listening to those voices, guys. They'll serve you well. As Silby said on the podcast, Harley Quinn, you're our only hope. Luckily, she's a damn good character to hang your hopes on.

The Cubs
Last year was so much simpler. It was one of the most exciting seasons Wrigley has seen in a long, long, long time: 97 wins, the third best record in baseball, a drive to the NLCS behind a young team with a super-chill manager in his first year with the club. It didn't even matter that they didn't pull it out in the end because they weren't even supposed to have gotten that far. Not that soon, anyway. Then they had that so-unbelievable-it-became-funny winter. And now this year...

Yes, it's exciting as hell, I know. But I could do without the talk of how historic the 2016 Cubs have been to this point. I could do without the expectations. And the heart palpitations. It's only May. I know this franchise. I know that if any team could win 120 games with a run differential of +400 and then get swept in the NLDS, it's this one. It's only May. There's a lot of baseball left to play... too much.

I still have hope, of course. Always will. And this team has more than earned that hope (that they've struggled the last few weeks against bad teams while beating up on the good ones helps remind me that underneath it all, they're still the Cubbies). But I've been on this ride before--and I'm not sure that I've ever seen it go this fast. Because their ticket for October might already be punched...

And it's only May.

America Beer
Okay, now we need to talk about something that is deeply stupid. Something that is deeply insulting. Something that will be with us at least until November. You think I'm going to make a joke about the election here, don't you? I'm not. There'll be time for that later. Anyway, this is probably worse.

What the hell, Anheuser-Busch In-Bev?! No, shut up a minute. I don't actually care--that was rhetorical. Stop it. Just stop... everything. Ideally, everything you do would just stop but I'll settle for you not wrapping your iced stormwater runoff in a flag that's already had too much done to it in the last few months.

Used to be, they'd settle for slapping some stars and stripes to the can or bottle some time between Memorial Day and the Fourth (a lot of breweries have long done this, even some very good ones). That was fine, it was subtle. It didn't have to mean anything. But this country doesn't do subtle anymore. This time, they've dragged the very name into the slop, affixing the word right on the can: America. It can't be ignored anymore.

If a person walks into a bar and orders "an America," a thoughtful bartender will slide a ridiculously large glass of bourbon their way and all would be well. If the thought occurred to make the request a beer, I don't know, maybe something that's still American-owned, that takes chances and doesn't try to please everybody? Isn't that how we like to see ourselves? There are a lot of good options in that direction. But if the person orders "an America" and is expecting a Budweiser (he (and it'll be a he) will be wearing some combination of a visor, aviators, a polo shirt, and a smirk that says he knows what he's doing is pissing people off, but otherwise why get up in the morning?), a thoughtful bartender will shut the establishment down until the bar patrons and wider community can overcome the douche-chill shockwave.

There's an easy line here about me loving America more than In-Bev does. I mean, I do. Most everybody does; it's a low bar. That a Belgian company would use the name "America" to enhance the already-bloated brand of a watered-down slap in the face to Bavarian/Czech tradition probably says more about early 21st Century geopolitics than I'm capable of parsing. But, like Trump, it's not the fountainhead that concerns me: it's the people who will lap it up, ensuring we'll be dealing with this again next year. And the year after. Until "America" replaces "Budweiser" entirely and we'll all look at ourselves, not quite sure when we hitched our star to the wrong wagon, but picking up on the unshakable sense that alcohol had something to do with it.

It's good to be back, everybody.