Rush to Flush The Mush

Hey-oh:

Happy Sunday to you (or whatever day it is in your time zone). I feel like there’s at least one of you I owe a quick note to—that would be Martin, in the pumpkin patch, with some comments about Bob Haney (it kind of sounds like an accusation in Clue, though not sure if they’ve made them quite that niche (yet))—so I hope those kind few will forgive me for trying to grind out a larger note to everyone.

I’m walking into this one unsure of where I’m gonna go, exactly? I was thinking it’d be a post called “Not For Me(?)” wherein I’d talk about two things I watched recently, Single Lady, Ali Wong’s new comedy special on Netflix, and then Edi and I finally rented Deadpool & Wolverine.

The précis of the post would be trying to reconcile that I’m not the ideal audience for Ali Wong’s comedy and I supposedly am for D&W, and then go on to right about the huge shock of not connecting with Ali Wong’s comedy and doing just fine with Deadpool & Wolverine. And then maybe the post would be me shrugging and saying, y’know, it’s ok to not like stuff I don’t like and like the stuff I like…and then maybe salt in an easy observation about social media and how much people still have trouble with that idea, pat myself on the back, and call it a post.

I don’t know, though.

The dots all line up but it also didn’t feel like an authentic recounting of my experience. For one thing, part of me is like, “Bill Hader is Ali Wong’s boyfriend and was apparently really into her before they even started dating, and so what is there so different between my taste and Bill Hader’s?”

(Which is a really dumb question, but hopefully at least a little forgiveable since I think Hader, like Edgar Wright before him, and Quentin Tarantino before him, have a little bit of a sideline as “entertainers who are also film nerds whose taste in films is similar enough to mine that I’ve expanded my horizons a lot.” And I also think Hader in his day job—or maybe his old day job—of “person who is funny professionally” is granted a bit more authority by me. Like, if he likes a comedy thing and I don’t, I’m doing it wrong.)

And but also? I feel like Edi really liked Deadpool & Wolverine wayyyyyy more than I did. Edi has a certain appreciation for the Bugs Bunny school of “Aint I A Stinker?” protagonists—I hereby enter her complete watch and rewatch of all eight seasons of Psych into evidence as Exhibit A, Your Honor—that made her a genuine fan of the first Deadpool movie and a solid “I got my money’s worth” appreciator of the other two.

Me, I thought Deadpool and Wolverine had enough good stuff in it to be enjoyable, but it also felt inert.

And so as I crest five hundred words, let me tie it off here. Because in a way this is the part of the “here’s why I’m not turning in my homework” excuse I find worth mentioning—to break down what didn’t work and why with either product requires more time than I want to give it. Why that might be is probably the interesting part of the whole endeavor for me, the part I don’t think I can figure out without doing what the thing I’m unwilling to do and break it all down.

My suspicion is that both things suffer from a feeling of complacency, maybe? Wong had some bits I really enjoyed, but it was the first time in a long time that if someone had turned it off twenty minutes in, held a gun to my head and had me write the rest of it, I could deliver something moderately close to how the rest of the special turned out.

And I guess I’m old enough that I don’t see that as a humblebrag (though that doesn’t mean that it isn’t, of course) but a failing of the work. It’s not like Ali Wong needed to deliver her version of Richard Pryor: Live On The Sunset Strip to win me over but I feel like I needed….something, you know?

Similarly, Deadpool & Wolverine spends a lot of time doing very little with a lot. Hugh Jackman actually commits to the bit and delivers, like, a good performance; for another, Cassandra Nova is really well handled (before she’s not); and the filmmakers do an ok job shamelessly ripping off a big chunk of Morrison’s Animal Man and effectively using it in the metacontext of the movie.

But the movie has no movement to it. The characters don’t grow, and so only change when they hit the page in the script that requires them to.

And this is why I don’t really have anything to say about the movie, really. Like takes to like, game recognizes game. I’m not going to do the work to understand why Single Girl and Deadpool & Wolverine didn’t really land for me because my suspicion is it felt like the creators didn’t put in the work. They saw what they needed to do and went, “nah.”

Maybe I’m wrong about that. However, as the saying goes, “Sewer rat might taste like pumpkin pie but I’ll never know.” I spent more than enough time talking about what I’m not going to be talking about.

And but so—what am I gonna talk about?

Oh! Speaking of not putting in the work, I got an email from the DC shop, letting me know I could get the rare drop of the two limited edition shirts announcing Hush 2, the sequel to Loeb & Lee’s Hush. Have you seen the fucking logo on this? Here’s both shirt designs:

I. Fucking. Died. H-2-S-H doesn’t look like Hush 2! It doesn’t look like anything! Maybe, maybe, I dunno, an acronym for, uh, “Head to Shit Head?” I don’t know if this was somehow sprung on some designer or… I mean, it feels to me like at the eleventh hour Jim Lee decided they needed promotional shirts with “cool” branding but… I mean, it’s not like DC found out about the sequel to Hush five minutes before we did! They’ve known for awhile. And this is all they could come up with?

It’s like they don’t even understand the idea of putting the number in the middle of the title, which is…don’t do it if it’s not cool? Plus, SE7EN is annoying but you can at least read it—you can see how the 7 is like a knocked over “V” and it’s eye-catching. “F8 of the Furious” scans.

When Todd Allen told me this was coming, I jokingly called it “Shush,” and I swear that felt like a better title than “H2SH.”

I mean, this is so bad it stops thought. I have no idea how to fix it or what I would do. (I’m also not a designer!) “HU2H” looks just like “Huh?” (Not entirely inappropriate, maybe?)

So I mean….why not call it, “Hush, Hush” instead of “Hush 2”? Then, instead of falling on your face doing the “replace the letter with a number that looks nothing like the letter” trick, you can do, I dunno, overlapping overlays of the word Hush with images in the overlap, or….the logo casting the shadow with something inside the shadow, or…

Call it Hushh? Call it Hush 2 but use the roman letters so it’s “Hush II” and then work the “II” into the vertical bits of the second H? Do Something, DC!

Anyway. That’s where I’ve got to leave it, although…

Why is it when I think Ali Wong, and Sean Levy & Ryan Reynolds & 3(!) other screenwriters didn’t put in the work, I have to craft a heartfelt “whatever, if they’re not going to put in the work, why should I” post….but when fucking DC Comics clearly doesn’t put any fucking effort into promoting a Batman comic they don’t really need to promote beyond announcing (and, really, are they wrong?), I’m all “give me the pen, you dummies! I’ll show you how it’s done!”?

I don’t know. Maybe that’ll be the post for next time. Or maybe it’s best not to think about it.

I hope you’re well! And I hope you have a good week.

-Jeff