We're Chained To The World, And We All Gotta Pull

Trigger warning for infanticide


For anyone who hasn't heard of the game franchise Max Payne, you're missing out. It's a series of games starring Max Payne (duh), an NYPD detective who is half Bogart and half Neo from The Matrix.

Now if that sounds like a strange mix, don't worry. It's great! Basically, he's Bogart in as much as he's a film noir cliché, with a very flowery inner monologue that sounds like it came straight from a forties detective film. The Matrix part is that you can activate bullet time (basically slow motion, which allows you to aim and shoot enemies before they can react). When the original game came out in 2001, it revolutionised third person shooters. The game was followed by two sequels (one in 2003, the second in 2012), which both received excellent reviews as well, although the third heavily differed in tone from the first two.

However, we're not here to talk about the games. That's for another time. In between the releases of Max Payne 2 and Max Payne 3, a Max Payne film came out in 2008. Loosely based on the events of the first game, it starred Mark Wahlberg as Max Payne. Spoilers for the film follow, and by association spoilers for the first game.

The film opens in media res, with Max sinking into the freezing Hudson River. As he slowly sinks beneath the surface, we hear his inner monologue talking about how he doesn't believe in Heaven, he only believes in pain and fear. Already I'm rolling my eyes at this stereotypical action movie dialogue, but then he starts talking about how there's an army of dead people under the ocean, waiting to draw him down to join them. This got my attention, because this felt like the kind of monologue he'd give in the games, and I was thinking "okay, this feels cool". Sadly, this is the only time he has any kind of monologue in the film, and it's also probably the best part of the film. Given that this monologue lasts approximately sixty seconds, and there's near enough two hours of film remaining, that's not good.

It then cuts back to a week earlier, where we discover that Max is a detective who only gets given cold cases that are impossible to solve. Already that's a big difference from the source material, where he joins the DEA and goes undercover in the mob. This part of the film is also where we discover that his wife and daughter were murdered by home invaders dosed on Valkyr, a new drug that's on the scene. Now the film just tells us this, we don't actually see what happens to his family until about halfway through the film. In the game, the first playable part is when Max comes home to find his wife and daughter killed. It's completely playable, and you hear his family being killed as you rush to try and save them (including his six month old daughter).

Another deviation from the game is the lack of the Mafia in the story. For two thirds of the game you're lead to believe the Mafia are the main villains behind the drug Valkyr, before it's revealed to be a failed super soldier serum that the creator decided to keep working on. In the film, while one of the Mafia underbosses (Jack Lupino) from the game appears, there's no evidence of him being a mafioso. Instead he's an ex-soldier who was a test subject for Valkyr, the continued usage of which drove him to violent insanity. In the game, about the only similarity between the two is that he's addicted to Valkyr, and violently insane.

There are a couple of scenes in the film where they have little references to the games (one of the first areas we see in the film is Roscoe Street Subway Station, which is the first proper level in the game, and Jack Lupino is confronted at a club he owns called Ragna Rock in both the film and game).

However, before we get to any exciting fight with Jack in the film, we have to first get through the first hour or so of the film. Apart from a very brief scene with Max torturing a suspect in a train station bathroom and an equally brief scene where his partner is murdered by Lupino who then throws Max around like a ragdoll, the entirety of the first nearly fifty minutes is basically people getting into arguments and stalking about the place.

The reason this is an issue is that Max Payne the game is essentially a playable John Woo simulator. Basically you run around shooting people for the entirety of the game, and you don't care how repetitive that may seem because the shooting is really damn good. So the film having barely any action in the first half is not fitting. Especially when the dialogue is just dull and generic.

But anyway, eventually the film remembers it's roots and decides to go full John Woo. Oh wait, that's what would have happened if the film wasn't crap. Instead the first action scene has Max being shot at by armoured SWAT (who are corrupt so it doesn't matter to his superiors that he shoots them), and he takes cover behind a wall and blindfires at them. Of course because he's the protagonist he has pin point accurate aim while roughly ten trained SWAT cops can't aim for shit.

So anyway the next action scene is Max vs Lupino. Anyone who's played the game knows that Lupino is a tough sonofabitch who constantly howls like a wolf and is a guy who worships pretty much every demon you've ever heard of. Lupino in the film is much quieter, and only talks about Norse Valkyries and who they're looking out for (either Max or Lupino). After a brief fight where Max uses his shotgun to block sword attacks, Lupino is unceremoniously shot in the back by BB. How dull.

For people who played the game, BB is the guy who killed Max's partner and only appears in a brief scene where he tries to get Max on his side before being killed by Max. He's not a very interesting character, and he's not the main villain. However he is the main villain in the film, and it's revealed he was Max's father's partner. Max's father was never mentioned in the games and only appears in the comics made to tie in to the third game. In that he's a Vietnam Vet who suffers from PTSD and abuses his wife, rather than a cop. Admittedly the film did come out before the comics, but it's still a cliché for the main character in a cop film to have a cop father who was betrayed (I think he was anyway, I kind of lost interest around this point).

So anyway BB betrays Max and rather than shooting him in the head and being done with it, he instead decides to frame him as a Valkyr addict who commited suicide by handcuffing himself and jumping into the river. He does this by slipping a vial of Valkyr into his coat pocket. For some reason he chooses not to empty the vial and therefore make it look like Max actually took the Valkyr, which proves his undoing when Max manages to break free of his handcuffs (via getting the goon with BB to accidentally shoot the cuffs.) He then knocks the goon and BB to the ground and runs away, with the goon and BB giving chase and managing to miss every shot. Max then dives into the freezing cold river, leading us back to the beginning of the film.

Despite the fact that the opening showed Max unconscious in freezing cold water, apparently all he needed to wake up was a hallucination of his dead wife saying... something to him (I missed what it was exactly). So he swims back to the dock and climbs out, then decides that in order to not die of exposure he must take the does of Valkyr that BB was so kind to give him. Within seconds of taking it, Max gets to his knees and starts TRIPPING. BALLS. Basically it starts snowing fire, and then he screams like a madman as the world around him catches fire. This was actually a pretty cool moment imo, and it leads into his assault on the Aesir building (the company behind the creation of Valkyr).

Max tracks down BB and his armed security to the Aesir Corporation, and tears through them like... well, like in the games. He sprints towards them while dual wielding machine pistols just as BB escapes. Sadly this is the most intense it really gets, other than that he shoots a couple of goons and manages to shake of getting blasted with a shotgun and an Uzi. I will admit I thought it was funny that Max only really started fighting like Max from the games when he was high on Valkyr, whereas in the games he just does it all the time.

So the film ends with Max shooting BB in slow motion. Note that this is maybe the third use of bullet time in the film, whereas in the game it's controllable by the player so you can use it whenever you like. Then Max just falls to his knees on the helipad, and apparently stays like that long enough for night time to turn to dawn. Then cops find him, and the credits roll.

Apparently there's a post credits scene which shows Mona - oh shit I forget to mention Mona? I suppose that shows how much of an impact she made on the film. Basically she's an assassin who helps Max for reasons - meeting Max in a bar and telling him about his next target, Nicole Horne (the actual villain of the game). This implies that Max got absolved of going rogue and killing a bunch of people. Yes this happens in the game, however the game explains it by way of a shadowy Illuminati-esque government conspiracy making all the charges against Max go away (yes really). The film just doesn't explain it.

So anyway, Max Payne's film adaptation is bad. Sadly, it's the only film adaptation we have. Thankfully we have the three games to try and forget the existence of the film, but forgetting this mess will be difficult.

I thought I had made a choice in watching this film, but there are no choices. Nothing but a straight line. The illusion comes afterwards, when you ask 'Why me?' and 'What if I hadn't watched this awful film?', when you look back, see the branches, like a pruned bonsai tree, or a forked lightning. If you had watched a different film, it wouldn't be you, it would be someone else looking back, reviewing another shitty film.

TW for mentions of rape

Some of you may have heard of a little known book by Margaret Atwood called The Handmaid's Tale. General synopsis is that due to a worldwide shortage in births, America has become a shithole dictatorship called Gilead where fertile women are raped and forced to bear children for the elite few. Ironically enough despite the fact that it's believed that women are affected by the sterility it's actually shown to be men. From what I understand the book ends with June (the narrator) being taken to some unknown fate, before skipping forward about a century where it's shown that Gilead has fallen and is now taught about in much the same way as real-life dictatorships such as Nazi Germany.

The TV show of the same name first aired in April 2017, and was released to rave reviews. It was also the only season to be directly based on the events of the book - ending the same way as the book, with June and the other handmaids being taken to an unknown fate. Overall, it was a very good but extremely harrowing season of television. The villainous Commander Waterford is played Joseph Fiennes, and due to the fact that his brother Ralph played Lord Voldemort I like calling him Lord Brodemort. He turns in a very good performance, although perhaps due to the fact that he's an English actor playing an American he puts on a very stereo-typically evil voice that no-one in the real world ever sounds like. If you met someone who speaks the way he does in real life you'd have nothing to do with him because you'd just know that he's the type of person to dropkick babies out of windows and tie helpless damsels to train-tracks while twirling his mustache and laughing.

Yvonne Strahovski plays his wife Serena Waterford, and she also does an extremely good performance. The only other thing I've seen her in was Seasons 7 and 8 of Dexter where she plays Hannah McKay, and while I thought she was a perfectly decent actress in that her character made me want to pull my eyes out of my head and stuff them in my ears so I wouldn't have to see or hear the absolute bastardization of a TV show I had a lot of fun with. However in this her character is actually well written so I don't have that problem.

June herself is played by Elizabeth Moss. Before The Handmaid's Tale she was best known for roles in The West Wing and Mad Men. I've personally only seen Mad Men, and I thought she was very good in that. June is acted extremely well as she goes from scared mother trying to protect her daughter to angry handmaid to the leader of a revolution and a cold-blooded murderer.

I'm currently partway through Season 4. Living in Northern Ireland we've got access to the show later than people over the pond, but even then myself and my mother are still an episode behind as of this writing. Part of this is because we're on our second rewatch of Breaking Bad, and Breaking Bad is something that just sucks away everything and demands your entire life. And it's something you happily give, because it is the greatest television show on the planet. Well, apart from Better Call Saul.

But another reason we're a bit behind is because honestly, after Season 1 The Handmaid's Tale was never as good. As I said before the first season was based directly on the book, so it was following Margaret Atwood's writing. I've read some of the book, and what I've read is very very good. The following seasons are based on events made fresh for the show, because they didn't want to do only one season. Anyway, so the unknown fate at the end of Season 1 is revealed to be a mock execution followed by all the handmaids barring June (who's pregnant) being tortured while she has to watch. Kind of ruins the mystique of the end of the previous season. But what makes it worse is what happens next. June manages to escape, and over the course of several episodes is getting ready to escape Gilead and go to Canada to be with her husband, Luke. Only, as she's in a plane about to take off, she gets recaptured and returned to Commander Brodemort. Seriously? After several episodes worth of hype at June escaping she gets caught? Fuck this.

And that is the biggest problem with Seasons 2 to 4 of The Handmaid's Tale. There are so many times where it looks like she's going to escape, and then she doesn't. Either she's caught, or she refuses to leave, or she goes into labour at an inopportune moment. It honestly happens so many times that I'm just going to start calling it The Handmaid's Fail, because that's pretty much what happens. There are still some great moments - the ending of Season 3 was amazing - but the number of times the creators troll us with "Hey June's gonna esca - PSYCHE!" I'm just not even sure what to say anymore. The absolute turd icing on the shit-cake would have to be the ending of episode three of Season Four - the episode I've just finished watching which inspired me to write this. June managed to escape with a bunch of handmaids, only for her to be kidnapped by Gilead. She refuses to say where the other handmaids are even as she's tortured both physically and mentally. She even refuses to say where they are when two others are pushed off a building in front of her. Eventually she does tell, but only when her daughter is threatened. The other handmaids are found, and they and June are basically told "yay you're gonna be handmaids again!" and I'm just like "Fuck. This". Only they're all put in the back of a minibus with only Aunt Lydia (essentially a nun with a cattle prod) and an armed guard. They're stopped at train tracks when they suddenly decide "hey lets escape" and attack Aunt Lydia before running away. They're running in slow-motion as triumphant music plays, before it cuts to a hilarious shot of Aunt Lydia - still in bullet time - shouting "NO, STOP!" to the guard as he draws his gun and opens fire on the handmaids. One of them drops which causes the others to keep running in an attempt to beat the train crossing. June and another handmaid called Janine get across the track, while the other four who were close behind them are flattened by the train. Then the episode ends after a brief flashback to Season 1 which shows them all meeting for the first time.

So basically four characters just got killed by a train. To this I say "what the fuck?". The show is just fucking sadistic at this point. At what point does it just become torture porn? If I wanted to watch torture porn I'd just put Saw on, at least that has Tobin Bell. The worst part of it is that there's apparently going to be a Season 5. Why? How can they keep dragging it on? To quote the title - when will it end?! At this point I wouldn't be surprised if it just ended with Gilead nuking the planet while The Ink Spots played.

For those of you reading this who don't know, around June last year I started working in a care home. I worked in that particular care home for about five months before leaving due to the fact that my hours were being reduced (there wasn't as much need for staff and I was bank), and I just didn't think it was very well run. I moved to Northern Ireland in late November, and was able to get a job the following month in another home. After completing the online training, I was able to start a few days after Christmas.

The difference between where I worked in England and where I worked in Northern Ireland are that the first place was a residential care home, and the place in Northern Ireland was a nursing ward specifically for people with dementia. Residential care homes have no nurses on staff, meaning that if for example a resident has a bedsore and needs their dressing changed, you need to arrange for the district nurse to come do it. Therefore typically, the residents are healthier and have fewer health issues. Where I worked in particular, the residents generally were fairly easy to get on with and if they needed assistance with personal care they would generally let you get on with it and wouldn't get unhappy or violent.

However, the home I worked at in Northern Ireland was quite different. For one thing, we were assigned wards that we would work on throughout the day, and there would be five carers per ward. My ward had about fifteen or sixteen residents living on it, whereas the home I worked in in England would have five carers for nearly forty residents. The idea with there being five carers on the floor would be that you would have two doubles, who would go and look after the residents who needed two people for their personal care (they would typically be people who could not move without assistance but could also be residents who were prone to violence), and then have one carer who would work on their own to get up the residents who only needed one carer to get them up.

For some reason after the first week or so, I would invariably be put on the singles every single shift that I worked, even though who worked singles and doubles was supposed to be mixed up every shift. You weren't supposed to have one person constantly on the singles, but they didn't particularly care.

Unfortunately I was still quite new to working on a dementia ward. It was quite different from where I had previously worked, because a lot of the residents had emotional issues and could get angry very quickly. I would be told "go get so-and-so washed and dressed and get them a new pad", and so I'd go get ready to do that. I'd go in so-and-so's room and tell them what I was there for, only to be told to go away, fuck off, what have you. I'd try to reason with them, tell them that I couldn't leave them as they were because they were dirty, only to have them tell me they were absolutely fine as they were and to go away. Some residents would start getting very emotional and start shouting and crying, some residents would try to attack me, one even tried to break my fingers and my arm on two separate occasions. I would then go and ask my colleagues for help, only for them to sigh irritably and tell me to essentially buck up and deal with it. They'd say that I'd have to just learn to coax them with my words, or trick them. Issue is, I'm not great at that sort of thing. I do not possess a silver tongue, and I had no idea how to convince someone to let me do something they had no intention of letting me do. Then a colleague would come along, persuade the resident in about five seconds, and then say "you just need to learn to do that". Great, thanks. It's like saying to someone who can't read "you just need to learn how to read".

This all came to a head this last Saturday. I don't know why, but absolutely none of the singles I was asked to dress would let me help them. There was one I was supposed to give a shower to but kept angrily shouting "I'm not having a shower". I asked someone what to do about that, they came over and got them into the shower within about twenty seconds. Great, kind of difficult not to feel stupid about that.

One resident tried to break my fingers and so I obviously went to ask for help about that. Where I used to work in England we were told that if a resident was violent to you you had the right to leave in order to protect yourself. Here I was basically told "deal with it lol". I did end up with a colleague helping me out with the resident but I was still made to feel stupid, which is something I tend to feel a lot anyway.

Later that evening, I was called into the nurse's office. I was told my colleagues had complained about me because I'd needed help with the singles. The nurse was friendly and polite, but told me that compared to the doubles I hadn't really been given that much to do. (Amusingly enough, I much prefer working doubles because it's something I actually feel I'm competent at.) I explained that I hadn't worked on a nursing floor or dementia ward before and was still unsure how to sweet-talk some of the more aggressive residents. He gave me some advice, and then dismissed me. I found one of my colleagues who complained and apologised to her. She said that I just needed to learn to coax the residents into allowing me to give personal care, and that I needed to be quicker (a lot of the time is spent either trying to convince a resident to let me get them sorted or trying to find clothes that aren't there). I then went to see if I could get another resident to get sorted and ready for bed. Of course they didn't, possibly because they were just in a bad mood or possibly because they could sense my growing stress and desperation and didn't like it.

Since leaving the nurse's office I'd been on the verge of crying (which is pretty fucking embarrassing when you're a six-foot-two going-on-25 year old bloke), and this just pretty much sealed the deal. I found the nurse and told him that I was struggling to get a resident to comply (note that I'd spent about five minutes trying to convince them), realised I was about to start crying, and... went and hid in the bathroom. I just couldn't handle it. Most of the time if I'm feeling miserable I manage not to cry (especially if other people are around), but not this time. It was like I was a kid again trying to hide it for fear of being mocked, ridiculed or yelled at.

Anyway, I spent a few minutes in the bathroom calming down, washed my face and then, feeling better I went back outside. I went around the corner to get some fresh PPE, and a colleague came and snapped at me "I asked you to do so-and-so, I just checked them and they're saturated. Why haven't you done them?"

What I wanted to say was "because I thought the nurse had told me that he'd done him." That was what I thought he'd said, obviously I'd misunderstood. What I actually said was "I don't know." That was basically what I said every time I was told off as a kid (or rather, every time someone yelled at me for no reason as a kid), because when I got yelled at it would frighten me and make it hard for me to find any other words. And basically it was like I was a kid again. She seemed to realise that I was utterly miserable though, and started telling me that she wasn't giving me a hard time, and that she didn't want me going home down-hearted, and that I could even pick the singles I was going to do the next day - oh joy - but I'd decided at that moment that I was done. I'd stick around for the rest of my shift (which was about twenty minutes at that point), but I wasn't coming in the next day.

I got a phone call a couple days later from HR asking why I'd resigned - particularly as I'd only worked there a month - and I told them that I didn't feel I was getting a lot of help. I found it incredibly stressful, and I was on the singles every shift even though I was still new and unsure of how to work with such highly strung residents. There was more I could have said - particularly how I was generally ignored unless I was told to do something - but I didn't want people getting in trouble. Story of my life really.

Having watched the video which shows the murder of George Floyd, it baffles the mind that people can be so unbothered by a man being slowly murdered maybe three feel away. Ex-Officer Tou Thao seemed completely uninterested in what was going on, and only ever expressed emotion when people stepped off the pavement closer to George Floyd. Then he'd get loud and angry. That's not even including Derek Chauvin pointing something (a gun maybe?) at the onlookers while kneeling on Mr Floyd's throat. I think what was even worse was that he continued to do it while emergency responders tried to check George Floyd's condition. I just hope that whatever happens, every person involved in that incident get thrown in the slammer.

For those who haven't been living under a rock, you've probably noticed we've been under lockdown for just over two months now. I turned 24 under quarantine, which didn't bother me that much considering I prefer quieter birthdays. However, there were some neighbors who I assume had a birthday that same day (April 9th), and decided to throw a party. In lockdown.

I have an elderly neighbor, not quite sure how old he is but I'm pretty sure he's in his eighties.
He's at high risk for respitory illnesses, and had to go in to hospital around a week ago. I heard his wife crying through the wall the next day, and was worried about him. Thankfully he recovered and came home.

Earlier today, I heard what sounded like another party coming from the same neighbors from my birthday. Honestly, I get that it's difficult to social distance. I like being able to visit friends, go into town, all that stuff. But seriously, it's the middle of a fucking pandemic. My neighbor could have died, and these idiots couldn't be bothered to be responsible.