The Advocate

When I first heard they were making a new movie based on the Clown Prince of Crime, I was immediately repulsed. I thought that the well of Joker takes was dry, with the best vintages reserved by Ledger, Nicholson, and Hamill. It felt like another Spider-Man reboot circa Andrew Garfield. As the release date approached, I saw the varied reservations from my fellow social justice class members, as well as a few comic purists, mental health advocates, and Jared Leto stans. They ranged from issues with the problematic centering of White male suffering to the breaking of DC canon. For my part, I tried to ignore them. I figured I would see the movie when I saw it and didn't really care for it otherwise. Recently, a close friend invited me out to see the film. So, I went. (Spoiler alert.) What I saw was nothing less than a cinematic masterpiece that filled me with horror and dread. It was a great movie. It was a terrible movie. It was too real... It was way too fucking re

(Even Sean Connery Will Not Stand Idly By) I spend an inordinate amount of time arguing with people on the internet. I have literally held up one index finger to My Life in order to finish the last sentence to a comment the length of a fortune cookie that took 30 minutes to think up. I'm not ashamed of this. I'm an arguer. I come from the land of arguers, raised by argumentative folks in a world of argumentative things where Up could very well be Down, depending on your perspective, and even the color of the sky was debatable. (You probably think that last sentence is an exaggeration. It's cute.) I've played Devil's Advocate so many times that if I could charge billable hours I would be rich enough to buy a Scrooge McDuck pool vault for the rest of my money. Hell, as a child, I used to raise my hand in class just so I could argue the most inane points of semantical nitpicky nothing-burgers. Once I launched myself into cyberspace, I played flamer , concer

( Credit to playwright Ernest Hemmings. ) Whether you're talking 'bout President  Obama is spreading Ebola , Secretary  Hillary deliberately caused Benghazi , or the thought that Earth is, actually, as flat as the ass of pancake , conspiracy theories seem to reproduce like a rabbit-mouse hybrid in heat. I grew up amongst many of them through the 90's and early 2000's. From apples laced with razor blades to HIV-infected needles in the parks and playgrounds of the neighborhood, or on the handles of the local gas station pump. Others were less well-known, such as the Native-American ghosts that haunted our high school campus and killed the science teacher on back-to-school night. Or the mysterious oil-derricks hidden between Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa in a locked-down facility that, purportedly, housed a testing ground for experimental weaponry and post-apocalyptic machinery. Indeed, I've actually tread those very lines myself as a teenager, searching f