The most salient trait of postmodernism is a clash between form and content. Classicism and romanticism emphasize content (“what is this thing about?”), and modernism emphasizes form (“what is this thing?”), but postmodernism sets form and content as adversaries, letting them tear at each other like rabid dogs. Look at Warhol’s Shot Marilyns:

What’s interesting about this artwork? Well, Marilyn Monroe is a beautiful woman, and it’s jarring to see her depicted in harsh screen prints (the hallmark of cheap commercial advertising at the time). She’s garishly transformed. Her makeup looks like a clown’s, her hair is a neon-bright wave crashing on a radioactive shore, her skin is queasily puce, like a putrefying corpse. We are meant to notice the clash between Marilyn’s glamorous, immortal face and Warhol’s tawdry, cheap, disposable medium. This is the essence of postmodernism: a square peg and a round Warhol.

A Goofy Movie is a postmodern animated film. Maybe the postmodern animated film. It tries to tell an earnest story about a father and son on a road trip…but it’s about Goofy. This makes it incredibly funny, because Goofy’s a really inappropriate character for this sort of movie.

“It’s hard to be cool when your dad’s Goofy” went the film’s tagline. Yeah, and it’s hard to make a movie full of earnest road trip cliches when your star’s Goofy. Countless emotional moments either fall flat or ascend into a divine Dadaist empyrean because of those stupid goddamn white gloves. I could point to countless things:

• Goofy has a son. Unless Max was conceived through parthenogensis, Goofy canonically fucks. How and when did he impregnate a woman? Did he say “a-hyuk-hyuk!” at any point in the procedure? Did he take the gloves off?
• Goofy’s wife has apparently died (they could be divorced, but it’s unlikely Goofy would have sole custody of Max in that case), which caused a fissure into an unfathomable universe to open in my mind. Goofy shopping for coffins; Goofy picking out a suit; Goofy writing a eulogy for his dead wife, silently awed by how writing it down makes it finally seem real; Goofy pondering mortality.
• Goofy gets out of his car, and locks it. As Roger Ebert noted, this is a deeply strange moment. Since when do cartoon characters take precautions like that?
• When Goofy finally decides to lay down the law to his wayward son, he lectures Max in his ridiculous “gawwshh” Pinto Colvig voice.
• Max gets in some minor trouble at school. The principal calls Goofy, warning that unless he steps up as a father, his son may someday be sent to the electric chair (!). Goofy freaks out at the prospect of Max strapped into Old Sparky.
• Goofy realizes his relationship with his son is based on a lie, and he sits alone in his car, stewing with emotions, his eyes pools of hurt…but the hands still have white gloves.
• Goofy as a curmudgeonly dad who hates rock music and loves fishing. Goofy singing a heartfelt duet with Max. You get the idea. The concept and the conception are matter and antimatter. The movie is such a swing-for-the-fences terrible idea that it works beautifully, like a clock so far wrong that it matches tomorrow‘s time.

The actual film is pretty good. It’s a sweet and touching story about fatherhood and generational differences. Many of the jokes unironically hit. The rockstar character was fun, and reminded me of Mok Swagger in Rock & Rule.

Can you imagine how shitty it would be if they remade this (correction: how shitty it will be when they remake this?) Max will glance up from Tiktok and say “OK boomer” when they’re driving. I’ll admit that it does have some dated “90s ‘tude” elements, like the Pauly Shore character, who sprays Cheez-Wiz into his hand and calls it the “leaning tower of Cheez-A.” If the whole movie had been like that, I doubt I’d remember it now. Thankfully, it’s about Goofy instead. I don’t think I’m laughing at the things the writers wanted me to laugh at, but at least I’m laughing.

(And maybe I’m touchy, but what’s with everyone getting pressed over the “is Goofy a dog or a man?” question like they’re catching the Zodiac killer? He’s a dog-man, that’s all. Don’t overthink it. He looks funny and cute, but he can also use appliances and drive a car. Best of both worlds. These are the same guys who make “cartoon logic” memes, like they’re onto something. Man, I can’t believe Spongebob can light a fire underwater, in defiance of the laws of physics. What a blunder. Someone should email the show’s writers and explain that this is impossible, so they don’t commit any other errors like that in future.)

German power metal was in resurgence in 1996, and its founding band resurged along with it. If Master of the Rings was an uncertain but interesting trial balloon for a new lineup, The Time of the Oath marks the point where they fully recovered. Helloween is back. No caveats, no qualifiers. They are back.

A concept album supposedly inspired by Nostradamus (particularly Quatrain 634: “many metal bands shall blatantly lie about being inspired by Nostradamus”), it was their longest studio album up to this point, aside from Chameleon. It definitely feels very long, and arguably moves with too slow a step. The final three songs are all epics, running 20 minutes in total. At times it’s exhausting, like listening to latter-day Iron Maiden.

But it’s music of grandeur, music of the ages. It feels weighty and massive, ringing out like a huge bronze bell. Obviously the two Keeper albums are holy classics, but the goddamn things end as soon as you put it on. By contrast, Time of the Oath is a deep pool you can sink into like a stone. It has humor and lightness and deftness: the large number of songs allows them to explore many tones and moods. Not all of these work, but in online forums I’ve often found myself defending its flaws, which I’ve grown to like.

“We Burn” is a scorching fireball of an opener, and “Steel Tormentor” is scarcely any slower. Deris drives these songs with his trademark verve and attitude, snarling around the microphone like a wolf. “Wake up the Mountain” opens with a Niagara-like torrent of notes from Roland Grapow. Time of the Oath marks the last time he tried to be Yngwie Malmsteen on guitar, before settling into a more blues-influenced style. The rest of the song is a stately midtempo rocker that reminds me of Rainbow.

Andi Deris dominates the songwriting here, composing two of the three best songs, “We Burn” and “Before the War”. The latter is a raging power-metal track that rolls the clock back to 1985, when Walls of Jericho came out. Kai Hansen would be proud to have written this (although he already had much to be proud of—Gamma Ray really hits its stride around 1996, too).

The album gets a bit weak in the middle. “Kings Will Be Kings” and “Power” have never especially grabbed me, and “Anything My Mama Don’t Like” is a pointless Deris-written hard rock song. Michael Weikath’s “Mission Motherland” is a lyrically and musically ambitious ode to panspermia: at nine minutes, it has its moments (some tempo changes keep things varied), but if you find the end of the album too much work, this is the one to skip. Weikath’s best song here might be the bluesy ballad “If I Knew”.

But then we get to the greatest thing album has to offer, Roland Grapow’s “Time of the Oath”. It has a grinding Zeppelin-esque set of riffs, a fantastically dense atmosphere, some spine-tingling choirs, and an electrifying vocal performance from Deris. “My sweetest memories…die in the cold!” Here’s where he conclusively demonstrates that he’s not just a spare tire until Michael Kiske 2.0 shows up, but Helloween’s new singer.

Helloween, for me, is not a band about speed and heaviness but about charm, and Time of the Oath ranks as one of their more charming releases. The songwriting, backed by Grapow and Weikath’s brittle Marshall crunch and Uli Kusch’s raw-sounding drums, has a deliberately and defiantly old-school flavor. The apocalypse described in the lyrics was sweeping over the industry like death, and here was Helloween, having the last laugh. The 90s were half-over, grunge was collapsing, and this defiantly 80s band was still here, playing power metal for all who wanted to hear it.

I love how this asshole died eight films ago and here we are, looking at his “Eminem through an Instagram aging filter” face in yet another one. I love how Saw 3D was marketed as “the final chapter” and three new sequels have been made since then. Saw has devolved into a Weekend at Bernie‘s farce where the creators have ended the series multiple times—and I mean publically murdered it, dynamited the corpse, and fired the ashes into the sun—only for the studio to carry on making more Saws anyway, like nothing happened. Kind of funny. I guess it’s our fault for seeing them.

I realize I’m watching a Saw movie in 2023 and the joke is on me, but can’t they try? A movie is an unexplored frontier: 60-180 minutes of blank space, and you can fill that space with anything. There are no rules. Tape doesn’t care what you put on it. With that in mind, why are we doing this again?

X is better than most movies in the Saw series, but that’s not hard (there will never be a Better Than Most Movies in the Saw Series award at the Oscars) and it still struggles with the fact that the franchise killed its one and only idea 620 minutes ago. Without John Kramer, there’s nothing, so they need to keep bringing him back, using increasingly contrived methods. Saw X is actually Saw 1.5: set between the events of Saw and Saw II. Kramer, you will recall, is dying of cancer (which I believe: Tobin Bell looks 20 years older than he did in the first film), so he undertakes an experimental new treatment procedure at a clinic in Mexico. The clinic turns out to be a fraudulent scam, preying on the desperate and gullible. Kramer decides to get revenge on them before he dies.

Setting the film in the past creates its own set of continuity problems (didn’t the Mexican Federales notice such gruesomely distinctive crimes, and draw parallels to the American Jigsaw killer?), but it doesn’t matter: the franchise long ago abandoned realism. In particular, Kramer is absurd. Once he was merely a super-genius, now he’s literally God, possessing perfect omniscience, knowing everything about everyone, and predicting the moves of others six steps ahead. While dying of cancer he designs and builds room-sized torture machines that would take a team of MIT undergrads six months and millions of dollars to construct. He’s such an unbelievable figure that it destroys what was interesting about the first movie: its sense of psychological realism.

The franchise has changed since the James Wan days. The first Saw had little gore, and was a “smart” horror/crime thriller in the mould of Se7en/Silence of the Lambs. Later entries dipped their toes into various horror fads such as splatterpunk, and found footage. Now we’re in the era of tedious “prestige horror”, so we get hokey scenes of Kramer fixing some Mexican kid’s bike, just to show he has a heart. I liked it more when he was a bad guy.

But that’s the problem with any horror franchise: the monster eventually becomes the hero. In the first Saw, your sympathies lay with the poor schmucks screwed into John Kramer’s machines. They were flawed, but redemption was possible. But now? Kramer is the star of the show, so they make his victims loathsome scum who basically deserve to die horribly. But if I no longer care if they live or die, what’s the point?

The Mexican setting is a waste—the film is as visually bland as ever—and aside from the expected “Hello Zepp” drop the music sounds like temp tracks. The plot makes little sense. Greutert directs like he’s assembling Ikea furniture. No inspiration exists. The Saw franchise is beyond dead and beyond a joke and they should either stop making them or be forced to stop. At least the title is accurate: this sawx.