I’ve just watched David Attenborough’s “A
Life On Our Planet” and it’s beautiful as always, frank, open, heartfelt, a
powerful plea to protect, preserve and even expand the wild places that he so
loves and has made it his life’s work to document and explain. To do so, he
says, is not mere environmentalism, but a necessity if humanity is to survive
on this planet. It’s all delivered in his trademark BBC tones of gentle wisdom
and quiet authority—not the gravelly voice of God a la Freeman but something
warmer, more familiar and human—it is assured, it is educated, intellectual,
knowledgeable and kind without being saccharine. It is a chronicle of nature in
the 21st century, which means of course it is a chronicle of how
fast that nature is disappearing and—OH MY GOD WE MADE DAVID ATTENBOROUGH CRY.
Well done, us. I hope we’re fucking happy with ourselves. We’ve saddened this
beautiful, beautiful man, whose hiking boots we are not worthy to—oh, it makes
me mad. MAD. I’ve been listening to Sir Dave since Life on Earth, back in the
early 80s, and it is just heartbreaking to hear him talk about how much has
been lost, much of it irrevocably. His prescriptions are not novel, and
repetition from the mouths of other environmentalists has stolen some of their
thunder, but he does stress how attainable they are—greater use of renewable
energy, cooperative and planned utilization of ocean resources, less dependence
on meat-heavy diets, an end to human expansion. Fine goals of course, but the
challenge is (as it always has been) that many refuse to admit there is even a
problem. I’m sure this documentary gets a rougher reception down America way,
where belligerent climate change denial has become a cornerstone belief for
half the population (the message probably also faces an uphill battle in, say,
China or India, sorry Americans for picking on you again, but you are the
Florida Man of the English-speaking world at the moment). Which is also sad, if
not quite as sad as seeing Sir David upset. It is so frustrating to hear people
at times bemoan our modern lack of moral compass, the cliched “What would Jesus
do if he was alive today” when we are surrounded on all sides by Attenborough
and Mister Rogers and Bob Ross and Steve Irwin and Keanu Reeves and, idk, Dave
Grohl, we are surrounded by figures pointing the way to kindness and humility
and respect and we keep throwing up our hands in the air and saying “Welp, too
bad everything sucks, that’s life.” The answers are all around us, people.
Worried what to do about climate change? Just listen, listen for once in your
goddam lives instead of yammering away on Facebook and Reddit and Twitter and
Instagram and just listen. What would Jesus do? I DON’T KNOW WHY DON’T YOU TRY
FUCKEN LISTENING TO ONE OF THE THREE DOZEN SHINING, POSITIVE FIGURES IN OUR
CULTURE. Maybe we wouldn’t be in such a goddamn mess then. But no, it’s Donnie
Trump, football players and the sodding Kardashians. Mad. But back to Sir
David. The poor dear is 93 but still going, if not strong, then gently and
calmly as ever, and I would say “we shall not see his like again” but I don’t
want to jinx it, I sincerely hope we do see his like again, whole battalion of
Davids, great regiments of Attenboroughs sweeping across the continents,
documentary teams in tow. Endless Davids, a never-ending stream Attenboroughs. Then maybe life on this planet will actually be worth living.
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
A Life On Our Planet
Monday, October 5, 2020
Foe
Title: Foe
Author: Iain Reid
Junior
and Hen, a couple living on an isolated farm in the near future, are suddenly
informed that Junior is being conscripted into a two-year space exploration
program. During his absence, the agency will provide a synth/replicant that
looks just like him, to take care of Hen and keep her company. As the
government agent regularly visits the couple and peppers them with strangely
personal questions, Junior starts to suspect the program is not what it claims,
and something more sinister is happening. At that point, I was figuring either
(A) the protagonist, Junior, would turn out to have been a synth the whole
time, or (B) he’d go away and when he came back his wife would have been
replaced with a synth. I must be some kind of goddamn genius, because ladies
and gentlemen: It’s both. For all the predictability of the twists, this is
still a neat little novel that packs a punch, particularly when you go back and
review the interactions between notJunior and his wife in a new light, realizing
that despite Junior being the “I” of the novel the main character is actually
his wife, Hen, grappling with living with this replicant imposter of her husband,
with the dissatisfaction that comes when you feel your life is in a rut,
everything is routine and one day blurs into the next. It’s essentially a
married woman having a mid-life crisis, dressed up in SFnal trappings. The
writing is sharp and snappy at first but starts to wear after a while, as all Junior’s
three-word declarative sentences get to be a bit monotonous after a bit, and
you kind of wish Iain would vary the pace every once in a while. The blunt
droning of Junior’s inner monolog isn’t helped by the fact that aside from the
two big twists, this short novel is essentially plot free, nothing much happens
except !Junior argues with his wife and gets confused and irritated with
everyone and everything else and—just as an aside—I empathize 1000% bro, I
really do. People are all malfunctioning robots, my guy, there’s no telling what
is going on in their faultily-programmed brains. Seriously, I’ve given up
trying to understand my fellow human beings, you’re all aliens to me. Anyway,
real Junior comes back, unJunior gets deactivated, but then real Junior and his
wife fight because he’s a real selfish asshole who really left her to go off on
a real two-year space program and she kind of liked the replicant better. So
she ups and leaves him, but before Junior realizes what’s happened, the agency
quickly subs in a replicant for his wife. Real Junior and unHen waltz off into
the sunset, happy in their comforting irreality, their artificial facsimile of
a happily married life. I’m not sure the plot makes a whole lot of sense once
you know the ending—why tell the replicant about the space program? Why tell
him that he is going to be replaced, when he already is the replacement? Why not
just have it live a normal life until the real guy comes back? But I get why it’s
structured that way, for that little dopamine rush when you figure it out. It’s
not a book built for the CinemaSins crowd, and I get that structurally the
point is to mislead the reader about what’s going on so you get that Eureka! Moment
and all those weird conversations between notJunior and Hen suddenly make
sense. Is the real horror the way our lives dissolve into drudgery, the way we
exist in order to keep on existing, that any change no matter how dramatic
eventually becomes mundane, routine, boring. Is the numbing comfort of the
familiar the real foe? I don’t know, you’re the robot aliens. You figure it
out.
Sunday, September 20, 2020
TENET
Well
I just went to see Tenet and dna teneT ees ot tnew tsuj I lleW
If by some mischance COVID gets me for this I just want you all to know that I died as I lived: Utterly confused by everything, but still having a good time on the whole. It’s a pity this came out so close after Bill and Ted Face the Fact That Keanu Reeves Is 56 Years Old reminded us that time travel stories are all faintly ridiculous since the writer can always have the heroes hide their own car keys for them to find later, as this realization makes all the backwards-running reverse-shooting and I don’t want to think about what happens if you have to go to the bathroom-ing in an otherwise solid actioner faintly risible. It’s JDW and Robert Pattinson’s excellent adventure. Watching the inverted fights just reminded me of the time Red Dwarf went to the backwards planet. Inevitably, as any Star Trek fan could tell you about time travel stories, it ends up being a bit of a narrative and visual ouroboros where the protagonist’s main mission is to make sure absolutely nothing happens. Still, it’s more grounded that Interstellar, less dreamy than Inception and reminds me of Memento more than a little. In short, a solid but unexceptional addition to the Nolanverse Criterion Collection and a further extension of his core philosophy that linear time can go fuck itself, as can people attempting to listen to the dialogue in his movies. The time travel whatthefuckery has some brilliant set pieces, including the airplane crash from the trailer (twice, both coming and going, as it were) and the highway car chase (also twice). Robert Pattinson exudes dapper charm from every hair follicle and in any sane world would be playing Bond, not Batman. But of course this is 2020, a year that hates sanity almost as much as Nolan does. What this movie isn’t is the savior of movieplexes and cinemas the industry had been praying for. The plot needed about three more rounds of editing to get rid of the extraneous excess and make it halfway comprehensible without three diagrams and/or a potentially lethal quantity of LSD, focuses on a dull lead who is effortlessly outshone in every scene by his sidekick, climaxes in an army apparently shooting at nothing, and uses a lot of pretty scenery to disguise the fact it is roughly 50% people standing around explaining the backstory. There are about three key scenes absolutely critical to understanding the movie’s incestuous pretzel of a timeline, and in all three cases the scene is cut as if the lives of the editor’s wife, son and chihuahua (“Bubbles”) depended on nobody understanding the plot points. I used to make fun of all those “The Ending of Return of the Jedi Explained, Jesus Fucking Christ” or “The Blinkingly Obvious End of Avengers Explained, You Complete and Utter Morons” YouTube vids, but I did it, goddamn it I did it, I went online and read a bunch of articles just to understand what the gnikcuf backwards hell was going on. But I won’t hold that against it, because this makes it probably one of about two big-budget movies released in the last year or two that has demanded the audience use somewhat more than two of their tiny little braincells to understand. After months of snacking on Netflix’s made-for-TV movie quality hamburgers, it’s amazing to discover Taste! Spices! Flavors! A plot which doesn’t pander in structure, theme or have a completely unnecessary love triangle! Oh, not being able to predict exactly what is going to happen in each scene, how I missed you. Which is doubly ironic for a movie that is half about things going backwards in time. I haven’t sat on the edge of my seat like that since Mad Max: Fury Road, the other blockbuster this decade to mainly be about people going backwards and forwards. Somebody send this script back in time so that we can avoid the mediocrity of Marvel cookie-cutter movies, or use it to kill baby Hitler, whatever.
Sunday, September 13, 2020
The Quantum Thief
Author: Hannu Rajaniemi
Publisher: Gollancz/Tor
For
a while there you could just call everything “nano” and science fiction audiences
would just nod their heads and accept anything you shoveled their way. Nanobots,
sure, Nanomissiles, why not, Nanowrimo, knock yourself out. Of course, today’s
audiences are far more intelligent, perceptive and sophisticated. Now, you have
to call everything “quantum.” Much better, isn’t it. Quantum Thief is less a
novel than the result of putting a mathematics textbook in a blender and
printing whatever words dribble out the other end. Archons and cryptarchs and
warminds and gevulot and phoboi and yes, whenever the writers of Bungie’s online
shooter game “Destiny” had writer’s block they flipped open a random page of
this book and used the first word that they saw. It’s normally at this point
where I try to explain what the story is about but you know, I haven’t the
faintest fucking clue. Couldn’t even tell you if the title means the thief is
quantum or he steals quantum or what either of those things would entail. In any
event, he’s rescued from the archons and warminds inside an infinite prison
where he has to play a real-life version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, why I don’t
know, by a Finnish woman, her flirtatious spaceship and the voice of God if god
was an amorous Italian woman. Again, I don’t know why said rescue happens, it just
does. Because of Quantum. They all fly to Mars where there’s a walking city in
which everyone has physical privacy settings, communicates by sharing GIFs (no
change there, then) and is immortal but periodically dies and spends time as a
mindless servant before going back to being alive again and no, I don’t know
why. Said city is also inhabited by a colony of “zoku” who are basically Quantum
gamers. The thief goes to the walking city to steal something, what I’m not
clear on, in order to establish proof of something, again your guess is as good
as mine, but also to find some of his lost memories, can’t help you there, and
in the process reveals some big secret about the walking city’s past, who tf
knows at this point, before the big climactic showdown with the cryptarch,
shruggie dot emoji. Quantum. His Finnish rescuer hates him at first but then
doesn’t, because he takes her to karaoke, and frankly this is exactly the
opposite of what I find happens every time I go to karaoke with a female
companion, perhaps because I’m not a dashing, debonair thief of the quantum
variety, but also perhaps because I have a signing voice that sounds like a
bronchial parrot with a stutter. Anyway, the effect is sort of dizzyingly amusing
for the first third of the book or so but then you slowly realize there’s no getting
off this quantumly wordy tilt-a-whirl and you’re going to be completely in the
dark about everyone’s motivations or what they’re even trying to do right up
until the final page. At which point, they proudly announced they’ve done whatever it was they were trying to do.
Huzzah. Good for them. It’s all giddily, sprawlingly, psychedelically inventive,
but it’s a bit Jackson Pollock painting in the way words are kind of splattered
across the pages and you fucking figure it out. The protagonist is more
annoying than raffish, the detective on his trail sherlockian without putting
any of the deductive effort into it, the gamer zoku are a hoot but in the book
far less than they should’ve been, an the two main female characters don’t do
much except get exasperated with the hero and occasionally try to kill him
until at the end when they don’t and do the exact opposite instead. Quantum.
Monday, August 17, 2020
Project Power
Title:
Project
Power
Directed
by: Henry
Joost & Ariel Schulman
Screenplay
by: Mattson
Tomlin
Network:
Netflix
Another
solid 4/10 effort by the masters of mediocre at Netflix. A stereotypical group
of government black hats test a drug which gives you superpowers for precisely
5 minutes (regardless of your body mass, what you recently ate or other factors
because that’s the way drugs work) on the unsuspecting inhabitants of New
Orleans. The power might be cool, like super-strength or invulnerability, or very uncool, like suddenly making your insides outsides.
It’s
up to a plucky teenager (Dominique Fishback), cop who always wears a football
jersey (Joseph-Gordon-Samuel-Johnson-Rasputin-Sputnik-Spam-Spam-Spam-Lyle-Levitt)
and a badass (Jamie Foxx) to stop them.
In
keeping with Netflix’s tradition of splurging on a big-name actor or two and
skimping on just about everything else, aside from the leads everything here is
pretty dire. Continuity is out the window—people magically know where other
people are, items appear and disappear with leprechaun abandon. The three
potential bad guys are barely in the movie and have little impact on the plot,
other than the one named “Biggie” who obviously has the best name.
The script
can’t decide what the central super-drug conceit is an allegory or metaphor for:
government and police corruption, the war on drugs, exploitation of the poor,
or what? As a result, characters will toss out the odd line about hard it is to
be a poor black woman in America today, and then the movie has fuckall else to
say about the subject.
Speaking
of dialog, since we’re not a professional website here, allow me to reproduce
one scene for your reading delectation:
Jamie
Foxx: What do you want to be when you grow up?
Dominique:
A rapper
J:
No, you cannot rap
D: I
can
J: I
refuse to believe in your capacity to rap
D: I
demand a trial of my capacity to rap
J:
No, it is impossible
D:
(raps)
J: I
am astounded and amazed at your ability to rap
The
cinematography (by Michael Simmonds) is arty without purpose. A fight scene is
shot entirely from within a 360 glass chamber whose windows are frosting over,
while the fight rages outside. This foregrounds the irrelevant frosting over,
while obscuring the dramatically relevant fighting. Elsewhere we get crazy off-kilter
angles, extreme rack zooms, incredible close-ups of people’s left eyeballs as
they look at something over their shoulder, none of which really conveys any
dramatic or emotional information. Just there to look cool.
Stuff should be in the movie for a reason. Either to impart information, or deliver an emotion, something, anything. There's a lot in this movie that is just kind of there. Take the above-mentioned 5-minute superpower limit. Aha, you think, a ticking clock. This will play a role in the big climactic showdown. Only no, it doesn't. It has about as much bearing on the plot as Dominique being a young black woman.
Foxx
is watchable and charming, even though he struggles with some of the cornier
lines, Lovett is barely in the movie and Fishback is fun to watch in the quiet
scenes with Foxx (when she’s not proving how badass she is by rapping), but
wasted in the action sequences.
Thursday, July 30, 2020
Monty Python and the Life of G
As
we’ve all discovered, living in the middle of a pandemic does many strange
things to your sanity, chief among them being going out of your tiny little
mind with boredom, the other being running screaming for something comforting
and reassuring.
Which
brings me to Monty Python.
I
recently discovered the entire four seasons of Monty Python’s Flying Circus,
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Life of Brian, as well as the documentary
Almost the Truth were all available on Netflix, so I’ve been both entertaining
and soothing my brain with hours of nostalgic comedy ever since.
I
can’t remember about three things from my childhood: Lord of the Rings, Star
Wars … and Monty Python. And Thomas the Tank Engine. Four things. Oh, and
G-Force. Can’t forget G-Force, man I loved that show. Five things … look, I’ll
start again.
I
couldn’t tell you when I first watched the Pythons, though it was maybe
somewhere around the ages of eight to ten, thanks to my British-born parents' love of the series. My parents, like Michael Palin and Terry Jones, went to
Oxford, so they were THE target audience for the Python’s brand of Oxbridge
humor.
We
had all the episodes on Betamax, being the cutting edge of video technology at
the time and far superior to silly and inevitably
destined-for-the-dustbin-of-history VHS, and a shelf full of books including
the Big Red Book (with its blue cover), Dr. Fegg’s Nasty Book, the Brand New
Monty Python Book, the scripts for both Life of Brian and the Holy Grail. All
the vinyl records, too. From about the ages of 8 to 18 then Python was a
constant companion, which was nice to have for a kid who went to six different
schools in the eight years of elementary school. (Incidentally, I discovered
that one of those schools—Sir Frank Markham Comprehensive in bracing, exciting Milton
Keynes—has since been demolished, to which I say: good riddance)
In
high school, I used to listen to Python tapes over and over again with a group
of friends at parties. It was a godsend for an otherwise cripplingly shy, awkward,
timid, dull and awful child-slash-teenager. With a single quote, you could make
the room laugh! As the only British one, they’d ask me to do the voices. I still
recall the look of stunned horror on the face of the uninitiated when they asked
me to do “Ms. Nigger-baiter’s just exploded!”
So,
this has been my own kind of 30-year reunion with the group.
Side
note: Apparently nostalgia running in 30-year cycles is an identified popculture phenomenon, as people who consumed
entertainment as kids become culture creators as adults, but let me just
quickly reassure you that I remain as unproductive and unoriginal as ever.
Half
a century after it was first broadcast, a lot of it has aged rather well. Monty
Python is superficially silly, silliness without any point beyond its own
silliness, but that’s ensured it hasn’t aged the way a lot of satire has.
On
the other hand, a lot of it doesn’t hold up now precisely because I spent those
first 10 years memorizing every routine. The Parrot sketch, the Argument
Clinic. I do expect the Spanish Inquisition, I do. Their appearance was
precisely the thing I was anticipating, really. Some of the sketches go on for
too long or take too long to set up, and you start to recognize the set-pieces
or concepts they re-use over and over: Sports but silly, man who speaks oddly,
man getting angry at shopkeeper, and so on.
It’s
the stuff you don’t remember anymore that delights. There’s a skit with John Cleese
and Graham Chapman as pepperpots talking about a penguin on top of their television,
and you can see them both fighting desperately to keep a straight face. It’s
such a human moment.
The
two movies hold up better, I think because the jokes are of a more consistent
and higher quality. I know everyone says you’re supposed to think Life of Brian
is the better film because it’s more coherent, with a single strong storyline,
and the jokes are more biting and satirical, but honestly, I find that for all
the jokes it’s a rather depressing movie. The bare-bones outline is this: Young
man in crushingly pathetic existence gets recruited by political extremists,
captured during a terrorist attack and then crucified. That’s just dark, man,
no matter how spot-on the Judean People’s Front and what-have-the-Romans-done-for-us bits are.
The
incongruousness of the final jaunty number, “Always Look on the Bright Side of
Life”, is of course precisely the point of it but it’s also kind of frustrating
to me—you’ve just spent 90 minutes showing me how crap life is, how the hell am
I supposed to look on the bright side now?!
Whereas
Holy Grail is yes, less a movie and more a series of sketches loosely strung
together with a common theme and characters, it’s true, but it’s also a far
more straightforwardly silly affair. I don’t really want to think about what’s
wrong with fanaticism and blind belief at the moment. I just want to laugh. There’s
that kind of youthful innocence to the Holy Grail, it’s a movie that doesn’t
really want to teach you any Deep Message or Truth about the world, it just
wants to have a giggle. And the jokes, especially in the first half, are some
of the best the Pythons ever wrote—“Strange women lying in ponds” still gets a
smile.
It’s
also, I think, a more visually interesting movie than Life of Brian, possibly
thanks to Terry Gilliam being the co-director. Apparently, the rest of the
Pythons got so irritated with his focus on the look of the thing over getting
the jokes that they got Jones to direct their other two movies on his own,
which is a bit of a pity, I think. Just the mise-en-scène, pardon my outrrrageous accent, you
know, the camera angles and the shot composition and the delightful grottiness
of medieval England make it the more interesting movie to watch.
The
ending is, of course, complete crap, with the whole thing just suddenly coming
to an abrupt
Monday, July 13, 2020
The Old Guard
Title: The Old Guard
Director:
Gina
Prince-Brythewood
Screenplay:
Greg Rucka
Network: Netflix
[somber
music playing]
Previously,
I kind of facetiously suggested there was no point in reviewing anything, as
various audience segments each consume entertainment for wildly different
reasons, and their aims or intentions often do not align with those of
reviewers, critics, award judges, or other gatekeepers of cultural quality.
What I had not considered, and what I’m now—after watching Netflix’s latest
action-caper “The Old Guard”—forced to consider, is that I omitted one case in
which reviewing is at best pointless and at worst counter-productive: What
if the product itself isn’t meant to be that good?
After
“Titan”, “Mute”, “Extraction” and now “The Old Guard”, I’m starting to get the
feeling that what Netflix is aiming for is not excellence, but a kind of
good-enoughness, sufficiently competent and well-made that it elicits just enough delight among a target audience segment, but done on the cheap, taking few risks, skimping on
script in favor of visuals. And it’s hard to critique something that doesn’t
feel like it was ever meant to be that great anyway. It’s the brainless summer
action blockbuster minus the block-busting and available year-round. It being
good or bad feels almost beside the point.
[suspenseful
music playing]
“The
Old Guard” stars Charlize Theron as “Andy”, Andromanche the Scythian, an unkillable,
fast-healing immortal along the lines of the Highlander or Wolverine or
Deadpool or Hayden Panettiere’s character on “Heroes” and yes, this concept is
precisely as tired and worn-out as Charlize’s cynical Andy.
Aside
from a few flashback scenes in some rather unfortunate Xena cosplay, the story
focuses on Andy and her team of three other centuries-old immortals, guy
(Marwan Kanzari), other guy (Luca Marinelli) and slightly shifty guy (Matthias
Schoenaerts) as they battle Martin Shkreli-esque pharmabro Steven Merrick (Harry
Melling), who wants to turn them into lab mice for the development of new drugs
based on their DNA. A new wrinkle occurs when a US Marine deployed to
Afghanistan (KiKi Layne) suddenly discovers she, too, is immortal.
[Frankie
Ocean playing]
The
plot is utterly predictable. The team is double-crossed in precisely the way that
you expect, by the person that you expect. After we learn that immortality
sometimes wears off, the person you expect to become mortal again does. When
the team is captured, they are rescued by exactly the person you expect in
precisely the way you expect. While one was previously encouraged to switch off
one’s brain for action movies, in this case it becomes almost mandatory. To the
point where it feels almost like a deliberate choice.
For
example, they say the famous Nigerian Prince Email scam was written in a suspicious, fishy, blatantly scammy style in order to turn off
anybody with half a brain, as the scam’s targets were the truly naïve and
stupid. Anybody else was a waste of the scammers’ time, so they set up the scam
so that the audience would self-select: Only those staggeringly dumb enough to
fall for it would bother to respond.
And
the cynical part of me wonders if that’s what’s happening here. I’d like to
believe Greg Rucka, the man who wrote the original comic book on which the
movie is based, is capable of coming up with an original twist or plot point.
Yet the movie is absolutely, totally laser-focused on not surprising you in any
way, shape or form.
[electropop
music playing]
The
dialog is dull and utilitarian. The fights are jerkily shot and confusingly
edited, and feature the Wickensian headshotting we’ve already seen ad nauseum
in three John Wick movies, not to mention Netflix’s own Extraction. Theron
essentially reprises her Furiosa role from “Mad Max” albeit with a better haircut,
but the others of her team make little to no impression at all. They all behave
exactly like a modern action-movie Special Forces team, and nothing at all like
1,000-year-old warriors.
Side
note: Why do these people need to eat and sleep? Doesn’t the not-dying bit
prevent you from starving or suffering from a lack of REM? What happens if you
cut their heads off? The implications of their abilities largely go unconsidered,
save for a flashback sequence in which Veronica Ngo’s character is chucked into
the sea inside an iron coffin, to drown and revive and drown again for
eternity. It’s the one genuinely creepy scene in the whole movie, and one I was
hoping was going to power the plot, but nope, bog-standard baddies it is (Ngo’s
character reappears at the very end in an obvious set-up for a sequel).
[another
misplaced musical cue playing]
There
isn’t much nice I can say about the rest of it, I’m afraid. The score, as I’ve
hinted, is intrusive and rarely fits the mood of the scene. Thematically, it’s
a bit of a mess: The preciousness of human life, how fleeting it is, ah me, oh
my, such pathos, now let’s go murder 50 faceless goons with headshots that
totally go SPLAT all over the walls.
The action
is frequently preposterous—upon discovering her rapid-healing abilities, Layne’s
squad-mates immediately turn on her. Why? Andy abducts Layne from a US army
base in Afghanistan in a Humvee. How? Layne drives about a creepily empty
London, streets totally deserted, until after the big escape and then cops and
a crowd show up. What? I’m not a fan of the Cinema Sins style of criticism and searching
for “plot holes” but this movie simply constricts itself in nonsensical plot
lines.
[Gummi
Bear viral song from 2007 playing]
But none
of it matters. This is a movie for all the Charlize Theron stans out there.
Your queen kicks ass. Yeah! In what feels like a deliberate shot at macho action-movie
tropes, she’s a lesbian, Marwan and Luca’s characters are a gay couple, the new
addition to the team is a black woman, the bad guy is a white dude with an army
of white dudes in cop gear. I can tell the online discourse for this movie is
going to be dominated by the presence of these elements. If representation
matters to you, then all the headthumpingly dull plotting and wooden
characterization probably won’t make any difference. If SJW-ness or whatever are
your personal bugbear, no number of killer action scenes would have saved it.
It
just has to be good enough to get a pass with its target audience, and they’ll
defend it to the death. A thousand words of mine aren’t going to change any
minds one way or the other. So I’ll stop.
Wednesday, June 3, 2020
This Is How You Lose the Time War
There's also a kind of giddy inventiveness to the ways the two agents come up with to leave each other their secret missives--encoded in the growth-rings of ancient trees or engraved in the long-buried bones of pilgrims, for example.
I don't entirely buy the love story at the center of the tale, either. It might be the nature of a romance told in letters, but both characters seem far more in love with themselves and their own cleverness than one another. It takes a certain kind of narcissism to believe that others should be intimately interested in your every thought and feeling, much like dedicated diarists, for example, there has to be some unshakable belief that your experience is uniquely worth sharing. (He said, on a blog, yes I know)
Much as it pains me to admit, great prose in the service of nothing but its own greatness is not a satisfying read, and in the end the book just comes across as entertaining but a bit self-indulgent, two writers deciding their letters to one another are terribly clever and should be worth $20 for anyone else to read.
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Wickensian Action: Extraction
About a third of the way into this movie, there’s a non-stop 12-minute car chase action scene that is easily the most enjoyable vehicular mayhem on screen since Mad Max. The camera gets into and then swoops out of cars on the move, taking us this way, then that way, zipping like a bullet across the battle scene, never resting for an instant. It’s glorious, simply glorious.
Monday, April 20, 2020
Star Trek: Picard
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
Kingdom (Netflix Series)
Title: Kingdom (Seasons 1 & 2)
When season 1 came out in 2018, the story probably felt more socio-economic than epidemiological: The king of Joseon (17th century Korea) has fallen ill and rumors circulate he may be dead—but access to the king is fiercely guarded by Cho Hak-ju, his chief advisor, and by Cho’s daughter, who also happens to be the king’s pregnant wife. The king’s older son by a concubine, Lee Chang, stands to inherit the throne if the king dies before the wife gives birth to a son.
Cho accuses Lee of treason and he is forced to flee to the south in search of clues to his father’s illness, accompanied only by his personal bodyguard. He finds the southern provinces ravaged by poverty and starvation, and by a strange plague has begun to turn the inhabitants into crazed, flesh-eating monsters. The wealthy and isolated scholars and aristocrats in the capital remain blind to the danger until it is literally on their doorstep.
Put it that way and it sounds like a companion piece to “Parasite,” the Korean Oscar-winning movie about income inequality and class conflict. However, the show has kind of been overtaken by recent events. Referring to the zombies as “the infected” takes on new resonance now. In the show’s tale of corruption and lust for power, we can perhaps now see the danger these leaders pose to society in a health crisis: They either ignore all danger signs, or are interested only to the extent that they can use the crisis to their own advantage. They remain assured of their own invulnerability until it is far, far too late.
It’s also worth noting that South Korea is emerging from the current crisis as one of the few countries in the world that has managed the virus with anything even remotely approaching success. All that zombie-fighting did them some good, eh?
Each season is composed of six one-hour episodes, making it a quick watch, though I find it kind of falls between two stools—too long for a feature film, too short for subplots or character development.
On the plus side, there’s a kind of streamlined simplicity to the narrative in that all conflict ultimately comes down to the power struggle between the Cho Clan and Crown Prince Lee Chang, but that does leave the world feeling a little thin and the characters as interchangeable as the ridiculous hats everybody wears. (I don’t think any culture’s 17th century dress comes out looking too cool, lace ruffs I’m looking at you, but Joseon Korea’s penchant for mumu-ish silk robes and a pheasant-feathered top hat just strikes me as impractical for a horror actioner).
Both the action and the acting are very melodramatic and Acting-y. The show’s zombies are nocturnal, so tension often requires the sun to drop like Wall Street in a pandemic. Hah, that’s a joke that’ll age like milk. Anyway. Mortally wounded heroes suddenly sprout more arrows than Boromir yet they always find time for five-minute death speeches, while the Queen Consort does little but stare eerily straight at the camera, but it’s serviceable—not Game of Thrones, but not Shannara Chronicles, either. Ryu Seung-ryong as Cho Hak-ju is excellent though, full of ruthless menace, vividly portraying a man to whom a devastating plague is just one more tool to be wielded in his bid to hold on to power.
Ordinarily, I’d recommend this as a refreshing take on the zombie genre, both in terms of setting and style, but through no fault of its own the show gave me stomach cramps, heart palpitations and a sudden need to watch something a little more lighthearted. Though I understand “Contagion” is seeing a resurgence in popularity now, so this is probably exactly what you all want to see. You loonies.
Monday, March 23, 2020
Altered Carbon: Resleeved
Title: Altered Carbon—Resleeved
Sunday, March 1, 2020
Altered Carbon (Season 2)
Title: Altered Carbon (Season 2)
Showrunners: Laeta Kalogridis, Alison Schapker
Writers: Laeta Kalogridis, Sarah Nicole Jones, Michael R. Perry, Sang Kyu Kim, Cortney Norris, Adam Lash, Cori Uchida, Nevin Densham, Alison Schapker, Elizabeth Padden
Network: Netflix
While the very word “Adaptation” implies change, I wish more adapters would err on the side of changing too little rather than too much. This Carbon would have been better if they’d altered it a bit less.
The Altered Carbon series on Netflix is an adaptation of a three-book series about super-soldier turned lone gun for hire Takeshi Kovacs, by author Richard K. Morgan. Series 1, released in 2018, covered the first book in the series, which I wrote about here and here. If you’re lazy, and hey we’re on the Internet so yeah, the gee-whiz SF premise is that human consciousness can be digitized, stored in a “stack” implanted in the spine, and downloaded into any available “sleeve” (what people in far future land call bodies).
This second incarnation of the Altered Carbon series is a bit of a mashup—in the messiest sense of the word—of elements from books 2 and 3 of the Takeshi Kovacs series, Broken Angels and Woken Furies, altered to the point of almost unrecognizability.
Carrera and Kemp from Broken Angels show up, though their motivations and characters are completely altered. The setting has been moved to Harlan’s World, as in Woken Furies, and it follows book 3’s hunt for legendary rebel leader Quellcrist Falconer plot line, though of course they had to make this literal by turning it into a hunt for the actual person rather than a copy of her consciousness. As I said before, we are in the age of incredibly literal SF. Oshima from book 3 is transformed into a black lesbian woman named Trepp (Simone Missick), though amazingly without raising the kind of outcry that casting white actor Joel Kinnaman to play a white character with a half-Japanese half-Czech name did in season 1.
Can’t imagine why not.
If you’ve never read the books that’s going to make as much sense as alien hieroglyphs, so here’s the plot: Kovacs (played by Anthony Mackie this time) is convinced his long-vanished lover Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry) is still alive. He is lured back to his home world of Harlan’s World by the prospect of finding her, only to discover he is suspected of murdering a cabal of super-rich “Meths” (short for methuselah because of their money-fueled longevity). He enlists the aid of Trepp and Poe (Chris Conner), the holographic hotel AI from season 1, and is hunted by Colonel Carrera (Torben Liebrecht), who creates a clone of Kovacs based on a stored copy of Kovac’s consciousness (Will Yun Lee) to help track down the fugitives.
None of these details actually matter much. Here’s what the show is like to watch: Bam! Aaah! Watch out! [Voiceover] Memories, are, like, ghosts, you know? Nanoswarm! The construct is destabilizing! Smash! Waaugh! Gyaaa! The End.
The first two episodes in particular are written by idiots for idiots.
Two examples from the first couple of episodes may illustrate:
Kovacs is stabbed in the shoulder and knocked unconscious. He awakes with no memory of what happened. To make himself remember, he stabs himself in the shoulder. Thank god his assailant didn’t kick him in the testicles.
In another scene, Colonel Carrera and four of his men (despite being a Colonel, Carrera only seems to have about four—alas for streaming TV budgets) investigate the scene of a murder. The police allow them in, but confiscate their weapons (why, I have no idea). Carrera and his men kill the cops anyway: Carrera takes one cop’s gun, shoots the cop, then tosses it to one of his men, who does a pirouette and then shoots another cop, the ballet guy then tosses the gun to yet another solider, who does a backflip, then shoots a third cop, backflippy tosses the gun YET AGAIN … Anyway, at the end of it all Carrera reports everything he found at the crime scene without covering anything up, so. What. The. Fuck. Was that all in aid of?
The dialog is enjoyable in its schlocky cheesiness. Colonel Carrera gets most of the best (worst) lines: “If we’re talking wolves, I’m the alpha and you’re nothing but my bitch.” Though frankly this is slightly let down by the fact that as the big bad, Carrera looks like a middle-aged metrosexual with about as much menace as Mark Ruffalo.
There are attempts at a serious tone, with laboring weighty voiceovers about the way we are are haunted by memories and vainly attempt to recreate our pasts, but the seriousness is undercut by the nonsensical action. The treatment of the virtual and digital is especially silly: Poe, the holographic AI, carries a shotgun, drinks whiskey and manipulates other programs by waving his hands around in midair.
To be honest, the show doesn’t seem that interested in its own themes, anyway. Character motivations are impossible to follow and don’t matter, as every problem is resolved by punching or shooting things. Carrera is working against the planet’s governor, no he’s working for her, Quellcrist is a murderer, no she’s a victim, no she’s a willing accomplice. Clone Kovacs is a ruthless killer who murders Trepp’s father, no he’s a caring, sensitive guy you’d like if you got to know him personally. Maybe if given enough time these changes would sit better, but with a season of just eight episodes character arcs get rushed in the mad dash to get through the convoluted plot involving about four double-crosses and a lot of unconvincing technobabble.
I get that streaming TV is not words on paper, and each medium imposes different needs. However, as I argued with Star Trek Discovery, if all you keep is the surface level stuff—the names and places, some of the technology, one or two lines—then why not go all the way and make something totally new? Using original works of fiction for little more than name recognition feels an uncomfortable combination of both horribly cynical and terribly hubristic—assuming you as the TV writer know better how to craft a story than the bestselling author whose works you’re plundering for your story line.
Think back to the Lord of the Rings movies, probably the best-loved and most widely acclaimed SF/Fantasy adaptations in recent memory (Game of Thrones had a shot at the title before that last season, sigh). Now, what do people remember about those movies? Was it Legolas surfing down an elephant’s trunk while no-scoping orcs with his bow? Was it Aragorn somehow grabbing a green ghost by the neck and threatening it with his sword? Was it the incredibly literal interpretation of the all-seeing eye of Sauron as a gigantic searchlight? Or—or were these dismissed as risible additions by the writers to an otherwise vivid portrayal of one of the classics of modern English literature?
The Takeshi Kovacs books are certainly no Lord of the Rings, but there was a core to them, a bitter suspicion of the corrosive effects that the convergence of money and technology into the hands of a few can have, but also a deep wariness of fanatics and extremists of any stripe—people who believe deeply in a cause often don’t care too much about the people who follow it. That gets thrown out the window—season 2 ends with Quellcrist vowing to travel to some other planet to continue her bloody revolution.
It’s a light, mildly diverting, disposable time-filler, something Netflix can dump on the service to keep you busy for a week or two until the next show comes around, but that’s pretty much the only mileage I got out of it.