The Witcher (Netflix series)

Title: The Witcher
Created by: Lauren Schmidt Hissrich (based on the novels by Andrzej Sapkowski)
Network: Netflix

3.6 (Not great, not terrible) / 5

In the first big fantasy series since the end of Game of Thrones, monster-hunter-for-hire Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill) finds his simple life increasingly complicated by a relationship with restless, anarchic sorceress Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) and Cirilla (Freya Allan) a princess fleeing the invasion of her homeland. 

Overall, this show felt more frustrating than anything else, as there's gold here but it keeps getting smothered in dross. It's more Lord of the Rings than Game of Thrones, more Dungeons and Dragons than Lord of the Rings, cheaper than either though thankfully not quite Shannara Chronicles cheap. Despite some elements that work rather well--Cavill's swashbuckling especially--I don't think it does enough to really establish its own unique voice or presence and differentiate itself from other fantasy properties.

The action, as I said, is great fun to watch, both kinetic and balletic, and the big fights in Blaviken in episode 1, as well as at the court and with a monster called a "striga" later on, are collectively the high points of the show. Cavill does the brooding tough guy shtick with just enough charm to make him likeable, and Joey Batey as the bard Jaskier makes a good foil despite sometimes teetering over the line from amusing to annoying. The female leads are less well-served by the script, and I found Yennefer's motivations in particular seem to change about twice per episode.

The set, prop and costume design is competent if unspectacular, some of it good, some of it feeling plasticky and as thin as a Young Adult romance. The dialogue is worse, often opaque and gnostic (a line about flowers dying gets repeated N times but I still haven't the faintest what that's all about) or else jarringly anachronistic, such as when a queen refers to a formal ball as a "shindig." 

The structure is another area that needed a bit of honing. The adventures of the Mandalorian with a sword were fun, but honestly I felt too much time was wasted on Yennefer's backstory and Ciri's adventures, without the writers giving either character enough to do. The show cross-cuts among these three plot lines, without telling you they are actually happening at completely different times, which can be a bit baffling until about episode 4 when things fall into place. While it's nice that the show trusts the audience to pay attention and figure things out, even just a small hint, a line ot text like "five years later..." or whatever would have helped keep things straight.

Thematically, it's a bit vague. At first, I thought we were going to get a kind of rebuttal of Game of Thrones' theme that you have to be a bastard to survive in the real world: Geralt lives in a grim, grey world, yet still manages to be both practical and moral. But a lot of the stories feel lobomotimzed. Many of the adventures are drawn from "The Last Wish" collection of short stories, a series of deliciously twisted fairy tales that reflected on our relationship with myths and monsters. While the basics of the stories have been kept, most of the flavor has been lost. 

For example, in episode 1, Geralt is caught between a wizard and a vengeful bandit leader, each of whom try to hire him to kill the other. We see him refuse to take sides, then at the end he suddenly goes on a murder spree for no apparent reason. In the original short story, we learn that although the bandit is a good person who has done some terrible things, and their quest for vengeance is actually pretty justified. The wizard, by contrast, is a fairly awful person, but currently not harming anyone. That's an interesting dillemma, a sort of "trolley problem, but swords". But in the show, nope. It's just suddenly time to do some stabbing.

Similarly, in another episode Geralt is captured by fugitive elves who have been persecuted and driven from their homes by humans. In the original story, there's some soul-searching about the fact that yes, what happened to the elves was a crime, but murdering innocent humans is also a crime, and in any event no amount of fighting will ever make things the way they used to be again. Here? Wisecracks and abortion jokes, and then the elves let Geralt go because shrug. 

This narrative incoherence is capped by the climactic battle at the end of episode 8, where none of the geography works and I have no idea where any of the characters are in relation to one another from scene to scene. What the start of Last Jedi was to the end of Force Awakens, the end of the season was to its start. A rousing climax that truly made the audience say, "What?"

There's a fateful reunion that should feel impactful, but instead falls kind of flat. It just happens. Huh.

To me, this is kind of the killer, because without a theme or thrust or direction, you're kind of left wondering what the point of it all is. 

So I think the bones are good, the foundation is solid, I just wished Netflix had been able to construct something a bit more solid on top of it. 

The Rise of Skywalker

Title: The Rise of Skywalker

Directed by: J.J. Abrams

Story by: Derek Connolly, Colin Trevorrow, J.J. Abrams, Chris Terrio

Nine movies and 40 years later, does it stick the landing? Well, I watched this movie less than 24 hours ago, and let me be honest, I’m struggling to remember a single thing about it. I came home and promptly watched a couple episodes of The Witcher series on Netflix (review coming soon). Stick the landing? Buddy, it barely registered before it skipped off into nothing. This movie is its own Force ghost.

The most fun I had with this movie is probably watching people online use it as an excuse to re-litigate The People vs. Rian Johnson for the billionth time in two years. And yeah, in many ways The Rise of Skywalker feels like it’s trying to escape The Last Jedi’s shadow, to the movie’s great discredit and detriment.

With one director helming parts 1 and 3 and another steering part 2, now more than ever the trilogy is a bit of a meandering mess. Online commenters either take this as vindication or insult to whatever stance they had regarding The Last Jedi, but honestly to me looks more like a multimillion dollar version of the joke writing assignment where one wants to write about a woman drinking tea and the other about a space invasion.

New elements from The Last Jedi that promised a different course for the series (anyone can be a hero), are either quietly dropped or waffled. Rey’s parents were nobodies so anybody can be a hero but wait, she’s the Emperor’s grand-daughter so no it’s all about ancestry BUT WAIT AGAIN maybe Finn (John Boyega) can use the Force so let’s just hint at that and never do anything with it. I don’t know if the series needed a single director or writer, but at the very, very least, the absolute barest minimum, it needed some kind of agreement about what Star Wars actually is.

Admittedly, the plot of the original Star Wars trilogy is not without its obvious cracks and flaws as writers constructed the story while it was being built—Darth Vader being Luke’s father still feels like an ass-pull, as does Luke miraculously being Leia’s brother. But if nothing else, the series at least felt tonally and thematically consistent. Take what you want--youthful aspiration, the lure of adventure, the redemptive power of friendship and love--the core was always there.

Well, the sequel trilogy is hollow to its core. While The Last Jedi certainly had something to say (perhaps too much), all The Rise of Skywalker wants to say is “Wheee!” and occasionally “Remember this?”

The plot is a bit like listening to a breathless five-year-old playing with his action figures: This happens and then this happens and then THIS happens and BAM! BOOM! but then THIS happens and then... Everything is bigger! Louder! Better! What if Force lightning, but more?! Cuts between scenes come at you at lightspeed, with barely a chance to register before we go hurtling off to the next scene. Nothing has any consequence. People appear to die but don’t three or four times, then one major one does actually bite the Force irretrievably, but nobody refers to this moment ever again. New characters are introduced then promptly disappear, there are a series of magic things that are needed to find other magic things which are lost but then immediately retrieved.

It’s not a movie capable of withstanding a single “Why?”

It’s all of the narrative incoherence of Abrams with very little of the visual verve. Abrams used to be good, at the very least, at imparting his goofy space adventures with some spectacle, but this time even shots that should make you go “Wow!”—skipping among planets at lightspeed, an underground ice cavern chase, a massive fleet waiting in shadowy fog, the arrival of the cavalry—don’t because they’re barely there on the screen for three seconds. The final climactic showdown takes place on the Death Star and space battle er, on an evil planet that is eternally night with bursts of lightning, and sadly pitch blackness isn’t really conducive to delivering impressive visuals.

There is an effort to impart the action with a sense of weight and finality, but as with much of this movie it is all text, zero texture. The reborn Emperor declares “I am ALL of the Sith!” and Rey counters with “And I am ALL of the Jedi!” and I don’t believe either of them because there’s no reason for me to. I don’t know what those words even mean. People agonize about killing this one mass murderer, but then happily mow down armored Stormtroopers we’ve established are actually brain-washed slave-soldiers. 

The one stab at a theme appears to be that all it takes is a courageous few to stand up to evil, that even just one voice of dissent can rally millions, but we’re just told that. Repeatedly. The actual rallying appears completely off-screen. In a straining effort to tie the nine movies all back together, it ends with a shot of one character on a planet she’s never been to, with talismans from one character who always wanted to leave it and another who was a prisoner there.

But for all that, I didn’t hate The Rise of Skywalker. It’s unoriginal, brainless, ephemeral, far too overstuffed to properly show off its own spectacle, but I didn’t hate it.

Maybe all that Star Wars movies can be anymore is vehicles for nostalgia, and maybe I can live with that. It was kind of nice to see Mark Hamill again, however briefly, and Carrie Fisher, however awkwardly, and even Harrison Ford, however gnostically.

As Ben Solo/Kylo Ren, Adam Driver remains one of the best things in the new series, imparting a bit of the Han Solo cockiness into his character. The new trio of Daisy Ridley, John Boyega and Oscar Isaac have glimpses of energy and chemistry, despite their scenes being kind of Death Star cannoned by the runaway plot. I just wished they had been better served by the story and edit. Boyega in particular I could have watched an entire movie about—he’s got the only interesting backstory, and the actor oozes fun, charm and charisma. I would love a story about ordinary people in the Star Wars universe rising to the moment to become heroes.

But if I never get it, that’s okay. I didn’t think I was getting any more Star Wars after Return of the Jedi, but then the prequels happened. I didn’t think we were getting more after that, but then Rogue One, Solo and this trilogy. I’m okay if we don’t get any more. I’m okay if we do.

The Rise of Skywalker doesn’t especially feel like the end of anything. That’s okay, too.

“Remember this?” I sure do, movie. I sure do. I probably won’t remember you, movie, but the feeling of Star Wars? I’m never going to forget.

Liveblogging Dune (1984)

Been a while since I've done one of these. In anticipation of the upcoming two-part remake of Dune by Denis Villeneuve, let's go back 35 years ... my god, 35 fucking years ... and revel in the many famous faces who graced this beloved SF classic's first strange and wonderful appearance on the silver screen.

0:08 Even the studio logo is in space. Very immersive. 

0:37 EYES

You know, there are lots of ways you can subtly deliver infodumps as part of the narrative without boring your audience: Make it organic to the scene; embed it in the action; make it matter to what is happening on the screen.

Or you could be director David Lynch, and have a giant space princess's disembodied head just fucken hammer you with that shit for two minutes straight while maintaining incredibly uncomfortable eye contact. Fuck you, cinema conventions.

0:52 "A beginning is a very delicate time" -- which is presumably why I'm going to freak you out by giving you this background in the most awkward and ham-handed manner imaginable.

1:18 Oop, looks like we lost the Starz+ Premium channel there for a sec. Whew, she's back again. 

1:48 "Oh yes, I forgot to tell you..." NO YOU DID NOT. Nobody believes you're ad-libbing this robotic little speech, princess. Quit straining for casualness when we can see your eyes scanning the space teleprompter. 

2:26 lol, I'm reading YouTube's auto-generated captions: "The planet is Arrakis, also known as Julie." 

Smash cut to the movie title: 

J  U  L  I  E

3:65 Well, those were some lovely credits, featuring the entire extended De Laurentiis clan. Must be time for another infodump. At least this one has pretty space planet graphics.

4:35 We travel to the space emperor's space palace, which appears to be somewhere on the set of the original Blade Runner. 

6:14 What's in space fashion in the galactic capital in the year 10,191 AD? Ah, black plastic garbage bags! 

7:22 See kids, this is what happens if you overdo the spice. Turns you into a floating scrotum. Just say no to life-prolonging, mind-expanding, time-and-space-altering drugs! And to floating scrotums.

8:57 We're on infodump #3 and counting, but this one's handled ever so marginally better by having two characters at least speak to each other. Of course, one of them is a vagina-mouthed ballsack, but still. 

10:32 lol again with the captions: "We must look at Paul Atreides. To Canada!" Always knew the messiah would be one of us. 

Side note: the space guild dudes are all bald and wear black, the space witches are bald and wear black ... Why does everyone in the far future look like goth Hare Krishnas?  

Anyway, the Spice Girls head to Waterworld, with a brief stop for infodump #4.

12:26 This looks like the setup for the funniest joke in the galaxy: "Captain Picard, Dean Stockwell cosplaying as an Indian woman and the winner of the 10,191st Annual Bushiest Eyebrows in the Galaxy walk into a bar... "

... and the punchline: "I'd know the difference!" (Cue laugh track, because it's the 80s)

13:21 Oh boy, you know you messed up bad when even Captain Picard wants to cut you.

13:32 A titanic fight breaks out between two rejected CG graphics from the original TRON movie.

17:43 Of all the changes to the original story that this movie made, "The Atreides secret weapon is screaming at things" is easily one of the most biz ... actually no, this is pretty par for the course. 

19:04 Duncan Idaho! Book fans will remember him as the man who gets cloned like a billion times so he can have sex with all the Atreides descendants. Movie fans will struggle to remember who the hell this guy is.

19:25 The captain from Das Boat, looking much more chipper now. 

28:02 THE PAIN. You know, if all it takes to prove you're the Superman is putting up with a nasty sunburn for 30 seconds, boy, imagine what a man who can step on a Lego without crying could be capable of. 

29:28 Captions are at it again: "A man will come, the wizard Cedric." 

Yes, the Canadian wizard Cedric, from the planet Julie.

30:53 It's Grima Wormtongue after he licked an electrical socket. Seriously though, the number of famous faces in this movie is phenomenal. 

33:03 So this movie took out the complex politics, planetary ecology and ruminations on fate and eugenics, and instead gave us: Sting in a latex codpiece. 

A fair trade, I suppose.

37:08 Pug dog.

38:01 PUG DOG. I've known of this dog's existence for less than a minute, yet I would die for it. Kill for it. 

38:27 Ahhh, the Spacing Guild spacing ship has a wonderfully baroque sense of scale to it. Obi-wan: "That's no cigar, that's a space station!"

Also: Pug dog.

40:00 So the floating larva-slash-brain thing spits up a planet or two and that's how to travel across the galaxy. Wait a sec though, if that's only possible because of the spice that's found only on Julie, how did humanity ever explore the galaxy far enough to find it? Guess that's why it took 10,000 years or so.

Speaking of time, good lord it's been 40 minutes and we aren't even on Julie yet. 

41:26 Fun fact: I think this woman is also a De Laurentiis. They're everywhere. They could be anyone. It could be you!

42:04 Pug dog.

43:46 I love this scene of the elite, crack squad of Atreides troopers lining up to fill their water bottles like spectators at a sports stadium. I've never empathized with background extras more in my life.

44:37 Another famous face--this time it's the bad guy from Strange Brew! I think Max von Sydow may have done some other stuff, but I hope that's the movie he'll always be remembered for. Either that or Conan the Barbarian. Max, I salute you! (Weird: I was thinking "Oh he looks much younger in this movie" then checked his bio, and my gravel-voiced man was already 55 back then.) 

I'm being a sarcastic ass here, but love, love, love the visual style and design work on this movie. The H R Giger gimp suits are just wild. It's going to be interesting to see how the Villeneuve movie is going to establish its own look, since this is just so original and iconic and whoah.

46:12 "Urine and feces are recycled in the thigh pads" and now I'm just thinking about the galactic superman drinking his own pee, thanks.

56:52 When the edible kicks in. 

59:07 It's so cool they were able to turn the weird little gadget woman from The Incredibles into a real human being. 

1:04:53 Did the murder-doctor really just stick a new tooth in that man's mouth using only his bare, unwashed hands? Oh, he really is evil. Somehow, being bugged about not flossing doesn't seem so bad now.

1:05:34 Oh no, the palace is being bombarded. No, not puggsly! RUN, PUG, RUN!

1:06:32 BattlePug to the rescue! Oh, it's all over for you bitches now.

1:09:07 I think the guard Piter is talking to is supposed to be deaf (to stop Jessica using her Jedi mind tricks on him) which means he's using an incredibly efficient sign language in which *touch ear lobe* means "take them to the desert so the bodies won't be found." 

Hyper-efficiency in communication is all well and good, but could lead to all kinds of miscommunication: 

Piter: *sneezes*
Guard: Detonate the atomic bombs? Very good sir.

1:15:34 The Peter Pan remake is wild.

1:24:35 It's the mark of a strong mother-son bond that you can take the time to discuss things. Such as the aroma produced by a 500 ton homicidal earthworm trying to battering ram its way into your hideout.

1:25:05 I know it's 1984, but the effects for Paul "falling" are just embarrassing. Flail your arms out a bit, Kyle. Thanks, fantastic. This will look great.

1:27:31 Jessica captures the Fremen leader Stilgar using the "Weirding Way." Part of her "Bizarro Training" by the "Looney Tune Sisters" on the planet "Shit's Whack Yo". 

1:30:44 Sean Young then shows up, confirming my theory that Dune is set in the Blade Runner CU. 

1:32:29 And there it is. The most famous crossover codpiece in music-cinema history since David Bowie jumped into a pair of tights. 

Serious comment time: We're about 2/3 of the way through this movie and we've only just finished Act I. While I'm tempted to blame Lynch for the idiosyncratic pacing and front-loading all the worldbuilding into the first 10 minutes, I think this is also the challenge of Dune as a work of filmic entertainment: All the tension comes at the beginning. Once Paul becomes an omniscient superman leading an army of invincible desert savages there really isn't much drama. 

1:36:22 Milking a cat and then you drink the milk? It's like someone read a cat owner's manual back to front.

1:36:57 Ah, Paul in love with a woman he met 7 minutes ago. See, this is the problem with pacing. 

"He who can destroy a thing controls it" is rather a dark philosophy isn't it. 

1:41:39 Ah but now, this is a cool shot and I can see why they put it on the posters: Paul walking down a dune, a line of Fremen watching silently behind. No joke there. It's just cool.

1:47:04 Montage with Voice Over: "And then the other 66% of the story happened." 

1:47:57 While we're all happy to see Picard again, WHERE IS THE PUG? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH THE PUG TELL ME IT WAS OKAY

1:50:15 "I have to drink the water or I'm dead!" Very true, Paul. Absolutely. Stay hydrated.

1:55:05 "The sleeper has awakened!" he shouts but I'm not buying it. This is supposed to be a climactic character moment before the final showdown, but what does Paul achieve? What did drinking the water actually do or change, why was it necessary? Right now it looks like he had a nice drink and a nap, had a weird dream and then declared everything was different. But he was already the messiah, already had an entire planet of fanatic soldiers under his control. So. What gives?

2:05:49 Climactic battle somewhat undercut by never having the opposing forces in the same effects shot. 

The sound weapon thing is odd, too. I think they invented it to avoid having to explain Herbert's idea that the elite forces of history have often been bred through severe environmental conditions (though I'm not convinced... the Greek phalanx, the Roman legions, the Mongols, the British redcoat all owed more to tactical innovation and training than to be raised on the rough). But the net result is a very detached and uninvolving battle, capped by a bizarre death for the big bad baron.

2:09:29 The final showdown is a duel with Sting's Feyd-Rautha, but without the background provided by the book (Feyd is also a potential Kwisatz Haderach) it's hard to see how the guy has any chance, or why he should be the final boss when he hasn't really done anything evil all movie. 

Unconvincing fight choreography too. Very stilted, awkward. They're supposed to be doing the "slowly edging the knife closer" trope, but Kyle's got his arm in the wrong place and you can see Sting should be able to easily knife him in a second. 

And the climax: FOR HE IS THE WIZARD CEDRIC! 

Hm. Visual design impressive, iconic, original, all that great stuff, but pacing is just awful, very drawn out intro and rushed ending, plus lots of weirdness thrown in to avoid explaining any of the finer points of the book. Like I say, I think the challenge for Villeneuve will be to make the second half interesting--how do you make a story about an all-seeing messiah engaging? In the book, it's most about Paul's internal struggle to chart a path that won't be TOO monstrous, but I wonder how they'll put that on screen.

6/10 though 5 of those points go directly to the pug

The King

Title: The King

Directed by: David Michôd

Written by: David Michôd and Joel Edgerton

Shakespeare’s plays about the life of English King Henry V receive an updating in this Netflix-produced movie, and you know, I haven’t the foggiest why.

It’s as though the writing team of the suspiciously foreign-sounding David Michôd (jk, he’s actually Australian) and Joel Edgerton sat down and thought, “What’s the one thing nobody remembers about Shakespeare—the language, right?” So they dumped all the flowery verbiage and settled on having the characters say “fuck” every once in a while.

The Saint Crispian Day speech? Well, who really wants to hear one of the most stirring battle speeches ever set down in the English language, right? I mean, look at this fluff:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Who needs that, right? I’d much rather hear the actor who played Tommen in Game of Thrones (Dean-Charles Chapman) say the “f” word.

Revisionism is the order of the day in this retelling, extending not merely to stripping away 90% of the language, but also to major character changes.

The declaration of war upon France by Henry V (a very pale and fey Timothée Chalamet) is portrayed not as a transformation, not a boy learning the brutal necessities of power, but rather an extension of the selfish, impulsive, prickly self-indulgence of his youth. John Falstaff (Joel Edgerton) is no longer boozy has-been put aside as Henry learns responsibility (“I know thee not, old man”), but becomes instead Henry’s sagacious and war-weary councilor, in a move which by pure coincidence gives the movie’s co-writer a far longer and juicier part. The wooing of Catherine of Valois (Lily-Rose Depp) is no longer played for laughs, but instead becomes a chance for Henry to get a reality check when Catherine not only proves completely fluent in English, but also schools Henry on how he has been manipulated into war by the Chief Justice (Sean Harris).

I wish I could praise some of the other elements of the film-making, but honestly after watching things like the “Outlaw King,” this feels like more of the same: Dim interior lighting, faintly silly haircuts and mud. Lots and lots of mud. There is an attempt at grittiness by slathering the combatants in a battle in the stuff, but honestly despite the commanders spending the previous 10 minutes discussing strategy, it’s filmed like a class of 10-year-olds playing rugby. Everybody sort of runs into the middle of the field and falls down. Nobody wears any heraldry, so I can only imagine the horrific slaughter the two sides must have inflicted on their own sides in this chaotic free-for-all.

The only bright spot I could find was Robert Pattinson (of “Twilight” fame, or infamy if you like) as the Dauphin, who clearly thought he was appearing in some kind of Pink Panther style farce. His accent and acting are both so wonderfully over the top, it’s the only pleasure in this otherwise dour and rather lifeless exercise. (I giggled every time two characters started speaking in French, only to say “Let’s continue in English.”)

While I also find blind hero-worship of The Leader mildly disturbing at best, an invitation to dictatorship and tyranny at worst, good ol’ Hal feels like a very odd target for deconstruction. I don’t think people out there chanting jingoistic slogans are quoting Shakespeare, you know?

What’s more, I find the “every hero you ever knew was actually a turd” school of film-making no longer terribly insightful or thought-provoking. As fans of swords’n’slaughter we’ve been through this already with Game of Thrones, and found at the end of it there was nothing, just cheap spectacle, sound and fury signifying nothing, all the while hypocritically dressing itself up in pacifist clothing while drenching the screen in 30-minute battlefests. It’s hollow, empty storytelling whose point has already been made several times by better productions.

At the time it was first staged, I’m sure Henry V was intended as a bit of nationalistic rabble-rousing, but Shakespeare is celebrated today for his poetry, not his patriotism, and sucking the language out of his plays sucks the life out of them.

Joker

Title: Joker

Director: Todd Philips

Writers: Todd Philips and Scott Silver

Incels. Misogyny. We live in a society. SJWs. Gun control. Third-wave feminism. Woke culture. Cancel culture. Culture wars. White supremacist violence.

These are just a few of the current hot-button issues and social media keywords that have absolutely nothing to do with the new Joaquin Phoenix movie, Joker.

Not that this has stopped anyone on social media from associating the movie with this or that cultural movement, but the truth is the movie has little on its mind other than letting Phoenix dance down a flight of stairs, baiting the Oscars and taking the odd, weak, mild, aimless jab at income inequality and the plight of the mentally ill.

Ever since Western civilization decided that the most appropriate amount to pay for news and information is zero dollars, pretty much every online media is now at the mercy of advertising revenue, which is in turn dependent on clicks, and every business has by now figured out that the single easiest, fastest and most effective way to get clicks is to package and sell anger, outrage, fear and anxiety. Hence the cynical attempt the label this a controversial, dangerous movie.

When it is actually just, well, a bit of a mess.

All the hot-taking and alarmist yelling obscures the fact that the movie at the center of all this is essentially “Taxi Driver” with clowns, featuring a mentally ill man whose life rapidly goes downhill on account of his illness until he turns to violence, which ironically (and predictably) turns out to be the one thing he can do that earns him social approval. There are some obligatory scenes linking the movie to the wider Batman story and mythos, but frankly they are entirely unnecessary and detract from--rather than add to--the focus of the movie. Add both “Superhero Movie” and “Deconstruction of a Superhero Movie” to the list of things this movie is not.

Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck, a middle-aged man living with his mother, who has a condition that makes him burst into uncontrollable laughter at awkward times. He works part-time as a clown, dreams of one day making it as a stand-up comic and fantasizes about a relationship with his single-mother neighbor. From this bottom-of-the-pole position, Fleck’s life promptly bids whatever tiny shreds of happiness it still had a not-very-fond farewell, flips his hopes and dreams the bird and leaps off the proverbial and dramatic cliff: He’s beaten up, loses his job, has the funding for his medication cut, and is finally assaulted again on a subway by three wealthy, 1% Wall Street bros before finally lashing out.

That feels like it should be some kind of turning point in the movie, but Fleck’s life goes on being ever-more horrible than before, with the added complication that he’s now under investigation by a pair of policemen who are bizarrely laid-back for guys investigating a triple homicide. There’s a vague B plot about how the murders spark an Occupy Wall Street-slash-Anonymous in V for Vendetta masks (only it’s clowns) anti-rich movement, but it just kind of happens in the background without linking to the fact that Fleck was despised for being meek and trying to get by, and lionized when he turns violent.

Phoenix has received a lot of praise for his performance, and I’d agree it’s sporadically magnetic, but a little uneven. The move doesn’t seem to quite know how it wants to show Fleck’s turn from downtrodden loser to violent sociopath. At times, it’s portrayed as a kind of evil butterfly crawling out of its chrysalis, with Fleck becoming surer, sharper and more charming the more he loses his grip on reality, but at others he reverts to awkward insecurity or frothing rage, so you’re never quite sure what the film-makers want to say or what the point of it all is.

Frankly, I didn’t feel there was anything either inventive or insightful about either the treatment of mental illness or the growing inequality of wealth. Much like the Batman tie-in of the plot, the twists (Spoilers!) that Fleck is actually adopted and was abused as a child or that his relationship with his neighbor is entirely imaginary fantasy don’t add to our understanding of either theme, and just feel kind of thrown in there because.

In the end, it’s just a kind of turgid downer, a pretty simple downtrodden man-goes-bonkers tale slathered in grease paint with the name of a beloved comic book character slapped on the poster.

Yesterday

Title: Yesterday

Director: Danny Boyle

Writer: Richard Curtis

It’s 2019 and Nostalgia is king, prince, emperor and all-powerful, all-consuming dictator-for-life. In the months ahead, there’s a new Terminator movie coming, a ninth Star Wars movie, while a new version of Dune is on the horizon, and Disney continues to self-cannibalize by remaking its entire back catalog in terrifyingly photorealistic CGI. It’s as though we’ve agreed that as a culture we’re fresh out of ideas, everything is horrible, and we’d much rather ignore it all and focus on the good old days of approximately 1960 to 1985.

Remembering things has never been more popular, and remembering music is the best kind of remembering there is. There’s nothing that quite conjures the carefree, idyllic, mildly traumatizing, socially awkward and spotty days of youth more than Nirvana, Pearl Jam and, um, Men Without Hats (shit, I don’t know). The entertainment business, its fingers ever on the pulse and wallet of the globe, has taken notice. After the screaming smash success of 2018’s Queen bio-pic slash Live Aid reenactment Bohemian Rhapsody ($900M sales vs. $52M budget) and the, um, existence of 2019’s Elton John soundtrack Rocket Man ($195M vs. $40M), making a movie to flog the music of the Beatles was probably a no-brainer, the lowest of the hanging fruit on the great money tree.

To its great credit, Yesterday manages not to come across as a cynical cash grab, and more of a slightly saccharine, inarticulate fan letter. The story, by screenwriter Richard Curtis, has Jack Malik (Hamish Patel), a struggling songwriter who gets hit by a bus, then wakes up in a world identical to our own, except that nobody knows what Coca Cola, Harry Potter or cigarettes are ... and nobody’s ever heard of the Beatles. Realizing the opportunity he’s been presented with, he promptly sets out to record and sell all the Beatles songs, passing them off as his own.

The set up and opening are charmingly funny and feature some great lines and sight gags, such as Malik getting his two front teeth knocked out by the bus and calling himself a “reverse rabbit”, or Malik Googling Beatles cover-band perfectly legitimate artists in their own right Oasis, and finding they don’t exist either.

However, once Malik finds success as a singer the movie shifts gears to focus all its non-Beatles-singing time on a frustrated romance between Malik and his manager, best friend and unrequited lover, Ellie Appleton (Lily James). It is quite possibly the most boring, predictable love story ever set to film, as simple as Ringo Starr’s drumming, as deep as “All You Need is Love”, as moving as “I Am the Walrus.” As a result, the intriguing premise goes largely unexplored, just the Beatles and a couple of random other things don’t exist, but everything else is exactly the same. But hush now, dear viewer, look: People who should be together not quite connecting!

Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire, doesn’t seem to have known what to do with the material, and throws in a bunch of artsy shots like slow-motion and tilted camera angles, which add nothing to our appreciation or understanding of the scenes.That feels kind of symptomatic of the script, not really sure what it should be doing with its premise.

However, Patel plays the slightly bumbling, desperate and lost Malik with a lot of charm, and it’s really his movie, although Ron Weasley-slash-Smeagol impersonator Ed Sheeran does make an appearance, to no great effect other than for people to go, “Huh, yup, that’s him.” Especially in the scenes before Malik hits the big time, the first part of the movie exudes a kind of warm and cozy charm, and I kind of wish the movie-makers had stuck with that.

I do also kind of wonder whether, as the movie kind of hints in its first third, the Beatles would really be successful if they released an album now, in this, the year of our Lord two thousand nineteen, in competition with the Ed Sheerans and Lady Gagas and “Uptown Funks” and “Old Town Roads” of this world. Or is that a silly question? No, they wouldn’t. Of course they wouldn’t. Success in the music business is a crap shoot, a game of luck, a matter of being in the right place and time, and another place, another time, wouldn’t be the right ones. The scenes of Malik rocking Wembley Stadium are far less believable than of him playing Yesterday to an indifferent and inattentive pub crowd.

Were the Beatles even that great? There’s a heretical thought. Stripped of their historical setting and of the boyish charm of the Fab Four, do the songs really stand on their own? In this respect at least, the movie has been a success: I’ve gone back, looked up “Strawberry Fields” and “Here Comes the Sun” and “Back in the USSR” and “Hey Jude” and “Revolution” and found there’s still a lot to like, a lot to appreciate. Score another victory for Nostalgia.

Anthem

Picked up BioWare's Anthem for $20 and just finished the main campaign. This game gets a ton of bad press, but if you just play it as Mass Effect in battle armor, it's fine. Not great, but fine.

It definitely feels like a BioWare game awkwardly grafted onto social loot shooter mechanics.

For example, it's got the mission, talk to people at base, mission cycle from ME, but none of the people you talk to go on your adventures or impact the game or campaign in any way, so you wonder why you're bothering.

Dialogues give you a kind of Renegade/Paragon reply option, but again, they don't seem to make any difference (your choices are essentially things like 'agree pleasantly' or 'agree sarcastically'), so again, why bother?

There a some good things. The suits are fun, flying is cool, environment designs are nice.

Combat is okay, if nothing special. Guns are kind of dull, just shotgun, AR, sniper etc archetypes, which makes the loot (ostensibly the motivator in loot shooters) a bit pointless, but at least the special abilities are fun to play with. Combos are a thing, as they were in ME3, so you can play around with freezing, burning and shocking your opponents.

Anyway I suspect the guns all actually perform the same regardless of displayed stats, to allow high and low level players to do missions together. The only thing that seems to matter is the cooldown on your abilities.

Enemies are seriously bland. Missions either defend the point or kill the VIP style, which gets a bit repetitive, but then I suppose the grinding in any social shooter is part of the territory. With the loot being so drab, though, there isn't really much motivation to stick with it.
 
Some of the basic things are pretty bad though. The UI for menus in particular is pretty crap and unintuitive. Inventory is straight out of ME1.  

In general, the game does a very bad job of explaining the mechanics. Like if I level up my "Arcanist" ranking I get access to "blueprints" but I've no idea which ones. Or at a high level you get to use "consumables" but it never tells you what they do or how to access them.

But overall I feel like I got my money's worth. I don't need a game that demands I play forever to keep up. Okay story, kind of fun combat, and I'm satisfied.

Liveblogging The Addams Family

Here we are again. At first, I thought this might seem a little mean-spirited, making fun of a comedy (it's SUPPOSED to be daft), but let's see how well this 1991 movie has aged...

1:00 carolers? This movie already as creepy af
Wait if they are caroling, why the hell they facing AWAY from the house? Literally unwatchable.
5/7

1:35 *snap snap*
The old boiling oil on the besiegers gag. Just like we used to do ... In the Crusades!
I hope the fuck-off huge scary-looking dude was not typecast as a huge scary-looking dude
(checks IMDb) Well, better luck in the next incarnation, my physically terrifying friend.

2:00 Ooh Christina Ricci.
Oh right she's like 40 now.
And was 12 then.
But in the middle there guys, mmmhmm.
 
3:11 Credits finally over ... Are long credits at the start a 90s thing? Have we as a species evolved beyond that?
Phoned-in credits too, font doing all the heavy lifting. Blow a bit of dry ice smoke, good enough, it's the 90s, these idiots will watch anything.
They can't even beat Saddam Hussein properly ffs
 
3:24 Motorboating grandfather clock. Now that's class.
 
4:22 Ah, disembodied hand, allow me to stand here and explain the backstory, even though you'd already know it.
The only story I know about Raul Julia, the only story I NEED to know is that he would later appear in a Street Fighter movie while dying of cancer, simply because his son loved SF and he wanted to go out on a movie his son would love.
He's like an early Keanu Reeves, only mortal
 
4:27 Christina Ricci! Rawr!
No wait she's still 12 here. Delete, delete
 
5:57 Despite their oddness, they're quite relatable characters really. He seeks to blot out the sun forever, just as I do
 
9:55 I feel like the movie keeps pausing you let you laugh. Only I don't.
I haven't laughed since mother died.
Shit was hilarious.
 
11:54 Pedophilia jokes, ho ho. You couldn't do that in this economy.
"Fine lunge, but your riposte, tut tut."
Dude just stabbed your chair and fell down Addams, WHAT RIPOSTE?
Literally unwatchable. 6/8
 
16:26 One liner. Indifferent action. One liner. Sight gag. One liner.
 
24:47 Keep waiting for Christopher Lloyd to shout "1.21 gigawatts!"
 
27:12 I don't want to know why the disembodied hand was in his room all night, or why he's got such a big smile on his face
 
36:20 Okay the electric chair bit was funny. Even I can appreciate a bit of cruelty to children.
 
54:48 Pyhyonesque combat sequence. It's like if Tarantino did a kid's movie. And how the hell is there still 40 minutes of movie.
 
57:00 Why'd the movie stop for a softcore sex scene? Because 90s G.
 
1:00:32 And now a Bollywood dance number. Movie is treading water.
 
1:04:00 Kenny from South Park puts in an appearance. Think It just said "I'm an admirer of Hitler".
Strong stuff for a PG movie.
 
1:08:00 Ok 'nother dance number, this time a cossack dance. It ain't treading water, it's drowning.
 
1:10:16 One minute he's chasing the daughter, then just like forgets and gets his sovietski groove on.
THIS ISN'T S8 OF GAME OF THRONES WE DEMAND CONTINUITY
 
1:20:40 He got a hand job. GET IT, A HAND JOB. AHAHAHAHA. Also he just rammed a stack of FedEx boxes up some lady's skirt.
 
1:34:12 1.21 Gigawatts!!!
Necromancy is a perfectly valid school of magic.
 
1:35:25 Hmm, overly long, reliant on sight gags and one liners. Would've worked better as some sort of visual medium, such as a prewar comic strip
 
8/11

Exhalation: Stories, by Ted Chiang

Title: Exhalation: Stories

Author: Ted Chiang

Publisher: Knopf

This is the second collection of short stories and novellas by American author Ted Chiang, probably best known for his short story "Story of Your Life", which the movie "Arrival" was based on. 

"Story of Your Life" was breathtakingly good, one of those rare stories that just powers straight through your eyeballs and blows apart your brain even as it puts your heart back together again. A linguist learns an alien language, and forcing herself to think like them enables her to perceive time the way they do--which leads/will lead/has always led to her realizing the trajectory of her life, and of her daughter's.

That's a pretty good taste of what Chiang is like. In the first collection, “Stories of Your Life and Others”, Chiang's stories often featured people's ideals or beliefs—especially religious beliefs—getting challenged or thrown out of whack by scientific discoveries or new technologies. For example, in “Acts of God” a recently-bereaved widower struggles with the meaning of devotion and faith in a world where the existence of God is an observable fact. In another story, the builders of the Tower of Babel discover their cosmology is all wrong—but not in the way you’d expect.

The collision of humanity and science continues to be a strong theme in this new collection, "Exhalation: Stories". The title story, for example, is about a race of automatons dealing with the knowledge of the inevitable destruction of their world. How do you go on living when you know nothing will last? In another, on an alternate Earth where humanity has found objective scientific proof that the universe was created by a god (nothing older than 8,000 years old exists) they then have to confront the fact that their planet is moving with respect to background radiation—meaning their planet is not the center of creation.

Generally, the collection is up there with his previous work, if not quite as good, but remaining both touching and thought-provoking. There aren’t any space battles or marauding aliens or killer viruses, it’s all low-key, very internal stuff, featuring people struggling to come to terms with what it means to be human (or automaton) in a complex, technologically-mediated world.

At the same time, Chiang remains an author much better at concepts and ideas than characterization and dialog, but maybe with the popularity of books like “Three Body Problem” or “Ancillary Justice” stories long on ideas and short on, er, story, are what’s in at the moment.

In particular the longest story in the collection, "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," is also the dullest and most meandering and could probably have delivered the same punch in a quarter of the length.

I must confess my main gripe with this collection is economic rather than stylistic, though. I'd already read many of the stories as they're available online from various sites, including both "Exhalation" and "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" and a couple of other stories, so the $20+ price tag for the Kindle edition felt a bit steep. I think only two out of the nine stories in the collection are actually original, with the others all published sometime between 2005 and 2015. They're good stories, but maybe wait for this one to go on sale?

In the meantime, here’s where you can read some of the stories in this collection:

The Lifecycle of Software Objects

Exhalation

What’s Expected of Us

 

The Great Silence

The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling