Don't Look Up

Professional comedians always tell you to throw away the first idea that comes into your head. Keep digging, that's when you get to the really funny stuff.

Don't Look Up is a movie composed almost entirely of first ideas.

It is a collection of the easiest, most obvious, laziest takes on all the targets of its satire: politicians are corrupt, TV is shallow entertainment, boomers are racist, tech bro superheroes never benefit anyone but themselves, science deniers are dummies. It's satire written by the top comments on Reddit. A collection of viral Tweets. 

The premise is that astronomers Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio discover a massive comet on a collision course with the Earth and try to warn people so we can do something about it. The Trumpish president (Meryl Streep) and her Don-Junior frat-boy son (Jonah Hill) find science boring and care more about the midterms, and blow them off. The two astronomers go on TV, where they get second billing to a pop star's (Ariana Grande) break-up, finally galvanize the nation into launching an attempt to knock the comet off-course, only to have it aborted by a weirdo Gates-Jobs-Musk tech giant (Mark Rylance) who wants to mine it for minerals needed to build smartphones. Their grassroots campaign to get people to look at the visibly approaching comet is met by a campaign with the rallying cry "Don't Look Up!" The tech giant's plan goes horribly wrong, of course, but not before he escapes on a spaceship. Then everybody dies.

It's a heavy-handed metaphor for global warming, or the COVID-19 pandemic, or any major social issue really, the cynical take that our society is by nature incapable of fixing any of its mistakes, and we're all doomed.

There are flashes of biting satire here and there--such as Jennifer Lawrence being confronted by her parents, who demand that she not bring "politics" (i.e. the fact that there's a giant fucking meteor headed for the Earth) into their house.

Most of it doesn't bite, because it's just the most toothless and banal restatement of the most common complaints about modern society. It doesn't satirize its targets, it just repeats them, without adding anything new or original. 

The movie also doesn't have a good grip on its tone, I think; the satire sometimes inclines to dry, black comedy, but then veers to silly over-the-top farce, like Ron Perlman's foul-mouthed geriatric astronaut using his pre-mission announcement to thank "the gays".

There's also just a lot of junk, though. The movie is about 30-45 minutes longer than it has any right to be. Scenes that either have no purpose in the story, or go on and on and on, like Ariana Grande singing an impending meteor song for five minutes, or DiCaprio's blowup with his wife who proceeds to throw all his medication at him, one by one, after announcing what each one does. A lot of scenes feel ad-libbed, in that the actors are kind of just talking without aim or purpose, just kind of rambling in the hopes that the scene will turn out OK.

I bet the movie was an absolute blast to make. Looks like the actors were having just the best time ever. As a consequence though, it does feel like the director, writer and actors are laughing at the audience, slightly smug and condescending. There's a crack about politicians being too stupid to be as evil as we think they are--thus putting the writers above both politicians and the general audience. 

Are they right though, are we doomed? It modern society congenitally incapable of taking action on any major issues or threats it faces? This movie won't convince you either way, being far too safe in its criticisms and repeating hot takes that have been around on social media for the last decade. 

For what it's worth, all of the criticisms ring true, if not especially insightful. Is the world going to hell in a handbasket? Yeah, does look that way. Is it too late to do anything about it? Probably. 

This movie won't change that, just make certain people feel better for being right. 

The Witcher: Season 2

The Witcher: Season 2

I didn’t think it was a bad season, really, but then I also don’t think it was an especially good one. It seems to have tried to fix things that were never broken, while nursing along all the broken things from the first season.

Before I complain though, I’ll be nice. I thought Jaskier (Joey Batey) was miles better this season, maybe because the overall tone was a bit darker, so the comic relief was more of a relief, maybe because the writing was better, less dependent on one-liners and more character-based.

At one point he shares a look and a smile with a bearded dwarf lady, barely lasts an instant, but it’s screamingly funny precisely because they don’t beat you over the head with it, just trust you to know the character and know what the look means.

There’s another bit shortly after where he and Geralt (an obscenely muscular Henry Cavill) are doing a walk and talk and he does a pitch-perfect imitation of Geralt. Again, nice little moment, building off our familiarity with the characters.

Then there’s a big, long scene where a dock worker complains he didn’t realize one of Jaskier’s songs took place in two timelines, ha ha, meta joke about the first season. Well, we’ll fix that with a purely linear narrative in season 2, hurrah for making stories more generic and predictable.

Which leads me to the point about trying to fix things that were fine.

The narrative invention is gone, and instead the suspense and drama are interrupted every two minutes to check and see what’s happening in the five other story lines (spoiler: Not much).

It’s also far less monster-of-the-week, more tired old “chosen one who might save or destroy the world” and you’ll be forgiven for checking if you’re accidentally watching Wheel of Time or not. Instead of twisted fairy tales, we get people possessed by demons being told to “fight against it!” and other staples of the genre.

The first episode is probably the best, and lo and behold, that’s the only one this season that has a monster-of-the-week setup. It’s a twisted take on “Beauty and the Beast” that dares to wonder what kind of woman would be attracted to a lion-boar-man living in a haunted mansion, and if such a person might not be the scarier of the two.

The rest is a fairly muddled and muddy tale about “destiny” which—and this is the killer—absolutely refuses to tell you what the friggin’ destiny in question actually is in anything but the vaguest terms imaginable. Something about the end of the world and the “Wild Hunt” and the “Conjunction of the Spheres” and “Elder blood” – the last of which seems to mean being part elf, but since there are whole tribes of elves running around it’s not clear why being marginally related to them is relevant. There’s also something called “Ithlinne’s Prophecy” but don’t worry, the show never bothers to explain what that is.

The other main story arc is about some ancient demon thing which, death stroke number two, absolutely refuses to tell you what it is friggin’ attempting to do in anything but the vaguest terms imaginable. “It feeds on pain” or something to that effect, which is great, just kind of generically evil without any goals then. “It wants to do bad stuff.” Very exciting.

So, we have a demon thingy which wants to do something, not clear what, and this may or may not have something to do with someone’s destiny, not clear what that is either. It’s the writerly urge to obfuscate and misdirect striking again, and it’s death to any kind of dramatic clarity or tension.

The dialog is pretty ropey, filled with lots of ponderous pronouncements which I think are meant to sound deep and meaningful, but are almost invariably just straight up baffling nonsense, like bullshit buzzwords spouted by a Lexus car commercial. “Fear is an illness, if you leave it untreated it can consume you” … “It’s not a question of price; it’s a matter of cost” … “True luxury should be compassionate, engaging and deeply personal.”

People keep saying these things but there’s no weight to them, nothing in the story to actually back them up.

“She's tougher than she looks,” says Geralt of Ciri (Freya Allan), his adopted daughter who he has known for all of half an episode. How the fuck would you know, Gerry? She’s ridden around on your horse for a day or two. Not exactly an Olympian display of fortitude.

The production design, directing and cinematography of the show are all kind of off-kilter, really. To examine a dead tree-monster thing (kind of like an evil Ent), Geralt rips random bits out of it with his bare hands. He goes to meet a kind of high priestess person, who o-VER e-NUN-see-AY-tes eh-VERY sy-LA-ble. There’s a wizard whose beard looks like painted-on asphalt. Telekinetic spells that blow people backwards ALWAYS do it in slow motion. There’s a bit of a Marvel-style reveal at the end of the last episode of … some woman, idk, she’s kind of there but gets no introduction or explanation.

Just so many bizarre choices.

I’m not sure I’m adequately conveying the atmosphere here. The bottom line is these people do not talk or act like human beings. It’s all just slightly off.

The Power of the Dog

The Power of the Dog

This will be short as there isn’t much to criticize.

The Power of the Dog is probably Hollywood’s second-best advertisement for traveling to New Zealand, next to Lord of the Rings. Here, NZ is subbing for Montana, and the landscape is NatGeo gorgeous, absolutely stunning, and the cinematography is very Every Frame a Painting level delightful. Lots of artsy shots of people silhouetted and perfectly framed in windows and doorways, very symbolic “inside looking out"/"outside looking in” shots for a psychological drama all about feelings that have been repressed and buried inside.

It’s glacially paced though, and extremely small stakes, so I can see this won’t be for everyone. Climactic scenes involve someone asking his brother to wash up before dinner, a dude playing the banjo in his room, and someone braiding rawhide into a whip. There are no guns at all, only two deaths, neither shown on-screen, and only one body. It's a movie that will have you as physically far from the edge of your seat as possible, real middle of the cushion stuff. Still, it’s a brilliant script, particularly adept at Show Don’t Tell, managing to communicate immense depth and turmoil to these characters without saying a word.

This is horribly unfair of me, but I’m afraid all that subtlety also makes the rare head-thumpingly obvious scenes stand out all the more, such as finding a secret stash of illicit magazines that the owner has—in a fit of self-destructive madness perhaps—carefully and self-incriminatingly written their own name on, or alcoholism being communicated by the tired trope of finding a whiskey bottle in the bed.

I don’t quite buy Benedict Cumberbatch as a charismatic bully or tough-as-nails cowboy with psychological insecurities though. I’ve seen lots of praise for his performance, but I don’t think he really has the physical presence for it. Director Jane Campion said there were lots of actors who can do tough, but not many who can also do vulnerable, and while she is an award-winning director and I’m a dipshit rambling online, Imma disagree and say Benedict can do vulnerable, sure, but asking him to play an American cowpoke was a stretch too far.

Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons both slip right into their roles, but the one performance I was impressed with was Kodi Smit-McPhee as Dunst’s son. He’s very good at the gawky, painfully uncool kid who seems like an absolute wimp, then gives us a peek at his startling and alarming knack for violence.

All the obliqueness and opaqueness means it’s a movie that’s up to you to interpret in some ways, especially the relationship between Benedict’s guy’s guy cowboy and mama’s boy Kodi, and it’s nice that the movie never comes out for or against any of these characters.

It’s up to you to decide what you make of it, and I make it to be a damn fine advertisement for New Zealand.

The Last Duel

The Last Duel

Caught this on Disney+ after it had been unceremoniously dumped there, following a slightly less than stellar theatrical run which can’t have lasted more than a month or so. 

I can see why, too—up against the likes of Dune (Part One!), released while we’re still mid-pandemic and saddled with both a tricky subject matter (viz: rape) and a 2.5-hour run time, not to mention Matt Damon AND Ben Affleck with dodgy facial hair, it’s a wonder this got made at all. Director Sir Ridley Scott can blame millennials all he wants for this failure, but honestly it’s the kind of movie that probably belongs on streaming these days, not the theater.

The movie is based on historical events, and the first thing I did when I heard about this movie was look it up on Wikipedia and let me tell you, HOT DAMN JESUS WHOO CHRISTING SHIT the reality of said duel is incredible.

Which is a shame, because the movie isn’t.

It’s not a bad movie, though the casting choices (and beards) are a little odd and the insistence on realistic indoor lighting gave me eye strain. No, mostly it isn’t that great because it is just plain old too damn long.

The Last Duel does the Rashomon thing of retelling the same story three times from the perspectives of the three main characters: First, Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), a prickly knight with easily wounded pride and a penchant for suing people; second, Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), a dashing, womanizing squire and favorite of the local Count (Ben Affleck), who is accused of raping Jean’s wife; and last, Jean’s wife herself, Marguerite de Carrouges (Nicole Holofcener).

It strikes me as an odd way to construct the story, because I thought the whole point of Rashomon was that none of the versions was trustworthy, and everyone distorts the story to fit their viewpoint. So you’re not sure who is telling the truth, or if an objective “truth” is even an achievable thing.

Whereas The Last Duel very definitely does NOT want you to have any doubt about what really happened. Each chapter begins with a title card saying “The Truth According to (Character Name)” then fades to black, except for Lady Marguerite’s version, where the words “The Truth” remain on the screen for a second or two. The movie wants to you accept that her version is fact, the others fiction.

But the structure of the movie actively works against that conclusion. Her version is presented after two very slanted alternatives, first Jean’s in which he is painted as a noble warrior done dirty by an unappreciative liege lord and his sly, cunning favorite Jacques, and then a second in which Jacques claims the encounter was consensual and no rape occurred. So when we are presented with Marguerite’s story of an aloof and uncaring husband and lecherous, libidinous squire, she comes across as too perfect; we are already primed to be suspicious of these stories.

But the movie can’t doubt Marguerite. 

You simply can't imply that she's lying about the whole thing. Not now, not in this day and age, not in this climate, not in this economy. She must be telling the truth.

This fact takes the wind out of the whole "conflicting stories" structure. What's worse, it's not even a movie about finding out the truth. The second half goes to great lengths to point out that the whole trial had absolutely nothing to do with the truth at all. So why, I cannot help but wonder, employ a technique designed for a movie about the murkiness of the truth when your whole movie is about how nobody is interested in the truth? Techniques should be used for a purpose. This one isn't.

The only thing the retellings achieve is shed a little light on the mentality of the characters, especially the two male protagonists, but that’s not really enough to justify going through the whole thing three times. Yes, we get that Jean is less worried about the harm to his wife than to his honor and reputation. Yes, we get that Jacques is so used to getting his way with women that he cannot even conceive his advances are unwelcome. He remains convinced no rape occurred because in his mind, none did. 

We could still get all of that with a straightforward chronological retelling, without the structural trickery.

The production design and performances don’t really do anything to elevate the material. As I said, the movie feels wonderfully authentic in all its dimness and Monty Python and the Holy Grail esque muck, but it can be a trifle hard to make out what is happening at times. It’s not quite desaturated, but does feel as if a blue filter has been applied to everything to make it all feel a bit cool and damp. 

Meanwhile Adam Driver is as watchable as always, and Holofcener is solid if unremarkable, but Damon is an odd choice for a blustering bully, and Affleck is positively bizarre as the buffoonish libertine Count Pierre d’Alencon, totally out of step with the tone of the rest of the movie.

The actual duel itself I thought got off to a good start, but became a bit too Hollywood fight scene for my taste. In the actual duel, Jean was clearly outmatched, just getting his arse constantly handed to him, but here they have to do all these little action moves and reversals and surprises and I actually found it LESS entertaining than just reading the boring old words on the boring old page.

Arcane

Arcane

Well I went into this the way the Internet intended and insists is the only true way to experience televisual entertainment: Absolutely clueless. Utterly unspoiled by even the tiniest, remotest hint of knowledge about premise, setting or plot. God’s very own fool experiencing the Platonic ideal of in-cave viewing experiences. The very tabulaest of rasas. Have never played or even seen gameplay of League of Legends, don’t even know what a MOBA is, just assume it’s either a kind of crypto or a type of NFT. In short: a complete idiot.

In this complete idiot’s opinion, it’s really rather good.

Let me get the bitching out of the way before I sing its praises though. The plot involves two magical substances neither of which is particularly well-defined: There’s “Shimmer”, a purply glowing liquid which seems to be vaguely narcotic and/or addictive but also turns you into a violent monster but also heals you from injury but also kind of does whatever the plot needs; Then there’s “Hextech” which is blue glowing stuff, which um, glows. And is blue. Also does whatever the story requires, really.

Arcane is set in a city divided between the “haves” in Piltover, who have a monopoly on clean, environmentally and sanity-friendly Hextech, and the “have-nots” in the squalid slums of Zaun across the river, where drug lords have flooded the streets with Shimmer. The conflict between the two halves of the city plays out through the relationship between two sisters, big sis Violet (“Vi”, voiced by Hailee Steinfeld) who’s solid if a little fond of punching things, and blue-haired little sis Powder (Ella Purnell) who is a few sprinkles short of a shaker in the sanity department.

That would be a very solid basis for a story, but the trouble is that to stretch it out to nine episodes, the show has key characters change their minds about Hextech, the Piltover-Zaun conflict and each other about three to four times per episode. One hero swears to destroy all Shimmer production in the city, then decides not to, then decides to stop anyone else from trying to destroy it, then decides not to do that either, all in the space of about 15 minutes.

Such vacillating works well with an unstable character like Powder, but when everybody’s core motivations is spinning 180 at regular intervals, it just gets hard to keep track of what each character is trying to do.

For all that tangle though, this is a genuinely well-made show. Don’t even need to qualify it with “for a show based on a video game whose fans are infamous for being a bunch of arseholes.” It’s just a very solid production.

The animation, by French animation studio Fortiche, is just delightful, a stylish and vividly colorful blend of CG and cell-drawn animation. It’s a clean, realistic yet not uncanny valley style. The characters’ eyes, in particular, are mesmerizing, expressive, almost glowing. Shot composition and transitions from scene to scene are fresh, imaginative and creative.

The voice acting is similarly excellent, even with a couple of stunt-cast Hollywood names in the major roles. Just excellent, top to bottom, conveying the weight and emotion of the words quite wonderfully.

The world these characters is a little narrow, to be sure, but I think it’s as broad as the story needs, leaving the rest of the world to be fleshed out in future. I think that’s a smart move, rather than trying to dump it all on the audience from the get-go, and definitely makes it easier for someone like me to get into the story. It’s a fun blend of steampunk and fantasy, “Dishonored” with a dash of “Brazil”, just dark enough to keep things interesting.

In short, it just ticks all the boxes all the way down.

The end result is a show that is kind of oddly addictive, which is a nice feeling really. It’s been so long since there was a show that I felt compelled to keep watching, just to find out what would happen next.

The Beatles: Get Back

The Beatles: Get Back

With "Get Back", director Peter Jackson has achieved the impossible: Making a documentary as long as the Lord of the Rings Extended Editions.

Presented with 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio recorded in 1969 as part of a planned documentary of the making of the "Let It Be" album, Pete has proven himself well and truly incapable of making any kind of editorial decision, and basically just kept everything.

There are three episodes to this thing, each over two hours long, but the only one worth watching is the first as that’s the only one in which anything of note happens—to whit, Paul comes up with the riff for the song “Get Back” and George decides to leave the band. While there are brief moments of delight here and there, such as John's monolog about masturbation in the Boy Scouts or the black humor that arises once George leaves, the rest is mostly just the four of them rehearsing, then the rooftop concert at the end which we’ve all seen before.

Even faced with such a logical and fitting end to the documentary Pete just keeps right on going, showing us the boys coming downstairs after the concert and anticlimactically going back to rehearsing again.

I leave you with one final thought about the song "Get Back": At one point Paul and John thought about turning it into a protest song opposing the white nationalist anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain at the time. Fifty years ago. Thank goodness that would never happen today. Look how far we've come. Look how much we've grown.

Cowboy Bebop (2021)

Cowboy Bebop (2021)

Okay cowboy beboppers, let’s get down to it

I only watched the original “Cowboy Bebop” 90s anime a week before this remake came out, and I suspect your reaction to this will depend on your relationship with the original. The more you liked the anime, the less you’ll like this.

I was … ambivalent about the series. It felt like a mishmash of elements the writer thought were cool—rolled-up sleeves on pastel blue suits, jazz music, space ships and bounty hunters, floating islands above glass-domed cities—just sort of slapped together for funsies. The dry humor hits right (blowtorch to light a cigarette, fantastic), but it has problems showing its female protagonist, Faye Valentine, in any kind of normal clothing or pose, and it appears to have borrowed its concept of male cool from Japanese high school dramas. 

Sorry, this wasn’t my anime gateway drug. I’d already seen and gotten over Ghost in the Shell and Akira by this point, and despite living in Japan hadn’t even heard of this until, geez, maybe five or six years ago. One of those things that made a bigger splash overseas than at home, it seems. No fond memories, then, no awakening to the world of animation.

So I’m equally lukewarm on its live-action successor.

Some days you be cowboy bebopping, some days you be cowboy bebopped

For me, the Hollywood remake is a solid B-. Episodes run an hour instead of the original 20 minutes, and the bulk of that extra is padded with toe-curling unfunny “banter” but it’s got just enough spark to keep you going. Every time I thought about giving up, there would be one good scene that actually works—the teddy bear “Ichabod” scene, for example—just enough that you keep on watching in the hopes of hitting that high again.

John Cho is a little bit too shiny smooth and button bright to convincingly play criminal hitman-gone-straight Spike Spiegel, and his wardrobe (along with almost everybody else’s) just proves how bizarre the original space-Lupin III character concept was. Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir) and Faye (Daniella Pineda) come off a little better, more rounded characters than their animated counterparts, though Daniella is stuck with some of the worst dialog (alas, repeating the punchline of a joke three or four times in succession does not make it any funnier) and a borderline-creepy lesbian sex scene. Ah well. At least she gets to wear relatively normal clothes in most of the episodes.

Much of it is shot like the 60s Batman TV series using a camera with a broken tripod so half the scenes are at a 20-degree angle, with paper-thin backdrop sets, stiff and stylized action sequences someone probably had to restrain themselves from adding “POW!” effects to. That would work if it was a kind of homage to the 60s era action shows, but half the story is this edgy, bloody rivalry between Spike and mafia capo Vicious (Alex Hassell) that doesn’t fit the tone at all.

Neither a cowboy bebopper nor a cowboy bebopperer be

Perhaps the minds behind TMNT and Thor 2 were not the ideal ones to entrust with this property. As I said, the show is oddly divided between whacky interstellar hijinks, eco-terrorists turning people into trees, people watching things oblivious to a massive fight taking behind their backs, that kind of thing, then goes diving into the Spike versus Vicious with its much bloodier and heavier themes of being stuck in one’s past. For my taste there’s too much faux-cool posturing, not enough Mandalorian in a pastel blue suit bounty hunting.

Bright Samurai Soul

Bright Samurai Soul

Following in the footsteps of such august properties as Star Wars, Altered Carbon and the Witcher, the beloved haha okay no sorry that muddled racism parable and Will Smith vehicle Bright is the latest movie to get an anime follow-up sequel. Or not a sequel. Not really a prequel either. It's. Um. Something. Definitely a viewing experience of some kind.

The world of Bright--essentially our world, but with elves and orcs--is now transformed into an oddly CGified woodblock print, so it looks a bit like an extended video game cutscene that someone mistook for a feature length movie. Instead of American urban decay, we're now in post-restoration Japan of the late 19th century, though as with the original movie the presence of elves and orcs and magic is the only difference between the real world and this, making the whole exercise kind of pointless theme-wise. The whole fantasy element adds nothing to the Meiji Restoration, nor does the Edo Japan have anything to say about fantasy. It's all just kind of there, in the same movie for some reason. At least the original had its fumbling and inept racism parable, while this just has, um, pretty colors.

Very pretty colors. Really. The colors are wonderful, the lines and details ravishing, the artistry superb, the soundtrack a sort of mid-tempo upbeat electronica which literally could not be a worse match for 19th century dueling samurai if you tried.

I'm struck, as I was by Star Wars Visions, how little these anime excursions take away from the original. It's just Edo Japan with a few extras tacked on, taking essentially nothing from its putative source material other than the name.

Though in this case, that's probably for the better.

Free Guy

Free Guy

Another Reynolds masterpiece here. Surprisingly sweet for a movie that so evidently hates its own subject matter. Hollywood does the usual thing of portraying all gamers as shut-in losers, which makes it hard to sympathize with the game designer protagonists, even if they have managed to create a fully functional emergent AI from gaming code, like if the "arrow to the knee" guy used disliking archers as the catalyst for the other 4 billion leaps forward it would take to become sentient. And nobody would ever use disliking things as the entire basis for their identity. Haha, now that is funny. 

Taika Waititi is unfunnily over the top in every scene, cutting away to streamers restating the action every five minutes is painfully stupid, total cringe bro, and Reynolds' funniest lines are all cribbed from his tweets about how great Aviator Gin tastes.

And yet. It's kind of giddily fun for all that. The high comes as Reynolds tries to rally the other in-game NPCs to fight for their freedom, by getting an IRL human to come and tell them how much better life could be. "How often are banks robbed in the real world?" Hardly ever! "What about corpses? How many corpses do you see per hour?" None per hour! "What about gun violence? See a lot of gun violence?" Actually, that's a big problem. A massive problem.

Red Notice

Red Notice

This is a typical Netflix original, a B movie with a couple of A list names to put on the poster and help you convince yourself it's worth more than a C- CinemaScore. The one thing it doesn't have, however, is Gal Gadot twerking on my face. 

Sorry, no, scratch that. I'll start again.

Red Notice is kind of a cross between Indiana Jones and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, a 1988 movie with Steve Martin and Michael Caine which was much less memorable than Gal Gadot twerking on my face.

Oh. Fuck. Just slipped out. Carry on like nobody noticed? Probably best.

I should have been the target market for this movie. Gal Gadot flashing a bit of thigh as she twerks, if not quite on my face, then in reasonably close proximity to it as I squinted at her through my cellphone screen, and yet. And yet. No. The best bit was Ed Sheeran screaming "I was in Game of Thrones! I'm Ed Sheeran, bitch!" as he gets arrested.

A movie as charmless as Dwayne Johnson, an insincere as Ryan Reynolds drinking his own brand of Gin in close-up, as disappointing as Gal Gadot not twerking on my face.

A Knight's Tale (2001)

A Knight's Tale (2001)

What a delightfully bizarre, strange, odd little movie this was. 

It's not often you get to see the Joker, King Bobby B, Wash, Vision, that one dude from HBO's Rome miniseries and a woman whose mouth is so wide it's like her teeth are a zipper for removing the top of her head gallivanting about a Renaissance Faire to the pounding beat of AC/DC. Where "We Will Rock You" isn't just the soundtrack, we have peasants clapping out the beat, where heralds announce their knights like hypemen at the boxing ring, where Heath Ledger in his prime shimmies to Bowie at a medieval ball.

It's camp, it's cheese, in that beautiful window of time when medieval movies were pure campy cheese. Look what came before: Conan the Destroyer (1984) The Princess Bride (1987), Dragonheart (1996) the Dungeons and Dragons movie (2000).

Then, bam. Fellowship of the Ring. 2001. 

And suddenly medieval fantasy was serious business. Beowulf, The Golden Compass, 2007. Game of Thrones, 2011. Warcraft, 2016. All deadly serious. And it keeps going, Wheel of Time. Lord of the Rings series on Amazon.

"You couldn't make that movie these days" is a common refrain, and they're probably right here, but not because of politics or Heath Ledger being undeniably dead, but because LotR and Harry Potter and Marvel and all that lot have drained all the goofiness out of fantasy. 

Whereas this movie is completely bonkers and it knows it:

What are the rules of jousting? Inconsistent!

How do you win a tournament? Unclear!

We emphasized how good a swordsman the main character is, how does this come into play later in the story? Not at all!

Why do the two leads fall in love? Because they're the leads!

Who is the female lead anyway? Doesn't matter!

No, but seriously, shouldn't we know more about her than just her name? Shut up already!

But the girl was destined for an arranged marriage with the bad guy, winning a tournament won't change that, will it? Sorry, the movie's over!

Why does the lead's main motivation suddenly shift to making his dad proud in the third act? Because!

It's like a time capsule, a little snapshot of the before times, and all the more precious for it.

Dune: Part One

Title: Dune: Part One
Directed by: Denis Villeneuve
Written by: Frank Herbert, really

Just to underscore how totally topsy-turvy our whole world has because of the whole covid thing, here’s a major Hollywood movie that actually came out here in Japan first, instead of six months later. Score!

Now I know some of us, me included, have been a little nervous about how this was being adapted for the big screen. You know, what got changed, what got cut, that type of stuff. Well, let me quickly reassure you:

It is TOTALLY long.

Almost three hours long. At last, a movie that delivers what the fans have always demanded: increased running time.

Real talk though, since movie critics these days are about as impartial as figure skating judges, you want to know if this movie lands the jumps or if it just whacks you in the kneecaps and calls it a day. And who can you trust if not some random dude online using an outdated medium to spew incoherent opinions? I got you, bro. Here’s the deal: It’s okay.

Everybody says the novel “Dune” is a tough movie to film because it’s so complicated, and sure that’s partly it, but the other part is because it’s hard to get a handle on exactly what it’s about. Not in the surface-level plot sense, but in the sense of, what is the point of any of this? Like there's stuff on ecology on there, a lot about expanding the limits of human capabilities with people who can navigate between stars or make super-fast calculations and people who can use their voice to subliminally control others and people with super-fast reflexes, then there's this whole thing about the dangers of a charismatic leader because the mistakes of the leader are multiplied by the number of followers they have and wow, it's all a bit much. And this movie never really gets to that. It’s all muscle, no heart; all plot, no point.

Before we go on with the plot breakdown though, spoilers for a book that’s now around 60 years old and has already been adapted for the screen twice, so if you need a spoiler warning then you are weak, your bloodline is weak and will be among the first to perish when the apocalypse comes. Okey dokey? Great, here we go.

If you were worried this movie was going to be a little dense and packed with all kinds of made-up names and stuff well then I gotta tell you buddy that is totally not untrue. Spot on really. Good call. The first third is disjointed almost to the point of incoherence, throwing scenes at you almost at random in the rush to set up all the storylines and characters, without making you really care about them.

First, we get a background exposition from Chani (Zendaya) about oppression, because oppression is HOT, though we’re going to be a little vague about it for the rest of the movie as we have all these other things we have to introduce. Cut to Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) heavily implying he’s part of the oppression and then there’s a made-for-movie yet largely unnecessary scene where his father, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) is commanded by the Emperor to take over the planet Arrakis from their enemies, Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) and his bald albino friends. We take time out during this scene to meet Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson, an actor whose name is longer than his part is) who is a Mentat, meaning he’s like a human version of Excel. Pretty neat huh? Don’t worry if you miss it, this ability will never come up again.

We’re then introduced to the family retainers Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), oozing Hawaii from every pore, Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) and Doctor Yueh (Chang Chen) then there’s this neat scene where an old lady from the handover scene (Charlotte Rampling) comes back and makes Paul stick his hand in her box until he screams. Then she just suddenly leaves without being clear about what that was all about, so we can have Paul’s mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) shout the explanation to him in a rainstorm. There’s also a cool fight scene where we see guys in the future wear personal shields that stop any high-speed blow or projectile which seems like it would be highly effective in combat, only it later turns out it’s really not and soldiers get killed super easily.

Then it’s off to the titular planet, where Paul survives an assassination attempt with a mosquito-shaped drone, meets some of the local “Fremen”, and goes to watch a crew harvesting spice, a psychoactive substance that extends life and grants prophetic visions. A giant sandworm attacks, and it’s really cool, kind of shaped like a dick but with massive spiny teeth, like a vagina. What? Oh yeah and the spice starts giving him visions and he starts hearing weird voices telling him to fulfill his destiny which turns out to be kind of irresponsible of the voices because they distract him immediately before the giant sandworm attacks and you’d think him ending up inside the stomach of a mobile Sarlacc monster would slow you down in the destiny fulfilling department.

Then Doctor Yueh knocks everybody out, surprise, he’s a traitor, too bad we never had a scene or two to set that up, and he turns off the house shields so the Harkonnens can launch a surprise attack which consists of these kind of upside-down fireworks that look really, really cool. There's also a badass laser beam that just slices through half the city. Paul and his Mom escape, meet up with Duncan, escape again, and then meet the Fremen, there's a duel where weird voices try to get Paul killed again by trying to chat with him in the middle of a life and death situation, and the movie abruptly ends but not before Chani turns to the camera, winks and says “This is just the beginning.”

So you see it’s a pretty faithful adaptation, though even with the long running time we don’t really linger on anything. Were you upset they made Kynes a woman? Good news is, she’s barely in the movie. Unsure about making the only Asian character a villain? Good news is, he’s barely in the movie. Worried someone is going to ask you to spell David Dastmalchian’s last name without looking it up? He’s barely in the movie. Felt a little queasy about having Javier Bardem play a quasi-Arabic tribal leader? Good news is you get the idea.

Part One is very much the story of Paul, and if there’s one thing this movie gets right, it’s Paul. He is very much the reluctant hero, an artificially manufactured messiah thanks to a literal human breeding program. This movie really doesn’t do the emotion thing very well, but one or two beats that actually land are about Paul and his slow realization that yes, he’s bred to be some kind of prophetic messiah, but rather than this being cool and awesome, he’s a freak and it’s going to be absolutely horrific. The horror part is a little vaguely done, just impersonal stacks of bodies burning and armies cheering his name, but it’s shot in such a way you just KNOW some evil shit is going on.

The art direction isn’t quite as iconic as the 1984 David Lynch movie, but it’s kind of engagingly weird. Instead of the decadent opulence and HR Geiger techno-organic look of the former, we get kind of post-modern brutalism. Everything is huge and blocky and bulky and the human figures are little scurrying mice down at the bottom. Oh, and two insectile appendages way, way up to whoever designed the look of the ornithopters. Kind of these dragonfly-looking helicopters. Very cool.

Aside from being long, the other thing that this movie is, above all, is loud. Like, settle the fuck down Hans Zimmer, all this kind of alien didgeridoo and drumming and atonal chanting is atmospheric as all hell but it’s also kind of distracting. We’ll be BRAAAP having a scene BRAAAAAAP where someone is BRAAAAAAAAP experiencing a vis BRAAAAAAP ion or so BRAAAAAAP meth BRAAAP ing and the score will BRAAAAAAAAP be so loud BRAAAAAAAP you can’t hear a word. Thank god for foreign subtitles.

It’s a shame we’ve only got part one to go on, because the stuff that I think works best is the wrestling with the destiny thing and that barely gets going. I think Denis does a good job of undercutting the “Chosen One” trope and shows us Paul is both uncertain of and unready for his destiny, and frankly it’s kind of a bummer destiny anyway. Denis does a much worse job of humanizing the other characters or getting us to care about their fates. Visually it’s interesting, but I was never knocked out, musically it’s intriguing but intrusive.

So I’m going to stick with what I said up top.

It’s okay.

The Suicide Squid

Title: Squid Game
Directed by: Hwang Dong-hyuk
Written by: Hwang Dong-hyuk
Network: Netflix

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Korea is HOT right now. Hotter than kimchi, sizzling like a plate of bulgogi. It's been bubbling away for a few decades now, but at least in the West, it's now hitting the boil. As we speak, I have lost my wife to the clutches of BTS. I no longer have a human spouse, I have an automaton engineered to spend all its free time watching several elfin boy-men dance amid pastel colors spouting powder-pink lines about lemon yellow emotions. And now this.

From the country that gave us period zombie horror series “Kingdom”, claustrophobic horror flick "Train to Busan", pop horror genre K-POP, teens frantically pushing buttons as fast as they can video game horror Star Craft players, and a dramatization of the rich-poor divide in “Parasite”, comes a series dramatizing the rich-poor divide via a “Battle Royale” style bloodbath and has anybody checked in with Korea lately, make sure they’re doing okay. Because I'm pretty sure the answer is 'No.'

Does the number one show on Netflix in something like 90-odd countries need any explanation?

Even if you’re only vaguely aware of "Squid Game", you’re probably aware of the premise: A collection of 456 indebted poors are recruited by a mysterious organization to play a series of six children’s games like “Red Light, Green Light” and tug-of-war for the promise of a cash reward, the catch being that the losers are ruthlessly gunned down by the game organizers.

The organizers claim the games are democratic and fair, but of course it’s part of the joke that they aren’t, and the system is rigged to kill as many of them as possible in the most entertaining ways possible. Participants aren’t told what game they’ll be playing until after they’ve decided who to play with, the games are either childishly simple or devilishly difficult depending on which order you play them in or who you play them with, and the organizers might just change the rules if they think you’re having it too easy.

The lesson is simple: You will be humiliated, beaten, trampled, even worked to death for sums of money that are completely meaningless to those wearing the boots. Bezos could lose 10 billion a year and not even notice it for a decade.

Why this, why now, is an interesting question. Maybe the dearth of big-budget productions in our pandemic lockdown times might be part of it, though, like, Apple TV's "Foundation", so that can't be all of it. The theme definitely digs into part of the anxieties and insecurities and ongoing discourse over the slide of rich nations into increasing inequality. The simplicity of the games and the quality of the character work also play a part in making it accessible to a global audience. A perfect storm, the right show at the right time. Is a milquetoast take but it's the best I can do.

It’s visually striking, hats off to the art department, especially in its vivid use of color. Everything from the bright pink jumpsuits and PlayStation-controller-button masks worn by the organizers to the pastel-colored MC Escher maze the contestants walk through to reach each game just leap out at you and underscore the insane irreality of what you’re watching and by extension, the insane rules by which we live our lives.

The real core is the characterization, as we follow unlikeable loser with a secret heart of gold Gi-hun, his boyhood friend and ruthless embezzler Sang-woo, and North Korean escapee Sae-byeok as they work alternatively with or against the other contestants as the games shift and the rounds progress, like a more cutthroat version (but only slightly more) of “Weakest Link” or “Survivor”.

The absolute kicker comes when the players are told to form pairs, and only then informed they have to play games of marbles against one another, meaning one of them is going to doom the other to death. There are about four gut punches in a row here—a husband and wife team playing against one another, a betrayal of a trusting soul, a lie to an old and senile man, a young girl who gives up on life.

Kind of a shame the marbles game comes about 2/3 of the way through, because the rest never quite matches that emotional weight. The consequences play out pretty much as expected, with childhood friends Gi-hun and Sang-woo, representing the good of the working man versus the evil of the moneyed elite, fighting one another in the eponymous squid game in the final round.

That at least was just a bit predictable. The epilogue and final reveal of who was behind it all is just bullshit. Sorry, it’s bullshit. Sequel bait from a series that had, up to that point, had a clear end point and a clear message.

There I was, thinking the writers were geniuses from setting up the “play six games to select the winner” format, because it’s the cinematic equivalent of a BuzzFeed listicle, it instantly gives you a structure and milestones to look forward to, you know exactly what destination this thing is heading towards, so you can strap in and focus on enjoying the ride. I want to take the first eight episodes and rub them in every “Loki”, “WandaVision”, JJ-Abrams-mystery-boxing idiot’s face and scream LOOK, LOOK AT WHAT YOU CAN ACHIEVE BY BEING CLEAR ABOUT THE ENDPOINT OF YOUR STORY. Then they get there and spend the last 30 minutes get fucking around on bullshit.

I’d say stop watching about 1/3 of the way through the final episode, skip the rest.

Utter, utter bullshit.

It also breaks a clutch of good storytelling rules, everything from Chekov’s gun (“Here is a bomb that can blow up this entire facility, got it? Okay, now let’s never mention this ever again”) to tying up character arcs in a satisfying way (“This guy’s dead. Wait! No he’s not! Actually, yes he is.”).

Which is a shame because the other 8 1/3 episodes are damn good. The development of the core three players in particular is outstanding—we start of despising Gi-hun because he’s such a useless clown, a compulsive gambler and a shitty parent to his daughter (for her birthday, he gets a present from a crane game, only when they open it, they discover it’s a pistol-shaped cigarette lighter), but as the games go on we see his compassion and empathy for others. The mirror image is Sang-woo, who at first seems the smart one, coming up with strategies to keep everyone alive, only to show his true colors and we realize that keeping others alive was always just a strategy to make sure he becomes the final survivor.

It’s a foreign production, so it seems to get a pass from a lot of things that would have the Twitterati up in arms if Hollywood tried it. There are only two main female characters, both in supporting roles, and one of them is an untrustworthy, conniving bitch. The only gay character is a creepy American VIP in the game organization who tries to force an undercover cop to perform fellatio on him (the VIPs for whose entertainment the game is played are all either English-speaking or Chinese). The only non-Korean player is Ali, a Pakistani laborer who is childishly simple, trusting and can’t speak Korean.

On that note, I’m not sure North American audiences get this, but “foreigners are simultaneously evil creeps responsible for all our troubles and naïve simpletons” is an instantly recognizable stereotype in Japan, too (just off the top of my head, see: “In the Miso Soup” by Ryu Murakami or “Out” by Natsuo Kirino). It’s just our version of the “immigrants are lazy welfare queens who are taking all our jobs” doublethink.

I think it’s significant that Japan’s precursor to this, “Battle Royale”, was not so much about society as about the failure of the education system, a theme repeated in e.g. “The Sky Crawlers” (where the enemy ace is known only as “The Teacher”). We’re still a little too enamored in the Skinner boxes we’ve built for ourselves over here so blaming society as a whole doesn’t go down well. Part of that is probably the key to Korean cinema's success, that unlike Japan they're not afraid to call out the fucked up things they see around them, though I'm sure there are a few Koreans less than thrilled to have their dirty laundry aired so publicly.

I don’t think Japan has yet to slide quite so far as Korea down late capitalism’s slipperiest of slopes, but we’re getting there, slowly but surely. Workforces are divided between the elite core guaranteed employment for life, and temporary workers guaranteed a kick in the backside when their contracts are up. We may not have quite as many billionaires as the States, but we’re working to close that gap even as we widen the income one.

Give us another decade and boy. Wow. We’ll be making some great content. You wait.

Black Widow

Title: Black Widow
Directed by: Cate Shortland
Written by: Eric Pearson
Network: Disney+
 

Yup, finally got around to watching White Actress, the movie that launched a thousand lawsuits, once it became free—well, no additional cost, whatever, shut up—to us cheapskate Disney+ subscribers unwilling to shell out $30 to watch it alone on our iPads.

Eh, by this point I’d waited around two years to see this, not like another few months was going to make much of a difference. I’ve already missed whatever cultural moment this movie might have had, and I don’t think it really every had much of one, other than people’s morbid curiosity about its box office numbers and the current schadenfreude over the Mouse getting fucked over by the talent, for a change.

So with the incredible timeliness and cultural impact that could only be achieved by a Blogspot site written by a middle-aged white man, here are my thoughts.

“Opinion without insight is worthless”, or so they say and they’re probably right, so with that in mind …

Fuck.

Like having no impact, no audience and no relevance has ever stopped me before. On with the show. More content! More! MORE!

My overall impression is the movie hamstrings itself by trying to do too many things at once. There’s some genuinely nice interpersonal drama about a fucked-up family kinda sorta learning to forgive one another and reconcile, but there’s also this whole other storyline about the exploitation of women that doesn’t quite link to the family drama, then there’s a kind of dealing-with-guilt thing CMYK 0/0/0/100 Woman Whose Husband Has Died is supposedly going through, all of which has to be squeezed in between cheesy CGI slugfests.

The family business is easily the strongest, as it’s the most developed, gets the most screen time, is the most concrete and as a result, hits hardest. Turns out Female Venomous Spider used to live Stateside as a kid, in a fake family that was part of the deep cover identities of two Russian agents. She has a happy life until their cover gets blown and they have to fly a Cessna from Ohio to Cuba, and no that doesn’t make much sense to me or anybody else who knows anything about geography. On landing in Cuba, the mission over and her usefulness at an end, ScarJo and sister Florence Pugh are promptly discarded by the people she had come to regard as her parents and the two girls are recycled for training as assassins.

The tangled feelings here are some of the best character work Marvel has ever done, which is a low bar for a property mainly about punching things, but still. Florence resents ScarJo for getting out and escaping to the West without ever trying to get her out, or even see if she was okay. They both hate foster-dad Red Guardian (Dave Harbour), an ageing, insensitive, sloppily sentimental and self-centered has-been interested only in war stories about his glory days. Meanwhile scientist mom Malena (Rachel Weisz) is a cold fish who can’t admit, even to herself, that these people matter to her. There’s a nice conversation between Flo and ScarJo beginning to bond over beers, then a dinner scene where all these old feelings come bubbling to the surface that is just the chef’s kiss, topped with a nice cherry of a bit between Dave and Flo where a Homer-esque Red Guardian reveals the soft side beneath his loutish exterior.

But that’s promptly interrupted by an action sequence.

They all have to go galloping off to take down the “Red Room”, a secret aerial facility where young orphan or homeless girls are turned into killers by a creepily Harvey Weinstein-esque dude named Dreykov (Ray Winstone). Giving Marvel’s most prominent female character a #MeToo moment isn’t necessarily a bad choice, but it doesn’t connect with any of the family stuff we’ve just been immersed in.

It’s not an issue that really gets shown to us, other than the odd choice of having a slowed-down, female vocal version of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” play over scenes of Nat’s indoctrination into the Red Room and I love this song, man, haven’t listened to it in ages, but love it, had to go back and listen to the whole album again, I remember everybody in class getting excited when one kid came back with a copy of “Nevermind” the day it was released and there was me wondering what tf everybody was losing their minds over and I later found that same kid became like a Jesuit or something, man, life’s paths are weird and ANYWAY, much as this song hits all my nostalgia buttons, let’s admit the lyrics are so very, very not about women’s oppression, "Here we are now, entertain us" is in no way, shape or form a call to action about anything and neither is most of this movie.

To complicate matters more, we learn through disjointed and vague flashbacks that part of the deal for ScarJo becoming an Avenger was to try to kill Dreykov with a bomb, only the bomb not only failed to kill Dreykov, it also mutilated his daughter (Olga Kurylenko and there’s something odd about casting a model-beautiful woman as a scarred burn victim, but hey, it’s cool that Olga is getting to do all these roles). The movie never actually shows us any of this, maybe because they worried it would make ScarJo a little too unlikeable, or else it was a late addition to the story and there was no footage.

In any event, the total lack of dramatization other than ScarJo looking a bit mournful for a few seconds means the whole overcoming guilt thing adds nothing to the story other than a mild sense of confusion as to why it was included at all.

In that sense, it is better than the victimization of women angle, as this relies on a series of out-there-even-by-Marvel’s-standards bullshit plot devices, pheromone lock anyone, overdone CGI and an unconvincing henchman whose superpower is kind of lame: The Taskmaster is supposed to be able to mimic the fighting styles of anyone she sees, but all this means is she strikes one or two poses—poses the movie goes out of its way to make fun of in two other scenes, neatly undermining any sense of threat.

The best things here are Harbour and Pugh, the first because washed-out superhero dad isn’t something Marvel has ever tried to do before so it’s a refreshing change, the second because her character is just the right shade of Deadpool self-aware while also being the emotional core of the story. Doesn’t hurt that Pugh is just button cute and fun to watch in every scene.

Black Widow is the least super of the Avengers superheroes (c’mon, even Hawkeye has a bow) so this movie could easily have been more of a slick spy story in the vein of “Atomic Blonde” or “Salt”. It absolutely isn’t and the over-the-top Marvelly bits jar strangely with the very down to earth reconnecting with your past bits.

I think focusing on family would have made a nice capstone to the character and to ScarJo’s run in the MCU. I’m not one who thinks there’s no relevancy to this movie just because we know the character gets killed off in movie that came out earlier but supposedly takes place later, I mean Jesus people, “Titanic” made over a billion at the box office, not like anybody was exactly shocked how that one turned out. Still, they could have leaned into the dramatic irony a little more, maybe giving us more of a signpost as to how this character came to feel that the world was worth sacrificing her life for.

This movie had a veritable Lord of the Rings plethora of endings as they tried to tie up the family thing, the family thing again, the guilt over the past thing and the exploited girls thing, AND the setup for “Avengers End Game” thing AND the setup for Flo’s ongoing role in the MCU and yet … and yet they never give us a satisfying goodbye to Natasha.

They come close. There’s one shot of her looking into the sunset, determined, steeled, ready to do what needs to be done. That might have done it. But then we get ScarJo in a blond wig saying goodbye to some dude we, the audience, barely know, with a flip line about having two families. It’s more her fixer’s big moment than hers, really.

And with that she CGI flies into the sunset. A kind of flippant goodbye that serves as an appropriate commentary on her throwaway role in the series, maybe, but not exactly a rousing climax to a decade of movies.

Marvel's "What If...?" (Episode 9)

Episode 9: “What if we tied the whole thing up with a big ole bow? And arrow?”

Sort of a part two this week that wraps up the Ultimate Ultron storyline from last week, and before I start with the bitching, let me say it wraps it up, as well as the whole first season, in a pretty satisfying way. All our favorites are back from their one-off episodes, so here’s Captain Britain only they call her Captain Carter because you don’t want to alienate the yanks, Party Thor, Killermongerer, Cthulhu Strange, Chadwick “Star Chad” Boseman, Post Apoc Widow and a new friend in the form of a Gamora who feels like her episode got cut from the season at the last minute, sorry babe. The zombies are even in there.

It’s basically one long fight scene, which gets a bit repetitive, here they are ducking behind a magical shield, ah here they are ducking behind a magical shield again, wait, what’s this, oho, they’re going to duck behind a magical shield this time. Lots of punching but then it's Marvel so I think you could have guessed. Ah, but it’s all good fun in a kind of hammy, cheesy way. Some of the twists don’t make a lick of sense, but then again neither does the whole concept of a robot who is so tough he just punches his way between dimensions.

There’s always been a bit of an RPG feel to the MCU in the way it has attempted to impose consistency and rules on the pull-whatever-out-of-our-asses world of comic book writing, and here we see the problem that arises in many long-running RPG worlds and campaigns: Power creep. The constant need to have this or that character be even biggerer and more badder and tougher than the last results in Ultimate Ultron, an invincible bad guy who is not merely the strongest thing in the universe, but the strongest thing in ANY universe EVER, thereby making him fairly useless as an antagonist because who could ever be a threat to that?

The workaround is, as usual, to have a good guy who ALSO just happens to be the strongest thing in the whole wide entire universe of universes times a zillion, what luck, so the two perfectly cancel each other out and the fight scenes can progress with the punching exactly as they do in every other single MCU movie. This was my gripe with the last episode, yes, I know, I am still on the "Resolving everything with punching" thing. OK. We’ll move on.

The writers have evidently learned the trick that audiences only remember the peak and the ending of any experience and nothing in between, because this episode is rescued from mere adequacy with a nice little series of vignettes promising happily ever afters for some of the more abused characters. Last-human-alive Widow gets a whole new universe to play in, Dr. Very Strange gets a job keeping a lid on a pocket universe, and Captain Carter goes back to what will evidently become a threesome with her, Widow and a resurrected Steve Rogers. Yowza. The sexual tension between Carter and Widow might be the best bit of this whole episode, nay, the whole season.

Q: Wouldn't it have been cool if, instead of the usual opening credits and intro monolog, they'd had Ultron take over the show and deliver the opening lines, had all the credits be "Producer: Albertron Davies" or "Director: Kevon Ultreige" by "Ultron Studios" y'know really play up the fact that this character has taken over the entire universe, huh, huh, wouldn't it?

A: No.

Q: So at the end, two forces are locked in eternal, perfectly balanced battle: An evil genius in an indestructible robot body versus … some guy with a chip on his shoulder?

A: Yes. Totally evenly matched.

Q: Enough about the individual episodes, what do we think about the series as a whole?

A: Limited by its obsession with resolving everything through punching. Yes, I am back on the punching things beef. Deal with it.

But yeah, a little unambitious, a little unimaginative, content to doodle and draw silly faces in the margins, gender or identity swap one character or have slightly different combinations of superheroes beat each other up, when it could do some interesting storytelling and use our familiarity with these characters to explore what makes them, us, anybody tick.

It won’t and as a result this series was at its most fun when it was at its least serious. Not everything has to have some deeper meaning, I guess.

Marvel's "What If...?" (Episode 8)

No video this week. Suck it.

Episode 8: “What if somebody fought God and won?”

Our premise this week is that Ultron, the robot baddie from Avengers 2, beats all the Avengers and wipes out all life on Earth in a rain of nuclear fire, then bisects Thanos like a little bitch when the big purple grape shows up to claim the Mind stone. He goes on to annihilate all life in the universe—not by Thanos’s pussy-ass method of snapping his fingers, but by the tried-and-true method of blowing shit up. That done, he sets his sights yet higher, and decides to fight the narrator of the series, the Watcher, so that he can kill every living thing in every reality. Ever.

Ultra-Ultron and the Watcher fight. As you would expect with beings of such unimaginable, incomprehensible power that it makes mere gods puny by comparison, so awesome that merely attempting to conceptualize the vastness of their existence would shatter the mind of any mortal, they do this by punching each other. We end on a cliffhanger as the Watcher turns to the only other person with experience in the galaxy-destroying business, Dr. Especially Strange from episode 4. Cue cliffhanger. To be continued, etc.

There’s also a subplot involving Black Widow and Hawkeye (neither of whom have superpowers, may I remind you) trying to evade a being that is powerful enough to detect the existence of alternate realities and beat up the narrator. They then decide to try the plot from the first “Independence Day” despite neither of them being Will Smith, or even Chadwick Boseman.

Q: They’re doing the Avengers thing of having everybody do one on their own, then coming together for the finale, aren’t they?

A: Yup.

Q: The Watcher keeps saying he can’t intervene because he swore an oath. So … who did he swear an oath TO? Like, doesn’t that imply there’s someone or something even bigger than him that can enforce obedience?

A: Good question, imaginary interlocutor. You’re so smart not to mention handsome. And not at all rambly, disjointed, forgetful or almost 50.

Q: Isn’t the animation a little uneven?

A: Yeah, beautifully detailed in some frames, then there’s an explosion or people running, and all their limbs turn to rubber.

Bo Burnham: Inside

Bo Burnham: Inside
Everything by: Bo Burnham
Network: Netflix

Let me begin by saying I went into this completely blind. I know nothing about Bo Burnham. I did not read up about Bo lore on Bokipedia. I did not watch 90-minute YouTube explainer videos on what everybody gets wrong about Bo. I am entirely unversed in the Bo Cinematic Universe. I mentioned that I had watched this to someone on Discord and they immediately accused me of being a TikTok girl and have no idea what that is, or what connection it has to any Netflix comedy special, be it wholly Boed or unBoed or any intermediate degree of Boification in between. Never heard of the kid.

I like him. I mean, his youth and talent and success irritate the piss out of me, but I like him.

Should I even explain what Bo Burnham: Inside is? Nah. Not much point. Bo makes a joke during this one-man audience-less show about the possibility that he’s just talking to himself, so let me quickly reassure you Bo, in many ways the total lack of audience is a relief. You can skip all the boring explanation bits of the review, for example, and just skip straight to trash-talking it. Go ahead. Do it. Not like anybody is going to fucking care.

There’s something fitting about talking to myself online about a musical-black comedy special consisting mainly of a man talking to himself online about being online all the time. Anyway, from what I can tell Bo is a comedy songwriter in the Al Franken, Weird Al or Eric Idle vein and I have just revealed the incredible paucity of my knowledge and unfamiliarity with this field. Funny songs, in other words, written, performed and shot by Bo in his home during the pandemic.

At some point online humor seems to have shifted from ‘silliness’ to ‘relatability’ and most of the jokes in this special aren’t jokes but things that exist in Bo’s life. Facetiming his mom, sexting, Jeff Bezos.

People don’t seem to tell jokes that much anymore, everybody agrees satire is dead now that people openly say and do the most moronic things imaginable, nobody understands sarcasm, and so what’s left is things that make people clap because they are able to identify them. Like a performer saying “San Francisco!” to their audience and receiving rapturous applause. Yes, that is a place, a place I am from! Woo! Yay! What I get out of Bo is a whole lot of relatability that I don’t much relate to, interspersed with some genuine comedy.

I think it’s unrelatable because the experience of a successful 30-year-old single entertainer living in the United States of Deliberately Fucking Up Their Covid Response at Every Imaginable Stage in Every Imaginable Way of America has been pretty different from a failed 47-year-old married-with-kids writer in Japan. Turning 30 is a distant, half-forgotten image in my rearview mirror. Aside from a three-week period in April 2020, I have been going to the office every day. We have been going shopping, eating in restaurants, getting haircuts, seeing our friends about as much as we did before, i.e. never. Like I have friends. Covid has changed many things, but the degree to which I am or am not online has not been one of them. So songs and jokes about how awful it is to be isolated and online all of the time, however well crafted and expertly shot, tend not to land for me. I wonder if they land for most people outside of a small clutch of social media addicts.

One of the non-song actual stand-up bits involves Bo wondering aloud if it is possible, in this day and age, times being what they are, and so on, is it at all possible for everyone to just shut the fuck up about anything. But you know what? I think most people do shut the fuck up. I think the vast majority of humanity shuts the fuck up on a pretty consistent basis. Maybe if you have a somewhat larger online presence than a Twitter account with three followers and a blog with even fewer than that, then online discussions might feel a bit more heated, but for most of us I suspect the Internet is about as participatory as a rock concert or one of America’s larger wars—in a very abstract way it couldn’t exist without us but nobody is seriously asking us what we think of it. Replying to famous Twitter accounts is like talking back to the TV. Anyway, it’s not like nobody had opinions prior to 2006.

The bit ends with Bo rhetorically asking himself why he doesn’t shut up, then quickly cuts away.

There is, of course, something ironic about a man with a self-written and directed comedy special in which he is the sole performer and often the sole subject complaining about people talking about themselves online. He is the very problem he is describing, a living example of the man who jams a stick in his own bicycle wheel and complains when he falls off. He does exhibit awareness of this, but he himself admits that self-awareness doesn’t absolve anybody of anything. So. There.

I did laugh though, at least in the first half. The facetiming and sexting songs are chuckle worthy, the dark humor of songs about how useless it is to worry about the world ending hits pretty hard, and much of the camera work and setup has an almost childlike and gleeful sense of inventiveness. There’s a brilliant bit about brands attempting to exhibit a social conscience, “The question is not whether you will buy Wheat Thins, but whether you will stand with Wheat Thins in the fight against Lyme Disease.” Spoofs of recursive reaction videos to reaction videos to reaction videos and twitch streamers trying to play the life of a depressed 30-year-old shut-in are also kind of funny. The song “White Woman’s Instagram” manages to be more than just relatable, by subtly lampooning the cheapening of real feeling and empathy by giving equal emotional weight to inspirational Lord of the Rings quotes misattributed to Martin Luther King, silly photos of dogs and heartfelt open letters to one’s dead mother.

The second half I liked a lot less, as it is mostly Bo chronicling his declining mental state in his isolated, always-online existence.

For one thing, I don’t buy it. There is something awfully contrived about filming yourself having a mental breakdown while staying in shot, in focus, and zooming artistically away at the appropriate moment.

I don’t buy it.

Maybe it’s Gen X suspicion of any public display of emotion, but I don’t buy it. I don’t believe Bo’s house is that messy, I don’t believe he set up a camera to catch himself waking up, I don’t believe he really cried on camera. I realize as I type this that the performative nature of public grief is part of Bo’s whole beef with the Internet, so this too is probably deliberate, but still off-putting and kind of alienating.

I don’t buy it.

For another, the whole pandemic has been far easier to cope with if one is not one of these quantum Schrödinger humans who disappears if they are ever unobserved. Bo’s theatrical moping about his expensive Los Angeles house is just barely more tolerable than Gal Gadot singing to us from her mansion and one suspects comes from the same root, the same need to be the center of attention at all times. I feel slightly greater sympathy to those suffering to the pandemic without the padding provided by being a YouTube celebrity with a number of comedy specials.

But you know. It was sporadically funny, sometimes gut-bustingly so, visually interesting, something a little different. It was fun. I enjoyed it. I just don’t think I’ll ever want to watch it ever again.

P.S. Listening to the songs from the special on Spotify is a whole other experience. Stripped of the burden of sitting through 45 minutes of material and allowed to command your full attention, I really appreciate that these aren’t just silly little quips, but actually pretty good tunes in their own right. They are bops, my friends, they are each a mood, whole and entire.

Star Wars Visions

I kind of liked the idea of bringing the circle of inspiration around full circle. The fact that George Lucas was originally inspired by not only 50s serials like “Flash Gordon”, but also by Akira Kurosawa’s samurai flicks, such as “Hidden Fortress” or “Yojimbo”, is one of the better-known back stories behind the OG trilogy. 

So bring it home. Let’s see what animators in the land the inspired the Jedi and lightsabers make of their hybrid cousin.

The answer is, well … Jedi and lightsabers, mostly.

In nine episodes produced by seven different Japanese animation studios we get two jedis fighting, a jedi rock band, two jedis fighting, a jedi fighting, nine jedis fighting, a robot jedi fighting, three jedis fighting, a furry jedi fighting and two jedis fighting.

In other words, the country that gave Star Wars its quasi-space samurai turns out to mostly be interested in quasi-space samurai. The characters, the settings, the costumes--the series doesn't look inspired by medieval Japan, it just looks like medieval Japan. Period. With jedis. Which is kind of a shame, I guess. Like a tourist who travels to Europe and eats nothing but McDonald’s, I can’t help but feel this is a missed opportunity, and wish that the animators had looked at Star Wars and seen something other than their own reflection.

Wellll-l-l-l, the visual look was always going to be the thing and the whole thing with this series anyway, wasn’t it? Like the “Animatrix” series (2003, or about five years ago by my reckoning) or “Halo Legends” (2010, i.e. that was just last week, surely?) the main if not only reason you do this is to splash a technicolor coat of Japanese cool over your product.

A couple of the episodes are indeed pretty to look at, especially the first one, “The Duel”, which has a very cool “Hellsreach” style jumpy, skittery black-and-white look to it, with splashes of red and blue color when the laser swords get whipped out.

“The Twins” gets a bit more gonzo, but looses several thousand points in my book for just copying the most iconic scene from “The Last Jedi”. Did I say the animators took nothing from Star Wars? My mistake. They took this one scene, and xeroxed it.

“Tatooine Rhapsody” and “T0-B1” are cutesy Astroboy style cheese harkening back to 80s animation; “The Elder” is basically “The Duel” again, only the bad guy is an old man instead of a woman; “The Village Bride” and “The Ninth Jedi” are a bit Ghibli with their wilderness scenes and plucky heroines, and “Akakiri” (red mist) is very Kurosawa with its bold use of color and bickering old guides.

There’s some stunt casting in the voices, with Lucy Liu, George Takei, David Harbour, Neil Patrick Harris and Temuera “Boba Fett” Morrison all taking a turn behind the mike, though as with much of anime its hampered both by trying to info dump at the speed of Japanese speech and by a listless give-me-my-paycheck delivery of hammy dialog. Voice acting is not in-person acting, and I can’t help but feel the production would have been better served by focusing on performances over names.

I do like the de-emphasis on canon though. It's a millstone that is only going to weigh down any future attempts to tell any other stories in this universe, so the sooner it is cast off the better. Just wish they'd been willing to go a little more lateral, but baby steps I guess.