I give it's "Lost but Suburbs" vibe in the early episodes credit for fully committing to the bit, if nothing else. The imitation of sitcoms over the decades was pretty thorough, including everything from the laugh track to story lines and dialog and humor styles. That said, it was a bit like the no-cut cinematography in 1917, a gimmick whose gimmickiness overshadowed the point of the gimmick. Actually, in the end there wasn't much of a point to the gimmick, except to entertain the viewer with the gimmick. Like the sitcom situations don't actually serve the plot in any way, it's just established that Wanda is living in this woo-woo land of make-believe. The show just drops the whole shtick in the last few episodes and no more is ever heard of it.
I also think the danger of a show within a show, a layer of fiction within your fiction, is that your IRL fiction has to be very, very grounded otherwise the lines between your real fiction and fiction fiction start to blur and the viewer gets confused about what's real fiction and what's fiction fiction. You get me? The "reality" of your fictional universe kind of gets worn away and it gets harder to empathize with your characters since they're all fiction.
So, and this is just an example, just spitballing here, just a f'rinstance, just say, making your main villain a literal witch would be a bad idea. Hypothetically speaking.
Good god that was dumb.
Attention writers: Wanda is the villain. She is also the victim. This is interesting, do not run away from that and insert some boring ass white dude and a literal fucking witch.
Also thought there were a whole bunch of extraneous characters in this, a show which could have been a pretty tight focus on dealing with grief. Like the writers or showrunners or Marvel or Disney got a little scared of how dark they were getting and threw in a slightly irritating Millennial youtuber type personality and the relative of some character I've never heard of from a movie I haven't seen.
I finally caved and got a Disney+ subscription and the first thing I watched was the Mandalorian but I have nothing to say about it so moving right along to other things I have nothing to say about, but will anyway: Not Only Falcon But Also Winter Soldier.
Confession time, the few MCU movies that I watched have almost all been blasted into my brain from the back of airplane seats at 30,000 feet above the Pacific, so nothing has really stuck. Needless to say, everything I know about this world has come second or third hand from social media but luckily we all know what a reliable source of information that is.
That said, I kind of liked this.
The opening and set up in particular were solid, especially the Bucky stuff with his psychologist and Sam's stuff with Isaiah. The whole question of whether a Black man could or should become the symbol of America was well-handled I thought, acknowledging both history and present issues, but also making the case for people to define for themselves what their national identity is.
That said, this was Subway sandwich overstuffed. I really wish Bucky had more airtime, because that's another fascinating subject they could have tackled--guilt, forgiveness and redemption. How do you make amends when "Sorry" does not even begin to cover it?
But nope, no time for that because in addition to race in America, we've also got immigration and the refugee crisis to deal with, and the dark side of being treated like a hero, and the radicalization of youth, and political accountability, and and and and it's all too much. The bad guy aims are vague and unconvincing and Bucky's redemption arc gets wrapped up off-screen.
Random thoughts:
1. More Bucky and Yori and the cute waitress from the sushi place.
2. It was just bizarre to me that they had Nubian women in full tribal regalia wandering around Latvia or Lithuania oh come on like you can tell the difference, you'd think that would have drawn more attention
3. Didn't know who Sharon was so the whole "Power Broker" subplot was a bit ?
4. Karli was in the Han Solo movie that nobody watched, too
5. Mackie going from practicing with the shield with Bucky in one scene, to not being able to catch it the next was just an odd bit of editing
6. More Zemo. Yes I know everybody loved his dance. More villains with comprehensible backstories and identifiable goals, please.
7. Is "USAgent" supposed to be significant? And who is Seinfeld lady? Don't make me google essential plot details please, shows.
Starring: John C Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed
Cuts about 90% of the Picaresque adventures of the brotherly bounty hunters and thus misses the sense of absurdity about the whole thing. It is a dadaish work, standing in opposition to both John Wayne and Unforgiven, declaring that there was no moral order in the West, inverted or otherwise, merely luck and chance, and the only real victims were idealists.
It is significant, I think, that the only character to get a "happy" ending is Eli, the one who had the simplest motives and ambitions.
Starring: Spider-Man, other Spider-Man, older Spider-Man, SpiderMan, Spiderman, Spider-Man But It's a Girl, Anime Spider-Man and Looney Tunes Spider-Man
"Anyone can be Spider-Man" assures this movie in which a group of heroes who have all been granted superhuman powers up to and including invisibility and the force lightning thing from Return of the Jedi after being bitten by radioactive spiders team up to do things which would instantly pulverize, squash, mash, rend, tear, destroy and kill any normal human who attempted them.
Deliriously fun for the most part, though the "reality" level is all over the place so I was never quite sure if I should be worried for anyone's safety or not, the serious scenes are corny as all hell, and like I say, the actual story itself completely and utterly contradicts the moral it tries to tell.
I’ve just watched David Attenborough’s “A
Life On Our Planet” and it’s beautiful as always, frank, open, heartfelt, a
powerful plea to protect, preserve and even expand the wild places that he so
loves and has made it his life’s work to document and explain. To do so, he
says, is not mere environmentalism, but a necessity if humanity is to survive
on this planet. It’s all delivered in his trademark BBC tones of gentle wisdom
and quiet authority—not the gravelly voice of God a la Freeman but something
warmer, more familiar and human—it is assured, it is educated, intellectual,
knowledgeable and kind without being saccharine. It is a chronicle of nature in
the 21st century, which means of course it is a chronicle of how
fast that nature is disappearing and—OH MY GOD WE MADE DAVID ATTENBOROUGH CRY.
Well done, us. I hope we’re fucking happy with ourselves. We’ve saddened this
beautiful, beautiful man, whose hiking boots we are not worthy to—oh, it makes
me mad. MAD. I’ve been listening to Sir Dave since Life on Earth, back in the
early 80s, and it is just heartbreaking to hear him talk about how much has
been lost, much of it irrevocably. His prescriptions are not novel, and
repetition from the mouths of other environmentalists has stolen some of their
thunder, but he does stress how attainable they are—greater use of renewable
energy, cooperative and planned utilization of ocean resources, less dependence
on meat-heavy diets, an end to human expansion. Fine goals of course, but the
challenge is (as it always has been) that many refuse to admit there is even a
problem. I’m sure this documentary gets a rougher reception down America way,
where belligerent climate change denial has become a cornerstone belief for
half the population (the message probably also faces an uphill battle in, say,
China or India, sorry Americans for picking on you again, but you are the
Florida Man of the English-speaking world at the moment). Which is also sad, if
not quite as sad as seeing Sir David upset. It is so frustrating to hear people
at times bemoan our modern lack of moral compass, the cliched “What would Jesus
do if he was alive today” when we are surrounded on all sides by Attenborough
and Mister Rogers and Bob Ross and Steve Irwin and Keanu Reeves and, idk, Dave
Grohl, we are surrounded by figures pointing the way to kindness and humility
and respect and we keep throwing up our hands in the air and saying “Welp, too
bad everything sucks, that’s life.” The answers are all around us, people.
Worried what to do about climate change? Just listen, listen for once in your
goddam lives instead of yammering away on Facebook and Reddit and Twitter and
Instagram and just listen. What would Jesus do? I DON’T KNOW WHY DON’T YOU TRY
FUCKEN LISTENING TO ONE OF THE THREE DOZEN SHINING, POSITIVE FIGURES IN OUR
CULTURE. Maybe we wouldn’t be in such a goddamn mess then. But no, it’s Donnie
Trump, football players and the sodding Kardashians. Mad. But back to Sir
David. The poor dear is 93 but still going, if not strong, then gently and
calmly as ever, and I would say “we shall not see his like again” but I don’t
want to jinx it, I sincerely hope we do see his like again, whole battalion of
Davids, great regiments of Attenboroughs sweeping across the continents,
documentary teams in tow. Endless Davids, a never-ending stream Attenboroughs. Then maybe life on this planet will actually be worth living.
Title: Enola Holmes Directed by: Harry Bradbeer Screenplay by: Jack Thorne (based on a novel by Nancy Springer) Network: Netflix
My
favorite scene in Netflix’s YA breezy, light, fluffy and fun Nancy Drew-slash-Ferris
Bueller knockoff “Enola Holmes” is when the black woman jiujitsu instructor in
Victorian London turns and says directly into the camera: “Sherlock Holmes
failed to dismantle the patriarchy.”
Which is to say, it’s a fun little
adventure movie several cuts above your usual made-for-Netflix fare but my god
is it horribly unsubtle with its out-of-place political posturing.
You could,
you know, make a movie that inspires the audience to reevaluate the place and
role of female characters in period dramas by doing what this movie does the
other 90% of the time when it’s not having anachronistic hyper-modern women
totally destroy those fuddy-duddy Victorian men with FACTS and LOGIC—i.e. by
creating an enjoyable, engaging movie in which women happen to play all the
central roles. That would do it, guys. That would get your point across. You
don’t have to bring the action to a screaming to a halt just so someone can
break the fourth wall and just say the premise straight to the audience.
It’s weird,
it’s distracting, it detracts from what would otherwise be a ringing endorsement
of more female-centric movies. Bah humbug get off my lawn.
Anyway. So. The
actual movie. Enola Holmes is a fictional sub-creation of the blessedly
copyright-free Sherlock (here played with marble stiffness and facial inarticulation by
Henry Cavill), a supposed younger, precociously and spunky and plucky teenage
sister of the big cocaine-addicted S, played with instantly adorable and delightful charm by Stranger Things’s
Millie Vanilli Bobbie Brown Bel Biv DeVoe. With Sherlock and brother Mycroft (Sam
Claflin) grown up and moved away, Enola is raised by her independent, eccentric
domestic white terrorist mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter) who speaks in
inspirational poster homilies (“If you want to be heard, you’ve got to make
some noise,” says the fey dearie as she builds pipe bombs to slaughter
innocents).
All seems well until Mother disappears one day—ooh, a mystery, involving a Holmes, who
would have guessed. Enola’s search takes her to London, and along the way
stumbles across a plot to bump off the young, pale, slightly foppish but
actually not really his personality is a bit of a mess honestly Marquess or Possibly
Viscount of Somewhereorother (Louis Partridge and His Hair), in order to
prevent said Lad Who Is Quite a Modern and Liberal Thinker from voting the
wrong way on a historically inaccurate bill to give women the vote. Enola promptly
stops looking for Mumsie (probably just as well, as this is not a terribly compelling arc) and resolves instead to save the Marquess (or Viscount) and His Hair. Aided
by numerous and repeated flashbacks to Enola and Eudoria beating the hell out
of each other at juijitsu, Enola solves the case, er, mainly by using jiujitsu
to beat up and kill the assassin sent after the young Laird. Not much sleuthing going on, really.
Enola’s
two talents appear to be decrypting messages that have been purposely fed to
her in order for her to read, and dressing up as a boy. Because either the
scriptwriters aren’t that good at coming up with clues and mysteries, or because
(as I’ve whined about elsewhere) our society is currently incapable of thinking
of any way to show strength other than beating people up.
Sherlock does show up
once or twice, but is here mainly used for the “Worf effect”, that is having a
supposedly intelligent character get out-thought by the protagonist in order to
showcase just how gosh darned smart she is.
In between, Enola talks to the
camera in the style and tone of Ferris Bueller, which doesn’t add much to either
the plot or our understanding of the character, but hot damn, that Millie
Bobbie Brown can charm the back legs of an Arcturan Megadonkey.
All this leads to the
rousing climax in which Enola saves the Lord, gets women the vote several decades too early, and manifests her manifesto, declares her
independence and sets up the sequel. Huzzah.
And I’m being incredibly cynical
about the whole thing, maybe because Generation X as a whole has been raised to
view the world through the filters of irony and cynicism, maybe because I’m an
incorrigible misanthrope, and yet this movie has moved me to wonder—is the
English-speaking world finally moving past detachment and irony as its default and primary if not only means of
interpreting the world? The bromides in this movie about equality and gender
ring tinny and false in these tired, failing old ears, surely nobody could say this with a straight face, yet the movie’s single
notable characteristic is how committed and sincere it is about everything.
Could, my crusty old heart wonders, audiences actually mean it, sincerely mean
it, sincerely enjoy having characters stand up and declaim their beliefs with
outthrust jaws and beaten breasts? Are we (and as a terminally-repressed
Englishman in Canadian disguise, I shudder at the prospect), are we on the cusp
of a new era of genuine emotion?
People online have long bemoaned the death of
satire, but few have considered what is taking its place, and I think I see now:
Sincerity. Meaning what you say. No more “ironically” enjoying things that are
objectively awful. No more sarcastically quipping lines you don’t believe in. No
more sneering at genre tropes or cliches in shows or movies that consciously
ape those tropes and hold them up to ridicule or else seek to subvert them.
A
movie about a plucky, spunky teenage girl who is (A) plucky and (B) spunky and
that’s it, that’s the whole thing, it revels in her terminal pluckiness overload
and in her anaphylactic-shock-inducing abundance of spunk. It wears its applique-thin
iron-on primary school philosophy on its sleeve and is proud of it, genuinely
proud, is not afraid to bellow it into your face. So to me, the effort feels
hopelessly misguided, because who my age takes philosophical moralizing in a movie aimed at teenage girls seriously, but I’m the one out of touch now, there’s a coming wave of
genuine-ness and it wears the winsomely smiling face of Millie Bobbie Brown.
Junior
and Hen, a couple living on an isolated farm in the near future, are suddenly
informed that Junior is being conscripted into a two-year space exploration
program. During his absence, the agency will provide a synth/replicant that
looks just like him, to take care of Hen and keep her company. As the
government agent regularly visits the couple and peppers them with strangely
personal questions, Junior starts to suspect the program is not what it claims,
and something more sinister is happening. At that point, I was figuring either
(A) the protagonist, Junior, would turn out to have been a synth the whole
time, or (B) he’d go away and when he came back his wife would have been
replaced with a synth. I must be some kind of goddamn genius, because ladies
and gentlemen: It’s both. For all the predictability of the twists, this is
still a neat little novel that packs a punch, particularly when you go back and
review the interactions between notJunior and his wife in a new light, realizing
that despite Junior being the “I” of the novel the main character is actually
his wife, Hen, grappling with living with this replicant imposter of her husband,
with the dissatisfaction that comes when you feel your life is in a rut,
everything is routine and one day blurs into the next. It’s essentially a
married woman having a mid-life crisis, dressed up in SFnal trappings. The
writing is sharp and snappy at first but starts to wear after a while, as all Junior’s
three-word declarative sentences get to be a bit monotonous after a bit, and
you kind of wish Iain would vary the pace every once in a while. The blunt
droning of Junior’s inner monolog isn’t helped by the fact that aside from the
two big twists, this short novel is essentially plot free, nothing much happens
except !Junior argues with his wife and gets confused and irritated with
everyone and everything else and—just as an aside—I empathize 1000% bro, I
really do. People are all malfunctioning robots, my guy, there’s no telling what
is going on in their faultily-programmed brains. Seriously, I’ve given up
trying to understand my fellow human beings, you’re all aliens to me. Anyway,
real Junior comes back, unJunior gets deactivated, but then real Junior and his
wife fight because he’s a real selfish asshole who really left her to go off on
a real two-year space program and she kind of liked the replicant better. So
she ups and leaves him, but before Junior realizes what’s happened, the agency
quickly subs in a replicant for his wife. Real Junior and unHen waltz off into
the sunset, happy in their comforting irreality, their artificial facsimile of
a happily married life. I’m not sure the plot makes a whole lot of sense once
you know the ending—why tell the replicant about the space program? Why tell
him that he is going to be replaced, when he already is the replacement? Why not
just have it live a normal life until the real guy comes back? But I get why it’s
structured that way, for that little dopamine rush when you figure it out. It’s
not a book built for the CinemaSins crowd, and I get that structurally the
point is to mislead the reader about what’s going on so you get that Eureka! Moment
and all those weird conversations between notJunior and Hen suddenly make
sense. Is the real horror the way our lives dissolve into drudgery, the way we
exist in order to keep on existing, that any change no matter how dramatic
eventually becomes mundane, routine, boring. Is the numbing comfort of the
familiar the real foe? I don’t know, you’re the robot aliens. You figure it
out.
Well
I just went to see Tenet and dna teneT ees ot tnew tsuj I lleW
If
by some mischance COVID gets me for this I just want you all to know that I
died as I lived: Utterly confused by everything, but still having a good time
on the whole. It’s a pity this came out so close after Bill and Ted Face the Fact
That Keanu Reeves Is 56 Years Old reminded us that time travel stories are all
faintly ridiculous since the writer can always have the heroes hide their own car
keys for them to find later, as this realization makes all the
backwards-running reverse-shooting and I don’t want to think about what happens
if you have to go to the bathroom-ing in an otherwise solid actioner faintly
risible. It’s JDW and Robert Pattinson’s excellent adventure. Watching the inverted
fights just reminded me of the time Red Dwarf went to the backwards planet.
Inevitably, as any Star Trek fan could tell you about time travel stories, it
ends up being a bit of a narrative and visual ouroboros where the protagonist’s
main mission is to make sure absolutely nothing happens. Still, it’s more
grounded that Interstellar, less dreamy than Inception and reminds me of Memento
more than a little. In short, a solid but unexceptional addition to the Nolanverse
Criterion Collection and a further extension of his core philosophy that linear
time can go fuck itself, as can people attempting to listen to the dialogue in his
movies. The time travel whatthefuckery has some brilliant set pieces, including
the airplane crash from the trailer (twice, both coming and going, as it were) and
the highway car chase (also twice). Robert Pattinson exudes dapper charm from every hair
follicle and in any sane world would be playing Bond, not Batman. But of course this is 2020, a year that hates sanity almost as much as Nolan does. What this movie isn’t
is the savior of movieplexes and cinemas the industry had been praying for. The
plot needed about three more rounds of editing to get rid of the extraneous
excess and make it halfway comprehensible without three diagrams and/or a potentially
lethal quantity of LSD, focuses on a dull lead who is effortlessly outshone in
every scene by his sidekick, climaxes in an army apparently shooting at
nothing, and uses a lot of pretty scenery to disguise the fact it is roughly
50% people standing around explaining the backstory. There are about three key
scenes absolutely critical to understanding the movie’s incestuous pretzel of a
timeline, and in all three cases the scene is cut as if the lives of the editor’s
wife, son and chihuahua (“Bubbles”) depended on nobody understanding the plot
points. I used to make fun of all those “The Ending of Return of the Jedi
Explained, Jesus Fucking Christ” or “The Blinkingly Obvious End of Avengers Explained,
You Complete and Utter Morons” YouTube vids, but I did it, goddamn it I did it,
I went online and read a bunch of articles just to understand what the gnikcuf backwards
hell was going on. But I won’t hold that against it, because this makes it probably
one of about two big-budget movies released in the last year or two that has demanded
the audience use somewhat more than two of their tiny little braincells to understand.
After months of snacking on Netflix’s made-for-TV movie quality hamburgers, it’s
amazing to discover Taste! Spices! Flavors! A plot which doesn’t pander in structure,
theme or have a completely unnecessary love triangle! Oh, not being able to
predict exactly what is going to happen in each scene, how I missed you. Which
is doubly ironic for a movie that is half about things going backwards in time.
I haven’t sat on the edge of my seat like that since Mad Max: Fury Road, the
other blockbuster this decade to mainly be about people going backwards and
forwards. Somebody send this script back in time so that we can avoid the mediocrity of Marvel cookie-cutter movies, or use it to kill baby Hitler, whatever.
Title:
Quantum Thief Author:
Hannu Rajaniemi Publisher:
Gollancz/Tor
For
a while there you could just call everything “nano” and science fiction audiences
would just nod their heads and accept anything you shoveled their way. Nanobots,
sure, Nanomissiles, why not, Nanowrimo, knock yourself out. Of course, today’s
audiences are far more intelligent, perceptive and sophisticated. Now, you have
to call everything “quantum.” Much better, isn’t it. Quantum Thief is less a
novel than the result of putting a mathematics textbook in a blender and
printing whatever words dribble out the other end. Archons and cryptarchs and
warminds and gevulot and phoboi and yes, whenever the writers of Bungie’s online
shooter game “Destiny” had writer’s block they flipped open a random page of
this book and used the first word that they saw. It’s normally at this point
where I try to explain what the story is about but you know, I haven’t the
faintest fucking clue. Couldn’t even tell you if the title means the thief is
quantum or he steals quantum or what either of those things would entail. In any
event, he’s rescued from the archons and warminds inside an infinite prison
where he has to play a real-life version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, why I don’t
know, by a Finnish woman, her flirtatious spaceship and the voice of God if god
was an amorous Italian woman. Again, I don’t know why said rescue happens, it just
does. Because of Quantum. They all fly to Mars where there’s a walking city in
which everyone has physical privacy settings, communicates by sharing GIFs (no
change there, then) and is immortal but periodically dies and spends time as a
mindless servant before going back to being alive again and no, I don’t know
why. Said city is also inhabited by a colony of “zoku” who are basically Quantum
gamers. The thief goes to the walking city to steal something, what I’m not
clear on, in order to establish proof of something, again your guess is as good
as mine, but also to find some of his lost memories, can’t help you there, and
in the process reveals some big secret about the walking city’s past, who tf
knows at this point, before the big climactic showdown with the cryptarch,
shruggie dot emoji. Quantum. His Finnish rescuer hates him at first but then
doesn’t, because he takes her to karaoke, and frankly this is exactly the
opposite of what I find happens every time I go to karaoke with a female
companion, perhaps because I’m not a dashing, debonair thief of the quantum
variety, but also perhaps because I have a signing voice that sounds like a
bronchial parrot with a stutter. Anyway, the effect is sort of dizzyingly amusing
for the first third of the book or so but then you slowly realize there’s no getting
off this quantumly wordy tilt-a-whirl and you’re going to be completely in the
dark about everyone’s motivations or what they’re even trying to do right up
until the final page. At which point, they proudly announced they’ve done whatever it was they were trying to do.
Huzzah. Good for them. It’s all giddily, sprawlingly, psychedelically inventive,
but it’s a bit Jackson Pollock painting in the way words are kind of splattered
across the pages and you fucking figure it out. The protagonist is more
annoying than raffish, the detective on his trail sherlockian without putting
any of the deductive effort into it, the gamer zoku are a hoot but in the book
far less than they should’ve been, an the two main female characters don’t do
much except get exasperated with the hero and occasionally try to kill him
until at the end when they don’t and do the exact opposite instead. Quantum.
