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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Episode
7: “What if we wanted to be free to do what we want to do, and we wanted to get
loaded and have a good time? And that’s what we did, we had a good time, we had
a party? Woo yeah?”
The
premise here is that a spoiled and feckless Prince Thor of Asgard decides not
to fight evil, but rather boredom and the squares, by slipping off while his
parents are away (his dad for rejuve treatments, his mom to get wine drunk with
other moms) and throwing a cataclysmically large party on Earth.
Oh
dear, you say to yourself, it doesn’t sound like they can fit much punching
into that kind of storyline BECAUSE YOU ARE A NAÏVE FOOL WHO KNOWS NOTHING.
Thor and co. and I do mean co. as in pretty much every side character from the
Thor and Guardians movies gets a cameo anyway they throw a party of such
massive proportions that it threatens to destroy the entire planet. Fire giant
king and herald of the end of the world, Surtur, rips the Statue of Liberty’s
arms off while trying to hit on her. Thor’s lightning accidentally knocks out
power to the entire eastern seaboard of the US. Loki develops a plan to use the
arch of St. Louis as a giant slingshot. That kind of thing.
It
is up to Captain Marvel to stop Thor in a battle of the blondes, by using all
of her cunning and crafty wiles or haha no not really, by punching Thor a lot.
It’s
mildly diverting though the whole thing is structured like an 80s sitcom
episode replete with putting the world back together before mom finds out.
It’s
funnier in the premise than the execution, but hell with it, these are comic
book characters and it’s oddly refreshing to see them portrayed as such. Sure,
it’s a filler episode in a filler series, designed to tide Disney+ audiences
over between “Loki” and the next big series, “Hawkeye” (well okay large-ish series, I mean
c’mon, it’s Hawkeye) so it’s not exactly essential viewing. But then the
whole MCU is about as essential as Twinkie filling anyway, so why not. I did
catch myself thinking at one point “ah, not like any of this series is canon
anyway” which is kind of a bass-ackwards way to approach entertainment. Of
course it’s lightweight, forgettably flimsy fun, what else was it supposed
to be? Why should it be anything else?
The
expectation that every story link into every other story is probably not a good
one for storytelling. This is just kind of its own thing for 30 silly minutes.
Good for it. I bitched and moaned about this series not taking its ideas
seriously, but if it won’t, then this is the way to go: Dispense with the faux-Shakespearean
tragedy about a wizard who gets sad or, um, zombies, and just have goofy, silly
characters doing goofy, silly things.
Episode
6: “What if we made one that was actually kind of good?”
For
all my snark about this series, I thought this week’s episode wasn’t too bad,
really. So this will be short, as I’m far better at snark than expressions of
genuine appreciation or emotion.
I
especially liked the theme (whether intended or not, I have my doubts) about the
dangers inherent in worshipping superheroes or following charismatic leaders.
This is Marvel we are talking about after all, so I’m not sure whether they
realized this week’s story beautifully illustrates why trusting in a superhero
to save you is such a short-sighted and stupid mentality. But own goals still count
as goals, so score one for Marvel!
This
one does a decent job of putting familiar characters into new situations
and—rather than having them just beat each other up—shows how they might react
to their new situation. The conceit is that Killmonger, Michael B Jordan’s
character from “Black Panther”, decides not to concoct a hideously complex and
byzantine plot to take over the highly advanced hermit kingdom of Wakanda by
challenging its king to ritual combat, but rather decides to concoct an even
more byzantine and frankly ludicrously complex plot to provoke a war between
America and Wakanda so that he can sweep in, save his homeland and rise to the
throne as a hero rather than a villain.
Step
one is to save Tony Stark from an ambush in Afghanistan (rewriting one of our
first-ever MCU scenes waaaay back in Iron Man 1). Killmonger is handsome, he’s
charming, he’s heroic, he has an amazing capacity for self-righteous violence, of
course everyone immediately loves him. Naturally he exploits this
hero-worship to get into Tony’s good graces and engineer an ambush that kills
both Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther and Don Cheadle’s James Rhodes, before
murdering Tony and pinning the blame on Wakanda. This works like a charm and
the two countries are soon at one another’s throats.
If
they’d stopped there, I would have loved, LOVED this. I mean, it’s not quite an
“Invincible” or “The Boys” level deconstruction of why superheroes are actually
kind of a bad idea really and maybe we shouldn’t be quite so willing to stop
thinking for ourselves, but for Marvel this is pretty spicy stuff.
Then
they throw in a gratuitous battle scene where the Americans send in an anime
esque robot army. Killmonger deactivates them, then for reasons best known to
himself reactivates them and spends five minutes beating up robots with a
spear. The whole battle scene is just … weird. Unnecessary and just bizarrely
frames this as a heroic struggle rather than a pointless fight engineered by an
unscrupulous zealot (for his own aggrandizement I guess—though he was already
the hero of the hour before the fight so I’m not sure what he hoped to
accomplish).
Q:
So, nothing to be snarky about?
A: Well,
at one point, the Watcher (the narrator) says something along the lines of
“Heroes never die.”
Just
after Black Panther, Iron Man and War Machine um, er … die.
Q:
How many times is this series going to kill Tony Stark?
A: AS
MANY AS IT TAKES.
Hey,
at least the old dude from Ant-Man wasn’t the bad guy this time.
Q:
Chadwick Boseman is in this one, too?
A:
Yes and just to make it extra weird he voices his own ghost.
Q:
Did they leave the door open for a sequel again?
A:
They did indeed, featuring everyone’s two favorite Marvel characters, Pepper
Potts and Black Panther’s kid sister.
