Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: The Marvels

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Some movies just don’t deserve the circumstances of their release. But things happen, and movies don’t always get released at the ideal time or place. Such is business! Such is life. Case in point, two things are true about The Marvels:

1. This is a fun movie! It’s one of Marvel’s’ better efforts in recent years, it’s full of appealing leads, fun action. It’s pretty good, I liked it, and more importantly, my kids who are right in the center of Marvel’s target age demographic liked it. Solid B!
2. This is absolutely the movie where the MCU ground out on a sandbar.

When long-running series in any medium finally grounds out, as they always do, there’s always a point where the audience just doesn’t show up, and something craters. And it’s always slightly unfair to whatever ends up in that crater, since the the quality if that particular thing doesn’t matter—by definition, no one saw it. Instead, it’s the built-up reactions to the last several things. As the joke goes, the current season of The Simpsons might be the best it’s ever been, but who would know? I’m certainly not going to waste my time finding out.

The MCU as a project had been sputtering since Avengers: Endgame gave everyone an offramp and then failed to find a way to get everyone back on board, but this was the point the built-up goodwill ran out. The MCU running out of gas was a big reason for 2023’s strange box office; “superhero fatigue” means a lot of different things based on whose saying it, but a lot of the time what it really means is “I’ve paid full price for enough mid-tier Marvel movies, thanks.”

And it’s really unfair that this innoffensive fun little movie had to be the one that became one of the biggest box office bombs in history, while far-worse misfires like that third Ant-Man or The Eternals, or that awful second Doctor Strange were “successful.” In retrospect, it’s clear whatever Marvel movie came out at the end of ’23 was going to be the bomb, and I, for one, am sorry it was this one.

It’s also a little weird since a lot of the strange blowback the original Captain Marvel got in certain quarters was due to being the one movie between the two halves of the Infinity War / Endgame pair; you ended on a crazy cliffhanger, but first you want us to watch a seemingly-unconnected semi-prequel with an unconvincing de-aged Nick Fury? What? As the the saying goes, if I had a nickle every time a Captain Marvel movie got screwed over by its place in the release order, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

But enough context, how was the movie?

The standout, of course, is Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan. She was outstanding in the criminally under-watched Ms. Marvel, and she’s the best part of this movie. And even better, the Khan family comes along from the show. The best parts of this movie is when it’s “Ms. Marvel: The Movie”, to an extent that they clearly should have had the courage to just do that.

But this is mostly a sequel to Captain Marvel, and that’s a little more mixed. The script seems to want Captain Marvel to be a loner wandering gunslinger-type, haunted by the past and avoiding everyone. The problem is that Brie Larson clearly wants to play the part as a sort of wisecracking Doctor Who with laser hands, bouncing around the universe with her cat getting into and out of scrapes. When the movie gets out of her way and lets her do that—flirting with Tessa Thompson, dropping in on planets where she might have married the prince that one time but don’t worry about it, deadpanning lines like “he’s bilingual,” the character works great. Whenever the action screeches to halt so that Carol Danvers can be sad about things that happened off camera since the last movie, or so she and Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau can be mad at each other for poorly justified reasons, the movie falls apart as the actors visibly struggle to make such undercooked gruel of a script work.

Meanwhile, that leaves Teyonah Parris kind of stuck playing “the third one”. Unlike in WandaVision, Monica Rambeau here doesn’t really congeal as a character. But she’s still fun, gets some good banter in, does the best she can with material.

On the other hand, Samuel L Jackson is having more fun playing Nick Fury than he has since, well, maybe ever. He’s always been a funnier actor than most people use him as, and he absolutely shines here bantering over the radio, or gawking at flerkin eggs.

The central conceit is that the powers of the three main leads become “entangled”, so whenever two of them use their powers at the same time they swap places. This turns out to be a great idea; both to get the three of them working together with a minimum of fuss, but also as a basic teamwork gimmick. The parts of the movie where they’re hanging out, listening to Beastie Boys learning how to use the swaps, or turning every fight into a tag team absolutely sing.

And this is really my core review: when it’s a movie about three charismatic women tag-team fighting space aliens, it’s a really fun adventure movie. It’s funny, it’s exciting, it all basically works. “Found Family” is overdone these days, but it’s hard to begrudge a cliché when it’s done this charmingly. It’s very “watchable.”

That said, it also has the now-standard Marvel Flaws^TM: an antagonist who isn’t a villain so much as a hole where a villain should be, a third act that devolves into incoherent CGI punching, and a resolution that’s the sort of “whoops, out of time, better do some poorly-justified vaguely sci-fi bullshit” that usually only happens when the b-plot of that week’s TNG episode ran long.

And there’s a stack of unforced errors too: while the place-swapping is the core concept for most of the movie, it never really pays off. When they finally get to the point where they’re going to have the showdown with the villain, the swapping stops for reasons as poorly-explained as why it started, and instead the antagonist gets what she wanted the whole time and immediately blows herself up. It’s a staggeringly incompetent ending, why on earth wouldn’t you use the thing that’s the main spine of the movie to allow the good guys to win? It’s almost trivial to imagine an ending where the three Marvels use their place swap powers to outwit their opponent, it’s inconceivable that no one working on the movie thought of one.

Which seems like the right time to mention that this is also the movie that inspired Bob Iger’s infamous and tone-deaf comments about having needed more executive supervision. On the one hand, that’s absurd, but watching this, it’s hard not to see what he means. As another example: this movie stars three characters from different sources, one of whom—Captain Marvel—already had her own successful solo movie and then co-starred in the most successful movie ever made, the other two were from different streaming-only shows that, rounding to the nearest significant digit, no-one watched. So, the character that gets the extended “previously on” flashback clip reel is… Captain Marvel? Yeah, movie, I remember Carol Danvers, we’re good there. I could have used a reminder about where Monica Rambeau ended up after WandaVision, though.

There really needed to be someone to look at that and go, “uhhh, are you sure about that?” And the movie is full of weird little lumpy decions like that.

But look, a couple of years ago, none of that would have mattered. We know this is true because Dr. Strange did just fine, and it has all these flaws and then some. But this movie didn't come out then, it came out now.

One of the lynchpins of the whole Marvel Movie project has been that they quickly figured out how to raise the floor and to make 2-3 movies a year that were guaranteed to be a B-, and then if a particular creative team came along and shot the lights out you were in great shape. And when one particular movie didn’t for whatever reason, that was mostly okay. There’s no shame in being mid-tier. Except, it’s now been years of nothing but mid-tier, and that infrastructure B- seems to have decayed to a C. And in a world where taking four people to see a movie costs more than the new Zelda, I think a lot of us need a little more than. “mid-tier.”

How can I put this—I suspect I’m a lot softer on the MCU than most people who own the number of Criterion Collection releases that I do? I tend to view Marvel Movies as the movie equivalent of fast food—but good fast food, In-N-Out burger or the like. And look, as much as we all like to talk about the death of cinema or whatever, being able to buy a double-double on the weekend doesn't actually make that much of a difference to the good restaurants downtown, and I think the MCU has had less of an influence on the world around it than we give it credit for. That said, there is a point where you say “gosh, we’ve gotten In-N-Out too much lately, you wanna go somewhere good?”

Movies from This Year I Finally Saw: Dune Part 2

Spoilers Ahoy

The desert is beautiful in exactly the way that means it’s something that can kill you. It’s vast, and terrifying, and gorgeous. The only thing that compares is the sea; but the sea is totally alien, and to survive there, we need to bring tiny islands of our world with us to survive. The desert allows no such vessels, it demands that we join it, live as it does.

My Dad grew up on the edge of the low desert, I spent a lot of time as a kid there. I mention all this so that I can tell this story: when we watched the 2001 Sci-Fi channel version of Dune, the first time the Fremen arrived on screen my Dad burst into laugher; “Look how fat they are!” he roared, “they’ve never been in the desert a day in their lives!”

He did not say that when we watched the new movies.

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And so yes, I finally saw the second half of Dune. I liked it. I liked it a lot. I think this has to go down as the new definitive example of how to turn a great book into a great movie (the examples for how to turn “decent-but-not-great” and “bad” books into great movies remain Jurassic Park and Jaws, respectively.)

It’s vast, it’s grand, it looks great, the acting is phenomenal, it’s fun, it’s exciting. It’s the sort of movie where you can list ten things about it at random and someone is likely to say “oh yeah, that was my favorite part.”

Denis Villeneuve has two huge advantages, and wastes neither. First, this is the third attempt at filming Dune, and as such he has a whole array of examples of things that do and don’t work. Second, he even has an advantage over Frank Herbert, in that unlike the author of the book, Villeneuve knows what’s going to happen in the next one, and can steer into it.

It’s immediately obvious that splitting the book into two movies was an even better idea than it first looked. While stretching a book-to-movie adaptation into two movies has become something of a cliche, Dune is different, if for no other reason than when they announced that they were going to make two films, literally everyone who’d ever read the book correctly guessed where the break was going to be.

But in addition to giving the story enough room to stretch out and get comfortable, the break between movies itself also turns out to have been a boost, because everyone seems more relaxed. The actors, who were all phenomenal in the first part, are better here, the effects are better, the direction is more interesting. Everyone involved clearly spent the two years thinking about “what they’d do next time” and it shows.

It looks great. The desert is appropriately vast and terrible and beautiful. The worms are incredible, landing both as semi-sumernatural forces of nature but also clearly real creatures. All the stuff looks great, every single item or costume or set looks like it was designed by someone in the that world for a reason. The movie takes the Star Wars/Alien lived-in-future aesthetic and runs with it; the Fremen gear looks battered and used, the Harkonnen stuff is a little too clean, the Imperial stuff is clean as a statement of power, the smooth mirrored globe of a ship hanging over the battered desert outpost.

The book casually mentions that Fremen stillsuits are the best but then doesn’t talk more about that; the movie revels in showing the different worse protective gear everyone else wears. The Fremen stillsuits looks functional, comfortable, the kind of thing you could easily wear all day. The various Harkonnen and Imperial and smuggler suits all look bulky and uncomfortable and impractical, more like space suits than clothes; the opening scene lingers on the cooling fans in the back of Harkonnen stillsuit’s helmets, a group of soldiers in over their heads trying to bring a bubble of their world with them, and failing. In the end, those fans are all food for Shai-halud.

Every adaptation like this has an editorial quality; even with the expanded runtime we’re playing with here, the filmmakers have to choose what stays and what to cut. Generally, we tend to focus on what got left out, and there’s plenty that’s not here (looking at you, The Spacing Guild.) But oftentimes, the more interesting subject is what they choose to leave in, what to focus on. One detail Villeneuve zooms in on here is that everyone in this movie is absolutely obsessed with something.

Silgar is obsessed that his religion might be coming true. Gurney is obsessed with revenge at any cost. The Baron is obsessed with retaking Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit are obsessed with regaining control of their schemes. Evis is obsessed with proving his worth to his uncle.

Rebecca Ferguson plays Jessica as absolutely consumed with the twin desires for safety and for her son to reach his full potential, whatever the cost. She has a permanently crazed look in her eyes, and the movie keeps it ambiguous how much of that is really her, and how much is PTSD mixed with side-effects of that poison.

At first, Paul is a kid with no agency, and no particular obsessions. He’s upset, certainly, but he someone who’s adrift on other people’s manipulations, either overt or hidden. You get the sense that once they join up with the Fremen, he’d be happy to just do that forever. But one the spice starts to kick in, Timothée Chalamet plays him as a man desperately trying to avoid a future he can barely glimpse. When reality finally conspires to make that future inevitable, he decides the only way forward is to sieze agency from everything and everyone around him, and from that point plays the part as a man possessed, half-crazed and desparate to wrestle him and the people he cares about through the only path he can see that doesn’t lead to total disaster.

My favorite character was Zendaya’s Chani. Chani was, to put it mildly, a little undercooked in the book, and one of the movie’s most interesting and savvy changes is to make her the only character that isn’t obsessed with the future, but as the only character who can clearly see “now”, a sort of reverse-Cassandra. While everyone else is consumed with plots and goals and Big Obsessions, she’s the only one that can see what the cost is going to be, what it already is. The heart of the movie is Zendaya finding new ways to express “this isn’t going to work out” or “oh shit” or “you have got to be fuckin’ kidding me” with just her face, as things get steadily out of control around her. It’s an incredible performance.

Chani also sits at the center of the movie’s biggest change: the ending.

In the book, Chani and Jessica aren’t exactly friends, but they’re not opposed to each other. The story ends with Paul ascending to the Imperial throne, with the implicit assent of the Spacing Guild and a collective shrug from the other great houses, and the story’s point-of-view slides off him and onto the two woman, as they commiserate over the fact that the men in their lives are formally married to other people, but “history will call us wives.”

Then, *Dune Messiah” opens a decade later after a giant war where the Fremen invaded the universe, and killed some billions of people. It’s not a recon in the modern sense of the word exactly, but the shift from the seeming peaceful transition of power and “jihad averted” ending of the first book to the post-war wreckage of the opening of the second is a little jarring. Of course, Dune Messiah isn’t a novel so much as it’s 200 pages of Frank Herbert making exasperated noises and saying “look, what I meant was…”

Villeneuve knows how the second book starts, and more important, knows he’s going to make that the third movie, so he can steer into it in a way Herbert didn’t. So here, rather than vague allies, Jessica and Chani stand as opposing views on Paul’s future. The end of the film skips the headfake of a peaceful transition, and starts the galactic jihad against the houses opposed to Paul’s rule, and then the movie does the same POV shift to Chani that the book does, except now it’s her walking off in horror, the only person convinced that this will all end in flames and ruin. (Spoiler: she’s right.)

It’s a fascinating structure, to adapt one long book and its shorter sequel into a trilogy, with the not-quite-as-triumphant-as-it-looks ending of the first book now operating as (if you’ll forgive the comparison) an Empire Strikes Back–style cliffhanger.

It’s also a change that both excuses and explains the absense of the Spacing Guild from the movie, it’s much easier to light off a galactic war in one scene if there isn’t a monopoly on space travel that has a vested interest in things staying calm.

Dune is a big, weird, overstuffed book. The prose is the kind that’s politely described as “functional” before you change the subject, it doesn’t really have a beginning, and the end kind of lurches to a halt mid-scene. (And it must be said that it is significantly better written than any of Herbert’s other works. Dune started life as fixup of serialized short stories; the novel’s text implies the influence of either a strong editor or someone who gave a lot of productive feedback. Whatever the source, that influence wouldn’t show up for any of the sequels.) It’s a dense, talky book, with scene after scene of people expositing at each other, including both their conversation and respective internal monologies.

Despite it’s flaws, It’s a great book, and a classic for a reason, mostly because whatever else you can say about it, Dune is a book absolutely fizzing with ideas.

This is a book with a culture where computers are outlawed because of a long-ago war against “Thinking Machines”, and a guild of humans trained from birth to replace computers. There are plenty of authors who would have milked that as a book on its own, here it gets treated as an aside, the name “Butlerian Jihad” only appearing in the appendix.

Taking that a step further, the guild of analytical thinking people are all men, and their counterpart guild—the Bene Gesserit—are the scheming concubine all-woman guild. And yeah, there’s some gender stereotypes there, but that’s also the point, it’s not hidden. They’er both “what if we took these stereotypes and just went all the way.”

The book is constantly throwing out new concepts and ideas, tripping over them as it runs to the next. Even the stock mid-century science fiction ideas get a twist, and we end up with things like what if Asimov’s Galactic Empire was a little less “Roman” and a little more “Holy Roman”. And that’s before we get to the amount of word-building heavy-lifting done by phrases like “zensunni wanderers.”

And on top of all that, Herbert was clearly a Weird Guy (complementary.) The whole book is positively bubbling over with The Writer's Barely-Disguised Fetish, and while that would swamp the later books, here the weird stuff about politics or sex or religion mostly just makes the book more interesting—with a big exception around the weird (derogatory) homophobia.

And this is where I start a paragraph with “however”—However most of those ideas don’t really pay off in a narratively compelling way. They’re mostly texture, which is fine in a sprawling talky novel like Dune, but harder to spare room for in a movie, or even in two long ones.

An an example: Personal shields are another fun piece of texture to the setting, as well as artfully lampshading why this futuristic space opera has mostly melee combat, but they don’t really influence the outcome in a meaningful way. You can’t use them on Arrakis because they arger the worms, which sort of explains part of the combat edge the Fremen have, but then in the book it just sorta doesn’t come up again. The book never gives the Fremen a fighting style or weapons that take advantage of the fact their opponents don’t have shields but are used to having them. Instead, the Fremen are just the best fighters in the universe, shields or no shields, and use the same sorts of knives as everyone else.

The movies try to split the difference; shields are there, and we get the exposition scene at the start to explain how they work, but the actual fights don’t put a lot of effort in showing “the slow blade penetrates”, just sometimes you can force a blade through a shield and sometimes you can’t.

Visually, this does get gestured in a few ways: those suspensor torpedoes that slow down and “tunnel” through the shields are a very cool deployment of the idea, and the second movie opens with a scene where a group of Harkonnens are picked apart by snipers but never think to take cover, because they usually don’t have to.

And this is how the movie—I think correctly—chooses to handle most of those kinds of world-building details. They’re there, but with the volume dialed way down. The various guilds and schools are treated the same way; Dr Yueh turning traitor is unthinkable because he’s a trusted loyal member of the house, the Suk School conditioning is never mentioned, because it’s a detail that really doesn’t matter.

As someone who loves the book, It’s hard not to do a little monday-morning quarterbacking on where the focus landed. I’d have traded the stuff at the Ecological Testing Station for the dinner with the various traders and local bigwings, Count Fenring is much missed, I’d have preferred the Spacing Guild was there. But it works. This isn’t a Tom Bombadil/Souring of the Shire “wait, what did you think the book was about?” moment, they’re all sane & reasonable choices.

It turns out letting someone adapt the book who doesn’t like dialoge is the right choice, because the solution turned out to be to cut basically all of it, and let the story play out without the constant talking.

And this leads into the other interesting stylistic changes, which is that while Dune the book is deliriously weird, Dune the movies are not. Instead, they treat everything with total sincerity, and anything they can’t figure out how to ground they leave out.

I think this is a pretty savvy call for making a Dune in the Twenties. Most of the stuff that made Dune weird in the 60s has been normalized over the last few decades of post-Star Wars blockbusters, such that we live in a world where Ditko’s psychedelic Dr. Strange has starred in six different big budget movies, and one of the highest grossing movies of last year co-starred a talking tree and a cyborg raccoon. There’s no out-weirding that, the correct answer is, ironically, to take a cue from George Lucas and shoot it like it’s a documentary about a place that doesn’t exist.

So most of the movie, the fights, the worms, gets shot with total seriousness, and then Paul’s powers get visually reduced to the point where the movie is ambiguous about if he can really see the future or not. Even something as out-there-bananas as Alia is stripped down to the minimum, with the story’s timeline being compressed from multiple years to a couple of months so that we don’t have to figure out how to make a toddler with the mind of an adult work on the screen.

Which brings me to the last topic I want to cover here, which is that David Lynch’s Dune hangs over this movie like a shadow. It’s clear that everyone making this movie has seen that one. This is almost always to this movie’s benefit, both in terms of what’s there and what isn’t.

To wit: if anyone could have made something as very-specifically weird as “toddler with the mind of an adult” work, it was Lynch, and he didn’t, so the new movie stays clear. The look of both the Atreides and the Harkonnens owes more to the Lynch film than it does to the book, and there are any number of other aspects that feel like a direct response to that movie—either copy it, or get as far away as possible.

I picture Villeneuve with an effects pedal labeled “Lynch”, and he’d occasionally press on it.

I really, really liked these two movies. They’re far better than the Lynch film both as an adaptation of the book and as movies in their own right. But I really hope that pedal gets a little more of a workout in Dune Messiah.

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You know, I really, really, really wanted to hear Christopher Walken say “Bring in that floating fat man—the baron!” I can hear it!

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This means that the music video for Weapon of Choice is a prequel, right?

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A final thought. Lynch’s Dune opens with Princess Irulan looking the camera dead in the eye and explaining the premise of the film, a sort of sci-fi Chorus asking for a muse of fire, but clunkier. Denis Villeneuve’s first part—correctly—does away with all that and just starts the movie.

Before this second movie came out, I joked that the real power move would be to open the this film with Irulan narrating (“The beginning was a dangerous time”,) to act as the ‘previously on Dune’ recap.

Reader, you cannot possibly imagine my surprise and delight when that actually happened.

Movie Review Flashback: Zack Snyder’s Justice League

Programming Note: Back in March/April of 2021, I wrote a review of the then just-released Snydercut of Justice League for [REDACTED, but a different REDACTED than last time]. I’m actually not a thousand percent sure this actually got published back then, but I’m putting it up here now for roughly its 3rd anniversary. I did a little cleanup, but mostly I left it as it was, three years ago. On an amusing personal note, writing this was one of the things that caused me to think “you know, I should really re-light the blog.”

So, #snydercut. The tl;dr is that by any reasonable metric it's a lightyears better movie than the theatrical Whedon version, and that it's absolutely a Justice League movie by the guy that made 300.

Is it any good, though?

There's something to be said for just raw, un-compromised artistic vision, and this is clearly the movie ZS set out to make, and dang did he ever make the heck out of it.

It's extremely Zack Snyder. The guy has a style, and this might be its apotheosis. If nothing else, he knows how to make stuff look cool, and every character has at least one moment where they're doing the coolest thing imaginable. If I'd had seen this at 15 I'd have lost my damn mind. And that's kind of the point—this is a 15-year old's idea of what cool and grownup is.

The whole thing operates at this level of just Operatic Pomposity. Extremely silly stuff is happening constantly, and the movie just plays it completely straight-faced, as if this was the most amazing stuff you have ever seen. I mean, SIXTEEN minutes into the movie, the literal greek god Zeus shoots a Jack Kirby character with lightning, and the movie shoots it like it’s the end of Macbeth.

And you can kind of see why. The "other guys" have established a brand for self-aware, slightly self-deprecating superhero movies, and you want to carve out a space where you don't look like an Avengers knock off. Problem is, the only space where this material can work other than "Robert Downey Jr smirking" is "as goddamn serious as possible", so they went with that, and it's hard to blame them. Well, and there's also a genuine audience of people who think Frank Miller is a genius non-ironically, and I'm glad those people got a movie for them.

Having the movie at full prescription strength is intersting, because all the bad ideas are still bad, but they're fully baked, and you can see where they were going with it.

It's almost boiling over with ideas it can't figure out how to land.

ZS knows instinctually that character conflict is interesting, but can’t figure out how that works. Instead, everyone settles into this kind of grumpy-surly mode, but never actually disagree about anything.

It keep gesturing at other, better movies. There's an absolutely lyrical scene where Barry Allen saves Iris West from a car crash in the middle of a job interview that both nails Barry's character as well as finally figuring out how to show The Flash's powers in live action. Wonder Woman stars in a 10 minute Indiana Jones movie with torches and secret doors and everything. There's a really neat sketch for a movie about Lois Lane and Martha Kent dealing with their shared grief over Clark's death, and exploring what it's like for the people who knew the real person when a famous person dies, and THEN, as soon as Lois decices to move on, Clark comes back to life.

Heck, I'd take any of those blown out to 90 minutes, no question. Still, abbreviated as these sketches are, they’re good!

But, theres at least two colossal conceptual screwups in the movie that even this version can't do anything about.

The first is trying to invert the Avengers model, and introduce everyone in this movie and then spin them off. It ends up as an amazing counter-example of how well put together the first Avengers really was. Consider: basically every speaking character—Heroes AND Villains—as well as the core McGuffin, had already been introduced, so all that movie had to do was remind the audience who everyone was and then say "oh no! this guy from that movie has teamed up with aliens to get that thing from that other movie!" And BAM, you get to start 2/3 into the story and just RUN. Justice League has to spend the first 120 minutes just explaining things so that the rest of the movie can even happen.

The second big screwup is trying to go for the Kirby Fourth World / New Gods / Darkside stuff in one gulp. There’s so much there, and this movie has to push most of it to the margins. The result is a movie where the actual bad guy only shows up right at the end and has no lines, while the rest of the time they fight his least-interesting henchman.

As kind of a bonus mistake, the movie picks up where BvS left off, which means a dead Superman, which means most of the middle of the movie is a speedrun of “The Search for Spock” but for Superman. And it’s massively irritating, because the emphasis is all in the wrong places. Literally no one on earth thought Superman was going to stay dead, and even less people thought that he was going to sit out a Justice League movie. So the Return of Superman stuff in the middle is never interesting, it just feels like padding in a movie that already has too much going on. One more sublot jammed in that could have easily been stretched out into it’s own story, or should have been left behind in the conceptual phase.

There were some things I really liked, though. As I alluded to earlier the way they represent the Flash by having him stay the same speed but having the rest of the world go into slow motion is absolute genius, a perfect fit for Snyder's slow motion fetish, and forehead-slappingly obvious once you've seen it. And even though Days of Future Past had done something similar with Quicksilver three years earlier, this movie keeps finding new ways to use the idea, and even the lighting, instead of being ridiculous, serves as a snazzy indicator that Flash speed has kicked in before you have time to process that the background has slowed down. The shot where he steps back and catches the batarang is brilliant, and was rightly the center of the trailer.

I basically loved everything they did with Wonder Woman? Great use of a great character.

I also like that they way they solve the “Superman is too overpowered" problem is to lean all the way into it, and just show him as being on a completely different level from everyone else. That shot when he's fighting the League, and Flash is running by the frozen slow motion melee, and then Superman's eye suddenly moves to follow Flash? That's one of the best things anyone's ever done with Superman in live action. And it almost makes the “Search for Superman” stuff work, because he operates less like a character and more like a bonus mcguffin—he’s the Death Star plans, and once the League has him back on his feet they’re in good shape.

But, here in 2021, the biggest ding on JL is that absolutely everything that this movie tries to do in terms of tone or content, Infinity War / Endgame does better. The way this movie tries to be all edgelord dark looks downright amateur hour in a world where the "goofy" superhero francise made a movie where the bad guy wins and half the main characters die, and then rolls silent credits in front of a stunned audience.

[TEMPORAL INTRUSION: Hi, Gabe from ’24 here.  The original version of this had a horizontal line marking a transition here, but I’m going to replace that with something a little more thematically appropriate and #helmancut my own review from 3 years in the future.

Obviously, this was all written before we knew they were going to finally put that cycle of DC movies out of their misery and hand the keys to the guy Disney accidentally fired over some tweets, or that Marvel was going to spend the next several years exclusively stepping on rakes they had carefully placed in front of themselves.  I’m on the record as saying I think “superhero fatigue” is really “bad-movie-with-assigned-homework fatigue”, but either way, it’s a real thing.  I agree with everything I wrote here, but after years of relentlessly bad superhero and superhero-adjacent movies, I wouldn’t have written all this in such an upbeat tone.  And also, I sorta failed to point this out before, but those last two Avengers movies weren’t that great either.  “Grimdark bummer-times serious” just isn’t a key superheros play well in.

What’s remarkable to me now is that in the spring of ’21, waiting out what we thought was the tail end pandemic and just before our fall plans were wrecked by the Delta variant, I still remembered enough about the theatrical JL that I could do a comparison without a rewatch; now, I’m not sure I could tell you anything that happened in any of those movies.  Honestly, the only part of either version of JL that I still really remember is that mini–Indiana Jones movie starring Gal Godot at the beginning.  With the entire exercise now in the rear-view mirror:  They should have done a lot more of that.

We now return to the spring of 2021.]

I may be slightly more interested in the practice of turning a "long bad movie" into a "shorter, less bad" movie than the average person, but I think it's fascinating to see this, the original, and compare it to what they shipped in 2017. It's clear what Whedon's marching orders were: "cut it down to two hours, and add jokes". And that first one is a hell of a thing. You can squint and see there's a decent 3 hour version of this with a really solid deleted scenes section on the DVD, but cutting out half the movie is going to require some serious restructuring. For starters, you gotta pick a main character. There's two obvious choices:

Cyborg is clearly meant to be the emotional center of the movie. He's the only character with an actual "arc" who ends the movie in a different place that he starts. There's a kind of neat story in there about moving through the stages of grief, learning how to deal with the cards life deals you, and then finding a new family and purpose. The problem is—and this is a darkly hilarious punchline after all the allegations and drama—it turns out Ray Fisher really can't act. He's utterly out of his depth the entire time, and is utterly unable to deliver what the movie needs him to. He seems like a neat guy who everyone likes, and he was clearly treated abominably, and Whedon is a garbage person, but cutting his part to the bone was clearly the right call. That guy has no business being anywhere near a big movie, much less anchoring one.

Fortunately, however, the actual main character of the movie is clearly Wonder Woman. All the critical decisions in the movie are hers, she's the one that figures things out and gets the big exposition, she's the only one that gets a side adventure at the beginning—she's even the only one that gets her own theme music. This is a fairly clear "Wonder Woman and the Justice League" cut where it sticks with her as a the spine as she figures things out and recruits a team; not unlike the way Steve Rogers stays as the spine of the first Avengers movie.

So Whedon, of course, cuts out all her scenes and shoots a bunch of new stuff to make Batman the main guy. And you can almost see the panic-logic here. Suicide Squad bombed, BvS got a much more tepid reaction than they were expecting, Wonder Woman wasn't out yet. Recentering the movie on the one DC character thats proven able to hold down a franchise is an easy call to make, and "this movie needs more Batman" is a seemingly safe choice. But damn, what a screw up. And then it gets all extra icky once you roll in all the stuff we now know about "Joss Whedon, Fake Feminist".

Were there better ways to spend that 70 million bucks? Probably. It it a great movie? Not really. This isn't a Blade Runner-style "good movie becomes great" recut, this a Heavens Gate-style "oh, it turns out they really weren’t incompetent".

I'm glad they did this though. Its easy to see why the cast was so disgruntled, and I'm glad we got to see the movie they signed up to make. As the various studios figure out what to do with their personal streaming services, I hope "original cuts" of movies becomes a thing. If nothing else, I hope this encourages Disney to drop the first version of Rogue One on Disney+, or even, dare I say it, the real Star Wars.

But you know what? We've all had our work fucked up by other people. I'm glad someone got to haul their real work back out the trash and say "no, I made THIS."

Hundreds of Beavers

Your weekend movie recommendation: Hundreds of Beavers. An indie movie that did the festival circuit over the last year or so, just came out on iTunes this week. It’s a comedy about an applejack salesman becoming north America’s greatest fur trapper. I had a chance to see this one early. All I’ll say is that it’s kid-friendly, and it’s funny.

I’m gonna need to you to trust me on this. Part of the joy of this movie is the discovery. Don’t read anything about it, don’t watch the trailer. Just watch it.

Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously, previously, previously.

Wait a minute, they fucking fridged Rebecca Ferguson’s character? Absolutely not.

Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Oppenheimer

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously, previously.

At the end of the day, it’s a movie about the atomic bomb that doesn’t have a single Japanese person in it, and that thinks the most compelling thing about the bombing is that a well-dressed, comfortable white guy was slightly uncomfortable.

This is the point where I should probably neatly set my bias out on the table. There’s a genre of “Man Cinema” that has always left me cold. “Man”, both in the sense that they’re about Men, but also that they’re beloved by a certain kind of male film-buff audience. Those movies where a Man is forced by Circumstances to do Things He Is Not Proud Of, and the central conflict is his terrible Man Pain, as he glowers into the middle distance, an Island that No One Can Understand. What few women there are tend to either be tools to use, prizes to be won, or The Secret Behind Every Man’s Success, but never really a character in their own right. Basically, the default mode of the 70s New Hollywood; essentially every movie Coppola, Scorcese, or DePalma ever made.¹ Or the kinds of movies that one scene in Barbie was making fun of.

Chris Nolan’s movies have always slid right into that tradition. And look, I’m not going to say these movies are bad, or invalid, they’re just not my jam. If Oppenheimer hadn’t been the other half of Barbenheimer, there was basically no chance I would have watched it.

One of the delightful things about Barbenheimer as an event was that it was clear, like Elvis vs The Beatles, it was possible to like both, but everyone was going to have a preference. Long before they came out, I knew I was going to be Team Barbie.

And so? In short, my feelings about the movie are as ambivalent as the movie’s feelings about it’s subject. It is, of course, well made, and I find myself with more to say about it than I was expecting. I also suspect that every criticism I have of the film is also something somebody who really likes these kinds of movies would say, just with different emphasis.²

And with the preliminaries out of the way…

This is a movie about Great Men, who recognize and respect each other, and the Small Men who surround and resent them, biting at their ankles. Greatness, in this movie, is an fundamental condition, recognized by other Great Men, sometimes even long before anything Great has taken place.³

The cast is uniformly excellent. The standout performance is Robert Downey Jr., who is so good in this they finally gave him his Oscar for Chaplin. He continually finds new ways to look Small, playing Lewis Strauss as a bundle of grievance and bruised feelings, starting every interaction with an air of desperation, and ending it with the look of a man who has formed a new permanent grudge.

Cillian Murphy, on the other hand, plays Oppenheimer as a man almost supernaturally serene, exuding confidence with a side-order of mostly-justified arrogance, but with an increasingly haunted look in his eyes.

Both Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh make the most of their reduced screen times to show why Oppenheimer couldn’t resist either (although the opposite is less obvious.) It does put Emily Blunt in the unusual-for-her position of playing the second choice, which she seems to relish, and she conveys Kitty Oppenheimer’s blossoming alcoholism as a sort of general aura of decay rather than any specific action.

My favorite character was Matt Damon’s Leslie Groves, who was the only person who seemed to be playing a character, rather than a sketch of one. Not only that, he plays Groves as someone both unimpressed but also unintimidated by Greatness; or rather, someone from a completely different Great-to-Small axis as everyone else.

But, there’s not a single weak link in the movie, even the actors that show up for just a scene or two. Most everyone else is are reduced to shadows, because the pacing is, to use a technical term, a little weird. The movie hurtles along at a breakneck page, skipping along the top of the waves from scene to scene, at times seeming more like sketches of scenes that actual drama—the characters arrive, strike a pose, deliver a series of one-line monologues, and then the movie moves on.

This is exacerbated by the movie’s nested-flashback structure, which I liked quite a bit. Three stories plays out across the movie—the period around and including the Los Alamos project, Oppenheimer’s security hearing after the war, and Strauss’ (failed) senate confirmation hearing. The movie slides from one time to another, additionally using color (or the lack of it) to indicate which parts are from Oppenheimer’s point of view, and which are not.

The result is a movie that seems to abbreviate everything and never manges to give anything room to breathe, despite being three hours long. My standard belief stands that no movie should be over 2 hours; I’m quite confident that there are better versions of this movie at both 110 minutes and at 4 hourlong episodes.

As such you don’t need to know anything about these people or events to watch the movie, but it certainly helps to know who the guy with the bongos is, because the movie won’t tell you.

Actually, let’s hang on Feynman for a second. One of the funnier aspects of the movie is that basically every character is a real person who was famous in their own right, and they pop in for a scene or two and then vanish. Occasionally, one can’t help but feel like the movie has focused on the least interesting person that was present for the Manhattan Project?

Feynman gets, basically, two scenes. He’s one of the few scientists who we see Oppenheimer personally recruit, and the scene is shot from below, causing Oppenheimer, Groves, and Feynman to loom like statues, as dramatic music plays. We don’t find out this character’s name, or what he does, but the cinematography of the scene makes it clear he’s one of the Great Men. From that point on he’s in the background of nearly all the Los Alamos scenes, although I can’t remember him having an actual line of dialogue other than occasionally playing those bongos.

Then, he pops back in again for the Trinity test for the really-happened-but-heavily-mythologized moment where he realizes he doesn’t need the special filter, he can just watch the explosion through his car windshield. And then he vanishes for the rest of the movie, because unlike, say, Fermi or Teller, he has nothing to do with the later political machinations. But still, you’re left pointing at the TV like DiCaprio in the meme, thinking “that’s Feynman! Show him picking some locks!” And the same with Fermi, and the Chicago Pile being reduced to mere minutes of screen time, or hoping he’d ask “Where is everybody?”

(And, Feynman is played by Jack Quaid, most known in these parts as the voice of Boimler on Star Trek: Lower Decks, and so presumably the reason he’s not in the later parts of the movie is that Mainer finally rescued him.)

But that’s not the point of the movie, and fair enough. Because the central concern of the film isn’t really the atomic bomb, it’s the vicious grievances of the small and petty, and to illustrate there’s no service great enough that can overcome failing to be The Right Kind of American.

There’s a quote from Werner Von Braun (not appearing in this film) about Oppenheimer that “in England, he’d have been knighted,” but instead he was hounded from any formal government post due to the constellation of long-standing grudges from Strauss and others being allowed to fester in the paranoid excesses of the 1950s. Although, speaking of England choosing who to knight, knowing what happened to Turing at about the same time makes it look like Oppenheimer got off light.

The scenes in the security hearing are excruciating. While the formal subject—the renewal of his security clearance—is technical and seemingly inconsequential, the subtext is that this is determining who gets rewarded for their work, who gets the credit, and most importantly, who gets to decide how to use what they all built. Everyone, and there are many, who ever felt slighted by Oppenheimer’s greatness gets to show up and slide a knife in, a cavalcade of trivialities and paranoia. Even Groves, nearly omnipotent a decade before, proves powerless before the unchained animus of the thin-skinned.

After Oppenheimer’s loss, the movie does its most fascinating and distinctive move, and instead of following the title character into exile, it watches the consequences play out years later for his nemesis. While the focus is on Oppenheimer, the man himself makes no appearance in this phase of the film, as Strauss runs headlong into the bill coming due for a lifetime of treating everyone the way he treated Oppenheimer.

I spent the whole first part of the movie with the nagging feeling that this was all very familiar. That kind of vague, near–deja vu feeling. What is this reminding me of? A Great Man, a Genius, taken down by the petty grievances of Small Men, told mostly in flashback?

About an hour in, it hit me: this is all just Amadeus.

Which illustrates what I think is the core flaw in the movie. It knows Oppenheimer is a genius, but a genius in something neither the audience nor the filmmakers know very much about. There’s no good way for him to Be A Genius on screen in a way the audience will recognize, instead we have lots and lots of scenes where other people talk about what a genius he is, and then Oppenheimer stands dramatically filmed from below, looking off into the middle distance, while dramatic music plays, not entirely unlike the Disney Pocahontas.

Recall, if you will, the opening scene of Amadeus. Salieri, Mozart’s colleague, Nemesis, and possible murderer, is in a sanatorium nearing the end of his life. A young priest, who acts as the audience’s surrogate, arrives to take his confession, and by extension, have the movie narrated to him. The priest has no idea who Salieri is, or was, or that he was once one of the most famous composers of Europe, just that he’s an old man with a piano.

Oppenheimer never mangages the simple directness of Salieri playing his own compositions, which neither the audience or the priest recognize, and then painfully playing the opening notes of Serenade №13: A Little Night Music and have the audience and their surrogate instantly recognize it. Just playing Mozart’s actual music covers the majority of what Amadeus is trying to do, and Oppenheimer has nothing like that to fall back on.

Similarly, RDJ is genuinely extraordinary in this, constantly finding new ways to be small, and petty, and fragile, but the script never gives him a scene with the clarity and focus of Salieri leaning back into his chair and hissing with a mixture of exhaustion and defeat, “That was Mozart.”

It is funny that for both Amadeus and Oppenheimer, it’s the actor playing the nemesis who won the Oscar.

The other biggest problem with this movie is it’s lack of an actual point of view. It’s not apolitical so much as anti-political, there’s a big hole in the middle where an opinion should go.

This is par for the course of Nolan movies—this is the man who made the definite “Fascism is good, actually” movie with The Dark Knight, but with the sense that he made it by accident, just by taking Batman more seriously than anyone else, and then failing to notice or care where he landed. There’s an almost pathological refusal to comment on what’s happening, to have an opinion. Part of this is the fact that the majority of this movie is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view, and his point of view is, to put it mildly, ambiguous.

The movie knows there’s something interesting about the fact that Oppenheimer and many of the other scientists are Jewish, building the bomb to stop the Nazis. It knows there’s something interesting about the fact he can speak multiple languages but not Yiddish. It knows theres something about the way many of these Great Men were leftist/socialist/communists types in their youth, then put that away to work on the bomb, and then have that come back to haunt them later. But the movie can’t quite figure out what to do with that, so it toys with it and then puts it back on the shelf.

It almost makes contact with the world view that only a WASP can be a real loyal American and that Oppenheimer is questionable from two directions—being both Jewish and a possible communist—but never makes the connection. It gestures at the fact that the jews were being put into camps, but then never addresses that the bomb was only used on the people the americans were putting into camps.

It utterly fails to put the security clearance hearing in any sort of context of the McCarthyism panic of the time, and the fact that a small people were using an atmosphere of paranoia to act on an old grudge and air out their personal animosity. It’s there, buried deep in the mix, but you have to have done the homework first to see it.

Some of this is down to the film’s structure and pace. For example, the fact that Strauss resented Oppenheimer’s seeming rejection of their shared Jewish heritage is actually in the movie, albeit expressed in two single lines of dialogue, 90 minutes apart. The root of their animus is left vague. In reality, wikipedia will give you screen after screen dissecting their mutual dislike; the movie more-or-less summarizes it with the look on RDJ’s face when he realizes that Oppenheimer already knows Albert Einstein.

Mostly though, the movie refuses to comment, Were Oppenheimer and the others going to communist meetings because they were believers, or because that’s where all the hot babes were? It’s ambiguous.

The whole movie is weird and ambiguous and ambivalent, because the real guy was weird and ambiguous and ambivalent. What did Oppenheimer really think about, you know, all that atomic bomb stuff? It’s not clear! And this is where the movie fundamentally makes a decision that I understand, but disagree with. Nolan and company make the call to just lean in to the ambiguity all the way, so not only do we never get a handle on Oppenheimer, we never really get a handle on what anyone else thinks, either.

So we get a scene where Oppenheimer and the other Manhattan project scientists are looking at pictures of the wreckage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the camera zooms on in on Cillian Murphy’s face filled with an ambiguous expression. No only does the movie not show the final result of their work, we don’t really see anyone else reacting to it either. And, that’s it, huh? That’s our take on the atomic bombing, the Scarecrow looking a little perturbed?

In fairness, the last scene lands on “this was probably bad, actually,” and Gary Oldman shows up (like he did in The Dark Knight) to deliver the closest thing to a point of view that the movie has, which is that Oppenheimer needs to get over himself, a whole lor of people had to work together to unleash what they did.

One gets the feeling that the movie ends on Strauss’ failure mostly because that’s the only storyline that has actual closure, everything else just kinda floats away.

And look, I don’t need every piece of art I consume to share my politics, I don’t need every movie to end with Doctor Who materializing and reciting the Communist Manifesto. I mean, that would be bad ass, but I get it. What bugs me is not when people have opinions I disagree with, it’s when they fail to have one at all. Because this is a movie deeply uninterested in having a broader opinion. There’s a point where a desire for ambiguity stops being an artistic statement in it’s own right, and starts looking like cowardice.

At the end of the day, this is a movie that thinks the atomic bomb was probably bad, but on the other hand, the guy who didn’t like Oppenheimer didn’t get his cabinet post so maybe that’s okay? It feels like nothing so much as a three hour version of that dril tweet about drunk driving.

If you want to spend three hours watching the way Greatness is torn down by Small Men, and about the way horrors of war beget further horrors made by haunted men, I’d advise against this movie and instead a double feature of Amadeus and Godzilla. If nothing else, in both cases the music is better.

---

1. One of the the things I love about Star Wars so much, especially in the context of the late 70s, is that Luke spends the first act being this kind of character, and then moves past it. One of the reasons Anakin never really works is that he is that kind of character—he’s clearly supposed to function like Michael Corleone, but they failed to hire Al Pacino to play him.

2. The all-time champion of this kind of review, of course, is Mad Max: Fury Road where the most positive and the most negative reviews were both “It’s just one big car chase!”

3. There’s a couple of scenes where you half-expect then to start comparing midichlorian counts.

Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Wes Anderson 2023 Double Feature

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously.

I don’t think “realism” is a super-interesting aesthetic goal. It’s a legitimate goal, certainly, but far from the only option and rarely the most compelling. But Movies, especially since the 70s, have had an attitude that that “realistic” means “for grownups”, and anything fantastical or stylized means “for kids”, with certain carve-outs for “surrealism” that mostly only apply to David Lynch.

Which is one of the reasons I love Wes Anderson’s movies so much, as he’s one of the people who seem to be actively thinking about “what can we do other than make it look real, though?” There’s a running joke that every Wes Anderson movie is “the most Wes Andersony movie yet!” but that’s not quite right. He’s got a set of techniques, tools, and he keeps refining them, finding new ways to hone the point.

Anderson always gets kind of a strong reaction in certain corners of the web, which is funny for a lot of reasons, but most of all because the kind of people who don’t like his movies tend to also be the kind of people who are mad everything looks like a Marvel movie now, and it has a real quality of “we want something different! No, not like that!”¹ That said, people mustering the energy to actually hate something is a pretty strong signal that you made Art instead of Content.²

It was a stacked year, with two releases, which I watched in completely the wrong order.

Asteroid City

It is an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication. But together they present an authentic account of the inner workings of a modern theatrical production.

Anderson has always leaned heavily into artifice as a storytelling technique, and here he pushes that about as far as possible. Even within the terms of it’s own fiction, it’s all fake: a fake performance of an unreal play, made for a TV broadcast which isn’t real either, and then proceeds into what is absolutely not a play. It’s a strong move to open with “none of this really happened”. That’s implicit in all fiction, but rarely is it foregrounded like this. The movie gets a couple of things out of this.

It results in maybe his all time best opening; black and white, a non-widescreen aspect ratio, and Bryan Cranston doing a Rod Serling impression as the host of the TV show from the 50s. He describes the play we’re about to see, and then introduces the writer (Ed Norton) who steps out onto the stage and introduces the plot outline, the characters, and then walks through the layout of the scenery, and the camera angle cuts around showing the “actors” in their street clothes, and then each piece of fake scenery. The camera pulls back, the lights turn off, and them—bam—we’re a color widescreen, following a train into Asteroid City, where the camera carefully shows us each of the pieces of the set around town, now both more and less real.

It’s Shakespearian, but not the way people usually mean it—instead it’s the opening of Henry V rendered in the language of TV.

And the movie proceeds in the multiple layers, moving back and forth between the Host and his TV show, the actors and writers of the “play” working on it, and then the “play” itself. This also means many of the actors are effectively playing more than one part, the “actor” and the “character”.

But we also get the layers bleeding into each other; the host accidentally entering the scene at the wrong time, actors leaving the play to talk to the director or to each other. Rushmore and Barbie meet up behind the stage and perform the scene that was “cut for time” roughly where it was supposed to go. Characters talk about ideas for how to stage scenes that are coming up. The structure of a play is maintained, with title cards popping in to remind us which act or scene this is.

The cast, as always, is stacked and excellent. Just about the entire Anderson rep company is in this, with actors who would normally get top billing showing up here to stand in the back of scenes with no lines, and then deliver one word or two. There is a Bill Murray–shaped hole that Steve Carell does about a good a job of fulling as anyone could. (Originally, I assumed the Bill Murray role was the one taken by Tom Hanks, but knowing that it was actually the hotel manager makes that character make a lot more sense.)

There’s a lot of thematic material churning around about loss and acceptance and moving on and human connections and art, but it’s also a movie where the characters openly talk about the fact that the don’t understand what it all means. Anderson likes to leave some blanks for the audience to fill in, and this might be his best deployment of that technique. I know what it all meant to me, but it feels like cheating to say.

Doesn't matter. Just keep telling the story.

But, now that we have all that out of the way, let’s focus on what’s really important: this is an incredibly funny movie, full of incredibly good actors, doing incredibly silly things with incredibly straight faces.³

It’s less of a movie and more a series of skits performed completely deadpan. All of Anderson’s movies are like this, but in some ways this as close as he’s ever gotten to the full Airplane!.

From the opening where Matt Dillon describes the two possible problems with the car and then discovers a third, followed by the three girls disagreeing with the waitress that they are princesses, the movie is continuously funny, and I pretty much laughed out loud the entire time.

Which, of course, is the secret to all the thematic and structural stuff I spent all those words on up front—it’s not that they don’t matter, but they’re there to set up a bunch of really funny jokes, and to do some slight of hand to keep you from noticing that the joke is coming, until, like the UFO, it’s right on top of you.

I loved it, by the way.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More

People love faces.

I could make an argument here invoking evolutionary biology, or some deeper philosophical point, but this isn’t that kind of review so I’m going to skip all that and say that most storytelling boils down to being fascinated by other people’s faces.

And so we come to The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which centers on “what if we had some really good actors look the camera dead in the eye and tell the audience a story?”

In a lot of ways, this quartet of stories feels like the endpoint of the increasing artifice Anderson has been working in since at least French Dispatch. My take is that this is less about artificiality for its own sake than it is borrowing visual storytelling techniques from other mediums and deploying them in a movie, where they look more fake compared to the default “realist” style.

A very early example of this is the scene in Life Aquatic where camera pulls back to reveal a cutaway side view of the Belafonte as Steve Zissou narrates a tour of his boat. The boat isn’t literally a cut-away, but the scene plays as “here’s how we would do this if it was a comic.”

Here, it’s using using techniques and tricks from the theatre, but remixed in a way you could never do live on stage. So, we have stagehands handing props to actors on screen, actors sitting on prop boxes to simulate levitating, pieces of scenery sliding in and out of frame as scenes reorient. Except the scenery moves in ways it never could on stage and the stage hands come from places they couldn’t have come; this is the visual language of a play deployed in a way that could only work in a movie.

The first segment starts with Ralph Fiennes in character as Roald Dahl himself, looking very much like the real thing, settling into a fairly accurate recreation of Dahl’s real-life writing hut. he settles into his chair, fusses about with his pencils, the heater pops and hisses. Bright colors non-withstanding, it’s realistic—we’re in the real world, watching Roald Dahl getting ready to write a story. There’s a naturalism to it, a sense of authenticity; this is probably what it really looked like when a roughly 60-year old man sat down to write. He settles into place, pulls the the writing surface into his lap, puts pencil to paper, and then…

…the whole tone changes. Fiennes continues to talk, narrating the story, but his aspect shifts; he’s the narrator now, not an old man writing; he pushes the paper away, stands up, walks out of the hut with a completely changed demeanor as the scenery changes behind him. We’re not in the real world anymore, we’re explicitly in the Land of Story now. It’s one of the most marvelous transitions I’ve ever seen, and it’s all in essentially one shot.

The story plays out as a series of nested stories, Roald Dahl’s outermost narration, Henry Sugar’s discovery of the book, the book’s contents as narrated by the doctor, the story told by the old man of how he learned to see without his eyes, and then back out again until we unwind back to Roald Dahl in front of his shed again. The narration passes hands, and the actors narrating play a kind of double role, both as a character on screen and then turning towards the camera to deliver an aside to the camera.⁴

I found it compelling almost to the point of hypnosis.

As with Asteroid City, the artifice is the point. Did this really happen? Of course it didn’t, it’s a short movie on Netflix based on a Roald Dahl story made by the guy who did Royal Tenenbaums. Does it matter? The end hits the same either way.

Anderson has never come close to matching the emotional punch at the end of Royal Tenenbaums of “I’ve had a rough year, dad.” He’s spent a lot of time trying to recapture that hit, never successfully. While he’s moved on from trying, he does like to end his movies with a punchline. “And that’s what I have done” is one of his best.

This is exactly the sort of experiments that 1) short movies, and 2) streaming should be used for. It’s outstanding that this was what finally won Anderson his first “big boy” Oscar.

Some stray observations on the other three stories:

“The Rat Catcher” was always one of Dahl’s slice-of-weird-life stories, where things keep getting more uncomfortable without ever being overtly dangerous. Here, it turns into an acting clinic between Ralph Fiennes finding new ways to be menacing, and Moss from The IT Crowd finding new ways to look horrified.

“The Swan” always bothered me as a kid, Dahl always had mean streak, and this was one of his meaner stories, the sort of story where only bad things happen. It also had a strangely ambiguous ending, especially for Dahl—what really happened there? Did the boy escape? Is he dead? Is the thing that happens at the end metaphorical for dying? And it’s ambiguous in the sort of way you can get away with in prose, since the reader can only “see” what the author describes. I was very pleased that they found a way to keep the ambiguity intact despite the audience now being able to see everything that happened.

Also, it’s hilarious that Rupert Friend was absolutely mesmerizing in this at the same time he was phoning in being the Grand Inquisitor in Obi-Wan Kenobi. What a weird year he had!

“Poison”, meanwhile, after almost being word-for-word with the source material, does change the end, to refuse to let the racism off the hook. Partly this is through some sharp editing, but mostly through the looks on Ben Kingsley’s face.

It’s worth noting, for the record, that while this set of stories has a remarkable variety of narrators, none of them are women, which while accurate to the source material, rankles somewhat here in the twenties.

I Guess I Should Put A Conclusion

Like I mentioned way back at the start, I watched these out of order, Henry Sugar first, then Asteroid City, so on first swing the movie felt like a step back from the shorts. On a rewatch in the right order, it was more obvious how they built on each other. But I enjoyed them both either way.

Where do you go from here, though? Henry Sugar really does feel like an endpoint for the approach Anderson has been developing since at least The French Dispatch, there’s a straight line from that movie, though Asteroid City to Henry Sugar. Or maybe not an endpoint but more that the technique has arrived at it’s final form.

I’m really looking forward to whatever comes next.⁵

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1. This is because these people don’t want “different”, they want everything to look like a Scorcese movie.

2. Which pretty much sums up the whole of the current economy and the human condition in one sentence. I will not be taking questions at this time.

3. It’s incredible.

4. It’s a kind of extended riff on soliloquies, but that both makes it sound overly pretentious and undersells it at the same time, so I won’t make that comparison.

5. I was expecting another stop-motion palette cleanser, but instead it sounds like it’s going to be a spy movie?

Getting Old

A very common trope in 80s movies was the tired, obstructionist, authority figure. You know, the EPA guy, the high school principal, the bad boss, whatever. The guy in a suit trying to stop the premise of the movie from happening.

These characters had two roles, narratively speaking. First, they acted as secondary antagonists, a miniboss for the middle part of the movie, if you will. But they also gave voice to the obvious objections to the high-concept premise, but did it in such an asshole way that the audience wouldn’t take them seriously. There probably are regulatory concerns about storing ghosts in a basement in Manhattan? Or problems with high school kids skipping that much school? But having the person bringing it up be such a jerk defuses it, and solidly positions the audience against the man with no dick, or whoever.

I suspect the reason these don’t crop up as often anymore is that movies feel that audiences are more confortable with those sorts of high-concept premises, and don’t feel the need to smooth that over as much. As an example, every John Hughes high school movie has the principal as one of the antagonists, but Clueless doesn’t even have the principal on screen, even though Cher spends less time in class than Ferris ever did.

I bring this up because one of the weirder changes I’ve noticed in myself—and by extension, my politics—as I’ve gotten older is an increased sympathy with these figures.

This observation is brought to you mostly by having rewatched Die Hard at the end of the year (remember kids, Santa won’t come until Hans Gruber falls off of Nakatomi Plaza) and I keep thinking about how Deputy Chief of Police Dwayne T. Robinson is a massive jerk, but isn’t actually wrong.

Die Hard is a great movie that has aged in some really interesting ways, which probably deserve a longer post at some point, but recall there are two sets of authority figure minor antagonists—the LA police, who are basically hapless, and the FBI, who are actively malevolent. The LAPD are there to make things harder at the start of the movie, as Hans Gruber says, he’s waiting for the FBI.

Deputy Chief Dwayne’s major objection is that, as he puts it, all the LAPD have is McClane’s word for what’s going on. What he doesn’t know is that he’s in an 80s action movie where reality is bending around Bruce Willis to make sure the first sentence of his obituary won’t contain the word Moonlighting; under “normal” circumstances, none of this would work out. The movie knows this, too, and makes sure we know it’s in on the joke by making his first objection, which the dad from Family Matters angrily denies, “how do you know he isn’t the guy who shot up your car?”—which of course, McClane was. When the FBI show up and turn out to be actual bad guys, the movie makes sure we know that Dwayne is as horrified as we are; he’s a jerk, and a dipshit, but he’s not evil, and he’s not wrong. Most days, he’d have probably even been right.

But that’s not the one I keep thinking about. The one I keep thinking about is the “Duality of Man” scene in the better, funnier second half¹ of Full Metal Jacket. You know, this one: Full Metal Jacket Born to Kill/Peace Button Duality of Man. It’s one of the most quoted scenes in the movie for a reason, it’s basically the whole movie’s philosophy in a nutshell.

The usual “young man discovering the movie” interpretation here is that the Colonel is confused, and that Joker outsmarts him here, and that the Colonel responds to his own confusion with angry bluster and weird jingoism. A scan of the youtube comments, which is always a mistake but bear with me, shows most of the people commenting have that view.

But go watch that scene again. General Rieekan, presumably fresh in from Hoth, knows exactly what the score is before he says anything. He’s not asking Joker about the peace sign because he’s confused, he’s asking because he wants to make Joker say it out loud.

“Then how about getting with the program? Why don't you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?"

There’s a whole media thesis in all this about the American Individualist Hero as the Lone Sane Man standing up to authority figures who represent The Establishment and the Insanity of the Status Quo, which I’ll spare you because I want to write that even less than you want to read it.

But look. If there’s one thing I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older, is that we’re only going to be successful if we all work together. There are very, very few situations where one person can actually ascend and leave everyone else behind. The colonel knows this—he might be waiting for this peace thing to blow over, he might be an asshole and probably a low-grade war criminal, but he knows all the marines are in the same danger, and all the statements in the world about the duality of man aren’t going to stop a bullet. (This is also kinda the point of the last scene in the movie.)

If I was living near that firehouse, I’d want to know that the EPA had signed off on anything called “a containment facility.” School is worth it, no matter how good your synthesizer coughs are. The guy on the radio who likes Roy Rogers really might have been the one that shot up your car.

And sometimes, in real life, the lame authority figure isn’t being obstructionist for obstructions sake, they sometimes know something you don’t. Or they’re remembering that there are other people here that you didn’t.

It’s worth acknowledging at this point that the “punk rocker to aging conservative suburbanite” is a cliché for a reason, and you have to stop and check yourself from time to time to make sure you didn’t accidentally dose yourself with the wrong red pill or whatever. But I think as long as you can keep your empathy up, you can shake that off, no matter how much you realize the boss might have a point.

Because real life is complicated, and messy, and full of choices with no good answers. And you have to power through, knowing there’s no good options, reducing harm as much as you can, linking arms, working together, pull as many people up the ladder behind you as you can. As fun as it is to be “that guy”, this isn’t Die Hard, for just about any possible definition of “this”.

There’s at least a dozen things I’m subtweeting here, but I cannot tell you how often I’ll see something—in the news, at work, just generally “around”—and mutter under my breath “why don’t you jump on the team?”

Kid, we all want to go home, and none of us want to be here. Let’s figure out how to all go home together.

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1. Don’t @-me, it’s true.

Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Animation Double-Header

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them, and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)

In brief: loved it.

The Turtles are a weird franchise for many reasons, not the least of which because they started as a satire of early-80s comics generally, and Frank Miller’s Daredevil specifically and then managed to wildly outlive all the things they were satirizing. (If you will, they’re the Weird Al of comics.). They’re an intentionally absurd concept, the characters look weird on purpose, the whole thing is deeply silly. But, they’re still here mostly because they’re just so much damn fun. As such, they’ve landed somewhere between a fairy tale and a jazz standard; constantly being reinvented, every couple of years someone new does their take; not a reboot so much as a new cover version.

TMNT adaptations live or die based on how well they remember that the turtles aren’t a team, they’re a family. There’s a tendency to write them as, basically, store-brand X-Men, with Leonardo as Cyclops, and Splinter as somewhere between Professor X and that floating head from Power Rangers. But Splinter isn’t their boss, or commanding officer, or their teacher, he’s their dad, and Leo isn’t their field commander, he’s the older brother the others let pretend is in charge. On that front, Mutant Mayhem does about as well as anyone ever has done.

Possibly the most genius move was to cast actual teenagers as the Turtles and then record them as a group; the characters and their relationship’s shine in a way they almost never have. There’s a scene towards the start of the movie—which rightly ended up as one of the first trailers—where Leo is trying to get the others pumped up for their new mission, which turns out to be shopping, whereupon the others proceed to bust on him mercilessly, which manages to simultaneously nail all four words of the title better than maybe anyone has before.

It’s an incredibly thoughtful take on the material. There’s a lot of “stuff” out there to use or not, and clearly a lot of care was put into what elements to keep, which to highlight, and which to leave behind. Its also a movie that knows its main job is to be an on-ramp, so it avoids any sort of extended exposition or complex back stories in favor of a fun adventure movie with fun characters.

The best word I can come up with for this movie’s relationship with the existing material is relaxed. It knows that the core audience it’s targeting doesn’t know anything, and that the older fans who do already have their own “definitive version”, all of which the movie seems to take as permission to try new spins on old ideas.

This leads to some fun choices—the villain is new, and their backstory is assembled out of some fun bits and pieces from previous versions. The tease of Shredder at the end manages to hit the same “oh snap, that’s going to be wild!” energy regardless of if you’re a new or old viewer.

There are some deep cuts here—this is a movie with both Utroms and Mondo Gecko—but the movie assumes you don’t know who these things are and even if you do, you havn’t seen them in this configuration, so the recognition is pure value-add, rather than a reward for finishing the homework.

Even the seemingly-strange call to cast Jackie Chan as Splinter pays off, giving Splinter a fight right out of an early Police Story, staggering around, desperately pulling props out of left field to fight off an endless supply of bad guys—there’s a bit with a desk chair that if you told me was from Rumble in the Bronx I would believe you with no further fact-checking.

But critically, the movie knows the only thing from the past it has to get right are the five main characters and their relationships, and there, it excels. I wasn’t expecting much, and it turned out to be the best take on the Ninja Turtles anyone has ever done.

The animation style here is fantastic, and clearly exists because Spider-Verse cleared the way, landing somewhere around a “hand-drawn claymation” aesthetic, while still being 3d CG. It looks great, from the subtle moves of the Turtle’s eyes or hands while they talk, to things like the Turtle van crashing through a crowd of absurd monsters.

We’re starting to see the projects that were greenlit because the original Spider-Verse was a hit, and it’s clear that movie is giving everyone else justification to explore more and different styles of animation.

It’s fun, the action is exciting, the characters are appealing, the conflicts justified, emotions earned, with a satisfying ending that leaves you wanting more. Yes please.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

Speaking of movies that were greenlit because Spider-Verse was a hit…

Let’s start with the negatives: this movie is way too long, and then ends with a cliffhanger. There’s no movie over two hours that wouldn’t be a better movie under two hours—or cut into two movies. If you really need that kind of time, you should probably be making TV? I’m utterly confident that when the sequel to this is finally released, it’ll be obvious how to rework the pair of them into three better 90 minute movies.

Otherwise, this is one of those sequels that actually understands what was good about the first movie, and then does more of that.

Most American comic-book superheroes tend to have a similar set of powers: strong, good at punching, maybe they can fly, some kind of signature weapon. Distinctive outfit, but not too hard to draw. Look at the Avengers; they’re all really good at punching, a couple of them can also shoot, and two can fly.

Part of what makes Spider-Man so fun is how weird the character is compared to that baseline. He’s not just strong, he’s crazy strong. He can’t fly, but he can swing? On Webs? And he can shoot those webs as either a weapon, or a tool, or a way to disable bad guys? Plus, sticks to walls, oh, and ESP. And on top of all that, he’s got one of the most elaborate costume designs out there. And then on top of that, he’s funny. Like the Turtles, it’s a character that started as a spoof—what if the teen sidekick was on his own, but didn’t have a job, and had to make his own costume from scratch and do laundry—that fully surpassed everything it making fun of.

As a result of this, Marvel has kept tossing out new spins on the character; as a woman, from the future, as a different kid, different revisions on the powers, maybe this one can do electricity. Even the “original” Peter Parker Spider-Man has two distinct iterations, one vaguely fifteen, one just shy of 30, occasionally married. Of the crowd of various alternate Spider-People, Miles Morales rose to the top as both a great character in his own right, as well as establishing himself as the definitive take on “Spider-Man as a teenager.”

The first Spider-Verse got a lot of mileage out of putting the older version of Peter and Miles together, with Pete acting as the mentor/experience superhero that Pete never had as a solo teen act, while—correctly—keeping the focus on Miles, and threw in some other Spiders while they were at it. The new movie wisely keeps Peter almost entirely on the sidelines, and fills the movie with other versions, delighting in being able to contrast the various Spiders.

The result is a movie that revels in how fun “Spider-Man” is a concept. Webs, sticking to walls, vaguely-defined ESP. Long scenes of Spider-People swinging through the air, shooting webs, solving problems the way no other action hero, super or otherwise, would.

It’s hard to begrudge the flabby length of a movie that’s enjoying itself so much. “How many times have you watched the Batmobile drive out of the Batcave?” you can almost hear the movie ask, “let’s spend a few more minutes with these ridiculous characters webbing up a falling building!”

This extends through the non-action parts of the movie just as well; these are characters that aren’t immune to gravity, but are highly resistant to it. My favorite scene in the movie was Miles and Gwen on what might be a date at the top of a building, casually walking off the edge of a ledge, and then sitting and watching the sunset from the underside of that same ledge, Gwen’s ponytail hanging down the only sign they’re sitting somewhere no one else could.

Which brings me to the other standout part of the movie, Spider-Gwen. “Gwen Stacy, but she got bit by the radioactive spider instead of Pete”, was one of those low-hanging fruit ideas that’s been waiting around for half a century for someone to finally pick. Originally tossed off as a one-off in the comics, the character hit hard enough she’s stuck around become the other best take on a Spider-Person in the last few decades. Even the costume is fantastic take on how a different kind of teenager would make a costume—spider symbol, but with ballet slippers and a hoodie. Expanding her role from the last movie, here she settles in as the other lead, anchoring most of the emotional journeys of the film.

My personal favorite alternate Spider-Man was Spider-Man 2099, from Marvel’s short lived 2099 experiment in the early 90s, which dared to ask, “what if our characters were just a little more cyberpunk, and a lot angrier?” None of them really worked, either creatively or commercially.¹ So, imagine my surprise when Miguel O’Hara, Spider-Man 2099 himself, showed up in this! I was a little salty when I found out he was going to be the bad guy, except he isn’t really—he’s the antagonist, but he isn’t the villain.

Good guys fighting each other is about the most tired trope super-hero comics has, and this movie might be the first time anyone has actually put the time in to work. I takes the time to set up a genuine difference of world view between Miles and Miguel, where by the end, you genuinely buy that neither is willing to let the other continue. Most of the time when the good guys fight each other it’s because they didn’t have one very simple conversation, here, that conversation happens, and things get well past that point before webs start slinging.

The nature of that conflict is delightfully meta. Miguel wants to “defend the timeline”, and if that means terrible things needs to happen to Miles, so be it. Miles, correctly, isn’t really interested in having loved ones die for an abstract point about “history going the right way”. This is explicitly framed in terms of “protecting canon” vs “new ideas”, with Miguel standing in for the old fans who won’t suffer changes to their beloved franchise, and Miles as the voice of the people saying, “yeah, but what if we didn’t just make bad copies of stories from the 70s?” Literalizing these kind of fan arguments feels like exactly the way to do franchise fiction here in the mid-20s.

And, I haven’t even brought up the animation yet, which is, of course, outstanding. Each alternate universe gets its own distinct animation style, which each character keeps when the move to a different universe, leading to multiple styles overlapping each other, which is visually astounding and somehow manages to never be overwhelming. It’s the sort of thing where you look at it constantly thinking “how did they do this?”, and then you find out that the answer was “labor abuse”, which does drain the enthusiasm somewhat.

It looks incredible, but for the sake of all the animators I hope the next one takes a long time to come out.

Fun, exciting, appealing characters, goofy powers, cool visuals. What more could you want from a two-and-a-half hour Spider-Man cartoon?

What did we learn from all this?

This is usually the point where were start talking about high-vs-low art, and questions like “what more could you want?” get answers like “real people with real emotions, we’ve had enough cartoons, thankyou”. This was the central conflict behind the Barbenheimer phenomenon over the summer, and why Coppola looked like he was going to have a stroke when he had to congratulate Barbie on “saving cinema”.

But I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. Theres a class of movies that don’t get made enough: the adventure film targeted at 9-year olds, but talks up to them instead of down, that they can watch with their parents and older siblings, and everyone enjoys them. This has never been that common a genre, because it’s way easier to either skew younger, or juice it up and go for the “older teenagers sneaking into R-rated movies” demographic. The PG-13-ification of action movies has only made this worse, I mean, they actually made a movie called Batman vs Superman a couple years ago that I couldn’t take my 9-year old to, and he’d have hated if I did.

I’m not looking for something drained of all content, but I am looking to avoid any more nightmares about “the time captain america kicked that guy into the fan”, or “when han solo got stabbed”, or, you know, extended scenes of animals being tortured to death. (Watching movies with tweens, you really notice how much torture these kinds of movies have in them these days.) You know, movies like old Star Wars, not new Star Wars. It’s always worth celebrating when there’s a fun movie everyone can sign up for.

Something else that’s been talked about a lot with regards to 2023’s strange box office has been “super-hero fatigue”, and while that’s not not a thing, it’s also not the whole story. Both of these movies were new swings at old superhero franchises with decades of “lore” and factionalized fan-bases, and they both got a very positive critical reception, they made a bunch of money, and managed to avoid being a flashpoint for toxic assholes. And let’s just really underline this, despite being animation, both movies had explicitly diverse casts and characters. It’s possible. More like these, please.

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1. Ironically the only time the “2099” concept worked, in the sense of “new takes on old characters, but in the blade runner-o-mancer future” was a couple of years later when DC Animation launched Batman Beyond. I’m utterly convinced that show started as “what would it have taken to make Spider-Man 2099 good,” and then worked backwards to make it Batman. Look, Terry is absolutely Spider-Man, he’s just stuck with a Bat-Suit.

Hot Takes on Lightsabers

This Monday dose of Hot Takes (tm) is brought to you by my having watched the trailers for both the next Rebel Moon¹ and the new Star Wars show The Acolyte² over the weekend.

I have some hot takes on Lightsabers.

Hot Take №1: Every Movie Should Have Lightsabers

I think the science-fiction movie community should do what fantasy novelists did with Tolkien’s elves, and just body Star Wars and run off with them. Put them in everything. The one thing from the Rebel Moons I fully endorse is the attitude of “it’s been long enough, we’re taking these.”

Hot Take №2: Movies With Lightsabers Should Use Them Less

A stylistic thing that the original trilogy did was that whenever a lightsaber powered up, it was a big deal. Partly, this was because they were expensive and hard to do, but the result was that they only³ came out at major story pivot points; when you heard that sound stuff was about to go down. Pulling a lightsaber out shouldn’t ever be casual, you know? It’s a sign the movie just shifted into a new gear.

This is where I segue and say I really like that Andor doesn’t have Jedi or the like, but I’d really like to see what that team could do with one (1) lightsaber fight.

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1. Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver; Yeah, it looks like more Rebel Moon!

2. The Acolyte; On the one hand, the track record for modern non-Andor Star Wars isn’t great? On the other hand, it’s being run by the same person who did Russian Doll?

3. Okay, the one genuine exception to this is the part in Return of the Jedi where Luke fights off the last speeder bike. But…

   1. This is Return of the Jedi, and that whole movie is a little thematically and structurally sloppier than its predecessors
   2. Plus, the whole middle chunk of that movie, from the sail barge exploding to Wicket telling 3PO about the bunker’s back door, is a total mess
   3. It’s pretty cool though, so we’ll let it slide

Nausicaä at 40

Hayao Miyazaki’s animated version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind came out forty years ago this week!

Miyazaki is one of the rare artists where you could name any of his works as your favorite and not get any real pushback. It’s a corpus of work where “best” is meaningless, but “favorite” can sometimes be revealing. My kid’s favorite is Ponyo, so that’s the one I’ve now seen the most. When I retire, I want to go live on the island from Porco Rosso. * Totoro* might be the most delighted I’ve ever been while watching a movie for the first time. But Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is the only one I bought on blu-ray.

Nausicaä is the weird one, the one folks tend not to remember. It has all the key elements of a Miyazaki film—a strong woman protagonist, environmentalism, flying, villains that aren’t really villains, good-looking food—but it also has a character empty the gunpowder out of a shotgun shell to blow a hole in a giant dead insect exoskeleton. He never puts all those elements together quite like this again.

I can’t now remember when I saw it for the first time. It must have been late 80s or early 90s, which implies I saw the Warriors of the Wind cut, or maybe a subbed Japanese import? (Was there a subbed Japanese import?) I read the book—as much of it as existed—around the same time. I finally bought a copy of the whole thing my last year of college, in one of those great “I’m an adult now, and I can just go buy things” moments. And speaking of the book, this is one of the rare adaptations where it feels less like an “adaptation” than a “companion piece.” It’s the same author, using similar pieces, configured differently, providing a different take on the same material with the same conclusions.

So what is it about this move that appeals to me so much? The book is one of my favorite books of all times, but that’s a borderline tautology. If I’m honest, it’s a tick more “action-adventure” that most other Ghibli movies, which is my jam, but more importantly, it’s action-adventure where fighting is always the wrong choice, which is extremely my jam (see also: Doctor Who.)

I love the way everything looks, the way most of the tech you can’t tell if it was built or grown. I love the way it’s a post-apocalyptic landscape that looks pretty comfortable to live in, actually. I love sound her glider makes when the jet fires, I love the way Teto hides in the folds of her shirt. I love the way the prophecy turns out to be correct, but was garbled by the biases of the people who wrote it down. I love everything about the Sea of Corruption (sorry, “Toxic Jungle”,) the poisonous fungus forest as a setting, the insects, the way the spores float in the air, the caves underneath, and then, finally, what it turns out the forest really is and why it’s there.

Bluntly, I love the way the movie isn’t as angry or depressing as the book, and it has something approaching a happy ending. I love how fun it all is, while still being extremely sincere. I love that it’s an action adventure story where the resolution centers around the fact that the main character isn’t willing to not help a hurt kid, even though that kid is a weird bug.

Sometimes a piece of art hits you at just the right time or place. You can do a bunch of hand waving and talk about characters or themes or whatever, but the actual answer to “why do you love that so much?” is “because there was a hole in my heart the exact shape of that thing, that I didn’t know was there until this clicked into place.”

Let Me Show You How We Did It For The Mouse

I frequently forget that Ryan Gosling got started as a Mouketeer (complementary,) but every now and then he throws the throttle open and demonstrates why everyone from that class of the MMC went on to be super successful.

I think Barbie getting nearly shut-out at the Oscars was garbage, but Gosling’s performance of “Im Just Ken” almost made up for it. Look at all their faces! The way Morgot Robbie can’t keep a straight face from moment one! Greta Gerwig beyond pumped! The singalong! You and all your friends get to put on a big show at the Oscars? That’s a bunch of theatre kids living their best life.

(And, I’m pretty sure this is also the first time one of the Doctors Who has ever been on stage at the Oscars?)

(Also, bonus points to John Cena for realizing that willing to be a little silly is what makes a star into a superstar.)

Friday Linkblog, best-in-what-way-edition

Back in January, Rolling Stone posted The 150 Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time. And I almost dropped a link to it back then, with a sort of “look at these jokers” comment, but ehhh, why. But I keep remembering it and laughing, because this list is deranged.

All “best of” lists have the same core structural problem, which is they never say what they mean by “best”. Most likely to want to watch again? Cultural impact? Most financially successful? None of your business. It’s just “best”. So you get to infer what the grading criteria is, an exercise left to the reader.

And then this list has an extra problem, in that it also doesn’t define what they mean by “science fiction”. This could be an entire media studies thesis, but briefly and as far as movies are concerned, “science fiction” means roughly two things: first, “fiction” about “science”, usually in the future and concerned about the effects some possible technology has on society, lots of riffing on and manipulating big ideas, and second, movies that use science fiction props and iconography to tell a different story, usually as a subset of action-adventure movies. Or, to put all that another way, movies like 2001 and movies like Star Wars.

This list goes with “Option C: all of the above, but no super heroes” and throws everything into the mix. That’s not all that uncommon, and gives a solid way to handicap what approach the list is taking by comparing the relative placements of those two exemplars. Spoiler: 2001 is at №1, and Star Wars is at №9, which, okay, thats a pretty wide spread, so this is going to be a good one.

And this loops back to “what do you mean by best”? From a recommendation perspective, I’m not sure what value a list has that includes Star Wars and doesn’t include Radiers of the Lost Ark, and ditto 2001 and, say, The Seventh Seal. But, okay, we’re doing a big-tent, anything possibly science fiction, in addition to pulling from much deeper into the back catalog than you usually see in a list like this. Theres a bunch of really weird movies on here that you don’t usually see on best-of lists, but I was glad to see them! There’s no bad movies on there, but there are certainly some spicy ones you need to be in the right headspace for.

These are all good things, to be clear! But the result is a deeply strange list.

The top 20 or so are the movies you expect, and the order feels almost custom designed to get the most links on twitter. But it’s the bottom half of the list that’s funny.

Is Repo Man better than Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Is Colossus: The Forbin Project better than Time Bandits? Are both of those better than The Fifth Element? Is Them better than Tron? Is Zardoz better than David Lynch’s Dune? I don’t know! (Especially that last one.) I think the answer to all of those is “no”, but I can imagine a guy who doesn’t think so? I’ve been cracking up at the mental image of a group of friends wanting to watch Jurassic Park, and theres the one guy who says “you want to watch the good Crichton movie? Check this out!” and drops Westworld on them.

You can randomly scroll to almost anywhere and compare two movies, and go “yeah, that sounds about right”, and then go about ten places in either direction and compare that movie to those first two and go “wait, what?”

And look, we know how these kinds of lists get written: you get a group of people together, and they bring with them movies they actually like, movies they want people to think they like, and how hipster contrarian they’re feeling, and that all gets mashed up into something that’ll drive “engagement”, and maybe generate some value for the shareholders.

But what I think is funny about these kinds of lists in general, and this list specifically, is imagining the implied author. Imagine this really was one guy’s personal ranking of science fiction movies. The list is still deranged, but in a delightful way, sort of a “hell yeah, man, you keep being you!”

It’s less of a list of best movies, and more your weirdest friend’s Id out on display. I kind of love it! The more I scrolled, I kept thinking “I don’t think I agree with this guy about anything, but I’m pretty sure we’d be friends.”

Today in Star Wars Links

Time marches on, and it turns out Episode I is turning 25 this year. As previously mentioned, the prequels have aged interestingly, and Episode I the most. It’s not any better than it used to be, but the landscape around it has changed enough that they don’t look quite like they used to. They’re bad in a way that no other movies were before or have been since, and it’s easier to see that now than it was at the time. As such, I very much enjoyed Matt Zoller Seitz’s I Used to Hate The Phantom Menace, but I Didn’t Know How Good I Had It :

Watching “The Phantom Menace,” you knew you were watching a movie made by somebody in complete command of their craft, operating with absolute confidence, as well as the ability to make precisely the movie they wanted to make and overrule anyone who objected. […] But despite the absolute freedom with which it was devised, “The Phantom Menace” seemed lifeless somehow. A bricked phone. See it from across the room, you’d think that it was functional. Up close, a paperweight.

[…]

Like everything else that has ever been created, films are products of the age in which they were made, a factor that’s neither here nor there in terms of evaluating quality or importance. But I do think the prequels have a density and exactness that becomes more impressive the deeper we get into the current era of Hollywood, wherein it is not the director or producer or movie star who controls the production of a movie, or even an individual studio, but a global megacorporation, one that is increasingly concerned with branding than art.

My drafts folder is full of still-brewing star wars content, but for the moment I’ll say I largely vibe with this? Episode I was not a good movie, but whatever else you can say about it, it was the exact movie one guy wanted to make, and that’s an increasingly rare thing. There have been plenty of dramatically worse movies and shows in the years sense, and they don’t even have the virtue of being one artist’s insane vision. I mean, jeeze, I’ll happily watch TPM without complaint before I watch The Falcon & The Winter Soldier or Iron Fist or Thor 2 again.

And, loosely related, I also very much enjoyed this interview with prequel-star Natalie Portman:

Natalie Portman on Striking the Balance Between Public and Private Lives | Vanity Fair

Especially this part:

The striking thing has been the decline of film as a primary form of entertainment. It feels much more niche now. If you ask someone my kids’ age about movie stars, they don’t know anyone compared to YouTube stars, or whatever.

There’s a liberation to it, in having your art not be a popular art. You can really explore what’s interesting to you. It becomes much more about passion than about commerce. And interesting, too, to beware of it becoming something elitist. I think all of these art forms, when they become less popularized, you have to start being like, okay, who are we making this for anymore? And then amazing, too, because there’s also been this democratization of creativity, where gatekeepers have been demoted and everyone can make things and incredible talents come up. And the accessibility is incredible. If you lived in a small town, you might not have been able to access great art cinema when I was growing up. Now it feels like if you’ve got an internet connection, you can get access to anything. It’s pretty wild that you also feel like at the same time, more people than ever might see your weird art film because of his extraordinary access. So it’s this two-sided coin.

I think this is the first time that I’ve seen someone admit that not only is 2019 is never going to happen again, but that’s a thing to embrace, not fear.

Kirk Drift

I read this years ago, but didn’t save a bookmark or anything, and never managed to turn it up again—until this weekend, when I stumbled across it while procrastinating as hard as I could from doing something else:

Strange Horizons - Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift By Erin Horáková:

There is no other way to put this: essentially everything about Popular Consciousness Kirk is bullshit. Kirk, as received through mass culture memory and reflected in its productive imaginary (and subsequent franchise output, including the reboot movies), has little or no basis in Shatner’s performance and the television show as aired. Macho, brash Kirk is a mass hallucination.

I’m going to walk through this because it’s important for ST:TOS’s reception, but more importantly because I believe people often rewatch the text or even watch it afresh and cannot see what they are watching through the haze of bullshit that is the received idea of what they’re seeing. You “know” Star Trek before you ever see Star Trek: a ‘naive’ encounter with such a culturally cathected text is almost impossible, and even if you manage it you probably also have strong ideas about that period of history, era of SF, style of television, etc to contend with. The text is always already interpolated by forces which would derange a genuine reading, dragging such an effort into an ideological cul de sac which neither the text itself nor the viewer necessarily have any vested interest in. These forces work on the memory, extracting unpaid labour without consent. They interpose themselves between the viewer and the material, and they hardly stop at Star Trek.

It’s excellent, and well worth your time.

(Off topic, I posted this to my then-work Slack, and this was the article that caused a coworker to wish that Slack’s link previews came with an estimated reading time. So, ah, get a fresh coffee and go to the bathroom before reading this.)

This is from 2017, and real life has been “yes, and”-ing it ever since. This provides a nice framework to help understand such other modern bafflements as “who are these people saying Star Trek is woke now” and “wait, do they not know that Section 31 are villains?”

And this is different from general cultural context drift, or “reimaginaings”, this is a cultural mis-remembering played back against the source material. And it’s… interesting which way the mis-remembering always goes.

A construction site! We need that good feminine energy: Barbie (2023)

Most of last year’s big movies “finally” hit streaming at the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them. Spoilers ahoy, but I promise not to give away any jokes, at least other than the one I used in the title.

There’s an almost infinite number of sentences you can start with “What’s really brilliant about Barbie is…” Here’s mine: What’s really brilliant about Barbie is how smart Barbie, the character, is. She’s not a ditz, or uneducated, or even really naïve—she’s an incredibly smart, accomplished person from a totally alien culture. The challenges she faces in “the real world” aren’t those of Buzz Lightyear grappling with existential crisis, they’re an immigrant realizing that the stories she heard back home are all wrong, and adapting.

There’s a difference between “naïve” and “misinformed”, and this movie starts all of its characters—the Barbies, Kens, business people, and students—solidly in the second category. Amongst the many joys of the film is watching all the characters adapt and learn.

In the center of this, Margot Robbie does one of the most subtle pieces of acting I can remember seeing. At the start of the movie, she looks and moves like a living doll; the way she stands, the way she moves her hands, the way she holds the not-quite-human expressions on her face. But by the end of the movie, she looks like a regular person—a regular person that looks like Margot Robbie, sure, but human. The expressions are natural, her gait has changed, her hands are real hands. But at no point is there a big change; she doesn’t get zapped with a “human ray”, she never shows off the difference by inflating and deflating while Lois Lane is in the other room. She just quietly changes over the course of the movie, subtly so that you never notice the change from scene to scene, but by the end she’s transformed. It’s a remarkable physical performance.

The movie has gotten an… interesting critical reaction.

The modern critical apparatus—pro and “internet”—has a hard time with movies that don’t fit in a comfortable category, and with movies about women. This one was both, and you could tell it really impacted into some weird seams of the structure around how movie reviews even work.

Just about every professional review was postive, some extremely so, and others with a sort of grudging quality where you could tell the writer was grouchy they hadn’t gotten to use the negative review they’d half-finished ahead of time.

Because the cognitive dissonance of “they made a movie about Barbie—Barbie, of all things—and it’s good” was clearly a struggle for many. My favorite way this manifested—and by favorite I mean the sort of laugh to keep you from crying favorite—was when everyone did their top ten best movies of the year lists in December. About half of the ones I read had Barbie on them, the other half not. But every single one that didn’t have Barbie on the list talked about it, pondering if it should have been there, justifying to themselves why it wasn’t. One, which I have lost the tab for and refuse to go digging for, had a long, thoughtful postscript after the end of the top ten list itself about how Barbie had made her cry four different times while watching it, but somehow these other movies were better. She spent more words on Barbie than her ten “best” movies combined. That’s a real calls are coming from inside the house moment, I think, maybe you’re trying to tell yourself something? If nothing else, maybe step back and define your terms: what do you even mean by “best”?

Roger Ebert (hang on, I know he wasn’t around to review this but this is gonna connect, bare with me) has a bit in his 2003 four star Great Movies re-review of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly where he talks about how he reacted to it when he saw it the first time in 1968, and says:

Looking up my old review, I see I described a four-star movie but only gave it three stars, perhaps because it was a "spaghetti Western" and so could not be art.

Barbie feels like a movie that’s going to cause a lot of similar reflections 35 years from now.

That said, my favorite review I read was jwz’s capsule description of watching it with his mother, wherein his mom just can’t engage with the fact that the movie called “Barbie” has the same opinion of Barbies that she does.

On the one hand, you clearly have the set of critics unable to comprehend that a movie based on Barbie could possibly be good, but also it’s hard to have an extended critical discourse about a movie where American Ferrera looks the camera dead in the eye and says the central thesis of the movie out loud.

I was just talking about the modern style to for Tell over Show, and this movie is a perfect example of that done well. We live in an era where subtlety is overrated, sometimes it’s okay to just say what you mean.

And—ha ha ha—everything you’ve read so far I wrote before the Oscar nominations were announced. I don’t have much to add to that particular discourse except to point out that regardless of context, any time a movie gets nominated for Best Picture and not Best Director, something is hinky.

Gerwig and Robbie being snubbed by the Oscars while Gosling was not is, of course, infuriating, but it’s also the new grand champion of “real life comes along after the fact and proves the movie’s point better than the movie ever could. (The previous all-timer was when Debbie Reynolds died the day after Carrie Fisher, so Carrie couldn’t even have her own funeral, which is a fact that should be tacked on to the end of every print of Postcards From The Edge.) The post-credits scene should just be Margot Robbie reading tweets about how Barbie should be grateful for the 8 nominations it got against Oppenheimer’s 12.

One of the other things that makes the movie hard to talk about is that all the movies you want to compare it to are made by and about men, and that feels a little strange.

The movie’s satire and takedown of toxic masculinity is as pointed and full-throated as any I’ve ever seen. It’s a David Fincher movie, but backwards and in high heels. But where Fincher tends to stop at “look at this sad weirdo”, this movie knows the Kens are victims too, and wants things to work out for them too. But, you know, tells a story about toxic men from the perspective of the women, which shouldn’t be rare but there you go.

It’s worth acknowledging that as a straight cis man who didn’t have Barbies as a central feature of his childhood, I probably responded to different things than maybe the intended core audience. (And, by the way, please someone do a metafictional satire of marketing and gender roles with The Transformers. I’m available to pitch.) But on the other hand maybe not? It’s dangerous to try and attribute any part of a work with shared authorship to a specific contributor, but this movie was written by both Greta Gerwig and her husband, Noah Baumbach, and there were definitely parts where I thought I could hear the voice of a fellow Alan. The Kens are a satire of a very particular Kind of Guy, and I can’t stand those guys either. The joke about “The Godfather” felt like it was written for me, personally. Alan trying to sneak out of Barbieland to get away from the Kens was basically my entire High School experience summed up.

There’s so many little, nice touches. The way that the “real world” is portrayed as realistically as possible, but the inside of the Mattel offices is a realm as strange and alien as Barbieland. The way those realms play as having their own internal rules that are totally different from each other. How casual the people in the know are with beings crossing between those realms, and the way they interact with each other. The fact that there’s a ghost, which is treated as being not supernatural at all, until it is. (In some ways, this is the best Planescape movie we’re ever going to get.) The way the Ken dance fight resolves. The choice of song the Kens use as a serenade. There’s a Doctor Who in it!

And, I don’t want to give anything away, but the thing Barbie says after being scolded by a student? When she’s crying on that bench? That’s the hardest I’ve laughed at a movie in I don’t know how long.

Mostly, though, what I like is how kind this movie is. It’s rare to see a satire that’s actually funny and loves both all of its characters and the thing that its satirizing—in fact, I’m not sure I can think of another one. Galaxy Quest, maybe?

This is a movie that wants everyone in it to do well. It’s a little disappointed in some of them; but no one really gets “a comeuppance” or “punished”, or really even a Second Chance; instead everyone gets an opportunity to do better, and they all take it.

There’s a saying that inside every cynic is a disappointed idealist; and this is a movie made by some very disappointed people. But it’s a movie that spends as much time showing a way forward, as it does attacking the problem.

The resolution manages to simultaneously hit “Immigrant assimilating while still being true to themselves”, “Pinocchio”, and “the end of 2001”, and do it with a joke. Brilliant.

Absolutely the best movie I saw last year.

X-Wing Linkblog Friday

The Aftermath continues to be one of the few bright spots in the cursed wasteland of the digital media. And yes, I realize Icecano is slowly devolving into just a set of links to the aftermath that I gesture enthusiastically towards.

Today’s case in point: X-Wing Is Video Gaming's Greek Fire

And, oh man, Yes, And.

This gist here is that not only were the X-Wing games the peak of the genre in terms of mechanics, and not only has no one been able to reproduce them, no one has really even tried. It’s wild to me that space fighter “sims” were a big deal for the whole of the nineties, and then… nope, we don’t do that anymore. Like he says, it’s remarkable that in the current era of “let’s clone a game from the old days with a new name”, no one has touched the X-Wings. Even Star Wars: Squadrons, which was a much better Wing Commander than it was an X-Wing, didn’t quite get there.

And yeah! You boot up TIE Fighter today, and it still genuinely plays better than anything newer in the genre. It’s insane to me that the whole genre just… doesn’t exist any more? It feels like the indy scene should be full of X-Wing-alikes. Instead we got Strike Suit Zero, the two Rebel Galaxys and thats it? Yes I know, you want to at-me and say No Man’s Sky or Elite and buddy, those could not be less what I’m talking about. That goes double for whatever the heck is going on down at Star Citizen.

(Although, speaking of recapturing old gameplay mechanics, I am going to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Descent 4 came out, it was just called Overload.)

A while back my kid asked me what video game I’d turn onto a movie, and without missing a beat and not as a joke, I answered “TIE Fighter.”

“Dad!!” he yelled. “That already has a movie!”

And, obviously, but the Star War I keep wishing someone would make is the X-Wing pilot show; Top Gun or Flight of the Intruder, but with R2 units. I don’t understand why you spend a quarter billion dollars to set some kid up to fail with his bad Harrison Ford impression before you do this.

So, he said as an artful segue, in other X-Wing news, remember Star Wars fan films?

There was a whole fan film bubble around the turn of the century, during the iMac DV era. The bubble didn’t pop exactly, but now that energy mostly gets channeled into 3 hour Lore Breakdown Videos on youtube that explain how the next 200 million dollar blockbuster is going to fail because it isn’t consistent with the worst book you read 20 years ago. ( *Puts finger to earpiece* I’m sorry, I’ve just been informed that The Crystal Star was, in fact, thirty years ago. We regret the error.)

But! People are still out there making their indie Star Wars epics, and so I’d like to call to your attention to: Wingman - An X-Wing Story | Star Wars Fan Film | 2023 - YouTube

(Attention conservation notice: it’s nearly an hour long, but all the really good ideas are in the first 15 minutes, and in classic fan film fashion it just kinda keeps… going…)

It’s the fan-filmsiest possible version of the X-Wing movie idea. It’s about 20 guys filming an X-Wing movie in their basement for something like 4 grand. They only have one set: the cockpit, and some really nice replica helmets. They use the sound effects from the cockpit controls in the X-Wing games! The group that this this are all in Germany, so the squadron looks like it’s made up entirely of the backup keyboard players from Kraftwork. It’s an interesting limit case in “how can we tell a story when the characters can’t even stand up or be on screen at the same time.”

I was going to put some more snark here, but you know what? It’s a hell of an impressive thing, considering. I’d never show this to someone who wasn’t already completely bought in at “surprisingly good X-Wing fan film”, but I think it demonstrates that the basic premise is sound?

This feels like the ceiling for how good a fan film should get. Could it be better? Sure. But if you put any more effort into an indie movie than this, you need to pivot and go make Clerks or El Mariachi or A Fistful of Fingers or something. The only person who got a ticket into Hollywood from a fan film was the guy who made Troops, and even he never got to direct a big-boy movie.

So, okay, what have we learned from today’s program:

1. Someone needs to make an X-Wing-alike.
2. If you’re about to spend a second thousand dollars on your X-Wing cockpit, maybe try and make an indie festival film instead?

3. Now that Patty Jenkins' Rogue Squadron movie is cancelled, someone pitch a fighter pilot show to Disney+.

   I should probably have another paragraph here where I tie things up? But it’s Friday, don’t worry about it.

Rebel Moon (2023)

This is as close to a review-proof movie as has ever been made: at this point, everyone on earth knows what to expect from “Zack Snyder does a sci-fi remake of Seven Samurai” and if they’re in the target audience. And yeah, it’s exactly the movie you imagined when you read that sentence.

At this point, Snyder’s ticks and interests as a filmmaker are well established. They shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, and there’s a shot right towards the start where the main character is planting seeds and the seeds flying though the air go into slow motion, so it’s not like they’re a surprise to him either. This is solidly playing to the part of the crowd that’s already bought in.

There’s guns that shoot blobs of molten lead. There’s a prison robot that looks like one of the statues from Beetlejuice. There’s another robot that looks like Daft Punk’s forgotten third brother that’s voiced by Anthony Hopkins of all people. I’m pretty sure if this had come out when I was fourteen, I’d have loved it. Everyone seems like they’re having a good time, and I think the number people in this movie who also worked on Justice League says a lot.

It’s not a good movie, but it’s a hard movie to genuinely dislike. I feel like this is where I should work up some irritation that something this banal got this much money, but you know what? I just can’t summon the energy. Are there things to complain about? Sure. But criticizing it feels like walking into a Mexican restaurant and complaining that they won’t sell you a hamburger; the correct response is to ask “what part of the sign out front was confusing?” It’s exactly the movie it said it was going to be, it you watched it and didn’t like it, well, your media illiteracy is not the movie’s problem. If I was in charge of spending Netflix’s money, would I have bought this movie? Probably not. But in a world where Netflix also keeps throwing money at the Dave Chapelle transphobia carnival, it hardly seems worth being irked by.

So, a few stray observations:

Before the movie came out, Star Wars was always cited as the big influence, but I suspect the movie owes a much bigger debt to Warhammer 40k. The whole design style and look of the thing screams Games Workshop. Like Event Horizon this feels like this could cleanly slot in as an unofficial prequel. (Warhammer 15k?)

Speaking of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker's first outing is the mother of all “making hard things look easy” movies. Lucas does some very subtle, tricky things with tone, and pacing, and exposition (more about that in a second,) and at first glance it looks like anyone could do the same thing. A lot better filmmakers than Snyder have stepped on the rake of “well, how hard could it be to make a Star War?” to the point where there’s almost no shame in it. Hell, Lucas himself only has about a 50% hit rate for “like star wars, and good.”

Right after I saw it, my initial zinger was “So you know, if *I* was going to remake seven samurai in the style of star wars, I'd try to make I understood how at least one of those movies worked.” Mostly what I was talking about was the different approaches to exposition.

For a long time, one of the established rules for telling stories in a visual medium was Show Don’t Tell. But, this was always more of a rule than a guideline. Author & extensive sex-scandal-haver Warren Ellis has a great riff on this: Show Don’t Tell Is A Tool Not A Rule.

That said, the style over the last decade or two has swung the other way. To pick one example at semi-random, author & divorced-but-no-sex-scandals-as-far-as-we-know-haver Neil Gaiman basically built an entire career out of Tell Don’t Show. The 21st century Doctor Who has been a heavy Tell Don’t Show work (although that as much working around the budget as anything,)

What’s funny about this is that the two major sources for Rebel Moon, The Seven Samurai and Star Wars are as Show Don’t Tell as it gets. Kurosawa, especially in his historical samurai movies, would make movies that just dropped the audience into a fully operational world and let them catch up. Lucas, heavily inspired by Kurosawa, turned around and applied the same technique to fictional settings. In both cases, all the characters know how the world works, they talk casually and in slang, there’s no character whose job is to ask questions. Supposedly, Lucas wanted to be a documentarian originally, and he shot his science fantasty movies like it. Star Wars especially I describe as having a “vibes-over-lore” approach to worldbuilding; you learn how things work by how the characters react to them, not what they say about them.

Flashing forward fifty years, Rebel Moon is all the way on the other end of the spectrum. Everywhere Kurosawa would have cut to a wide shot and let the wind howl a little, or Lucas would have pointed the camera at the sunset and let John Williams take over for a little bit, here a character looks directly into the camera and dictates another entry for the Lore Wiki. It’s not actually that strange for a genre movie here in the early Twenties, but the contract between this and the style of the direct source material is vast.

I feel a little bad doing this in a review, but the best illustration of the difference is the Auralnaut’s Zack Snyder's STAR WARS: Part 1 - A New Hope which reworks the original Star Wars to work like Rebel Moon does.

Like Zack, I’m gonna save the wrapup and resolution for the second part.

Good Adaptations and the Lord of the Rings at 20 (and 68)

What makes a good book-to-movie adaptation?

Or to look at it the other way, what makes a bad one?

Books and movies are very different mediums and therefore—obviously—are good at very different things. Maybe the most obvious difference is that books are significantly more information-dense than movies are, so any adaptation has to pick and choose what material to keep.

The best adaptations, though, are the ones that keep the the themes and characters—what the book is about— and move around, eliminate, or combine the incidents of the plot to support them. The most successful, like Jaws or Jurassic Park for example, are arguably better than their source material, jettisoning extraneous sideplots to focus on the main concepts.

Conversely, the worst adaptations are the ones that drop the themes and change the point of the story. Stephen King somewhat famously hates the movie version of The Shining because he wrote a very personal book about his struggle with alcoholism disguised as a haunted hotel story, and Kubrick kept the ghosts but not the rest. The movie version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was made by people who thought the details of the plot were more important than the jokes, rather than the other way around, and didn’t understand why the Nutrimat was bad.

And really, it’s the themes, the concepts, the characters, that make stories appeal to us. It’s not the incidents of the plot we connect to, it’s what the story is about. That’s what we make the emotional connection with.

And this is part of what makes a bad adaptation so frustrating.

While the existence of a movie doesn’t erase the book it was based on, it’s a fact that movies have higher profiles, reach bigger audiences. So it’s terribly disheartening to have someone tell you they watched a movie based on that book you like that they didn’t read, when you know all the things that mattered to you didn’t make it into the movie.

And so we come to The Lord of the Rings! The third movie, Return of the King turned 20 this week, and those movies are unique in that you’ll think they’re either a fantastic or a terrible adaptation based on which character was your favorite.

⁂

Broadly speaking, Lord of the Rings tells two stories in parallel. The first, is a big epic fantasy, with Dark Lords, and Rings of Power, and Wizards, and Kings in Exile. Strider is the main character of this story, with a supporting cast of Elves, Dwarves, and Horse Vikings. The second is a story about some regular guys who are drawn into a terrifying and overwhelming adventure, and return home, changed by the experience. Sam is the main character of the second story, supported by the other Hobbits.

(Frodo is an interestingly transgressive character, because he floats between the two stories, never committing to either. But that’s a whole different topic.)

And so the book switches modes based on which characters are around. The biggest difference between the modes is the treatment of the Ring. When Strider or Gandalf or any other character from the first story are around, the Ring is the most evil thing in existence—it has to be. So Gandalf refuses to take it, Galadriel recoils, it’s a source of unstoppable corruption.

But when it’s just the Hobbits, things are different. That second story is both smaller and larger at the the same time—constantly cutting the threat of the Ring off at the knees by showing that there are larger and older things than the Ring, and pointing out thats it’s the small things really matter. So Tom Bombadil is unaffected, Faramir gives it back without temptation, Sam sees the stars through the clouds in Mordor. There are greater beauties and greater powers than some artifact could ever be.

This is, to be clear, not a unique structure. To pull an obvious example, Star Wars does the same thing, paralleling Luke’s kid from the sticks leaving home and growing into his own person with the epic struggle for the future of the entire galaxy between the Evil Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance. In keeping with that movie’s clockwork structure, Lucas manages to have the climax of both stories be literally the exact same moment—Luke firing the torpedoes into the exhaust port.

Tolkien is up to something different however, and climaxes his two stories fifty pages apart. The Big Fantasy Epic winds down, and then the cast reduces to the Hobbits again and they go home, where they have to use everything they’ve learned to solve their own problems instead of helping solve somebody else’s.

In my experience, everyone connects more strongly with one of the two stories. The tends to boil down to who your favorite character is—Strider or Sam. Just about everyone picks one of those two as their favorite. It’s like Elvis vs. The Beatles; most people like both, but everyone has a preference.

(And yeah, there’s always some wag that says Boromir/The Who.)

Just to put all my cards on the table, my favorite character is Sam. (And I prefer The Beatles.)

Based on how the beginning and end of the books work, it seems clear that Tolkien thought of that story—the regular guys being changed by the wide world story—as the “main one”, and the Big Epic was there to provide a backdrop.

There’s an entire cottage industry of people explaining what “Tolkien really meant” in the books, and so there’s not a lot of new ground to cover there, so I’ll just mention that the “regular dudes” story is clearly the one influenced—not “based on”, but influenced—by his own WWI experiences and move on.

⁂

Which brings us back to the movies.

Even with three very long movies, there’s a lot more material in the books than could possibly fit. And, there’s an awful lot of things that are basically internal or delivered through narration that need dramatizing in a physical way to work as a film.

So the filmmakers made the decision to adapt only that first story, and jettison basically everything from the second.

This is somewhat understandable? That first story has all the battles and orcs and wargs and wizards and things. That second story, if you’re coming at it from the perspective of trying to make an action movie, is mostly Sam missing his garden? From a commercial point of view, it’s hard to fault the approach. And the box office clearly agreed.

And this perfectly explains all the otherwise bizarre changes. First, anything that undercuts the Ring has to go. So, we cut Bombadil and everything around him for time, yes, but also we can’t have a happy guy with a funny hat shake off the Ring in the first hour before Elrond has even had a chance to say any of the spooky lines from the trailer. Faramir has to be a completely different character with a different role. Sam and Frodo’s journey across the plains of Mordor has to play different, becase the whole movie has to align on how terrible the Ring is, and no stars can peek through the clouds to give hope, no pots can clatter into a crevasse to remind Sam of home. Most maddeningly, Frodo has to turn on Sam, because the Ring is all-powerful, and we can’t have an undercurrent showing that there are some things even the Ring can’t touch.

In the book, Sam is the “hero’s journey” characer. But, since that whole story is gone, he gets demoted to comedy sidekick, and Aragorn is reimagined into that role, and as such needs all the trappings of the Hero with a Thousand Faces retrofitted on to him. Far from the confident, legendary superhero of the books, he’s now full of doubt, and has to Refuse the Call, have a mentor, cross A Guarded Threshold, suffer ordeals, because he’s now got to shoulder a big chunk of the emotional storytelling, instead of being an inspirational icon for the real main characters.

While efficient, this all has the effect of pulling out the center of the story—what it’s about.

It’s also mostly crap, because the grafted-on hero’s journey stuff doesn’t fit well. Meanwhile, one of the definitive Campbell-style narratives is lying on the cutting room floor.

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One of the things that makes Sam such a great character is his stealth. He’s there from the very beginning, present at every major moment, an absolutely key element in every success, but the book keeps him just out of focus—not “off stage”, but mostly out of the spotlight.

It’s not until the last scene—the literal last line—of the book that you realize that he was actually the main character the whole time, you just didn’t notice.

The hero wasn’t the guy who became King, it was the guy who became mayor.

He’s why my laptop bag always has a coil of rope in the side pocket—because you’ll want if if you don’t have it.

(I also keep a towel in it, because it’s a rough universe.)

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And all this is what makes those movies so terribly frustrating—because they are an absolutely incredible adaptation of the Epic Fantasy parts. Everything looks great! The design is unbelievable! The acting, the costumes, the camera work. The battles are amazing. Helm’s Deep is one of those truly great cinematic achievements. My favorite shot in all three movies—and this is not a joke—is the shot of the orc with the torch running towards the piled up explsoves to breach the Deeping Wall like he’s about to light the olympic torch. And, in the department of good changes, the cut down speech Theoden gives in the movie as they ride out to meet the invaders—“Ride for ruin, Ride for Rohan!”—is an absolutely incredible piece of filmmaking. The Balrog! And, credit where credit is due, everything with Boromir is arguably better than in the book, mostly because Sean Bean makes the character into an actual character instead of a walking skepticism machine.

So if those parts were your jam, great! Best fantasy movies of all time! However, if the other half was your jam, all the parts that you connected to just weren’t there.

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I’m softer on the “breakdancing wizards” fight from the first movie than a lot of fellow book purists, but my goodness do I prefer Gandalf’s understated “I liked white better,” over Magneto yelling about trading reason for madness. I understand wanting to goose the emotion, but I think McKellen could have made that one sing.

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There’s a common complaint about the movie that it “has too many endings.” And yeah, the end of the movie version of Return of the King is very strange, playing out a whole series of what amount to head-fake endings and then continuing to play for another half an hour.

And the reason is obvious—the movie leaves the actual ending out! The actual ending is the Hobbits returning home and using everything they’ve learned to save the Shire; the movie cuts all that, and tries to cobble a resolution of out the intentionally anti-climactic falling action that’s supposed to lead into that.

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Lord of the Rings: the Movie, is a story about a D&D party who go on an exciting grueling journey to destroy an evil ring, and then one of them becomes the King. Lord of the Rings: the Book, is a story about four regular people who learn a bunch of skills they don’t want to learn while doing things they don’t want to do, and then come home and use those skills to save their family and friends.

I know which one I prefer.

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What makes a good adaptation? Or a bad one?

Does it matter if the filmmaker’s are on the same page as the author?

What happens when they’re only on the same page with half of the audience?

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The movies are phenomenally well made, incredibly successful films that took one of the great heros of fiction and sandblasted him down to the point where there’s a whole set of kids under thirty who think his signature moment was yelling “po-TAY-toes” at some computer animation.

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For the record: yes, I am gonna die mad about it.

Sunday Linkblog, Nightmare before Christmas edition

Noted science fiction author and unrepentant Burrito Criminal John Scalzi has spent every day of December reviewing various “Comfort Watches”, movies you can, as he says, enjoy every time and watch with your brain turned off.

So far, every movie on this list has caused me to ho “heck yes! Love that movie!” when the title pops up in me feed reader. I’ve been meaning to link to this series for a while, so let me gesture towards two fo them for you.

Today’s was The December Comfort Watches, Day Seventeen: The Nightmare Before Christmas. I fully endorse everything he has to say about it, but especially that Danny Elfman’s work was and continues to be the main attraction.

He’s about a decade older than I am so I didn’t come on board with Oingo Boingo like he did; my entry point was Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, which was just about the greatest movie my then 7-year old mind could imagine. (Well, greatest movie with Luke Skywalker in it, obviously.). Even then, the music was incredible. I spent hours designing breakfast-making Rube Goldberg machines on paper, and that wasn’t just because Abe Lincoln’s expression was funny.

I can’t now recall when I saw Edward Scissorhands or Beetlejuice, so instead flash forward with me to Batman ’89. Recall how the movie opens: the camera is moving though some kind of strange.. Tunnels? Canyons? It’s not clear. Meanwhile, what’s immediately one of the greatest movie themes of all time is playing over the credits. It’s perfect music for Batman, a little spooky, a little exciting, has a kind of haunted church organ thing happening. The music kicks up a gear, and the camera pulls out of the whatever-the-ares, and it turns out we’ve been flying along inside the Batman logo; and as the logo fills the frame and the music starts going “BUM BUM BUM BUM BUMMM”, 11-year old me thought that was the single coolest thing he had ever seen. Even today, when I occasionally rewatch the movie, that shot sends me right back to being 11 and thinking “holy smokes, they really made a Batman movie!”

Anyway, after that, I was on-board for whatever those guys did.

When Nightmare came out— checks notes huh, also thirty years ago, would you look at that, what the heck was in the water in ’93—I was pumped for it.

It did not disappoint. All three of the major creatives—Henry Selick, Tim Burton, Danny Elfman—have done great work since, but nothing better than this. The absolute peak for everyone involved, and considering their other work, that’s saying something.

However! As long as I have you here, I wish to also call your attention to the Special Edition re-release of the soundtrack from some years ago. This had Patrick Stewart re-record the opening narration, which is as you would expect excellent, but also record the original unused closing narration.

Reader, Nightmare is an almost perfect movie, but I think that ending would have been even better.

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As an addendum, let me also direct you to: The December Comfort Watches, Day Six: Down With Love. Down With Love isn’t so much under-rated as under-acknowledged, there are days I think maybe I dreamed it since no one else ever seems to remember this movie exists. It’s phenomenally good, a movie where absolutely everyone is doing career-best work and knows exactly what the job is. Other than general relief that someone else has seen it, I also mention this because my kids are both at an arts-heavy school, and they’re talking about what pieces from movies they could use as an audition piece. And there a… thing? Towards the end of the movie? Which even obliquely mentioning is too much of a spoiler, but 1) after they shot that they should have directly handed Rene Zellweger the Oscar for that year, and 2) would be an incredible audition monologue. So I’m trying to figure out how to trick my teenagers into watching a 20-year old spoof of a 50-year old movie series.