Doctor Who and The Devil’s Chord

First: what a great title!

If “Space Babies” was about re-establishing what median-value Doctor Who is like and getting everyone back on board, “The Devil’s Chord” seems like it’s about building out from that and establishing how the show is going to work going forward. Because as soon as The Maestro climbs out of that piano, it’s clear we’re operating in a different gear—excuse me—different key than we have before. Between this and the previous, theres a real sense of “mission statement”: this is the vibe Doctor Who is going for in this iteration. Evil drag queen space gods eating the concept of Music and destroying the future? Yes, please. We’re miles away from anything else on Disney+, or anywhere else on TV.

This is also where Gatwa’s and Davies’s take on the character is starting to come into focus. Back at Christmas and then in “The Space Babies” the take on the character was basically “big and fun.” And this stays true here, the Doctor’s excitement over where Ruby wants to go is a standout, and also feels like Davies riffing on the last time he was relaunching the show, where the first place the new companion wanted to go was to watch their dad get killed in a car accident? Finally, as he says, they want to go somewhere fun.

But I’m starting to run out of ways to phrase “this is all really fun!”, so fortunately this is where they start—and I’m sorry but I can’t help myself—adding more notes to the character. Presumably we’ll all be writing “this is when they really cracked the character” pieces next week, but for the moment two observations:

The second most interesting of these is when the Doctor realizes who or what they’re dealing with, and his response is to just… run away. The scene where they’re hiding from The Maestro and the Doctor makes a sound-proof zone to cover their tracks is probably the most effective sequence in any of Gatwa’s time so far.

“Scared” isn’t usually an emotional state the Doctor operates in, for solid structural reasons if nothing else. Doctor Who is frequently a scary show, and it’s sweet spot is right out at the edge of what the younger audience is capable of handling. But one of the things that lets Doctor Who get away with operating that far out on the ice is the character of the Doctor themselves. The Doctor is effectively indestructible, nearly always wins, and almost never scared, so they provide a real emotional safety net for the younger audience—The Doctor is here, so this is all going to be okay. Obviously we’ll see where this goes, but combined with them running away from the monster in “The Space Babies” as well, this take on the character seems to be centering on “enthusiastic but scares easy,” which is a fascinating take.

The most interesting scene, though, was the bit where he mentions that he and his granddaughter are currently living on the other side of town. Gatwa takes an interesting angle on the scene, and rather than sad or wistful, he plays the Doctor as basically cheered up by the idea that she was out there, regardless of where she is now. Unlike the last time Davies was show-running, this clearly isn’t a character that’s going to stand crying out in the rain.

This is, I think, the first time Susan has been mentioned by name in the 21st century version of the show. Like the premise speed-run in the previous episode, or the re-staging of the ruined future scene from “Pyramids of Mars” in this one, this feels less like a deep-cut continuity reference than a combination of making clear what elements of the show are in play while also deliberately hanging some guns over the mantle. Add to that the name drop of The Rani last week, and the not one but two mysterious women lurking around in the background of these last couple of shows, and clearly something is up. I’m going to refuse to speculate further, sine Davies likes to drop in these crumbs but never before built up a mystery that was solvable, these are always things that can’t make sense until the context of whatever the big-ticket finale does in June. But! Fun spotting the things that will make more sense on the rewatch regardless.

Because I grew up in a very Beatles-centric house, a few notes on the boys from Liverpool themselves. Lennon didn’t start wearing that style of round glasses until much later, but I understand wanting to flag “which one is John” with his most signature feature considering how little the actors look like the real people. I was hoping the the secret chord was going to turn out to be the mysterious opening chord of A Hard Day's Night. And look, if it had been me, I’d have had Harrison be the one to solve the puzzle.

Finally, the ending dance sequence looks like it was a lot more fun to make than it was to watch, mostly because that song wasn’t nearly good enough to spend, what, three whole minutes on? I think I see what they’re trying to do, but more than anything it had the quality that they had under-run and needed to pad out the show.

But, it was big and fun, and one of the all-time great cinematic battles of Ham vs Ham since Shatner and Montalban squared off. Jinkx Monsoon clearly looked at what Neal Patrick Harris did back in December and thought, “I can beat that.”

Were these two premiere episodes the best episodes of Doctor Who ever? No. But they’re more entertaining than the show has been in years, and it’s been even longer since it’s had this clear a vision of itself. In the six stories since November, we’ve gone from a 2008 revival piece to tuning up a whole new instrument. And then next week they’re handing it to the best person that’s ever played it…

Doctor Who and the Space Babies

And we’re back!

There’s an absolute sense of glee here. This is a show that’s absolutely in love with existing, made by people who are clearly relishing every second of their day, and inhabited by characters “glad to be alive.”

Thise sense of all-encompassing joy seems to be the central animus of Ncuti Gatwa’s take on the character—his is a Doctor who is psyched about everything and is here to have the best time possible, and hopes you’ll come along.

My favorite scene, if I’m honest, is the show ostentatiously spending the new Disney-infused budget on some gorgeous throwaway dinosaurs and then an absurdly expensive-looking prosthetic to land a butterfly-effect joke. It’s a show having an absolute ball that it can do things like this now. There’s a shot of the Doctor leaning against the Tardis while a volcano erupts in the background that’s exactly the kind of shot Doctor Who has always wanted to do, but never could until now.

And then, the final punchline of that scene with Gatwa’s muttered aside about having to turn on the Butterfly Compensator is the perfect example of the Doctor Who difference. On the one hand, it’s the exact kind of winking semi-science that’s Doctor Who’s bread-and-butter, but it’s also one of the things that makes the Doctor being an unreliable narrator of his own show so great, because it could just as easily be complete bullshit he made up on the spot because the real solution was more complex than he wanted to talk about.

But this is also our old friend, Russel T. Davies, angry nihilist, so my other favorite scene was the absolutely snarling satire about abortion and child care he banks into the episode halfway though, once everyone had relaxed and wasn’t ready for it.

Davies always liked a mostly fun and frothy lightweight season opener, and this is right in line. It’s just fun, infectiously so. After it was over, as the closing credits rolled, my fourteen year-old looked up and the screen and said “this show has got to be the best job in the world.”

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It both is and is not a relaunch. On the one hand, Who has been in continuous production since 2005, albeit with an increasing irregular schedule. But on the other hand, this is the first regular actual season that wasn’t a one-off special or miniseries or something since January of 2020, and the show hasn’t been a mainstream hit since 2014 or so. And there’s probably a fair number of new-ish viewers coming in via Disney+.

So Davies splits the difference, correctly I think, and mostly seems to focus on people who have some familiarity with the show but need a refresher. “Remember that Doctor Who show you watched a decade ago? it’s back!” So the show speedruns laying out the premise, but in the gear of an extended “previously on” bit instead of making sure new viewers are keeping up.

But also, every show is a tangled mass of dense auto-continuity these days. And every episode of the show is streaming on iPlayer. Wikipedia will point you and the right ones. And every single references or easter egg is going to spawn dozens of explainer articles or reddit threads or youtube videos or some other SEO-chasing content glurge. Davies seems to cheerfully shrug and recognize that everyone that doesn’t know all this by heart is going to look it up anyway, so why burn too much screen time on it when he can use that for something else.

This doesn’t feel like anything so much as the start of a new creative team on a long-running comic, so the lore recap is not only there to help people jump back on board, but gives Davies a way to lay out which bits he’s going to be using. He’s clearly taken with the idea of the Doctor as an orphan, but all the other store-brand Campbell chosen one “revelations” that surrounded that a few years ago are left unmentioned. And his description of what happened to the Time Lords doesn’t really match anything we saw on screen before. But that’s less about “being inaccurate” than, I think, establishing the vibe the show intends to go on with. “There was a genocide and I was the only survivor” sets a very specific tone here in 2024, even before you factor in the fact that those lines are being spoken by the child of Rwandan refugees. It’s a very different tone from 2005’s “there was a war and everyone lost.”

It’s worth comparing the approach here with how Davies relaunched the show the last time, back in 2005. There, the show very carefully walked the audience through what was happening, and made sure everyone got it before moving on to the next thing. Here, the show knows that shows this complex are the default rather than the exception, assumes most of the audience already knows all this but needs reminder, and for anyone else, here’s enough keywords so you can fill in the gaps on wikipedia tomorrow morning.

The TV landscape around Doctor Who is very different now than it was in 2005. In ’05, there was basically nothing doing what Who does best—science fantasy adventure stories for smart 12-year olds and their parents. The only other significant science fiction show to speak of was Battlestar Galactica, and that was in a whole different gear. Buffy had just gone off the air, Star Trek Enterprise was gasping out it’s last season. Who had a lot of room to maneuver, but not a lot of context, so it started from “basically Buffy” and then built up from there.

Here in ’24, there’s a lot of TV operating in Who’s neighborhood. Heck, even just on Disney+, the various Marvel and Star Wars shows are going after much the same audience, and the next streaming app over is full of new actually good new Star Trek.

As such, Davies doesn’t waste a lot of time on median value Who, but leans all the way in on stuff only Doctor Who would even thinking of doing. One of the major animating forces here seems to be, basically “Yeah, Loki was pretty good. You ever see Loki do this?” and then pulling back the curtain to show a room full of babies. Space babies.

What makes this show different from all the other sci-fi-eqsue shows with baroque lore? A main character who loves life, loves what he does, doesn’t carry a weapon, and thinks it’s just as important to save the monster as anyone else.

A criticism you sometimes see about this show is that it “doesn’t take things seriously enough”, or variations thereof. And this is one of those criticisms that almost gets it, but missed the point entirely. Because the show does take things seriously, just not the same things that a show like Star Trek does. To quote the show’s own lead character, the show is very serious about what it does, just not necessarily the way it does it. To put that another way, Doctor Who is a show that takes being very silly very seriously.

At 46, I loved every second of this, but if I’m honest, I know I would have absolutely hated this at 15, and (even more embarrassingly) probably would have hated it at 30. What I didn’t understand then, but understand now, is that being incredibly serious all the time isn’t a sign of strength, or maturity, or “adultness”. It turns out, it’s the exact opposite. To quote the Doctor again, there’s no point in being grown up if you can’t be childish sometimes.

And maybe serious isn’t the right word for what I mean here. Doctor Who frequently isn’t “serious”, but it is always “sincere.” And that’s “The Space Babies”; it isn’t serious for an instant, but it’s as sincere as anything.

Plus, they spent a tremendous amount of Disney’s money to put a huge fart joke on BBC One in primetime.

Nice to see you again, Doctor.

Weak Points in the Critical Apparatus

There’s a class of artists that the critical apparatus has always had a problem with. These are artists who, regardless of medium or genre, are:

1. Broadly Popular
2. Consistant
3. Prolific
4. and this last one is the real key: not complex in the ways the critical apparatus is set up to value

And mostly we live in a time where we’ve figured out how to talk about this and we don’t sweat High vs low art thing as much.

But every now and then one of those artists will release something that banks into the broader culture at a weird angle. And the critical apparatus kinda just throws their hands up in the air and says “it’s fine, I guess? You already know if you want it, why are you hassling me?”

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."

Fallout (2024)

I found myself with more free time than I was expecting last weekend, and as I was also lacking in appropriate supervision, I “accidentally” watched all eight episodes of the new Fallout tv show.

I liked it! I liked a lot. It was fun, exciting, funny, great cast, looked amazing. But I’ve been wrestling with this post a little, because this is one of those weird bits of art where I genuinely liked it, I enjoyed watching it, and yet find myself with mostly only critical things to say.

Let’s get my biggest surprise out of the way first: Ron Perlman wasn’t in it. It’s a weird omission, considering how closely his voice is associated with the source material. Without getting too heavy into the spoilers, there was a scene near the end where a character looks over at a shadowy figure, and I thought to myself, “this is perfect, Ron is going to lean into the light, look the camera right in the eye and say the line.” And instead the shadowy figure stayed there and that other character looked the camera in the eye and said the line. Maybe it was a scheduling thing, and he was too busy teaching people how many ways there are to lose a house?

But okay, what did I like?

I liked the three main characters very much. Lucy, the most main of the main three manages to hit the very tricky spot of being “naïve”, but not “stupid” or “incompetent.” She’s just got a different set of experiences and skills than everyone else, but she learns fast and she figures out how to apply those skills to the new situations she finds herself in. She also manages the equally tricky maneuver of being a genuinely good person who stays a genuinely good person as the world around her gets weirder and more complex. She pretty much consistently finds the right reasons to do the right things, no matter how morally gray the world around her gets. She also looks remarkably like the starting model for the player character in the first game.

Maximus, on the other hand, manages to covey a sense of always being morally ambiguous and compromised no matter what he’s doing. It’s also a tricky performance, a character whose always likable despite the audience never really knowing why he’s doing what he’s doing. He’s always thinking, but you never know about what.

Rounding out the triptych of leads is The Ghoul, who is clearly designed to be everyone’s favorite character—the sort of hyper-competent amoral badass gunslinger thats always fun to watch. In addition, he’s played by Walton Goggins, who dials the goggins-o-meter all the way up to 11 and seems to be having an absolute blast. Goggins effectively plays two roles—the Ghoul in the post-apocalyptic present of the show, and Cooper Howard, the fading western actor-turned Vault-Tec spokesman in world before the bombs drop.

But the rest of the cast is outstanding as well. Everyone is great, they get the tone they’re supposed to be going for. And then, special mention for Kyle McLachlan—that’s right, hero to children Dale Cooper himself—who shows up for a tiny part right at the start and again at the end, and just absolutely owns the room. I’m not sure any actor has ever “understood the assignment” more than Kyle does in this.

My favorite parts of the show were those flashbacks to the world before the war—a world where there are robots and futuristic cars, but it’s been the 50s for a century. The production design here is outstanding; at first glance it’s the 50s, trilbies, poodle skirts, but with just enough high-tech stuff around the edges to produce a subtle dissonance. And then the show opens with every nightmare we had as kids growing up in the cold war.

Mostly, the show is those three out in the wasteland, paths intersecting, running into weird stuff. Their relative goals are less important—and frankly, underbaked—compared to them bouncing off each other and the various dangers of their world. The maguffin itself feels almost perfunctory, we have to have one for genre reasons, so this’ll do. The star attraction is the wasteland itself, a Mad Max meets spaghetti western desert full of monsters, mutants, skeletons. Whenever the show was about those three out having crazy sidequest adventures, following “the golden rule”, it sang.

But let’s step back and talk about Fallout as a whole for a sec. To recap: Fallout is a series of CRPG video games. The first kicked off the late 90s renaissance of “western-style” CRPGs. Fallout acts as kind of the “parent dojo” for a lot of the CRPG world; the leads for the first game would go on to form Troika Games, the team that made Fallout 2 would form the nucleus of Black Isle studios inside Interplay, which also worked with and helped launch Bioware with Baldur’s Gate. A Fallout 3 was in the early stages, but cancelled as Interplay finished going out of business.

After Interplay imploded, Bethesda picked up the rights to the series in the fire sale, and ten years later published Fallout 3. Meanwhile, many of the crew from Black Isle had reformed as Obsidian Entertainment, which would then work with Bethesda to make Fallout: New Vegas with a team composed of many of the people who worked on the original cancelled Fallout 3, and using some of the same designs. Finally, this was all capped off with Fallout 4 once again by Bethesda.

The point to all that is that the series is five games, each made by different people, at different companies, starring different characters, all with different tones and takes on the material, across nearly 20 years. I think it’s best thought of as an anthology series riffing on the same concepts rather than any sort of single vision or viewpoint. There’s a few core pieces—that mad max–meets–westerns wasteland, vaults full of elites waiting out the end of the world, mutant monsters, and a tone described as “satirical” by people who think that’s just a fancy synonym for “dark humor”—but otherwise, each game does its own thing.

How do you adapt all that in to 8 episodes on Amazon Prime? This adaptation makes a really interesting choice, in that rather than directly adapting any of the plots of the previous games, or mix-and-matching elements from them, it tells a new story with new characters in the same world. It’s effectively “Fallout 5”. This turns out to be a great idea, and it’s one I can’t believe more video game adaptations haven’t done.

It also, in a pleasant surprise in this age of prequels, is set after the other games, so those stories are vaguely treated as having “happened” and then here are some things that happened next.

As such, the show gives itself the flexibility to pick and choose various bits from the games to use or not, as well as threading new new inventions. It manages to hit a sort of “median-value” Fallout vibe, equidistant from all the games, which is a harder accomplishment than it makes it look.

Tone-wise the show settles on something best summed up as “Diet Westworld”. Because, of course, this is made by the same team that made the “stayed on too long” Westworld for HBO and the “killed too soon” The Peripheral for Amazon.

It has a lot in common with Westworld: multiple characters stories interweaving, a story that plays out in two time periods, The Ghoul is who Ed Harris’ Man in Black wanted to be when he grew up, a sort of jovial nihilism. It’s not simplified so much as streamlined, the time periods are obvious, the list of characters is shorter.

It definitely inherits Westworld’s desire to have everything be the result of one mystery of another, it’s a show that constantly wants to be opening locked boxes to find another locked box inside.

And this is too bad, because for me, Fallout is one of those settings that works much better when it’s operating a vibes-over-lore mode. You’re out in the wasteland, and it’s full of weird stuff that no one can explain, because anyone who could died before we were born, and we’ve got better things to do than speculate. Why are these vaults here? Grandma’s notes don’t say. Rad scorpions, huh? Yeah, they seem bad. Super-mutants? Yeah, don’t get near them.

Unfortunately, the games, and now the show, have trended more towards the “explain everything and fill in every detail” school of design, which… sure. It’s fine. I bring this up because the show leans hard into my single least favorite corner of the setting, namely that Vault-Tec, the company that built the vaults, was Up To Something, and Dark Secrets Abound. And this has always made me make a kind of exasperated sound and throw my hands up in the air because, really? “A third of a percent of the population decided to wait out the end of the world in luxury apartments while everyone else did the work to survive and the rebuild, so their grandchildren could emerge and take over” wasn’t enough satirical payload for you? You had to also make them Lex Luthor? And this is probably because this happened during Peak X-Files, and wheels-within-wheels conspiracies were cool and trendy in the late 90s, but now that just makes me tired.

The show even kisses up against the Thumb Thing. Let me explain. The mascot of both the franchise and Vault-Tec is the Vault Boy, a 50s-esque smiling cartoon character usually shown throwing a thumbs-up. No matter how bad things get, there’s the Vault-Boy, happy as can be.

There’s this urban rumor meets fan theory that the reason the Vault-Boy has his thumb up is that this is a way to gauge how close you are to an atomic bomb going off; if the mushroom cloud is smaller than your thumb, you have time to get to shelter. And, this is the most Lore Brain thing I’ve ever heard. Of course that’s not why he has his thumb up, he’s doing that because it’s funny to have a relentlessly optimistic cartoon character in the face of the terrible horrors of the aftermath of a nuclear war. But the people poisoned with Lore Brain need everything to Mean Something, so this rumor persists, until the show dances right up to the edge of endorsing it. And this drives me crazy, because not everything needs to have some complicated explanation you can read about in the wiki, stuff can just be thematic, you know?

The show also picked up Westworld’s (and The Peripheral’s) grim sense of humor. I preferred the Fallout games when they were on the funnier end of the spectrum, and I could have gone with a funnier show. It’s not not funny, but it’s also a show that cast Matt Berry in a fully serious part, which feels wasteful.

And a final thing Fallout inherited from Westworld is the “adult-ness” of the content. I promise I’m not one of those weirdoes that thinks movies shouldn’t have sex scenes, but my hottest take is that most movies would be better one rating lower than they are. And normally, this wouldn’t bug me, except I have a 12-year old at home who loves Fallout, and I can’t in good conscience show him the show.

Because I lied up at the top, I didn’t just happen to watch it over a weekend, I previewed the first part to see if I could watch it with the kids, realized that the answer was “…probably not?” and then jammed the rest of the show to see if I was right.

And what really grinds my gears about that is the content is only barely over the line into that TV-MA / R level, it wouldn’t have taken that much to knock it down to a stiff PG-13. And, like, if you’re going to go “adult”, go all the way, you know? I kept grumbling “pick a lane!” under my breath while watching it; it kept feeling like one of those 80s movies that threw one dramatic stabbing or topless scene in just to get their PG movie up into R so the teenagers wouldn’t think they’d gone soft. If you’re not going to let my kid watch it, go full Robocop, you know? Or, more to the point, full Westworld.

Because, unlike Westworld, none of that stuff mattered! Whereas Westworld was fundamentally The Writer's Barely-Disguised Fetish (In Color!), here it’s all basically frosting. You could have cut around it, or panned away, and really not lost anything. On the other hand, if I’m honest, it wasn’t the mild sexy stuff or the CG gore that tipped it over the line to “nope, wait til he’s older”, it’s that there’s a sequence halfway through the first episode that’s every nightmare he’s ever had about a school shooting. And in fairness, that part is key to the plot the way the sexytimes and cartoon gore is not, so this is where I throw my hands up and say Libya is a land of contrasts, and that I get it, I really do, but I would have really preferred watching this show with my kid than not.

And my final gripe I’m going to air out here is that the show ended up with a worse case of Surf Dracula syndrome than it originally looked like it was going to have. She gets out of the vault in the first episode, but then the last episode ends on a note that’s clearly supposed to tease the next season, but instead feels more like they’ve finally arrived at the premise of the show. There’s a much better version of this show that got to that set of plot beats at the end of the first hour and built up from there.

Or to put that a different way, it feels like the show ended at the end of the first act of the main quest-line, after mostly draining side quests.

TV is in a weird place right now, and Fallout reflects the current anxiety over the form. It’s certainly not a old-style traditional episodic show, but nor is it the “badly-paced 8-hour movie” so many streaming shows tend to be, nor does it manage “heavily serialized but every episode does it’s own thing” as well as Westworld did. Instead it lands somewhere in the middle of all of that, and ends up feeling like a show that’s both very busy but also killing time until the next season.

And I don’t think dropping the whole show at once did them any favors. Whereas Westworld dominated the conversation for weeks at a time, this show is almost impossible to talk about, because everyone has seen a different number of episodes, so instead of talking about anything interesting, the web swirls around Vault-Boy’s thumb and dates on chalkboards. There’s a lot to talk about, and I notice every website that might want to talk about them already have the quality of walking back into the room saying “…and another thing!” long after the conversation was over.

I’m getting dangerously close to saying “I wish they had made a different show,” but I wish they’d leaned a little harder into the 50s aesthetics and had each episode be standalone new wacky adventures every week with the premise explained by the words to the theme song.

And this is all the nature of the medium here in 2024, but I really wish that last “okey-dokey” felt earned, that it felt like a punch-the-air climax to what had come before, instead of feeling like Dracula was finally getting his surfboard out.

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.

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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?

Doctor Who Grab Bag

The PR machine is gearing up, and as such they announced all the episode titles and writers for the upcoming season over the weekend, along with a new trailer: Doctor Who's New Trailer is a Time-Traveling Delight

I’m hoping someone eventually writes a gossipy behind-the-scenes book about how this iteration of the show came about. The stories around the campfire sure makes it sound like the show really was effectively canceled after Chibnall & Whittaker left in ’22, and then something happened and now Davies is running a new show with the same name as part of a co-production with his old friends at Bad Wolf and spending Disney’s money to do it. It also sure seems like there wasn’t that much time between that deal happening and the new-new show going into production.

Backing some of those rumors up is the fact that of the eight episodes this year, RTD is writing six of them. The two he’s not writing are the long-rumored and half-heartedly denied return of Steven Moffat for what’s likely to the best show of the season, and the previously announced pair of Loki’s Kate Herron with Briony Redman.

Doctor Who never had a writer’s room in the American TV style, nor did it usually do the BBC-style single author, instead it tends to use a rotating bench of freelance writers, which helped give the show it’s “anthology but with the same regular cast” vibe. Having nearly every episode be written by the showrunner raised eyebrows in some corners of the ‘net. But I suspect there isn’t anything more to it than the fact that they had to stand up a new production essentially from scratch, and fast, and there wasn’t time to find and spin up a batch of writers, especially if there was a chance they would need any handholding. So, RTD leans into the throttle and does most of them himself, and then pulls in the one other guy whom he knows can deliver a script without any assistance, and then the woman who directed what was effectively the best season of Doctor Who in years.

Meanwhile….

If two weeks ago was “Caves of Androzani” at 40, that means the next story, “The Twin Dilemma” also turned 40 over the weekend. “Twin Dilemma” is mind-wrenchingly bad, and not in a fun way, just 4 25-minute slices of pure anti-quality, the mathematical opposite of entertainment.

One of the funniest things about classic Doctor Who is that one of the all-time best episodes aired back-to-back with the absolute worst. This is a power move very few shows attempt? Star Trek, for example, had the basic decency to put “City on the Edge of Forever” and “Spock’s Brain” on opposite ends of the run, you know?

Back before the show came back, we spent a lot of time trying to convince ourselves that the show’s early-80s implosion wasn’t as bad as it really was, that there were some gems in there, that you could appreciate it on its own merits, but also maybe there were some Lessons that could be learned.

Which brings me to last week’s other pair of Doctor Who-related anniversaries, as last week also marked 19 years since the new show came back, and 20 since they announced that it woud.

Because after the show came back, and was just casually wildly successful, we could all relax. The good parts of the old show were still good, but we didn’t have to convince anyone else—or ourselves—that the bad parts were otherwise. Because the only lesson from that part of the old show was actually “don’t hire people bad at TV to run your TV show.”

With all these popping in March, it feels like there’s a spring metaphor in here somewhere, but that would be crass.

And finally…

From basically the first moment it was announced that Davies was coming back to run the show, everyone assumed his first call was going to be to Moffat, in a sort of “If I have to come back, so do you” way. Moffat’s response to this was to give a series of very carefully phrased denials, where he never actually said he wasn’t coming back, and the fact that he was coming back after all became one of those worst-kept secrets around. The word on the street was that he was writing episode 3 of the season, and then it leaked via a producer’s CV that he was probably also writing this year’s christmas episode.

And so they finally admitted that he was coming back a week or two ago, with this vaguely embarrassed air of “why did we cover this up, again?” Because he is, in fact, writing episode, titled “Boom”, and still strongly rumored to be writing the christmas show, rumored to be called “Joy to the World.”

Armed with that knowledge, I’d like to call your attention to this interview from the end of January, from well before anyone admitted he was coming back (seriously, it’s only a minute or two, go watch and I’ll meet you under the link):

Doctor Who's Steven Moffat on possible return: "It's fine without me!" | Radio Times

My favorite part is the little pause where he builds the sentence in his head and works both his episode titles into his non-denial denial that he’s coming back. This is the guy who wrote an entire season that locked into place around the Tardis being all four parts of “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” and also built a joke in “Blink” around trolling a specific web forum; glad to see the old magic is still there.

This is gonna be really fun.

Lightsaber Hot-Take Follow-Up

Following up on last Monday’s Hot Takes on Lightsabers: Last week’s episode of The Bad Batch? That’s how you pivot a story around a lightsaber powering up. A perfect example of “oh snap, it just Got Real.”

(Also, are you watching Bad Batch? You should be watching Bad Batch)

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.

Doctor Who Season 1/14/40

As long as I’m linking to trailers and embedding video, there’s a trailer out for the new season of Doctor Who:

Wait, did they do the Akira slide… with the Tardis?

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

BSG, Fifteen Years On

It’s been called to my attention that the last episode of the “new” Battlestar Galactica aired fifteen years ago yesterday?

My favorite part of that finale is that you can tell someone whose never seen it that the whole show ends with a robot dance party, and even if they believe you, they will never in a million years guess how that happens.

And, literally putting the words “they have a plan” in big letters in the opening credits of every episode, while not ever bothering to work out what that plan was, that’s whatever the exact opposite of imposter syndrome is.

Not a great ending.

That first season, though, that was about as good a season of TV not named Twin Peaks has ever been. It was on in the UK months before it even had an airdate in the US, and I kept hearing good things, so I—ahem—obtained copies. I watched it every week on a CRT computer monitor at 2 in the morning after everyone else was asleep, and I really couldn’t believe what I was seeing. They really did take that cheesy late-70s Star Wars knockoff and make something outstanding out of it. Mostly, what I remember is I didn’t have anyone to talk about it with, so I had to convince everyone I knew to go watch it once it finally landed on US TV.

It was never that good again. Sure, the end was bad, but so was the couple of years leading up to that end? The three other seasons had occasional flashes of brilliance but that mostly drained out, replaced by escalating “what’s the craziest thing that could happen next?” so that by the time starbuck was a ghost and bob dylan was a fundamental force of the universe there was no going back, and they finally landed on that aforementioned dance party. And this was extra weird because it not only started so good, but it seemed to have such a clear mission: namely, show those dorks over at Star Trek: Voyager how their show should have worked.

Some shows should just be about 20 episodes, you know?

Book Lists Wednesday

Speaking of best of lists, doing the rounds this week we have:

The Great American Novels

We give the Atlantic a hard time in these parts, and usually for good reasons, but it’s a pretty good list! I think there’s some things missing, and there’s a certain set of obvious biases in play, but it’s hard to begrudge a “best american fiction” list that remembers Blume, LeGuin, and Jemisin, you know? Also, Miette’s mother is on there!

I think I’ve read 20 of these? I say think, because there are a few I own a copy of but don’t remember a single thing about (I’m looking at YOU, Absalom, Absalom!)

And, as long as we’re posting links to lists of books, I’ve had this open in a tab for the last month:

Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction - Wikipedia

I forget now why I ended up there, but I thought this was a pretty funny list, because I considers myself a pretty literate, well-read person, and I hadn’t even heard of most of these, must less read them. That said, the four on there I actually have read—Guns of August, Stillwell and the American Experience in China, Soul of a New Machine, and Into Thin Air—are four of the best books I’ve ever read, so maybe I should read a couple more of these?

Since the start of the Disaster of the Twenties I’ve pretty exclusively read trash, because I needed the distraction, and I didn’t have the spare mental bandwidth for anything complicated or thought provoking. I can tell the disaster is an a low ebb at the moment, because I found myself looking at both of these lists thinking, maybe I’m in the mood for something a little chunkier.

Caves of Androzani at 40

As long as we’re talking about 40th anniversaries, this past Saturday marked 40 years since the last episode aired of “Caves of Androzani”, Peter Davison’s final story as Doctor Who.

One of the unique things about Doctor Who is the way it rolls its cast over on a pretty regular basis, including the actor that plays the title character. This isn’t totally unusual—Bond does the same thing—but what is unusual is that the show keeps the same continuity, in that the new actor is playing literally the same character, who just has a new body now.

The real-world reason for this is that Doctor Who is a hard show to make, and a harder show to be the lead of, and after about three seasons, everyone is ready to move on. The in-fiction reason is that when the Doctor is about to die they can “regenerate”, healing themselves but changing their body.

This results is a weird sub-genre of stories that only exist in Doctor Who—stories where the main character gets killed, but then the show keeps going. And the thing is, these basically never work. Doctor Who is a fairly light-weight family action-adventure show, where the main characters get into and out of life-threatening scrapes every time. “Regeneration Stories” tend to all fall into the same pattern, where something “really extra bad” is happening, and events conspire such that the Doctor needs to sacrifice themselves to save everyone else. And they’re always deeply unsatisfying, because it’s always the sort of problem that wouldn’t be that big a deal if the main actor wasn’t about to leave. There have been thirteen regular leads of the show at this point, and none of their last episodes have been anywhere near their best.

Except once.

In 1984, Doctor Who was a show in decline. No longer the creative or ratings juggernaut that it had been through most of the 1970s, it was wrapping up three years with Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor that could most charitably be described as “fine”. Davison was one of the best actors to ever play the part, but with him in the lead the show could never quite figure out how to do better than about a B-.

For Davison’s last episode, the show brought back Robert Holmes, who had been the show’s dominant—and best—writer throughout the seventies, but had’t worked on the show since ’79. Holmes had written for every Doctor since the second, but had never written a last story, and seemed determined to make it work.

The result was extraordinary. While most previous examples had been huge, universe-spanning stakes, this was almost perversely small-fry. A tiny colony moon, where the forces of a corporation square off with a drug dealer whose basically space Phantom of the Opera, with the army and a group of gun-runners caught in the middle. At one point, the Doctor describes the situation as “a pathetic little war”, and he’s right—it’s almost perversely small-scale by his standards.

That said, there are enough moving pieces that the Doctor never really gets a handle on what’s going on. Any single part would be a regular day a the office, but combined, they keep him off balance as things keep spiraling out of control. It’s a perfect example of the catalytic effect the Doctor has—just by showing up, things start to destabilize without him having to do anything.

What’s really brilliant about it, though, is that he actually gets killed right at the start. He and new companion Peri stumble into an alien bat nest, which lethally poisons them, even though it takes a while to kick in. Things keep happening to keep him from solving all this, and by the end he’s only managed to scare up a single does of antidote, which he gives to his friend and then dies.

It's also remarkably better than everything around it—not just the best show Davison was in, but in genuine contention for best episode of the 26 seasons of the classic show. It’s better written, better directed, better acted than just about anything else the old show did.

It’s not flawless—the show’s reach far exceeds the grasp of the budget. As an example, there’s a “computer tablet” that’s blatantly a TV remote, and there’s a “magma beast” that’s anything but. But that’s all true for everything the show was doing in the 80s—but for once, it’s trying to do something good, instead of not having enough money to do something mediocre.

My favorite beat comes about 3/4 of the way through, when the Doctor has either a premonition of his own death, or starts to regenerate and chokes it back—it’s ambiguous. Something happens that the Doctor shakes off, and the show won’t do something that weird and unclear again until Peter Capaldi’s twelfth Doctor refused to regenerate in 2017.

It also has one of my favorite uses of the Tardis as a symbol; at the end, things have gone from bad to worse, to even worse than that, and the Doctor, dying, carries the unconscious body of his friend across the moonscape away from the exploding mud volcano (!!), and the appearance of the blue police box out of the mist has never been more welcome.

As a kid, it was everything I wanted out of the show—it was weird, and scary, and exciting. As a grown-up, I’m not inclined to argue.

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.”