The Coen Brothers' latest film is an anthology available on Netflix called the Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a series of Westerns that carry with them a great deal of humor but also maybe their most pronounced sense of existential dread since No Country for Old Men.
The eponymous character is a blend of these notions - a singing cowboy who seems like a total throwback to the sanitized west of TV westerns of the 1950s, complete with decidedly square duds and a goofy singing voice (which he employs regularly) all while being a gunslinger capable of unleashing Peckinpah-levels of violence upon his foes.
Cynicism runs through all the stories, which show a world and life ruled by brutality, selfishness, and a failure to connect with others on a meaningful level. At one point early on, Buster Scruggs shows a wanted poster of himself that calls him a "misanthrope," which he denies by saying that he would never blame humanity for being such wretches, as it is simply in their nature (you know, what a misanthrope would say.)
The stories range from the cartoonish (Buster Scruggs) to the nightmarishly surreal and, most devastating of all, pure tragedy. (I don't want to say which one it is, as the end is something of a twist, though not if you know what to expect from the movie at that point.)
The Coens have always had a sense of humor about their own dark worldview - the Nihilists in the Big Lebowski are often seen as self-skewering stand-ins for the directors, and A Serious Man manages to embody the dark, "some people get screwed for no reason" ethos while still being hilarious (in stark contrast with No Country for Old Men, which is about as funny as a heart attack, even with Anton Chigurh's ridiculous hair.)
Coincidence and bad luck seem to be a constant theme for them, certainly in this movie. It calls to mind the notion that something being a million-to-one chance means it actually happens all the time - there are billions of us on this planet, after all. Acts have unintended consequences, though it seems as if the cruel ones always achieve their purpose.
The final piece of the film is simultaneously the most mundane and yet also the most terrifyingly strange. Five passengers ride in a cramped stage coach to a town. They simply talk, comparing world views and beliefs about where they are going. In a real sense, very little happens in the last segment, there is nothing explicit to say that anything unusual is going on. And yet, watching it, I was 100% convinced that the passengers (at least three of the five) were all dead and on their way to the underworld. Yet this segment ends with the unnamed frenchman, one of the three, looking around the spooky-ass and dreamlike town and simply shrugging before he puts on his hat.
Perhaps, the Coen brothers seem to be saying, this is the only way we can really deal with the existential dread of existence - to shrug and move on with our lives as best we can. It's not the greatest pep talk, but it does suggest that we have some degree of control over how much we let the horrors of life affect us.
Art is, after all, a medium of catharsis. We can hope our fates will not be so dark as those in these stories, but channel our fears into these stories and then step away from them.
Sunday, November 25, 2018
Sunday, October 28, 2018
The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
Hey, remember Sabrina the Teenage Witch? I do. Back when I was a kid, it was one of the more successful family sitcoms on ABC's TGIF lineup. I honestly do not remember if it was actually any good because I wasn't much of a critical thinker when I was like... nine. But it was about a teenage girl who was also a witch, raised by her aunts, with a wise-cracking black cat named Salem and a boyfriend and best friend at school from whom she had to keep her magical life a secret.
It was pretty low-key and kooky in a very family-friendly 90s sitcom manner, as I recall.
The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina are not like that.
Based on the same Archie comic title, this show is, like Riverdale before it (there's no way this would exist without Riverdale,) following the direction that the comics took and examining the story in a far darker manner.
In this version of Sabrina, the whole "witch" thing is way more fire and brimstone than Harry Potter. Her aunts, her live-in cousin (who has apparently been under house arrest for the last 75 years yet looks like he's either in his 20s or 30s) and the members of the religion for which her late father was the high priest is a straight up satanic coven, its members all adherents to the devil, as in the actual fallen angel lord of hell. The early episodes deal with her awaiting her "Dark Baptism" (her sixteenth birthday, which happens to be on Halloween during a blood moon eclipse.)
(Pedantic aside - it does frustrate me a little, as someone who took a semester of Irish gaelic, that one of the coven members refers to Halloween as Samhain but pronounces it "sam-hen" instead of "sah-wen," which is how it's actually pronounced.)
Much as I gather Riverdale does, the show plays with time period. From the cars and clothing, it seems like it's in the 50s or 60s, but then you see a person using a laptop and characters discussing a 1970 Toni Morrison novel as a "classic." It's a stylized world, and I think we're just meant to roll with it.
Ultimately, the show so far (I'm three episodes in) does largely play with the idea of the teenage identity crisis, and particularly how young people are expected to make commitments they aren't informed or mature enough to make. On top of it we see the theme of oppressive patriarchy that the devil claims to free people from - though the more one spends actually looking at it, the more the devil seems like the ultimate exploitative patriarch.
The show (and I gather the recent incarnation of the comics before it) play an interesting game with the "dark is not evil" trope, giving Sabrina some loving family members (at least Cousin Ambrose and Aunt Hilda - Aunt Zelda's going to need to prove herself) who are nevertheless part of this coven, praising Satan and all that.
The supernatural world seems to be almost entirely populated by people on the devil side of things - even a mortal lawyer with experience in witch law named Daniel Webster (the show is not what you'd call subtle) is only in such a position thanks to past demonic interactions. We do have a mystery about a possible witch hunter who has killed some local warlock, but that story feels disconnected from the main plot so far - which is whether Sabrina can have her cake but eat it to, retaining and expanding her powers without, you know, giving her soul to Satan.
The show has style up the wazoo, which I think counts for a lot, and the comfort the show has with going dark is pretty fun. For these first few episodes, Kieran Shipka does a great job radiating charisma and making us like this version of Sabrina, even if the story doesn't give her a ton of agency to begin with (which, to be fair, is part of the point.) As often happens with stories like these, the mundane stuff with her mortal friends who aren't in the know sometime struggles to feel relevant. Her friends at school really feel like Supporting Characters (capitalization intended.) Harvey, much as he did on the sitcom, is mostly just kind of dopily likable but if his simplicity is his main appeal, the show hasn't really explored that much. Mind you, I don't need high school drama in this high school drama, but their relationship starts the series as shockingly secure and supportive for a couple of sophomores.
Still, it's a bit of a trip to see these characters rendered in such a darker world. Some might find the cinematography - particularly an effect in which the edges of the screen are blurred - distracting, but so far I'm enjoying it as a bold choice. As a fantasy nerd, I will say that I'm not very enamored of God/Devil dichotomies in world-building, though I think it works a little better here than it did in, say, Sleepy Hollow (I got so excited in the end of the first season when the spell they cast used the most famous quote from the - fictional, but canon-straddling - Necronomicon, thinking the cosmos of the show was going to get more complex and interesting.)
It was pretty low-key and kooky in a very family-friendly 90s sitcom manner, as I recall.
The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina are not like that.
Based on the same Archie comic title, this show is, like Riverdale before it (there's no way this would exist without Riverdale,) following the direction that the comics took and examining the story in a far darker manner.
In this version of Sabrina, the whole "witch" thing is way more fire and brimstone than Harry Potter. Her aunts, her live-in cousin (who has apparently been under house arrest for the last 75 years yet looks like he's either in his 20s or 30s) and the members of the religion for which her late father was the high priest is a straight up satanic coven, its members all adherents to the devil, as in the actual fallen angel lord of hell. The early episodes deal with her awaiting her "Dark Baptism" (her sixteenth birthday, which happens to be on Halloween during a blood moon eclipse.)
(Pedantic aside - it does frustrate me a little, as someone who took a semester of Irish gaelic, that one of the coven members refers to Halloween as Samhain but pronounces it "sam-hen" instead of "sah-wen," which is how it's actually pronounced.)
Much as I gather Riverdale does, the show plays with time period. From the cars and clothing, it seems like it's in the 50s or 60s, but then you see a person using a laptop and characters discussing a 1970 Toni Morrison novel as a "classic." It's a stylized world, and I think we're just meant to roll with it.
Ultimately, the show so far (I'm three episodes in) does largely play with the idea of the teenage identity crisis, and particularly how young people are expected to make commitments they aren't informed or mature enough to make. On top of it we see the theme of oppressive patriarchy that the devil claims to free people from - though the more one spends actually looking at it, the more the devil seems like the ultimate exploitative patriarch.
The show (and I gather the recent incarnation of the comics before it) play an interesting game with the "dark is not evil" trope, giving Sabrina some loving family members (at least Cousin Ambrose and Aunt Hilda - Aunt Zelda's going to need to prove herself) who are nevertheless part of this coven, praising Satan and all that.
The supernatural world seems to be almost entirely populated by people on the devil side of things - even a mortal lawyer with experience in witch law named Daniel Webster (the show is not what you'd call subtle) is only in such a position thanks to past demonic interactions. We do have a mystery about a possible witch hunter who has killed some local warlock, but that story feels disconnected from the main plot so far - which is whether Sabrina can have her cake but eat it to, retaining and expanding her powers without, you know, giving her soul to Satan.
The show has style up the wazoo, which I think counts for a lot, and the comfort the show has with going dark is pretty fun. For these first few episodes, Kieran Shipka does a great job radiating charisma and making us like this version of Sabrina, even if the story doesn't give her a ton of agency to begin with (which, to be fair, is part of the point.) As often happens with stories like these, the mundane stuff with her mortal friends who aren't in the know sometime struggles to feel relevant. Her friends at school really feel like Supporting Characters (capitalization intended.) Harvey, much as he did on the sitcom, is mostly just kind of dopily likable but if his simplicity is his main appeal, the show hasn't really explored that much. Mind you, I don't need high school drama in this high school drama, but their relationship starts the series as shockingly secure and supportive for a couple of sophomores.
Still, it's a bit of a trip to see these characters rendered in such a darker world. Some might find the cinematography - particularly an effect in which the edges of the screen are blurred - distracting, but so far I'm enjoying it as a bold choice. As a fantasy nerd, I will say that I'm not very enamored of God/Devil dichotomies in world-building, though I think it works a little better here than it did in, say, Sleepy Hollow (I got so excited in the end of the first season when the spell they cast used the most famous quote from the - fictional, but canon-straddling - Necronomicon, thinking the cosmos of the show was going to get more complex and interesting.)
Saturday, September 8, 2018
Castle Rock and Stephen King
Hulu's new series, Castle Rock, which is nearly done with its first season, is set in the eponymous town - a location that finds itself the location of many of Stephen King's books. Much as Lovecraft imagined various placed in Massachusetts like Arkham and Innsmouth, King has a few places in Maine that similarly embody the state's essence while leaving any real locations safely unmentioned.
Castle Rock is where Cujo and the Dead Zone and Needful Things and a number of other King works are set. King's is a shared literary universe, and while not all plots intersect, the implication if you've ever read his work is that they are all happening within the same universe - or rather multiverse, given that they all revolve around his Dark Fantasy opus, the Dark Tower, named for the cosmic lynchpin that holds all universes together (and maybe is God?) that is under threat from the forces of chaos and evil.
Castle Rock the show plays with a lot of King elements. The plot begins after the suicide of the Warden at Shawshank Prison (yes, the same Shawshank from the not-at-all fantasy/horror/scifi Shawshank Redemption.) As a new private prison company takes over Shawshank, they investigate an abandoned wing of the prison only to discover a man in his late twenties (seemingly) who has been locked in a cage hidden deep within in a water tank in this most isolated part of the prison.
When they ask him his name, the only one he can produce is "Henry Deaver," the name of a man who grew up in Castle Rock but left to become an attorney. Henry is called back to Castle Rock and decides to champion the man while he reconnects with his family and his strange home town.
But there's a reason Henry is hesitant to do so. When he was a preteen in the early 90s, he went missing for several days, during which his father Matthew, the preacher at the local church, died. Upon his return, suspicion fell upon him, and his absence was never explained.
The season up to this point has been unpacking the mystery of what happened to Henry and who/what "The Kid," namely the guy who had been locked up in Shawshank, is.
The location is certainly familiar, though sometimes I wonder if the show is pulling its punches in ways King would not. Half of King's monsters tend to be humans, and one could argue that the Warden who kept The Kid locked up is one of them, and that Henry's father - who we learn more and more has convinced himself he is hearing the voice of god and doing very strange things because of it - are pretty classic King villains. King has a tendency to take mundane evils like childhood bullying and parental abuse and following through with them, often having supernatural monsters empower this all-too-real cruelty, where defeating the monster and defeating a human evil are one and the same.
Henry's "othering" by the town is very interesting due to the fact that he's a black adoptee who grew up in a very white town in rural Maine, though I don't know that they explore this theme all that much. I think, for example, we'd see a lot more explicit racism in a King book, perhaps spurred on in people who had been unconsciously or dog-whistlingly racist by some supernatural threat.
The Kid is a curious figure, and there is a constant guessing game of whether he is, as the Warden once said "the Devil" or if he's just someone who has suffered horrific abuse and whose flat and alien-like demeanor are simply a response to the stress.
When we learn that this guy has looked the same for almost three decades, and that acts of barbarous violence seem to erupt around him, the whole "he's the devil" theory starts to look more likely.
In the latest episode, we actually get a rather definitive answer to both of the core mysteries of the series, though of course they raise new questions.
Spoilers ahead.
Castle Rock is where Cujo and the Dead Zone and Needful Things and a number of other King works are set. King's is a shared literary universe, and while not all plots intersect, the implication if you've ever read his work is that they are all happening within the same universe - or rather multiverse, given that they all revolve around his Dark Fantasy opus, the Dark Tower, named for the cosmic lynchpin that holds all universes together (and maybe is God?) that is under threat from the forces of chaos and evil.
Castle Rock the show plays with a lot of King elements. The plot begins after the suicide of the Warden at Shawshank Prison (yes, the same Shawshank from the not-at-all fantasy/horror/scifi Shawshank Redemption.) As a new private prison company takes over Shawshank, they investigate an abandoned wing of the prison only to discover a man in his late twenties (seemingly) who has been locked in a cage hidden deep within in a water tank in this most isolated part of the prison.
When they ask him his name, the only one he can produce is "Henry Deaver," the name of a man who grew up in Castle Rock but left to become an attorney. Henry is called back to Castle Rock and decides to champion the man while he reconnects with his family and his strange home town.
But there's a reason Henry is hesitant to do so. When he was a preteen in the early 90s, he went missing for several days, during which his father Matthew, the preacher at the local church, died. Upon his return, suspicion fell upon him, and his absence was never explained.
The season up to this point has been unpacking the mystery of what happened to Henry and who/what "The Kid," namely the guy who had been locked up in Shawshank, is.
The location is certainly familiar, though sometimes I wonder if the show is pulling its punches in ways King would not. Half of King's monsters tend to be humans, and one could argue that the Warden who kept The Kid locked up is one of them, and that Henry's father - who we learn more and more has convinced himself he is hearing the voice of god and doing very strange things because of it - are pretty classic King villains. King has a tendency to take mundane evils like childhood bullying and parental abuse and following through with them, often having supernatural monsters empower this all-too-real cruelty, where defeating the monster and defeating a human evil are one and the same.
Henry's "othering" by the town is very interesting due to the fact that he's a black adoptee who grew up in a very white town in rural Maine, though I don't know that they explore this theme all that much. I think, for example, we'd see a lot more explicit racism in a King book, perhaps spurred on in people who had been unconsciously or dog-whistlingly racist by some supernatural threat.
The Kid is a curious figure, and there is a constant guessing game of whether he is, as the Warden once said "the Devil" or if he's just someone who has suffered horrific abuse and whose flat and alien-like demeanor are simply a response to the stress.
When we learn that this guy has looked the same for almost three decades, and that acts of barbarous violence seem to erupt around him, the whole "he's the devil" theory starts to look more likely.
In the latest episode, we actually get a rather definitive answer to both of the core mysteries of the series, though of course they raise new questions.
Spoilers ahead.
Sunday, May 27, 2018
The Expanse Gets a new Mystery
I watched about five episodes of Alias before I gave up. The reason was that they would always end on what seemed like a cliffhanger, but was really the climax that was meant to lead into the final act. It was a very artificial way of creating cliffhangers that was, in fact, just a rip in the middle of the plot. I'd argue that an effective cliffhanger is more the Inciting Incident of the next story - not the climax of the previous one.
The Expanse actually does something similar, but for whatever reason, it works a lot better. The story of Leviathan Wakes, the first book in the series, is divided between seasons one and two, and there's a transition to the second book, Caliban's War, in the middle of the season. We just saw the resolution of Caliban's War in the previous episode, and now we're getting into Abaddon's Gate. I haven't read the books, but there is a pretty clear divide here, in this case with a rather big time jump, not to mention a little isolated short story that ends in what is honestly maybe the most gruesome death I've ever seen on screen.
With Errinwright and Mao both arrested, and even SG Sorrento-Gillis resigned (we don't really see his fall from grace, as he came out of Errinwright's arrest as kind of an opportunistic victor,) the war with Mars seems like it's died down - presumably to previous Cold War positions. The biggest deal is the giant ring that the protomolecule has been constructing out beyond Saturn after the massive jellyfish/Lovecraftian god rose out of Venus and traveled there.
So what is going on with our people?
One thing that's surprising is that the Roci crew is now famous and kind of legitimized thanks to their many heroic feats. They have a documentary crew on board and there's new reports that portray them in a flattering light (though I've got a pet theory developing about the docu-crew that might be total BS.) Holden, Alex, and Amos have been invited to check out the ring along with a huge and totally-not-at-all-going-to-die-horribly group of UN representatives (including potential survivor of whatever horrible thing happens Anna Volovodov.)
Amos is, as always, reluctant to share anything about his past, and clearly misses Prax, even though he's glad that Prax is back home on Ganymede with his daughter. We actually don't get a ton in this episode for the Roci crew, though I'll come back to Holden.
Naomi has left the crew and is now working for Drummer, who has become captain of the Behemoth - the renamed Nauvoo, now the most powerful ship in the OPA. Indeed, we're seeing the OPA starting to adopt a more legitimate aesthetic, with some sort of hierarchy and a new logo that looks more precisely designed than the old Anarchy A.
Drummer is awesome as always, but while she and Naomi see eye-to-eye, the OPA leadership (which is apparently a thing now) sends a man named Ashford to be Drummer's XO. Ashford is an old space pirate, and seems to be very much your standard OPA tough guy when he has a violent confrontation with some old rival on the bridge of the Behemoth. But despite his snarky attitude, Ashford presents an enigmatic face: when Drummer wants to space a drug-supplier who provided the stuff that got one of her crew killed, Ashford argues in front of the rest of the crew that he ought to be taken to the brig and court-martialed like one does in a real navy. It's certainly good advice if the OPA wants to be seen as legitimate, but at the same time, Ashford's ambition and willingness to undermine his captain is on full display here.
Ashford could really go either way - a status-climbing future mutineer or a really useful, tell-it-straight-to-the-captain first officer. And it's David Straithairn, so that's good.
We're also introduced to a new character (I can't recall if she's named.) There's a group of what appear to be salvage workers working on some station (I couldn't tell if it was near the ring or not.) One of the workers, however, is clearly there for other reasons, as she plants explosives on the station they find, killing a friendly co-worker who finds the bomb after taking some kind of strength-increasing drug hidden in a false tooth.
That suggests to me that this is someone backed up by powerful resources, but we really don't know what the motivation is here just yet.
Second-to-last, let's talk about our poor one-shot Belter. We were introduced to the idea of sling-shotters in season one, where the super XTREME Belters get in tiny ships and attempt to fling themselves between various planets and moons at the fastest speeds attainable to beat previously established records, using the slingshot effect to accelerate as much as they can. Clearly a lot of people die this way, like we saw in season one.
But generally not like this.
Our Belter, a dweeb who is just trying to impress his super-hot and not very faithful girlfriend back on Ceres, blasts Belter covers of old Deep Purple Songs (seriously, "Highway Star" in Belter Patois is the kind of thing that could be cheesy but is actually awesome,) is breaking records, but it turns out all of the coverage of his shot are being pre-empted by all the news about the ring and the fact that the famous James Holden is heading out there to investigate (which, to be fair, has a very tabletop RPG feeling to it - like, why are these guys being sent other than "they're the System's greatest heroes?" Considering that the Expanse was originally conceived of as an MMORPG, if you think of the Roci crew as a group of RPG PCs, it actually works out shockingly well.)
So our dumb, horny, but ultimately innocent belter dude decides that if he's going to get his girl back, he's got to do something really unprecedented. So he changes course, getting ready to send his ship through the massive ring. Once he tells his girlfriend, she sends him a video where she shows him her boobs, which was what this was all about in the first place, and so he enthusiastically goes forward. Telling the UN ships warning him from proceeding the old "oops, sorry, technical difficulties. I'm totally going to stop once I can!" he proceeds to travel through the gate.
And then... uh... um... ew.
See, a field pops up within the gate that stops his ship cold. Everything in the ship goes from thousands of miles and hour to zero velocity in an instant. Well, everything that's a part of the ship. The belter guy, who is strapped into his chair but honestly this'd be ugly any way, keeps moving forward. And he's torn apart... like, depth-wise. It is super, super, super nasty.
What this means for the gate is a big question mark I'm sure we'll spend the rest of the season (and the first half of the next! Thanks, Amazon!) exploring. But for this one dude... that's a nasty way to go. At least it was very quick.
Ok, but I said I was getting back to Holden.
Holden is getting ready for some bunk time when he hears a familiar voice. He looks down and it's Miller, wearing his old stupid hat. And then Miller disappears.
Now, I have had a bit of this spoiled, but I've got to say it's nice to see Thomas Jane back, even if for now he's kind of a dream-like apparition. Given the nature of the protomolecule and Juliet's quasi-resurrection, it always seemed like a possibility that it could bring Miller back in one way or another, but we've got a few questions to ask - is this Miller really the same guy? Does he want to protect humanity from the dangers of the protomolecule? And how big of a presence is he going to be?
The fact that there's a bit of protomolecule on the Roci has been a dangling plot thread for a while now, so if this is the payoff, I'm pretty happy about it.
The Expanse actually does something similar, but for whatever reason, it works a lot better. The story of Leviathan Wakes, the first book in the series, is divided between seasons one and two, and there's a transition to the second book, Caliban's War, in the middle of the season. We just saw the resolution of Caliban's War in the previous episode, and now we're getting into Abaddon's Gate. I haven't read the books, but there is a pretty clear divide here, in this case with a rather big time jump, not to mention a little isolated short story that ends in what is honestly maybe the most gruesome death I've ever seen on screen.
With Errinwright and Mao both arrested, and even SG Sorrento-Gillis resigned (we don't really see his fall from grace, as he came out of Errinwright's arrest as kind of an opportunistic victor,) the war with Mars seems like it's died down - presumably to previous Cold War positions. The biggest deal is the giant ring that the protomolecule has been constructing out beyond Saturn after the massive jellyfish/Lovecraftian god rose out of Venus and traveled there.
So what is going on with our people?
One thing that's surprising is that the Roci crew is now famous and kind of legitimized thanks to their many heroic feats. They have a documentary crew on board and there's new reports that portray them in a flattering light (though I've got a pet theory developing about the docu-crew that might be total BS.) Holden, Alex, and Amos have been invited to check out the ring along with a huge and totally-not-at-all-going-to-die-horribly group of UN representatives (including potential survivor of whatever horrible thing happens Anna Volovodov.)
Amos is, as always, reluctant to share anything about his past, and clearly misses Prax, even though he's glad that Prax is back home on Ganymede with his daughter. We actually don't get a ton in this episode for the Roci crew, though I'll come back to Holden.
Naomi has left the crew and is now working for Drummer, who has become captain of the Behemoth - the renamed Nauvoo, now the most powerful ship in the OPA. Indeed, we're seeing the OPA starting to adopt a more legitimate aesthetic, with some sort of hierarchy and a new logo that looks more precisely designed than the old Anarchy A.
Drummer is awesome as always, but while she and Naomi see eye-to-eye, the OPA leadership (which is apparently a thing now) sends a man named Ashford to be Drummer's XO. Ashford is an old space pirate, and seems to be very much your standard OPA tough guy when he has a violent confrontation with some old rival on the bridge of the Behemoth. But despite his snarky attitude, Ashford presents an enigmatic face: when Drummer wants to space a drug-supplier who provided the stuff that got one of her crew killed, Ashford argues in front of the rest of the crew that he ought to be taken to the brig and court-martialed like one does in a real navy. It's certainly good advice if the OPA wants to be seen as legitimate, but at the same time, Ashford's ambition and willingness to undermine his captain is on full display here.
Ashford could really go either way - a status-climbing future mutineer or a really useful, tell-it-straight-to-the-captain first officer. And it's David Straithairn, so that's good.
We're also introduced to a new character (I can't recall if she's named.) There's a group of what appear to be salvage workers working on some station (I couldn't tell if it was near the ring or not.) One of the workers, however, is clearly there for other reasons, as she plants explosives on the station they find, killing a friendly co-worker who finds the bomb after taking some kind of strength-increasing drug hidden in a false tooth.
That suggests to me that this is someone backed up by powerful resources, but we really don't know what the motivation is here just yet.
Second-to-last, let's talk about our poor one-shot Belter. We were introduced to the idea of sling-shotters in season one, where the super XTREME Belters get in tiny ships and attempt to fling themselves between various planets and moons at the fastest speeds attainable to beat previously established records, using the slingshot effect to accelerate as much as they can. Clearly a lot of people die this way, like we saw in season one.
But generally not like this.
Our Belter, a dweeb who is just trying to impress his super-hot and not very faithful girlfriend back on Ceres, blasts Belter covers of old Deep Purple Songs (seriously, "Highway Star" in Belter Patois is the kind of thing that could be cheesy but is actually awesome,) is breaking records, but it turns out all of the coverage of his shot are being pre-empted by all the news about the ring and the fact that the famous James Holden is heading out there to investigate (which, to be fair, has a very tabletop RPG feeling to it - like, why are these guys being sent other than "they're the System's greatest heroes?" Considering that the Expanse was originally conceived of as an MMORPG, if you think of the Roci crew as a group of RPG PCs, it actually works out shockingly well.)
So our dumb, horny, but ultimately innocent belter dude decides that if he's going to get his girl back, he's got to do something really unprecedented. So he changes course, getting ready to send his ship through the massive ring. Once he tells his girlfriend, she sends him a video where she shows him her boobs, which was what this was all about in the first place, and so he enthusiastically goes forward. Telling the UN ships warning him from proceeding the old "oops, sorry, technical difficulties. I'm totally going to stop once I can!" he proceeds to travel through the gate.
And then... uh... um... ew.
See, a field pops up within the gate that stops his ship cold. Everything in the ship goes from thousands of miles and hour to zero velocity in an instant. Well, everything that's a part of the ship. The belter guy, who is strapped into his chair but honestly this'd be ugly any way, keeps moving forward. And he's torn apart... like, depth-wise. It is super, super, super nasty.
What this means for the gate is a big question mark I'm sure we'll spend the rest of the season (and the first half of the next! Thanks, Amazon!) exploring. But for this one dude... that's a nasty way to go. At least it was very quick.
Ok, but I said I was getting back to Holden.
Holden is getting ready for some bunk time when he hears a familiar voice. He looks down and it's Miller, wearing his old stupid hat. And then Miller disappears.
Now, I have had a bit of this spoiled, but I've got to say it's nice to see Thomas Jane back, even if for now he's kind of a dream-like apparition. Given the nature of the protomolecule and Juliet's quasi-resurrection, it always seemed like a possibility that it could bring Miller back in one way or another, but we've got a few questions to ask - is this Miller really the same guy? Does he want to protect humanity from the dangers of the protomolecule? And how big of a presence is he going to be?
The fact that there's a bit of protomolecule on the Roci has been a dangling plot thread for a while now, so if this is the payoff, I'm pretty happy about it.
Solo: A Star Wars Story
As an aside, before I even begin: Does "A Star Wars Story" work for you? I feel like it sounds awkward. Something about the indefinite article and the utterly generic "story." It's like whenever you have a biopic that's "Otherwise Interesting Title: The Famous Person Story" always makes it sound like it's some really crappy made-for-TV-movie-back-when-such-things-were-often-terrible.
Anyway.
I'm still often surprised to see people who react so negatively to the Last Jedi. As a lifelong (if starting at age 9 counts) Star Wars fan, the Last Jedi was the exact sort of decon/recon I wanted to see of the new movies. The Force Awakens, while its characters redeemed it, rehashed a lot from the original movies, and the Last Jedi delved into the philosophy and mysticism in ways that I found fascinating. I felt it challenged the audience in a way that the Force Awakens had been too gunshy to do - examining just what would happen to someone who was simultaneously a human being but also a godlike figure of legend.
Solo doesn't do that. In many ways, it is the quintessential fan service film. It ticks a hell of a lot of boxes, explaining things like why Han described the Kessel Run in units of distance rather than time (which has been a subject of nerdy debates for like forty years - I'd always just assumed it was a research error) or why his last name was Solo (turns out the heavy-handed character labeling is in-universe.)
True to Star Wars tradition, Solo is a mixture of genres. It's part Western, part Noir, part Heist movie. I don't want to do a full plot recap, but basically the film starts with Han and his girlfriend Qi'ra (I had just assumed she was Keira until I saw the IMDB page) trapped living in some rat hole on Corellia run by a local crime boss. Han gets his hands on some valuable fuel and attempts to use it to escape the planet with Qi'ra, but just as they are about to get out, Qi'ra is seized by the mob lackeys and they're separated.
Hoping to be a pilot, Han joins the Imperial Academy, but we rush through those three years to find that he washed out and wound up in the infantry, fighting in some WWI-style trench warfare on some planet that is probably totally innocent and just being put under the Imperial boot heel.
But the movie isn't about the Empire or the not-quite-there-yet Rebellion. We actually don't see a lot in the way of Stormtroopers or the Empire in general. Indeed, as the brief blue-texted captions at the start (echoing the initial "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...") describe, it's a time of lawlessness. The Empire, like so many autocratic regimes that claim to be there to restore law and order, are actually not in the least interested in doing so.
As befits a Han-centric story, we're dealing with criminals and outlaws, and only in the sense that the more powerful mobsters have friends or minions within the Imperial hierarchy does the government really come into play.
So what we have is a plot in which Han screws up a job, only to realize that this puts him in debt with a very powerful person you wouldn't want as an enemy, and so he and his team have to pull a more dangerous job, all while dealing with double-crosses and unclear loyalties.
Of the three genres that the movie apes, the least effective is the heist movie - there's very little of the fun, Ocean's Eleven-style planning, complications, and reveals. Instead we see criminals doing what I might term "opportunistic heroism," as they stage a slave revolt within the spice mines of Kessel so they can sneak their loot out in the chaos.
In terms of Noir, Han's relationship with Qi'ra is pulled pretty directly out of that genre - the lost love who resurfaces with a potentially darker past than the hero's and whose loyalties thus cannot be trusted. Unfortunately, the only real payoff for this is what seems like a sequel hook for a movie that's already an interquel spin-off featuring a character long thought dead unless you've been watching the animated TV shows or, like me, reading AV Club reviews when they catch your attention. It's really not clear to me that such a sequel will happen unless by shear force of Disney filmmaking will. Unfortunately, this forces Emilia Clarke to play the whole movie as an enigma we might never be able to explore and unravel.
One of the oddities of the movie is that Alden Eirenreich is not all that much younger than Harrison Ford was when he first played Han. Now, I wouldn't want to see Han as a little kid (just as, in retrospect, it wasn't a great idea to introduce Anakin in the prequels before he was, like, twenty - among other issues.) But it does sort of shrink the time scale here. Lando is supposed to be one of Han's best friends by the time of Empire, and so having him just meet him here suggests the bond is a somewhat weaker one than we might have assumed (one could have imagined them being childhood friends from the way they act in Empire.)
Now, for the record, I did think it was a pretty fun movie. It just didn't blow me away with anything. It was pretty much the movie I expected it to be. And some people might really like that - especially after the risks that Last Jedi took. If you're looking for space adventures with Han and Chewbacca, this is definitely that. And if you want to explore the underbelly of the Star Wars universe in a way that Rogue One didn't even really do, this gets at that as well. Star Wars popularized the "used future" aesthetic, and this really gets that look - we even see that Lando's ship - you might have heard of it - the Millennium Falcon, was once a pretty snazzy vessel before Han got it all jacked up.
I would say that all eight existing main Star Wars films are essential in their own way - the prequels for showing how ambition without restraint can create cinematic abominations, and the sequels for handing off a film franchise to a generation of filmmakers who grew up on it and seeing their own takes on the world and its mythos (I don't really need to explain why for the originals, right?) Rogue One was a bold and bleak leap out of the series comfort zone, which made up for its flaws with "holy shit did they really do that?" chutzpah.
Solo... is inoffensive. I'm a sap so I'll always be curious about the fate of long-lost love interests, but in ways that Rogue One avoided by centering entirely on new characters, Solo suffers a bit of the inherent problem with prequels, which is the foregone conclusion. We know that he won't get back with Qi'ra because he has to get with Leia. And we know that Lando, Chewbacca, and Han are all going to be fine, which then makes the deaths of other characters less shocking.
If there's one thematically interesting thing the movie reinforces, though doesn't really introduce, it's the idea that Han gets betrayed. The depths of that betrayal do have a range - Lando at one point abandons him in the middle of a standoff, but one does not get the impression that either of them considers it personal. But given what we know of how Han ends up in the end of The Force Awakens (does that still need a spoiler tag? Would you be reading a review of a Star Wars movie if you hadn't seen it?) the fact that Han's life is filled with betrayals makes his death at the hands of his own son really freaking tragic.
Still, this isn't a movie to make you think too hard about the consequences of Han's lifestyle choices. It's fun. Don't expect epic and you'll have a good time.
Anyway.
I'm still often surprised to see people who react so negatively to the Last Jedi. As a lifelong (if starting at age 9 counts) Star Wars fan, the Last Jedi was the exact sort of decon/recon I wanted to see of the new movies. The Force Awakens, while its characters redeemed it, rehashed a lot from the original movies, and the Last Jedi delved into the philosophy and mysticism in ways that I found fascinating. I felt it challenged the audience in a way that the Force Awakens had been too gunshy to do - examining just what would happen to someone who was simultaneously a human being but also a godlike figure of legend.
Solo doesn't do that. In many ways, it is the quintessential fan service film. It ticks a hell of a lot of boxes, explaining things like why Han described the Kessel Run in units of distance rather than time (which has been a subject of nerdy debates for like forty years - I'd always just assumed it was a research error) or why his last name was Solo (turns out the heavy-handed character labeling is in-universe.)
True to Star Wars tradition, Solo is a mixture of genres. It's part Western, part Noir, part Heist movie. I don't want to do a full plot recap, but basically the film starts with Han and his girlfriend Qi'ra (I had just assumed she was Keira until I saw the IMDB page) trapped living in some rat hole on Corellia run by a local crime boss. Han gets his hands on some valuable fuel and attempts to use it to escape the planet with Qi'ra, but just as they are about to get out, Qi'ra is seized by the mob lackeys and they're separated.
Hoping to be a pilot, Han joins the Imperial Academy, but we rush through those three years to find that he washed out and wound up in the infantry, fighting in some WWI-style trench warfare on some planet that is probably totally innocent and just being put under the Imperial boot heel.
But the movie isn't about the Empire or the not-quite-there-yet Rebellion. We actually don't see a lot in the way of Stormtroopers or the Empire in general. Indeed, as the brief blue-texted captions at the start (echoing the initial "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...") describe, it's a time of lawlessness. The Empire, like so many autocratic regimes that claim to be there to restore law and order, are actually not in the least interested in doing so.
As befits a Han-centric story, we're dealing with criminals and outlaws, and only in the sense that the more powerful mobsters have friends or minions within the Imperial hierarchy does the government really come into play.
So what we have is a plot in which Han screws up a job, only to realize that this puts him in debt with a very powerful person you wouldn't want as an enemy, and so he and his team have to pull a more dangerous job, all while dealing with double-crosses and unclear loyalties.
Of the three genres that the movie apes, the least effective is the heist movie - there's very little of the fun, Ocean's Eleven-style planning, complications, and reveals. Instead we see criminals doing what I might term "opportunistic heroism," as they stage a slave revolt within the spice mines of Kessel so they can sneak their loot out in the chaos.
In terms of Noir, Han's relationship with Qi'ra is pulled pretty directly out of that genre - the lost love who resurfaces with a potentially darker past than the hero's and whose loyalties thus cannot be trusted. Unfortunately, the only real payoff for this is what seems like a sequel hook for a movie that's already an interquel spin-off featuring a character long thought dead unless you've been watching the animated TV shows or, like me, reading AV Club reviews when they catch your attention. It's really not clear to me that such a sequel will happen unless by shear force of Disney filmmaking will. Unfortunately, this forces Emilia Clarke to play the whole movie as an enigma we might never be able to explore and unravel.
One of the oddities of the movie is that Alden Eirenreich is not all that much younger than Harrison Ford was when he first played Han. Now, I wouldn't want to see Han as a little kid (just as, in retrospect, it wasn't a great idea to introduce Anakin in the prequels before he was, like, twenty - among other issues.) But it does sort of shrink the time scale here. Lando is supposed to be one of Han's best friends by the time of Empire, and so having him just meet him here suggests the bond is a somewhat weaker one than we might have assumed (one could have imagined them being childhood friends from the way they act in Empire.)
Now, for the record, I did think it was a pretty fun movie. It just didn't blow me away with anything. It was pretty much the movie I expected it to be. And some people might really like that - especially after the risks that Last Jedi took. If you're looking for space adventures with Han and Chewbacca, this is definitely that. And if you want to explore the underbelly of the Star Wars universe in a way that Rogue One didn't even really do, this gets at that as well. Star Wars popularized the "used future" aesthetic, and this really gets that look - we even see that Lando's ship - you might have heard of it - the Millennium Falcon, was once a pretty snazzy vessel before Han got it all jacked up.
I would say that all eight existing main Star Wars films are essential in their own way - the prequels for showing how ambition without restraint can create cinematic abominations, and the sequels for handing off a film franchise to a generation of filmmakers who grew up on it and seeing their own takes on the world and its mythos (I don't really need to explain why for the originals, right?) Rogue One was a bold and bleak leap out of the series comfort zone, which made up for its flaws with "holy shit did they really do that?" chutzpah.
Solo... is inoffensive. I'm a sap so I'll always be curious about the fate of long-lost love interests, but in ways that Rogue One avoided by centering entirely on new characters, Solo suffers a bit of the inherent problem with prequels, which is the foregone conclusion. We know that he won't get back with Qi'ra because he has to get with Leia. And we know that Lando, Chewbacca, and Han are all going to be fine, which then makes the deaths of other characters less shocking.
If there's one thematically interesting thing the movie reinforces, though doesn't really introduce, it's the idea that Han gets betrayed. The depths of that betrayal do have a range - Lando at one point abandons him in the middle of a standoff, but one does not get the impression that either of them considers it personal. But given what we know of how Han ends up in the end of The Force Awakens (does that still need a spoiler tag? Would you be reading a review of a Star Wars movie if you hadn't seen it?) the fact that Han's life is filled with betrayals makes his death at the hands of his own son really freaking tragic.
Still, this isn't a movie to make you think too hard about the consequences of Han's lifestyle choices. It's fun. Don't expect epic and you'll have a good time.
Sunday, April 29, 2018
Avengers: Infinity War
The third Avengers movie has a lot going on. There are several plots that converge and split off to give every major character something to do, even if a few of them don't get a whole lot. I'm fine with that: we're talking about a movie with nearly every superhero character they've introduced in the MCU (with a couple exceptions,) and in the interest of telling a coherent story, some people have to become supporting characters.
This is very much the movie that the whole MCU has been building up to, though I'd also caution people watching it that this movie is also very much building up to the film formerly referred to as Infinity War Part Two.
Given how many moving parts the film has, it makes sense that the Russo brothers structured the film to be about Thanos, and you can see him as its protagonist and our heroes as his antagonist. It's actually sort of interesting to think about the meanings of those words. "Protagonist" technically means the person who causes agony. This comes from the era of the Greek tragedy, where we would see heroic characters make flawed choices and wind up dead or ruined thanks to their hubris. The antagonist is often the agent of this death or ruin, but the idea of a tragedy is that it ends poorly for our protagonist, typically brought on by their own actions.
In the kind of heroic tales that we're used to in modern culture, and particularly of the adventurous or superhero variety, there's an inversion that takes place: we tend to see the bad guy as the instigator of the conflict, and it's the heroes' job to stop their plan to return to the safety of the status quo. In this way, most modern stories are kind of tragedies of the villains. The script has been flipped to have us focus on the heroic antagonists, but this has become so normal that we just think of this as standard storytelling at this point.
So what about Infinity War?
Well, to talk about that, we've got to make a spoiler cut.
This is very much the movie that the whole MCU has been building up to, though I'd also caution people watching it that this movie is also very much building up to the film formerly referred to as Infinity War Part Two.
Given how many moving parts the film has, it makes sense that the Russo brothers structured the film to be about Thanos, and you can see him as its protagonist and our heroes as his antagonist. It's actually sort of interesting to think about the meanings of those words. "Protagonist" technically means the person who causes agony. This comes from the era of the Greek tragedy, where we would see heroic characters make flawed choices and wind up dead or ruined thanks to their hubris. The antagonist is often the agent of this death or ruin, but the idea of a tragedy is that it ends poorly for our protagonist, typically brought on by their own actions.
In the kind of heroic tales that we're used to in modern culture, and particularly of the adventurous or superhero variety, there's an inversion that takes place: we tend to see the bad guy as the instigator of the conflict, and it's the heroes' job to stop their plan to return to the safety of the status quo. In this way, most modern stories are kind of tragedies of the villains. The script has been flipped to have us focus on the heroic antagonists, but this has become so normal that we just think of this as standard storytelling at this point.
So what about Infinity War?
Well, to talk about that, we've got to make a spoiler cut.
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Legion Chapter Nine
Legion was maybe my favorite show, and definitely my favorite new show of last year. A combination of Kubrickian and Lynchian visuals, not to mention a general aesthetic, sound and music design, and mindbending story all really hit my favorite notes.
I think perhaps a bit like Hannibal, which grew more visually ambitious (and potentially alienating,) Legion seems to be going more extreme with oddness.
Theoretically, having the Shadow King extracted from his head should have made things a little more sane for David Haller, but the world he returns to after his journey in the metal sphere at the end of last season (in the middle of the credits, if I recall correctly) is crazier than just about anything we've seen before.
The heightened reality of Legion has always been part of its charm - its ambiguous time period, for example, with people sporting 50s clothing fashion, using technology that looks more like it's from the future. In season two, we find that our Summerland crew has left their utopian forest home and moved in with their former adversaries, Division Three. This makes Clark part of the team (it's odd to think that he was only in the pilot and the finale last season, other than the cliffhanger in the penultimate episode - I guess it goes to show you that a good performance can really leave an impression,) but we also meet the weirdest character outside the Shadow King himself, Admiral Fukuyama, who is in charge of Division Three.
Fukuyama is apparently a cyborg, wearing traditional Japanese robes (as far as I can tell) and a big wicker basket on his head (or it is his head?) and is followed around by a group of women with mustaches who speak for him with computerized voices. There's a scene in which David meets with Fukuyama and each of the Admiral's three... translators? stands behind a plastic disk that magnifies their faces... for some reason.
And indeed, I think that if there's one critique that I'd accept, even if I wouldn't necessarily agree with it, is that there's a lot of weird here that might just be for the sake of weird.
Anyway, we get some plot development: Division Three has found some kind of psychic disease called the Catalyst that causes people to freeze up, only chattering their teeth incessantly but unable to do anything else, and it seems to always follow in Oliver's - and thus the Shadow King's - wake.
David is found in a nightclub by Ptonomy and Clark amongst a group of these chattering victims, though he seems to be free of the curse. However, as he talks to people at Division Three, he discovers that what he remembers as a day of absence in the weird sphere was a year for everyone else. Big changes have happened, not the least of which is the relocation and the new alliance.
The Summerland crew is not sure what to make of David's claims of amnesia. Syd defends him, Cary and Kerry seem most interested in just moving forward. Ptonomy worries that the Shadow King still has some influence over him, and Melanie has fallen into a deep depression over Oliver's bait-and-switch of a return, even apparently developing a taste for that Vapor drug that David and Lenny had used.
Fukuyama summons David to meet with him, and explains that while the Shadow King is dangerous possessing Oliver, he'd be even more dangerous if he were able to recover his own body, and so a race is on to discover Amahl Farouk's corporeal form.
We also get a vision of what seemed to happen in that club - David appears to have been following some strange monk through the club when he encountered both Lenny and Oliver. They then had some kind of psychic dance-off (I'm not sure if it's a visual metaphor for some kind of psychic battle or if they really did enlist the people in the club through psychic domination.)
But at the end, as David sleeps next to Syd in their divided bed (having been far more intimate in their mental-only white room,) he has a dream or vision of Syd, who appears to be communicating to him from the future. Future Syd tells him that he needs to help Farouk, not stop him.
There are a ton of unanswered questions: like the growing sense I'm getting that Lenny isn't and maybe even wasn't actually an avatar of the Shadow King, but perhaps one of his victims. We still don't know what the deal is with the whole Lenny/Benny thing. I'm also wondering if Amahl Farouk is even the same person as the Shadow King - could Farouk have been a possessed victim like David? Is the Shadow King even the big bad of the series?
I think perhaps a bit like Hannibal, which grew more visually ambitious (and potentially alienating,) Legion seems to be going more extreme with oddness.
Theoretically, having the Shadow King extracted from his head should have made things a little more sane for David Haller, but the world he returns to after his journey in the metal sphere at the end of last season (in the middle of the credits, if I recall correctly) is crazier than just about anything we've seen before.
The heightened reality of Legion has always been part of its charm - its ambiguous time period, for example, with people sporting 50s clothing fashion, using technology that looks more like it's from the future. In season two, we find that our Summerland crew has left their utopian forest home and moved in with their former adversaries, Division Three. This makes Clark part of the team (it's odd to think that he was only in the pilot and the finale last season, other than the cliffhanger in the penultimate episode - I guess it goes to show you that a good performance can really leave an impression,) but we also meet the weirdest character outside the Shadow King himself, Admiral Fukuyama, who is in charge of Division Three.
Fukuyama is apparently a cyborg, wearing traditional Japanese robes (as far as I can tell) and a big wicker basket on his head (or it is his head?) and is followed around by a group of women with mustaches who speak for him with computerized voices. There's a scene in which David meets with Fukuyama and each of the Admiral's three... translators? stands behind a plastic disk that magnifies their faces... for some reason.
And indeed, I think that if there's one critique that I'd accept, even if I wouldn't necessarily agree with it, is that there's a lot of weird here that might just be for the sake of weird.
Anyway, we get some plot development: Division Three has found some kind of psychic disease called the Catalyst that causes people to freeze up, only chattering their teeth incessantly but unable to do anything else, and it seems to always follow in Oliver's - and thus the Shadow King's - wake.
David is found in a nightclub by Ptonomy and Clark amongst a group of these chattering victims, though he seems to be free of the curse. However, as he talks to people at Division Three, he discovers that what he remembers as a day of absence in the weird sphere was a year for everyone else. Big changes have happened, not the least of which is the relocation and the new alliance.
The Summerland crew is not sure what to make of David's claims of amnesia. Syd defends him, Cary and Kerry seem most interested in just moving forward. Ptonomy worries that the Shadow King still has some influence over him, and Melanie has fallen into a deep depression over Oliver's bait-and-switch of a return, even apparently developing a taste for that Vapor drug that David and Lenny had used.
Fukuyama summons David to meet with him, and explains that while the Shadow King is dangerous possessing Oliver, he'd be even more dangerous if he were able to recover his own body, and so a race is on to discover Amahl Farouk's corporeal form.
We also get a vision of what seemed to happen in that club - David appears to have been following some strange monk through the club when he encountered both Lenny and Oliver. They then had some kind of psychic dance-off (I'm not sure if it's a visual metaphor for some kind of psychic battle or if they really did enlist the people in the club through psychic domination.)
But at the end, as David sleeps next to Syd in their divided bed (having been far more intimate in their mental-only white room,) he has a dream or vision of Syd, who appears to be communicating to him from the future. Future Syd tells him that he needs to help Farouk, not stop him.
There are a ton of unanswered questions: like the growing sense I'm getting that Lenny isn't and maybe even wasn't actually an avatar of the Shadow King, but perhaps one of his victims. We still don't know what the deal is with the whole Lenny/Benny thing. I'm also wondering if Amahl Farouk is even the same person as the Shadow King - could Farouk have been a possessed victim like David? Is the Shadow King even the big bad of the series?
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