Same and Story

Once again, I'm doing two films in this review, largely because of the nature of them, i.e. directors doing the same thing means I don't really have that much to say. It's an interesting side note to Hollywood's obsession with IP, where everything is a sequel to something that came before (Frozen 2!), rather than an original idea/setting/character.

Right from the start, I will admit to not being much of a Pedro Almodóvar fan. I like his films because they're always well-crafted and his storytelling technique is a solid one. His characters are human, they react in very human ways, and there's always a solid foundation to build from. My detachment comes from the fact that it very often seems to be the same story, despite variations in setting and characters. Pain and Glory, his latest, is no different.

All artists draw from themselves and their own experiences. Given the semi-autobiographical nature of Pain and Glory, it probably shouldn't be that surprising that it seems like a rehash of themes that Almodóvar has used before. And, again, that doesn't mean it's bad because the final product is a good one. It's an interesting film and the story moves well and there's the usual passion from the characters that are, again, emblematic of his films. But it's also largely like the films he's done before. You know how the story is going to proceed and even the little meta twist at the end isn't anything that's particularly memorable. This is Antonia Banderas and Penélope Cruz and, especially, Asier Etxeandia doing really well with their parts and creating believable people with genuine emotion attached. Those performances alone make it a good film. But the story is still regular Almodóvar and if you've seen one you've, unfortunately, seen most of them. If you're a fan, it's definitely worth seeing. If not, it's an Amazon or Netflix choice.

Speaking of Netflix, we come to Scorsese's latest, The Irishman, which suffers from exactly the same circumstances, except worse and longer. The film is based on Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran's book, I Heard You Paint Houses. I read it years ago, around the time of its release, on someone's recommendation for an insight into "actual" mob doings. It's a good book. Unfortunately, the film is also basically a note-for-note retelling that often saps the life from the story. Sheeran wasn't trying to craft a story when he wrote it. He was just offering up an experience that he'd lived and allowing people to draw from that what they might, including the details on the Hoffa situation. Scorsese chose to highlight that moment with Hoffa by using two framing devices when telling the story: one from Sheeran's perspective waiting to die in a nursing home and one from his perspective while taking a drive to Michigan a couple days before Hoffa was sitting outside the Machus Red Fox in 1975. That turns what could have been a tight two-and-a-half hour film into an occasionally tedious three-and-a-half hour film. Scenes of the drive were repeatedly presented to try to drive home the "mob life" point that we'd already gotten and the emotional impact that Sheeran was suffering because of the nature of the task before him, which we'd also largely already gotten. That meant that they felt like filler.

What's worse is that this is the same ground that Scorsese has trod many times and with the same actors. DeNiro? Pacino? Pesci? Romano? The gang is all here and you can throw in Harvey Keitel along with them. There comes a time when a director has used an actor in the same type of role so often that all you can do when seeing the new film is be reminded of the old ones. Witness anything Clint Eastwood has done directing himself in the past 20+ years. This is what happens here, when all we think about through most of the film is how similar it is to Goodfellas or Casino. This is a Scorsese gangster film! Anyone excited?

Like Pain and Glory, the performances are somewhere between solid and excellent, although Pacino's booming voice is a marked deviation from Hoffa's which was a real problem when trying to look at him as anyone but Al Pacino. It was interesting to see the CGI effects that made them appear to be 40-year-old versions of themselves, rather than attempting a ridiculous amount of makeup. Problem is, making someone look like they're 40 doesn't affect the fact that most of them still move around the set like they're 80, because they are. So even 40-year-old Frank Sheeran made you feel like you were just seeing the same scenes that you'd watched before. And this is the root of the problem: We've all been here before. This film gives us nothing new. It's just more "mob life" stuff. They even include dates and methods of death for a lot of the minor characters, most of which had absolutely nothing to do with Sheeran's life in general or the Hoffa situation in specific, but were actually connected to the Philly mob war in the early 80s. What does that detail offer us, except "This is another Scorsese mob film"?

In a film industry that is obsessed with mining the familiar in order to guarantee ticket sales from those who seemingly never seem to tire of watching the same stuff, over and over, like sitcom reruns, these two films, despite not following that trend of "IP first, story second", actually end up doing so, anyway. It sounds incredibly ageist to suggest that these two masters of the craft should probably rest on their laurels and open up space for others if Almodóvar and Scorsese still want to work and others still want to work with them. But I'm pretty much done with the experience that they're offering and I'd much rather see something else by someone like Bong Joon-ho, if only because it won't distract me by reminding me of everything he's done before.

Watching Watchmen

I've had a number of people ask me if I'm planning on watching HBO's Watchmen series and, presumably, writing about it. The short answer is: No. I'm not planning on it.

The long answer is: I'm not radically opposed to the concept. If people want to do that and if more people want to watch it, go nuts. I'm just not really enthused about it because I tend to agree with creators Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, who have been largely irritated and confused, respectively, about most of the projects that DC has engaged in (like the prequel limited series) that are taking advantage of the story they completed back in the 80s. Watchmen was a completed story in 1987. They said what they had to say and it was done. Fin. They both moved on. They had a different take on the later film version, because Moore had become alienated by Hollywood over the debacle that was the film version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, while Bolland wasn't quite so embittered and was at least eager to see his work brought to life in another format.

But the TV series is something different. In essence, DC and HBO are saying that this is kind of a continuation of a completed story. You can all see the contradiction there, right? It's as if HBO is coming in with a continuation of Moby Dick: "Oh, but NOW we have the continuing adventures of Ishmael where he, like, finds someone obsessed with hunting down a giant SQUID! ... Yeah! ... 'Cuz that's, y'know... cool." Except that, no, it really isn't. It's just grafting. I haven't seen any of HBO's series but have had much of it explained to me and there's really no reason for it to be set in the world of the Watchmen except for brand recognition. You could do the same story in a whole new world and not be constrained by any of the easy segues or "Gotcha!" moments and, instead, have a whole tableau in front of you that was genuinely original (Please don't @ me with any of that "There's nothing new under the sun" nihilist bullshit.) But, instead, they've done the typical grafting routine that has been endemic to American TV since the 70s, where there'd be a hit and they'd decide to do a spinoff because they had an automatic audience from the previous show. The problem is that most of them were shit because they didn't do the actual creative work necessary to make them good or because the original story they told was, well, already told, just like this one. The lone exception was one of the first in the form of The Jeffersons and that may have been because they were, for once, giving actual insight into how Black people are just like White people, which was a novel concept back then and (sigh), for some people, remains so today.

So, Watchmen drew in viewers because it was WATCHMEN. Will it be good on its own? Who knows? Was it developed to be good on its own? I don't know that, either. I know that it reminds me of something Dave Sim, of Cerebus (and, unfortunately, rampant misogyny) fame used to tell people at comic conventions, back in the day. People would show him their artwork and complain about how they couldn't get noticed by Marvel and DC. Their artwork would usually be of the most popular books of the time. He'd tell them: "Look, you clearly have talent. But if you really want to do The X-Men, go ahead and do The X-Men and just call it something different." What he meant was for them not to tie their participation in the field or their sense of self-worth as artists to the two corporate behemoths of the time. If they wanted to be comic artists, they should go out and be comic artists. If they wanted to do superheroes, they should go out and do superheroes. Hell, John Byrne, as mainstream a comic artist as you could get, showed them how to do it by producing The Next Men for Dark Horse, which was always kind of an inside joke that the pronunciation made super obvious (and super ironical, since Byrne had once been the artist for X-Men...)

In other words, there's no harm in being original. HBO, of all producers, has enough clout to just say: "We're doing a superhero story. It's in the vein of Watchmen." People would have flocked to it because it's a new HBO series and they used a buzzword for comic fans (and fans of the film. If they exist.) I would have been interested and far more so if they'd said "like Watchmen, but not Watchmen" because, as noted, I agree with Moore and Bolland. Watchmen has been done. Tell me a new story. I don't really care what the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan is doing (kinda like Superman) or what fanatics inspired by Rorschach or The Comedian are doing. I can get that just by reading 4chan. You want to tell me something new about a superhero in our "real world"? I'm all about it. Just make it your own thing. This is why I'll always respect Neil Gaiman for getting DC to sign a contract with him that basically said he'd only keep working on (and eventually finish) The Sandman series, if they agreed that they'd never produce anything else with that character unless he was involved. That way, he'd ensure that whatever stories were told were within the confines of his vision and didn't become marketing crap. Moore and Bolland didn't get that chance. You'd like to hope that Melville would have.

Roundabout conclusions

I walked out of Jojo Rabbit last night with a similar impression to what I had after seeing Tel Aviv on Fire. Both were good films that I don't regret seeing. Both involve tendentious political/sociological situations that are sure to invite controversy. I went into both expecting some seriously sharp wit... and came out having seen a far sweeter story than I expected and feeling like something was missing.

Unfortunately, I get that there's a pretty thin line you have to tread when writing (and directing) a movie about a Hitler Youth member whose secret friend just happens to be the organizational namesake, so you kind of have to be careful about when and how you take your shots. That said, I really wish that Taika Waititi had taken more of them. On the face of it, this is clearly what you'd call an absurdist fantasy, But the thing about absurdism is that you really need to be incisive to make it work. A classic example is Monty Python. A lot of their material is rooted in the classical educations that most of the troupe received at Oxford and Cambridge. Despite something like the Philosophers' Football Match sketch being absurd on a number of levels, the humor in it is actually pretty elevated once you get to the decision to actually put the ball in play (in a manner of speaking.) You don't need an actual philosophy degree to get it, but you have to have some awareness. My assumption is that anyone who goes to see Jojo Rabbit is going to be someone that has that level of awareness, so there would have been no problem with writing to that level.

Instead, he largely ducked the humor approach and instead went with a more emotional story about dispelled dreams and the wisdom gained from new circumstances; in Jojo's (Roman Griffin Davis) case, the discovery of a young Jewish girl hiding in his house whom he discovers to be as human as he is, plus the knowledge that his mother was the one who helped her get there and is now opposing the state religion that he believes he should be a part of. That's a decent story, albeit one that we've seen many times before, and certainly redolent of modern times in the US as we wait for Trump supporters to realize that that's probably not something they really want to be a part of, either. And that's valid reason enough to keep telling this kind of story, as we watch "Germany in the 1920s" mildly materialize around us. It's just not the type of story I went into the theater expecting to see. That doesn't make it bad. It just means that I went into the film kind of expecting to see more scenes like the Gestapo raid/Heil Hitler chorus, when much of the cast comes close to breaking the fourth wall as they engage in the idiocy that's layered over what is otherwise a very serious moment in the story. I suppose it might be the difference between the genuine political cynics among us (raises hand) and those who aren't when it comes to appreciating Waititi's approach here, in that I already assume that most humans are complete idiots that will let this happen again and don't need to be warned about the seriousness of it. (Waking up at 2 AM on election day three years ago and bursting out laughing would be a huge tell.)

To the film's credit, most of the performances were really excellent. Scarlett Johansson was the perfect, efficient German matron, always encouraging her uncertain offspring while working at cross purposes to him. (I had to wonder if the diehard Tom Waits fan encouraged Waititi to use him in the film's soundtrack.) Sam Rockwell continued his tour of excellence, contributing to some of that absurdity with subtle acknowledgments of the gallows humor of it all in the waning days of the Reich. And both Davis and new friend, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) appropriately provided some of the more heartfelt and genuine moments, while their worlds crumbled or were reborn around them. One highlight was Jojo's best friend, Yorki (Archie Yates) and his implacable levity ("I know! It seems I just can't die!") in the film's more serious moments. And it has to be acknowledged that Waititi chewing scenery as Hitler is open to question: Since Hitler himself made that kind of bombast a signature of his public performances, can we accuse Waititi of overdoing it? Or was he just playing to form? Or, in fact, playing to what a child's interpretation of his hero would have been? There are so many layers and they're so wonderfully open to interpretation in the same way that I appreciate his willingness to not shy away from treading that thin line and actually making this film.

So, even if I wanted him to go farther and wanted more mockery and more humor and somewhat less drama, I have to say that I think the film succeeded in what its visionary was trying to accomplish. Even if you don't know or care about Hegelian thought, I think this film is well worth it.

Crevices and layers, like a rock

Like a lot of modern filmmakers, Bong Joon-ho isn't deterred by the constraints of genre. You can go into a film thinking it's a comedy or a thriller or a sociological drama and come out of it thinking that it was very different than what you expected. The real talent is in making something that crosses multiple genre lines and still has a consistently told story. Parasite, Joon-ho's latest, takes those three listed approaches and effortlessly blends them into something greater. It's a multi-layered film, with several themes all competing for prominence at the same time, with characters weaving in and out of the story's varied angles and adding something more to it in every frame. It won the Palm d'Or at Cannes this year and I can easily see why.

The most obvious themes are those of class differences and differing expectations. The Kim family have been struggling for some time, at least in part because the family patriarch, Ki-taek, doesn't have a clear plan as to how to move forward. Lacking that plan, he's imparted his own method of skirting the edges to both his wife and his children. They're all essentially grifters; feeding off the naiveté and obliviousness of Korea's upper crust who are only too happy to hire others to do the things that they don't want to dirty their hands with and are otherwise completely ignorant of the lives and mindsets of those they employ.

But that's where the parallels start. The wealthy Parks never consider that they might be completely taken advantage of by their hired help because of their unwillingness to take responsibility for the impact that their decisions have on those around them: their staff, their children, etc. They don't think ahead to where they're going. They simply subsist in the very comfortable stasis that they currently occupy. Similarly, when the Kims finally put another scheme into place, there's no thought about how to use that advantage to plan for the future. It's all about what they can get away with right now. This is clearly a group of highly intelligent people with great awareness of how society functions, but they don't look past the concept of feeding off what's left to them by the wealthier set. An easy contrast can be drawn between Ki-woo and the friend who found him his position with the Parks, Min-hyuk, who was playing tutor while attending university for a prospective career.

However, that's also an indication of difference in expectations. The Kims are jaded. They don't expect things to change for them and, thus, seek to survive on what's immediately available. At one point, a casual reference to "500 university graduates applying for a security guard position" is a good summation of why they think like they do and why their employment motivations are more centered around grifting than taking the presumed normal way out of their basement apartment. What finally pushes Ki-taek over the edge into a, uh, different approach is finally getting to hear his bosses in a situation that's not one manipulated by him. This is when the subtle bigotry about the "subway people", followed by the reality that what little they had has been washed away in a flood, makes him decide to leave society behind; perhaps in the hope that his family will do better off without him, as they might be forced to make a plan of their own, rather than following his absence of one.

Bong is aided in his effort by excellent work by his cast; the most notable of which is Park So-dam as Ki-taek's daughter, Ki-jeong. Her almost literally commanding performance as an art therapist is both intimidating and hilarious and it feels almost like there was more to be mined there that may have ended up dying in the edits. Jang Hye-jin, as Chung-sook, also had a wonderfully complex role that she breathes life into. While clearly a domineering personality and the one member of the family who has tasted the prospective "big time" as a silver medalist in the hammer throw, she provides the overall spine to the group, but still defers to Ki-taek when it comes to actual organization. It's a nice examination of cultural and family dynamics at work and she treads the middle line between officer and soldier quite well. That kind of water-treading nature also becomes evident when Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun) and his wife, Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), find themselves alone, with kids asleep or outside and, thus, presented with the opportunity for a sexual encounter which they resolve solely by masturbating each other through their clothes. They, too, are unable to break the roles that they've adopted, despite the seeming freedom to do otherwise.

Bong details this fairly complex sociological tale with a good dose of humor ("Why would you screw in my seat? Why cross the line like that?") and a willingness to enter the realm of what many American moviegoers would consider bizarre. The broadly humorous note is that these highly intelligent and canny people all believe that their change in fortune is driven by a rock that Min-hyuk handed off to them before he left for the States. It's a great example of how even the most hardwired operators can depend on nebulous concepts like luck in determining how their plans play out. I think the film overall was a good step forward from Snowpiercer; a film with similar and similarly complex themes which stuck too closely to the Western tradition of storytelling and, thus, didn't really deliver. Parasite, on the other hand, succeeded wildly.

Alexandria

Actually saw THREE movies this week: Dolemite is My Name, The Lighthouse, and Tel Aviv on Fire. (This is the reason for the odd title.) I can't say that I was particularly blown away by any of them, so I figured I'd just do a three-fer and include them all in one post. Normal service should resume next week. (Yes, I know the title only properly references two of them, but that's because I couldn't find a decent way of working Master Shake in there.)

Dolemite is My Name. On the face of it, it's a cute film. It's nice that Eddie Murphy is still around and still able to entertain and he does an excellent job portraying Blaxploitation legend, Rudy Ray Moore. Likewise, it's great to see people like Craig Robinson, Keegan-Michael Key, and especially Wesley Snipes, ham it up to the maximum possible degree. The problem is that Moore's story is as close to a boilerplate Hollywood script as you're going to get. He really was a self-made star and he really did succeed when everyone doubted him. That note-by-note storytelling really saps the film of any plot-driven energy and forces us to rely on the performances. That's great in stand-up and sketch comedy (not surprising, given the huge number of them among the cast), but doesn't do much else. Murphy recreating Moore's non-kung fu fight sequences would be great as a sketch, but here it's worth a couple laughs (most of them generated by Snipes' disgust with the whole sequence) and then we're back to the bog-standard story progression. On the one hand, it's weird to be denigrating what is essentially a true story. On the other hand, when sitting in a theater, you're usually expecting truth to be stranger than fiction, or at least more interesting, and this simply isn't. It's worth a watch on Netflix if you enjoy any of the actors and/or have a passion for 70s schlock film.

The Lighthouse. Continuing the train of mild disappointment, I have to say that this is a decent, psychological horror film, but has more than one stretch where it becomes kind of tedious. I thought Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson were great in their roles, even if Dafoe was a little trying. I think the decision to film it in black-and-white to emphasize the use of light and shadow, as well as the late 19th-century time period, was a great one. I think the use of the dream/delusion sequences was subtle enough to keep the audience just on the edge of knowing what was real and what wasn't and made good use of the kraken/squid imagery in what was a borderline Lovecraft-style tale of eerieness. But it was also rather slow and the characters spent a long time on camera doing not much of note. There were also some things clearly played for shock value. Pattinson jerking off to a mermaid statue that he'd found in his bunk isn't that much of a departure from some guy with a Victoria's Secret catalog if he's been stuck on an island with one weird, old guy for a few weeks and no one else. Is that interesting? Not really. Certainly the one thing that the film lacked was any sense of build-up to the atmosphere. They were dropped on the island and things immediately became strange because of Dafoe's character and his attachment to the light. There were very few quiet moments where any sense of danger or the unknowable emerged, since there weren't many quiet moments to begin with that weren't interrupted by the two leads shouting at one another. Put simply, I can certainly appreciate the craft that went into shooting the film and which the actors used to perform it, but overall, it just didn't give me what I'm usually hoping for in a horror film.

Tel Aviv on Fire. This is the film that everyone was most interested in seeing, partially because of the premise, but also because the trailer made it seem like it was going to be an intelligent farce. It comes in hard on the 'farce' part, but not quite as much on the 'intelligent'. I feel like if Salem (Kais Nashef) had been presented as an actual writer trying to deal with the hypocrisy and procedural stupidity of the occupation, that might have been a good deal funnier. But that would have been a different story. As it is, the rather normal love story, mixed with Salem's self-affirmation and newfound purpose, hampered by the checkpoint officer's (Yaniv Bitton) determination to make the world fit the vision that he, his family, and much of the Israeli public desperately cling to, is story enough to easily make this the best film of the week. While it was kind of boring to discover that Salem's character was to be the young fool who had passed up a good thing and was now faking it to make it, he and the rest of the cast had roles that were written well enough to go along for the ride. Bitton, as the officer determined to prove his importance to his wife by engaging the very soap opera that he once derided, is really the highlight of the film. The production crew's worldly cynicism about their circumstances in the territories and what risks they can take with their varied audiences becomes another high point, when their naiveté about Salem's presumed innocence in the real world allows the young fool to inadvertently walk all over them. Whether the show elevates itself to actual art is debatable and the same can be said for Tel Aviv on Fire. Much like Dolemite is My Name, this is a cute film, but one that's heartfelt enough and not so tied to obvious Hollywood tropes that it becomes something a bit more worthwhile.

Empathetic vistas

Right from the beginning, it has to be said that Monos is one of the more visually striking films I've seen recently. From the Colombian highlands to the Amazon basin, you're going to see some impressive vistas which are a perfect contrast to the close-ups of humanity that are also witnessed. Is it more affecting to see the crumbling of a near-child's face when she's been shoved away from her first encounter with human tenderness in who knows how long, than a slice of pristine wilderness in the evening as the sun slides away? Both of those are transitions. Both of them are decent allegories to what's taking place in broad form throughout the film. Both of them can leave you with open ends (where does she go from here?; what happens at night?) The real question becomes: Is it enough to make a film from?

I think the answer, by and large, is "Yes." Film is a visual medium. It's quite possible to tell a story without uttering a word, simply by letting the images and actions on the screen convey everything that needs be "said." Those of you that know my fandom will remember me citing the director's cut of Blade Runner as an excellent example of this, where Ridley Scott had lengthy scenes without dialogue that provided everything that the viewer needed to know to continue his story. The studio, of course, subsequently ruined these by putting in Harrison Ford's voiceover for the theater release. Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is another good example. Director Alejandro Landes definitely pushes Monos in that direction, despite extensive use of dialogue to build the characters of the performers and expand on one of the central themes of the film: the slow dissolution of humanity when removed from society.

Now, let's also clarify up front that this story is essentially Lord of the Flies. The lead characters are teenagers or children and their detachment from society leads to a very simple cult of personality structure to their group organization. In fact, they doubled down on that Lord of the Flies comparison when the head of a pig ends up staked near one of the group that is being punished for snitching. They've been sequestered in a wilderness location because they're functioning as guards for an American prisoner whom they call 'Doctora' (Julianne Nicholson) at the behest of The Organization; a political/criminal faction of some kind that could be using typical hostage tactics to protect their interests or could be using her as leverage for some kind of goal. That's never revealed in the film and is largely unimportant, as the central element of the plot is observing how rules, norms, and relationships are established and maintained, not only among people separated from the typical parameters of society (laws), but also from any older people to guide them, with the exception of the occasional visits from the Messenger (Wilson Salazar) who merely urges them to greater zeal on the part of the Organization and self-recriminatory group judgments ("shaming") to keep them from going too far outside the boundaries of what the main faction wants from its soldiers. In that respect, it's easy to become sympathetic to the main characters, despite their increasing ruthlessness, because the Messenger is perfectly aware that he's shaping weapons and his occasional visits are merely to ensure that those loose cannons don't turn on their forgers...

What further complicates personal matters among the characters, but only enhances the emotional appeal to the audience, is that these teenagers are developing as teenagers do and start making stronger physical connections among themselves (and probably because it's pretty boring sitting in the jungle, watching a prisoner.) Landes rather skillfully uses the primary expression of sex as both the very commonplace activity that it is and the wholly human bond that it is, while remaining restrained on the visual depictions, given that the subjects of the film are young enough to send some viewers into a Helen Lovejoy spasm. It's sex as an essential part of the story of life, rather than basic titillation or because a "love interest" (ugh) has been written into the script to fit the expectations of the typical audience.

The fact that so much about the plot is left to mystery is another genuinely appealing aspect to it. Landes begins with what I usually call the "Howard Chaykin technique"; dropping the audience right into events with no preamble or preparation. We just know that a group of young people with military hardware are holding a woman hostage in the hills and are entrusted with a cow. Go. When Doctora is placed in front of a camera to give the typical message to the outside world via the hostage, we never hear any of the details and she's handed a newspaper with the word "Deforestacion" splattered across the front. Are they a hardcore enviro resistance group? Is that just a cover story for some kind of secession activity? Clearly, holding the cow but being instructed that it must be returned in the future seems to indicate an appeal to the common farmers of their country. But we don't know any of the hard detail because our main characters don't know. The point of the film isn't to deliver a broader plot. It's for the audience to ride along with these kids as their world breaks down around them, completely isolated from the larger world that presumably all of them knew before they signed on (or were drafted into) the Organization. As broad as the vistas are, the film itself is quite personal. Again, that most affecting moment, when Swede (Laura Castrillòn), who is perhaps 15, begins to panic at everything that is happening around her and tries to find comfort in the presence of the only adult and conceivable mother figure, Doctora. Separated from any kind of gentle human contact herself, Doctora at first responds as any caring human would, before realizing that she's showing empathy to one of her jailers, who forced her to participate in the gang-like birthday abuse of one of the other members of the cell. The audience rides along with Doctora in the tumult of her emotions and it should be the point where most would learn to appreciate the story being shown to them, even if it is unconventional.

The flip side to that is the increasing savagery exhibited by the characters, as almost all similar stories and situations tend to descend. It's a frequent thought that survival instinct becomes paramount in all animals and humans are no different. When driven to the limits of rational behavior or when all behavior that doesn't orbit around maintaining one's existence in the world can be dismissed as irrelevant, all empathy drains away. I found myself wondering why Doctora wouldn't have casually buried her stolen machete in the head of a 10-year-old boy out of simple frustration and vengeance. That kind of base operation was mentioned in a book known as The Long Walk, ostensibly about an escape from a Soviet gulag in the 40s. Pushed to the limits of survival, when he and his compatriots reached British India, they found themselves unconsciously reverting to basic habits and fighting anyone who tried to prevent them from, as they saw it, surviving, even while surrounded by people committed to returning them to health, physical and mental. One could imagine similar circumstances for most of the kids in this film when/if they ever returned to society. "Monos", of course, means "monkeys" in Spanish.

Monos is a film that takes a little patience, but there's so much happening on screen that has nothing to do with special effects or complex plotting, but everything to do with basic humanity, that I think it's worthwhile to seek it out wherever you can find it and, for once, be able to just sit back and enjoy something that's both moving and highly intelligent.

Half truck, half story

[There are minor spoilers, yo.]

Stories have a beginning, middle, and an end. Full stop. That's what a story is. From that rather unforgiving perspective, El Camino is not a story. It's an addendum to a story, because the beginning is in Breaking Bad and this is really all about the end. I mean, I guess you could say that this two-hour film was about not having the money, getting the money, getting more of the money, and then using the money to disappear into Alaska... and that's a story. It's not quite the level of discourse I'd expect from someone as talented as Vince Gilligan, but it's arguable.

This is starting out pretty bleak, as a lot of things have over the past few weeks. These are relatively bleak times, on a personal and public level, so that's quite possibly coloring my perspective. Furthermore, I'm still aggravated about having to scrape out a draw against the Mancs yesterday, so there's that. When it comes to sports, writing, media... I am pretty much an "excellence demander", as the saying goes. That's why I'm looking at El Camino from the perspective of the basics: Does this tell a story? Does it tell a good story? Does it serve any purpose beyond titillation of hardcore Breaking Bad fans? The answer to all of those is, largely, "No." On the other hand, most TV and most films are filed under "entertainment" for a reason. This one gives you a couple hours to watch Jesse's recurrent struggle with his sense of humanity that almost constantly gets him in trouble in the morally ambiguous world that he followed Walter into. It gives you another look at Breaking Bad fan favorites like Badger, Skinny, Mike, Todd, and even Walter himself; still in desperate schoolteacher mode and not yet having descended to the notorious Heisenberg. It also gives us one last look at clean-up guy, Robert Forster (RIP), who is his usual low-key, amiable, but still memorable self.

And that contrast raises a lot of overarching and frequently asked questions about these kinds of entertainments. How is something defined as "good" or, in the case of Breaking Bad, "universally acclaimed"? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? (No. Not that kind of beholder.) If El Camino was written for Breaking Bad fans and it serves the interests of Breaking Bad fans who just want to spend more time in that world (especially with Better Call Saul having been on hiatus for a while), then that kinda makes it good by default, right? We still get Vince Gilligan's solid writing and directing, as well as Aaron Paul. Sure. It's fine. I'm a diehard Breaking Bad fan. I'll watch anything that Gilligan puts on the screen, which is why I was eager to watch El Camino.

But I'm also interested in stories that actually go somewhere. Yes, we get to see Jesse once again regret that his streak of morality prevents him from pulling a trigger that he probably should and gets him into a problem that is more complicated than it had to be, if he could just emulate some of Walter's ruthlessness. Yes, we get to see his final interaction with his naive and anguished parents. Yes, we get to see him reminiscing about the frustration of his relationship with Todd; his ironic innocence and brash youthfulness in interacting with Walter; his wistful longing for Jane. All of those are well-acted and at least somewhat poignant moments that are well written, too. Those are all entertaining.

And, in the end, just more of the same. This is an epilogue to the real story that is Breaking Bad. Unlike the prologue that is Better Call Saul, we don't get to see a character that transforms over the course of a story; in which we see key moments that we can look back to as the places where the path was laid in and the might-have-beens blew away in the breeze. El Camino is just an elaboration on Jesse's hysterical laughter as he flees Walter's murder/suicide of Jack's Aryan gang in the final episode of the series. We knew Jesse was getting away and finally escaping Walter's shadow and all the danger that had come with it, despite never being able to escape the pain that had ensued. This film was just an elaboration on how he got away, which doesn't tell us anything we didn't know already and doesn't really do much else, except entertain, which is perhaps the point.

HBO has started up a sequel series about The Watchmen. I don't have any particular interest in seeing it because, when it comes to that particular property, I tend to agree with both its artist, Dave Gibbons, and its writer, Alan Moore, both of whom expressed varying levels of confusion and dismay that anyone would want to "continue" a story that they had told and completed. It's done. As Moore has stated, it's an icon of its time and an artifact of it. There's nothing else to be done with it that doesn't diffuse or distract from the original. Who knows? It might be fantastic. But does it really do anything with the material that we haven't seen before or hadn't really been interested in seeing in the first place? Breaking Bad is kind of in that same sphere. No one wants to see HeisenBadger: Back to the Blue. We've seen the story that Gilligan wanted to tell. Now let's move on.

In the end, is El Camino worth your time? Sure. If you're a Breaking Bad fan, you could be doing a lot worse than spending a couple hours with Jesse and Vince Gilligan again. It's still entertaining, if somewhat predictable. It's just not transformative like BB was and it won't do much more than make you think you should go back and watch "Fly" again.

Taxi Driver with makeup kind of misses the point

When you're going to see a movie about a clown, there's only one album you should be playing on the way there. The cover is above. No, the Butthole Surfers don't really have anything to do with clowns but that's not really the point. Neither did Joker, unless you're into the whole "evil clown" thing that creates rather pointless stories like It. (Or you played Dragon Warrior 2 on the Nintendo gray box. Shut up. I'm old.)

So, yeah, I finally made it to Joker and I have many thoughts, which is in itself kind of remarkable since it was a film that was paced at a level that approached tedium but had enough style happening on the screen (helped ably by Joaquin Phoenix) to keep you watching, if occasionally impatiently. The Joker is one of the more fascinating characters in the DC stable, as he's the pinnacle of the "Batman as his own antagonist" phenomenon. Normally, you read a story for the lead character whose story it is; the protagonist. But, from the 70s forward, a lot of people read (and many writers wrote) Batman comics to see him play the straight man to his more interesting opponents. Batman was a force of nature; often one-dimensional in his approach to life (billionaire playboy who solves 'problems' with his fists.) That gets old fast. So you'd read his comics to see what unusual activities figures like The Joker and The Riddler and Scarecrow and Poison Ivy and Clayface were going to get up to. We were more interested in what was going on inside the minds of the deviants from society than the neo-fascist in the cape who claimed to be defending it (but who, in all honesty, also clearly had some mental health issues.) The most prominent among those was The Joker, who wasn't just compelled by his psychological issues, but reveled in them. The greatest Joker story ever told was Steve Engelhart's "The Laughing Fish" in 1978, where the Joker dumped chemicals into the water around Gotham to give all of the fish his maniacal face and then tried to claim a trademark on them so he'd get a percentage of every fish sale. When he didn't get it, he started climbing the chain of officials at the local patent office, murdering them until he found one that agreed with him. My girlfriend gave me a confused frown when I mentioned this story. I said: "Yes. That's exactly the way you're supposed to react. If you're not laughing." He was crazy, but there was a distorted genius in what he did. That's entertaining to watch or read.

Joker, the film, is not like this. Phoenix is entertaining enough to watch, but he's entertaining because he's Joaquin Phoenix, not The Joker. Writers Todd Phillips and Scott Silver (Phillips is also the director) decided to make an origin story for the character that's grounded in more realistic circumstances than "burglar breaks into playing card factory, falls into chemicals while fleeing police, comes out looking like Billie Joe Armstrong after bathing in bleach for a week, loses mind." Bob Kane and Bill Finger's original story was as simplistic as most comics were in those days and DC has been trying to catch up to Marvel for, oh, fifty years now by attempting to make their characters into real people. The first few DC films have largely failed at that, so they doubled down here and, in that respect, largely succeeded. This is a story about someone with mental health problems who has been ignored or discarded by society as so many people are these days. Phillips and Silver weaved in the prevailing economic mood of the time (so many with so little, so few with so much), in addition to making the statement that society isn't paying enough attention to those that need help, in both internal and external ways. In making the film more of a personal tragedy, they've essentially made it the Pagliacci joke. This is an apocryphal story about a man who goes to a doctor because he's so miserable and the doctor suggests he go see the famous clown, Pagliacci, to improve his mood, whereupon the man informs him: "But doctor, I am Pagliacci." For those of you in the comic set, this is the joke that Rorschach recites while we're watching The Comedian get tossed out a window to his death in the opening scene of The Watchmen.

Speaking of Alan Moore, Phillips and Silver clearly drew inspiration from Moore's The Killing Joke, which was a mild reworking of the Joker's origin to be a failed comedian, rather than just a small-time hood. They're also obviously big Scorcese fans because all I could think of while watching the first half of this film was that it was funny to see DeNiro doing a remake of Taxi Driver. But this is kind of where all of this begins to break down. Taxi Driver was Scorcese's statement on how some people felt that society had decayed and Travis Bickle was going to cleanse it and himself. Joker is making the same statement but from a different angle, in that the rich have allowed people to suffer in a state of decay when they shouldn't have to. The locus for that societal perspective is the very emotional tale of a man who has suffered that neglect, both in general and personally, as he discovers that his life is a lie told to him by his similarly ill mother and his gentle nature is easily abused by others. It's meant to be an emotional tale because, like the Pagliacci story, it's a tragedy. You're meant to feel sympathy for the protagonist because of what he's suffered. The problem is: That's not The Joker.

The reason that Engelhart's version was so interesting was because he held an internal logic that could be seen by others, even if it couldn't be understood. There was intelligence there. Similarly, the most obvious and direct comparison to Phillips/Silver/Phoenix's version is the one created by the Nolan brothers and Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight. Ledger's Joker is considered insane because he looks at things radically differently from most of society and then acts on that perception. His intelligence is evident in every word he speaks in the film, as is the ruthless nature behind it that drives him to make statements with both words and actions. Phoenix's Joker is the polar opposite of that. He's not a figure to be feared and marveled at. He's an object of pity until he goes about murdering people, whereupon the pity becomes mixed with revilement and a reintroduction of the disdain he's felt all his life. It's not compelling. In some ways, it's not even interesting, except for the fact that it's much closer to reality than much of what is displayed in Nolan's film. Arthur is what the Joker probably would be in the real world: a less confident, somewhat more off-kilter Travis Bickle. There's nothing wrong with a film or a story based on emotion. There are some really good ones. But, again, that's not The Joker.

Indeed, when Arthur finally does begin making pronouncements at the end of the film, there's nothing particularly innovative or interesting about them. They're simply restatements of what the film has already been telling us: society has forgotten or ignored these people and now there's a tiny bit of payback. These aren't unusual statements of philosophy. They're boilerplate repetition. There are no questions posed, as by Ledger's version, about the value that human lives hold or how some may be more valuable than others. That's implicitly what Phillips' film is saying, but that's the screenplay preaching, as the characters in his film aren't asking any of those questions or even considering them. They're already fully-formed in their opinions and don't develop at all, except in that Arthur changes from meek servant to vengeful killer. Are there layers to that character in the same way there are in other versions of it? I'm not sure.

I appreciated Phillips' approach to storytelling. It's a moody story that stays moody; even moreso than Taxi Driver. He also pointedly used a comic panel approach to several scenes. Arthur crossing the street to Arkham Asylum and the overhead shot of him curled in his bed with cigarettes and gun resting on the bedside table are both moments that could be dropped right into a comic book page. Those are establishing shots, giving you a feel for where the next several panels or couple pages are going to be and what they're going to feel like. Frank Miller must also still be feeling a little tickle from people continuing to borrow the "pearls in the air" moment when Martha Wayne is shot that he first introduced in The Dark Knight Returns. And, again, Phoenix has to be lauded for his performance, as does Zazie Beetz, as Sophie, the neighbor down the hall and object of Arthur's fantasies.

This isn't a bad film. It's just not a very good one. One aspect that drags it down is its very nature: it's yet another comic character origin story. Are we going to need a Joker reboot 10 years down the road the way they seem to be doing with Spider-Man every decade? Do we need this story told again with different actors and someone else trying to put their own shine on a piece of tin that's almost worn through from all the polishing? In contrast, you know what one of the best things about Ledger's Joker was? The Nolans didn't even bother trying to do an origin story for him. It wasn't important. Here he was in full force from the opening minutes of the film. Indeed, they kept teasing the audience with what his life story might have been. The fully formed nature of his character is what gave it and the film such dynamism. A similar phenomenon can be seen in The Silence of the Lambs. We aren't shown normal-if-somewhat-creepy psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter before he starts chowing down on people. He's already there in the, uh, flesh when the film begins. He's witheringly intelligent, dangerous, and confident. So is Heath Ledger's Joker because the origin of "an agent of chaos" really doesn't matter.

But the other weight on this film is the seeming insistence on reducing the spectacular to the mundane. Superheroes and their opposite numbers are intentionally larger than life. If DC's attempt to make its characters real humans outside of the spandex is to reduce them to people that most of us, for good or ill, would probably ignore, they're kind of missing the point. Believe you me, I'm not interested in another Marvel fireworks display, either. I haven't even seen Endgame yet and I'm not sure I'm going to bother. I've honestly had my fill of typical superhero stories, which is why I stopped reading them 30 years ago. But I'm still interested in characters that fascinate on the screen because of who they are and how they look at the world. If the only one that's offered is a meeker version of Travis Bickle, well... I've been there already; in the same way I've seen enough wild costumes and force bolts.

Le(A)d Astra(y)

[Note: Being a grammar Nazi (the only kind of Nazi our president doesn't like!), it aggravates me to no end that many professional writers don't know that the past tense of 'to lead' is 'led'. 'Lead' is the metal. This is also pertinent because we're talkin' science here. I just wanted to clear that up in case anyone suspected me of poor execution in the title. It was just a convenient bit of wordplay. Thank you. Joke has been ruined. Proceed.]

One of the main challenges for any writer of fiction is knowing what your story is. You may start out writing a slam-bang adventure story only to find yourself meandering through the mind of one of your protagonists who never quite understood why Mrs. Watson didn't give him an A+, instead of just an A, on his baking soda volcano in second grade. You might begin writing a tale about the travails of the downtrodden in post-WWI Birmingham, only to veer into a pastiche of faux Shakespearian tragic romance (Shots fired, Peaky Blinders.) Or you might, as in the case of Ad Astra, not have a clue as to what your story was when it started and still not have one (as your audience didn't) when it appeared in finished form on the screen.

This isn't to say that your story can't change as it moves along or have more depth than is initially thought. But it has to retain some level of coherency so that your audience still feels like they're with you when the end credits roll or the last page is turned. If your story starts out as a moody study on the question of the moral rights of intelligent beings but incorporates some of the best aspects of horror thrillers along the way (like, say, Deus Machina), great, But if your story starts out as something of an introspective wander, contrasting the vastness of space and global politics with one man's struggle with his own inner demons, then you probably want to stay there and not take a hard right into an action/heist film, with the appropriate plot holes and drastic departures from the established pace.

Since so many people have been complaining about the voiceover in the film, it's pretty easy to draw a comparison between Ad Astra and Blade Runner, as a case study in how to and how not to stick with the story. Blade Runner began as a noir film: ex-cop drafted to do what he does best: legally kill other sentient beings. But, along the way, we're examining what makes that right and even what the definition of "humanity" happens to be. There are going to be brief and intense action scenes, but nowhere along the way do you lose sense of what the story is and how outside events (defining emotional vat-grown humans as not humans, but emotionless killers as still human) are only highlighting the essential question of the film. Ad Astra doesn't do that because the essential question of the film really has no ethical or moral parameters. It's mostly about Roy McBride and his personal issues. And that can be a story. It just usually doesn't need a trip to Neptune with a ship blasting radiation that somehow threatens all of Earth to make it work. The voiceover in Blade Runner was just one more mistake that lessened the theater release of the film. In Ad Astra, it really doesn't have that much impact because the questions the film asks aren't important enough to be distracted from.

It starts out interestingly. We have the drop from the space antenna which introduces us to Roy and his apparent inability to be affected by even the most trying circumstances. Then, we have the flight to the Moon which is followed by a near ambush by pirates where Roy is still Joe Cool and shows us the transposition of regular Earth struggles (the fight for resources) to space. And then the weird encounter on the Norwegian station with the space monkeys (baboons.) It's strange, but that's fine. Some of the early parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey are strange, too, despite everyone only remembering the final 20 minutes. Then, we hit our hard right turn.

The difference between our main character struggling with issues surrounding his father's absence in the face of a mounting threat to his home planet and the father's absence being THE REASON there's a mounting threat to the home planet is, uh, rather stark. One approach is an opportunity to play into larger messages: "Hey. Look how we're still fighting the same wars out in space. Even the animals are against us out in space. Do I really want to go through with this? Would I have been the loyal soldier if I didn't need Space Force to replace Dad?" and so on. The other approach is Star Wars. Unfortunately, Ad Astra went with Star Wars and we quickly got into action movie mode wherein you paper over all the obvious plot holes and just expect the hero's journey to jump those chasms because he's a hero. "Your dad is the menace currently orbiting Neptune, coincidentally enough, and he also killed my parents when he started on his personal crusade so, here, let me show you the secret passage out to a launch pad. On Mars. Your codename is now Colonel Mustard. Here's a candlestick."

Yeah, man. You lost me right there.

The rest of the film is just bog-standard adventure story and a lot of glowering by Tommy Lee Jones. Don't get me wrong. Jones does OK with the rather one-dimensional role that he's given. Pitt's performance is also decent, especially for someone who's supposed to be in his own shell. But there's just not much left here that didn't come from a SyFy Channel screenplay with a somewhat better visual effects budget. Even worse, despite their general adherence to science in their science fiction, they totally lose that adhesion in the second half of the film. Instead of a natural phenomenon threatening Earth or even an alien-created one (since Jones' original mission was discovering new worlds and new civilizations, yo), we find out that said mission, one couple hundred foot-long ship currently orbiting Neptune, is the threat to our entire planet.

So, lemme just go over some basic astrophysical stuff. The Earth's atmosphere blocks all kinds of nasty radiation coming from the source of all life on this planet: the Sun. The Sun is one AU away: 93 million miles. When Earth's and Neptune's orbits happen to line up so they're at their closest point (Neptune orbits the Sun every 165 years, as opposed to Earth's, you know... 1 year.), they're 2.7 billion miles apart. Billion. With a 'b'. So, 29 times farther away at their closest point. Thus, the premise of this story is that one ship at least 29 times farther away than our Sun is more of a radiation threat than said local star. And it's because of some special technology that Space Force used to send our antagonist out to Neptune. Technology that, in the intervening 30+ years, has somehow fallen out of use, despite it being a superior method of travel...? Even worse, the film begins failing on the basic physics front for no other reason than to deliver a pretty picture. Our hero has to blast through Neptune's ring to get back to his ship. So, despite being thrust forward fast enough for small meteorites and dust to flare with friction against his blast shield (let's not talk about the physics of that), none of said space rocks hinder his momentum whatsoever. This is completely aside from the whole momentum thing that was already ignored when dad and son are doing the impromptu spacewalk (i.e. when momentum is arrested, you stop; of all films, Gravity failed with this principle, too.) And, again, this is all in service to making a pretty picture of Roy blasting through a natural phenomenon (Is that why Earth is out of resources and pirates are on the Moon? Maybe.) But none of these pretty, CGI pictures do service to the story or are even that impressive, especially when you compare them to a previous film in this diatribe, where matte paintings and models made Blade Runner so visually impressive and absorbing that it didn't need a voiceover.

Again, don't get me wrong. If you're going to go full-on laser blasters and hyperspace and jetpacks (We still don't have jetpacks! We were promised jetpacks!!), go for it. Do that thing. I'm all about it. The least troubling parts of George Lucas' films are the way they abuse science. I don't care. That's why it's science fiction. But if you're going to give us the "Just a few years from now..." premise, rather than the "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." one, then stick with it.

Do I think it was an awful film? No. I think it had its moments. Am I glad I didn't actually spend money to see it (unless you consider the wholly appropriate membership to the Michigan Theater spent money... which it is... but, I mean, isn't just for this film)? Yes. Ad Astra is an interesting experiment in how to lose track of one's own story, for all you film students out there, but there's not much else that can really be said about it.

It's a dry sweet

Similarly to the last piece I wrote about a film, it took some time for the words to come about Honeyland, an interesting documentary about a beekeeper living in the hills of Macedonia with her elderly mother. It was apparently the most lauded film at this year's Sundance Film Festival and has the unusually high critical rating of 99% on Rotten Tomatoes. Even for great films, that's exceptional. Having seen it, I think it deserves most, if not all, of those plaudits. Unlike Cold Case Hammarskjöld, this film carried a narrative from the opening moment and didn't need any special construction to establish or maintain it. That said, the overriding feeling I have after seeing the film and thinking about it for the past few days is: "Okay." The only reason I have been thinking about it is because I've been trying to write this. Beyond that, there's nothing particularly compelling about it, except to say that it's a very well done look into both the average day and some extraordinary circumstances in the life of Hatidze Muratova.

What I will say is that watching the daily activity of rural beekeeping, with hives nestled in between rocks or the crevices of ruined buildings, is interesting in itself. Likewise, her trip to the market in Skopje and changing relationship with a new family, who bring their cattle to the otherwise deserted village where Hatidze has always lived, are likewise interesting; largely because they're experiences that most people and especially most Americans would never have, otherwise. But that's the same as watching a National Geographic piece. What makes the film is the level of intimacy that Hatidze allows to the filmmakers, as we sit and watch her concern over her mother's ailing health come forth as reproving bickering; her relationship with the new neighbors shift from concealed joy at having someone to teach and converse with to frustration with the disruption of her livelihood; and her concern about never finding regular companionship expressed in casual comments to her mother and deep consideration of what kind of hair dye to purchase at the market.

One wonders sometimes how it is that documentary subjects are able to tune out the fact that cameras are following them everywhere and watching every reaction and personal moment. It would seem that someone as isolated as Hatidze would be even more conscious of that situation, but she remains as open about discussing the reality of her work as she is displaying her reactions to the world around her. It's a simple story, but simple stories can have depth without requiring elaborate plot twists. Sometimes, it just depends on how relatable your characters are, no matter that the story is taking place in some fantasy realm like Westeros or some place so far from one's daily reality that it might as well be a fantasy realm, like the hills of Macedonia.

I think, perhaps, that my reticence toward gushing about a really well-made film might be that we've been seeing so many documentaries recently that I've become mildly jaded toward the format. Perhaps it will take something as invigorating as Maiden to get me back to the point where I can appreciate a narrative grounded simply in the facts of someone's everyday life. Don't let that dissuade you from seeing Honeyland, if you get the chance, though.

Carnivals are usually fun

Give me a line that doesn't sound stupid. I dare you!

Jeff Bezos apparently told his creative types that he wanted to have the "next Game of Thrones" as an Amazon original. Carnival Row is supposedly one of the first entries in that attempt to recreate the (ahem) magic of the HBO series. I can tell you right now that, if by some miracle they actually succeed in that effort with this show, I will lose what little faith I have left in humanity. It's been a while since I've seen something this bad. Yes, I know the last episode of Game of Thrones was just a few months ago, but even that had some redeeming value (Solid actors with actual roles, a decent line or two, etc.) I didn't see any whatsoever in Carnival Row.

First off, let's just assert one thing: No show is going to capture the zeitgeist the way GoT did for two reasons: 1. The multiplicity of networks means no one is watching any one thing at any given time. There's too much choice out there to capture the same size audience so that that one thing will be the only thing talked about at the office the next day. 2. Almost all of these new services are offering up entire seasons in one go. There is no designated watching time, such that you know that you and several million other people are all planted in front of your TVs at the same time (and tweeting about it at the same time...) That kind of communal activity just isn't possible when some people binge things inside 24 hours and others can only watch them over a few weeks. At the moment, Hulu is the only one attempting weekly releases to try to maintain that community tension (and, of course, show commercials.)

Wait... You want us to say what?

That asserted, there's no way that Carnival Row should become the next big hit because no one except Jeff "more money than any deity you can think of" Bezos would have been willing to pay for it. It's awful, top to bottom, from every technical perspective you can think of: acting, direction, writing (save me, Jeebus; ESPECIALLY the writing), as well as the more nuts-and-bolts stuff like lighting and basic physical functions (how dual, insect-like wings actually work, for example.)

Now, granted, you had to expect that the acting would be brutal if the lead is Orlando Bloom, whose range is essentially "pensive but wooden figure constantly trying to convince you that he actually has emotions.", but how did they trick Jared Harris and Indira Varma into this? Promise them they'd only have scenes with each other so they could feed off one another and ad-lib their way out of the awful script? Apparently not, since it was still awful when Harris was explaining- to his wife -how his job works and the status of the current legislature. Because she wouldn't know these basic things, would she? And, overall, the acting doesn't rise above the level of Bloom's emoting in front of his boss (complete with requisite fist slamming to the desk) at how much he feels for the Fae people and their plight. Could they have made this any more obvious? How about if he did the classical "baring a breast with a ready dagger" bit?

Dreary. Like pretty much everything.

But the direction was poor, too. Chase scenes are supposed to build tension, not stutter for five minutes while the two participants keep pacing each other, but that's exactly what happened as Rycroft Philostrate (Bloom) and Unseelie Jack (Matthew Gravelle) race across the rooftops. It was like trying to turn over an engine when the starter is failing. You keep feeling that something's about to happen as the car does that shudder... but then nothing. So, you try again. That's not tension. That's anticipation and despair, because the motion that you get means nothing and the motion you expect never happens. You want tension? Go watch The Bourne Identity again to see how to set up and conduct a chase scene. Oh, and the names... Rycroft Philostrate. Vignette Stonemoss. Imogen Spurnrose. Seriously? I mean, you're serious with this? It isn't fantastical enough that you have people with wings and demons living in the sewers and you think Orlando Bloom can actually act, but you have to give people names that would make each and every one of these people despise their parents?

But that's part and parcel of the worst part: the writing. It's brutal. Half of it is exposition, but even where it isn't, they have the True Detective, season 2 pattern down cold (i.e. People don't fucking talk like that!) My favorite bit was where Bloom confronts the sergeant he suspects and the latter responds: "Just what are you insinuating?" Wut? Not "What's all this about?" or "Tryin' to make a point?" or even "What are you tryin' to say here, inspector?", all delivered in standard Cockney. No, no, no. Let's reach into Webster's for the elevated term because that's the first thing that would come to mind for Average Joe Desk Sergeant. All that tells me is that, in addition to your world not being real (suspension of disbelief!), your characters aren't real, either, because they speak like someone just handed them a script, rather than how they would if they actually lived in your unreal world. JFC, Tamzin Merchant's entire role (Imogen) is exposition! Every time she opens her mouth, she's dropping facts like an almanac to people that should already be familiar with them. She even describes what we've already seen, as if we need that explained to us like her entire family history and marital status. "Carriage!" Yes, we saw that. This is the same response I'd expect from a four-year-old pointing out the window to say: "Fire truck!", because it's exciting for him and he thinks no one else saw it. But we're watching the screen (presumably), so we don't need it announced.

"I'm about to tell him what style of hat he's wearing!"

The crowner is, appropriately, the last scene, where you'd expect some more detail and, instead, are given none, presumably because the writer (René Echevarria) thought it would be "mysterious". Unseelie Jack is about to unburden himself of, y'know, everything and decides that that's the moment to drop some hints about the horrible things that he's seen and why Rycroft Philostrate(!) has no clue about the real world. It's at this point that you'd normally drop in a couple names or words that the audience won't recognize or understand so that they have something to entice them into watching the next episode (although, with this series, perhaps this is a blessing.) Think Melisandre talking about the Lord of Light/Red God/R'hllor. You don't know who that is or what its role is in Westeros, but she name-drops because it's natural to her (she lives there and, really, with the Red God) and it gives the audience something to think about, in addition to providing a little detail on the world. We get none of that from Unseelie Jack's monologue. None! It's all horrible darkness this and you won't believe what I've seen that, but we don't get one single detail about this obviously overarching plot element. So, his entire speech becomes ephemeral, as we later watch a Fae woman get devoured by something in the sewers down by the docks which, for all we know, might be a common thing in these parts... and tells us the same thing his useless speech did!

Me, too. It's called "This screenplay."

I'm not even getting into more technical detail, like how showing everything with a blue lens to make it seem "dark" also begins to make everything blend together. Or how you don't soar, as Vignette(!) does in the opening scene, with dual, halteres-type wings (think common housefly.) Or how working girls don't sleep with their johns! That's because they're working and need to move on to the next guy. If you're going to use sex as a major plot element, you might as well know how it works, yo.

I honestly can't fathom how even Amazon greenlit this thing and I've seen Britannia. Echevarria was showrunner on Terra Nova (once described as "Stargate Universe by Dr. Seuss"), if that gives you any indication at which level things are operating. But if one is trying to field the "next Game of Thrones", one certainly wouldn't start here. Aim higher.

Cold Case, cold film

It's not often that I get stuck with the "blank page" writer's phenomenon. You know, that point where you're just staring at the page/screen and not knowing how to actually apply words to it? But in trying to keep up with my pseudo-promise to review all of the films we see at the Michigan/State, I kind of struggled with Cold Case Hammarskjöld. It's not because it was great and I didn't know how to encompass it. It's certainly not because it was bad and I didn't know how to get started ranting (see: any of my coverage of Game of Thrones' final season or True Detective's second season if you want to see loquaciousness in the service of bad productions.) It's because it wasn't much of... anything. It's not as if there isn't substance to the film. There certainly is. It's loaded with facts that reflect the colonial exploitation of Africa, the dirty wars that accompanied and followed that exploitation, the influence of massive corporations in those wars, racism, disease, and the turbulent political period following World War II and the introduction of the Cold War. It is all of those things. But it's also somewhere between a newsreel and a Twitter thread in its presentation of them.

The film examines the death of former United Nations secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, in a plane crash in what was then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia.) As Hammarskjöld was a fervent reformer and champion for the rights of those who had been (or still were) under the colonial boot, he had a lot of enemies. As the plane crash was very swiftly examined and buried by the Rhodesian authorities, it's never been far from the thoughts of many people that the crash was actually a calculated assassination. This is the premise of the film, as Danish filmmaker Mads Brügger and Swedish journalist Göran Björkdahl interview people both involved in the clean-up and those who claim to be part of the mercenary outfit that actually carried out the crime, the South African Institute for Maritime Research. The film continues down that rabbit hole, exploring the possible paymasters behind SAIMR and the various other projects that the Institute was involved in, ranging from pedestrian white supremacy to attempted genocide.

Sounds fascinating, right? And it probably would have been for someone who hadn't already spent many years reading about that activity. There were several moments in the film where I would have been more interested by an exploration of the larger picture beyond what was hinted at, but they quite properly avoided that and tried to stay focused on Hammarskjöld's death, for the most part. But that also set the film up to be something like a first draft of a screenplay for a police procedural, without any real narrative or character, except the interjection of the two filmmakers in something of a Mr. Bean role, as they fumble around trying to dig up the wreckage of the infamous crash. I think they tried to compensate for the fact that they were laying things out in pretty straightforward fashion by showing Brügger dictating the story to two different transcribers and showing their reactions to both the story and his elaborations upon it. The fact that both transcribers were Black does kind of dovetail with one of the more explosive elements of the conspiracy story, but I'm not sure if that was intentional or coincidental.

Of course, the conspiracy is kind of the central conceit of the film and, in that respect, it's just like watching Oliver Stone's JFK. The surrounding plot and performances run secondary to the theme in that film in the same way they do with this one. But it's the manner of delivery that kind of stalls out here. If you're already aware of the mountain of evidence out there about the activities of South African mercenary groups, then it's not difficult to believe that what's being presented here is true. But it's also not that interesting because the filmmakers take pains to not dramatize the possibilities, as Stone did in his film. For documentarians, that's a laudable goal. But it also kind of saps the life from the presentation in this case. And that's strange for me because it sounded like a great idea. I'm a Cold War enthusiast. I used to live and breathe that stuff. I have board games sitting in my house based on that period, mostly because they're about the Cold War, as opposed to whether they're any good on a rainy afternoon (They are.) But this film just didn't sing to me. I walked away from it thinking more about the casual reference in one moment to Jonas Savimbi, rather than about the film itself, because there's actually more story around the former UNITA leader.

I won't say that it's not worth your time, as I think it is. It's just that I wish it were more worth it.