Spider-Man: No Way Home

 

This is a weird movie to analyze for a number of reasons. For one, Disney has released an unprecedented amount of details from the movie to "build hype", meaning you likely walk in knowing what will happen for the entire first half of the movie.

For another, this movie relies on having seen more movies previously than any film I've heard of before. It assumes familiarity with all the Avengers movies, including the two Spider-Man movies in that universe. But it also pulls in from the previous five Spider-Man movies released by Sony from 2002 to 2014. Maybe catch "Into the Spiderverse" just for thematic parallels. (There's even some references to the Netflix Marvel series, and the Tom Hardy Venom.) You can still understand the plot of what is happening without those, but many of the jokes will fall flat otherwise.

But what makes it harder is... it's really three movies in a row, which are pretty different. If we're doing any analysis deeper than "the jokes sure were funny," we have to admit that Spider-Man 3 goes through three very different stories. We'll go into those.

Lastly, my own personal experience watching this also couldn't help but be shaped by reading Worm. This shouldn't be that surprising: both are stories about a teenage superhero with bug powers and wrestling with the split between their quotidian life and their awesome power. There were just multiple scenes I couldn't help watching without thinking "how did Worm do this exact thing."

Act I: A social media horror story.

The first part of the story is the most affecting and disturbing. And the least subtle. Mysterioso ended Spider-Man 2 by exposing Peter Parker's identity and accusing him of of murder, broadcast live over the web and J. Jonah Jameson's Breitbart/Alex Jones style show. For about 40 minutes we live through a painful immersive piece about the entire world suddenly knowing our deepest secrets and believing absurdly wrong things about us. (As I said at the time, "Far From Home" was really the Marvel movie about the powers of the reality stone.)

Obviously, it's "about" the modern phenomenon of going viral and getting canceled. "Twitter has one main character every day - the goal is to never be it." It's also about our fear at fake news and how reality has polarized into different silos, completely in disagreement, where our enemies take the barest string of facts and come to radically different beliefs based on them. 

Much of this act is not shot realistically, but metaphorically. The shot of all the students in Peter's school parting like a wave for him while their flip-phones record him, evokes the famous scene from Tobey's Spider-Man 2 when the subway of New Yorkers crowd surf Spidey on their hands. 

The movie even realistically shows that going "viral" like this is not a one-sided affair. Half the world hates you, but half the world (or more) loves you. (The opening radio show calls of Hancock also do this, quickly.) But the earnest love is awkward and certainly not a balance for the pain of all the hate. This is epitomized in the scene in front of the trophy case that Parker's principal has made to celebrate their "hero." (That scene can't help but recall in Worm when Taylor returns to her high school as one of the reigning crimelords of the city, and the principal falls over herself to favor her.)

The whole act is effective, and extremely uncomfortable. It's hard to call something that digs into our modern fears this much "fun." There is no real truth, just whichever fantasies the public and our enemies find the most convincing.

JJJ I think is a problem. Jameson has always been this sort of propagandist preaching hate towards Spiderman, but in the comics and other movies he has a personal connection to Spiderman. He is his employer, and generally an asshole but a human-sized one, and will in the end go out of his way to show humanity to Peter Parker. This both redeems the jerk, and lets us laugh at him for the dramatic irony of hating someone's public identity so much while not seeing them and liking them up close. The latest trilogy completely misses this human connection, and in doing so just makes Jameson an unforgivable monster. Anyway...

Act II: The multiverse

This is what the trailers were all about. Peter performs a magical spell with Dr. Strange that "messes up" and summons antagonists and other Spidermen from the previous two trilogies. We get William Dafoe's Green Goblin and Alfred Molina's Doc Ock and oh yeah Jamie Foxx and... the janitor from Wings as a sand monster.

The entire magic spell plot is senseless, with no logic but what is needed for the appropriate drama, and has both Peter and Dr. Strange being absurdly stupid (which is fine) and immediately kicking themselves for how stupid they were right after (which is not. Either commit to the bit or don't do it.) I am fine with characters being irrational and doing what is needed for the plot, if we believe in them as characters, but not if they go around the rest of the story commenting on how weird it was they did that thing. But fine.

What is more to be regretted is the drawn out tease of the "multiverse" the MCU has been doing. We've had "the multiverse is coming... dun dun dun" now be central to Spider-Man 2, WandaVision, the Loki series, and now this movie. It's still always "coming" and we "know frighteningly little about it." Presumably this will take center stage in the movie teased after these credits, but it has been a damn lot of teasing. Especially since the amount of multiverse crossover in this movie is basically pornographic.

Anyway, this act stretches from the first scene between Peter and Strange in the sanctum to right after their second. The one thing I really want to say for it is... damn William Dafoe is good. When I first saw the Green Goblin appear, I felt bad that MCU had reduced him to a CGI cameo for a paycheck. But his scene in the soup kitchen, and later in Happy's apartment, really let him shine.

The Act ends when Peter manages to defeat Dr. Strange in his own pocket dimension, and is a little bit in awe of himself for having done it. Which slightly touches on but doesn't embrace what could have been the main theme of this movie: awesome power.

In Worm, there is a scene after Taylor has defeated Mannequin, the technologically enhanced member of the Slaughterhouse 9, and one of the most feared villains on the planet. She crawls back into her apartment to find some hoodlums there. And they are terrified at how monstrous she is, having killed a monstrous enemy, and she reflects on what this says about her. Spider-Man realizing he just defeated the world's greatest magic user could cause that same reflection.

Because that is a sub-theme of this entire Act. Oh no, Doctor Octopus is here to threaten our universe's Peter Parker who has never had to deal with those robotic tentacles before. Oh it's no problem, Doc Ock has bluetooth on and Tony Stark gave Parker the best hacking tools money can buy. Mechanical villain is easily disabled. In fact with his magic friend, Spiderman doesn't have to kill any of these enemies, but can trivially lock five of them up in inescapable prisons. 

This world (the Avenger's) is the super-science world. This Peter Parker is not just a webslinger, but possibly the most powerful person in this universe. Nothing is... really a threat to him. The awe of being a supreme entity could be a really interesting topic for a teenage superhero to wrestle with. I highly recommend "Strong Female Protagonist" for this very reason. But this movie doesn't engage with this sort of existential crisis.

Act III: Everyone Deserves a Second Chance

That's the title of this act because they repeat this moral like a dozen times. This finishes up the movie, even though it has two distinct parts (Peter trying at first to cure all the villains of their defects, and then the all out brawl after that fails the first time) but they are at least related to each other, and follow a combined arc.

It's certainly interesting as a series of short stories, and allows all the cameo actors to show off briefly, and we get the adorable chatter between the three different Spidermen. But I'm not gonna pretend that was a theme that was in any way supported by the first half of the movie.

The death of a major character here is, as everyone else has said, unearned. I don't really have anything to add to that besides how annoying it is that the new myths of our culture are so dependent on actors' contracts and the need for a main character to have the same sort of tragic backstory as their previous iterations have. It's without doubt the worst part of the movie (especially with the whole "receive a mortal blow, get up and walk around and talk for a while, and then pass out from blood loss, and no hero tries to take them to a hospital at any point.")

***

Update: Second Chances. (Hey, we're thematic here.) Muga brings this up below, but I had wanted to address this regardless once I had a chance to think about it more.

What does "a second chance" mean in this movie? It's the rallying cry of why Peter wants to figure out a way to "fix" the villains (which, to be fair, the movie gives a whole three lines of dialogue to how creepy "fixing" people sounds) so they don't go back just to die.

As Muga says, it's also easy to see this as a theme in how Peter wants to rewind time to fix what went wrong, or at least then rewrite memory.

But these aren't the same thing, nor the other ways "second chances" come up. What does a second chance *mean*?

Does it mean "we think you as a person have a lot of value, that first strike will not put you out, we'll give you another chance to prove yourself." Or does it mean "we will literally let you go back to your mistake, and do it right this time now that you've learned from it?" 

Who is getting the second chance? The same person in the same circumstances, just hoping the fate goes another way? A person who has learned from what went wrong the first time? Or a person that has been forcibly changed by external forces?

What does mercy and redemption really mean? Do we value people because "they are not the worse thing they have ever done", or are we saying "if I were god, it would be my responsibility to fix all the bad parts of people?"

These are all good questions to be raised by a movie. But this movie in itself is not interested in their complexity, and just slaps multiple things together that aren't really connected to say "second chances!"

How to Recommend Arcane

 So there is this weird thing where a lot of fans of the game League of Legends are saying "the cartoon Arcane on Netflix is good and you should watch it." The reasons they give are:

1. You don't need to know League of Legends to enjoy it.
2. The animation is sooooo good.

And if they're really specific:

3. One character is soooo cool. (Probably "Silco.")

This is not a very convincing recommendation. You don't lead with why something is really good by trying to reassure about a problem. And "animation quality" only goes so far.

Probably inflated by current fans, but then, what show isn't.

Part of the problem though, is that they are right. This is about the best animated show since the first Avatar. They just don't have the words to articulate why it's setting off alarms of "this is great" in their mind. In an ideal world all it would take is sufficient trust in the person's taste to say "if they say it's 10/10 must watch, then I will" but sadly we live in a fallen world.

(I don't know any League stuff, and did not read any information about the show before watching it. So I did not know how it would end, which most other people did. I feel lucky that way.)

So let's try to recommend it properly.

1. The show has an incredible amount of intention and effort put into it and it shows. The soundtrack is wholly original, including songs from Sting and Imagine Dragons. The animation studio took six years to make it. The voice actors include big name character actors (like Hailee Stanfield and my favorite Shohreh Aghdashloo.) Even the episode titles show thought and thematic understanding.

You know all those movies where you think "wow they paid all this for special effects and big name stars, couldn't they spend a little on the script?" Well this one, they put the effort into the writing.

2. It's not about the plot. It's about the little things. It's about the characterization. The world and its politics and even half its cast are pretty flat and typical for the fantasy genre. But given these set-pieces, the creators wanted to do the best possible example of that world and those characters and it worked. It's about taking a family melodrama and paying it real respect and getting into every scene intensely. It's about making the fight scenes both a) an excuse to show off great animation and b) a catharsis for the emotions between those two characters. The fight scene at the end of Episode 7 raises the bar for fights like the first Matrix did.

IMO, the plot and characters start out slow. The first three episodes are more like backstory you would get in a paragraph of exposition from one series (like "everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked".) Which make them a little bit grating, but once you get to the current time, all these characters have a richness because you have seen where they came from. And once you finish and understand everything, you want to rewatch the beginning so you can actually appreciate all the details this time.

3. That sort of fractal complexity. Remember the thing about "whether you need to know League of Legends to get this?" At first no, but the show is filled with small easter eggs to please those who know more about the world. But that's only a subset of the show is filled with easter eggs for once you can see all the thematic connections. It rewards intensive viewing and understanding.

Which believe me, you really can't believe watching the opening scenes.

4. A comparison in method (though not in scale) is Shakespeare. The plots of Shakespearean plays are pretty basic. But you take a well known plotline, and give serious attention to every character and every bit of dialogue, and it makes a work of art. For some reason this works even better for tragedies, which is what Arcane is. A tragedy where you keep hoping they'll work things out and they're so close, but they were cursed to always fail.

This is really aided by being animation instead of live-action. The attention to character details includes how they are drawn, how they move and flow, and their background music.

5. So yes, some of the characters are very good. Silco, as mentioned above. Jinx and Ekko and Vi and Caitlyn. Unfortunately that doesn't sell a neophyte anymore than saying "Zuko is funny and has a good redemption arc" could sell somehow on Avatar. But well... the good ones are really, really good.

6. It has moral nuance. On the top level this just means "there are two sides fighting each other, but neither is the good side or the bad side." There's the rich side and the poor side, but also the rich side is full of idealists and the poor side is full of cynical criminals. We might root for one character or another, but they're all full humans with understandable goals.

But actually mean there are characters who do genuinely terrible things that hurt and mess up other people. And there are characters who are hurt and only wanted to be loved. And those are the same people. A desire for acceptance or the ability to grant it, is not, in this world, the same thing as being good or having a good effect on the people around you. Which is very realistic, and wholly lacking from television let alone animated stuff.

(I think some of this is an accident. That the creators wanted to make some characters more one-dimensional, and kinda just failed and gave us complicated flawed characters instead.)

***

Anyway, see it. Part of me wants to say "because we won't see it's like again for a while." It's lightning in a bottle and even season 2 will probably fall short.

But another part of me hopes that studios see the reaction to this and realize "the bar has been raised." You can just take years writing and drawing an simple story that's expertly crafted, and audiences will love you for it.

Edgar Wright and Wrong

I haven't seen much discourse around "Last Night in Soho" yet, which is surprising, because it's by pop-auteur Edgar Wright, and features some very controversial decisions. I guess "Eternals" is just eating up all the mindspace... which tells you all you need to know about discourse priorities.

Anyway, this review is going to compare LNiS and one of his first movies Hot Fuzz. This will be so spoilerific that I even blacked out what the movie of comparison is. Point is, only read beyond here if you have seen both movies and don't care about spoilers. (Also you should totally see Hot Fuzz, it's great. Also Last Night in Soho is totally a horror movie so don't see it if you dislike any aspect of scary movies.)

LNiS starts off very strong, using several standard cliches to tell us what moral universe we are in. Thomasin McKenzie plays a rural ingenue Eloise who is going to the city to study fashion, while we see her downplay the fact that she sees the ghost of her mother (which touches on both "generational trauma" and "hysterical women" genres.) The modern city she arrives to turns out to be... dingy and disillusioning. Her taxi driver makes "jokes" about stalking her, her dorm room is tiny and shared with a character we are supposed to see as "low class playing at elite," and all in all it's a shattering of the fantasy of the city Thomasin has from sixties culture of movies and dances and flowing dresses. So far, so good, the metaphorical stakes are set.

[The racial dynamics of the very English movie are... complicated. Eloise is lily white and a symbol of purity, and her first antagonists are women who all have much darker skin than her and were created in a lab to give off "cosmopolitan foreign vibes." But the filmmaker probably considers those cool girls largerly white, and the one person from the city who is uncomplicatedly nice to Eloise is very black. So you can read that as successful tokenism, or you can see the classism against the cool girls as shading into colorism if not specific racism. Anyway.]

In short order, Eloise moves into a flat in an old house and has a dream, where she is glamorous Anna Taylor-Joy in the height of sixties glamour. It's really a beautiful scene (I think it was single-shot, but not sure) and shows how what Eloise most wants is a high-class fantasy of the past. She has witty repartee and a fancy cocktail with Matt Smith who dances with her and then punches out a creepy guy who calls her a wh-re. (The movie makes frequent use of slurs against women to stab a scene with the threat of degradation. Eloise's greatest fear is to be the women these words describe, much like how the n-word was originally a word of *differentiation* between classes of freedmen, used only to describe the underclass that the middle-class African Americans feared becoming.)

But even in her dreams, the threat of class degradation follows Eloise, and her dream doppleganger Sandy. (Actually this is complicated: the dreams *start* with Eloise and Sandy performing the same actions and us seeing the other actress reflected in mirrors, which is really cool, but quickly Eloise moves to a third-person observer role and is often entirely separated from the actions Sandy takes.) She is tricked by Matt Smith (only known as "Jack") into being a sleazily dressed dancing girl to the hoots and jeers of ugly old men. We are then shown a horrific montage of her fellow dancing girls and how they fall into prostitution, which Sandy will as well. The movie leaves the sexual violence (mostly) as unseen dread, and emphasizes only how low-class the whole thing is.

Eloise spends a while losing her grip on reality as her dream world shifts into her waking life, and we are told this is just like what happened to her mother (and is a clear metaphor for the strain of moving to the city.) This climaxes in the film's tour-d-force where Eloise and her black boyfriend are hooking up in her bed and she suddenly starts seeing Jack murdering Sandy with a knife for disobeying him. Eloise starts screaming, the boy panics especially as she keeps screaming even after he has stepped away, and the landlord Ms. Collins bangs down the door. So in the same shot we have allusions to interracial sexual assault, black fear of being wrongly lynched, and a bloody sex trafficking murder that two of the five people in the scene can't see. It's intense. We see Sandy die of neck wounds.

Eloise spends the rest of this movie trying to solve the murder and find Jack (who she suspects to be a threatening creep at her bar, but isn't) and seeing her reality dissolve as spectres of all those ugly old male clients haunt her.

Here is where you have to trust I have told you everything relevant and am not skipping over minor details:

When Eloise tries to flee the city, Ms. Collins (for no particular reason) tells her that she is Sandy, and she actually took the knife and killed Jack, and then went hunting using the promise of her body, and killed dozens of her clients.

What.

Let's compare to one of Wright's first films "Hot Fuzz" which is about fascism (the word is used several times.) Simon Pegg plays a cop who strictly enforces the law to the letter and allows no flexibility. He is kicked out to small town with no crime and a police force that lets all scofflaws completely evade the justice system. He is incensed that this does not fit his conception of order, but the townspeople insist they are happy and he is too strict, which becomes absurd as we see a number of mysterious murders take place and the bucolic townspeople sweep them under the rug.

The twist halfway through is that the town elders are the real fascists, who summarily execute anyone who causes the slightest bit of trouble or ugliness to their town (including the kids who Pegg had brought in for underage drinking.) The theme of the entire movie so far had been "the pursuit of law can go too far", the flip is only that it's not Pegg's character who was going too far. And the conflict of "adherence to the law" vs "local judgment" shows that the latter can be just as cruel and destructive as the former.

It's a really fun movie that pays off paying attention to detail and caring about themes. Heck they spend like five minutes of screentime flashing back to every minor clue that set this up, clues as frequent and small as a typo of the protagonist's name in the local paper.

The point is that LNiS does *none of this*. All we've seen of Sandy is a horrifying trap of sex-trafficking, and not like, a cruel streak of someone who likes to take visceral vengeance. Her first killing is an entirely justified self-defense... and then the narration just tells us she also committed uncountable serial killings after that. (There's a similarity to I Am Legend when we learn these ghosts of ugly men haunting Eloise were trying to seek justice, but again lacking I Am Legend's buildup. In the Will Smith movie, we can see all of the zombies' actions were about freeing their damsel in distress, whereas these ghosts "help" Eloise get their justice by... holding her down and trapping her.)

I am sympathetic to "in pursuit of justice we can go too far and become the real villain", but you have to build that shit up. You can't just show an extremely sympathetic victim and then say "once they got any agency they killed a dozen people off screen how about that?"

[Also this Sandy is now definitely the villain, and the action of the climax is her trying to kill Eloise and her boyfriend and then burning to death in her house.]

And it's really sad because the first nine/tenths of the movie is so good artistically. The set design is excellent at details for both showing a high-glamour and a gritty and dingey world. The blocking choreography for Sandy and Eloise are amazing (and what many in the audience probably came for.) Everyone involved obviously loves fashion and treated this movie as an excuse to dive into the closest of half a century ago. So much about this movie is good, and I am sure Wright wanted to inject moral nuance into a typical damsel-in-distress narrative. But "what if everything you knew was actually the other way around" just doesn't do it.

To play contrarian, you could make an *existentialist* argument that the film is precisely about our lack of knowledge. That just because you dreamed of yourself as the ghost of a person and identified with them *does not mean you actually know them.* The being you identified with may end up being very much not you, the victim you pitied may be the real monster, and the world of the past you longed for you never understood. But again, it's better when that is supported by the text in some way and not just a rug ripped out from under you in the last moment.

Megapost: Six Movies You Should See

  Or "My Recent but Serendipitous Watching Habits, in Chronological Order of Their Release."

All of these are good, but the last one is the best. And yes, minor spoilers, but nothing that would ruin enjoyment of the movie.

1. Total Recall

The 1990 classic, not the recent remake, when Schwarzenegger's star was rising and his work the most exciting. The rule of Philip K Dick adaptations is that 1) the movie is nothing like the book it's based on but b) it's very very good regardless.

I hadn't watched it for so long because I just didn't see the appeal of Ahnold in surrealist horror. What's the point of another 80's action movie? (And it is *extremely* 80's.) And possibly back then, I was right. But now, when we are surrounded by scifi constantly that attempt realism and the emotional nuance of literary fiction, it's breathtaking to see a movie full of ideas about "how the future might be." No filmmaker is that naive these days! In the first few minutes we see viewscreen windows by the kitchentable, someone changing their nailcolor with the touch of an electrode, and a tourist industry based on loading memories where you can select your personality within the memory via drop down menus. "This is a thing we thought could happen in a noncataclysmic way" screams at you, like Blade Runner and Back to the Future 2, in ways that Interstellar or Age of Ultron or even Blade Runner 2(049) don't.

But it also has the narrative awareness that is very, uh, Dick-ian. The plot of the movie of course is that a working schlub goes to get a memory vacation injected into his head, and something goes wrong, and it turns out he's a secret agent whose brain has been wiped on a mission to save Mars. We are of course wondering whether the rest of the film is real or just the memory he bought - particularly as the story unfolds featuring elements he specifically selected when signing up. Meta asides are made when we dream something is it because we want it or because we remember it, or "even if our past self is telling our brain-wiped self what to do via recorded messages, they may not have our best interests at heart." It plays with reality in a *fun* way that rewards paying attention to what people are saying, and not just in a nihilistic inevitability way.

2. Crimson Peak

Again, Guillermo del Toro's foray into romantic gothic horror has been out for years, and was critically hailed, so why didn't I watch it before? Well mostly watching a Final Girl moan in a lonely castle with obviously-duplicitous-jerks for two hours until we have the inevitable bloody-but-victorious resolution didn't appeal to me.

Good news! There's only one hour of moaning in a lonely castle. The rest is an entertaining time watching Tom Hiddleston be convincingly seductive (and not just an unconvincing villain who stands in for patriarchal abuse.) 

To make up the rest of the difference, the aesthetics are spot on, mixing black and white and red in dozens of interesting and breathtaking ways. But no surprise given GDT. It is, as the main character says early on "a romantic story that just happens to have a ghost in it."

3. Replicas

This utter failure you probably haven't heard of, as it is the most unsuccessful movie Keanu Reeves has ever done. And plotwise it is hilariously bad. Two notable plotpoints of this scifi film include:

a) The trouble in their "uploading a brain to a robot procedure" has been confounding this unicorn startup as every robot immediately goes insane, and only their leading scientist can figure out the cause, a singular insight that makes him irreplaceable and lackthereof has halted progress at the startup for months. What is this insight? That a human's brain if copied perfectly *has no memory of how to control robotic body parts* and is still trying to beat a heart or listen to nerves on the skin of your bicep, and freaks out when 99% of this sensory response becomes mechanical chaos. No one else has thought of this yet.

2) The biomedical startup working on mind copy and transfer secretly is funded by a private military outfit that has no interest but to load the mind of the best soldier into a thousand robots for the supersoldier army. It takes, again, Keanu's brilliance to point out that the murderous CEO could instead *use this technology to sell body transfer rejuvenation to very rich people.* Any other movie would have spent its runtime agonizing over the ethics of *that*, but here its the solution against dumb militarism.

The movie is full of plotholes like that, so don't watch if you live to spot inconsistencies (or I guess, if that sort of masochism is why you watch movies.) But then you ask, why should I watch this flop, Blue?

Because the *texture* of the movie is another thing altogether. The movie spends the majority of its runtime not on plot developments or ethical debates but on *the specific experiences of trying to clone a mind and body using near future technology.* Like do you remember how the first half of Primer is not complicated time travel conspiracies, but just watching a couple of guys in a garage do the painstaking steps of making a startup, except all their hard work and geekery is around boxes that send you back in time? If you like the gritty detail and tension of "staring at chemical balance monitors for 17 days" and "stealing car batteries from every car on your block when you need to make a power backup at 2am" then this is the movie for you.

Yes, I know how absurd the plot is. Don't think you understand a movie just from reading the wikipedia plot summary. Watch the runtime of the film itself, which is the sort of experience you can summarize but not *relate.*

And if you are going for Tim Roger's Review of Cyberpunk 2077 "Watch every Keanu Reeves movie referenced in this game" Challenge, then this will probably be the last missing step in that goal for you.

4. Dune

UPDATED: What do you expect me to say? Villeneuve's sweeping aesthetics are engrossing but the plot is not very good due to not having aged well since the 60's and being underexplained in the movie? That the famous actors detract from the immersion of seeing them as a character instead of Jason Momoa and Zendaya? Yeah these are true and everyone else is saying them. Also it's good and you should go see it in a theater.

But let's compare to Dune 1984 (which I watched afterwards just to get some closure, since the new movie ends 60% of the way through the book) and talk about adaptation.

As numerous scantily-researched hot-takes have revealed, the wrong thing to see in Dune is a "rise of the Chosen white dude who leads the natives to freedom" narrative. Which, frankly, is all the 1984 movie really conveys. Even way back in 1965 before we had anti-colonialism, Frank Herbert wasn't interested in that story, he was interested in catastrophizing it. 

The important thing about the 2021 production is that Villeneuve emphasizes how much of a bad idea this hero's journey is. Paul is filled with dread at the murder that will be done in his name if he takes on a Great Destiny, and he wrestles with that fear for most of the movie. It does a layered job of complicating what would otherwise be a very cliche warrior-messiah story.

But I suspect in the end it won't be satisfying. Emphasizing this dilemma as in the head of the protagonist so much will only disappoint, when we wonder why he makes the wrong decision in the end. Paul does lead a genocidal war by the end of the series, despite all his angst and doubts. He's not going to turn back, despite all this wrestling.

Which is why the way the book handles this is so superior: the detached perspective of Princess Irulan's biography entries bequeaths us with an outsider's sense of doom, without focusing on "why isn't the main character as sensible as we are about this?"

5. Army of Thieves

The first ten minutes of this movie stand entirely on their own, and will give you enough idea of its tone and story-telling technique to decide whether you want to watch two hours of this. It's like Galadriel's opening monologue in LOTR, but for a millennial heist movie. Just go watch it, right now, really. Come back when we meet the femme fatale.

Netflix's prequel to Netflix's Army of the Dead which came out only earlier this year. But it's not telling the story of "how the zombie experiments started" but rather "why was a world class safecracker just happening to be working as a locksmith near the zombie ground zero", and does it in while the zombie apocalypse is happening in the background. It's a good combination as the zombie-stuff gently touches the plot and affects the psyche of the characters, but it's A-plot at any point.

SMG:

I don’t actively seek these things out, but it seems that many reviewers can’t process that Army Of Thieves is entirely a magical-realism romantic comedy starring Dieter the safecracker, with absolutely no ‘world-building’. It’s not even really a narrative prequel; Army Of The Dead arguably works better as a retroactive sequel to this.

Movie owns a lot, as it happens.

Since not zombies, there are two things that AoT *is* about:

1. Wagner's Ring Cycle

2. Being a passionate nerd about something. 

In this case, safe-cracking, but it's such a vapid metaphor that you can insert any subject of your passion into it, ala Antarctica and "A Place Further than the Universe." The movie only has a very surface-level understanding of either Wagnerian opera or safe-cracking and if you are informed about either you will probably be as underwhelmed as when Stargate talks about viruses. 

But even without particulars, it gives us the universal of what nerd adoration is. "To really love something, you have to engage with it" is a touching, er, touchstone of the script.

It has a great deal of meta-ironic humor about it's own genre, which is about 80% funny and only 20% annoying, but that's what you get these days, especially considered its predecessor. Ruby O. Fee's speech about how dreams of zombies are either a prophecy of zombie-related death or a manifestation of self-doubt manages to be hilarious because it is true on both levels, and is the highlight of the movie.

(And the class analysis of a movie where "even as the masses are swarming with revolution, the elites spend all their attention on status games and the government spends all its attention on thwarting those status games" is pretty simple.)

6. The Harder They Fall

Wow, movie of 2021 so far, and there's not much time left to surpass it. It's like if Netflix said "let's put every charismatic black actor on for maximum screentime" (except Mahershala Ali) "and see what happens." All of those stars play characters who are scene-chewing archetypes in their own different ways. Matt Stoller Zeitz's review starts:

"The Harder They Fall" is a bloody pleasure: a revenge Western packed with memorable characters played by memorable actors, each scene and moment staged for voluptuous beauty and kinetic power.

They worked hard to make every single scene enjoyable in itself - nothing is just plot setup for future payoffs or pacing to lull us. It's all witty dialogue, audience-pleasing music, or Idris Elba being stone-cold as fuck.

Despite really disliking MSZ usually, you should probably read his whole review for the mechanics of what make this movie so great. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-harder-they-fall-movie-review-2021

You came here for the ideological analysis, and there's no way a "Western with an all black cast in 2021" could fail to have something worth analyzing. After someone calls Elba's villain the devil, Bass Reeves (also featured in HBO's Watchmen series) says "He's not the Devil, he's just a man. I've seen the Devil and he's white." And the movie keeps a background at all times of "no matter how bad the cartoon villains in this movie are, the threat of what the white man is going to do is worse." It gives a noble and complicated air to even the worst characters, as they at least are putting their ruthless ambition to the task of standing against *something* and it becomes easy to admire them in the scenes that describe their motivations.

(Plus, the one scene where they encounter white people, is *aesthetically* very interesting no matter what you think of its politics.)

... sometimes the plot strains credulity, especially assuming universal malevolence from the oppressor. A train will not, can not even, stop for a horse, let alone one with a black outlaw on it. And the plot requires that a white general rather give pardon to a black criminal than let his aide escape responsibility for warcrimes. The film seems to forget what this implies about the antipathy of the Other, but then we can forgive the characters who are so used to sneering and bulldozing for not seeing it either.

This is the rare case where I will say watch the movie instead of reading the spoilers, and that the rest of this paragraph is therefore hidden from the innocent: Idris's villain starts the movie with an act of such unmitigated evil against defenseless innocents that it takes the entire movie to build him into someone we can respect, right until it breaks our heart for him why he did that particular crime and his intentions for Nat Love the main character. And then we remember that Love, in the second scene of the entire movie, too killed a man of the cloth who had tried to escape his past transgressions. It's a movie that doesn't hammer you the entire runtime with how the hero and villain are mirrors, but once it reveals that you see how those dominos have been set up all along.

An important thing to note is that of course it's a cliche by this point to reveal "the villain is related to the hero!" But it's been worn down by so many examples that don't get the point of the twist at the end of Empire Strikes Back. It's not just that "these characters share a bloodline and therefore some magic powers, or that the hero should now care about the villain because they're related." The point in ESB is to realize "Anakin always Darth Vader, the dreams Luke had were always the nightmare too, and the Republicn *was* the Empire" all of these things are linked and blindly following the Jedi path will just lead to the same failure state. This is the agony that drives Luke to jump into the abyss in despair, which would otherwise not make sense because he finds out "oh I guess we share some DNA, still you're a mass murderer." We get the same thematic connection in THTF: Nat is suddenly able to see his whole life path as parallel to Rufus's, not as just an amoral comeback, but a specifically designed trap for him. That if you are going to damn someone for their past sins, you need to dig a lot more graves than just two. That is the revelation that makes this scene hit.

The one flaw that stands out is that this, like many crime-escapism movies is about a strict hierarchy of "cool" where you can only succeed in killing someone if you are superior to them on some scale of class/violence/coolness. But we know power levels only exist to be subverted? Layer Cake dealt with this in the ideal way, by monologuing the entire movie about this hierarchy only to have the main character be shot at the moment of his apogee by a complete loser nobody. (The Wire sorta did that, having a 5 year old shoot Omar.) Death does not care how impressive you are, and chaos can come at you even through the lowest of the low.

Btw, if you enjoy the movie, check out the... prequel? remix? "premix" version made by the director in 2013, "They Die by Dawn,"  adding Rosario Dawson, Michael Kenneth Williams, Giancarlo Esposito, and Bokine Woodbine to the all-star cast list. https://youtu.be/pKx-bJuyWpM

I watched everything good on Apple TV

 ... and decided I could unsub before the free trial week ended. Here's a review:

• Ted Lasso Episode 2.9
• Almost as inventive and cinematically interesting as people said it is. A good watch without having seen the rest of the show, but then it also didn't inspire a need to watch the rest of the show.
• Foundation
• Very painful to watch but honestly the most artistically interesting of all of their offerings. It's half modern YA multi-racial novel about chosen ones, and half Shakespearean stage play about three emperor clones and their robot advisor. It has nothing to do with the books of course, but let's be honest, every addition to the Foundation universe since 1988 has adulterated the austere logic-puzzle nature of the first three books with absurd soap opera melodrama. This is no different and just reflects the concerns of the modern day in its changes.
• Come From Away
• A cute musical that tries to take the tragedy of September 11th and turn it into something that brings us closer together in human unity (because the US blew that shot.) However, it mostly just makes you wish everyone was Canadian. I'm told by learned sources that the multi-angle filming makes you miss the true wizardry in the stage production, of how the different scenes and blocking flowed if you were viewing them from a static angle.
• For All Mankind
• WATCH THIS ONE. I don't even care about the space race or military culture, but it's supremely GOOD in the powerful performances it gives of normal people dealing with plausible-but-extremely-stretching situations. I can't even say there's much art to analyze, it's just beautiful like a very indulgent and well written fanfic delivered by convincing actors.
• Wolfwalkers
• The follow-up to "Secret of the Kells" with the same gorgeous animation style, but unfortunately now with an incredibly cliche story that was so oft-trodden I couldn't finish half of it. Watch this if you like pretty drawings or Princess Mononoke was too morally complex for you.
• The World's a Little Blurry
• The Billie Eilish Documentary, filmed with a lot of home footage. If you are a fan of her music, you will like this which has a lot of said music and fits its themes. However, you will also fail to be surprised by any of this because it's dramatic arc is exactly the story you would expect given her public persona and her music, filmed decently well with a fake veneer of intimacy. I don't know if that's because it's all a mask and this is a continuance of said mask, or this chronicles her genuine self. It didn't really matter though. I much more highly recommend "Val" the documentary of Val Kilmer which is weird as fuck and tells a story that surprised me a lot more with very weird narration style. (Both of course are self-flattering in a self-deprecating way, but it's autobiographies, you know that going in.)
• Boys State
• Someone recommended this but I didn't get it.

Anyway, as a streaming network, it seems to have a pretty high average quality and they're certainly ambitious. Most of the shows on the front page looked "interesting." But it's too hit or miss for me to want to keep on subscribing, especially if you can binge both seasons of For All Mankind in just three days.

Midnight Mass: The Sun Rises on the Good and Bad Alike

 

Writing a review of the Netflix horror miniseries "Midnight Mass" that does what I want it to do is hard.

On one hand: I want you to watch it. If your bar for entertainment is watching series on streaming services, and you care enough about mythic themes and/or class analysis to be reading this, then this is a series you will derive enjoyment from. The acting is fine, the dialogue is fine, the plot is fine, the cinematography is fine. All more than fine, really. A solid B+ or even A-. If you can spend your time watching She-Ra or Westworld or Shang-Chi, than you damn well will find this show as entertaining as any of those.

Of course, as a horror mini-series, much of it turns on a couple plot revelations we could call spoilers. I'm not gonna sink to the level of trying to really dig into this work while avoiding the basic plot structure and themes, so reading this review will spoil you if you haven't seen it. And I just encouraged you to see it. So that's an unfortunate Catch-22 that cuts out most of my audience. (This reminds me of a famous review of Litany of Earth, a genre story.)

But the biggest problem is that all the interesting things I have to say are about how this story fails. As a way to pass the time, I recommend this series. As high art worthy of appreciation, I don't think it measures up. But why it doesn't measure up is in fact really important and illuminating. So it's also worth watching just to understand that, or contest my interpretations. Even though after reading a bunch of criticisms, people usually don't want to invest seven hours in something to see it for themselves.

(Don't worry I'll also casually point out a bunch of themes and moments that are perfectly obvious, but every single hot take and review out there will either miss, or cover like a holy revelation. Did you notice that each episode title is a part of the Bible that corresponds roughly to the place of this episode in the plot arc? I sure hope so.)

And as always, I have some meta-narratives about the nature of art I want to get at in this review, that it will be sad not to share just because of that dreaded word. So I've made it possible to jump over like, the actual substance of the review to the conclusion.

I don't even think knowing the spoilers ruin the enjoyment of the story, so read on if you can throw caution to the wind. But yeah, spoilers from these three asterisks to the next three.

***

The first thing is to say how much the author (writer/director/producer) Mike Flanigan loves the idea behind this story. You can read from this heart-opening essay by him how long he had been trying to get the idea translated into any form.

Midnight Mass has been part of me for so long, it’s difficult to remember when exactly it started. There has probably never been a project more personal to me. Its journey to the screen was very long, I’ve changed enormously since I began working on it (as has the world in general) and as of this writing, it’s the single most rewarding professional experience of my life. 

I don’t remember the first time I started thinking about the doomed residents of Crockett Island, but I recently dug up the pages from my first stab at a Midnight Mass novel from early 2010. I have also found pages from an attempt at a feature script dated May 2012, before I quit my job as a reality TV show editor and began prepping Oculus – my first “real” movie – later that summer. 

I have a more advanced screenplay from 2013, and I remember the moment when I realized it wasn’t going to work: I was well over 150 pages into the draft, Riley Flynn and Father Paul Hill were having their first consequential conversation about alcohol

...

It’s fascinating to me, looking back at early drafts of Midnight Mass, just how plainly my own issues with alcohol were driving the story. Riley Flynn, former altar boy turned atheist, stares through bloodshot eyes at the car accident he caused, watching an innocent teenager die on the pavement because he drove drunk. And this is how we meet the protagonist. Riley was always a thinly disguised surrogate, an avatar unlikely to fool anyone except myself, who wouldn’t admit how much I had in common with my own character for many years. 

Nothing wrong with putting his own personal demons into one of the main characters. And really this essay is using vagueness and focus on biography to avoid what he is really talking about because of that dread word Spoilers.

To put it bluntly and simply: Midnight Mass is story about a priest bitten by a vampire who sees the monster instead as an Angel of the Lord and brings it back to his declining parish who turn it into a Catholic mystical cult. This works in how much of Christianity makes references to resurrection, everlasting life, drinking someone's "blood", obedience to authority, holy war and cataclysm, and ornate ritualism. It also works in how declining fishing and post-industrial communities are places of pain and hopelessness and can be suckered into new addictions easily. It also allows you to address ideas of forgiveness, what we believe lies after death, and the sociology of religions. It allows you to build a couple of characters very richly, full of angst about past decisions, as well as populate a whole town from pattern-cut stereotypes (the busybody nun, the town drunk) and and more modern characters who are millennial cultural commentary (the Muslim sheriff dealing with racism and suspicion, the daughter of the abusive alcoholic everyone ignored.) It invites a ton of moving-but-stock imagery, from desolate northern coastlines to Catholic liturgies covered in blood. And you know the end is going to be an orgy of violence, perfect for sweeps week.

There is in short, a lot of meat on the bones of this idea.

Anyone who has kept a private passion project that they worked on for years, watching as it seemingly built itself out in your head, knows what this is like. There were just so many good ideas that could hang on the structure of this central idea, that you want it born out in a larger and larger format. A novel, no a movie, no a TV-miniseries, no a whole franchise with spinoffs and an tourist destination. So having seen the series, you know exactly what Mike had rambling around in his head for over ten years, wanting to show the world.

But that is the root of the problem. Because you look at it, and other than the desire for "largeness", you ask "why couldn't this be a novel? Or a 2 hour movie? Or a comic book?" You'd have to add or remove characters to fit the particular length, but otherwise there's nothing about the story that tells differently on the big screen than on the page. Because it's not really "Midnight Mass the tv series" it's "the idea of Midnight Mass, as interpreted through the media of streaming series."

A golden example is the monologues. Frequently in a heated scene, one character will begin giving a speech without interruption for 3-5 minutes. There's one each for defending Christianity, Islam, atheism, and holistic spirituality, but also ones for public secularism, potential visions of life after death, living with enormous guilt, living with hate for someone who hurt you, or even just apocalyptic understandings of what Christianity calls us to do. They are well written speeches - but that's it. They are entirely unrealistic in the scene in particular, because the person they are arguing with just sits back and takes it and never interrupts or asks a difficult question. And even if you forgive that for poetic license, the delivery by the actor really is not much better than if you just read it. (To be fair, the actors often go for "understated wrestling with emotional pain" which is better than hamming it up, but still not a lot is shown.) I don't hate these speeches, but they stick out like a sore thumb and feel like a tumblr blog post written at 3am. I totally read tumblr at 3am. But because I read so much of it, I don't need to watch a show with a 7 figure budget to read speeches like that.

Another example is the monster. Fun fact: the word vampire is never used in the series. Even the captions refer to it as "angel". It's a bony, inhuman creature whose only evidence of sentience is participating in certain rituals in an orderly manner and occasionally wearing clothes. Otherwise it's nothing more than a flying vermin that acts on instinct. The real transubstantiation of it is how humans interpret it as the holy messenger they want, dress it up in other words, and project into it the mission they hope it has. This story doesn't actually give any credence to Catholic mythology - there's no reason to actually believe this is the sort of angel prophets had spoken of - and that's a cool thematic decision to explain how religion is a purely human interpretation on events.

But also the monster looks kind of dumb. Well, cheap. Definitely not terrifying. When it's a couple eyes in the darkness, sure that's scary. And wearing vestments, yeah that's cool. But it's wings look too much like TV-scale CGI, and all the violence it wreaks is filmed just like any Stephen King TV monster. There's nothing that says "yes, I sure am glad you showed me this with your cinematic talents, rather than drawing a comic panel or simply writing about it."

This is especially important in horror, where your one advantage is that you are allowed, even encouraged to evoke discomfort and strong emotions in your audience. (Which, they do very early on with the dead victim of Riley Flynn appearing to him before he goes to sleep.) That's the difference between film - conveying an emotion through manipulation of the visuals and sound and speed - and television - we pointed a camera where the plot and dialogue were going on and hopefully it's not distracting in any way. 

The second to last episode captures the feeling of being trapped in a small church as some people die, resurrect as vampires, and begin feeding on the people trapped in there. Right on. The last episode, as the new vampires spread out to the island, completely fails to capture this. We see shadows in the distance, and logically we know it's bad, but we're not being put in the eyes of someone running from their own child who is suddenly crazed for blood and clawing at them. It's the Jurassic World pterodactyl scene, not the magic of found footage.

The one exception to this is a plot hole / literary device. Some people start lighting buildings on fire with the hilarious logic that:

• Every vampire will burn in the sunlight come morning.
• They control the church (and rec center which is thematically very distinct)
• If they burn every other building on the island, they can select who they want to hide during the day in the church, and everyone they don't like will die.

Okay yes, this is a very dumb plan. Destroying every single structure on a large island capable of providing shade is pretty much impossible. Especially if you consider that people can quickly build new structures if all they really need is a roof. When someone replies "well hide in the boats" they're told that a group of 4 people managed to destroy every boat on the island in the middle of the dark night. Hell one shot shows people standing on a bridge as they wait for the sunrise to come kill them as we see under the bridge is enough shade to hide them.

But we can accept it as a thematic statement. This person would rather burn the whole rest of their world if it means they get to control the one means of survival. And then when just one person is willing to burn that refuge too, they've written their own death warrant and caused the death of everyone in their project.

But the visuals go beyond even this. On a very large island a few houses are burning. And instead we see orange burning horizon everywhere. Loud explosions going off every 15 seconds for about half an hour of screentime. It's like being in the middle of an epic warzone. All from, at most, twenty-ish people tossing alcohol-soaked rags into several houses.

But at least this fits the Revelations imagery. It feels like being at the end of the world, where all is flame and ash. It's not a tactical-realistic depiction of house fires, but it conveys the fear of apocalypse. I salute that, they just didn't do it with any of their other epic violence imagery at their climax.

Which is all a pity, because again, the author chose some really interesting linkages and I can see why he wanted them to get coverage.

Multiple characters wrestle with the legacy of alcohol addiction, but because they are used to the struggle when they are faced with the power and hunger of blood-thirst, they have the will to fight it that other characters who looked down on them lack.

Someone gives a speech about how we never really die so long as the world we are a part of lives on... as we see the island that was their entire world completely annhilated down to every building and remaining soul, by their hand.

The priest's character is excellent. The nun's character - busybody moralist who seeks to be a wild eyed servant of the apocalypse - is my favorite. And their alliance and eventual conflict shows what happens when beautiful ideals crash up against those who would execute them.

The show is very, very clear that if you believe in universal love at all, it has to encompass the convicts and the drunks and the racial minorities and the people who ignored you. (Though bony vampires and fetuses are left up as more ambiguous. Whoo boy their fetus theology is... complex.)

The various small characters who aren't center stage - the Muslim kid whose assimilation to local Christianity breaks his father's heart, the elderly woman aged back to her youthfulness in what she understands was a monstrous sin, the town mayor, the weed dealer - are great ideas but even in a seven hour series don't get enough time to breathe and so feel like half-silent pieces of scenery for the more central characters to act at. Flanagan has an actual town in his head and only had this miniseries as a portal to show us parts of it. (Even originally the town was supposed to be larger, but COVID filming demanded they have no extras, so he left it extra desolate. Which is atmospheric but also begs "how do you even have a high school class?")

*** END SPOILERS

So, why do it? If you've got a perfectly good novel, or comic series, why the need to make an expensive and extremely draining filmed series. Sure we can say "the money" as an explanation for Mike, though he clearly takes pride in the story having such a platform. So where does this pride come from?

And really we are asking: why do we care? If we have a story we already love - in book form, or a videogame, or podcasts or comics - why are so many of us WILD to see it on "the big screen." Do we have ideas for how this specific visual medium will convey what's important to us about the tale?

Why do we care about yet a third big-budget Dune adaptation? Why are so many people worked up about who is voicing Mario in some animated movie coming out? Why do we sit around saying what famous actors should play niche characters from our favorite fantasy book (myself included)?

Especially when well over half the time, the adaptation is disappointing. And even a significant percentage of adaptations that are good, are so because they reject important elements of the original work: Starship Troopers, anything involving Philip K. Dick, and arguably Lord of the Rings.

Wanting something to be a movie (or streaming series) is not a process that reliably gives us something good. So, why do we do it?

My theory is that we want to be real. We want ourselves to be real in a way that everyone in the world knows who we are, and we are a constant point of reference for others. And failing that, we want the things connected to us to be real. "You work for Mr. Soandso? I met him at a party, we really hit it off." "Yeah I contribute to that group blog, yeah I played in that LARP too!" and so we want that realness for the things we really care about. We want everyone to know about our favorite characters. And if they have a visual identity and actor they are linked to, that makes them even more real. (Even if that usually means their realization won't be what we loved about them.)

It's the same reason that even after an anarchist mob throws out the monarch in the name of THE PEOPLE, everyone tries to gather close to touch the hem of the demagogue who will become their face. So they can tell their friends "yes, I was there, I touched his boot, it smelled of soup."

Part of this is just numbers. Your fanfic doesn't get any advertising. Books barely get any. But movies do get some, and so more people will "know" of the work and consider seeing it, than novels few ever hear of. (By this logic, big budget movies are "more real" than streaming series, which does seem to be the attitude people have, even though series always bring more content from the original story.)

Mike Flanagan had an idea. By getting it on Netflix it had more reality than if he just wrote it in a book or got Vertigo comics to draw it.

But that doesn't really make it better than if he had done those things.

Lost Girls and Love Hotels

Watching this movie was a fairly weird experience. I recommend watching it for anyone who can stomach it. It has a 50% review rating on Rotten Tomatoes which... I think is the most interesting rating to have, don't you?

So bad news first: yeah, there's a lot of sex. More sex than I've seen in any movie I can recall. And the film portrays an *attitude* about sex that is hard to swallow (nymphomaniac addiction used to hurt yourself to pierce through the ennui of a directionless life.)  If you're not disturbed by the movie, you're probably viewing it with too much credulity. And we here at Prequels Redeemed heartily frown on the sort of "Law and Order: SVU" tactic of "show you violent sex and tell you it's morally bad and risky" so you can have your titillations and judgments in the same sitting.

But Oh My God, the cinematography. This unknown, straight-to-Prime-streaming, mid-low-budget novel adaptation has the most gorgeous, intentional cinematography and well thought out shot framing of any movie I have seen since "Long Day's Journey Into Night". Some of it is of the sex, yeah, and in particular the camera loves showing off the tattooed body of Takehiro Hira (the main character father of Giri/Haji.) But the same eye is applied to everything. There are so many shots within shots (through mirrors and hallways and windows) and perfectly symmetrical (or uncomfortably asymmetrical) shots. Every single time you look at the screen, you knew the director cared what exactly you were seeing, and was not just providing a platform for plot or characterization.

Like watch the trailer.

And you think "well this is very stylized trailer and the movie won't be like that" aka Bullshot, but no, the entire damn movie looks like this trailer. It's so great.

The movie is haunting. It's claustrophobic. It's muted. The actress looks bored and vapid because the main character is bored and vapid all the time, even when she's having bad idea sex. It contrasts with how attractive these people are and makes us feel dissonant. In a movie about intimacy, all of these elements heighten the narrative, such as it is.

You could say it fetishizes Japanese culture but it's not really about Japanese culture in any way (the Yakuza-ness of the sexy dude doesn't really go anywhere, like a bang bang shoot out ending - we only get one very brief glimpse of shibari.) It's about someone hoping to find themselves there in all the wrong ways, and decidedly not doing so, until they leave. But the plot isn't going to help you moralize very much (except against its obviously toxic elements), so most half of the reviews hate it.

RottenTomatoes: The website's critics consensus reads: "While it's a well-acted and occasionally involving mood piece, Lost Girls & Love Hotels often dampens its erotic elements with listless ennui."

Someone is missing how often a person's kink is listless ennui.