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.
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.
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.
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
