I'd like to say I won't be putting up any AI written movie reviews here. Well, I can say that because it's true. But I would like to say because it's a special talent only I can do and Claude can't produce movie reviews that I respect. But I can't because it is far from true. Its reviews of "Beef" and ""Wuthering Heights"" were really very good by my standards. However, I do not think they would be interesting for anyone else, and if you care, you can make as many as you want on your own too.
It will update twice weekly and already has a dozen posts queued. The posts are very short or very long depending on how you want to read them. Subscribe or something.
There's two posts to start today, an explanatory intro, and the first binary to cover: Linear vs Harmony.
I'll be talking about dualities that are off the left-right grid. The sort you've seen me talk about already - archetypal vs humanist, real vs symbolic - and many news ones in excruciating detail.
Also there will be "comics."
Just read the introduction to get an idea and the CONTROVERSY behind this blog. You won't believe what it is --- no it is probably gonna be your first guess.
Stop me if you've heard this before: A director who is the master of his medium, suddenly devotes all of his attention to an original scifi IP of his own making, with woefully lacking plot and characters, but it gets defended as one of the most beautiful things to grace the screen, and ends up getting #1 in ratings for its niche.
This tortured analogy compares James Cameron's Avatar, and Vince Gilligan's Plur1bus (or Pluribus), both of which are peaking in attention this month. Avatar 3 Fire and Ash just came out, and Pluribus has the most viewers Apple+ TV has ever gotten.
Most importantly, both of them have gotten the epithet "pretty" but in entirely different ways.
Did I like the Matrix Resurrections? No, not really, but that is mostly a matter of craft. It wasn't elegant in any way - plot, action, characters, shots - but more a lump-sided mix of ham-handed explanations and confusing scene changes. Nothing was done in a way to make someone say "wow, I want to learn how to do that."
But it turned out everyone wanted to argue about ideology anyway.
This is a review of Diablo 4, which has the best writing of any Diablo game (low bar) that is actually up to the category of "somewhat good" when judged absolutely[1]. Experiencing it directly is definitely better, so if you haven't played it but you intended to, I recommend to play it first before reading that. But sliver of the population that hasn't played it but plans to must be very, very small at this point. So most of you should read ahead:
In the Diablo-verse cosmology, the human world (Sanctuary) was made when an angel and a demon had blasphemous sex together (they also birthed a son who became the first necromancer.) The angel, Inarius, was cast out of Heaven for this, and exiled to the human world. At some point he comes to hate his demon lover, Lilith, and convinces himself that he can only return to Heaven once he has killed their son. So he spends a thousand years hunting them until he can finally face her in bloody confrontation. His armies had to invade Hell to get him to this point, and the cut scene of this battle is one of the best cut scenes Blizzard has made. It's worth watching.
INARIUS: I made it right to satisfy the Heavens.
LILITH: Tell me, did they rejoice?
LILITH: They do not want you. We made a choice, and that they can never forgive, no matter what you tell yourself or who you sacrifice. Silence is their judgment.
The voice actress's delivery is silky and chilling, I love it so much. When you killed your son, did the Heavens rejoice? No, Heaven remains silent. It's amazingly existential. Heaven does not care, even when - especially when - you try to placate them.
Then he skewers Lilith, and then she kills him.
Sometimes we want to be returned so much, that we convince ourself that there is a way back into Heaven. Our hope finds its focus in an object that disturbs us. Something - more often, someone - is wrong with the world. They represent everything we hate about the world, and the sins we feel guilt for So, unsurprisingly, we come to believe that if only we rid the world of that objet petit, they would let us back in.
And so we kill this pharmakon. And do the Heavens rejoice? They remain silent. The blood letting was for nothing, just a delusion that we believed in. One that consumed us. And once we culminate this dream of removing the defiler -- Heaven has nothing to say. We are not welcomed home into paradise, there are no trumpets and light, nothing is changed -- except one person is gone, or a corpse is lying on the floor.
Diablo 4, good writing, as I was saying.
What does this have to do with our world? You don't believe in Heaven. You don't even know someone who really believes in Heaven.
We believe in paradise only by its absence.
Our world is a wreck of hatred and buffoonery. We come to believe it is some person's fault: I don't mean the president or some systemically powerful person, but someone normal and connected to us. Maybe our son the necromancer, but always someone we know like our foot knows the pebble in our shoe. Reasonably then, we want to get rid of it. Them. And if we can't, then they keep rubbing against us like that metaphorical pebble, gradually wearing us away. We obsess about them.
But when we remove a pebble, at least there is some physical relief. When we remove a person - the Heavens are silent. The world and our problems with it are not actually fixed. Heaven does not suddenly welcome us back with open arms. It doesn't even care.
Fortunately for our conscience, soon enough we forget the silence. A new pebble bothers us and we find a new person to blame for the Fall. Inarius is not welcomed after the death of his son, so he chases down Lilith and tries to kill her. Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.
The algorithms that are trained to capture your attention by showing you negative news and rage bait are not going to stop because you removed the pebble. Revelation will not come as a loud rebuke, but in silence.
A dream is when you know where you are, but not how you got there.
[1] But don't play the expansion pack, Vessel of Hatred. That's just dogshit.
Given how many good movies from 2025 there are to see, I'm behind on the Marvel slop and only got around to watching Fantastic Four - First Steps today. (Okay I found out it had Jennifer Garner and I was very impressed with her in Weapons. Plus Natasha Lyonne and Ralph Ineson's voice[1].)
Even with my lowered expectations, I was disappointed. But to my surprise, I was also delighted.
Competition is stiff, but after much reflection I am confident that this is the worst written script of any MCU movie. The comedy is very broad, the plot is paint by numbers and each step spelled directly out by the characters several times, and the emotions are always told instead of shown. I can see where the comic lines are trying to go, but they fall far short. Which gives us the worst line of the film:
"I don't tell you how to pilot, you don't tell me how to kill sexy aliens," by the bad boy Johnny Storm. Or explaining Archimedes lever to "three of the most brilliant scientists in the world" three times.
(The exceptions are the Silver Surfer and Mole-Man. Julia Garner and Paul Walter Hauser[2] get lines suited to the tragedy or comedy of the story respectively, and deliver them like actual Hollywood actors, with nuance and inner thoughts unsaid.)
The scene-changing twists - Silver Surfer rescue and baby Jesus - are *painfully* telegraphed and cliche, making the drawn out processes before those moments equally boring and agonizing.
Maybe some will disagree with me. I only know I wanted to like this. Pedro Pascal can make bad Disney writing leap off the page. The central theme of the plot - Galactus is tired of living and wants to pass his curse on - has a lot of potential. And I don't like being annoyed, but the dialogue of the movie is fighting me the whole way.
Normally, I'd have dropped out of this movie by the first 30 minutes. But just as I could not ignore the painful dialogue, I can't deny my eyes:
This is the best looking movie Marvel has given us.
Seriously, the cinematography is gorgeous. Look at any scene - there's excellent color matching, the blocking is dynamic enough to keep your attention, there's always something going on the screen. There are some amazing "money shots" like these:
You just know they were planning on this shot from day 1.
Alexa, show me how these demigods see normal humans?
Okay maybe the lesson is Johnny Storm should have been seen and not heard. They even make effective use of the "Human Torch" as a light source in dark scenes. And this makes the decision to gender swap the Silver Surfer more aesthetically reasonable. Johnny and Shala-Bal are set as counterparts, opposites but connected.
Making Galactus - a giant humanoid who also eats planets - into not a joke in a live action movie is very hard. And... well they did their best with ugly machine-factory style planet eater ship, reminiscent of Man of Steel and Omnicron. Nothing could be helped for the bad boy and his purple helmet itself though.
I love how much of the setting is simply shown from the fashion the people are wearing - you don't need technology benchmarks or exposition about the Cold War and the Beatles. Real attention was paid to every extra's outfit.
I couldn't find any shot where I felt it was just "point the camera at the plot." It makes me wish the movie had been silent. (Sadly the score did not add a whole lot either, which I only note because I was spoiled by One Battle After Another and No Other Choice.)
But there is one omnipresent visual technique that had me nodding in approval and cackling with laughter. But let me use an example from a beloved movie we know well:
More posts to come soon, even a radical new directions. I've had a lot of thoughts about the movies I have seen in the back half of the year.
In the meantime...
If you are a fan of the writing on this blog, I recommend you check out this upcoming book about practicing sorcery.
The Goetist is a wisdom book, a manual of living the good life, in the shape of a sorcerous rite. A despairing man's devil-conjuring invocation turns into a meditative, unsentimental education in the most important subjects of all: how to build up a soul from nothing, make art without apology, and find purpose in the face of a hostile universe.
Structured as a series of poetic essays,in the tradition of Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, The Goetist moves topic-by-topic through the driving concerns of a lonely introspective aspirant: desire, necessity, joy, morality, myth, constraint, legacy, and more.
(I don't know why the A in After is capitalized. I was taught that propositions aren't capitalized in titles. But my education was wrong about many things.)
No Spoilers for once.
***
In the year of our lord 2025, a famous auteur, the type who comes out with one brilliant masterpiece every few years, made a comedy movie satirizing the foibles of the modern political moment.
And then it happened again.
The first is Eddington, by Ari Aster of Hereditary and Midsummer. The second got wide release just yesterday. One Battle After Another (OBAA) by Paul Thomas Anderson, of There Will Be Blood and Boogie Nights. Maybe Robert Eggers will do the third one.
Eddington was... a disappointment. I actually kinda liked it, but that opinion is not universal and I can see why. It is "about" politics writ large and COVID times in particular. It shows the right-wing characters - a gun nut sheriff, youtube addled conspiracy theorists - and left wing protesters to moderate establishment politicians as bumbling buffoons at the mercy of corporate puppeteers. It's pretty funny and there's nothing to fault in the performances of Paul Pascal, Joaquin, and Emma Stone. You should have a fun time seeing it.
Reviewers claim that it "both sides" the national debate, given that it's a movie for progressive audiences but most of the lines from left-wingers are parodies of privilege, dilettantism, and virtue signalling. I did not feel the same way. The protesters in the street are kind of dumb, but nowhere near as criminal as the conservative sheriff, and in the end the "true villain" is implied to be a corporation that doesn't care which side is in charge so long as they get what they want. I feel this message is more leftist than not.
But I can understand why people would think the movie is apolitical. It is close enough.
This is NOT the deal with OBAA.
OBAA is an adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon psychedelic novel originally about the 60's, but updated for the omnipresent Now. (There's a 15 year gap between the backstory and the main action of the movie, but both of them feel ambiguously current.) The all-consuming issue is immigration, or rather the rounding up and imprisoning of immigrant populations who otherwise do all the work needed in factories.
The resistance left in this movie is fool of bumbling pot-heads who forget all the rules of spycraft, overly officious bureaucrats, and hyper-individualist traitors. They also without doubt are the heroes of the movie. They are actively trying to do good against the machine of the fascist state. There are also some competent good guys among them. Their enemies are storm troopers and rich Christians obsessed with racial mixing. (They think it is a deadly sin. Presumably they aren't fans of Thomas Jefferson.) And one roided out racial fetishist, played brilliantly by Sean Penn. That Supporting Actor Oscar is his.
I believe in the Left cause enough to be often frustrated at the actions of actual leftists, who sometimes seem to think being self-defeating is evidence of purity to the cause. I laughed at Eddington, and can even say it somewhat accurately reflected politics before 2025.
It's a lot harder to say that now. Now, one of those sides is running a regime that seeks to disenfranchise millions of citizens, rewrite the constitution, invade major American cities with the National Guard, fire comedians who make jokes they don't like, declare emergency powers at the drop of a hat, and to use the power of the government to force companies to bend the knee to them. Oh, and have turned ICE into a black-masked Gestapo who grab anyone who looks vaguely foreign off the streets and send them to prisons with names like "Alligator Alcatraz" and "the Hellhole No One Returns From."
In contrast, I guess the current left is... doofishly hostile to their own allies. It's annoying, but there's no longer any equivalency between the two.
Eddington is a holdover of the era of Trump's first term and Biden's term (and the end of Obama's.) Politics is a joke where both sides are behaving oafishly but nothing is really happening in government anyway. I can't blame Aster, as that is the environment when he was filming it.
OBAA (besides superior acting, writing, and that AMAZING score) is about the more recent current moment. Trump's second term really does seem a threat to free society. I don't know how to productively fight the state, but if you could do so it would be genuine freedom fighting. It fits our actual mood.
Yeahhh! Look at that badass Mads Mikkelsen, with a beard and a gun on his back. He's probably riding a motorcycle while slaughtering Evil Bikers.
And I want to assure you viewer, that yes, this is a movie about:
Mads getting some revenge on some gangsters who killed his wife. It's satisfying, violent righteousness.
It is *also*:
A geek comedy using offensive stereotypes, but also plenty of jokes that come from within the nerd community, accurately making fun of themselves. They are bumbling, rude, gold-hearted, and eclectic dorks.
A heartfelt emotional drama between a stoic father and his teenage daughter as they cope with the grief of their mother's violent death.
And, weaving all these threads together, a found family tearjerker centered around a gay twink.
Each of those aspects of the movie are executed well and entertaining. If these tropes even remotely interest you, you should watch this movie and you will enjoy it.
But that's not what is important about "Riders of Justice." Spoilers beyond the fold, but really, what spoilers can there be in "Mads will shoot a bunch of bikers?"
Yesterday, I was reading analysis of a beloved movie, where a main character is acting badly, that seemed to entirely miss the message, theme, and tone of the movie. I was pretty shocked that someone could spend so much time watching this movie and thinking about it to miss the obvious surface level ironies, but well the internet has many voices and these things happen.
Then it happened again, same day.
The first was "Buffalo '66." I don't blame you for not having seen it or even heard of it, but it was actually a big deal back in the day and certainly has spent enough time under scrutiny. The tone and cinematography of the movie are of a perfect sort of misery to capture upstate New York.
The movie is written and directed by, and the main character is played by, auteur Vincent Gallo. Gallo plays what can only be described as the Biggest Loser in the Universe. He has just gotten out of jail for assaulting someone over a football bet, and his only plan now is to assault them again. He is a whiny, bitter, violent manboy who does not have the skill to accomplish anything at all. He looks like shit and his vocal ticks all scream insecurity. His only other plan, before probably dying in a foolish assault, is to kidnap a girl, and take her to his parents house, so he can lie that he has a girlfriend to make his parents proud of him. I was watching this review: https://youtu.be/wyTVj7RD7fM?si=0_IyghAqmzMfeHDh
The "girl" in this case is played by a 17 year old Christina Ricci. And from the above review at least, it sounds like the set was made into Hell for her. This was her first time away from home, cut off from her support system, under a director who didn't have any line between "her boss" and "the actor playing her abusive boyfriend." Other actors would do things like spontaneously hug her breasts tightly without telling her. She was under age. And again, this was Buffalo in the winter. (That's not even a joke - she had to wear a revealingly short skirt, in this weather.)
That's only one perspective on a 27 year old set, but it's easy to agree this was a toxic. (And Giallo seems incapable of not being an asshole in his many interviews.) This movie should not have been made, under any ethical system that takes into account the abuse of employees.
But then people use that immoral set behavior to conclude... this movie is just a male fantasy, specifically Giallo's, about a manic pixie dream girl. It's nothing more than an incredibly hot and vulnerable woman falling for a dude who treats her badly.
WHAT MOVIE WERE YOU SEEING? Giallo's character is a pathetic, self-loathing, piece of shit who is not capable of earning anything, be it money or basic human respect. What sort of macho bro would say *this* is his fantasy?
The movie is not about some dude getting what he wants. It's about a man who has been completely starved of affection growing up, and as a result turns out to become a nothingburger of a human being. (A really popular theme about bros, I know.) And yet somehow, through divine grace, comes across a person who gives him back all of that affection, unearned, in one afternoon. And he can't even respond to her love, because a) he doesn't know how to and b) he's frankly terrified.
While it looks miserable to be the *character* Ricci plays in this scene, and probably the actress was actually miserable here, it's Giallo that is the punchline of this joke.
The theme of the movie is unconditional love triumphing in even the worst of conditions. You can take it or leave it (it's kinda slow, and the sexualization of the 17 year old actress is uncomfortable) but you can't see this movie and think the theme is "Giallo gassing himself up."
***
So later that evening I watched "K-pop Demon Hunters", finally. I've encountered at least a dozen people telling me I need to see it - including the bride and groom at a wedding I crashed. Neither K-pop nor anime are really my thing, but when something is so culturally popular, I gotta see it to understand what the fuss is about. It's usually a worthwhile experience.
I was utterly surprised and bewildered. The best word I have for it would be "incomplete." Not in the sense that the movie was bad, or the morals were bad. It was a perfectly fine narrative and cinematic experience - just the last 15 minutes of the movie are missing, and without that the film is either incoherent or satirical.
You better believe this is going to contain spoilers.
KDH is about a band that fights demons and sings musical rituals, who are trying to finish the ritual of generations and seal away all demons forever. Unfortunately their leader is secretly half-demon, AND there's a demon boy band standing in their way. I knew how it would end from the first five minutes.
This is THE modern myth we see in popular fantasy trying to send a message. We saw it in "EEAOO." And "How to Train a Dragon." "Ne Zha 2" for more dragon examples. "Starship Troopers." "Attack on Titan." Every single Guillermo del Toro movie. Zootopia. Oblivion. Damsel. The Legend of Ochi. It goes back to Frankenstein, for crying out loud. The story is secretly fascists vs monsters, and the "monsters" turn out to be the oppressed class. Our heroes figure this out, just in time to stop their former-bosses from wiping out the monsters.
This narrative becomes so obvious over the course of the movie that I thought the writers were overdoing it. The "demons" turn out to be individual, warped souls with sad backstories. They're really just serving their tyrannical despot, who really is evil. And the "good guy" characters keep emphasizing how all demons should die and none of them have ever done anything good to deserve existing. The mentor of the good guys keeps emphasizing the ethnic demon cleansing side of this ritual.
I'm not exaggerating. Here are the lyrics of a song they wrote:
And the leader of the band (sadly there are only two real characters in this movie - the two frontsingers - and her other bandmates are static reflections of her different sides) is struggling with her demon heritage. She has hidden it from everyone, and made uncomfortable by all this demon genocide talk. She's afraid to tell anyone, and her surrogate mother tells her the only solution is to repress that side until the climactic ritual - the Golden Honmou - will wipe away her "bad" part. The demon army, and her internal angst, are one and the same thing - currently being repressed.
We're told the tyrannical leader of the demons can only be defeated with "love, not hate."
She starts falling for the leader of the demon boy band. He has a tragic backstory.
The demons have fantastic, adorable pets.
The leader starts losing her voice. And without her voice she thinks she has no value.
Characters mention frequently how much suffering the Golden Honmou will be for the demons.
The main character sings a very dramatic song about no longer hiding her demon self.
Her own friends try to kill her when they find out she's half-demon.
The girls only care about their fans as a resource to collect and hoard, and not as individuals to serve and to respect their needs.
There is a song that is particularly violent, that the half-demon leader is uncomfortable about.
The demon boy band turns out to be kinder and more considerate than the girl band.
The best song in the movie is about the demon boy band being able to love bad people.
(This is somewhat even more heavy-handed for anyone who has read this blog. It is a fight between a harmonious community that would never have any problems at all ... against a monstrous Other, that must be eliminated. In that conflict, in art, you should always choose the side of the Other. The harmony is a lie.)
Okay, okay, I get it. The kpop band will realize the spell was oppressing the demons, and they will defeat both their mentor AND the tyrannical demon king, and the demons will join the humans in peaceful co-existence.
So let's just get to it already.
Only twenty minutes till the end of this runtime people, you better start revealing the twist soon.
It's a climactic battle. I guess the turn will be here.
Well, there's still 15 min of runtime left, they still have time to spur of the moment realize demons are people too.
Victory, but I sense a coda coming.
WHAT! THE CREDITS ARE 14 MIN LONG????
That's just... it?
Our heroes just... beat all the demons down, and conducted the sealing ritual? The leader's demonic patterns are barely visible, in accord with her mentor's promise long ago. The sympathetic leader of the demon boy band sacrifices himself... and the other four members of the boy band are just slaughtered by the good guys, and don't matter ever again.
The girls who were about to kill their leader for being half demon, don't get any comeuppance for putting demon-fear over friendship? All the ominous lines about KILL EVERY DEMON were just about being unfair to HER, and not all demonkind?
It's genuinely unclear whether the girls performed their final rituals - the spell they do at the climax is successful, but we don't actually see gold in the ubiquitous magic prison field - and no one talks about the spell afterwards.
So I don't get it. This is not me saying "a movie about showing solidarity with the oppressed is better than this movie that is about FRIENDS coming together and maybe talk about your problems instead of hiding them." I'm saying the solidarity-movie is what this movie was being! How could you litter "our heroes are pretty flawed" and "it sucks to be a demon" moments, if it was going to be a manichean ending?
If anything, this movie looks like "Starship Troopers," where the forces of "good" are triumphant and the underclass is kept down, and no one talks about the moral contradictions at all. But that's a satire! Is this movie a satire? If it is, it's an incredibly tone-accurate one.
What would it mean if they didn't mean the movie to be satire? This isn't "wow they were lazy or dumb", it's "their work shows a lot of intelligence and craft and effort -- put into the other side of the narrative."
I've seen there are a lot of ideas online about this dissonance between the tone and the ending. People say it was supposed to be a THREE HOUR movie, or there will be a SEASON 2!
I think that's way too long. You just needs 20 extra minutes, that are the same as the 20 minutes at the end of Damsel, or How to Train Your Dragon. I have to presume they made *that* movie, and then focus groups caused them to change the ending around, and they just cut and re-drew the climax/denouement scenes for time. I don't see why there was a bad reaction, bad enough to make the creators do THIS hackjob, but who knows.
The heart of film is visual style, and Wes Anderson is one of the most stylized directors working today. He is certainly the most popular of the great formalists. And I haven’t given much analysis of his films before - their class commentary is usually too obvious. But the Venetian scheme is a good starting place. As always spoilers below the cut.
Of course you should watch Season 2 of Andor. I'm not even going to waste text trying to convince you. There are none so blind as those that refuse to see.
Tuesday night's set of three episodes - 2.7 thru 2.9 - were bonus amazing and in many ways the climax of what this season and all of Andor had been moving towards. They have ignited a huge explosion of praise online, especially from the sort of left-wing popular-culture obsessives we know so well.
I find that... confusing, or maybe willfully blind. Spoilers below the cut.
There, I said it. I enjoy the Apple streaming mammoth "Severance" for its individual episodes. It has a strong directorial style, extremely fitting actors for their characters, and very thought out set design. Any 45 minutes of it is worth watching.
But the metaplot is an extremely cliche "mystery box" with "the large corporation has a conspiracy that is *even more evil than you thought* and for extremely vague and unrealistic motives." I don't care what is going to happen to Lumon in the end. I'm sad that seems to be the only sort of analysis I can find on reddit or any other place discussing the shows.
... but I'm even more frustrated that everyone analyzing the plot is missing the central point. Spoilers for the finale below.
Jun Jong-Seo is a Korean actress whose star is rising very rapidly, and I think her three most American movies make an excellent, impromptu trilogy.
She barely has any filmography so far, only 7 movies (and at least started her acting career on break from college.)
But my favorite films of hers make a trilogy, where she is a central figure of concern, and we see thematic progress in her arcs.
Movie 1 is "Burning," which was a critical darling about perspective and the hero-narratives we make for ourselves and never really knowing someone. I consider this the "Death" or "Non-existence" arc.
Movie 2 is "Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon," a psychedelic neon dream on the streets of New Orleans, with house-mix soundtrack to boot. I consider this the "Freedom" or "Actualization" arc.
Movie 3 is "Ballerina," a Netflix paint-by-numbers revenge flick. But it's executed really well with gorgeous action scenes and a classic lesbian-tragic series of flashbacks that's so popular these days. I consider this the "Responsibility" or "Power Trip" arc.
Yes, you should go see Dune 2 and form your own reading of it. It's a magnificent film that during its entire 2 hour 45 minute run I did not want to miss a single scene. So I am going to write this post as if you are fully spoiled, if spoilers mean anything with an adaptation. If that's an issue for you, please go see it.
Additionally, this quality creates a dearth of discourse. If the movie is simply objectively "very good" and it's 9 months till Oscar contention, what hot takes can we have?
The immediate answer to fill that vacuum was "compare this Dune movie to other forms", especially the novel and the 1984 movie by auteur David Lynch (with only a few geeks bringing up the Sci-Fi channel series or Jodorowsky's ill fated project.) Which is difficult because comparison invites judgment, and this movie is both a) obviously good and b) extremely different than those two versions at some fundamental levels.
For me, though, I have learned to relax and let it go. I remember the turning point moment. I was watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my roommates, and it went into a backstory flashback set in high medieval Germany. “Why are you sighing?” one asked, noticing that I’d laid back and deflated rather gloomily. I answered: “She’s not of sufficiently high social status to have domesticated rabbits in Northern Europe in that century. But I guess it’s not fair to press a point since the research on that hasn’t been published yet.” It made me laugh, also made me think about how much I don’t know, since I hadn’t known that a week before. For all the visible mistakes in these shows, there are even more invisible mistakes that I make myself because of infinite details historians haven’t figured out yet, and possibly never will.
...
Now, historians aren’t certain of Cesare’s birth date. He may be the eldest of his full siblings, or second.
The difference between Cesare as elder brother and Cesare as younger brother in the shows is fascinating. Showtime’s Big Brother Cesare is grim, disillusioned, making hard decisions to further the family’s interests even if the rest of the family isn’t yet ready to embrace such means. B:F&F‘s Little Brother Cesare is starved for affection, uncertain about his path, torn about his religion, and slowly growing up in a baby-snake-that-hasn’t-yet-found-its-venom kind of way.
Both are fascinating, utterly unrelated characters, and all the subsequent character dynamics are completely different too. Giovanni/Juan is utterly different in each, since Big Brother Cesare requires a playful and endearing younger brother, whose death is already being foreshadowed in episode 1 with lines like “It’s the elder brother’s duty to protect the younger,” while Little Brother Cesare requires a conceited, bullying Giovanni/Juan undeserving of the affection which Rodrigo ought to be giving to smarter, better Cesare. Elder Brother Cesare also requires different close friends, giving him natural close relationships with figures like the Borgias’ famous family assassin Michelotto Corella, who can empathize with him about using dark means in a world that isn’t quite OK with it.
Dune is a story so big, so poured over by analysts already, that these movies don't feel like artistic adaptations so much as differing historical interpretations. Both 1984 and the 2020's movies feel like they are actually trying to be about the same events, but have very different understanding and evidence. They're groping in the dark for monocausal patterns when the real truth was probably messy, contradictory, and inexplicable.
What is Dune 21/24 about?
Sometimes on Twitter people argue about whether Dune is appropriationist and centers a white savior, and other people say "no the entire point is that this is exploitative and a disaster waiting to that happens." Well if anyone has missed that nuance, Villeneuve hammers it home relentlessly.
For the first time we are introduced to political splits among the Fremen, with the Northerners being more worldly, civilized, and practical and the Southerners - who live in an uninhabitable sandstorm - being backwards and more fundamentalist. And this split is mirrored in the characters - Chani, her friends, Gurney Halleck, and Paul-before-he-drinks-Water-of-Life are all very firm on messiah-hood being a bad ending, and would only be the result of manipulation by the Bene Gesserit. Whereas Jessica, Alia, and Stilgar are arguing for messiah-hood against others, and not above using manipulation to achieve this.
Paul, in the most recent movie, is doing everything he can to stay secular, but feels historical currents pushing him towards taking the religious mantel. Until his hand is forced - he can either "go to the South" and follow his mother, or he can stay behind to be slaughtered (the inclusion of the scene where Feyd-Rutha kills one lone last-standing Freman is meant to show "what would have happened to Paul if he stayed.")
We get this same theme with the quotidian shots of the Emperor and his daughter in their garden, discussing politics. The currents of the great houses and the Bene Gesserit are forcing their hand, so they must play into Paul's hand even though they know it will spell the end of their imperial dynasty. Fate is cold and relentless, and about large forces not magic powers.
Paul most of all does not want to become messiah, and most of his point of view is speaking against it. But then he's maneuvered into drinking the Water of Life and... at that point he basically disappears as a viewpoint character. We don't have access to his internality anymore, he's just a machine for holy war. It was a very disturbing transition.
Lady Jessica is a villain almost as much as any Harkonnen, who tells herself she is doing all this just to keep her son safe, but by the end is just trying to spite the Bene Gesserit.
The biggest change from the novel is where Lynch's Dune swerves into all the "weird fantasy shit", this Dune avoids it as much as possible. That's right: there's no CHOAM representatives, no voice cannons, no special powers for the Fremen troops at all, Alia isn't even born during this movie (no "my brother is coming" creeper 4 year old harbinger), no mentats, no ghoula, no rain, no weirding way. Both Paul and Feyd come across as normal ass knife fighters who can defeat one other normal human in 1-on-1 combat, but not much better than that.
And... I still love the 1984 Dune. I suspect its memes will even surpass the Villeneuve version. It's not just cheesy but it buys fully into the cheese. Paul's messiah-hood is fully righteous and victorious! He's got a creepy blue-eyed 2 year old sister with sorceress powers! He summons the rain and the storms! And he's fighting not just against other humans, but monsters-in-fish-tanks controlling the throne.
To Lynch, the world of Dune is one where individuals matter - because they've got super weird powers, or just the sheer complexity of entities. But in the recent movie, there is merely a cold hand of history, more Marx than Tolkien.
And neither really makes sense alone. Even though the 2024 Dune "feels" more realistic, it simplifies the forces involved (no CHOAM presence, nor the other small organizations), and is so smooth in its progression there's no time skip. Which means less than 9 months of lower Spice production has toppled the imperial throne, instead of the 4 or so years in the book. Weak ass emperor.
And entire people have been removed from the Villeneuve narrative - like Leto, Paul and Chani's first son - because they would complicate the Paul/Chani antagonistic narrative that Villeneuve wanted to end with.
***
If you like this reading, I'd suggest you read the (much smaller) book "Elder Race", telling the same historical events from different ontologies.
Not a long post today. I wanted to write about the Starship Troopers discourse on Twitter, but only after the heat had died down. Someone very foolish wrote a long thread about why ST wasn't satire, including such shallow examples as "the fascist characters are good looking." The level of conversation went down hill from there.
But the sticking point that does have many people convinced of the rightness of the heroes in that movie is they are actually fighting bugs. Fascism is about starting wars of aggression, and genociding human beings or aliens that look cuddly, right? You can't be fascist if you are defending against an actual inhuman, implacable menace, right? It's one thing to call Jews bugs, but what about actual bugs?
Which reminded me of SMG paraphrasing Lacan back in the Gamergate days.
It doesn't matter if there is a conspiracy in reality or not. Paranoia is in how you yourself think.
In the classic example: a man can be paranoid that his wife is cheating on him, even if the wife actually is cheating. He might start obsessively documenting her activities, going on about a conspiracy by wives to cheat on their husbands, etc.
Which isn't to say it never matters if a conspiracy has a point, but rather the question is how you react to it.
The Starship Troopers movie takes fascism at it's own face value (ie, the original novel by Robert Heinlein) where their beliefs about the Enemy are empirically true -- and shows why that is still wrong. Why would should still mock, disdain, and avoid these fascist impulses.
Myself, I have found the "Would you like to know more?" clips the best demonstration of how someone who controls information doesn't try to convince the populace by censoring, but by flooding them with so much more empty and unfounded information (gasp, maybe even the evil word "misinformation") that even the intelligent leaders feel educated for believing the lies.
What movie skewers the left as effectively? The powerhouse Paul Schrader movie "First Reformed."
FR is a tightly directed movie with a stunning performance by Ethan Hawke, about a minister of a dying Episcopalian church giving into despair.
The object of his fixation is the collapse of the environment, and America's inability to face it. Like Starship Trooper's bugs, this is in universe an undeniable problem. The minister is not making it up. There's not some Scooby Doo villain behind it all who can be thwarted by apolitical misfits and then everything returns to normal. There is no normal possible anymore.
And yet the minister's response is suicide and terrorism. This is not the right response even if you are right about the problem. We are supposed to explore the pathology of this character even when his object of fixation is real.
(As he contemplates his stolen suicide vest.) I have found a new form of prayer.
I don't know what you've seen on Twitter or Letterboxd reviews, but suffice it to say, some watchers do not get the nuance of that point anymore than the Starship Troopers "defenders."
What did I do today, you ask? Well I moved all my movie reviews from various discords and blogs to Letterboxd finally, since that is a better place for them. If you want to read my more shortform movie thoughts and recommendations - or you're just really bored - you can keep track back here.
One of the things I enjoy on this blog is comparing two disparate movies to discuss their similar themes. I've decided to make this a regular feature, and I should clearly start with the Oscar nominated movies. So we have one movie praised as a the culmination of a legendary director's career, and one by a first (and only) time director with a 31% at Rotten Tomatoes. One movie I felt mediocre on, and one that is my secret fave that no one else has seen. One claims to be a historical retelling, the other is a very far fetched fantasy - though probably both are equally believable.
As always, this review will bare all spoilers. One of which has no spoilers, and the other of which whose entire plot is a spoiler.
What do these two have in common that compels me so?
1. Whatever else you think of them, they have astounding levels of craftsmanship.
Martin Scorsese CAN in fact take a 3.5 hour tale of an Oklahoma community and make it a tense thriller that is enjoyable to watch. Leo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro are still at the top of their game, and in particular DeNiro has made "kindly grampa who also orchestrates killing" into what will be a beloved trope. But neither of them touch on fucking first timer Lily Gladstone playing a cypher who is a clever, jaded Native American woman but falls into a trap of love anyway, and can always feel the jaws of death slowly clenching around her community. She absolutely deserves that Oscar.
Whereas Antebellum asks Janelle Monae to carry an entire movie on her back, which she absolutely can. And Jena Malone picks up the slack for the villainous side of things. The production design is so rich and luscious, especially in highlighting evil. The scene transitions between the different settings are creative and great. And everyone who watches this movie HAS to make mention of the opening 5 minute shot that takes us through all the parts of a slave planation.
These are both quality films that are fun to watch and demonstrate real beauty.
2. Both wrestle head on with the historical injustices of racism. And did so in a way that got them a ton of controversy.
This is a rough one. It is clear both movies wanted to tell stories they thought were undertold, of how generations past have suffered and how that still resonates to the present day. It goes without saying that the "anti-woke" part of society (ie. people who have never even consumed some media because someone told them it was social justicey) would avoid these movies.
But the "woke" condemn them too for "white people telling other people's stories" and the awkwardness that entails, and for "exploiting pain and violence of a minority" which becomes the only way that minority is seen. Having seen both movies, I understand where these points are coming from. I don't find these problems ring so loud as to ruin the entire work for me.
I honestly think KotFM suffers more for this. But really because I always have this problem from Scorsese that I can't tell what story he is trying to tell. All of Scorsese's criminal epics have this problem: there isn't an arc so much as a flat line.
"A normal white man is not in any way distinct, just wants to get ahead and make money. He drifts without much agency into making some money illegally, and it works fine because no one in authority cares. He has wild success and lives it up outrageously. Then... some people in authority suddenly do care. And because our criminal was a) an untalented idiot and b) didn't think anyone cared, their crimes are very easily untangled and exposed. Then they get sent to jail, but are unrepentant. In fact the psychology of the central character has never changed the entire time: they were a brute who got lucky until they were a brute who got unlucky."
What are we supposed to take from this? Is our criminal a unique specimen, driven to his misdeeds by special circumstance or tragic upbringing? No, no, the director insists he has no excuse. Ah, so is our criminal the everyman, and any of us could be like him if the dice had rolled differently? No, no, he is specially evil and deserves our spit.
In KotFM this applies to the whole town. The Hale family were killing dozens of Osage members because no one (with authority) cared, so they could get away with it. They would walk up to any homeless man on the street they had never met before and ask "Say, will you kill my sister in law for me?" The hired thugs were always cowards and idiots, so they'd be caught the second any real law enforcement turned up, and they'd flip on the people who hired them.
In fact, that becomes the most confusing part of the story. Some white people think the Native American life has no value, and will conspire about killing them and covering it up without a second thought. But other white people think this is a terrible crime, and will be unrelenting in pursuing it. And there is incredibly little difference shown between these people. The hardest part of this movie is keeping track of "is this white man one of the killers, or someone trying to stop the killers?" Who could tell the difference between Ernest's brother (bad) and brother-in-law (good)?
You could say "not being able to tell this is what makes being a person of color so scary" and touche, but this particular telling feels like more of a cop out than that. It wants to present both "white people are so casually evil..." and "... that other white people feel they have to stop them."
(This is made very explicit in the most comedic scene, where one white man is asking a lawyer on the legality of adopting two half-Indian children, becoming their next of kin, and then killing them to get the money. The lawyer is appalled and the criminal can't understand. But the directing bypasses the implication that the lawyer WAS a part of a healthy society that does not approve of the murder of children.)
Neither movie satisfies either the woke or anti-woke, and as such most ideologically-driven people in the ever churning culture wars won't end up watching it. Which really is a pity.
3. They are at heart stories of class envy.
The thing that struck me most about these tales of racism is how much they are about class. Both movies feature rich, or at least respectable and successful, minorities and show how much white people seethe at this wealth as unjust. They are not universalist movies about how "no person deserves oppression, every person has dignity" but are demands to "see that these people are rich and high-status, regardless of the color of their skin.
This is not to say anything in either movie DOES say you should degrade poor people. It's just they find it more important to say "how can you degrade this person? They're rich damnit!" (And all good imperial colonizers know, the way to control a population is to get their leaders more concerned with their own elite status than with solidarity with their own poor.)
My favorite part of Antebellum is dead in the middle, a classic Mike Yanagita scene that leaves you wondering what the point of that was. Janelle Monae, her black lady friend and her white lady friend, go out to a fancy restaurant. At some point a man sends them over a drink, and her black friend sends it back because it is too low class and "we are champagne ladies." Eventually they leave and take separate Ubers. Nothing else of note happens.
For one thing, it is deliciously tense. At this point we know Monae will be kidnapped, and we're waiting to see how. So every moment is filled with a little dread and anticipation as we wonder "is this how they get her?" And all three actresses are quite good at such comedic dialogue. Fun times.
But what really makes the scene fit with the movie is all the class security. They are trying to insist so hard to the world that "we are high status, even if we are Black!" (As part of the scene, the two Black friends comment that the hotel staff is brusque and rude to them. The white friend says she didn't notice anything rude. The two Black friends share A Look. No mention is made of how hotel staff would treat people who can't afford their fancy rooms.)
An editorial note to be clear: these characters are not wrong. Treating someone who is rich (or well educated, or talented) like they aren't just because of the colorof their skin IS a form of racism. And if it happened to you, you'd be rightly furious. It's just also true that if we end the day just by treating rich Black people like rich white people, most forms of inequality will persist.
It's impossible to analyze these movies without being pulled to the dread specter of Tulsa. What caused the furious explosion of violence wasn't just racism, but racism mixed with "eat the rich" class envy. "You mean they drive fancy cars while cutting my wages, AND they're Black!!!!" Which is not to say "this is a righteous socialist act", but rather that "it will be very hard for a minority to get a foothold in the American power structure if we burn them down every time they get wealth like cutting tall poppies."
4. Both movies highlight the absurd denialism of a villain's fantasy.
This one is a bit of a stretch, but I could not resist.
One of the biggest controversies of KotFM has been the compartmentalized image of Ernest Burkhart. In the movie (and some historical tellings), he tenderly loved his wife while slaughtering her people. And I guess that sort of character, who learns the Osage language while raising his half-Osage children, but also participates in systemic oppression, could be an interesting contrast for a tragic character.
But for Ernest? Just no. He kills his wife's sisters. He poisons his wife too. Maybe that's a sort of love, but it's a creepy possessive love at the very most. These are not the actions of a tender or caring normal man. Which either means their marriage was pretty unhealthy, OR Ernest was several standard deviations from normality, which cuts against Scorsese's "we all are guilty" message.
Whereas the brokenness of Antebellum's fantasy is its most interesting part.
The secret of the movie's setting is that white supremacist Civil War reenactors are kidnapping "uppity" black people (professors, famous artists) and imprisoning them on a fake plantation, basically to fill out their Antebellum LARP.
... the quick-witted among you will notice that you can't have confederate soldiers AND be "antebellum."
And the movie is full of this. The reenactors are rich and obsessed enough to get all the set design details for their little fantasy, but there are so many ways the fantasy can not be sustained. Soldiers keep their cell phones on them and they ring at inappropriate times. The Black prisoners keep mentioning their real life even though it carries a penalty of death. The slaves are kept at night in wooden sheds with open doors.
... which is very dumb, because any of the kidnapped victims if they run away, know there's towns and news crews just a few miles away if they can just get there. The reason chattel slaves of the 19th century didn't run away, was because there was just nowhere to go. To keep people nowadays, you'd have to build an actual modern day prison. But that would ruin the genteel fantasy.
It's warped to say all these anachronisms are the funniest part in a movie where men watch their wives burned to death. It is often a godawful experience. But the grisly inhumanity of it, that makes no sense even on its face, is kind of the point.
