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
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
When the trailer first came out, my reaction was "this isn't a successor to Maleficent, this is a successor to Joker." I only had no idea how right I was. This was a great movie to be the first film I've seen in a theater since early 2020.
The movie is a heavily filmic homage to the late 70's and early 80's fashion/art scene in London and New York. It particularly loves the "Anarchy in the UK" vibe of that time. It excuses these aesthetic indulgences with the story of mad genius who becomes a superhero/supervillain alter ego with the power and morals of fashion. To this con-artist, style is substance.
And like Joker, the director realizes "wait I can get hundreds of millions of dollars from a studio to make this homage to 70's film... if I just say 'by the way the main character shares a name with some other IP', with no actual obligation to fit any pre-existing canon or imagery? Radical."
So watch it without thinking of Disney canon, and just drink in the visuals, the camerawork, and the conflict between our human self and our inhuman ideals.
Ideally, you'd watch this movie turning off the dialogue. The soundtrack is fantastic (again, homage to the 80's punk scene). And the visuals and camerawork are luxurious. The actual dialogue is a lot of bad accents, bad plot exposition (oh god the voiceover), plotholes the size Cruella could drive a Rolls Royce through, and middling witticisms. You can pick up "what is happening, how people feel, what are their motivations" entirely through the visuals. (The most you miss is a punchy running joke about saying "thank you".) I realize this won't be an option for most people, but in twenty years when this is a cult hit being watched on HD-mini-USB-chips or whatever, I think they'll go for the dialogue-less option.
Anyway, assuming you have seen it, or don't care about spoilers, let's talk about what we actually saw:
***
The first thing that jumps out at you about this fashion-obsessed movie is color. Unsurprisingly, they do a lot with the black and white motif. More surprisingly, they are consistent about the meanings of those colors.
One of the complaints people seeking to understand the foundations of racism make, is how we attribute black as the negative color, and white as the positive color. Cruella - with her half black, half shock white hair - subverts that. Like her hair, she has one white ethnic friend/goon and one person of colour friend/goon, who each offer different advice.
In the movie black (as in black hair) is the color of: conscience, conformity, the middle-class, a desire to fit in and take the straight and narrow. It's how you would think the hair of a small child or twenty something would actually looking. (And it's the life path her South-Asian friend pushes her to. And every person of colour in the movie - including the new Roger and Anita - are part of a middle-class "goodness.")
Whereas white is the color of: age, aristocracy, the will to power, crime and violence. It's how the villain/mentor primarily appears. It's how her white hair stands out. (And it's the life path her Irish friend pushes her to.)
[Recall the bit in 101 where the Dalmatians try to get away by rolling in so much coal dust that they look like black dogs with white spots.]
The third color we see is of course, red. Red appears in many ways (an inappropriate red dress at the B&W ball) but most strikingly it appears as a cut that bleeds. Red is the color of messy humanity, that doesn't fit in the conformity vs ambition balance of the rest of the world.
If someone set it out to create a movie where "the color white represents evil" this is what they would have arrived at (well, after the Hunger Games.) Which is of course why vicious Dalmatians kill her mum.
Here's the thing about the Dalmatians. Cruella doesn't want revenge on them, which is most commentator's interpretation of the scene where they know her off a cliff. We see later from the glint in her eye that Cruella fears those dogs. And Cruella's first coping mechanism is to go towards the things she fears. She always runs headlong at the thing she is afraid of, because she has no room to run away. In this movie she moves towards the dogs to sit down near them, and in the future she will make a coat out of them. Because she can't afford to give fear an inch.
She learned this from the villain, the Baroness.
Of course, the movie tries to build up the Baroness as some great figure of evil, despite a boring name and no franchise history we know of, which is doomed to be disappointing. But what is interesting is how much of this character is just straight up Cruella, which the protagonist embraces whole-heartedly. In most superhero origin stories, we get some scene of the supervillain saying "you're just like me!!!" and the hero saying "neverrrrrr!" But instead for this costumed superstar, she consciously embraces the lessons of the fashion world prima donna.
Baroness: If I had cared about anyone or thing, I might have died like so many brilliant women with a drawer full of unseen genius and a heart full of sad bitterness.
It's a rallying cry for second wave feminism, and a rationale for why it's okay to skin puppies.
***
I suppose for the people who haven't seen it - or who have but resist reading - I need to explain why this is a superhero origin story. It's because it starts with a "normal" human who wants to fix a wrong in the world and to do that creates an alter-ego who performs superhuman feats and poses as a symbol of their ideals.
In this case, not only does the protagonist take on the mask of "Cruella", but she literally has a funeral for her old, human self (Estella.) She makes clever costumes. She even fights seven goons in a show-off-y manner. And more plot and shenanigans revolve around keeping these two identities separate and secret than in eighteen MCU movies about superheroes.
If anything, Cruella is more like Superman than Batman or Iron Man - Cruella (with the bicolor hair) is who she really is, and Estella is a wig she wears on top of that. (One of the awkward bits of dialogue is that "Estella didn't get anything done, Cruella does," when as far as we can tell, Estella was a heartless and successful thief.
What's her superpower? Well when Estella gets pushed off a cliff to fake her death... she survives with a literal parachute skirt. Improbable, maybe, but it's wholly in keeping with her nature.
Not a few critics have complained that this prequel pulls its punches by not having Cruella kill a single dog - or single person, or even do anything really bad besides steal from the underserving and emotionally ignore her henchmen (who she learns to make up with.) And it is true that it's weak to revel in how EVIL your style is, while shying from anything that might get you an R rating. But they do the next best thing: Cruella frequently mentions the possibility of killing someone or a dog, and when the normie is shocked shocked at doing such a thing, she laughs it off as "obviously a joke." This is what some call the "Nelly defense," and often stands for "this person is totally willing to do such a thing but society so far won't let them."
This is not a story like Maleficent. This is not even a story like Spider-man. It would however fit in the DCEU.
***
Tragically, I can't analyze the fashion like this movie deserves. Other bloggers will have to take up the mantle. The outfits do take center stage, is all I can say. Obviously this blog is going to love the asymmetry and use of garbage in her designs.
There's also a lot more to say about dogs in this movie. Cruella has a complex relationship with the famous Dalmatians (including using them in her coup d'grace, bringing them to heel with a command, and gifting them to Roger and Anita.) And once again with the duality, she has a dog she was raised with that she loves, and another (one-eyed) dog that came as part of her grifter life, coming to represent the emotional and manipulative parts of her soul, respectively. So she doesn't kill any dogs, but they are still involved in her narrative arc.
It would be impossible for class not to feature prominently in any movie about getting revenge on an aristocrat in Britain. However, despite this surface rebellion against the established order, the class reading doesn't go much deeper. Obviously rather than overthrow the hierarchy, Cruella just wants to install herself at the top of it
