Ghosts Will Understand

Dulcie and Cath are not in a good place during the show, that is the very essence of their particular story during the season. Cath is trying to make a perfect life for them by doing anything and everything possible to brute force it into existence because of the resentment she still has towards her wife. Dulcie, in turn, has resigned herself to this as a form of penance. 

They are both unhappy and it is only through the honest airing of their issues and the dismantling of their calcified current selves that their relationship can actually recover. Cath has to listen but, just as vitally, Dulcie has to speak.

Trying to paint Cath as this horrible person or whatever is just the weakest of analysis or criticism, it is such a myopic, surface level nothing of a read. And frankly it does the show and everyone who worked on it a great disservice to try to flatten any part of it down to something as simple as “Cath = bad”.

Deadloch is the greatest thing around and everyone needs to watch it. It is better than whatever you are thinking about watching next, it has the queers, and the murders, and the solving of the murders, and the humor, and the drama, and Kate Box’s height.

Watch it.

And because the show is so amazing, I’ve actually already started rewatching it which is something I generally don’t do.

Just re-finished the first episode and it was an extremely interesting experience. Not just because it was still so excellent but it really highlighted just how immaculate the writing is on this show.

So have a little bit of:

“Deadloch Rewatch Details” - Episode 1

Finally got around to Glass Onion. I honestly don't have much to say,  it was wonderful, exquisite, fun, funny, that cast, everything is good and great and topical and amazing, that final shot, the retro portraits in the credits.

So I am basically making this small, irrelevant post to recommend everyone who enjoyed this to watch The Last of Sheila. Rian Johnson has mentioned the film as one of his inspirations for Knives Out and it is even more apparent with Glass Onion. I'm going to skip talking about the plot of the film, it is a mystery after all, but I will say it is my favorite murder mystery/whodunnit film, the cast is beyond excellent, and it is as twisty and turny as can be.

Glass Onion actually had a few direct nods to The Last of Shelia: Stephen Sondheim(along with Anthony Perkins!) wrote The Last of Shelia and was with Angela Lansbury, Natasha Lyonne, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, playing Among Us with Blanc. And at the very end of Glass Onion, Blanc is wearing a hat with its brim folded to bring to mind a deerstalker cap, which also happens during a scene of The Last of Sheila.

Narratively it isn’t much like Andor, it takes place after Return of the Jedi dealing with the remnants of the Empire, but it hits many of the same laudable qualities of Andor.

I won’t go into any detail but everything about it is top class: the characters are instantly iconic(Yrica might be the most interesting character in the entire Star Wars franchise), we get more quality queer rep, the spectacle and action and imagery is amazing, the books are just flatout great.

Prior to Andor these novels were my pick for Best Star Wars Ever! and upon first seeing the first episode of Andor I immediately wanted all the people working on the show to get the chance to adapt these novels.

So, yeah, Andor is excellent. Sucks that it hasn’t received the attention it deserves but at this point that shouldn’t be surprising. “Fans”(and by that I mean fans of anything, not just Star Wars) want things that are either poppy and fun or, if the work is of a more serious nature, they want it to be a hollow and disposable experience so they don’t have to engage with it in any real way.

This latest episode was brilliant, the release valve for all the tension the show has built to this point. A lot of people died, some lived, horrible things had to be done(Cinta almost certainly killed everyone she held hostage, including that kid), and the fight is just getting started. 

The fantastic scene of the Imperial bigwig explaining how they view the Aldahnis(sp?) and the violence-free application of force they’ve used to subjugate them was a marvel, not just for how it echoes our own history but also the way it helps to rebuild the menace of the Empire that has been missing from most of this franchise. 

After the original trilogy, where the Empire was completely defeated, the idea of them being threatening in any real way has taken a backseat to just, I don’t know, the basking in the aesthetics of them. But every now and then a piece of Star Wars media comes out that gets a handle on what makes the Empire such a powerful force. People have waxed poetic about the opening Star Destroyer shot in A New Hope, how the film uses its immense size to convey the Empire without saying a single word and yet very little of Star Wars follows through with the idea. The Empire is many things, it is evil and violent and uncompromising, but what Andor understands(and Rogue One before it, and The Alphabet Squadron trilogy as well even as it is dealing with the remnants of the defeated Empire) is that the Empire is large, it is at a scale that dwarfs the very idea of change. It looms.

Rogue One is basically a whole film designed around this, designed around what that opening of A New Hope so perfectly showed. The little people on the ground raging against the metal sky. Jyn hiding in the hole at the beginning, Saw’s forces in their caves while a Star Destroyer floats above Jedah, our heroes storming Skariff as AT-ATs march on them, Jyn and Cassian having to scale the tower to get the information out, and all of this as the Death Star weighs heavy over everything, literal death from above.

Andor obviously gets this too(a single TIE fighter had never been more menacing) but also shows the more bureaucratic weight and pressure of the Empire. A bunch of Imperial suits in offices grinding their heels into the faces of untold billions, unseen and largely unnoticed. Why kill a bunch of locals when you can slowly control where they can go and what they can do, especially when they can also make a good future labor force? 

Andor is great and everyone should absolutely watch it(whether they like Star Wars or not)and it is one of the crowning achievements of the entire Star Wars franchise(assuming it sticks the landing, of course). But who needs that when you got Reylo, amirite?

I thought about making this a companion post to my massively successful The (subtextually queer) Princess, using the two films as pretty perfect examples to showcase exactly what queer subtext is and why one has it(The Princess) and the other doesn’t(Prey). But I am real lazy at the moment so we are all just going to have to be content with me just putting the thought out there.

This was a pretty good time. Seeing the trailer for the first time I was interested in what it was selling but at the same time I was wary that the film wasn’t going to live up to the straightforward promise of said trailer. “Princess in tower fights her way out” was what I wanted and, thankfully, exactly what I got.

The fighting is fun, plentiful, and bloody(thank the gods this was R-rated) and the film mercifully didn’t try to have an epic plot, letting the simplicity of its concept being the whole of it(no needless end of the world junk here). 

Even though the film is straightforward I wish it was even more stripped back, the brief flashbacks we get are all unnecessary and they ruin the wonderful momentum the rest of the film has. I would go so far as to say that I think the film would’ve benefited from never leaving the protag’s side, the story is so simple that I don’t think seeing the flashbacks or even the villain plotting add anything. There is one exchange in the film between our heroine and villain towards the end before they throw down, says all that needs to be said.

If you want Joey King swinging a sword(you do), Olga Kurylenko with a whip, and a plethora of gross medieval dudes getting stabbed, The Princess is just what you need.

What a film. And I mean that in the most complicated of ways.

On the one hand the film is just full of cool, great shit. Elizabeth Olsen is perfection and the portrayal of her(on a filmic, non-story level) as this unstoppable villain is fantastic. The rest of the cast is aces as well. It has the best superpower stuff in anything(the dueling music is an obvious standout). The climax is straight and to the point and it doesn't feel either drawn out or perfunctory.

But on the other hand...wowzers is this one massively unintentionally sexist film. Even ignoring the way that the Wanda we saw at the end of Wandavision doesn't at all match up with the Wanda here(a big thing to ignore), the way this film explicitly draws a line between:

'Sorcery'

logical

ordered

male-coded

GOOD

'Witchcraft'

emotional

chaotic

female-coded

EVIL

It sure is something. The film even gives Wanda a couple of lines pointing out this bullshit(the line about how Strange does shit and gets to be a hero, Wanda does it and gets vilified, and her pointing out Strange's hypocrisy when he Dreamwalks and drives his own multiversal-corpse with demons) but it never interrogates this view.

The storytelling decisions surrounding Wanda throughout the whole film feel like the writers/producers picked the worst option every single time, with them seemingly hoping that the Darkhold just being there will be enough to paper over the turn they've take her character. She is so wonderfully kill happy that it is unbelievable that Feige and co. let it happen(oh and I saw you film, trying to show that a lot of people survived Wanda's attack at not-Nanda Parbat. Please, she slaughtered those fools.)

I mean just for simplicity...why wasn't the villain of this film a Wanda from a different universe? It covers the same story, it allows you to have your rampaging monster Wanda(lover her) and also gives you the 'real' Wanda getting to talk her down at the end, win all around. One other simple change that would've helped would have been for Strange at the end to actually try to take America's power for himself, having him fail this test of character would've done wonders for balancing the scales. Having America run from Strange to Wanda takes us back to the opening of the film and America bringing Wanda to other-Wanda without Strange's go-ahead would help remove the unnecessary paternalism that the film accidentally creates.

But having Strange himself falter at the end as a learning moment wouldn't have been a neat enough bow for Marvel, I guess.

Despite the numerous problems with the film, this is still easily one of Marvel's best. Raimi brings a pulse to the film, well except during the Illuminati sequence which feels tepid compared to the rest(until Wanda meets Xavier at least), and enough can't be said about Elizabeth Olsen's performance. She has turned the finger-tensed, spell gesturing into basically an artform at this point and even when handed this 1.5 note character(on the page) she single-handedly makes her the entire heart and soul of the movie. Strange fixes his watch at the end like it is some big symbolic moment and feels like the most hollow thing compared to *gestures at everything Wanda*

I won't go into a big thing here but the response to this film was interesting. I kind of obliquely touched upon this in a previous post about Eternals but I feel there is something really disheartening being bred in the Marvel machine(though it certainly isn’t unique to them). I feel that Marvel's adherence to its own 'house style' has created a problem where now a sizable chunk of the fanbase will always be unhappy if a Marvel film strays even for a little bit from said 'style'. Multiverse of Madness, Eternals, Iron Man 3, these films aren’t that far from the Marvel rulebook, more minor variations on a theme than any grand reinvention, but just the tiniest deviations have sent waves of apoplectic nonsense throughout segments of the ‘fan’base.

p.s. Not really a flaw with the film but it bummed me out that America was basically a completely different character.

p.p.s. Oh, and a bonus negative 100 points for not having Doctor Mordrid anywhere in the film. All the multiverse shenanigans, all the different Stranges, and you don't do one where he is Jeffrey Combs?

Princess Leia Princess Leia Princess Leia Princess Leia Princess Leia

Princess Leia Princess Leia Princess Leia Princess Leia Princess Leia 

Princess Leia Princess Leia Princess Leia Princess Leia Princess Leia

Princess Leia Princess Leia Princess Leia Princess Leia Princess Leia

The amount of people I’ve seen casually mentioning the straightwashing and then continuing with some sort of “but I still really like it!” is disgusting. And not to mention the numerous people who, even if they didn’t know about it before watching, just ignore it.

Directed by Chloe Zhao

 I generally don’t engage too much with the MCU fanbase these days, I generally like the majority of the films but there is definitely a slight disconnect between how I see the films and how the more ardent fans seems to. 

I first noticed this with the response to Thor: The Dark World, not a particularly great film or anything but the negative reaction to it was so confusing to me as it seemed about on the same level as its contemporaries, and it even had a couple of laudable elements(cinematography, Loki’s scene where his cell is trashed), but everyone treated it like it was some blight. The same thing happened with Iron Man 3 to even sharper effect, that film is easily one of the best films in the MCU still and yet there is a not insignificant number of fans who will decry it as one of the worst.

So when Eternals came out to a rather tepid response I did initially wonder if this was because the film was lacking or maybe the fanbase was once again rejecting something great for reasons I will just never understand.

Eternals is so good. Even going into it with some hype growing in the back of my brain(always a bad idea) I was just so enamored with this film, with its visuals and characters, with its focus on said characters finding meaning(or not) in their neverending lives, the action(when we get that prolonged moment of a Deviant constantly slamming Ikaris’ face down into the ground so he can’t eye-blast it during the big jungle fight, so good. Everything with Makkari, even better.)

Once aspect I loved and it made so incredibly happy was the rhythm of the film. I’ve complained about this so many times but superhero films(not all but certainly most) have a very real problem of reaching their crescendo in the middle of the film instead of at the climax in the third act. The need to up the stakes more often than not leads to bloated cacophonous nonsense in the end. CA: The Winter Soldier has the great freeway sequence in the middle of the film and then for the finale it is basically a disaster movie and a less than stellar showdown between Cap and Bucky. Black Panther has a lot of cool stuff in the middle, including the dramatic duel between BP and Killmonger, but then the film ends with a large messy war and a lackluster showdown between hero and villain. Having the hero and villain throwdown...just to then do it again 30 minutes later is a tricky thing to pull off well.

Eternals, by actually have a strong narrative core to it, doesn’t need to give us a first fight before the final showdown, thus allowing the climax of the film to be the big fight we want while also making it the emotional climax for the characters. It all peaks together, everything comes to ahead when it should.

I could talk for ages about the look of the film, so many images and shots that are just perfect. There is a moment where Thena is standing in the river after Gilgamesh’s death and the shot is mainly the river and its rippling and just Thena’s legs/dress. Seeing that moment was maybe the most shocking thing in the whole film, shots like that don’t appear in the MCU, if a visual like that would show up it would be used to show the reflection of a character in the water, because how can you not show your movie star every single possible moment?

But here it was a moment of pure aesthetic power. Nature and grief and time.

And there are just so many little things the film does so well, like despite the Deviants being purely CGI the film has them constantly interacting with physical space and objects(the jungle sequence is the high point for this). Or the way that even though they all care for each other none of them really understood what Sprite was going through and that her ‘betrayal’ is as much a philosophical one as it is a direct response to the way she felt cast aside. Or that Kingo stands up to Ikaris but then tells the rest that he does actually agree with Ikaris’ stance and that he won’t help them...and then he doesn’t come back for a big hero moment in the end. Or some of the edits. Gilgamesh’s ashes to Hiroshima. The volcano to the painting.

Eternals is so good. And the reaction to it is so disheartening. Like post-Matrix Revolutions Wachowskis, this is blockbuster cinema done right.

Never in a thousand years would I have expected that an adaptation of, well, anything would add a fridging of a female character that wasn’t in the source material.

Straight vampires...in 2021. Who would even think of doing such a thing?

Ignoring that fatal error, this was actually a very fun little flick. Our three leads are all great, its fun and poppy and moves along a good pace, and the film does that John Wick-ian thing of just putting you in the world and letting the characters walk through it as our main means of understanding said world. The worst parts of the film are any time it gets too exposition-y and, really, there were just too many moving parts(I don’t think we needed Victor or Jay).

It is also a nice modern take on the ‘Yuppie Nightmare Cycle’ of the 80s(Something Wild, Into The Night, for instance), films where a usually male lead character goes on a journey through the night(figuratively and usually literally)  where adventure, danger, mystery, and a mystery woman, shake the protagonist out of the drabness of their life and the malaise of the world.