NightScriber

That is this movie.

Happy 50th to Marvel Comics’ famous frenemy Harry Osborn!

The result of Marty’s ill-fated attempt to replace the pervasiveness of fax machines with smartphones. What of the cost, Marty? What of the cost?

I am older than Mr. Fantastic. I don't know what to think about that. It's more than can be said about anyone involved in this movie. I don't think there was much thought going on there at all. Fantastic 4 is a movie that generates a weary resignation, of the kind I find too often when discussing certain aspects of the video game industry (oh Konami, how deep does the rabbit hole go?). It is superhero movie fatigue given form and film. A circus of corporate greed and incompetence, but all the clowns are sad and the popcorn is stale, and the organ grinder's monkeys are all fat and bored. It's not even good enough at being bad to be worth a proper outrage. It's just sad. There's a special place for movies like the Fantastic 4, and it is a dusty and misused shelf in the back of the mind, right next to The Last Airbender, where the very electric snappings of our neurons are bitter.   The Long and Short of It Fantastic 4 fails as a movie, period. It fails further when viewed as an adaptation of previously existing material. The movie's pacing is nonexistent. Nothing of significance happens. It takes an hour for the team to even get their powers, and another half hour for them to work together as a group. That leaves ten minutes or so for the movie's lone fight scene, which is visually unimpressive, thematically unsatisfying, and narratively unfulfilling. It could have been compressed into a five to ten minute intro and nothing would have been lost. This is a superhero movie. By default, the audience is willing to accept that people have superpowers in it. There is no need for origin stories, unless the origin story actually has a meaningful narrative impact with the characters. We don't need time spent on how Gandalf's powers work, or the manufacturing methods used to build the Millennium Falcon. It's the beauty of suspension of disbelief. There is nothing in this movie that would make me think that it would not have been improved to start the movie with them already possessing their powers. The trite, slavish, lazy adherence to formula is on full display here. It should be noted here that I have no major attachment to the Fantastic 4 as a series or as characters. I know who they are and the generalities of their position in the world of comics. Even with that simple knowledge I came away disappointed - the movie could not even deliver "The Four are a family that have adventures with wacky cosmic stuff and science" or "Doom chews the scenery and is glorious" - the two most basic facts of the property, as far as I am aware. It's like the Guardians of the Galaxy stuck dealing with insurance disputes, or Mojo Jojo being laconic (Imagining Dr. Doom with Mojo Jojo's speech patterns, however, is a great deal of fun.) And the military and government are totally bad, guys. No this wasn't clearly reshoots thrown in by executive command. We promise. Poor pacing, poor acting, poor directing, poor effects, poor story, poor everything. Not worth being thorough, certainly - what good is critique when nearly everything is done wrong and nothing works? The only positive things I have to say about the movie are that Reed and Ben have a believable chemistry in the brief time we see them as adults. They actually act like friends, and in moments the acting goes above the mediocrity of the rest of the film. The sequence where we see the actually legitimately effective horror shots of the four right after their powers is mitigated by the lack of effective pacing - the characters were not strong enough for me to care, and it was a foregone conclusion anyway. If this wasn't an adaptation of something, I might have actually been shocked and impressed. Can't have that. Nothing in the movie worked. Go to the Last Airbender shelf, Fantastic 4. Go there and don't come back. There's nothing for you here.

Ant-Man is a good movie. I recommend seeing it. This is a pretty odd thing for me to say, because even a few months ago I would have thought this was just a cynical cash grab by Marvel trying to wring more money out of one of their C-listers for an MCU already bloated to Jabba the Hutt proportions. (Ultron didn't leave me in great confidence). I had no knowledge of Ant-Man in the comics (other than Hank Pym beat his wife once and there's been drama for years over that), nor did I find the concept very interesting. All that considered, the movie defied my expectations, enough so that I think this is one of Marvel's better films of recent years. So if good word of mouth is enough to persuade you (That plus bargain Tuesdays at the local theater was enough for me), go out and see it. From here on I'll go more in depth, so I'll throw up a spoiler warning, just in case. I won't go into supreme detail, and there's not much to spoil on the whole, but consider yourself warned nonetheless. Minor Spoilers Begin Here Pro - The main cast is well-written and well acted. Scott (Paul Rudd), Hope (Evangeline Lilly), and Hank (Michael Douglas) all have a decent amount of depth to them. Hank has both his outbursts of temper and his regrets at actions caused by his outbursts, and through this the movies illustrates a man who does want to do good, but is not always the best at it - he is hamstrung by his pride, his fears, his guilts and reservations. He's a flawed man, and I don't feel it was cheaply so. The other two I'll cover in their own entries. Pro - Scott Lang first, Ant-Man second. As an extension of the above, I felt that the movie did an excellent job of establishing Scott as a character outside of his identity as Ant-Man. Too often I find that the execution is the other way around, but here we're able to see Scott as a human being. It's the grand advantage of being a C-lister - when you are down on the street level, you're more connected with the average person, and thus more connected to the audience. He's not Thor, and that's a good, refreshing thing. Plus, his interactions with his daughter are adorable. Con - The villain is forgettable. Darren Cross is about as forgettable as they come for villains. A typical angry, jealousy-ridden puppet of the military-industrial-political complex, who gets an easy out of "there's something messing with your head". While there's nothing wrong with having the military-industrial-political complex as your overarching thematic enemy, there is a certain amount of eye-rolling when one hears "military applications" for whatever superhero thing the movie is about - marvel has done quite enough of that by now, i think we get the point (still, I'd rather have that than Mr. "Deadpool Stole My Girlfriend Boo-Hoo-Hoo" Thanos) Though, that might just be memories of Jurassic World lurking around in my head, having snuck out of the shallow graves I tried burying them in I still find it incredibly, painfully ironic that the military-industrial-political complex is portrayed as the villains by a studio owned by Disney. There's a certain clash of ideals there. Pro - The movie is funny. People in the theater were laughing at jokes, myself included. There were some excellent sight gags featured, and on that end I will say no more to avoid spoiling it. It's a movie that knows how and when to be fun, and it never gets too serious for itself. Pro / Con - Hope is essentially a discount Mako Mori. She's got the hair, but doesn't have the robot. And this both works for and against her. Early in the movie I was thinking "oh look, another distant woman with dad issues", but as the film progressed I found that, while this was still the case, it was justified (as with Mako). I mean, her dad's Hank Pym. He's not winning any dad of the year awards anytime soon, and her issues with him are more than just some misplaced teenage angst. There's legitimate hurt and mistrust there, but also legitimate love. It's a relationship I could see happening in real life, and so a sight better than other executions of the trope. Con - It's part of the MCU. I have said it with Guardians and I will say it here - the weakest part of the movie is the fact that it's part of the MCU, and then has to deal with the baggage of their overarching masterplot (and eventually be dragged into it). For a movie with such strong focus asAnt-Man (focus on a single main character, a few minors, and a single, central plot conflict without outside interference), this detracts from things significantly. It makes it "less important". He's not Thor, he's not Iron Man, he's not Cap. He's not an A-lister. Even if those characters don't appear in the film, Scott will be and is compared to them by the viewing audience. Everything becomes diminished, which is unfair. Scott being a street-level C-lister allows for writers to use him to tell more close to the heart stories, and it's unfair that he gets shackled with "not as cool as the other guys." Close to the heart stories are cool - in truth I would say they are the greatest of superhero stories. Pro? - It's part of the MCU. Ant-Man serves as a sort of a counterpoint to the Avengers. He's the guy on the street, the actual human being with actual human relationships and actual human problems. Looking back at the Avengers movies, figures like Thor and Cap seem outright cartoonish in comparison - as divorced from reality as the military-industrial-political complex is. There's something in here about Lex Luthor and Superman, but that deserves another post. But this counterpoint is an important one to have. It is important to care about the little guy. That was horrible, and I can't guarantee it won't happen again. Con - They ignore that, though. In the end, Scott is more or less dragged into the Avengers, so there can be silly civil war stuff and eventually Thanos can read sad poetry at them. Final: Ant-Man is not revolutionary. It didn't blow my mind, or surprise me, or do the unexpected. It was by the book. But it was by the book in a way that understands why the book was written, and why what's in the book is in the book. It could very easily have been a horrible lazy cash in, but it wasn't, and that's good enough for me.

I finished the Book of the Fallen just over a year ago now (after 8 months of work at it), and I have sung its praises to anyone willing to lend an ear, and to many who weren't, to be honest. My drive to read the Ian C. Esslemont Malazan books was never particularly strong, and so in the last year I have only read one of them, Night of Knives, and begun on the second, which is the subject of my musings today. I've been carving away at Return of the Crimson Guard since May. Given that I am still three hundred pages from the ending two months later, it's safe to say that it hasn't lit the same spark as the main series did. This is somewhat to be expected, of course; Erikson and Esslemont are two very different authors and I can't expect them to be the same. Return of the Crimson Guard is a good book, but it is also a weak book. My biggest issue, I think, is that Return takes a great deal of time to really start tying the plot together. It's something of a silly complaint in the Malazan universe, but here it carried a bit more weight than usual. The first three hundred, four hundred pages or so are mostly spent getting grounded, and it's not incredibly efficient at that - the cast and location are shuffled constantly, and this is without location tags or POV tags when the scene shifts. Even for a Malazan veteran it gets to be a bit much, though it falls into place eventually. Though, I must admit the mess is appropriate: the book is dealing with events in the Imperial heartland while the main series focuses elsewhere, and the result is what appears to be a game of Crusader Kings that's gone sour - rebellion all over the place, scheming administrators, incompetent leadership, the whole shebang. It's delightfully complex and chaotic, and actually quite rewarding for those who like watching train wrecks in slow motion. Everything is happening everywhere, all at once, and when things get moving there are interesting scenarios to be had. The problem is that there's not a lot of engagement in the build-up to those interesting scenarios. Even the interminable Tiste Andii segments in Toll the Hounds, or the even more interminable Shake chapters of Dust of Dreams, came with the knowledge that eventually I would be back on the Darujhistan streets or back with the Bonehunters and all would be well again. I never have that feeling in Return - it's never as boring as the Shake (though I think it would be incredibly difficult to top that), but there's no part of the cast that I am invested in enough to really get excited about. I'm in it to see what the outcome is in terms of the greater conflict, but the individual people are more or less out of the picture. But, this is a dreary portrait I paint. The book is still good, especially in seeing the train getting wrecked behind the scenes of the main series, the Malazan standard of morally-grey conflicts is still there (notably with the Wickans and the Seti - they're being thoroughly mistreated by the Malazans, but are still some of the most obnoxiously stubborn, xenophobic, violent heel-draggers I have ever seen in fiction). Perhaps things will really pick up and impress me in the last 300 pages. I'm not going to write it off, but it certainly could have used a better editor.