Weird Noir

Kay Cannon’s Blockers really surprised me. While I went in expecting a grossout comedy after catching the trailer (which caused Stevie to bow out), what I discovered instead was a sincere and sharply witty film about our attitudes to sex.  Concerned more with the hang-ups of parents played by Leslie Mann, John Cena and Ike Barinholtz than their onscreen children (Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan and Gideon Adlon), Blockers does indulge in scenes with bodily fluids flying hither and thither - but it’s also an interesting investigation of the pressures we put on young women when it comes to sex. 

Next we discuss Alex Garland’s long-awaited Annihilation, adapting the first novel of Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach trilogy to the…well our smallscreen as it turns out. 

Here it is, our wrap up of all the things we loved in 2017. Books, films, telly and comic books - we’ve got our picks of the things we loved, including some we already reviewed here on the pod. 

And if you want a sampling of what we discuss in this episode - 

Twin Peaks The Return

Brooklyn 99

The Good Place

Colossal

Thor Ragnarok

Logan Lucky

Get Out

Logan

Ladybird

My Favorite Thing is Monsters

Giant Days

Legion

Woman of Substances

The Flop House

I Don’t Even Own A Television

My Favorite Murder

The Dollop

Happy new year folks - see you in 2018. 

Star Wars and Paddington - two films that smack of adult nostalgia for their childhoods, now re-marketed to children today. 

Paddington 2, directed by Paul King, conjures up a sense of Englishness that is at once classic, but also modern.  It’s a charming film that is well worth your time.

The latest Star Wars - which Stevie has not seen, so Emmet is left to be interrogated on its merits - is brought to the screen by Rian Johnson. 

Instead of heavily relying on the established Star Wars formula, Johnson chooses to highlight the use of those repeated plot threads - temptation by the dark side, a Jedi mentor crippled by failure, a resistance army forced to continually retreat from an evil empire in pursuit - then flips these narratives in interesting ways. 

This is a spoiler free discussion that treats of The Last Jedi’s position in relation to the original films - and the whole Star Wars marketing phenomenon. 

Inspired by the release of Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Stevie proposed this show should concentrate on how films and television handle morality tales (seeing as churches are more concerned with who is sleeping with whom like institutional Hedy Hoppers….but I digress). 

Singling out The Good Place, Lucifer and the second season of Preacher, Stevie and Emmet tackle how pop culture today deals with morality and religion. 

Sadly Star Trek: Discovery gets short shrift, but we’ll get back to that sooner rather than later. 

This week we take a tour around Spain with Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan, and then revisit the cold calculations of murder in 1989 Berlin. Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip to Spain is the third in a series of would-be travelogues that blends reality and farce to excellent effect. Brydon and Coogan play versions of themselves, again musing on death, fame, sex - as well as the passing of David Bowie.

  In between driving each other to distraction with dueling impersonations, the pair enjoy amazing food lovingly prepared onscreen and go on yet another literary tour, this time following the foolhardy exploits of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. 

Less literary fun is to be had in David Leitch’s Cold War espionage thriller Atomic Blonde - although Bowie *does* of course pop up again. This is Berlin after all.  Adapting Antony Johnston and Sam Hart’s comic The Coldest City to the big screen, Charlize Theron stars as Lorraine Broughton, an MI6 operative sent to Berlin to recover a McGuffin taken from a murdered former lover by a KGB agent. 

There she encounters James McAvoy’s gone-native agent Percival, who clearly knows more than he’s letting on, and is tailed by a French agent played by Sofia Boutella. 

Complete with a stormer of a soundtrack of 80s hits, Theron carries the picture with a heady mix of cool glamour and a capacity for savage violence. 

This week Stevie and Emmet also recommend - Tim Powers’s Medusa’s Web Birthright by Joshua Williamson and Andrei Bressan Jon Ronson's So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

MOMENTS IN THRILL-POWER: “But we’re supposed to be turning this into a theme park!”

From Indigo Prime: Fegredo and Brecht - How The Land Lied (2000 AD Prog 682, 1990) Script: John Smith, Art: Chris Weston, Letters: Steve Potter

three dead

book of hours, France, ca. 1490-1510

Comic histories can be treasure troves of trivia and tidbits relating to our favourite creators. They can also often feel leaden, or un-insightful. 

I feel this is because comics is a medium infused with the experience of nostalgia. Possibly because of the emphasis on it being a child’s past-time. Now some kinds of books share this – say the works of Enid Blyton for example, or more recently series like The Baby-sitters Club and Goosebumps – but they are introductions to the wider world of reading. Comics contain childhood associations for many people and the attempt to tell the story of the industry and its major players in the conventional historical style can feel like pinning dead insects to cardboard. Brian Cremins’ book Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia is the exact opposite of this approach. It is full of insight, warmly written and with a passionate sense of the imagination behind the character of Captain Marvel. Cremins has a sense of his subject that transcends both fannish trivia and overly formal jargon. The chapter alone on Otto Binder and his use of Mr Tawny is a poignant and beautifully captured reflection.

This is thoughtful, well-researched and compelling writing. Strongly recommended not just for fans of Captain Marvel, but students of comic book history. Captain Marvel and the Art of Nostalgia can be purchased here.   - Emmet O’Cuana

So one of the first things I did once Ed Harris’s Man in Black started hunting for the solution to a labyrinth was google “Westworld and Gnosticism”. 

Everything about this quietly confident show has hinted at a willingness to engage with science fiction’s more ambitious side. Adapting Michael Crichton’s first ‘amusement park gone wrong’ yarn, Westworld has an inventive cleverness to its proceedings.    Compare it to the existential questions that bubble up in the fiction of Philip K. Dick say, or the movies of Andrei Tarkovsky. But with more naked bodies and bad language (HBO!) My search results were quite promising by the by - I’d recommend this piece in particular.  At first I read the show as a conflict between the gnostic idea of an evil god, a demiurgos, trapped in a plane of existence and visiting misery on its inhabitants until it breaks free. Ed Harris seemed to fit that bill.  His scalping of a ‘host’ - the name given to the artificial intelligences that inhabit the simulation and are forced to endure the desire for pleasure/pain that the park’s guests are entitled to - and reveal of a labyrinth etched into the scale he brutally obtains marked him out as an unholy entity loose in this world.  And at least from the point of view of the hosts he is.  Dr Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) is also shown interacting with the park. He meets a child, who speaks with a British accent and appears to have a lot in common with Ford. They go for a walk across the desert and encounter a serpent. Ford commands the serpent to stop and then sends it away. The boy is astonished and then just as casually Ford dismisses the child, revealing it is just another host.  Or, the boy is his son, like Jesus, and the serpent, well - I don’t need to keep going down this path.  Indeed, Westworld is tantalizing as a potential collection of allegorical readings, say Gnosticism versus traditional Christianity. But then so many post-Lost shows have flirted with that intertextual treasure hunt for referentiality. See also The Matrix, itself seen as a gnostic text, or Star Wars which eventually gave rise to a religion of its own to trouble census-takers.   Maybe none of it means anything at all and it’s just an intriguing science fiction mystery.  I’m enjoying it regardless.  - Emmet O’Cuana

Nadja | Michael Almereyda | 1994