"Black Bag" Snaps

I was a little worried about seeing Michael Fassbender playing another intelligence operative in "Black Bag" so soon after I'd seen him in "The Agency."  However, the two characters and the two projects are completely different.  Fassbender and Cate Blanchett play married MI6 agents George Woodhouse and Kathryn St. Jean.  We first meet them when they're throwing a dinner party for two other co-worker couples from British Intelligence.  There's Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela) and Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), whose tempestuous relationship is on the rocks.  There's psychologist Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naonie Harris) and Col. James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) who are more recently linked.  Also, one of the people at this dinner party is a leak, who may be responsible for putting a cyberweapon in the wrong hands.

"Black Bag" is an espionage thriller, but one that is very small scale and very tightly focused on the interplay among a small number of characters, all of them connected to each other through various personal relationships.  As George hunts for the leak, he stress tests all his suspects, including his wife, who has always disagreed with him on the subject of their finances.  Their fascinating relationship is at the heart of the film.  How do they manage to maintain their marriage and their careers in a field where nobody can trust each other, and everyone around them has made a mess of their love lives?  We listen to the pair exchange pillow talk and promises, some that we're meant to take at face value, and some that we're not.  George says he'll never lie to Kathryn.  Kathryn says she'll never lie to Greorge - unless she has to.  

I expected "Black Bag" to be more of a standard spy thriller, with the chases, fight scenes, and other showy set pieces that I associate with the genre.  What director Steven Soderbergh and writer David Koepp have put together is a lot sparser and more down-to-earth, built around conversations, interrogations, meetings, and some very tense dinner party games.  It's more stylized and definitely more sexy than the soberly paranoid spycraft of John LeCarre, whose work is alluded to in various ways, but it doesn't bother with the flashy business of going on missions or putting on false identities.  Wardrobes are aspirational, but reasonable.  There's a little bit of globetrotting, a few shots fired, and one satisfying instance of incendiary vehicular carnage, but otherwise the performances are the main event.  And of course the performances are great.  Fassbender and Blanchett have loads of chemistry, and we get to see it up close and personal.         

   

It's really extraordinary how Fassbender and Blanchett have both played similar characters before, but George and Kathryn feel entirely unique, and in conjunction with each other they're a different organism altogether.  I've seen a few reviews of "Black Bag" reference "The Thin Man" movies, which star another effortlessly suave crimebusting couple, but like everything else in "Black Bag," more is done with less.  George and Kathryn aren't showy or demonstrative, but their obsession with each other is plain.  Unlike the other couples in the story, their romance is very much alive, and their seduction of each other is ongoing.  I appreciate that it's an unfussy romance for adults as well.  There's a remarkable degree of self-control and letting the silences speak, which does so much to cultivate the air of mystery around our leads.  

What keeps me from wholeheartedly falling in love with "Black Bag," is that I saw Soderbergh's "Out of Sight" recently, which has a similarly low key, mesmerizing love story playing out.  And that highlights the one thing about "Black Bag" that I felt fell somewhat short - the score.  The irony is that the composer is David Holmes, who did the score for "Out of Sight," and many, many other Steven Soderbergh films over the years.  Much as I love the "Black Bag's" commitment to minimalism, there were some scenes where I just needed a bit more.  Then again, I've only seen "Black Bag" once, and I suspect this is the kind of movie that improves with repeat viewings.  In any case, it's not one to miss.

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"What If…?" Year Three and "Creature Commandos"

I did "Rank 'Em" posts for the first two seasons of "What If…?" but I don't have much to say about the individual episodes of the third season.  And since this is also the concluding season, I thought I'd put down some final thoughts on the series as a whole.  

So, this season of "What If…?" feels like an afterthought.  Most of its eight episodes are spent on oddball pairings of characters from the MCU's Phase Four, like Shang Chi and Kate Bishop, and Agatha Harkness and Kingo the Eternal.  We get another original character, Byrdie the Duck (Natasha Lyonne), who is the daughter of Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) and Howard the Duck (Seth Green).  The episode explaining how Darcy and Howard got together is far and away the best episode of the season, because it's something so weird and nutty that it could only happen in this series.  The slapstick humor premise, where all the biggest baddies in the universe end up chasing Byrdie's egg, actually works.  

Like the previous season, there's an ongoing plot involving the Watcher that ultimately turns into another big multiverse-spanning fight involving Captain Carter, Kahhori, and other recurring characters.  It's completely unnecessary, but in the interest of giving the series a definite ending, I guess it's fine.  I have more of a bone to pick with the lackluster individual plots this year, like "What If… the Emergence Destroyed the Earth?" which spotlights Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) in a post-apocalyptic universe, or "What If… the Hulk Fought the Mech Avengers?" where a motley collection of second stringers fight kaiju.  The ideas aren't bad, but the execution is lackluster, and it's very apparent that the show  is trying to boost the profiles of some characters it wants us to care about.  Meanwhile, hardly any of the original Avengers lineup even show up for a cameo.  There are a few surprises and the humor is generally better, but this season of "What If…" appears to have been severely limited in its choice of material, and it's something of a relief to see it go.  The series as a whole has been an interesting experiment, but always felt very constrained by studio politics.

Meanwhile, over in another comic book universe, the animated "Creature Commandos" on Max is the first official project to come from James Gunn's new creative leadership on the DC superhero franchise.  It's essentially "The Suicide Squad" with monsters.  Under the command of Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo), Task Force M is made up of dangerous individuals who aren't technically human but capable of heroism.  These include G.I. Robot (Sean Gunn), the radioactive Doctor Phosphorus (Alan Tudyk), Frankenstein's monster (David Harbour) and the Bride (Indira Varma), the amphibious Nina Mazursky (Zoe Chao), and the Weasel (Sean Gunn).  James Gunn wrote every episode and is very gung-ho about this being a launching point for all kinds of media to come.  Unfortunately, "Creature Commandos" completely failed to win me over.

I think if I had seen this series a few years ago, before the "Harley Quinn" series and before "Invincible," I would have found it more interesting.  Unfortunately, after the most recent batch of edgy animated series based on comic books, "Creature Commandos" can't help but feel derivative.  None of the characters particularly stand out.  The production values are decent, but nothing special - the animation, action scenes, and level of violence are all fairly middling.  Despite the big names in the cast, I didn't particularly like any of the characters.  They're all extreme personalities who eventually learn to get along and bond with each other, while fighting much less interesting villains.  Each episode fills in the backstory of one of the Taskforce M members, which are all predictably tragic and violent.  

I've liked most of James Gunn's comic book movies up to this point, but the tone is something I've had to get used to.  There are always a lot of juvenile assholes and hostile reprobates trading one liners, and everyone seems to have a lot of pent-up aggression.  While everyone eventually becomes like family to each other, the learning curves can be pretty steep, and the universe is far too grim and mean for the show to be a good time.  This approach is perfect for "Creature Commandos," a show aimed at angry adolescents, where everyone has an awful backstory and plenty of excuses to behave badly.  However, I'm not an angry adolescent, but a bored elder Millennial who has seen this kind of thing too often.  Good luck to Gunn, but I can recognize when a piece of media is definitely not for me.       

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My Favorite Shirley Clarke Film

Shirley Clarke was a Jewish female filmmaker who came to prominence in the 1960s, which meant she was almost unique.  She started out as a dancer and choreographer, who moved in independent and experimental film circles when she crossed over into filmmaking.  Her later work in the '70s and '80s consists almost totally of live video projects and dance-related endeavors.    When she was active as a feature filmmaker, her work was almost totally unknown in the mainstream, and it was only after significant restoration efforts by Milestone Films that much of Clarke's work became available to the wider public in 2012.  

Though some of her short films won awards and were well received, her features were not.  Perhaps this is because so many of them were about African-American men.  As Clarke put it, she didn't know how to deal with the "woman question," and found that she could relate better to the struggles of black men - a Harlem gang member, a beloved jazz musician, and a fascinating gay hustler and performer, who goes by the name Jason Holliday.  Holliday is the subject of Clarke's 1967 film "Portrait of Jason," and I don't know whether to call it a documentary or not, because I have no idea how much of what we see is real and how much is a performance by the title character.  

Jason Holliday is the only person we ever see in "Portrait of Jason," as he's being interviewed by Clarke and her partner Carl Lee, who can be heard offscreen.  The interview took place entirely in Clarke's living room, during a shoot that reportedly lasted for twelve hours.  The film cuts the footage down to 105 minutes.  During this time, Holliday reels off stories about his life and adventures, several of them salacious and shocking.  He frequently appears to be inebriated.  He giggles, rambles, and seems to be on the verge of tears at one point.  He spars with the interviewers, who call him out for his bad behavior, becoming more and more emotional as time goes on.  There's been a lot of conjecture about what really happened during the course of that marathon all-day shoot.  Was Clarke's goal to get Holliday to break down on camera?  Is the film exploitative?  Is it in bad taste?  Holliday himself seemed to be delighted with the results in interviews, or at least with the attention and the notoriety the film brought him.       

How much of what Holliday is telling us, is the truth?  His stories certainly have the ring of authenticity to them, giving us a glimpse of the usually invisible lives of sex workers, LGBT individuals, and others on the lowest rung of the social ladder.  What's so striking here is Holliday's attitude.  He speaks about controversial, and at the time what would be considered indelicate subject matter, with great pride and wit.  He's not ashamed of who he is and what he's done, even when challenged by the interviewers.  He styles himself as an aspiring cabaret performer, sharing his observations on life and love with his audience.  Jason Holliday is a persona, but it's a persona that has been chosen wholeheartedly.  

Shirley Clarke had a fascinating career, and by her own admission it was only possible because she was rich and privileged, with the connections to get things made that other filmmakers couldn't.  However, she used that privilege to put the lives of black men, heroin addicts, the unseen, and the ignored on screen.  Her first feature film (which also happens to be the first found-footage film), "The Connection," was the subject of a pivotal censorship lawsuit due to its realistic use of vulgarity.  Most of her narrative films blur the lines between truth and fiction, telling their stories through the improvisations of non-actors, usually to a jazz soundtrack.  "Portrait of Jason" has more in common with these films than her straight documentaries, which is why I'm still hesitant to put it into either category.  

Finally, I want to make a quick note that Andy Warhol tried to make a movie with Jason Holliday before Shirley Clarke did, which never came together.  And this is probably the closest I'll ever come to covering Andy Warhol's work on this blog.   

What I've Seen - Shirley Clarke

The Connection (1961)

Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World (1963)

The Cool World (1963)

Portrait of Jason (1967)

Ornette: Made in America (1985)

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"The Last of Us," Year Two

I want to state up front that I haven't played either of the "Last of Us" games.  Spoilers for the first season, but not the second ahead.

"The Last of Us" is one of the HBO shows that has been the most affected by the WGA and SAG strikes, and the behind-the-scenes turmoil going on at Warners.  The second season is only seven episodes, down from nine in the first season.  It's based on "The Last of Us 2," but apparently covers less than half of the story from that game.  I suspect that these issues would have already been testing the patience of the audience, even before we got into the various adaptation decisions that irrevocably changed the nature of the show.  In short, this is a risky and difficult season of television, but it's not without some rewards.

Without getting into too many details.  Season two of "The Last of Us" is a transitional year, where Ellie eventually emerges as the main character of the series, and a lot of new characters are introduced.  We open on Ellie and Joel living in Jackson, Wyoming with Joel's brother Tommy (Gabriel), in relative safety.  Other members of the community include Ellie's love interest Dina (Isabela Merced), her ex Jesse (Young Manzino), Tommy's wife Maria (Rutina Wesley), a therapist named Gail (Catherine O'Hara), and her husband Eugene (Joe Pantoliano).  New villains include Isaac (Jeffrey Wright) and Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), members of a paramilitary group based out of Seattle.  There are still plenty of the Infected around, and they're as significant a threat as ever, but the major antagonists this year are all human.

There's a time skip between the seasons so Joel and Ellie aren't quite the same as when we last left them.  Their relationship has become much more complicated, as Ellie is now an adult who is doing her best to distance herself from Joel for a variety of reasons.  The events of the season one finale are a major component of the rift, and both of them are still dealing with a lot of guilt and trust issues.  Revenge is another major theme for several different characters, but most prominently Abby, who has connections to last season's Fireflies.  I understand that she's supposed to be one of our new POV characters, but she doesn't get as much screen time this year as I was expecting.  Neither does Pedro Pascal as Joel, which really leaves a void.  Bella Ramsey is a solid performer, but she's better when she's playing off of Pascal, and pairing her up with newcomer Isabela Merced for so much of the season instead is a significant downgrade.

Still, there are a lot of great moments this season.  I love that there's room for some of our veteran character actors like Wright, O'Hara, and Pantoliano to have some extremely affecting moments.  Nothing is quite on the level of Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett's episode from the first season, but the potential is certainly there.  "The Last of Us" has an extremely deep bench of talent, and I kept spotting familiar actors like Hetienne Park, Ariela Barer, and Danny Ramirez in minor roles.  It's impossible to predict where any episode is going to go, and even who's going to survive the next five minutes.  The shrinking episode numbers aside, "The Last of Us" still boasts a large budget and prestige television production values.  A massive scale Infected siege on Jackson is one of the major highlights of the year.  And yet it's nowhere near as impressive as an episode later in the season, made up almost entirely of intimate dialogue scenes.

However, there's no getting around that the season ends prematurely, and it feels like the show has turned a corner into much dicier territory.  Like "House of the Dragon" last year, the lower episode count is definitely a problem, but I suspect the real issue is that both series are trying to stretch out the life of their available source material.  "The Last of Us" could make it work with the talent that it has, but it'll be an awfully long time before we find out - maybe too long for some fans.  Season Three won't be here until 2027 at the earliest.  

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Meet "Mickey 17"

Bong Joon-Ho makes two kinds of films.  He makes socially conscious Korean dramas with genre elements, like "Parasite" and "Mother," which are generally smaller scale and usually very, very good.  When he can get a larger studio to foot the bill, he also makes more elaborate allegorical science-fiction films, like "Snowpiercer" and "Okja," which are usually in English, more cartoonish, and I don't enjoy them nearly as much.  "Mickey 17" falls squarely in the latter group, a big budget sci-fi black comedy, starring Western actors, that seems very concerned with being broad enough to appeal to a Western audience.  It is by no means director Bong's worst film, but "Mickey 17" is far from being another "Parasite."  I liked it mostly for Robert Pattinson's performance, but I understand why other viewers have been less happy with the end results.

Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) has signed on to be an "expendable" employee on a space voyage to colonize the planet Niflheim.  Thanks to clone printing technology, his memories and consciousness can be transferred to a new body every time he bites the dust, which he is obliged to do over and over again.  He's given all the most dangerous assignments on the ship, used as a human guinea pig by scientists, and generally treated very badly by just about everyone.  However, during the voyage he does fall in love with the security agent Nasha (Naomi Ackie), who makes things more bearable for him.  Others on the ship include the immoral expedition leader Marshall (Mark Ruffalo in "Poor Things" mode), his calculating wife Yifa (Toni Collette), and Mickey's untrustworthy old friend Timo (Steven Yeun).  However, Mickey's worst enemy may be himself.  After his seventeenth clone, Mickey 17, is mistakenly left for dead on Nilfheim's surface, he makes his way back to the ship to discover Mickey 18 has already been printed.

Roughly the first half of "Mickey 17" is very good.  The worldbuilding is excellent, the dark humor is fantastic, and the performances are great.  Robert Pattinson is easy to root for as Mickey - a slightly dim working stiff who is unhappy with his lot in life, but very easygoing and loveable.  He's that perpetually accommodating loser who doesn't know how to stand up for himself, and ends up being bullied by everyone, including himself.  Marshall and Yifa are playing the usual selfish elites that usually show up in  Bong Joon-Ho movies - thoughtless, cruel creatures that can be fun if they're funny enough.  I wanted Ruffalo and Collette to go further over the top than they did, but I don't really have any complaints.  They fit right into "Mickey 17's" nightmare vision of space exploration, where the lower level workers are routinely exploited and deprived with frightening nonchalance, and Marshall and his too-perfect teeth cultivate a zealous cult of personality that keeps him in power.  Watching Mickey suffer and die in increasingly gruesome ways is morbidly funny and impactful.  

Where the movie loses its way is around the midpoint, when it feels like it's obliged to be a typical Hollywood action blockbuster, and find some way to engineer a happy ending for Mickey and Nasha.  This roughly coincides with the appearance of the "Creepers," the dominant alien life form on Niflheim, who look like giant pillbugs.  If you're familiar with "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind," they're dead ringers for the Ohmu.  Suddenly we're in a very different kind of movie, where the conflicts become very black-and-white, a few minor characters suddenly get a lot more screen time, and Mickey 17's existential quandary with his unwanted twin gets shoved into the background.  It's not bad, but it's not nearly as interesting as the movie that we were watching up to that point.  There's some messiness with shifting POVs and a weirdly structured ending that makes me suspicious that director Bong was forced to compromise on his finale.       

   

If you're familiar with Bong Joon-Ho's other films, "Mickey 17" fits right in with his other work thematically and aesthetically.  It's awkwardly trying to graft a lot of those elements on the structure of a typical blockbuster with mixed results, but I thought that there was plenty worth watching.  Pattinson in particular is a lot of fun as the Mickeys, and I hope he has a chance to work on something this big and weird again soon.  

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"Lost," Year Three

Spoilers ahead for the first three seasons of "Lost."

The third season of "Lost" is a big improvement over the second.  It feels like the writers know where the story is going, even if that may not be the case.  The focus is narrowed to only a handful of characters, who finally get enough screen time to gain some more depth, and the story builds over the course of the whole season to a satisfying climax.  The season finale is the best episode of the show so far.

Having good, well-defined villains helps a lot.  We get a much better picture of Ben Linus and the DHARMA Initiative group, as Jack, Sawyer, and Kate spend the first several episodes imprisoned in their stronghold.   The one major new character this year, Dr. Juliet Burke (Elizabeth Mitchell), is introduced as a villain and becomes more complex as the season goes on.  While I'm still not as interested in the captured trio as I am with characters like Locke, Hurley, Sun, or Sayid, at least this run of episodes fleshes out Jack, Sawyer, and Kate to the point where they feel like more well-rounded characters.  Sawyer in particular emerges at the end of the season with a very good arc.  DHARMA could be more threatening though.  Ben and Juliet's mind games are awfully tame by 2025 standards, and the stakes always feel very arbitrary for everybody - all the attempts to recruit Jack and Locke into the cult feel silly.  Still, I'll take the crazy cult over the smoke monster and random polar bear sightings.  There's still too much about the island that's way too mystery-baity.  

The best storyline of this year definitely belongs to Charlie.  I haven't written much about Dominic Monaghan's work in the show, because there simply wasn't much to the character aside from being an addict and glomming onto Claire to worrying extremes.  Desmond's premonition gives him a chance to finally make some meaningful decisions and be a hero.  I'm heartened that the show managed to stick at least one good exit for a character.  The worst storyline is probably the little experiment with Nikki (Kiele Sanchez) and Paolo (Rodrigo Santoro), two background characters who have their own running narrative in the background of other episodes.  While I like the concept, and I'm glad the writers are experimenting like this, it's just not done well.  We barely learn anything about these two before their featured episode, where they're killed off with surprising cruelty.  

And speaking of being killed off, I was not pleased to lose Mr. Eko, whose actor quit the show.  Unfortunately that means the only surviving character from the tail section group is Bernard, and all the black regulars are gone aside from Rose and some random flashes of Walt in the finale.  The cast keeps getting whiter, and the issue is glaring.  On the one hand, I don't think the "Lost" writers should have felt obliged to tie themselves in knots trying to keep up the characters and storylines that weren't working.  On the other hand, this is clearly a systemic issue.  Lindelof and company getting called out for this kind of thing was instrumental to getting us the much improved "Watchmen" and "The Leftovers," later on down the line.  

I like that the flashback-heavy structure is still being used, and especially that this allows backstories for some of the characters to be gradually deepened and given more context.  Flashbacks build on flashbacks, setting up the next season when we'll see how the characters' absences will affect the direction of their stories.  I like Sun and Jin's episode this year in particular, because it shows how much the two of them have habitually been keeping secrets from each other.  Then there's Locke, whose terrible father (Kevin Tighe) keeps coming back in more surprising and entertaining ways.  The flashbacks are also handy for fun guest star appearances.  It was nice to see Nathan Fillion as Kate's ex, Zeljko Ivanek as Juliet's ex, Bai Ling as Jack's ex, Cheech Marin as Hurley's dad, Beth Broderick as Kate's mom, and Billy Dee Williams as himself.  The production values continue to improve.      

I've been warned that the show peaks with the fourth season and it's all downhill from there.  All of the subsequent seasons are also shorter than the first three, so I'm actually well past the halfway point for "Lost."  I'm enjoying "Lost" enough that I'm going to see it through to the end.  However, at this point I'm glad that I didn't watch this while it was airing.  The ability to work through the episodes at my own pace is very important to bolstering my goodwill toward the show.  Also, having some foreknowledge of where the story is going is helping to curb expectations.     

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"The Gorge" and "Companion"

2025 has been very good for original genre films so far.  A few minor spoilers ahead.

First, "The Gorge," which is an offbeat horror-action mystery movie, where the best thing about it is surprisingly the romance that develops between the two leads.  Miles Teller plays Levi, an ex-Marine who is sent by a not-suspicious-at-all Sigourney Weaver character to a mysterious gorge, which is guarded on one side by a lone American soldier, and on the other side by a lone Soviet counterpart, both in command of impressive military arsenals.  Their job is to keep whatever is at the bottom of the mist-shrouded gorge from ever getting out.  The two soldiers are forbidden from contact, but the Soviet turns out to be the lovely Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), and both of them are bored, so of course they start flirting with binoculars and homemade signs.

I appreciate that we find out very quickly that there are eldritch monsters who keep trying to come out of the gorge, and have to be repelled with a lot of heavy gunfire.  The mystery is not drawn out at all, though there are the usual twists and turns about what's down under all that mist, for those who are here for the monsters and the action.  However, I was pleasantly surprised by how much of "The Gorge" is actually a romantic-comedy, featuring two capable, attractive young people who come up with a lot of different ways to carry out their romance, despite being physically separated.  Directed by Scott Derrickson, who mostly does horror, this is a fun digression from the usual formula, and I found it very enjoyable.  Well, until the film is obliged to be an action movie again.  

"The Gorge" is a pretty by-the-numbers monsterfest in the second half, when our leads are expected to go fight more CGI beasties and uncover the terrible secrets about the gorge.  Fortunately the actors are very good, especially Anya Taylor-Joy proving again that she's a solid action star.  The creature designs also feature some very creative and memorable abominations.  I think it helps that I went into "The Gorge" expecting a B-movie, and that's exactly what this is.  The romance is a nice bonus, but in the end the mindless violence takes center stage, and is both very mindless and very violent.  It's hard to get too upset with the film for doing exactly what it said it would from frame one.  Would I have been happier with a smarter, more thoughtful film that spent more time on the central relationship?  Sure, but that's not the movie "The Gorge" is trying to be, and I don't begrudge it any of its indulgences.

On to "Companion," a horror/thriller/comedy where I have to tread more carefully because it does have several big reveals that will directly impact audience enjoyment.  Let's just say that the film is about technology and romance, and involves three couples having a weekend getaway together.  There's Iris (Sophie Thatcher), who is nervous about meeting the friends of her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) for the first time.  There's Eli (Harvey Guillen) and Patrick (Lukas Gage), the friendly gay couple.  And then there's prickly Kat (Megan Suri), who is dating an eccentric Russian, Sergey (Rupert Friend).  Drew Hancock, previously of "Suburgatory" and "Blue Mountain State," is making his feature film debut here as writer and director.

"Companion" is one of those tricky little genre movies where the characters are playing cat-and-mouse and trying to outwit each other constantly.  The writing is clever, darkly funny, and occasionally lands a good zinger.  The young actors are a solid bunch who're mostly known for their television work, but easing into bigger film roles.  Sophie Thatcher, of "Yellowjackets" and "Heretic," is the standout.  Iris is our main POV character, and Thatcher is effortlessly genuine and relatable throughout, despite dealing with a lot of heightened, high concept material.  When things go south, she's easy to root for.  

This is the kind of premise that could have gotten very silly very quickly, without Thatcher's grounding presence.  Frankly, the movie still is silly a lot of the time, on purpose, but it also offers some decent observations about how technology can enable some of humanity's worst impulses.  But more importantly, it's a fun watch, and hopefully we'll see everyone involved continue to do good work in the future. 

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