About That Live Action "Cowboy Bebop"

Despite knowing better, I watched all ten episodes of Netflix's live action "Cowboy Bebop" series.  It's not very good, and I knew from the outset that it wasn't going to be very good.  However, the original anime is one of the foundation pieces of media that helped to define my path as a young animation nerd, so I felt obligated to take a look at this thing and see exactly how bad the damage was.  

From the first episode, the biggest issue is clear.  The creators of the live-action "Bebop" are way too enamored with the anime.  They spend considerable effort recreating whole scenes from the original show in live action, the way the recent "Ghost in the Shell" feature did, even reusing not-great dialogue and a ton of the old music.  The opening sequence and title screens are reproduced with remarkable faithfulness.  Key members of the original "Bebop" creative team like director Shinichiro Watanabe and musician Yoko Kanno are prominently credited.  However, we can place most of the blame on the 2021 series creators, Andre Nemec and Christopher Yost, who decided to make the show look and feel like the anime in every way that they could, from the production design to the cinematography to the actors that were cast.  Sometimes this works, and sometimes it really doesn't, especially when the copying is so direct that it feels like something akin to slipping into a reverse uncanny valley.

The main cast is the best thing that "Bebop" has going for it.  Space cowboy and bounty hunter Spike Spiegel (John Cho) and his partner Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir) chase bounties all over the solar system in the beat-up starship Bebop.  Sometimes they team up with wild card Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda) for various jobs.  The three of them have great rapport, and it's fun to watch them banter and compete, and eventually form a rough found family together.  The changes to their characters, like Jet having a young daughter, Kimmie (Molly Moriarty), and Faye's mother figure Whitney (Christine Dunford) are good ones, who help them come off as more well rounded.   When the show is about the Bebop gang having their day-to-day adventures, and tackling the new problem of the day, the show is watchable.  The bounties are a  greatest-hits collection of the most memorable characters from the anime, and include some memorable weirdos.

Unfortunately, the show also devotes considerable amounts of time to the story of two people from Spike's past as an assassin for the mob - his old partner and nemesis Vicious (Alex Hassell) and his old lover Julia (Elena Satine).  Vicious and Julia were minor characters from the anime, their relationships with Spike never really developed much.  The new show makes them main characters, a loveless husband and wife, who are trying to move up in the Mars-based Red Dragon Crime Syndicate, and destined to intersect with Spike again someday.  And they're absolutely terrible and boring whenever they're onscreen.  In trying to flesh out Vicious and Julia, the show's limitations really show.  No matter how much backstory they get, they're never more than bad copies of bad cliches.    

Despite "Bebop" being billed as an action series, the fight and chase sequences are fairly mediocre television quality.  They're very style over substance, and all the major set pieces constantly feel like they're stretching the budget to its limits.  Overall, the show's quality is wildly uneven, with some episodes looking very polished and expensive, while others are scraping the bottom of the barrel.  There'll be a great-looking effects shot followed by an especially garish use of greenscreen moments later.  Compared to other science-fiction shows, "Cowboy Bebop" too often underwhelms.  Many similar space cowboy concepts were executed a lot better twenty years ago with Joss Whedon's "Firefly." 

I don't think that a live-action "Cowboy Bebop" is a bad idea, inherently.  One of the impulses behind the original series was mashing up different genres, different musical styles, and different influences to create something new.  Remixing the show's elements again in a live action format yielded some good things - Cho, Shakir, and Pineda's performances as our heroes are fun and engaging.  I don't mind that minor characters like bar owner Ana (Tamara Tunie) were transmogrified into totally different new versions.  However, too much of the show is not remixing or reinventing, but straight up regurgitation, with very disappointing results.  

  

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Under "The Power of the Dog"

I watched "The Power of the Dog" and was initially stumped as to how to write about it.  This is a long, slow, contemplative melodrama from Jane Campion, featuring several good performances.  It's a western, set in Montana in 1925.  I've read some good critical takes on the film pointing out its treatment of Biblical themes, masculinity, and sexuality, but I think it's best to approach it initially as a collection of character studies of the four main characters.

We start with the Burbank brothers, sweet-natured George (Jesse Plemons) and the much smarter, much meaner Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch).  They're wealthy ranchers who manage a large cattle operation together, with Phil very much in charge.  During a cattle drive, they stay at the inn of a widow, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee).  Phil antagonizes Peter, who is bookish and physically awkward, but George is attracted to Rose.  The film is divided into multiple chapters, each focusing on the various relationships of these characters over time.  The film eventually becomes a slow burn thriller, one that doesn't end in any explosive confrontations, but certainly comes to a satisfying and well-earned resolution.   

"The Power of the Dog" falls very much into the category of revisionist western because it punctures the image of the hypermasculine, physically strong, rough-living cowboy in several different ways.  What's interesting here is that Phil is aware of and clearly enraptured with this ideal, embodied by his unseen mentor, Bronco Henry.  Phil is so obsessed that he despises everything that doesn't match up - anything feminine, anything too civilized or genteel, and anything he views as weak.  He bullies George for being soft and fat.  He mocks Peter for his effeminate behavior.  He goes to war against Rose more for what she represents than anything she actually does.  His downfall comes from his inability to recognize that strength doesn't always look like what he's come to expect.  

Cumberbatch's performance as Phil is at the center of the film, and the best thing I've seen him do in a long time.  It makes such good use of his physicality, and his American accent here is much better than his previous attempts.  At the outset, his behavior is so hostile and so aggressive that it threatens to become caricature, but Cumberbatch ensures that Phil always remains keenly intelligent and aware of just how far he can push, which makes him feel much more dangerous.  By contrast, we have Kodi Smit-McPhee, who has always been an interesting presence whenever he's popped up.  Here, he's playing a nebbish with a lisp, and turns out to be hiding a steelier interior.  And the movie works so well because we only get limited glimpses of that interior.  Plemmons and Dunst's supporting work is also very good here, and I was a little disappointed that their screen time was so limited.  

What's so fascinating about Campion's approach is that it doesn't spell things out and the viewer has to piece together many events.  We have a pretty good understanding of what drives Phil, and what his relationship to Bronco Henry was like, but there are tantalizing hints of what Phil was like as a younger man, before he became a rancher.  Peter tells us at one point that he worried that he wasn't kind enough as a child, and his ambitions as a  medical student may be hiding a more worrying side to his behavior.  Then there's the time jump that occurs midway through the film, where suddenly the balance of power between three of the characters has shifted.  This is one of those films that almost demands to be rewatched because certain revelations will make you rethink so much of the characters' intentions behind certain actions.

"The Power of the Dog" is a beautiful film, but one which reveals its beauty slowly.  The pacing is sure to be the biggest stumbling block for casual viewers, especially those who might be expecting a more traditional kind of thriller or crime story.  However, there's such a wonderful exactness to the storytelling, and such a careful control of the mood and tone.  Ari Wegner's cinematography is harsh and evocative.  Campion's characters might be unsubtle, but they're so alive and vital that I was immediately invested in their lives and their mysteries.  It's been such a long time since Campion's last film, I'd forgotten what she was capable of.  It's good to know she can still surprise. 

    

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The Unlikely "tick, tick... BOOM!"

Could it really be that after multiple disappointing musicals this year, the one that finally impressed me was about yet another self-obsessed white guy songwriter in existential crisis hung up on turning thirty?  I am so disappointed in myself.  However, I've always had a weakness for films about artists and the artistic process, and "tick, tick... BOOM!" is exactly that.  It's an adaptation of the semi-autobiographical musical theater piece created by Jonathan Larson a few years before "Rent," detailing his struggles to workshop a new musical in 1990.

I was under the mistaken impression that "tick, tick... BOOM!" was an original musical film written by Lin Manuel Miranda, who makes his directing debut here.  Instead, it's absolutely an adaptation of Larson's work, and to Miranda's credit it's a considerably better screen adaptation than either Larson or Miranda's musicals have gotten so far.  The direction is nothing spectacular, but it highlights the performances well, understands how to execute some of the trickier conceits, and most importantly it trusts the material.  For instance, there's a song number staged at a diner, meant to be a (sadly terribly timely) tribute to Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park With George."  Not only does Lin Manuel Miranda preserve the nerdy referentiality, he leans into it by populating the scene with beloved Broadway stars and playing up the artifice of the production design.  This is also one of those artist biopics that keeps dropping little nods to the artist's most famous work, in this case "Rent," suggesting where Larson's influences came from.  I usually find this sort of thing very obvious and pandering, but here it's done subtly and you actually have to know Larson's work to catch many of the little references.   

A large amount of the credit should go to the cast, especially Andrew Garfield, who plays Jonathan Larson.  He sings, he emotes, and he displays enough creative verve and energy to get viewers caught up in his pursuit of Broadway success.  Alexandra Shipp plays his girlfriend Susan, and Robin de Jesus plays his best friend Michael, both former creatives who have given up on their Broadway dreams, or are on the verge of doing so.  Judith Light plays theatrical agent Rosa, and Bradley Whitford plays Larson's idol, Stephen Sondheim.  And a vast array of Broadway talent, young and old, are on hand for cameos and bit parts.  The film feels very much like a community effort, and you can feel the affection for Larson and his work in every frame of the film.  And of course, since this is a period piece, the musical is also a nostalgic glimpse of the Broadway community that existed in the 1990s, weathering the AIDS crisis and a swiftly changing New York.     

It helps a lot that the musical stays very grounded in the real world, aside from a few brief dream sequences like the "Sunday" number.  The more theatrical numbers and staging are wisely limited to the framing device, where Larson performs "tick, tick... BOOM!" in its stage format with a few other musicians, acting as narrator and internal monologue for the dramatized version of his life.  And it's very much the life of a struggling artist, full of constant juggling of work and relationships, and trying to stretch limited resources.  The musical that Larson is working on, titled "Superbia," is a science-fiction satire that I could easily see being gussied up for the screen with flashy special effects and  fantastical costuming and sets, but this never happens.  Miranda keeps it simple and bare bones, letting the music and the performances stay at the forefront.  And it works beautifully.

And finally, to be frank I like the music in "tick, tick... BOOM!" so much more than anything I've heard from stage and screen musicals recently.  Yes, the style is old fashioned and earnest, but it works for me.  It works so much better than I was expecting.  When the inevitable "Hamilton" screen adaptation happens, I think Lin Manuel Miranda has proven that he's the best choice to direct it.  At the very least, they should let him take a stab at creating a better film version of "Rent."  

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"Masters of the Universe" Brings Out the Old Toys

Spoilers for the first episode ahead.

"Masters of the Universe: Revelations" is billed as a continuation of the '80s "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" cartoon, aimed at nostalgic adults.  With it, creator Kevin Smith has done what a lot of us have dreamed of doing with some of our beloved childhood media.  The original "He-man" was notoriously badly written, full of lazy contrivances and silly cliches that followed familiar Saturday morning cartoon templates.  Smith and his team confront this head-on, making the beloved characters break out of their child-friendly status quo and reckon with the weird character dynamics and odd choices that were inherent in the original "He-man" formula.  And though the execution isn't always great, it's a fun idea that brings something new to a franchise that was only ever intended to sell action figures.

The ten-episode series starts by immediately killing off both the villain, Skeletor (Mark Hamill) and the hero, Prince Adam (Chris Wood), and revealing the truth that Adam is He-man's secret identity to all of his stunned family and friends.  Among them is the warrior woman Teela (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who becomes our POV character.  After reacting negatively to being kept in the dark about He-man, she's  banished and goes off on her own to try and pick up the pieces in the wake of the final battle.  However, when the need arises, she joins up again with He-man's surviving companions - including her father Man-at-Arms (Liam Cunningham), the Sorceress (Susan Eisenberg), Cringer the Battle Cat (Stephen Root), and Orko the Imp (Griffin Newman), to save the day and the universe.

The original He-man fans are sure to get a kick out of this series, because it's full of cameos and callbacks and references, but this is definitely not the original "He-man."  Powerhouse Animation provides some fabulous visuals that are consistent design-wise with the first series, but the show isn't interested in telling the same old formulaic stories where He-man always wins.  Eventually, we do get to see him in his full action hero glory, because nobody ever really dies in this universe, but it takes a lot of work and a lot of false-starts before we get there.  Smith and company are more concerned with helping these characters grow up and interrogate their own shoddy construction.  Inevitably, this results in some tonal weirdness because the characters just weren't designed to be this deep.  

Still, it must have been so satisfying for the writers to be able to ask questions, like, doesn't Prince Adam keeping up this secret identity show a fundamental lack of trust in his friends?  And, doesn't Adam's family dynamic with his parents King Randor (Diederich Bader) and Queen Marlena (Alicia Silverstone) seem to be wildly dysfunction?  And, when is the sorceress Evil-Lyn (Lena Headey) going to realize that Skeletor ain't treating her right, and she doesn't have to put up with his nonsense?  While I don't think you need to have much familiarity with the old '80s cartoon to enjoy this new show - and I certainly didn't have much - it helps to have some knowledge of the old character relationships, and the tropes of kids' media from that era.  

Occasionally, I think the writers get way too wrapped up in the show's lore, and the snarky dialogue is more out of date than it thinks it is, but mostly all these transformations and subversions work.  And they work because you can tell the creators love this franchise and these characters, and are eager to give them new stories.  The inherent corniness of the fantasy premise, and having characters with names like Evil-Lyn and Man-at-Arms is carefully preserved, but I like that we're meant to come at them from a more adult perspective.  Orko, for instance, goes from comic relief to a more poignant figure, and Prince Adam is actually much more interesting and heroic when he isn't being He-man.   

My biggest quibble with the show is with its casting, which features an awful lot of celebrities who aren't a good fit for their characters.  They make the show feel like more of a vanity project than it should.  I mean, the series is super indulgent anyway, but it's executed well enough that this mostly doesn't matter.   I'd be up for more of this series in the future, especially if the creators can maybe tackle the Dolph Lundgren movie next.      

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"Arcane" is Full of Surprises

I've watched a lot of expensive, ambitious animated series over the years aimed at older audiences, and many of them fall victim to certain common issues.  The biggest one is that they're simply not very well written or conceived, often too reliant on their visuals or their adult content.  "Arcane," based on the "League of Legends" game franchise, is one of the best I've seen because it is absolutely rock-solid in its storytelling.  It's not just that the worldbuilding is strong, or the characters are unusually nuanced, but because it understands the strengths of animation, and what to do with them.

  

Set in the steampunk fantasy world of Runeterra, "Arcane" follows several characters who live in the city of Piltover, renowned for its scientists and inventors, and Zaun, the dangerous "undercity" below it.  Two orphaned sisters, Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) and Powder (Mia Sinclair Jenness) grow up in Zaun under the care of their foster father Vander (JB Blanc), while dodging crime lords like Silco (Jason Spisak) and Piltover's law enforcers.  One day, their gang steals "arcane" crystals from a promising young scientist, Jayce (Kevin Alejandro), who is at the center of another group of characters - an enforcer, Caitlyn (Katie Leung), a professor, Heimerdinger (Mick Wingert), his assistant Viktor (Harry Lloyd), and an ambitious member of Piltover's ruling council, Mel Medarda (Toks Olagundoye).  This sets off a chain of events with major consequences for both Piltover and Zaun.  

I spent a good amount of time reading up on the production details for this series, because "Arcane" feels like it came out of nowhere.  The unusually high quality animation was produced by Paris based Fortiche Production, which has previously only done animation for other "League of Legends" projects.  The style is similar to Sony's "Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse" and SPA's "Klaus," using a combination of CGI and traditional animation.  This allows the characters to combine the expressiveness of hand-drawn animation and the polish of CGI, which is important because so much of the series is focused on character relationships and interactions.  The series being animated helps it to realize all sorts of impossible environments, weapons, and visuals.  The characters include wildly stylized humans, non-human creatures, and people who are magically enhanced.  Notably, it also allows the early episodes to put its young leads into dangerous situations, and portray violence as more brutal than genre shows are usually comfortable with.      

And this is the crucial thing that distinguishes "Arcane" from other animated projects I've seen in this vein.  It offers up plenty of action and spectacle, but always in service of its thoughtful, multi-faceted story.  All the characters rely on very familiar tropes often found in gaming and anime, but they change and grow and subvert stereotypes.  I love tough-girl Vi, cunning Mel Medarda, and the deeply twisted Silco.  This is a universe where everyone is trying to do the right thing according to their own systems of morality, but good intentions often bring about catastrophe.  I appreciate that every major conflict is driven by specific choices and their unintended consequences.  The writing does a nice job of giving every major player an arc, and showing us how the world works more often than telling us how it works.   There's only one major character I have reservations about, Jynx (Ella Purnell), a Harley Quinn-like agent of chaos, whose mental instability makes her a little too much of a psycho cutie cliche. And yet, she's so charismatic, it's hard to take your eyes off of her.    

"Arcane" has some rough edges and tonal problems.  Parts of the story are repetitive - Vi is kidnapped or carried off with alarming frequency - and there's no getting around its reliance on easy shocks.  However, I like that it takes its cues from darker, bleaker anime series like "Fullmetal Alchemist."  And it does right by its characters, never letting the audience write anyone off, even when they seem irredeemable.  I have no experience with Riot Games or "League of Legends" whatsoever, but the show got me completely invested in the fates of these characters and their world.  I can't wait to see what else this franchise has in store.  

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My Favorite Paul Verhoeven Film

I've learned to appreciate Paul Verhoeven's films though I've never much liked them.  I think of his style as characterized by an aggressive, harsh vulgarity.  People's behaviors are crude and animalistic.  Violence and gore are shown explicitly.  Human bodies are fetishized, and often so in-your-face that they're rendered alien and grotesque.  I still associate him with the 1980s because his boundary-pushing Hollywood efforts like "RoboCop" clearly left a mark on the filmmaking of that era - and not always for the better.  

Before Verhoeven came to Hollywood, however, he was a notorious Dutch provocateur, making very sexually frank, uninhibited films that often attracted controversy.  They were satirical, lurid, and frankly very culturally specific.  I had a rough time connecting to his characters, who felt very remote and driven by forces that I didn't understand.  The one exception was "The Fourth Man," the psychological thriller that Verhoeven made in 1983, which attracted wide acclaim, and would help to propel him toward larger, more ambitious films.  "The Fourth Man" stands out from the rest of Verhoeven's early work, because it follows the familiar template of a mystery film.  Verhoeven had to reign in some of his wilder impulses to get the plot to work, which also had the benefit of making the film more accessible.     

However, that plot still features many of Verhoeven's favorite themes, exploring homosexuality, sexual obsessions, and a healthy dose of frustrated Catholicism.  The hero becomes ensnared in the machinations of a black widow who murdered three of her former husbands.  He's constantly having dreams and visions of impending doom.  These dream sequences present the opportunity for Verhoeven to really indulge in stylized, surrealist imagery.  He plays with bright colors and iconography to great effect.  Memorably, there's the leading man's encounter with a life-size sexy Jesus on the crucifix, and a nightmare where the femme fatale cuts off his genetalia with a pair of scissors.   The sex - and there's a lot of sex in this movie - always comes with a sense of danger and foreboding.  

There's also a level of camp in the film that may or may not be intentional.  The performance of leading man Jeroen Krabbe, especially when his character is supposed to be overcome with religious fervor, is so over-the-top that it's difficult to take the third act seriously.  Verhoeven's images of death and gore are so obviously fake, the most violent moments are also the most silly.  I don't know if Verhoeven intended to undercut and satirize common mystery film tropes, but the obvious artificiality and deliriously heightened tone of the film helped a lot in making his usual stylistic choices more palatable for me.  "The Fourth Man" has a lot in common with Verhoeven's later sexual thriller "Basic Instinct," having a similar focus on trashy thrills and visceral sexuality.  The character of Christine, played by Renee Soutendijk, is an obvious precursor to Sharon Stone's voracious Catherine Tramell, with her striking looks and predatory demeanor.  

Verhoeven has said that the film is related to his "vision of religion," which is highly critical and skeptical.  The hero is ultimately saved and perhaps redeemed by visions from the Virgin Mary, but it also puts him in the hospital, considered mentally ill, with his fate unknown.  I think this is the reason why I managed to connect with this Verhoeven film, as wacky as it sometimes is.  He gets his point across in a way that doesn't get overwhelmed by what he's doing stylistically, unlike the anti-fascist messages in "Starship Troopers" or the showbiz allegory of "Showgirls."  Verhoeven's other explorations of religion, such as last year's "Benedetta," have been less successful.  

When it comes down to it, I respect Paul Verhoeven for constantly pushing boundaries and taking risks in his films, but most of them are clearly not made for me.  His aggressively masculine view of the world and prurient obsessions tend to leave me queasy.  However, the fact that he hasn't lost an ounce of his nasty verve over the years, never allowing himself to become compromised, signals to me that he absolutely deserves the label of great director.  And this post, to be honest, was long overdue.

What I've Seen - Paul Verhoeven

Turkish Delight (1973)

Soldier of Orange (1977)

The Fourth Man (1983)

Flesh+Blood (1985)

RoboCop (1987)

Total Recall (1990)

Basic Instinct (1992)

Showgirls (1995)

Starship Troopers (1997)

Hollow Man (2000)

Black Book (2006)

Elle (2016)

Benedetta (2021)

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"Midnight Mass" Outstays Its Welcome

This is the latest miniseries from Mike Flanagan, who you might remember was the man behind Netflix's "The Haunting of Hill House," and various recent Stephen King adaptations.  I was under the impression that "Midnight Mass" was an original feature, but instead it's a seven hour miniseries that presents a slow burn horror story.  It's a rewarding watch, but requires so much patience that I don't think it's going to land very well with the usual horror audiences.

Two men arrive on the remote fishing community of Crockett Island - Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford), a recently released convict returning home, and Father Paul Hill (Hamish Linklater), filling in for the ailing Catholic Monsignor during Lent.  As the two men settle in, various supernatural events take place, and it becomes clear that they are connected to the church.  We meet other members of the community, including the Muslim sheriff, Hassan (Rahul Kohli), Riley's pregnant childhood friend Erin (Kate Siegel), Dr. Sarah Gunning (Annabeth Gish) and her dementia-stricken mother Mildred (Alex Essoe), town drunk Joe Collie (Robert Longstreet), and the self-righteous church lady, Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan).   

For the first chunk of "Midnight Mass," I was with the show.  I was perfectly happy to watch the slow escalation of the supernatural material, and get to know everybody on Crockett Island.  It's a small, insular community where many people have been touched by tragedy.  Riley struggles to get over his guilt and substance abuse issues.  Father Paul is carrying a secret that is deeply tied to his faith.  "Midnight Mass" takes the time to really examine Father Paul's struggles to bring the community together, and is meticulously detailed in its portrayal of all the ins and outs of Catholic liturgy.  The characters have the opportunity to talk at length about religion and belief in a way that you don't see very often these days.  And it's great, up until the point where it clashes with the show's other aims.

Because once the gore and the horror kick in, Flanagan can't quite seem to commit to the heightened, Grand Guignol level of carnage that he invokes.  Bev Keane is set up for the entire show to become a really despicable, power-mad villain, but she never gets to go as big or as ostentatious as she easily could have.  Father Paul's final fate struck me as anticlimactic, and not in a good way.  The finale is weirdly stop-and-go, with an especially egregious pause toward the end so that one of the heroines can have a long monologue about the nature of death.  And you might remember that Mike Flanagan has a bad habit of having his characters ramble on about existential matters to the point of absurdity.  It's fitting for a ghost story, but weirdly out of place in "Midnight Mass," which has jump scares and mass deaths and a familiar creature that nobody ever gives a name to - but we all know what it is.

I enjoyed a lot of this miniseries, but I desperately want to edit it down to something more manageable.  You could easily lose ten minutes out of every single episode, and condense whole chunks of the storyline.  There were so many events that felt like they were playing out at a glacial pace.  I like the way the show pulls off some of its big twists, but it's all so drawn out and lugubrious that it's not much fun.  To Flanagan's credit the characters are better fleshed out than most, and tragedy that some of them meet hits harder than expected.  The actors are very good, especially Hamish Linklater in one of the most showy roles he's ever had.  Flanagan does stick the landing, though it takes a while to get there.  However, I worry that he's becoming afflicted with the same tendency toward indulgent bloat that afflicts Stephen King.  

After this and the recent "Haunting of Bly Manor," I am convinced that Mike Flanagan is one of the most talented people working in the horror genre today.  However, giving him carte blanche with a passion project like this has led to very mixed results.

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