"For All Mankind," Year Two

The most fascinating episode of this season is the first, where we skip ahead to the 1980s and get a great montage of how world history  played out differently in this universe.  Margo is now running the Johnson Space Center, and Ellen (Jodi Balfour) is being positioned to take on leadership of NASA.  Ed is head of the Astronaut Office, and Karen runs the Outpost, which has been renovated into a nicer bar.  Their adopted teenage daughter, Kelly (Cynthy Wu) is considering college options.  Gordo and Tracy have split, while Molly and Dani are struggling to stay in the game.  Aleida (Coral Peña) is now an adult, but her road to NASA is as rocky as ever.  

Other prominent characters include Gordo and Tracy's son Danny (Casey W. Johnson), Ellen's girlfriend Pam (Meghan Leathers), Air Force General Nelson Bradford (John Marshall Jones), and astronaut trainees Gary Piscotty (Michael Benz) and Sally Ride (Ellen Wroe).  And if you think that's an awful lot of characters to keep straight, that's a big part of why this season is so much rougher than the first one.  The show has jumped over a decade ahead, to when the space program and Jamestown Base have significantly expanded, but the show spends way too much time on Earth following the fairly mundane lives of its characters.  And where the excitement of watching space travel progress through the years helped to patch some of the weak characterization in the first season, the second makes a lot of those weaknesses plain, because it covers a much smaller span of time.

Where the first season of "For All Mankind" was more heavily focused on being historical and science-fiction, this year the balance has shifted toward melodrama, with several episodes feeling like "Mad Men" lite.  And frankly, it's not good enough to be "Mad Men." I don't like most of the major characters this year.  Maybe it's because we have actors of all the wrong ages playing people going through various midlife crises that seem awfully trite and contrived.  I don't feel inclined to root for Ed or Gordo in their latest bids to reclaim glory, or to fill much sympathy for Karen and Tracy as they keep making self-destructive choices.  It's good to see more prominent roles for Molly and Ellen, who were some of the more interesting supporting players last season, but they don't actually seem to get more screen time or emphasis.  None of the new faces really stand out or get much opportunity to distinguish themselves, though the show has set up several of them to become key players in the future.  

The one character I still really enjoy is Margo, because she's actively engaged in her job as a NASA administrator throughout, and tackling the bigger challenges of keeping the space program going.  It also helps that she looks era and age appropriate throughout, and gets smart, snappy dialogue that wouldn't be out of place on "The West Wing." She's the one who has to juggle the concerns of the White House, the military, and her own people as the Cold War continues to rage, and the moon is quickly becoming its newest front.  Things really heat up with the Soviets this year, and I wish the narrative had been more concerned with the escalating arms race instead of everyone's love lives.  I miss the little snippets of real news footage and cutaways to historical figures that were used so well in the first season.  They still appear in the second, but much more sparingly.   

The show's production values remain excellent, especially all the work in space and on the moon.  Jamestown Base and all the various ships and other vehicles look fantastic.  There are two moonwalk sequences that are among the tensest things I've seen in any media this season.  The finale is a big, effects and action heavy piece of spectacle that is absolutely ludicrous in the way it plays out, but so impressively executed that I can't really complain.  While I'd like "For All Mankind" to be a more staid, pseudo-documentary style program, that's not what the show is.  It may be hard science-fiction, but it wants to be entertaining above all else.  So it builds up larger-than-life heroes, indulges in maudlin pathos, and everybody always has the worst timing.

And it's good enough at doing those things that I'll keep watching.  I'll probably still be frustrated with the show, but I'll keep watching.     

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Meet "Shiva Baby"

Back in 2015, Trey Edward Shults made a little-seen independent film called "Krisha," about an elderly woman whose mental state disintegrates during a Thanksgiving gathering.  "Shiva Baby," directed by Emma Seligman, has more or less the same plot, except that we have a young Jewish woman attending a shiva with her parents.  Also, it's a black comedy.

Danielle (Rachel Sennott) is a college senior who has a sugar daddy relationship with a man named Max (Danny Deferrari).  She attends the shiva of a distant relative with her parents, Debbie (Polly Draper) and Joel (Fred Melamed), and finds Max also attending.  Max finds out, via the circulating gossip, that Danielle has lied about financial status and career plans.  Danielle finds out that Max is married to a woman named Kim (Dianna Agron), who is also at the shiva with their baby in tow.  Danielle's childhood friend Maya (Molly Gordon), who she's had some bad history with, is also in attendance to help escalate tensions.

"Shiva Baby" is the ultimate nightmare family event, where all the comfortable fictions that Danielle relies on get shredded by her family over the course of one afternoon.  At first, it's just the usual little white lies about her plans for the future - that she's studying, and has interviews lined up.  Then, the thornier, more personal business starts coming out.  And all of this is done through the relentless chit-chat of nosy friends and extended family.  Seligman's portrayal of the tight-knit Jewish community is very loving, even as she shows how unbearable it is.  There seems to be an endless stream of elderly, beautifully dressed women who want to grope, feed, and interrogate Danielle about her love life and career prospects.  Her parents think nothing of trotting out the most embarrassing episodes from her past and setting her up for future humiliations - all with the greatest affection.  There's a clear generational divide, and the younger characters have their own unspoken rules.  I love the little rituals and absurd bits of behavior that Seligman captures - everyone ignoring Max's screaming baby, all the passive-aggressive micro-aggressions, and several attempts to be helpful going horribly awry.  

The cast is great.  This is the first thing I've seen Rachel Sennott in, and she's fully in command of the movie, both dramatically and comedically.  Danielle's great failing is that she hasn't been honest with anybody, and her attempts to try and control the damaging information reveal all her insecurities and foibles.  Her best moment is a bit of physical comedy with the buffet that every woman will understand all too well.  Draper and Melamed are a lot of fun as her parents.  I appreciate that while they're insufferable, they're also quite lovable.  It might take a minute or two for them to register when Danielle really is in distress, but then they immediately want to help.  Deferrari and Gordon as Max and Maya, who have very good reasons for being upset with Danielle, keep up the glowering and the hostilities nicely.  I wish the film had gone into more detail on Danielle and Maya's relationship, which is glossed over very quickly, since it's an unusual wrinkle in the dynamics that nobody seems comfortable with.

The filmmaking is a lot of fun, gradually ratcheting up the anxiety through uncomfortable camera angles and elements of sound design.  When Danielle feels cornered, the gossip gets harder and harder on the ears, even though the content is just inanities.  More obvious cinematic tricks are kept to a minimum, fortunately.  The film is more effective for how wonderfully plausible it is, and how organically the comedy is integrated.  A major theme is that everyone trying to be considerate and trying to put on their best face for others results in everyone being miserable.  This results in two of the film's best scenes - one involving an impromptu job offer, and another involving Danielle's parents' van.        

Out of everything I've seen in 2021 so far, "Shiva Baby" has been the most pleasant surprise.  I'm looking forward to seeing what Seligman and Sennott do next.

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So, About "Loki"

Spoilers for the first three episodes ahead.

Of all the MCU Disney+ series that have been released so far, "Loki" feels the most of a piece with the cinematic releases, specifically the more comedic installments like "Thor Ragnarok" and the cosmic adventures like "Guardians of the Galaxy."  Part of this is because "Loki" is a show that serves as an immediate sequel to the recent "Avengers" films, tying up one of the loose ends.  We finally get to learn  what happened after Loki (Tom Hiddleston) got his hands on one of the Infinity Stones during Tony Stark's trip to the past, and got a chance to change his fate.   

"Loki" has a very high concept, very comic book premise.  After his escape, Loki is almost immediately caught by the TVA, the Time Variance Authority, which is an organization in charge of correcting anomalies in the timeline.  The TVA exists in one of those fabulous fantasy planes of existence, like "The Good Place," where the metaphorical and metaphysical are whimsically rendered as a somewhat sinister bureaucracy.  The TVA has agents, judges, "hunters," analysts, and receptionists, who work in a swankily designed retro office environment, shuffling paperwork, monitoring data, and taking their orders from the unseen big bosses upstairs.  Loki is deemed a "variant," an alternate version of himself that is a threat to the sanctity of the timeline.  He's slated for "pruning," until a TVA agent named Mobius (Owen Wilson) recruits him to help chase down a more dangerous variant.

Creator and showrunner Michael Waldron is an alumnus of various Dan Harmon shows like "Rick and Morty," and I can definitely see some DNA from those projects in "Loki."  The series has a knowing, satirical attitude towards its fantasy concepts and an immense scope, where the characters are using portals to jump to different worlds and different time periods at the drop of a hat.  We're in the Gobi desert one minute, then ancient Pompeii the next, and then a futuristic big box store the next.  And with Marvel's resources, everything looks fantastic.  It occasionally feels like watching "Doctor Who" with a budget that "Doctor Who" could only dream of.  However, the show does suffer from being too ambitious - it keeps trying to top itself with wilder and wilder concepts, and executes these hairpin turns that sometimes work and sometimes don't.  Nearly every episode introduces major new characters all the way through to the end.  I'm glad "Loki" is getting a second season, because it doesn't feel like the show has done enough with half of the concepts that it introduces.

The talented cast do the bulk of the work making sure that this thing is grounded in some kind of emotional reality, and the mystical babble is able to be mistaken for sane, coherent dialogue.  Hiddleston's Loki has already had a redemption arc in the movies, and here we get a very different version - more self-reflective and self-directed.  Hiddleston makes the most of his new wealth of screen time to really dig into what makes Loki tick.  Without his powers as a prisoner of the TVA, he finally has some time for introspection, and to consider alternate pursuits - like friends and a potential love interest.  Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha Raw, and Wunmi Mosaku as TVA employees are great - Wilson in particular brings a wonderful comedic energy to this universe.  However, the actor that really got my attention was Sophia DiMartino, who plays a variant named Sylvie.  This is the first thing I've seen her in, and her presence is amazing.      

 

At six episodes, "Loki" really only feels like half of a proper season of television.  An awful lot of the show feels like it's setting things up for bigger payoffs down the line, not only for itself but for the rest of the MCU.  This is infuriating to some degree, but Loki as a character progresses enough during the show that I found it a worthwhile watch anyway.  Too much ambition is always better than too little, and while some of the show's conceits fall flat, it's plenty entertaining the whole way through.  

The show also has my favorite surprise cameo so far - I won't spoil it, but it's nice to know that "Loki" is in the hands of complete and utter nerds.

    

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"Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and "Dumb & Dumber"

 1994 was the year of Jim Carrey, the year he had three hit movies, all of which were successful enough to have sequels and Saturday morning cartoon spinoffs.  I saw and really enjoyed "The Mask," but I never watched the other two movies that made Carrey a star: "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and "Dumb & Dumber."  So, I thought it was time to correct this and take a stroll through nostalgia land.

It's not that I avoided these two movies.  I was a teenager when they came out and had the opportunity to see them.  However, from what I'd seen of the ads and clips, "Ace Ventura" and "Dumb & Dumber" featured the kind of juvenile humor that I associated with Adam Sandler, Pauly Shore and Jim Varney movies, which weren't really for me.  It also didn't help that for the longest time, I thought that both "Ace Ventura" and "Dumb & Dumber" were directed by the Farrelly brothers, whose subsequent movies never impressed me much.  Well, except "Fever Pitch."    

Frankly, my instincts were correct.  "Dumb & Dumber" is one of the hardest watches I've ever sat through.  It's one of the movies that popularized the kind of moronic gross out humor that plagued the comedy genre for the next two decades, and still rears its head occasionally.  The movie is literally two hours of grown men acting like six year-old boys.  There's a lot of eye-rolling toilet humor, a lot of screaming, and a lot of casual crassness that never quite becomes profane.  Jim Carrey as Lloyd Christmas and Jeff Daniels as Harry Dunne are the ne plus ultra idiot manchildren.  They can put on a front of normalcy, but their natural state is one of embracing the male id with everything they've got.    

It's kind of impressive how relentlessly, aggressively awful Harry and Lloyd are.  The Farrellys are not artless in their puerility.  Some sequences, like the makeover montage, are actually pretty enjoyable for their subversiveness.  And I have to give Carrey and Daniels their props for committing so hard to such physically demanding roles.  They're constantly bouncing around the screen, wrestling and crashing into things, and performing endless pratfalls.  Alas, I couldn't enjoy much of it.  Mostly, I just cringed and waited out the clock, glad that this wasn't an R-rated film like "There's Something About Mary."  if this had been the first Jim Carrey movie I'd seen, it would have taken me a long time to get over it.      

"Ace Ventura" isn't really to my taste either, but I found it much more watchable and entertaining.  Jim Carrey is obnoxious in the title role, but he's dialed way, way down from "Dumb & Dumber," and occasionally shows signs of the genial charm that would help him transition into dramatic roles a few years later.  Ace Venture is socially graceless, but he's intelligent and he's good at what he does.  Even though "Dumb & Dumber" and "Ace Ventura" have the same content rating, "Ace Ventura" is far tamer and less malicious.  The humor is silly more than gross, with the unfortunate exception of the ending, which involves an extended transsexual panic joke that has aged badly enough that it's pretty wretchedly offensive now. 

 

It's in "Ace Ventura" that Carrey really distinguishes his brand of physical humor.  He's able to turn himself into a cartoon character with his wildly exaggerated facial expressions and willingness to be outrageous.  He's great playing off all the animals, harassing football players, and making a nuisance of himself.  Director Tom Shadyac, who had his feature debut here, knows exactly what to do with him.  Everything in the movie is big, loud, in-your-face, and heightened to match.  It feels like a hyperactive kids' movie, and I suspect that this is one of those films that is best loved by little boys of a certain immature mentality.    

As for me, a rapidly aging woman with a historically terrible sense of humor, this retrospective has proved illuminating, though not particularly pleasant.  The irony is that I really like Jim Carrey as an actor, but I have no patience for the majority of his most successful films.  I liked all of his movies that made no money - the artsy, pretentious flicks like "Man in the Moon" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."  However, you can't really talk about his career without the context of "Ace Ventura" and "Dumb & Dumber," so I'm glad I finally bit the bullet.

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My "Incredibles 2" Rant

Many PIXAR movie spoilers ahead.

I've been watching some of the recent PIXAR films again, specifically a bunch of sequels and prequels that have quickly been forgotten by the mainstream.  Honestly, I like some of these films better than the originals - "Monsters U," "Cars 3" and the last two "Toy Story" films.  Even though they're considered second tier PIXAR movies, they're still leaps and bounds ahead of most other animated films.  And then we come to "Incredibles 2," which I've come to regard as the most disappointing film that PIXAR ever made.  Yes, even moreso than "Cars 2," because who seriously had any expectations for "Cars 2"?

This is not to say that "Incredibles 2" is not a good film.  It is a perfectly entertaining two hours of action and comedy and superhero hijinks.  However, aside from the improved animation, there's nothing in it that's up to par with the original "The Incredibles" from 2004.  I originally wrote a very brief, perfunctory review of "Incredibles" 2 when it was released in 2018, not quite being able to articulate at the time why I felt so dissatisfied with the film.  It wasn't until I went back and revisited the other films PIXAR was making from around this time that I realized why "Incredibles 2" bothered me so much.  To put it bluntly, nobody learns much and nothing changes.

Let's look at some of the other PIXAR franchise films.  What really struck me about "Toy Story 3," "Toy Story 4," and "Cars 3" was that they poignantly acknowledge the passage of time.  Andy grows up and passes his toys along to Bonnie.  Lightning McQueen retires and becomes a trainer.  Others, like "Finding Dory" and "Monsters U," shift their focus to different characters, putting the previous stars in smaller supporting roles.  Even "Cars 2" is more of a Mater movie than a Lightning McQueen movie.  PIXAR movies are so good at delivering big, emotional moments, in part because they don't hesitate to tackle those big, emotional times in people's lives, when things change and there's the opportunity for growth.

And this is what's missing in "Incredibles 2."  Fourteen years after "The Incredibles," the sequel picks up seconds after the first movie ended with the fight with the Underminer.  The only character who has to deal with a major life change is Mr. Incredible, who has to be Mr. Mom when Mrs. Incredible gets a new job.  The new job could have been an interesting hurdle for Mrs. Incredible, but it's not treated that way by the narrative.  She has no trouble adjusting whatsoever.  Violet's got the same teenage love troubles from the first film, while Dash doesn't get an arc at all, and Jack Jack is comic relief.  There's no emotional stakes here for the family remotely on the same level as what we saw in "The Incredibles," no real shaking up of the status quo.  The whole film feels like it's treading water, not a retread of the first film, but showing no interest in really progressing.

There are a lot of reasons I can think of for why there was no time jump.  Maybe they wanted to keep Jack Jack a baby, as his material is easily the best part of "Incredibles 2."  Maybe they wanted to keep the '60s aesthetics that were such a big part of the first film's charm.  However, there's no good reason for why the family dynamics remain so static.  Even if you consider that everyone's in the same place they were in after "The Incredibles," enough big changes have recently happened that they should have more of an effect on all the characters.  Violet and Dash got to let loose with powers!  Their parents just dodged a major marital crisis!  They should still be dealing with the fallout of all this, right?  Even the Mr. Mom plot is less about Mr. Incredible coming to terms with being a primary caregiver than just having a rough transition and some burnout.    

Then there's the villain, the Screenslaver, who has such convoluted motivations that I couldn't really follow what was going on thematically.  They hate Supers, so they go to the trouble of almost bringing them back into the public eye, with the intention of painting them as all baddies.  And they hate them because a Super failed to save someone in their past, and it's somehow all the Supers' fault for giving everyone a false sense of security.  And all the Screenslaver monologuing about everybody being addicted to their screens and simulacra of reality was a red herring.  Unless superheroes equate to watching too much TV?  There are also personal stakes missing here - I feel like Helen and Evelyn's bantery relationship could have lead to more interesting places, but I don't see anything on the level of Bob and Buddy's failed hero worship link from "The Incredibles."                 

The production of "Incredibles 2" was rushed, and it shows.  "Incredibles 2" and "Toy Story 4" swapped release dates at one point, which meant "Incredibles 2" lost an entire year of development time.  We know that Brad Bird's initial idea for the film had to do with AI instead of brainwashing screens, and the villain was swapped out at least twice, but there have been persistent rumors that there were other, bigger changes that negatively impacted the finished product. Now, this kind of major rejiggering happens with animated films all the time, but it's pretty obvious that "Incredibles 2" needed that extra year.  "Toy Story 4" is about Woody having a major shift in worldview and deciding to change his life completely.  The biggest development in "Incredibles 2"?  Mr. Incredible learns to be a better father.  And that makes for a nice movie, but also a very underwhelming one.   

I try to resist wondering what an "Incredibles 2" made in the same spirit as "Toy Story 3" or "Cars 3" would have looked like.  Would Violet and Dash be struggling to escape their parents' shadows?  What would Jack Jack be like as a teenager in the 70s?  Or Bob and Helen as grandparents?  Well, maybe we'll find out if they ever make "Incredibles 3."

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"Luca" is the Perfect Summer Film

Luca (Jacob Tremblay) is a young sea monster who lives off the coast of Italy, and has been warned by his protective parents (Maya Rudolph, Jim Gaffigan) to stay away from the surface and human beings.  However, Luca befriends Alberto (Dylan Jack Grazer) another, slightly older sea monster boy, who lives on a deserted island and shows him the fun of breaking the rules.  The pair discover that they transform into human beings when they dry off, and eventually find their way to the seaside town of Portorosso, and the yearly triathlon competition where their new pal Giulia (Emma Berman) aims to dethrone the reigning champ, Ercole (Saverio Raimondo).

Director Enrico Casarosa isn't shy about stuffing all the nostalgic Italian imagery he can into "Luca," and it's notable that his major aesthetic references are decidedly not other PIXAR films.  Instead, this feels like one of Hayao Miyazaki's early features, full of gorgeous scenery and picturesque locales, that the characters explore at a lackadaisical, unhurried pace.  The film takes its time to really enjoy its setting, in this case the picture perfect little town of Portorosso, where the kids are constantly eating gelato and playing soccer.  There's  a lot of influence taken from the sunny Adriatic vistas of "Porco Rosso."  The characters are more stylized and look a bit like Aardman Animation stop-motion creations, mostly around the mouths.  They behave more like traditionally animated cartoons too, with more exaggerated expressions and movements.  

After years of chasing photoreal visuals, you can feel PIXAR taking a step back from realism, and it's to the movie's benefit.  "Luca" is a beautiful blend of the real and the stylized.  You have characters like Machiavelli the cat and Uncle Ugo (Sacha Baron Cohen), who are utterly cartoons, but are made to credibly inhabit more realistic places.  Portorosso is an idealized destination, built of old memories of Italian films from the 1950s, but there's a nice tactility to the narrow streets and brightly painted buildings.  And then you have all the rain and water animation, which look as good as any effects work that PIXAR has ever done.  This is one of those films that I'd recommend just on the strength of how good it looks, and the kind of relaxing, idyllic atmosphere that it's able to conjure up.  I wouldn't be remotely surprised if we saw a spike in Italian tourism after this.   

And while it may not be to everyone's taste, I appreciate that "Luca" is not an epic adventure that deals with terribly weighty subjects.  It's a smaller scale story that is mostly about a trio of kids becoming friends and growing up a little over one happy summer.  Many exciting things happen, with everyone training for the big race, and the sea monster kids having to keep up the ruse that they're visiting humans from out of town, but all the stakes are fairly small and personal.  It's the right size adventure for this set of characters, and I wish more animated films were comfortable enough to do this.  We get a lovely resolution at the end of the story, but also a credits sequence that hints at everyone's further adventures - a format that Studio Ghibli uses frequently.   

I debated over whether to say anything about the LGBT narrative that's formed around the film, which honestly feels like wishful thinking to me.  The kids are all prepubescent, and their behavior isn't suggestive of anything more than platonic friendship as far as I can tell, but you can't stop people from speculating.  The film is rated PG for some mild language and risky behavior - Luca and Alberto enjoy riding their homemade Vespa scooter down very steep hills - but is otherwise completely safe and inoffensive.  "Luca" is easily the best kids' film of the summer, and I hope its absence from theaters won't dissuade PIXAR from making more original films like it.    

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"The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" Gets Complicated

Spoilers for the first two episodes and "Avengers: Endgame" ahead.

Of the Marvel series that were announced back when the whole Disney+ scheme was getting off the ground, "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" was the one that I was looking forward to the least.  Sam Wilson (Anthonie Mackie) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) struck me as two of the least interesting heroes in the MCU.  Bucky in particular had been so poorly handled in some of his previous outings that I had written him off as a fundamentally unsympathetic character.  

The show at least has a good jumping off point.  At the end of "Avengers: Endgame," Steve Rogers handed the Captain America shield to Sam.  But what are the ramifications of a black man becoming Captain America?  What are the ramifications of a black man fighting for America, period?  So, the series opens with Sam donating the shield to a museum, and trying to get on with his life, visiting his sister Sarah (Adepero Oduye) and her kids.  Meanwhile, Bucky is also trying to cope with the loss of Steve and living with the ghosts of his time as the Winter Soldier.  He sees a therapist, Dr. Raynor (Amy Aquino), and looks after an elderly man named Yori (Ken Takemoto).  

Very quickly, however, things heat up.  A refugee rights group, called the Flag Smashers, have gotten hold of a batch of super soldier serum.  They're lead by a passionately idealistic teenage girl named Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman), and bent on causing all sorts of trouble around the globe.  Wary of their escalating violence, the US government has commissioned a new Captain America to help deal with them - one Captain John Walker (Wyatt Russell), backed up by his black best friend, Battlestar (Cle Bennett).  Many other familiar characters end up back in the mix, including Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp) and Baron Zemo (Daniel Bruhl), as well as several surprises that I won't spoil here.    

There's a lot of interesting material in this show, but the execution is very, very messy.  This is one of the most adult projects to come out of the MCU yet, looking into the effects of systemic racism, imperialism, PTSD, and the suppression and neglect of vulnerable groups.  The ambition is very commendable, and I like that it takes a sympathetic stance toward the hardships faced by refugees and  minority communities.  These are issues with no easy answers, and the show embraces the frustration of trying to make difficult judgement calls and avoid labelling people as terrorists and villains.  The trouble is, Karli and the Flag Smashers are clearly villains, even though their intentions are good.  They resort to deadly violence at the drop of a hat, and it's impossible to justify their actions.  The show doesn't try very hard anyway, having Erin Kellyman deliver impassioned speeches in the place of actually showing us the refugee crisis.  And while the idea of Karli as a sympathetic Joan of Arc figure is fine in theory, she doesn't work onscreen at all - and sticks out like a sore thumb in every scene she's in.

The arc of John Walker is more successful.  He is legitimately compelling as the guy who's been picked to be the new Captain America based on his service record.  Unfortunately, he's not up to the task, and I don't think it's much of a surprise that he also shows villainous tendencies.  However, Walker is better constructed, and thanks to Wyatt Russell he's legitimately a complicated and interesting figure.  Out of everyone in "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier," he comes off the best because he's got the clearest and most complete story.  In second place is probably Zemo, because Daniel Bruhl is terribly charming, and able to give us a much better, more well-rounded picture of the character than we got in previous MCU installments.  I hope they do more with him in the future.  

As for Sam and Bucky, the series does its job of humanizing both of them.  Sam gets more of the heavy thematic stuff, working out who he really wants to fight for and why, while Bucky is still on the road to redemption.  Seeing them both interacting with normal people in normal environments helps immensely in confirming that they actually have personalities.  They're still not close to being MCU A-listers, but this is a good start.  Part of the problem is that they're obliged to spend so much time going through the expected action-adventure plot, and it's not a good one.  The story is convoluted, repetitive, badly paced, and hard to follow at times.  Sam and Bucky are billed as co-leads, but the show's not really about their friendship, and there's a disappointing lack of banter.  

I appreciate that "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" wants to be smarter and more meaningful.  However, all it can do is make these big, symbolic gestures using stand-ins for real injustice.  It has to do an awful lot of work to dance around subject matter that's too political and incendiary for the MCU.  The Flag Smashers are lame villains because they have to embody way too many vague socio-political forces and avoid offending anybody.  I wish they'd been downplayed or left out of the show entirely, since there are already stand-ins for the forces of clueless American military interventionism and past racial injustice that would have made for much better primary foes, and made for a cleaner narrative.   

Anyway, this was a noble effort at doing something different, and I'm all for seeing where this impulse leads in future installments of the MCU.  But Marvel can do better.  They should do better.  

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Miz Media Mommy

I've been trying to figure out how to write this post for a while now, but I've always been stymied by worries over privacy, and paranoia over sharing too much information.  However, I think I've finally figured out a way to thread the needle.

So, if you've been reading this blog for a while, you've probably realized that I haven't been a "Miss" anything for a long while, and that I have young kids.  And as they've been growing up and watching more media, I've been trying to navigate how to manage their relationship with television and movies.  I've run across a lot of other media-savvy parents who have been excited about sharing their favorite media with their kids, in some cases even planning out at what ages it would be best to introduce them to Ghibli movies and "Star Wars" and so forth.  I, on the other hand, am trying very, very hard not to do that.

My parents are film lovers, and I watched a lot of films with them as a kid, but there was never any kind of pressure to like certain kinds of films.  My mother would roll her eyes at superhero media, and my dad vocally disliked cartoons, but we watched them all the same.  Looking back, I watched a lot of junk, and some of that junk has transmogrified into the classics for my generation - movies like "Hook," "Hocus Pocus," and "Space Jam."  I watched some of the films my parents had grown up with, like "The Jungle Book" and "The Sound of Music," but there weren't many.  In high school, I ended up discovering the "Star Wars" and "Back to the Future" movies by myself, after catching some network television broadcasts.  Nearly every franchise I came to, I ended up watching all out of order.  

I'm trying to keep this in mind as my kids are taking their first baby steps into the world of movies.  They're still at the age when cartoons dominate their viewing choices, favorites are watched over and over again ad nauseum, and many films like "Wreck-it-Ralph" are still far too scary.  I've shown them a few of my favorites, but I've been mostly letting them take the lead.  We watched "The Wizard of Oz" "James and the Giant Peach," and "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" because we read the books first.  Currently, they're far more interested in various television series that their friends are also watching - mostly educational shows from PBS, Netflix, and Amazon Prime.  They're also primed to be more avid gamers than I ever was, already fans of "Minecraft," "Untitled Goose Game" and "Slime Rancher."    

While I want my kids to be able to appreciate the good stuff, I don't necessarily want them to have the same kind of relationship with media that I've had, and they don't need to see movies and shows the "right" way.  While I plan to share my love of films with my kids, I also want them to develop their own tastes.  I want them to be able to discover the classics on their own, and if they have no interest in the classics, that's fine.  Pushing my love of films on my kids could easily be counterproductive, especially since a lot of my favorites are films that are very much of their time.  It would be nice to bond with my kids over certain pieces of media, but if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen.    

Right now, while they're very small and super receptive to whatever I suggest, it's more important to steer them away from inappropriate and misleading media.  But my kids are not going to stay small.  And they already have very strong opinions and preferences. I fully expect to have to sit through many of the godawful kids' films of the 2020s, some of which will become the cult classics of Generation Z.  I expect my kids to become engrossed with media that I can't stand - maybe the Logan brothers or some streamer who plays the same titles that they do.  I expect they'll roll their eyes when I get excited about lame-o old Spielberg movies.  

But maybe they can be convinced to watch "E.T." or "Close Encounters" with me on occasion, just for a few minutes.  And I'll try to keep an open mind about whatever they want to share with me.  The universe has its own ideas about how these things work, and all I can hope for is that they get through the "Pokemon" phase quickly.  

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My Top Ten Episodes of the "DuckTales" Reboot

I toyed with the idea of a combined list, taking episodes from both the original 1987 "Ducktales" and the 2017 version, but there are enough strong episodes of the new series to fill a list all by itself, so best not to muddle things.  So, get out your exclamation points.  Here are my top ten favorite episodes below, unranked, and ordered by airdate.  All the spoilers ahead! 

"Woo-oo!" - Introductions are always fun, and this double episode does a lot.  We've got Donald set up as a loveable, overprotective father, Scrooge as a selfish curmudgeon, the triplets as separate personalities, and the new Webby as a brilliant eccentric.  The new mystery uncovered at the end of the hour promises the series is ready to go places that no other Duck media has gone before.  And the best part is, it does!         

"The Other Bin of Scrooge McDuck!" - The idea of Scrooge having his own secret bin underneath the real one, to keep his most dangerous discoveries safe, is also such a cool, spooky  idea.  While darker is not always better when it comes to kids' cartoons, you've got to admire how creepy and alarming the appearance of Magica here is, tormenting poor Lena and Webby.  Some of the imagery with Lena pushes right up against being disturbing.      

"The Last Crash of the Sunchaser!" - The high point of the season, where everyone hits their emotional low.  As the Ducks work themselves out of a tricky situation balancing act with the stranded airplane, they also finally confront the big secret the show has been dancing around the whole time - Della's disappearance.  The ending, where we see exactly what happened to Della and what happened to Scrooge in the aftermath, is a stunner.  

"The Shadow War!" - At last, the full force of Magica De Spell is unleashed in a truly epic finale to the first season, bringing together all the McDuck allies and friends that we've met over the course of the series so far.  We get to see everyone, including Scrooge, in full battle mode against Magica and her shadows as Duckburg descends into full scale crisis.  Also, Don Cheadle's surprise appearance, via "Barksian modulator" is fabulous stuff.  

"Last Christmas!" - Occasionally "DuckTales" gets too carried away with its numerous references and homages.  The first "DuckTales" Christmas episode indulges in this a lot, patterning itself after "Mickey's Christmas Carol," and having nods to the old Donald Duck shorts and Uncle Scrooge comics.  At the same time it also gives us priceless kid versions of Donald and Della, reworks a couple of familiar characters, and sets up the next episode with Della.  

"What Ever Happened to Della Duck?!" - Della's big episode gives her the entire story to herself, which is unorthodox, but absolutely necessary for a character introduction as monumental to the Duck universe as this.  She is such a poignant and tragic figure, and if "DuckTales" is remembered for nothing else, it should be remembered for debuting Della.  The vocal performance by Paget Brewster does a lot of the heavy lifting, and deserves all the kudos I can give.

"Nothing Can Stop Della Duck!" - And of course, we have to have the big reunion episode when Della finally comes home.  Of course she has trouble readjusting after all this time, and of course there's a bumpy road to reconnecting to her loved ones and learning to be a mom.  It's sentimental as anything, but also totally hilarious, because Della is such a tough customer with an irrepressible attitude.  The nephews' reactions to their intended names are amazing.    

"The Duck Knight Returns!" - "Darkwing Duck" passes the torch from one voice actor to another, and does this neat trick of merging what was originally a meta joke into a full origin story for the character.  There's some not-so-sly commentary on reboots and legacies and the nature of fandoms.  However, the highlight for me is that Jim Cummings goes full, raging egomaniac for his final Darkwing performance, and that they still leave the door open for more.  

"Astro B.O.Y.D.!" - While I enjoy the plethora of anime references, which are often nerdy animation things like the Zenigata walk and an Itano circus sequence, what I love this episode for is that it adds some shadings to the one character in the reboot that I was not happy with the new version of: Gyro Gearloose.  B.O.Y.D. is a great new addition to the show, and tying in his story to the disillusionment of cynical Gyro pays off in such a satisfying way.  

"The Last Adventure!"  - I'm a little sad that we didn't get another season with May and June, to say nothing of the rest of the characters, but this is as good an ending as we're probably ever going to get for any Disney show.  I'm so glad the creators carved out room for Webby and Launchpad to have big moments, and nearly every major character got some sort of resolution.  The credits sequence acting as a big curtain call was especially sweet.    

Honorable Mentions: "The House of the Lucky Gander!" "The Secret(s) of Castle McDuck!" "Raiders of the Doomsday Vault!" "Timephoon!" "Moonvasion!""Quack Pack!" "Louie's Eleven!" and "Escape from the ImpossiBin!"

  

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"DuckTales" Reboot, Year Three

Minor spoilers ahead.

This is the last season of Disney's "DuckTales" reboot, and while I love the show, I think it ended exactly when it should have.  This is a prime example of a show trying to do way too much at once.  There are so many, many characters now, so many more introduced, and the show is starting to get tripped up by its own mythology.  The biggest difference with this season is that there's no big, emotional, high stakes character arc to build momentum behind.  You can see the bits and piece of it - Huey is the most prominent triplet this year, and Mrs. Beakley is keeping a big secret about Webby that gets revealed in the finale - but the season is kept very episodic with few connecting storylines.  

The evil organization F.O.W.L., lead by the Phantom Blot (Giancarlo Esposito), is on the loose, and competing with the McDucks to find a group of special relics.  This means more globetrotting to places like the hidden mermaid commune of Mervana and the Library of Alexandria, and facing F.O.W.L. villains like Steelbeak (Jason Mantzoukas), Black Heron (April Winchell), and John D. Rockerduck (John Hodgman).  And it also means having encounters with other McDuck relatives and Disney Afternoon characters like Gosalyn Waddlemeyer (Stephanie Beatriz) and Kit Cloudkicker (Adam Pally).  And the show also takes pains to check in with every McDuck ally we've already met like Lena, Goldie, Penumbra, Storkules, and Scrooge's parents.  As a result, the most significant new character, Daisy Duck (Tress MacNeill), didn't get nearly as much time or attention as she should have.  

There's nothing wrong with episodic stories, of course, and the show's level of quality remains very high.  I'm constantly marvelling at the amount of work that goes into the designs and animation.  A high point is the episode where the gang travels to Japan, which incorporates a lot of little homages to various classic anime, including specific bits of character and effects animation that only hardened otaku would probably catch.  There are spy, caper, and holiday episodes, plus a bizarre meta episode that sees the family trapped in a '90s sitcom called "Quack Pack."  There's also a double episode that is essentially a backdoor pilot for a new reboot of "Darkwing Duck."  And good grief, the talent that shows up here to voice a couple of lines for a minor character is just ridiculous.  To preserve the surprises, I'm just going to express my appreciation of Hugh Bonneville, Martin Freeman, Michelle Gomez, Amy Sedaris, Keith David, Nestor Carbonell, Jaleel White, and Marc Evan Jackson.  

I appreciate that the show is run by committed nerds, who will not hesitate to create an entire episode around a shameless "Die Hard" joke, but we've probably hit the point of diminishing returns.  There's still plenty of material left for future seasons, but the show doesn't seem interested in getting into the big, emotional stories that made the first two seasons so unusual, and the individual ones are getting more and more obscure.  I'm not sure what a kid who wasn't familiar with "Tale Spin" would get out of the "Tale Spin" episode, and the "Quack Pack" episode's parade of references were already probably pushing it.  Meanwhile, Donald and Daisy only had about two good episodes to establish their relationship, Huey didn't get an arc remotely as well fleshed out as his brothers, and parts of the finale could have been set up much better.    

Speaking of the finale, not many shows get a feature-length adventure to wrap everything up the way this one does, and it's a good one.  In fact, if the third season were just this ninety minute special, it would have solved most of my issues with it.  Older duck fans might have some issues with what the creators do with some of the characters, but within the continuity of the show itself, this is such a treat.  It's especially wonderful to the original "DuckTales" creations like Webby and Launchpad, and if this is the last we ever see of the characters, I'll be satisfied.

Watch this space for my Top Ten episodes of the "DuckTales" reboot, because this show has earned it.  

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"Raya" is Peak Disney Spectacle

Let's get the caveats laid out first.  I am Asian, but not from the part of Asia that "Raya and the Last Dragon" takes its cultural influences from, the countries of Southeast Asia: Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar/Burma.  So I can't really offer much insight as to how accurate or respectful Disney was in the creation of "Raya."  Clearly, as with "Moana," they just went with an amalgamation of different bits and pieces from all of these places, and simplified everything down through a fantasy lens to make it all as kid-friendly as possible.  

Instead of using any specific regions, "Raya" takes place in the magical land of Kumandra, which has been split into five rival kingdoms.  The story is very familiar stuff, echoing many recent Disney films.  You have the tough, admirable princess, Raya (Kelly Marie Tran), who  is betrayed as a child by the princess of a rival kingdom, Nemaari (Gemma Chan).  They accidentally release the monstrous Druun upon the land, who promptly turn Raya's beloved father Chief Benja (Daniel Dae Kim) into stone, and set Raya on a quest to find Kumandra's last surviving dragon, Sisu (Awkwafina), who saved the world from the Druun once before.  Raya has her animal sidekick, an armadillo/pillbug hybrid named Tuk Tuk (Alan Tudyk), and gathers an array of allies along the way, including an enterprising 10 year-old boat restaurateur named Boun (Izaac Wang), a gang of monkey con artists lead by a ruthless baby, Noi (Thalia Tran), and a big warrior named Tong (Benedict Wong) with a soft heart.  

The film is a pleasure to watch for its absolutely fabulous worldbuilding and immersiveness.  The sensory pleasures of taking in the gorgeously rendered animation are hard to overstate.  Water is the big thematic element here, with Sisu able to summon rain and mist, and prance through the air by stepping on raindrops.  The effects animation is some of the best I've ever seen.  The designs are fairly generic, but so well executed that it's hard to raise any objections.  I raised my eyebrows at the sight of Sisu, who looks like an Asian dragon by way of Hasbro's My Little Pony toy line, but her big poofy mane is so tactile and huggable, and it's a delight to watch all the hair animation and fluid dynamics in play when she goes swimming.  

"Raya" is very much an action film, very concerned with fights and chases and spectacle.  It's a little darker than the Disney norm, so there are tense clashes and brushes with peril that might be too much for smaller kids.  There's also a lot of story packed into the film - probably too much - as we end up visiting all five regions of Kumandra in quick succession.  The setup of all the mythology is very brisk and efficient, but I felt the character building fell a little short, especially with Raya and Nemaari.  I like the idea that Raya's biggest hurdle is learning to trust people again after being hurt, but this doesn't provide her with much of a personality.  For all her sword skills and warrior might, she's one of the more generic Disney heroines, even though she doesn't fit the popular image of one.  

Sisu essentially having Awkwafina's usual goofy screen persona worked out okay, but other modern touches come off as jarring.  There are attempts to use modern kids' patter that feel way too aggressive and self-conscious.  The physical humor works better, such as the antics of Noi and her gang of furry tricksters.  I appreciate that we get a more well-rounded cast of Asian characters here than something like "Mulan."  Also, while the animators took a lot of liberties, I vastly prefer Sisu to the sorry excuse for a Chinese dragon that was Eddie Murphy's Mushu.       

I could see every story beat coming from a mile away, and "Avatar: The Last Airbender" did most of this better twenty years ago, but I had a good time with "Raya," and I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to see it on a bigger screen.  I hope this one doesn't get lost in the shuffle of VOD releases, because I was very pleasantly surprised by what Disney was able to accomplish.

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My Top Ten Films of 1956

This is part of my continuing series looking back on films from the years before I began this blog. The ten films below are unranked and listed in no particular order. Enjoy.

Aparajito - The second film of Satyajit Ray's "Apu" trilogy follows the young hero through his transitional years, from childhood to young adulthood.  There are major changes in his life, starting with the family's move from their rural village to a major city.  New opportunities take Apu to Kolkata, and on the path to a bright future, but this requires a separation from his remaining family.  Every step of his growth and maturation is realized beautifully, balancing the excitement of advancement with the sting of loss. 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Paranoia, social commentary, and some good old fashioned monster moviemaking help set this sci-fi horror classic apart from its contemporaries.  The effects work is fairly rudimentary, and the ending loses its nerve - the wraparound sequences are infuriating - but I still get a thrill watching Kevin McCarthy deliver his final impassioned warnings straight into the camera.  The film is so simple, but hits a nerve in the best way.  Stay on guard, or the pod people will be after you next!  

The Killing - One last heist goes horribly wrong, and in the hands of Stanley Kubrick this results in some fabulous sequences of tension, suspense, action, and tragedy.  This, more than any other film, helped to get the ball rolling on Kubick's reputation as a great filmmaker.  He was able to achieve so much with a modest budget and resources, including the staging of complicated sequences like the iconic finale.  And this, more than any other of his features, reflects Kubrick's roots in documentary and industrial film.    

A Man Escaped - I have my reservations about Robert Bresson, but he knew how to put together an excellent thriller.  "A Man Escaped" is an extremely minimalist, simple film about a member of the French Resistance, Fontaine, who is captured by the Nazis.  In depicting his attempts to escape, Bresson focuses on the psychological struggle of Fontaine to maintain his nerve as the situation becomes more tense.  The severity and directness of Bresson's style proves to be a great match for the material.   

The Ten Commandments - And on the opposite end of spectrum, we have the grandiose spectacle of Cecil B. DeMille's epic about the exodus of the Jews from Egypt.  Between Charlton Heston and Yul Brenner taking turns chewing scenery, the opulent production design, and the parting of the Red Sea, this was Hollywood filmmaking at its most Hollywood.  Its four hour length and shameless stunt casting feel oddly quaint in this day and age, and I admit that it's become something of a guilty pleasure.  

Bigger Than Life - This Nicholas Ray melodrama goes in directions I wasn't expecting.  It examines the life of a man played by James Mason experiencing a serious health scare, but also an oddly subversive examination of the American nuclear family.  It's more disturbing than frightening when Mason's mild-mannered schoolteacher starts to go off the rails and turn on his family, and unusually incisive in the way that it draws attention to the toxic nature of  masculinity as it's often portrayed in film.  

The Burmese Harp - I appreciate "The Burmese Harp" for being an out-and-out Buddhist film.  Our hero is a Japanese soldier in Burma at the end of WWII, who discovers his spiritual side while trying to help his fellow soldiers through the aftermath of Japan's defeat.  It's starkly antiwar in its portrayal of man's inhumanity to man, though not as brutal as Kon's later "Fires on the Plain."  There's a beauty and a lyricism to the film that is so appealing, especially the images of the monks and the war-torn landscapes.  

The Searchers - The most iconic John Wayne film and the most iconic John Ford western.  Though made in the classic era, "The Searchers" reflects a more complicated view of the American frontier than most of the films of its time.  Likewise, Wayne's Ethan Edwards is a more complex figure who finds himself an outsider at the end of the film.  "The Searchers" is designed to be an action spectacle, and some of the production values are a little suspect, but the deeper themes and thoughtful story still resonate.

Street of Shame - Kenji Mizoguchi's last film returns to one of his favorite subjects - the plight of women in Japan.  Here, he looks in on the life of several women in a brothel, trying to make ends meet.  He humanizes and sympathizes with his subjects, examining their different motivations and personalities.  Like Mikio Naruse's "Flowing," which came out the same year, the film presents a candid, critical look at the social mores of post-war Japan, and the lack of opportunities for women to find better situations.

The Red Balloon - One of the great cinematic flights of fantasy is this beautiful short film about a boy and a red balloon.  Camera and editing tricks give the balloon its own inner life and will, and capture a child's eye view of the world.  Director Albert Lamorisse had his own children act in the short, which might be why it has such a personal, intimate feel.  The use of color, the dearth of dialogue, and the poetic ending all give this the feel of a modern fairy tale - and one that could only work on film.

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"Nobody" Delivers Guilt Free Carnage

I enjoyed the mindlessly violent movie "Nobody" more than I've enjoyed nearly any other film I've seen this year on a purely visceral level.  And this is strange for me, because I usually have a lot of queasy feelings of guilt about enjoying something this out-and-out exploitative.  Also, I've reacted very badly to similar  films about vigilantes in the past, like "Death Wish" and "Taken."  So, I ended up thinking way too hard about a movie that is doing its best not to have its audience think at all.

Bob Odenkirk plays a seemingly ordinary, middle-aged suburbanite named Hutch Mansell, with a dull job, a failing marriage to a realtor named Becca (Connie Nielson), and two kids.  Hutch, of course, has a secret that the audience already knows.  He's a man capable of great violence, who gave it all up to build himself a normal life.  Now, however, the opportunity to come out of retirement rears its head, and Hutch finds himself up against a Russian crime boss named Yulian Kuznetsov (Aleksei Serebryakov) and his endless mobs of heavily armed minions.  RZA and Christopher Lloyd also play significant characters, but I leave you to discover which ones for yourself.      

So, the big reason why I didn't find "Nobody" particularly distasteful, is because it's a cartoon universe.  The violence, orchestrated by "Hardcore Henry" director Ilya Naishuller, is wildly over-the-top and intended to look cool.  The villains have no depth whatsoever, and exist to be easy targets.  There's a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor, visual playfulness, and obvious exaggeration.  "Nobody" was written by Derek Kolstad, who is responsible for the "John Wick" movies, and this could have easily been a film from that franchise.  It borrows some of the best gags, like minor characters immediately backing off and retreating when they realize who Hutch is.  The action scenes are full of unlikely and impossible acts of badassery, getting more and more outlandish as the film goes on.      

Another key difference is that "Nobody" is not a revenge movie.  There's little attempt to justify any of what our leading man is doing or take the plot seriously.  Hutch returns to  violence because he wants to, and perhaps on some level he needs to.  The film puts much more effort toward showing that Hutch is a good, kind, responsible man, despite his propensity for carnage.  Bob Odenkirk seems like an unlikely action star at first, but he's so good at generating quiet pathos and intrinsic decency.  Hutch appreciates the damage he can cause, and doesn't take it lightly.  We want him to let loose, and Hutch does too, but he refuses to do it indiscriminately, the way we see in so many other films like this.  Even when he finally does find the suitable targets for his ire, he plays fair.  He's not mean about his savagery, and what really seems to tick him off the most is when he's not afforded the same courtesy by his enemies.

"Nobody" fits the genre of the middle-age male power fantasy to  a T, and I appreciate that it's so direct in its aims, and frequently self-aware.  Despite how Hutch is introduced, we're not here to examine the existential malaise of the modern man.  We're here to enjoy watching people get into ridiculous fights and blow things up real good.  Hutch being representative of an older generation of ass-kickers mostly just serves as a handy excuse to feature an old muscle car in a chase scene, and to put Louis Armstrong, Andy Williams, and Pat Benatar on the soundtrack.  And frankly, it's a nice change of pace.      

I look forward to the inevitable "Nobody" sequels, and can only hope that Connie Nielsen gets to join in the antics a bit more next time.       

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Watching "Happily"

I've been mentally compiling a list of indie films that fill a category I like to think of as modern episodes of "The Twilight Zone."  These are character pieces that have genre elements, like "The One I Love," "Marjorie Prime," and "Colossus."  They're limited in budget, but try to say something about the human experience through interesting allegorical devices.  Most of them aren't all that successfully executed, but they usually manage to raise thoughtful questions in a novel manner, so I always enjoy them when they pop up.

"Happily" is one of these, about a married couple, Tom (Joel McHale) and Janet (Kerry Bishe), who are still madly in love after fourteen years together.  They're obnoxiously in love.  They're maybe even unnaturally in love.  This all comes to a head when they're disinvited from a couples' weekend for being too insufferably happy together, and then visited by a mysterious man (Stephen Root) who seeks to correct the aberration that is their relationship.  One thing leads to another, and Tom and Janet end up reinvited to the couples' weekend, which gets very strange very quickly.

The ensemble is the best part of this film, which includes several comedic actors like Natalie Zea, Paul Scheer, Natalie Morales, Jon Daly, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Charlyne Yi, and Al Madrigal as the other couples and friends.  "Happily" would have been a much worse film if it weren't for the participation of these players, who do so much to infuse life into the characters.  They're fun to hang out with, and feel like they're all really friends.  And they do all the vital, nonverbal work of showing how Tom and Janet are such outliers from the friend group. It's fun tracking all of the dysfunctional relationships through the film, and everything builds to one of those delightful scenes where everybody's secrets come out.  The film maintains an interesting mix of comedy and moody, existential horror.  There are several ominous shots of fancy architecture set to electronica music, conjuring echoes of '70s Italian giallo flicks, and a few trippy dream sequences and brushes with nocturnal horror.        

I really loved the first two thirds of "Happily."  I liked the very specific, very weird mood and tone.  I liked all the strange concepts that are set up,  and was looking forward to how they would pay off.  And they do pay off, but not in a way that's very compelling or satisfying.  Taken in isolation, the ending isn't bad, but it's the ending to a different kind of film, a more multifaceted ensemble film where Tom and Janet didn't have nearly the amount of narrative emphasis that they had for the previous hour.  I can't help feeling that "Happily" would have worked better if Natalie Zea or Paul Scheer were the main character, and we'd seen all the events play out from their point of view, so certain events were more ambiguous.  And while I'm okay with what the film decides to do with the supernatural elements and Stephen Root's character, the final resolution is messy and undercooked.   

This is the feature directing debut of  BenDavid Grabinski, who has some very appealing takes on this material, and is able to make the story feel timely without making it feel too obviously of its time.  I like how his take on romance is simultaneously very idealistic and very cynical, and how he addresses adult relationship issues and friendship dynamics that you don't see much of on the big screen.  So, while I don't think that "Happily" really works as a feature, I'm not sorry that I watched it and I'm looking forward to whatever Grabinski wants to make next.  He got about 80% of the way to making something really good this time out, so I'm rooting for him to get some more chances in the future.          

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Errol Flynn and the Swashbucklers

Swashbucklers seem to cycle their way back into the popular culture every couple of years.  Pirate movies, musketeer movies, and really anything with fencing or duels qualifies.  And then there are the echoes of the genre that pop up in so many other adventure films - the lightsaber duels in the "Star Wars" films, and the recent slew of Disney live-action fairy tale films that all lean heavily on action spectacle.  You can trace all of it back to the lighthearted adventure stories and movies that were popular from the 1920s through the early 1950s. 

And if there's any actor synonymous with the swashbuckler genre, it's Errol Flynn.  I'd seen "The Adventures of Robin Hood" as a child, and recognized him as sort of a broad caricature of himself from movies about Golden Age Hollywood like "The Aviator" and "The Rocketeer."  However, I hadn't actually watched his films.  So, while I was catching up on director Michael Curtiz's filmography, I watched the two famous Errol Flynn pirate films that helped cement many of the tropes of swashbuckler and adventure films that are still around to this day.  "Captain Blood" was the picture that brought Flynn and his leading lady, Olivia de Havilland, to stardom in 1935.  "The Sea Hawk," five years later, copied the same model of big budget action, source material from novelist Rafael Sabatini, and a rousing score from Erich Wolfgang Korngold.  

It was a great surprise to discover how entertaining these films still are.  And it's no wonder Flynn became an icon - he's wildly charismatic, and such a delight to watch onscreen.  In both films he ends up in chains and miserable servitude, before fighting his way to freedom and glory, and it's impossible not to root for him every step of the way.  Seeing his antics immediately recontextualized a couple of later pieces of cinema for me, namely "The Princess Bride'' and the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films.  Cary Elwes and Orlando Bloom were clearly cast based on their physical similarity to Flynn, and the Dread Pirate Roberts is transparently a sendup of Flynn's dashing, chivalrous screen persona.  So much of those films are homages and gentle lampoons of "Captain Blood'' and "The Sea Hawk."  I mean, they visit Tortuga and Port Royal in "Captain Blood!"  Everyone gets stuck in a deadly swamp in "The Sea Hawk!"      

The Curtiz films, of course, have much more sincere and melodramatic stories, with less humor and no irony whatsoever.  "Captain Blood" follows the travails of an Irish doctor who is unjustly transported to the Caribbean for helping a wounded man, sold into slavery, and eventually transformed into a principled pirate who is the bane of his former masters.  "The Sea Hawk" sees Flynn play a privateer under the command of Queen Elizabeth I, who has an instrumental role in helping her prevail over the Spanish armada.  The stories are more epic in scope, and the stunts and effects work may be more rudimentary, but they're also more impressive considering their era.  "Captain Blood" notably is only a few years removed from the silent era, sporting intertitles and German expressionist flourishes. 

Flynn himself cultivated a scandalous reputation that probably affected those later screen depictions of him - most famously the crackpot version played by Peter O'Toole in "My Favorite Year."  However, in "Captain Blood," he's brand new, alongside a sparkling nineteen year-old Olivia de Havilland.  He swordfights, fistfights, and performs acrobatics with ease.  Part of me wants to seek out his other films - Flynn and de Havilland were paired for a total of eight pictures - and part of me knows that I've probably already seen his best work.  Flynn was an action star, one of the first, and never displayed much range.      

They do, however, make me feel less trepidation about exploring this era of filmmaking.  After slogging through so many maudlin melodramas and nihilistic noir films of the '50s, I'd almost forgotten how much fun older films could be.  Maybe I just needed a change of pace - and a change in genre. 

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