"Ghostlight" and "Sing Sing"

I had trouble figuring out how to write about "Ghostlight" and "Sing Sing," which are two of the clear standout films of the year so far.  They're both about how their main characters find redemption and meaning through their participation in amateur acting troupes.  In "Ghostlight," a construction worker named Dan Mueller (Keith Kupferer) stumbles across a tiny group of performers and joins them, which helps him to emotionally connect to his wife (Tara Mallen) and daughter (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) as they weather a family crisis.  In "Sing Sing," we watch a group of prisoners take part in a Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program, including long timer Divine G (Colman Domingo) and newcomer Divine Eye, who plays himself.  

What's difficult for me is that both of these films spend a lot of time examining the acting process, which has always been the aspect of movies and moviemaking that I know and care the least about.  I know good acting when I see it, and have always been - to my discredit - incurious about the actual mechanics of what goes into performances.  Media about the profession of acting hasn't been of much interest to me either - it's a big reason why I abandoned "Barry" pretty quickly.  "Ghostlight" and "Sing Sing," however, are much more accessible.  They're about amateurs who have few pretensions about what they're doing on the stage.  These are people who act because they enjoy it and get something positive out of the act of participating in the shows being staged.  

And the shows being staged are pretty chaotic affairs.  The "Ghostlight" players put on "Romeo and Juliet," with the leads being played by middle-aged adults, as a one-night-only performance.  The RTA group has more funding and experience, and decides to do an original time travel comedy that incorporates ancient Egypt, Freddy Krueger, and "Hamlet," complete with "to be or not to be" soliloquy, to appeal to their inmate audience.  However, both films take pains to demystify the process and capture the positive communal experience of putting on a show like this.  We see a few acting exercises and sit in on a few rehearsals, getting to know the actors as they struggle with their Shakespeare. 

"Ghostlight" strikes me as more successful at doing this.  I didn't recognize any of the actors, with the exception of Dolly de Leon, playing a former professional who is in the group because it's the only way she'll ever get to act in lead roles.  The Mueller family is played by a real couple and their daughter, who bring their existing family dynamic to the screen to good effect.  The conceit that "Romeo and Juliet" is mirroring the Muellers' real life tragedy feels a little too tidy, but the emotional journey that we watch them navigate as a result is handled beautifully.  In both films acting becomes a form of therapy for the actors.  It serves as a way for Dan to access and process emotions that he's been closed off from, helping him transform and heal from the past trauma.

"Sing Sing" is a very different kind of film, with documentary elements and more of a traditional character study with Colman Domingo's performance serving as the main event.  The play is a big part of his story, but the "therapy through acting" arc is given to a supporting character, Divine Eye, while Domingo's Divine G is struggling with a more existential crisis related to his incarceration.  This is a prison drama at the same time that it's a narrative about the creative process.  "Sing Sing" makes it clear that there are limits to what this kind of rehabilitation offers, and there's more emphasis put on the relationships formed between the prisoners in the program.  Nearly all the other actors are real RTA participants playing versions of themselves.  

It's curious, but the characters in "Sing Sing" feel more fictional than the ones in "Ghostlight," often coming across as very idealized versions of real people.  The ones in "Ghostlight" are more well-rounded, and often more relatable.  I'm not sure which take is the better one, and perhaps it's wrongheaded to be comparing these two films at all, but I suspect it's a matter of taste.  And in that spirit, I can happily recommend both.  

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Doubling Back on "Blink Twice"

Spoilers ahead.

I was not originally going to write a full post for  "Blink Twice," the directing debut of Zoe Kravitz.  I did a little capsule write-up as part of my post on 2024 summer thrillers and chillers.  This was one of the better ones, but not at the top of the rankings.  I found Kravitz's direction impressive, but you really don't want to scrutinize the mechanics of how any of the drugs or other mind-altering substances in "Blink Twice" work.  However, I couldn't stop thinking about the movie, so I feel compelled to write a little more.  Let's treat this as a post-viewing spoiler discussion.

I think the arrest of Sean Combs and the details coming out about his crimes had a lot of do with my continued interest.  I think watching a couple of interviews with Zoe Kravitz did too.  And seeing the film dismissed in some corners as "Get Out," but with #MeToo and anti-one percenter themes kinda riled me up to defend it.  Yes, all the themes in "Blink Twice" are familiar and topical, but Kravitz really tackles them in a way that not many other directors have.  There's a literal, prominent trigger warning at the beginning of the movie for a reason, but at the same time "Blink Twice" isn't difficult to watch.  There's a lot of humor, action, and smart framing of events to get the horror and depravity across while still being very entertaining.  The multiple jump scare sequence is one of my favorite parts, and I love the casual "what were we thinking?" banter when the women start putting the pieces together.  

I also keep noticing similar imagery in other media.  The private island vacation, the high end clothing, the beautifully plated food, and the luxury items in little gift bags are all things that you see again and again in modern media aimed at women, especially reality programs.  All the Cinderella narratives seem to involve shopping sprees and makeovers, and so many happy endings involve shots of lazing on a tropical shore.  Kravitz sets up these things as a trap, turning everything from the fancy drinks to the specifically designed clothing against our protagonists.  People have pointed out that Olivia Wilde did similar things with "Don't Worry Darling," where the perfect version of the '50s was supposed to be the draw to keep the victims complacent.  However, not very many people view the '50s as some kind of perfect ideal anymore - even the tradwife trend ditches the old aesthetics - and plenty of media from the last thirty years have happily subverted it.  "Blink Twice" hits so much harder because it's using current signifiers of wealth and privilege, all the things that people aspire to have right now.    

And let's not forget that Channing Tatum's Slater King is part of the package.  As we've seen over and over again in recent years, a man with too much money and too much privilege usually turns out to be a monster.  And yet, there's this terrible impulse to keep lionizing the people who win at capitalism, the Elon Musks and the Donald Trumps who have way too much control over our lives, even though they've demonstrated their total lack of decency and morality.  Tatum's over the top performance as this unbelievable narcissist would seem implausible if we hadn't seen this kind of behavior normalized by real people in the upper echelons.  And Haley Joel Osment and Simon Rex are there to remind you that even the harmless-looking funny guys can turn out to be predators.

I want to talk a little bit about the ending, which has attracted some controversy.  Frieda, played by Naomi Ackie, decides to turn the situation to her advantage rather than expose the truth.  She proves just as cutthroat as her subjugators, and just as willing to exploit her newfound power.  It's a dark turn, but a smart one.  I choose to interpret it as a reminder that women are just as susceptible to being monsters, and men can certainly be victimized.  And this kind of nuance is why I think "Blink Twice" comes across so much better than most of the socially conscious horror that I've seen recently.  If you want a happy ending for Frieda, it has to come with a price.  

    

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"KAOS," Year One

"KAOS" is a fantasy series with a fun premise.  What if the Greek gods existed in the modern day, and the world functioned the way that it did in Greek mythology?  Well, to start you'd have a much more abusive and contentious relationship between the gods and humanity, with the all-powerful Zeus (Jeff Goldblum) and Hera (Janet McTeer) as the heads of a dysfunctional family of deities that lives in immortal opulence.  The mortals on Earth spend much more of their lives devoting themselves to worship, knowing that at any moment they could be wiped out by a god-created disaster or turned into an insect.  Defiance of the gods is almost unheard of, and a desecrated monument means a national emergency.  

However, a reckoning is coming, as explained by our narrator Prometheus (Stephen Dillane), who is comically chained to the side of a mountain like in the myth, except for the times when Zeus snaps him over to Olympus to have someone to vent to.  A prophecy has been made that spells the end of Zeus's reign, and Zeus's paranoid, selfish efforts to safeguard his power make his already bad relationships with everyone around him worse.  Hera is constantly machinating behind his back.  His dealings with his brothers, Poseidon (Cliff Curtis) and Hades (David Thewlis) are fraught.  The only one of his kids who will talk to him is Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), the underachiever who is still hanging around, trying to get some paternal approval.  These Olympus antics take up roughly half of the show's running time.

Meanwhile, the other half is about the humans - specifically three humans who will spell the end of Zeus.  These are Riddy (Aurora Perrineau), short for Eurydice, a woman who has fallen out of love with her husband Orpheus (Killian Scott), a man with a secret named Caeneus (Misia Butler), and Ari (Leila Farzad), short for Ariadne, the daughter of the President of Crete, Minos (Stanley Townsend).  If you know your Greek mythology, don't worry about spoilers.  Each classic story is given a few updates and subject to significant reinterpretation.  We see the whole Orpheus and Eurydice story from Eurydice's point of view, for instance, which means spending a lot more time in the underworld right as things are going metaphysically sideways.  However, despite the involvement of notables like Suzy Izzard and Billie Piper, the human storylines don't come off nearly as well as the ones about the gods, as they're often played straight.  All the fun, absurdist comedy, seems to be reserved for the immortal types.    

Created and written by Charlie Covell, "Kaos" delivers what it promises.  The production design is excellent, often incorporating clever little gags and motifs, like the underworld being entirely in black and white, and the Fates (Suzy Izzard, Ché, and Sam Buttery) all being played by trans or nonbinary actors.  The writing is pretty solid, with good pacing, and some resonant themes related to subverting systems of belief and authority.   Where the satire really hits is the material showing those in power to be totally undeserving of it, such as the narcissistic, contemptuous Zeus being thrown into turmoil because he thinks he's found a new wrinkle on his forehead, or the well-tanned Poseidon who of course swans around in a megayacht.  I wish the whole series had been about the gods' domestic squabbles - Hera being nasty to Persephone (Rakie Ayola), and any other woman she views as a threat, is a joy.  Goldblum and McTeer expertly camping it up is just the tip of the iceberg.

I should warn the prospective viewer that "KAOS" is only the first season of a planned three season show.  I'd initially thought this was a miniseries, and was disappointed to discover that the last episode didn't wrap up the way I was expecting.  There are resolutions to be found, but "KAOS" is also clearly just getting started.  I'm crossing my fingers that enough Netflix viewers feel the way I do about the show, and we get to that ultimate ending sooner rather than later.     

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"Int. Chinatown" Comes to the Screen

"Int. Chinatown" is a television show aimed at critiquing how television shows work, specifically cop dramas like "Law & Order," and more specifically how Asian-Americans are portrayed onscreen.  Based on the book by Charles Yu, which was written in screenplay format for extra meta fun, "Int. Chinatown" is about a generic Asian background character, Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang), who decides to be something more.  I never watched much of "Kevin Can F**k Himself," but this functions kinda similarly.  

Willis works as a waiter with his best friend Fatty Choi (Ronny Chieng) for his Uncle Wong (Archie Kao) at a restaurant in Chinatown.  He's close with his parents (Diana Lin, Tzi Ma), and has never gotten over the disappearance of his older brother Johnny (Chris Pang) twelve years ago.  One day a detective named Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet) comes into the restaurant and into his life, spurring Willis to get involved in her case.  However, neither of them can seem to get much attention from the lead detectives, Turner (Sullivan Jones) and Green (Lisa Gilroy), who always seem to be at the center of the action.  Even the lighting gets more interesting whenever they show up.  However, that won't stop Willis and Lana from digging into the mysteries of Chintatown, uncovering the conspiracy around Johnny's disappearance, and finding their way into the spotlight.  

"Int. Chinatown" is not remotely subtle about what it's doing, which is to show how limited the depictions of Asian American on TV have been through a genre that everybody is familiar with.  The episodes are even named after common roles for Asian actors like "Delivery Guy," and "Interpreter," as Willis figures out new ways to insert himself into the story, working his way toward leading man status.  It's also constantly taking apart common police procedural tropes in the process.   We get glimpses of the show that Willis is stuck in, called "Black & White: Impossible Crimes Unit," where the photogenic leads are constantly trading quips, the tech guy's job is to "enhance" everything, and of course there's a grumpy chief (Michael J. Harney) laying down the law.  There are a lot of fun gags with framing and blocking to denote the different levels of reality, and pointing out things that make no sense, like everyone insisting that Lana is a "Chinatown expert."  Eventually, the writers also take aim at old 70s and 80s action shows, and more modern prestige television too.   

There's a lot to like here, but the execution hits some bumps.  At ten episodes "Int. Chinatown" runs too long, and some of the concepts are messy.  There's a subplot with Willis's mom becoming a realtor that feels like part of a different show.   A whole episode is devoted to the super warped reality of advertisements, which never quite comes off right.  There have also been several very good recent movies and shows about the Asian-American immigrant experience, like "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once" and "The Brothers Sun" so a lot of the Chinatown tropes that are being taken to task in "Int. Chinatown" feel very out of date.  I'm also a little surprised that B.D. Wong's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" psychiatrist character wasn't referenced at all, considering that he was one of the few Asian regulars in the genre.  The material that tends to work better revolves around broader, more general cop show nonsense, like a throwaway line about having to specify that the orchestra violinist murder and the string quartet murder are two different murders.    

However, Fatty inexplicably becoming a beloved celebrity because he's such a mean waiter is fantastic stuff.  Ronnie Chieng frequently steals every scene that he's in.  And I'm always glad to see Jimmy O. Yang in anything, because he's got such a terrific screen presence, and works well as a leading man in spite of his character actor looks.  I haven't seen Chloe Bennet in anything since "Agents of SHIELD" either, and she's great here, especially when Lana starts going off the rails. As someone who watched a lot of cop dramas, and recall a lot of terrible Chinatown episodes, I came for the meta, but I stayed for the ensemble.  It's always wonderful to find Asian actors like Diana Lim and Charles Pang who I wasn't familiar with before.  

  

I doubt we'll get a second season, but I'm still rooting for one.

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Growing Up with "Didi"

We don't learn the name of the title character of "Didi" (Izaac Wang) until pretty late in the film.  We know his friends, Fahad (Raul Dial) and Soup (Aaron Chang) call him Wang Wang.  He tells the older skater kids he's trying to impress that his name is Chris.  However at home, with his ever-nagging mother (Joan Chen) and paternal grandmother (Chung-Sing Wang), who speak very little English, he's Didi, which means younger brother in Mandarin.  Notably his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), who is about to go off to college, doesn't call him Didi.  Vivian and Chris Wang have grown up in the suburbs of Fremont, California, and don't speak Chinese to each other.  They only speak Chinese to their mother and grandmother.  Their father is absent, said to be working in Taiwan.

"Didi" captures a very specific time and place, but also a more universal experience.  Chris is thirteen years old, and it's the summer before he starts high school.  His sister, who he bickers and fights with constantly, is about to leave for university.  He hangs out with his friends, pulling pranks and posting stupid videos on Youtube, which is just starting to become popular.  The movie takes place in 2008, so Chris chats with his friends through AIM, and gathers information about his crush, Madi (Mahaela Park), through her Facebook page.  He works up the courage to talk to her, one thing leads to another, and then everything in his life starts to change much too fast.  And when Madi asks him what she should call him, at first he's not sure what to say.    

I was initially very apprehensive about watching "Didi," which was written and directed by Sean Wang.  As much as I am invested in Asian-American representation, Chris Wang is exactly the kind of teenage boy - constantly pulling pranks, talking like a wannabe rapper, and indulging every stupid notion that comes into his head - that I loathed being around when I was growing up in not-so-dissimilar circumstances.  To be blunt, I was always the Vivian in this story, though my relationship with my younger brother was never anywhere near as bad.  I wasn't keen on sitting through ninety minutes of teenage male nonsense, wrapped in skater-boy nostalgia, like Jonah Hill's "mid90s."  I'll admit here that I had a harder time trying to decipher some of the mid-2000s vernacular and acronym-heavy chatspeak used by Chris and his friends than I had with the Mandarin dialogue.    

However, it wasn't hard for me to find some empathy for the kids in "Didi."  Despite being about half a generation older, I recognized a lot from my teenage years in the film.  Sean Wang captures the look and feel of California suburbia better than most - the sunbaked sidewalks, the kids being a mix of ethnicities, and not being able to go anywhere without a car.  This version of the Chinese-American immigrant community also rings true - the achievement-oriented chatter among the adults, the test prep classes, and the endless unsolicited advice from family members forever highlighting your deepest inadequacies.  The most important character in the film after Chris is his mother, played with just the right amount of warmth and steeliness, by Joan Chen.  I don't know that I'd characterize "Didi" as a film about the mother-son relationship, but it's a big piece of the picture, and done beautifully.  

And by the end of the film, I found I liked Chris Wang very much.  I got invested in his search for identity, his missteps with his friends, his attempts to become a skateboarding "filmer," and finally finding some meaningful connection to his family.  I appreciate that a lot of his journey to maturation comes from  reacting to negative social pressures in a constructive way, and realizing that he doesn't have the luxury of staying an adolescent asshole forever.  Sometimes it's painful to watch, but it's also tremendously satisfying to see Chris figure things out.  Even though a lot of what came out of his protagonist's mouth got lost in translation, Sean Wang got all the important parts across just fine.    

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My Favorite Michael Haneke Film

This "Great Directors" entry was almost titled "The Michael Haneke Film I Dislike the Least."  Haneke makes films I don't enjoy - bleak, depressing, hopeless, anxiety-inducing, and psychologically grueling.  Of course, they're also brilliant.  Haneke films are absolutely thrilling in the way they control and manipulate the audience's perceptions.  What you don't see is as important as what you do see, and you can't trust what Haneke shows you.  He will use the language of cinema to trick you, to mislead you, to pull the rug out from under you, and leave you at the cliff's edge.  There will be mysteries with no solutions, buildups with no payoffs, and suffering without hope of salvation.

Haneke's first feature film, "The Seventh Continent," is one of his most conventional.  It's one of the most horrific, disturbing features I've ever seen, but it follows a fairly straightforward narrative.  Over three years, we watch a well-to-do family live out an ordinary life, but a terrible tension is building in each scene of mundane domestic activity.  We rarely see the characters speak to each other, but simply watch them carry out their repetitive daily chores.  There are many Bressonian shots of hands and objects.  Letters to relatives, read aloud, provide some bare bones exposition.  We are given clues to why the members of the family are so unhappy, but nothing concrete.  There is nothing to explain why they take such drastic action in the last act of the film.

Many of the usual elements of Michael Haneke films are already present in "The Seventh Continent." The married couple, like many Haneke leads, are named Georg and Anna.  Much of the action (or inaction) is relayed in long, unbroken shots.  The editing is very abrupt, cutting to black screens between certain scenes.  Sometimes those black screens linger, emphasizing that more is going on that we're not seeing.    The themes are familiar - existential malaise, nihilism, and the corrupting effect of modern society.  Haneke's filmmaking approach is extremely assured, honed by a long career in television.  "The Seventh Continent" is similar to Chantal Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman" in structure, very formalist and very simple, except that the ending has a more defined escalation, and drawn out climax.  

Even though we're never clued into the why, the family's acts of violence are made very explicit.  I don't think that Haneke would have chosen to show this later in his career.  He's never shied away from depictions of violence, but his later films don't focus on them the way he does here.  Frankly, this is the part of the movie that had me the most engrossed, especially the long, hypnotic scenes of deliberate property destruction.  The way the film is set up, they act as a release or punchline to the earlier, repetitive establishing shots of the family living in this stifling, airless life of alienation and mundanity.  These were the scenes that I found the most disturbing, because I felt a visceral thrill at watching this aspect of the family's self-annihilation.  The much-discussed shots of money being destroyed and flushed down a toilet are more jarring than the scenes of violence against human beings - almost surely because the former is almost never seen in media, while the latter is commonplace.      

I don't find any of Michael Haneke's films entertaining, and I'm not meant to.  Many Haneke films can be described as mysteries or thrillers, but they don't follow the rules for these genres.  In many cases, they actively subvert them, such as the two versions of "Funny Games," which actively seek to frustrate the audience over and over again.  "The Seventh Continent," at least, seems more interested in enlightening the audience than denying them.  Haneke claims that the film is loosely based on a real incident - I've never been able to find confirmation as to whether this is true or not - and if the mystery was taken from real life, I expect that limited how horrible Haneke was willing to be to the characters.  It's strange, but Haneke's films are usually so cold and so inhumane, I feel nothing for the people in them.  "The Seventh Continent" is a rare exception, where I had nothing but sympathy for everyone involved.         

What I've Seen - Michael Haneke

The Seventh Continent (1989)

Benny's Video (1992)

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)

Funny Games (1997)

The Castle (1997)

Code Unknown (2000)

The Piano Teacher (2001)

Caché (2005)

The White Ribbon (2009)

Amour (2012)

Happy End (2017)

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"Twisters" and "Rebel Ridge"

Catching up on summer action movies.

"Twisters" is the kind of simple, old fashioned disaster movie that is designed from the ground up to be a crowd-pleaser.  You've got Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell as the photogenic leads, Lee Isaac Chung directing - seemingly an odd choice until you remember "Minari" was about living in the American Midwest - and the best inclement weather that ILM can provide.  In addition to the disaster sequences and the obligatory romance, "Twisters" also features a plot that panders shamelessly to Middle America.  The well-funded scientists Edgar-Jones initially teams up with are positioned as the baddies, while the ragtag, thrill-seeking gang of storm chasers, who cultivate a social media following, are positioned as the heroes.  And to the credit of the filmmakers, it mostly works.        

There's been a lot of attention around Glen Powell's participation in "Twisters," since his star is on the rise and he has the showiest part, but the main character is Kate Carter, the meteorologist played by Daisy Edgar-Jones.  I'm more impressed with her than with Powell, as she has no trouble carrying the film and holding my attention, despite being saddled with a pretty dull trauma recovery arc.  I wish the film had made more use of its supporting cast, which includes Anthony Ramos, Sasha Lane, Brandon Perea, and Katy O'Brian - most of them in bit parts.  However, a big mark in the film's favor is that it has no overt connection to the 1996 "Twister" film, and I wouldn't even treat "Twisters" as a direct sequel.  There are a couple of common elements and homages, like the Dorothy doppler device, but otherwise "Twisters" wastes no time on nostalgia.  

And now for something completely different.  "Rebel Ridge" is possibly the most un-Jeremy Saulnier movie that Jeremy Saulnier has ever made.  The director is best known for slow-burn thrillers like "Blue Ruin," and "Green Room" - always very grounded narratives with realistic violence and consequences.  "Rebel Ridge" is designed to be a subversion of one-man-army films like the original "Rambo," or more recently the Amazon Prime "Reacher" series.  However, while it's shown that a single, righteous man on a mission can't defeat a corrupt police force on his own, "Rebel Ridge" makes one big concession to Hollywood-style fantasy.  Terry Richmond, played by Aaron Pierre, is a man of superhuman competence who makes for an incredibly appealing action hero.  I've liked Pierre in other roles, and it's great to see him in a fantastic part that makes him look like the coolest man alive.   

 

"Rebel Ridge" is slow paced, and more concerned with making its case against police abuses and civil forfeiture laws than delivering big action sequences.  The initial transgression against Terry involves two police officers running his bike off the road, and then seizing the cash that Terry intends to use to bail his young cousin out of lockup.  Still,  the action that we do get, and more importantly the long lead-up to that action, is very effective.  The confrontation scenes between Terry Richmond and the cops are tense and engrossing.  Fine one-liners abound.  Saulnier makes sure that both sides get their say, and we're made to understand the systemic incentivization for police misconduct before Terry makes the wrongdoers pay for it.  Those wrongdoers include the Chief of Police, played by Don Johnson, and officers played by David Denman and Emory Cohen.  Anna Sophia Robb shows up as one of Terry's few allies, Summer, a law student who helps him dig into the legal record.

Not everyone will have the patience for "Rebel Ridge" or appreciate its insistence on de-escalating most bad situations instead of going for the big payoff.  There are definitely politics and social commentary in play - economic, governmental, and of course racial.  Quite a lot of "Rebel Ridge" is actually an investigation story, and it zigs where you'd expect it would zag.  The ending will likely infuriate some as much as it satisfies others.  Frankly, I'm pleasantly surprised that the movie is as entertaining as it is while not being subtle at all about its messages.  I hope Saulnier has a few more movies like this in him.

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"Star Trek Prodigy," Year One

"Star Trek Prodigy" is a "Star Trek" series specifically aimed at children, and I had every intention of ignoring it, until the excellent reactions for the second season started coming in. I haven't watched many CGI animated series since the Mainframe shows from the '90s like "Reboot" and "War Planets," in part because the animation quality for television projects has always been pretty rough. "Prodigy" has the advantage that almost none of its major characters are human, so the character animation has more leeway to get creative, and counteract the stiff, plasticine look of most TV-grade CGI.


Initially produced for Nickelodeon, and then Netflix, "Prodigy" is about a group of ragtag youngsters who escape from forced servitude on a mining asteroid by stealing an abandoned Federation ship called the Protostar. How the ship got there and why it was abandoned are mysteries that the show takes its time answering. A twenty-episode season gives the writers plenty of time to properly acquaint us with all the characters, set up the stakes of the story, and spend some time introducing viewers to some of the big concepts of the "Star Trek" universe. The kids include Dal (Brett Gray), a cocky youngster from an unknown species who declares himself captain, Jankom Pog (Jason Mantzoukas), an earthy Tellarite who takes on engineering duties, Rok-Tahk (Rylee Alazraqui), who looks big and scary but is really a shy science girl, Zero (Angus Imrie) an intellectual energy-cloud being in a containment suit, and Gwyn (Ella Purnell), the complicated daughter of the Diviner (John Noble), the villain who runs the mining asteroid.


Shepherding them along is a hologram of Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), who initially mistakes the kids for a group of Starfleet cadets. Even after learning the truth she encourages them to follow their dreams of joining Starfleet, helping them through lessons on the Prime Directive, the Kobayashi Maru scenario, and other common "Star Trek" dilemmas - presented in a kid-friendly way, of course. There are other concessions to the young audience, such as the ship's pet Murf (Dee Bradley Baker), a big, friendly, rainbow slug who acts like a dog. However, there are also a surprising number of Easter eggs and "Star Trek" references for existing fans, including several cameos. More importantly, "Prodigy" feels like "Star Trek" through and through. Our young heroes run through plenty of common "Star Trek" scenarios, from exploring alien worlds, to the ship being sabotaged, to difficult moral dilemmas. There's a big, epic, season-long story involving the Diviner trying to gain control of the Protostar and using it against the Federation, but we also get plenty of smaller, episodic installments about facing the monster or crew disagreement of the week.


In short, I didn't realize how much I'd missed this kind of "Star Trek." Far too many streaming shows are giving us eight measly episodes every two years, and it's so nice to be able to watch the "Prodigy" kids learn and grow together over a longer, more relaxed season. All the characters are pretty tropey, but thanks to enthusiastic performances and committed writing, it's not hard to get attached. Even the hologram of Janeway feels like a well-rounded, very lovable character, entirely separate from the "Star Trek: Voyager" Janeway, by the end of the first season. I'm sure you could quibble over some of the mistakes in "Trek" lore, or the rather flimsy storytelling devices that the writers invent to keep the kids on the Protostar for so long without any real supervision, but that just feels stingy.


If "Prodigy" weren't a "Star Trek" series, I probably would not have watched it, and I'm glad I did. It's a fantastically well made adventure show for newcomers to the "Star Trek" franchise, and I intend to go on to the second season when I have a chance. I especially appreciate seeing how far television CGI animation has come over the last two decades, though I think I'll always prefer the traditional stuff.

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Five Years After "Endgame"

I planned to write a new installment of "State of the Superhero" for 2024, but I really only have anything to say about the MCU.  The rebooted DC films under James Gunn haven't really gotten off the ground yet, and their television offerings have been scarce under David Zaslav.  There aren't any more upcoming Sony Spider-Verse movies after "Kraven," aside from the far-off promise of "Beyond the Spider-Verse," and "Spider-Noir."

So, let's talk about what's going on with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  In short, the Multiverse Saga (Phases 4-6) is not going well.  Phase Four was massively impacted by the pandemic, and the quality of the television and film output was hit-or-miss, introducing a lot of new characters like Shang-Chi and the Eternals.  There was some grumbling about sub-par sequels, but the box office was still mostly okay.  Then came Phase Five, and the wheels really started coming off.  2023 was the worst year for Marvel Studios to date, with the awful "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania," and "Secret Invasion."  "The Marvels" bombed spectacularly, though it didn't deserve it.  The allegations against Jonathan Majors came out around the time "Quantumania" did, prompting his removal from the franchise, despite playing the villain, Kang, who was set to be the big bad of the next "Avengers" film.  Then along came the SAG/WGA strikes, which meant more disruption and delay.  

I'm not going to get into all the turmoil going on at Disney and Marvel Studios behind the scenes that has contributed to the chaos, but everyone seems to agree that the increased amount of Marvel content due to the Disney+ streaming service has drastically affected its quality across the board.  Nearly every announced project has seen multi-year delays, and I've lost track of all the directors who have come and gone from the perpetually in-limbo "Blade" move with Mahershalla Ali, which was initially announced back in 2019 was recentlly taken off the schedule entirely.  The new "Daredevil" series had to be extensively retooled after several episodes had already been shot.  I'm not going to say much more about the upcoming Disney+series, because they'll be dealing with a backlog of already announced projects for at least the next year - none of them very interesting.  However, at least they're hiring more seasoned showrunners for future streaming projects.

What prompted this post was the 2024 Comic-Con announcements, which promised some big things going forward, and signaled that there have been a lot of frantic attempts to fix things out of the public eye.  The biggest news is that Jonathan Majors' Kang is being replaced by a new Big Bad - Doctor Doom, who will be played by Robert Downey Jr.  The fifth Avengers movie, formerly known as "Avengers: Kang Dynasty," has been renamed "Avengers: Doomsday."  The sixth Avengers film is still "Avengers: Secret Wars."  The Russo brothers, who have made some underwhelming films since "Endgame," are returning to helm both.  In other words, Marvel's getting the band responsible for their most lucrative movies back together.  I've seen some disappointment that Marvel is playing it safe and playing the hits, but I honestly think this is a pretty good outcome for everyone involved.  The Russos get a steady paycheck for a few years, and the next "Avengers" films are in the hands of directors with a lot of  experience.

We also got a much better look at the next few MCU films coming our way.  2025 will see the release of "Captain America: Brave New World," "Thunderbolts*," and "The Fantastic Four: First Steps."  I'm not too enthused about any of them.  "Brave New World,"  is going to be another espionage thriller in the same vein as "Winter Soldier," more grounded and realistic, despite Harrison Ford Hulking out in some of the leaked footage.  "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" series was such a mess, I'm glad that Anthony Mackie will have a chance to relaunch his version of Captain America, but the best case scenario that I can see is that this ends up being a homage to political thrillers of the 90s like Harrison Ford's Jack Ryan movies.  "Thunderbolts*" (I expect the asterisk is meant to represent the six main characters coming together) is a team-up movie for the MCU's antiheroes and reformed villains - mostly from "Black Widow" and " The Falcon and the Winter Soldier."  Frankly, it looks like a much less interesting version of "The Suicide Squad," and I'm not really a fan of any of the featured characters.  Florence Pugh's Yelena, the new Black Widow, is okay, I guess.  Bucky's charms continue to elude me.     

Finally, we have "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" which Marvel is pinning a lot of their hopes on.  It's kicking off Phase Six, and will likely lead straight into "Avengers: Doomsday."  However, this has been a difficult piece of material to adapt, and frankly I've never seen any adaptation of "The Fantastic Four" that I've liked.  Nothing about the new attempt is catching my interest so far.  The '60s setting isn't going to help bring in audiences, the "First Steps" title is meh, and the cast is not anybody's first choices for these characters.  The hovering car makes me think this movie is going to be aimed at an audience a lot younger than the ones for the three movies it's following - one of which is the R-rated "Deadpool & Wolverine" that made a billion dollars.

At the time of writing the next "Spider-man" movie was just announced for 2026. It seems awfully fast, but Marvel is going to need those reinforcements.    

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My Top Ten Episodes of "Star Trek Discovery"

We've come to the end of the first "Star Trek" series I've finished in a very long time.  It had its lows, but it also had some highs that I think are worth looking back on.  Most of my picks are from the first three seasons, with one two-parter cheat.  Episodes are unranked and organized by airdate.  And spoilers ahead.

"The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry" - The big spectacle of the show's first two episodes shows off what the big budget can do, but the story doesn't really start to coalesce until the third episode, where we meet several characters, including Lorca and Stamets, and actually tangles with some proper science-fiction concepts - Tardigrades and the creation of the very important spore drive.  Yep, the Discovery runs on mushroom power.

"Despite Yourself" - It's the Mirror Universe!  And a major character has secretly been evil the entire time!  The early days of "Discovery" spent a lot of time reworking elements from the original "Star Trek" series, and the best update was definitely the Mirror Universe being run by a fascist version of the Federation called the Terran Empire.  So it's no wonder why the writers decided to spend a good chunk of the first season with everyone's evil doubles. 

"Vaulting Ambition" - Of course, the Mirror Universe doesn't really get fun until Empress Georgiou shows up.  She is in the running for the best character in "Discovery," and I'm so glad that the show decided to keep this campy version of her around long term.  We also learn what Mirror Burnham has been up to in the Mirror Universe with Lorca, there are agony booths, and the whole thing is just delightfully macabre and very much in the spirit of early "Star Trek."  

"Brother" - Here's our introduction to Captain Christopher Pike, who takes emergency command of the Discovery and kicks off the Red Angel storyline.  We also get a lot of new information about the relationship between Burnham and Spock, whose big reintroduction is saved for a few episodes later. This is also the first appearance of the delightful Jett Reno, played by comedian Tig Notaro, initially a marooned Starfleet crewmember.

"An Obol for Charon" - The big Saru episode.  Our favorite Kelpian thinks that he's about to die when a condition known as Vahar'ai is triggered by his encounter with an unknown life form.  Saru's one of the show's most dependably watchable characters, largely thanks to the performance of Doug Jones.  It's wonderful to see him get a turn in the spotlight, and take his first steps toward becoming the more assertive "Action Saru" of the later seasons.    

"Such Sweet Sorrow" - The final showdown against the rogue AI, Control, brings the second season to a close.  Discovery parts ways with the future crew of the starship Enterprise, who head off to do "Strange New Worlds," and Burnham gets to save her friends (and the universe) after getting closure with her mother.  This marks the end of the "Discovery" in this corner of the "Star Trek" universe, and unfortunately it's mostly downhill from here.    

"People of Earth" - Time jumps can be tricky things, but "Discovery" had one of the more successful ones.  After two episodes spent on separate adventures, Burnham has a big reunion with her ship, and we get a look at how Earth and the Federation are doing in 3188.  And the short answer is, not great.  I know the storyline didn't have the greatest resolution, but the initial setup and worldbuilding for the post-Burn timeline is fascinating.

"Forget Me Not" - 2020 doesn't seem that long ago, but it's when nonbinary representation really started ramping up in the mainstream media, and everybody developed pronoun trouble.  The introduction of Adira Tal stands out as a high point for "Discovery," though I wasn't always onboard with how their character developed throughout the rest of the series.  And the less said about Saru's subplot on improving crew morale, the better.

"Terra Firma" - This two-parter marks Michelle Yeoh's exit from the series, after a brief detour back into the Mirror Universe for a final test, and a meeting with my favorite legacy character in the series.  I sorely wanted more of "Carl," especially in this incarnation played by Paul Guilfoyle.  I'm glad that Georgiou got to go out on a high note, even though the character is supposed to be back in one form or another in future "Star Trek" media.   

"Coming Home" - The fourth season finale is the one with the Stacey Abrams cameo, but it also nicely wraps up the Unknown Species 10-C storyline and gives us a big action finale.  Because this is "Star Trek," the actual resolution comes from talking to the alien threat and convincing it to stand down, instead of fighting it into submission.  And I would have been perfectly okay if the show's creators decided to end the series here.    

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"Star Trek Discovery," Year Five

I admit I'm a little relieved that "Star Trek Discovery" is over.  I liked the first few seasons, but by the end the show was running on vapors.  It's honestly a little hard to remember that "Discovery" was originally launched to be the flagship of this era of the "Star Trek" franchise.  Jason Isaacs, Michelle Yeoh, and some weird looking Klingons featured heavily in the first season, and the "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" spun off from the second season with characters who were initially established as part of the "Discovery" universe. I thought the timeskip in the third season worked out fine, but Michael Burnham becoming Captain in seasons four and five signaled the show jumping the shark and running out of ideas.

After spending a season chasing down an unknown alien species, Discovery spends its last year on a treasure hunt to find the technology of the "Progenitors," the beings that may have created and seeded life across the galaxy.  However, they're up against Moll (Eve Harlow) and L'ak (Elias Toufexis), a couple of mercenaries who want the technology for their own purposes.  Tilly's back from the Academy to help finish out the series.  We also get one new crew member, Rayner (Callum Keith Rennie), a disgraced ex-Captain who Burnham decides to give a fresh start.  He's a more old fashioned hardass who clashes with the touchy-feely attitudes of the Discovery crew.  This makes for a briefly interesting dynamic with Burnham, but not much is actually done with it.      

The whole season is very underwhelming.  The stakes are low throughout, and it's difficult to stay invested.  Moll and L'ak are possibly the worst "Star Trek" villains of all time, a pair of sketchy criminal types who somehow stay one step ahead of Discovery for the entire season, despite far fewer resources.  Individual characters don't have any specific issues to work through beyond the same mild relationship troubles.  Saru courting the Vulcan T'Rina (Tara Rosling) is cute and all, but not compelling.  Booker is still around to be Burnham's love interest, but the writers have stopped trying to give him anything else to do.  Each episode is a self-contained, typically "Star Trek" adventure - we get a "time bug" that sends Burnham and Rayner time hopping, and a Prime Directive moral quandary on an alien planet - but none of them particularly noteworthy.  

The problem here is pretty clear, and it's been clear for a while.  Despite all the resources put toward the show, "Discovery" ran out of story to tell and had no good reason to still be on the air.  Few of the characters have ever been well developed enough to carry individual episodes on their own, and in the absence of a stronger central mission, they frequently feel like they're spinning their wheels.  I strongly believe that the show has the potential to be a "Strange New Worlds," but nobody ever put in the effort.  Too much of "Discovery" was action and spectacle first, and character last.  Occasionally there is a decent science fiction concept explored, or some callbacks to other parts of the "Trek" universe - "Enterprise" fans should keep their ears open during the finale - but there are too many shows now that present better alternatives.         

  

I've been a "Discovery" apologist for what feels like most of the show's run, and I still believe that the early seasons are worth a watch.  I hope this isn't the last we'll see of the characters, but after five season's it's time to move on.  

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My 2024 Holiday Wish List

Okay, it's time to ignore politics for a bit and get into the state of Hollywood.  It's been an interesting year, and a lot of long-running concerns about the industry are coming into better focus.  The strikes are mostly over, but the labor issues are not.  Streaming is quickly becoming a worse deal now that it has more of a monopoly on our attention, and broadcast is continuing to limp along.  The box office is in recovery, but the movies coming out seem to be safer and blander than ever.  Looking back on last year's wishlist, things have gotten better and things have gotten worse.  

So this year for the holidays, I want…

For seasons of television to be longer.  There were too many seasons of ongoing shows this year that were eight episodes and barely progressed their stories.  It seems to be a cost-cutting measure, exacerbated by the strike, and it's driving viewers nuts.  Some of the bigger budget series like "House of the Dragon" and "Rings of Power" take multiple years to produce a season, and the momentum and interest just die if they don't deliver something more substantive to keep the anticipation going.  There are a lot of big titles on their way in 2025, including "Stranger Things," so this is definitely going to come up again.  

For the demonetization of the culture wars.  After the anti-woke mobs set their sights on titles as disparate as "True Detective: Night Country," "The Acolyte," and the upcoming "Snow White" live action movie this year, it's pretty clear that this is all an excuse for the online deplorables to harass women and minorities.  The primary targets are almost always women.  The primary tactic is endless online vitriol about what women are doing or saying or making.  A big contributing factor that has emerged this year is that anti-woke content gets lots of attention on platforms like Youtube, which means there's a significant monetary incentive to keep generating more ragebait.  Youtube and their ilk could fix this - if they wanted to.  Instead, I expect they'll wait until things get out of hand again.  And they will. 

     

For the superhero movie industrial complex to proceed with caution.  2025 is going to see James Gunn's rebooted DC cinematic universe release its first film with the new "Superman," and Marvel release at least three new MCU superhero titles.  If the past few years have shown us anything, it's that less is more when it comes to superhero media.  The flow of Sony Spider-verse movies seems to have finally dried up, but Marvel and DC seem determined to maximize their output.  If we're not careful, things could quickly go back up to pre-"Endgame" levels.  At least the releases of new MCU series on Disney+ are slowing down.  For now.

For the streaming services to get better about marketing.  I'm not sure how anyone is finding out about shows these days, but I know people are looking for more to watch.  I don't know if I've ever had more requests for recommendations than I have in the past year.  My own watchlist is a mile long, but nobody else researches this stuff the way I do.  I'll note that it has been a little easier to keep up with new shows this year thanks to some delays, but there's no shortage of good stuff to watch.  The problem is definitely awareness. 

For one of the Twitter alternatives to gain enough steam to become a real contender in the social media race, because original recipe Twitter is pretty much FUBAR at this point.  I'm rooting for Bluesky myself, though it's quiet enough over there at the moment that I'm actually enjoying the environment.  

For my kids to latch on to a new musical with a soundtrack that doesn't make me want to strangle myself.  I curse the day that "Wish" was unleashed on the unsuspecting public.     

And finally, for all the media coming next year to exceed my expectations, and the creators behind them to have every opportunity to do good work.

Happy Holidays

  

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"Kinds of Kindness" Kinda Rules

Good grief, I can't tell you how much I appreciated a little Lanthimos this year. In a torpid summer season full of franchise reruns, a nasty anthology film from a weird European director was exactly what I needed. It's taken me longer than I'd like to admit, but I've really grown fond of the absurdity of Yorgos Lanthimos's work. If you'd told me fifteen years ago that I'd actually enjoy watching his characters' deadpan line delivery, frequent acts of self-mutilation, and warped attitudes toward sex, I'd have thought you were crazy.


Yet here we are. "Kinds of Kindness" is a rare anthology film, featuring three stories all with the same cast playing different characters, with one exception. Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone each play the lead of one story, and jointly share the narrative in the third. In the first story, Plemons plays a man whose life is totally controlled by his micromanaging boss, and attempts to resist. In the second, Plemons plays a cop whose wife, played by Stone, returns home after being lost at sea. Finally, Stone plays a cult member in the third story who is searching for someone who can resurrect the dead. Other members of the ensemble include Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, and Mamadou Athie, who play different roles in each story. There is one minor character in common, known only as R.M.F (Yorgos Stefanakos). He has no lines, but is a vital piece of each plot, and the stories are titled "The Death of R.M.F.," "R.M.F is Flying," and "R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich."


All of the stories follow the style of Lanthimos's earlier absurdist films like "Dogtooth," "The Killing of Sacred Deer" and "The Lobster." Each explores personal relationships and human impulses through allegory, pushing the characters to wild extremes. I think that these shorter pieces, co-written with Efthimis Filippou, actually work a lot better than some of the full length feature films. The time limit forces the filmmakers to be more efficient in their storytelling, and the bizarre concepts don't have the time to grow stale. I also like the use of the same cast in each story. The characters are unconnected, but there are echoes of the same behaviors and characteristics from one performance to the next, especially because everyone's dialogue shares the same particular cadence and phrasing.


It's been a while since I've seen a film that so clearly invites interpretation. I don't want to say anything definite, except that the stories seem to be ordered by how straightforward they are. The one where Willem Dafoe is controlling Jesse Plemons' life has a pretty clear theme, and the simple premise is taken to its logical end. The next with Stone returning from the sea feels like the modern day adaptation of a folk tale, using dream logic and instances of surrealism. The final story is the most complicated, with some concepts like the cult taking longer to set up. I'm still working out my feelings towards it. Crucially, however, none of the stories feel unfinished or that they should be longer than they are.


I really enjoy all of the actors involved in "Kinds of Kindness," especially when they're able to find the notes of humor and whimsy in the madness of Lanthimos's cruel universes. Emma Stone has a celebratory dance in the last segment that is perfect in its strangeness and intensity. Jesse Plemons gradually unraveling in the first segment is a joy. Lanthimos sticks him in more and more uncomfortable parts of the frame until you can just feel him ready to explode and run amok. And after everyone's antics in "Poor Things," the one graphic sex scene in the film felt more like a punch line than anything disturbing.


The only element that feels very un-Lanthimos is the soundtrack, especially the opening with The Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams." It's oddly on-the-nose, almost spoon feeding the audience the premise of the first story. Still, it made for an excellent trailer, so I'm not inclined to complain.


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My Top Ten Films of 1938

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.  

A Woman's Face - I saw George Cukor's 1941 remake of this film with Joan Crawford first, which is a perfectly fine movie, but far inferior to the Swedish original.  Ingrid Bergman's performance as the scarred leader of a blackmail ring is incredible, and her unlikely redemption is far more moving than the played up romantic relationship and courtroom theatrics of the Hollywood version.  Kudos should also go to director Gustaf Molander, especially for the influential post-surgery sequence.  

Port of Seven Seas - Not all remakes are created equal, however, and I find this greatly condensed version of Marcel Pagnol's Marseilles trilogy a delightful watch.  Written by Preston Sturges directed by James Whale, lensed by the great Karl Freund, and starring an excellent cast led by veteran character actor Frank Morgan, the film is a charmer through and through.  Fans of the original will likely cry foul at some of the changes to the plot and characters, but taken on its own, it works beautifully. 

A Slight Case of Murder - A comedy starring Edward G. Robinson as a Prohibition bootlegger trying to go straight, based on Damon Runyon's only play.  Robinson as this genial, rough-edged mobster trying to join polite society would be funny on his own, but give him a family with similar criminal instincts, a couple of dim-bulb goons, and four dead bodies to get rid of, and you've got a classic.  None of the gags or characters are particularly original, but the execution from everyone involved is perfect.   

Pygmalion - This is a direct adaptation of the George Bernard Shaw play that the "My Fair Lady" musical was based on, with a screenplay by Shaw himself.  Much of the material in the later adaptations was created for this film, including the embassy ball sequence.  I can see why this was considered the definitive screen version of the story for so long.  Wendy Hiller's Eliza Doolittle is one for the ages - painfully genuine and easy to root for -  and Leslie Howard as Professor Higgins is no slouch either.   

Boys Town - Hollywood mythmaking may have never been better than this biopic of Father Flanagan, a Roman Catholic Priest who started a boys' orphanage in 1917.  The story and nearly all the characters are fictional, based very loosely on the real Flanagan and his organization.  However, you never saw a more inspirational, life affirming piece of cinema, with Spencer Tracy playing the embodiment of all of humanity's generosity and kindness, declaring for the ages that there's no such thing as a bad boy.  

Alexander Nevsky - Sergei Eisenstein's historical action film is easily the most exciting thing he ever made.  There are epic battle sequences, touches of manly humor, and hints of the fantastic as the film chronicles the exploits of a Russian hero out of legend.  It's the cinematography that's the main event here, creating these magnificent visual compositions and in camera effects that are stunning to this day.  Every subsequent screen battle owes something to Eisenstein's work here.

Bringing Up Baby - One of the best examples of the screwball comedy pits Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant against each other and a leopard named Baby.  This was a box office bomb upon release, but subsequently rediscovered by generations of comedy fans who couldn't resist the expertly engineered comedic chaos of miscommunications, mistaken identities, bad luck, and physical pratfalls galore.  By the time Hepburn and Grant are dangling on that dinosaur skeleton, I was in love with both of them. 

The Adventures of Robin Hood - Was there any leading man that had more charm than Errol Flynn?  And "Robin Hood" was Flynn at his peak, wooing Olivia de Haviland as Maid Marion, and Basil Rathbone as the villainous Guy of Gisbourne, all in glorious Technicolor.  The movie still holds up, thanks largely to its exciting stunts, including one of the best screen sword fights of all time.  Kudos should also go to the unusually high production values, helping to show off the newfangled color photography.   

You Can't Take it With You - A Frank Capra comedy that puts two of my favorite actors - James Stewart and Jean Arthur - into a very unlikely premise.  The son of a greedy factory owner falls for the daughter of a family of eccentrics, who also happen to be the lone holdouts preventing  a pivotal business deal from going through.  The farce commences, resulting in literal fireworks, but the core of the picture is the very Capraesque appeal to humanity and neighborliness over capitalism and greed.   

The Lady Vanishes - Finally, this is one of Alfred Hitchcock's last British films, the success of which spurred him to head for Hollywood.  "The Lady Vanishes" is one of the undisputed classics of the mystery genre, though it's also often also classified as a romantic comedy and a precursor to a lot of WWII spy thrillers.  Of the accomplished cast, May Whitty as the vanished Miss Froy made the biggest impression on me, a pleasant old woman who nobody should be surprised is keeping big secrets.    

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Time With "A Gentleman in Moscow"

I'm not surprised that "A Gentleman in Moscow" is based on a novel.  The eight episode Showtime series 

charts the fortunes of a group of characters in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.  Each episode opens with narration to help measure the passage of time, and bring the watcher up to speed on where we are in Russian history.

Ewan McGregor stars as Count Rostov, a genial aristocrat who is spared from the purge because his writing is believed to have helped the Revolution.  However, he is judged and sentenced to live the remainder of his life in the Hotel Metropol in Moscow.  Rostov becomes a permanent guest at the hotel, under the watchful eye of the menacing Soviet official, Glebnikov (Johnny Harris).  He meets an actress, Anna Urbanova (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who eventually becomes his lover and close confidante.   His old school friend Mishka (Fehinti Balogun), a Communist writer, also visits him often.  However, his most constant companion is Nina Kulikova (Alexa Goodall), the young daughter of a hotel employee who is curious about Rostov's life as an aristocrat.

I watched "A Gentleman in Moscow" specifically for Ewan MacGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and wasn't disappointed.  Both of them have very entertaining roles in the show, but they're in  a more sedate and old-fashioned sort of costume drama than I was expecting.  Count Rostov is a tragic figure, a man forced to stay on the sidelines of history, largely cut off from friends and family, while trying to reconcile with the ghosts of his past.  He makes a fulfilling life for himself in the Hotel Metropol, as he struggles to retain what little he can of his old life and worldview, but it's an existence that is constantly marked by tragedy.  It's all very melancholy and very Russian, though the finale gives Rostov a final shot at doing something meaningful, and wraps things up for all the characters in a satisfying way.

History lovers should be warned that the show isn't very interested in actual Russian or Soviet history, with elements of the story frequently taking on a fanciful, fairy tale quality, especially in the earliest episodes with young Nina.  The show also uses colorblind casting, so Fehinti Balogun from "I May Destroy You" can play Mishka, and Leah Harvey from "Foundation" can play Marina, one of the hotel employees who befriends Rostov.  The hotel itself is real, but was used as offices for the new Soviet bureaucracy for a good chunk of the time that "A Gentleman in Moscow" takes place.  The show turns it into a romantic sort of nexus for international travel, and there are secret rooms and hidden passages, of course.    

The series changes from episode to episode as each installment takes place further and further in time from the last, but not as much as I was expecting.  Some characters age significantly, while others barely seem to change, even after decades.  Even using the most generous reading that we're seeing things from Rostov's subjective viewpoint, a show that spans thirty years could stand to spend more effort showing the passage of time.  Instead, references to Russian history serve as our guideposts, and unfortunately I wasn't well versed enough in the subject for the mentions of Khruschev or Nazi mobilization to be of much help.    

However, the show is well written and charming enough for me to overlook a lot of its contrivances.  I like that it's slower paced and fairly low stakes, with Rostov rarely able to intercede in the events that he witnesses as much as he wants to.  I like that it spends a lot of time contemplating the loss of a bygone era, and seeing Rostov find a place for himself in the new order, even if it's a low status one.  And I'm glad that MacGregor got to play this role, and didn't bother about trying to do it with a Russian accent.  

Finally, the show has my favorite opening sequence of anything I've seen all year.  I'm a sucker for fancy animation, and the artful use of Soviet graphic design elements is just delightful.  It perfectly sets the tone for a show that is a little slower, a little more classical, and a little more of an old fashioned epic than you see much of nowadays.  And thank goodness for that.

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My Criterion 40

Criterion is releasing a forty movie set this year, to celebrate their 40th anniversary.  It's supposed to be a sampling of some of the collection's best, and a good starting point for those just getting into world cinema.  I consider it a point of pride that I've already seen all forty, but most of these aren't films that I'd choose to own.  So today, for fun, I thought I'd put together my own forty-film collection of Criterion titles.

This is entirely  a fantasy exercise, and I know there are licensing issues that would make the inclusion of some of these films in a real set impossible.  Many of the original releases are out of print.  I'm going to play fair and only include titles with spine numbers, leaving out titles from the Eclipse series and the titles that have shown up on the streaming service.  I'm also leaving out shorts collections, television shows, and the Beastie Boys video anthology.  Single films only are eligible, though some will be from sets where they've been grouped with other titles.

By my own estimates, I've watched roughly 70-75% of the entire collection, which I think is good enough to make some decently well-informed selections.  

And now with all caveats covered, let's get to the list, ordered by spine number:  

10. Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg)

13. Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme)

30. M (Fritz Lang)

61. Life of Brian (Terry Jones)

62. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Th. Dreyer)

93. Black Narcissus (Powell & Pressburger)

101. Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman)

111. Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati)

198. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (R.W. Fassbinder)

306. Le Samouraï (Jean Pierre Melville)

316. Ran (Akira Kurosawa)

420. Happiness (Agnes Varda)

459. The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel)

484. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 1975 (Chantal Akerman)

501. Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders)

519. Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami)

573. The Music Room (Satyajit Ray)

591. 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet)

666. The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo Del Toro)

680. City Lights (Charles Chaplin)

691. Thief (Michael Mann)

717. The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy)

765. The Black Stallion (Carroll Ballard)

779. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch)

821. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick)

843. Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson)

888. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky)

918. The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov)

937. Dragon Inn (King Hu)

950. Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder)

1023. The Cremator (Juraj Herz)

1025. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)

1064. Parasite (Bong Joon Ho)

1094. Watermelon Man (Melvin Van Peebles)

1153. Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra)

1154. Eve's Bayou (Kasi Lemmons)

1157. Daisies (Vera Chytilova)

1158. Power of the Dog (Jane Campion)

1191. The Trial (Orson Welles)

1215. Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr)

So, my initial shortlist was over a hundred titles long, even when I limited myself to one title per director.  A lot of these titles are ones I've written about for "Great Directors" or ones that I probably will write about in the future.  I briefly considered disqualifying every film I'd written about for this blog, but that was going too far.  I did, however, disqualify everything in the existing Criterion 40 set, which knocked out several  titles, including "All That Jazz," "Bicycle Thieves," "The Night of the Hunter," "Do the Right Thing," "Sullivan's Travels," and "3 Women."

Availability was a consideration.  I don't believe that Netflix films like "Power of the Dog" have any other home media releases, while they seem to reissue "The Princess Bride" every time it has an anniversary.  Quality of the release was a consideration - I've seen some awful prints of older films, especially the public domain ones like "The Trial."  Criterion's restoration work is central to its purpose and identity.

Diversity was a consideration.  I was glad to find so many titles from female directors like Lucretia Martel, Kasi Lemmons, and Mira Nair had found their way into the collection over the last few years.  A few directors probably would have had films on this list if more of their titles were available.  I hope there's more focus on South American films next, which I wasn't able to represent at all.  I know I don't have enough documentaries or silent films and not a single animated film, but forty titles isn't a whole lot to begin with.  

And here are a few too many honorable mentions that were the hardest ones to cut:

6. Beauty and the Beast (Jean Renoir)

26. The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie)

49. Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini)

135. Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock)

158. The Importance of Being Earnest (Anthony Asquith)

160. À Nous la Liberté (Rene Clair)

168. Monterey Pop (D.A. Pennebaker)

247. Slacker (Richard Linklater)

453. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai)

522. Red Desert (Michealangelo Antonioni)

561. Kes (Ken Loach)

544. Head (Bob Rafelson)

570. Zazie Dans Le Metro (Louis Malle)

576. Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang Dong)

645. The Ballad of Narayama (Keisuke Kinoshita)

852. Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene)

982. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell)

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