"Game of Thrones" and Spoiler Culture

Despite the title of this post, no spoilers lie ahead.

Once I finished this latest season of "Game of Thrones," months later than everyone else as usual, I set about catching up with the fandom. I read reviews, listened to recap podcasts, and went back over fan discussions of various episodes so I could see the reactions and speculation. Usually there's some chatter about leaked spoilers and set reports, but this time around it was very different. Apparently at some point last year, well before the season started, somebody involved with the production leaked a scene-by-scene breakdown of all the episodes.

Now, "Game of Thrones" has always been a fandom where a viewer has to watch out for spoilers, because a good chunk of the fans read the George R.R. Martin books, and discussion of the adaptation choices has always been very lively. I knew about the Red Wedding years before it happened, for instance. This situation is something very different. I tracked down a copy of the spoilers myself and found a list of bare bones plot points, essentially. They had no possible function except as spoilers, and it turned out that they were very accurate ones. Only one or two of the described scenes didn't turn up in the final version of the show, possibly because they were being saved for next year or because the writers had changed their minds about a particular development.

It's one thing to be familiar with a piece of source material that's being adapted into another medium. It's quite another to simply have a plot synopsis of everything that's going to happen. I don't understand the appeal of the latter, but apparently there's ravenous demand in the "Game of Thrones" fandom for these details. Nobody would have leaked the synopsis if there wasn't. Along with the breakdown that turned out to be real, I found several others with erroneous speculation about what was going to happen this season. More fascinating were people piecing together information from set reports and media coverage to figure out which characters were going to appear in which locations, and in what combinations.

HBO has been very proactive about stopping early leaks of the completed episodes, and scripts are subject to all kinds of security measures, but how do you prevent something like these latest spoilers? I suppose that the saving grace is that there was no way to confirm the synopsis was real until the new episodes were actually released. And I should note that there were enough eyebrow-raising developments in the last season of "Game of Thrones" that the leaks were suspected of being fakes for a good long while. Without that confirmation, the spoilers wouldn't be considered newsworthy, so there was little danger of a spoilerphobe like me accidentally stumbling across them.

Still, there is a lingering risk. There are always those internet pests who love posting spoilers everywhere, and once the leaks were confirmed at the start of the season, they would have surely been emboldened to go on another rampage. I think what really disturbs me most about this situation is that somebody close enough to the production to have all this information is knowingly enabling this kind of behavior. At the time of writing, the leaker remains anonymous, so there's a good possibility that what happens in the final season of "Game of Thrones" may also wind up leaked well in advance. And this time around, more people may pay attention - willingly or unwillingly.

And if "Game of Thrones," one of the most lucrative and high profile productions isn't safe, what is? I cringe at the thought of "Star Wars" or "Avengers" spoilers floating around out there, especially as those film series are approaching some pretty significant climaxes. For those viewers who like their spoilers, and can somehow enjoy a piece of media in spite of knowing all the surprises in advance, I suppose there's nothing really wrong with that. However, the spoiler culture that they've allowed to flourish is getting out of hand.

I'm grateful now that I've detached myself a bit from the current entertainment media, because the distance provides some insulation from these kinds of spoilers. However, this is also a reminder that I have to be more vigilant than ever to enjoy my media the way I want to.

---

Missmediajunkie v. A Serious Editorial Error

I've screwed something up. I realized today as I was going over the last several months of posts that my rate of television reviews had shot way up. November was absurdly lopsided, with eight posts about specific television series only one review of a recent film. And upon more thorough inspection, I realized that I had essentially reviewed every single series I had watched throughout 2017, but maybe only a fifth of the films, throwing the balance of the content on this blog seriously out of whack.

I know exactly why this happened too. I find it easier to write about media I like, and I've spent most of the fall catching up with "Twin Peaks" and "Game of Thrones," while my rental queue has been mostly full of the so-so remainders of last summer like "Cars 3," "The Dark Tower," and "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets." However, I want to clarify that I don't think the issue is that television has been better than films lately. It's just that there's so much more television. Series take much longer to watch than films, so I end limiting myself to only the very, very best shows to maintain any kind of parity with the amount of time I spend watching movies.

Except, there hasn't exactly been parity lately. Over the last few months my schedule has changed and it's been more convenient for me to watch 20-40 minute episodes of a series than 90-150 minute features. On top of that, the latest seasons of several major shows have become available recently and I've been playing catch-up while I can. This is actually fairly out of the ordinary for me because I'm more of a completist about cinema, so I tend to watch more titles, including a lot of the mediocre ones. On the television side, I didn't even bother watching "The Defenders" crossover event series after some of the less-than-enthusiastic reviews came in.

And since series represent more of a time commitment, it feels like a much bigger omission if I don't write about a season of television that I've watched compared to a film I felt similarly about. That's why I have a review of Netflix's "Mindhunter" in the works and not Taylor Sheridan's "Wind River." They're both about as equally compelling and well made, but "Mindhunter" was ten episodes and took a whole weekend to get through, while "Wind River" was two hours and took an evening. Honestly, "Wind River" probably could use some more exposure because it was one of those smaller films that went under the radar, but I don't feel strongly enough about it to write anything. With "Mindhunter," spending ten hours with the main characters at least helped me to solidify a more concrete opinion.

And I think this is a problem because my output on this blog ends up not reflecting the kind of media that I'm actually watching. If I'm watching more movies, why aren't I writing about those movies? If I took the time to watch "Cars 3," why not spend a couple of paragraphs taking it apart? If I'm mostly writing about the media that I enjoy, we could take that to mean that I'm not writing as many negative and ambivalent reviews as I should. But on the other hand, I don't care enough about "Cars 3" to do more than acknowledge that it exists. If I'm going to put my opinions on this blog, shouldn't they be the opinions that I'm more invested in? When I write an mixed or ambivalent review, I think it should be one I'm writing because I still care about the media I'm reviewing.

This all may be beside the point anyhow. With Oscar season upon us and the prestige pictures starting to roll in, I expect that the balance is going to shift towards movies for a while. Pretty much every television and web series I've been watching is on hiatus, and I have my usual massive end-of-the-year list of movies to go and hunt down for 2017. Still, now that I've identified this set of biases, I can keep a better eye on them and ensure that they don't get out of hand again in the future.

---

Your 2018 Oscar Nominees

It's been an interesting awards season, with a lot of different narratives battling it out and a lot of different interests in play. I've been lucky enough to see most of the big contenders (reviews are forthcoming, but I have a hell of a backlog) so I feel pretty good about offering some thoughts on the nominees this time around.

Let's start right off with Best Picture. "Call Me by Your Name," "Dunkirk," "Get Out," "Lady Bird," "The Shape of Water," "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri," and "The Post" were pretty close to locks, so the real news here is "Darkest Hour" and "Phantom Thread" winning themselves spots. This is a pretty strong group, and the only change I'd make would be substituting "Darkest Hour" with "The Florida Project." At least it managed one well-deserved nomination for Willem Dafoe.

Best Director nominees usually point to the actual frontrunners, so "Dunkirk," "Lady Bird," "Get Out," "The Shape of Water" and "Phantom Thread" are apparently on top. However, with so much politicking around getting more diversity into this category, I wonder if Peele and Gerwig might have gotten a boost via campaigning. Meanwhile, Paul Thomas Anderson has claimed "Phantom Thread" is his swan song, which may have helped his case too. I feel Luca Guadagnino should be here, but the direction was probably the least successful part of "Three Billboards," so Martin McDonagh does not. He deserved the nomination he got, for Original Screenplay. Best Editing, another key predictor category for Best Picture, points to the real competition being between "Three Billboards" and "The Shape of Water" this year.

The acting categories offered some surprises. I suspect the controversy around James Franco cost him a nomination. Not much of a loss, honestly. I haven't seen Denzel Washington in "Roman J. Israel," but I wasn't especially impressed with Franco's Tommy Wiseau. "The Disaster Artist" only got a nomination for Screenplay, and I'm not sure it deserved even that much. Over in the Supporting Actor category, the big surprise is that Armie Hammer and Michael Stuhlbarg both lost out on nominations for "Call Me By Your Name." Instead the slots went to Woody Harrelson, who did an okay but unremarkable job in "Three Billboards," and Christopher Plummer for "All the Money in the World," the notorious rush replacement performance after Kevin Spacey had to be removed. I haven't seen Plummer's work yet, but Stuhlbarg should definitely be up there over Harrelson.

Over in Best Actress, these are the same names that have been up for awards all season long, and deservedly so. Supporting actress is more interesting, with the expected nods for Allison Janney and Laurie Metcalf, who will be duking it out, but Lesley Manville edged out Hong Chau and Holly Hunter for a nomination. Also, it's a relief that the Oscars have finally settled the eligibility issues around Netflix titles. Mary J. Blige is here for "Mudbound," one of four nominations the movie received. The other big nomination "Mudbound" netted was a Best Cinematography slot for Rachel Morrison, the first female nominee in the category. I'm still rooting for Roger Deakins for "Blade Runner 2049" though.

Over in Screenplay are a good sampling of other strong contenders that didn't quite make it into the running for Best Picture, including "Molly's Game," "The Big Sick," and "Mudbound." We also got a welcome surprise nod for "Logan," which should make the comic book fans happy. It's interesting that "Dunkirk," "The Post," "Phantom Thread," and "Darkest Hour" are absent. Also note the nominations for "Baby Driver" and "I, Tonya" in Best Editing.

In the smaller categories, I'm glad to see that the rule changes in Best Animated Feature don't seem to have affected the nominations much. We still got two indie pictures alongside the usual studio pictures. "Blade Runner" managed five nominations in an array of production categories, all richly deserved. And finally, I'm ticked that Agnes Varda, grand dame of the French New Wave, got a nomination for Best Documentary Feature for "Faces Places."

Alas, nothing for "Wonder Woman," "The Beguiled," "mother!" "Lady Macbeth," "Columbus," or "Detroit," which all had elements that were very award-worthy, even if the whole films weren't. Overall it feels like a strong year, so it's hard to feel too down about snubs with so many interesting races to watch. And away we go.

---

"Ingrid" Goes Deep

There have been a spate of recent films that have tried to tackle the dark side of life online, from domestic dramas lamenting the loss of real interpersonal connections, to horror films full of supercharged stalkers and online bullies gone viral.  And while these portrayals have been well-meaning, and usually got the broad outlines of the bad behavior right, there was also a sort of overblown alarmist feel to many of them.  

And now along comes Ingrid, played by Aubrey Plaza, who is an absolutely perfect, terrifying example of someone who the internet is turning into a monster.  Ingrid is an internet stalker, who we first see disrupting a former friend's wedding, a friend we learn that Ingrid has been hounding on social media.  Blocked from seeing any of her victim's accounts, Ingrid decides to move onto a new target, a trendsetter named Taylor (Elizabeth Olsen), who lives in Venice, California with her husband Ezra (Wyatt Russell).  Using her inheritance from her recently deceased mother, Ingrid moves to Venice, and sets out to become Taylor's new best friend.

I related so much to Ingrid, it was unsettling.  I distinctly remember being that lonely, socially-awkward twenty-something, who did not have her life together in the slightest, and was envious of friends who seemed to know what they were doing.  Ten years ago, however, social media wasn't what it is today, and people were still wary of sharing so much of their lives online.  If I were that same twenty-something now, would I be obsessively checking other people's beautifully curated Instagram and Facebook feeds the way Ingrid does, trying to live vicariously through them?  Taylor's LA aesthetic is not my thing, but I admit being drawn toward an artsier crowd I only knew via online blogs.  Would I have been a potential Ingrid, just a few clicks away from going after someone with a can of mace?

As black comedies go, "Ingrid Goes West" is on the gentler side, which I found made it more memorable and effective.  Ingrid is a terrible person, but thanks to Aubrey Plaza, she's also a lot of fun to watch.  And even when she's at her worst, taking advantage of new friend Dan Pinto (O'Shea Jackson Jr.), or luring Taylor's dog away so she can play hero, it's easy to sympathize with her.  Humanizing Ingrid, and to a lesser extent Taylor and Ezra, keeps the audience on its toes.  We can't simply write off Ingrid as a nutter for her behavior, because we're shown that it's stemming from deeper problems, and she has the capacity to be someone better.  And when it becomes clear that Taylor isn't everything she's made herself out to be, it still doesn't excuse Ingrid's treatment of her or mean that Taylor doesn't get to be angry.

As a small indie production with a limited budget, and made by a first time filmmaker, "Ingrid Goes West" has the usual technical limitations you would expect.  However, I like the way that director Matt Spicer frames Aubrey Plaza, keeping us firmly in Ingrid's headspace through all the different phases of her relationship with Taylor.  This is one of the best performances I've seen Plaza give, selling Ingrid's every emotional high and low as she swerves from trainwreck to picture-perfect bestie to jealous girlfriend.  The film's biggest strength is the script, specifically how it finds all these little moments to fill in the details about Taylor and Ezra's relationship, or what happened to Ingrid's mother.  Dan is probably the least likely character - way too forgiving and nice to be true - but O'Shea Jackson is such a charmer, I was just happy every time he was onscreen.

And I appreciate the way that "Ingrid" handles Internet addiction, showing it from different angles, and pointing out that it's really an extension of other issues that the characters already have.  Ingrid without social media would still be obsessive and miserable.  Her ready access to more information is just exacerbating and enabling an existing problem.  The internet stalker is becoming such a common trope in media, it's nice to get a more nuanced portrait of one.  And Aubrey Plaza was seriously overdue for a starring role like this one.  

---

Returning to "Twin Peaks"

The much-hyped return of "Twin Peaks" resulted in absolutely dismal ratings for Showtime.  I'm not surprised, because the audience for the show was limited from the start.  It only makes sense to watch the new "Twin Peaks" if you watched and enjoyed the original.  Also, you'd better be a fan of the increasingly esoteric work of David Lynch since "Twin Peaks" went off the air in 1991.  There's material in the revival that is daring for a premium cable outfit to be airing, and would be unthinkable on network television.  

In other ways, however, the return of "Twin Peaks" feels like a throwback.  Eighteen episodes were aired across fifteen weeks, making it one of the lengthier television seasons for any cable drama.  Each episode also ends with a full scroll of production credits, often over a closing musical act.  The pacing is unhurried, making room for dozens of characters and subplots.  The show more or less retains the broader structure of an evening soap and detective program, but only bothers about things like plot toward the very end of the season.   

Instead, David Lynch is more interested in his own experiments in mood and tone, sometimes horrific, sometimes satirical, and sometimes just inexplicable.  Bizarre things happen every week, sometimes to further the story or add character shadings, but more often because this is "Twin Peaks," and weird happenings are par for the course.  An entire episode is devoted to giving context to the show's supernatural mythology, but it unfolds like an experimental film with little exposition or dialogue. Michael Cera drops by for a single scene to play the son of Andy and Lucy, impersonating a young Marlon Brando the whole time.  Why?  Well, why not?    

The revival is full of little cameos like this, making some episodes feel like a string of loosely collected vignettes.  Several of the new characters are played by Lynch regulars like Laura Dern and Naomi Watts.  Nearly every surviving member of the original cast returned, though the twenty-five year hiatus means that even the youngest cast members are now middle-aged, and most of the leads are in their sixties.  In some cases this means a radical transformation of a character like Bobby Briggs, from troublemaker teenager to sympathetic police officer.  Due to the long production time, several actors passed away in the time between shooting scenes for the show, and the episodes going to air, including Catherine Coulson and Miguel Ferrer.  It gives the whole revival a melancholy, elegiac air at times.

One original cast member who hasn't lost a step is Kyle MacLachlan, who returns playing three versions of his Agent Cooper character.  He gets the most coherent and complete storyline here, trying to navigate his way back to the town of Twin Peaks after a long absence, with an evil doppelganger causing trouble along the way.  However, MacLachlan actually spends most of the season as "Dougie," a third, idiot-savant version of Cooper, who goes off on a series of totally unrelated adventures.  Those who are invested in the plot will find plenty of labyrinthine new developments to puzzle over, but I quickly found it futile to try and keep track of all the obscure character names and obtuse symbolism.  Apparently it all does make sense, but that's beside the point.

So what is the point?  Well, it's watching a tender scene play out between Norma and Big Ed in the diner, or a spectacularly horrific one involving Sarah Palmer in a nearby bar, or a delightfully silly one with a gangster played by Robert Knepper and a trio of pink-clad gun molls.  It's hearing the wonderfully distinct sound design, which Lynch himself is credited for in every single episode.  It's seeing MacLachlan and Laura Dern reunited again.  It's appreciating how much better Dana Ashbrook's acting chops have become.  It's doing a double take every time you spot a famous face like Eddie Vedder or Monica Bellucci.  It's being absolutely infuriated by Audrey Horne's brief storyline.     

And it's marvelling at the fact that David Lynch was given complete carte blanche by Showtime to make the new "Twin Peaks" exactly the way he wanted, without compromise.  And whatever you make of the show, that's a rare and wonderful thing.  

---

"Game of Thrones" Year Seven

Spoilers ahead

This was the year that "Game of Thrones" transitioned from following the logic and pacing of a prestige television series to something closer to a run of blockbuster action films.  Suddenly we're skipping all travel time, allowing characters to journey all over the Westeros map seemingly instantaneously.  Character drama has been cut back in favor of more action scenes, which are fancier and more polished than ever.  More importantly, we're quickly barrelling toward the end of the series, and "Game of Thrones" is fully in set-up mode for the finale.  That means lots of table setting - killing off inconvenient and extraneous minor characters,  accelerating story arcs, and forcing more and more meetings of various characters and storylines to get everyone where they need to be for the big showdowns.  

And this is a pretty jarring change, considering that in prior seasons it felt like the show was dragging out many developments, and there was a lot of drama being milked out of certain characters barely missing coming into contact with each other.  So this year, when three of the surviving Stark siblings are reunited at Winterfell, Danaerys reaches Westeros and becomes allies with Jon Snow, and a whole passel of half-forgotten minor characters wind up teaming up for an adventure beyond the Wall, it feels like "Game of Thrones" has cranked up the momentum to pretty reckless speeds.  Suddenly multiple players that we haven't seen for years are back in the thick of the action, while others are quickly bundled off into obscurity with hasty farewells.  Some of these reunions and partings simply do not get the necessary time or attention that they should, though there's an undeniable thrill from seeing so much plot advancement at last.

It's especially noticeable since this year's plot is largely original material concocted by Benioff and Weiss, that is noticeably weaker than George R.R. Martin's work.  Much of Jon and Danaerys's season is spent on a very slapdash, foolhardy plan to convince Cersei to put aside hostilities long enough to deal with the invaders from the north.  They're also supposed to be getting romantically involved, though the two hardly have any chemistry to speak of.  And then there's Arya and Sansa dealing with Littlefinger's machinations, a promising situation that is mucked up by poor execution more than anything else.  The performances help salvage some of this - Lena Heady keeps the King's Landing scenes on track while Peter Dinklage does his best to sell some of the more ridiculous business at Dragonstone.  Minor characters like Bronn, Tormund, and Sir Davos fare better than the headliners like Jon and Sansa, because they aren't so mired in the dense plotting.   I'll miss Diana Rigg, who got the best scene of the year.

What does work consistently, however, is the spectacle.  We're treated to plenty of CGI-heavy battles, white walkers, and dragons this year.  The action and effects work has been ramped up to new heights, and the production has never looked more impressive.  Seeing the dragons deployed for battle is especially satisfying after years of build-up.  In short, this season of "Game of Thrones" is worth a watch for the eye-candy alone.  Of course, "Game of Thrones" was never a show you only watched for the eye candy before this, which doesn't bode well for the future.   Those viewers who like the show for its rough-edged, smartly written medieval world where anyone could die at a moment's notice, may be especially disappointed.  At this point, all the leads have plot armor a mile thick, and seem to be losing IQ points with every passing episode.  

Then again, this year of "Game of Thrones" may well be a fluke.  It's such a departure from the previous six seasons of the show, I can see the creators doing a course correction for the final year.  Also, if we treat the seventh and eighth years as a single season, as they were originally intended to be, the series could be saving the meatier character drama for the final stretch the way they have with previous seasons.  This close to the end, I'm hoping these stumbles are the show getting all the kinks out in preparation for its final year.      

Fingers crossed.

---

"Stranger Things," Year Two

Minor spoilers ahead.

While the second series of Netflix's "Stranger Things" didn't manage to make lightning strike twice, I was plenty satisfied with the direction that the Duffer brothers decided to take things.  Everything people liked about the first series is back, from the never-ending '80s references to the stellar kid actors.  There are a few missteps and some shameless pandering to contend with, but "Stranger Things" remains one of the most wildly entertaining shows currently running on any platform.  

A year has passed and it's 1984 in Hawkins, Indiana.  Things are normal, aside from the arrival of some new kids in town - tough girl Max (Sadie Sink), who becomes a classmate of Mike and  the gang, and her bullying older brother Billy (Dacre Montgomery).  Oh, and Will is still seeing sinister visions of the Upside-Down, requiring regular visits to Hawkins Lab, under the new management of the seemingly nice Dr. Owens (Paul Reiser).  And then there's that mysterious blight killing local crops that might be connected to a looming shadow monster Will sees in his visions.  

Unlike the first year, where the storylines had the adults, teens, and kids grouped separately, this time around the character dynamics see some shaking up.  The Byers family mostly functions together as a unit, trying to deal with Will's "episodes."  Everyone else, however, gets to combine in more interesting ways.  There are some fun new pairings like Eleven and Hopper forging a father-daughter relationship, and Dustin and Steve become unlikely brothers-in-arms.  Some of the kids warm to Max immediately, but others don't - notably Mike - creating new tensions and splits.  We still have all these stories eventually converging in one big event at the end of the series, but it's a twistier road to get there.   

And the approach works pretty well, keeping the plotting from getting repetitive and mostly balancing out the amount of screen time everyone has.  Mike noticeably gets less attention this year, possibly because Finn Wolfhard went off to make "It," but he makes the most of the time he does have in the spotlight.  And while the new kids could have done with more fleshing out, there's also a sense that the creators are saving that for next season - because this time around everyone knows that there's going to be a next season.  The story is more open-ended, and some things are set up that definitely haven't played out all the way yet.

While the budget for special effects has been beefed up, particularly for several CGI critters, the highlights of this year are the performances.  Several of these are much improved, notably Winona Ryder, who thankfully takes things down a few notches.  Joe Keery is one of the surprise MVPs, who ends up playing the Josh Brolin big brother role to the younger kids' Goonies in the last few episodes.  Noah Schnapp gets way more to do this time around, and he's great.  I also really enjoyed Millie Bobby Brown's Eleven, who remains the best part of the show, getting to go off on her own adventures for a bit, before rejoining her friends.  

We still end up with confrontation scenes that are overly screamy, and nerdy elements that are way too self-indulgent, but the Duffer brothers display an excellent sense of how to keep things fresh and entertaining for their audience.  I love the way they manage to mine so much humor out of serious situations, and can't resist poking fun at many old cliches.  Nancy and Jonathan's subplot, for instance, would have been a lot more tedious if it weren't for the intervention of a local conspiracy theorist.  And I admit, the boys dressing up as the Ghostbusters for Halloween, and nobody wanting to be Winston, is too perfect for words.    

"Stranger Things" remains a show of very specific genre pleasures, leaning heavily on nostalgia and familiarity.  However, no other show comes close to filling this niche, and few are as consistently entertaining.  I can't help feeling uneasy that the Duffer brothers and Netflix are pressing their luck continuing the series, because they're almost certainly going to hit diminishing returns soon.  But it hasn't happened yet, so I suppose we should just enjoy the ride while we can.

----