Rank 'Em: The Best Picture Winners of the '20s and '30s, Part 2

Continued from the previous installment.

6. You Can't Take it With You (1938) - I can't resist a romantic comedy starring Jean Arthur and Jimmy Stewart, especially when it's from Frank Capra organizing the screwball hijinks.  However, it's hard to make a case that this is better than all nine of the other nominees, especially when those nominees include "The Adventures of Robin Hood," "Boys Town," "Pygmalion," and Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion," which was the first foreign language film nominated for Best Picture.  And though "You Can't Take it With You" remains very watchable, it's not one of Capra's best.  

7. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) - The beloved WWI novel is brought to screen with wonderfully evocative imagery.  However, the film is very old, very long, and despite all the thunderous effects and explosions, it doesn't match up to more modern depictions of warfare.  However, for 1930 it was a standout, and none of the other nominees even comes close.  1930 was an odd, transitional time for Hollywood, and this was only the third Oscars, so the quality of the films in contention wasn't great.  It's only real competitor was the Maurice Chevalier comedy, "The Love Parade."  

8. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) - Charles Laughton was one of the most dependable portrayers of villainy in the 1930s, so of course he played the tyrannical Captain Bligh to perfection, Clark Gable (sans moustache) played Fletcher Christian, and the film was a huge box office hit.  I don't have particularly strong feelings toward this version of "Mutiny on the Bounty" otherwise, but I will note that it was up against some really iconic films for Best Picture, including "Top Hat," and "Captain Blood," and very good versions of "David Copperfield" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream."  

9. Grand Hotel (1932) - This is one of the films that Greta Garbo is best known for, especially the famous "I want to be alone" line.  The cast also boasts two Barrymores, Wallace Beery, and Joan Crawford.  It's a perfectly fine romantic melodrama of the era, with some notable production advancements, but 1932 was the first year with an expanded number of Best Picture nominations - eight this year, and ten from 1933-1943 - and I absolutely would have picked Josef von Sternberg's adventure film "Shanghai Express" or Mervyn LeRoy's newspaper noir "Five Star Final" over this.    

10. The Great Ziegfeld (1936) - Frankly, this wasn't a great year for the Oscars.  "The Great Ziegfeld" is a perfectly decent showbiz biopic that features some of the most elaborate song and dance production numbers of all time.  It's nearly three hours long, and absolutely smothered in excess.  However, I didn't find any of the other nominees particularly deserving either.  Maybe I could make an argument for Jack Conway's "A Tale of Two Cities" with Ronald Colman, or  Capra's "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town."  However, "Ziegfeld" wasn't even close to the bottom of the barrel for this decade.

11. Cavalcade (1933) - A remarkably maudlin chronicle of an upper class family's eventful history from the turn of the century to after the end of WWI.  There's nothing objectionable about the film aside from laying on the syrup too thick, but I have no idea how this movie managed to beat out some of the other nominees.  1933 had some of the best nominees of this era, including "42nd Street," "The Private Life of Henry VIII," "Lady for a Day," "She Done Him Wrong," and the only adaptation of "A Farewell to Arms" worth anything.  "Cavalcade" isn't the worst of this lot, but it's close.    

12. The Broadway Melody (1929) - The general consensus is that "The Broadway Melody" won on the strength of its technical achievements.  It was the first sound film to win, one of the first sound musicals and one of the first to feature a technicolor sequence.  It helped usher in the sound era, but the content is pretty mediocre stuff - your standard showbiz tale of a group of up-and-comers who put on a big show.  Still, it didn't have much competition.  "The Patriot" is lost, but the other nominees are pretty rudimentary - "Hollywood Revue" is essentially a filmed theater show.  

13. Cimarron (1931) - Finally, my pick for the worst of the decade (and really, the worst in any era) is "Cimarron," a western about the Oklahoma land grab.  It morphs into a family epic and melodrama about the taming of the frontier.  It's very unfocused, badly paced, and fundamentally doesn't work as the feminist narrative the book was.  What really kills the film from a modern POV, however, are the unfortunate racist caricatures of the African-American and Native-American characters, who are patronized relentlessly by all the white characters.

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Rank 'Em: The Best Picture Winners of the '20s and '30s, Part 1

I've finished watching all the available Academy Award for Best Picture nominees, the exceptions being "The Patriot" (1928), considered a lost film, and "East Lynne" (1931) and "The White Parade" (1934), which are only available to view in person at the UCLA film archive.  

I've been debating about the best format to write about these films, since I'm honestly not too interested in analyzing most of them.  My yearly posts on Best Picture nominees are done as Rank 'Em posts.  Originally, I was planning to rank all 93+ Best Picture winners in one list, but that didn't seem quite fair.  How on earth are you supposed to compare the merits of a silent film like "Wings" to modern films?  Heck, some of these movies are so wildly outdated, I struggle to see them as anything more than historical curiosities.  So, I've resolved to divide up the films by time period.  I'm doing lists for each decade of Best Picture winners, and will talk about additional nominees, and who I think should have won various races in the individual write-ups.  I could do year by year ranking lists and discuss every single film, but right now I want to do a shorter series.  However, I'm leaving the door open for that in the future. 

I'm going to start with the '20s and '30s and work my way up to the present day.  I think it's best to combine the '20s and the '30s in a single post because there would only be two entries for the '20s.  I'm also listing thirteen entries here, because awards buffs will remember that Best Picture was actually split into two different categories: "Outstanding Picture," won by "Wings," and "Best Unique and Artistic Picture," won by "Sunrise.    

Here we go.

1. Gone With the Wind (1939) - 1939 is considered one of the greatest years for movies of all time.  "Gone With the Wind" remains the clear winner, but other contenders included "The Wizard of Oz," "Ninotchka," "Love Affair," "Stagecoach," and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."  "Gone With the Wind" tops this list because it's got such indelible characters and the epic filmmaking still wows to this day.  It was such a cinematic touchstone for so long that I still hold tremendous affection for it, though it seems to have finally reached its cultural expiration date.    

2. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) - The only "Best Unique and Artistic Picture" winner is widely recognized as one of the greatest silent films ever made, and F.W. Murnau's masterpiece.  It's a dreamy, impressionistic film about a couple's rift and eventual reconciliation.  Leading lady Janet Gaynor won the first Best Actress trophy, and Charles Rosher and Karl Struss got Best Cinematography. "Sunrise" competed against "Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness," an ethnographic story of Thai farmers done in a similar style to "Nanook of the North," and King Vidor's classic, "The Crowd."

3. It Happened One Night (1934) - One of my favorite romantic comedies pairs Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in a gleeful Pre-Code romp.  The leads are fantastically charismatic and sexy throughout, and Frank Capra knows exactly how much to show (and how much not to show).  It's legendary at the Oscars, as the first film to win all five major awards (for Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Writing). The other contenders for this year included rival screwball farce "The Thin Man," and another Claudette Colbert picture, the lavish Cecil B. DeMille version of "Cleopatra." 

4. The Life of Emile Zola (1937) - This one surprised me, because it's such a typical biographical melodrama, about writer Emile Zola and his part in the famous Dreyfus affair.  However, it tells a truly compelling story and Paul Muni is excellent in the lead.  I also admire how screenwriters in the '30s were able to pack so much more story into films of the time.  I think the right picture won here, but I'm also very fond of some of the other nominees: screwball comedy "The Awful Truth," Katherine Hepburn showbiz film "Stage Door," and the earliest version of "A Star is Born."  

5. Wings (1927) - The other winner of the first Academy Awards is a silent film more impressive for its technical accomplishments than its artistry.  However, it's also notable for being one of the first films to show nudity, for LGBT content, and for its ambitious staging of WWI aerial battles.  However, "Wings" became such an obscurity over the years, it was considered a lost film until a print turned up in France in 1992.  It remains very watchable today because it was designed to be an adventure spectacle.  And it's Pre-Code sensibilities often make it feel more modern than later films.   

Boy, this got long.  Looks like I'll have to break this installment up into two parts.

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About That Live Action "Cowboy Bebop"

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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Under "The Power of the Dog"

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

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

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

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

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

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

    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"Masters of the Universe" Brings Out the Old Toys

Spoilers for the first episode ahead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"Arcane" is Full of Surprises

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

  

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

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

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

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

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