Movie Review: The Sheep Detectives

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Earlier this summer my sweetie-wife and I ventured to the local cinema and caught a screening of The Sheep Detectives, the latest feature film from Craig Mazin, the showrunner for both Chernobyl and The Last of Us. Mazin, before his pivot to prestige television for HBO, was known as a comedic writer, and the overwhelming success of Chernobyl drastically charted a new course for his career, but before fungal zombies and Soviet nuclear disasters there was an odd German novel, Glennkill, translated into English as Three Bags Full, where a flock of sheep must solve the murder of their shepherd. For more than a decade Mazin’s screenplay adaptation of this book bounced from production company to production company, never quite making it all the way to production, seemingly doomed to eventually become an episode of the podcast Greatest Movies Never Made, but eventually it did find its home, its magical journey ending with a cast that included Emma Thompson and Hugh Jackman along with a number of stars to voice the sheep.

While losing some of the novel’s darker aspects, The Sheep Detectives kept its core enchanting concept: a flock of sheep, with an understanding of humans that comes only from the detective novels their shepherd read to them each night, must against all odds untangle his mysterious death and bring the killer to justice. Along the way the sheep must confront the terrible truths that they have chosen to forget, hiding from the reality of both their lives and the people around them.

The script is sharp, funny, touching, and insightful. While there are a number of human characters, and not all of them simply stock mystery novel types, the focus remains fixed on the sheep and their relationships. Mazin, on the podcast he co-hosts with fellow screen-scribe John August, Scriptnotes, relays that working with producer Lindsey Doran taught him that in the end every story is about relationships, and this is visible in his screenplays for Chernobyl, The Last of Us, and The Sheep Detectives.

The film, having made its way from the big screen to streaming, is now beginning to arrive on the YouTube genre of ‘reactors’ where people who have never seen a film watch one and post edited videos of their reactions to various scenes. Nearly all of them that have ventured to watch The Sheep Detectivesexpected to encounter a light, frothy little movie that was not going to challenge them emotionally, and quite a few finished the film with many, many tear-soaked tissues. It is not a tragedy or a sad movie, but it is one that does not treat death as merely a plot contrivance, but something terrible and inevitable for us all.

The Sheep Detectives delivers on comedy and gags but also on heart and soul, and it is a film that is well worth the time invested in experiencing it. It is not for everyone. Some audience members may switch it off with completely dry eyes, but for those whom it does touch, that touch is meaningful.

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Not a Very Productive Year

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I had hoped to have another novel completed by the end of this month, August, but instead I have absolutely nothing finished and nothing even started.

I started out with an idea for another folk horror, this one set in the present day in the mountains of eastern Washington state with an isolated community of woodworkers and the outsider who came there for lust mistaken for love and commercial profit but who instead encounters the thing under the mountain. I worked on that idea for several weeks: careful planning, character design, my beloved 5-act structure. And yet when I went to outline the project all of my passion just drained away. I still have all the notes, a spreadsheet with color-coded characters and their events, and yet I can’t seem to find the enthusiasm that started the story when it first came to me.

I shifted to another idea that came to me in the middle of the night. A horror novel that was also a noir. This one would have been set in the years following World War II, a great setting for noir, and it would deal with an airman returning to his west Texas town, the people there who hold him in deep suspicion, and his dark desires that were awakened by something he had encountered in the high cold air.

But that story is finding it hard to reach takeoff speed.

There are only four months left to 2026 and several of those months will be stressed with the busiest period of work for my day job. Work that will bring overtime and its blessing of extra money but that will make writing much more difficult. Still, I shall try to get a book out before this year closes.

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A Tongue-In-Cheek Insult Has Become the Default

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 When political commentator and trained psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer proclaimed for the first time that someone suffered from ‘Bush Derangement Syndrome,’ he was not entirely wrong. Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean had suggested, without coming right out and saying it, that President George W. Bush had, due to his connections with the Saudi royal family, advance knowledge of the terrible 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3000 people and hurtled this nation to war in the Middle East. As with any major event in the media (the Moon Landing, the Kennedy assassination, Bruce Lee’s untimely death, and so on), there invariably follow flocks of conspiracy theories seeking to give secret but understandable reasons for the events, and 9/11 was no different. G.W. Bush, who had come to the office while losing the popular vote, through methods and decisions that were, for many, very easy to question, was a ripe target for such thinking, but suggesting such things without evidence for political gain is, at the very least, distasteful. As such, calling Dean ‘deranged’ for this level of antipathy towards Bush is not entirely without some justification; however, it did not stop there, with that one column, that one instance, but became for the conservatives of America the rallying cry and universal shield against all criticisms of the Bush presidency as, over the years, support for the man plummeted. By the end of his second term in office, scarcely a third of the nation supported the man and yet the right continued its assertion that attacks against him and his policies were evidence of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Of course, the vitriol hurled at his successor, questioning his birth, the endless coded and not-so-coded racial attacks, controversies over such insignificant issues as wearing a tan suit, ‘terrorist’ fist bumps, and the like were never considered a symptom of derangement. The phrase was not retired but merely put away for safekeeping, like an assault rifle in a safe, ready to be wielded when the times changed.

And times they did change.

In 2016, the Republicans nominated and elected a man who embodied every insult that they had hurled at Democratic presidents: the lying, the sexual degeneracy, and the financial corruption they saw in Bill Clinton, Trump exceeded by every measure; the ‘cult of personality,’ the political inexperience, the irreverence for the institutions, the domineering, authoritarian, free-speech-quashing behavior that they accused Obama of, Trump trumpeted at every turn. Even with Trump’s successor, Biden, whom they accused of mental incompetency, Trump, with his limited intelligence and willful ignorance, is the living example of those insults, but to say such things, to point out what is obvious to the most casual observer, is only heralded by the right as proof of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome.’

Well, if acknowledging reality makes me ‘deranged,’ then I have no need to be cured.

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The Importance of the Denouement

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In storytelling, whether that be in prose or cinema, one of the trickiest and yet most vital elements of the structure is the denouement. It is the part of the story where the plot, the character development, and the crisis have all passed and all that remains is the ‘wrapping up’, a little emotional palate cleanser that leaves the audience or reader on the final emotional notes that bring resolution to the tale’s symphony.

The denouement can be exceedingly brief, such as in the film The Maltese Falcon. Once the police arrive at Sam’s apartment and he turns his partner’s killer over to them the story is all but over, but that would be a very unsatisfying end. Instead, we get two more beats. One detective, hefting the fake falcon, asks Sam what it is and his reply is cinematic legend, ‘The stuff that dreams are made of.’ That single line serves as the audience’s sole peer into Sam’s inner life, the only hint to how he really felt. The second beat is as Sam and the police walk out of the apartment and take the stairs down while the killer rides the caged elevator down on their symbolic descent into hell. These two beats provide the emotional closure that the mystery demanded, Sam’s melancholic mood along with the justice that has been served.

Merchant Ivory’s The Remains of the Day also has a bittersweet denouement to its tale of misguided service and repressed romance. Mr. Stevens returns empty-handed from his trip to the west country where he had hoped to reengage the services of Ms. Kenton, the woman he loved but never could face that truth himself, and resumes his quiet life as butler for his new employer, a retired American congressman. His life is winding down, the years ahead are growing shorter, and while he has come to some realizations about the nature of the man of peerage he had served, it is far too late for the character growth that Stevens himself requires.  A bird trapped that they free from his new employer’s grand house serves both as a metaphor for letting go of the past, the film’s final emotional beat and bringing the film full circle by allowing a swooping camera move away from the estate mirror imaging the camera move the swooped into the mansion at the film’s opening, creating both an emotional and a visual denouement.

A denouement does not need to be quiet or nostalgic. In Star Wars, the story has ended with the surviving rebel fighters speeding away from the exploding Death Star and the ghost voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi telling Luke that the Force will be with him, always, but the film gives us one more beat: the medal ceremony.

In a grand hall housed in an ancient structure, the entire rebel force has assembled to witness Princess Leia bestowing on Han and Luke medals for their gallant service.  The droids are presented shiny and repaired, Chewie roars in triumph and the movie closes with a rousing militaristic march to seal the audience’s emotional state.

A missing or flubbed denouement can harm an otherwise fine production. The SF/Fantasy novel 1633, a sequel to 1632, ended so abruptly that reading it on an e-reader, I kept trying to turn the page when no more pages remained. Lacking any closure, the book felt unfinished. I never read any further into the series. David Gerrold’s A Season For Slaughter, the fourth novel in his ecological alien invasion series ended on a cliffhanger which dictated that the novel could have no denouement. A cliffhanger that remains unresolved from the book publication way back in 1993.

John Landis’ horror/comedy An American Werewolf in London, which along with The Howling, created the current interpretation of man-to-wolf transformation, ends without any denouement. The beast is killed by London’s SWAT, the man’s body is revealed and his love, Alexandra Price, cries, the screen slams to black and a doo-wop version of Blue Moon plays over the credits. This movie needed one more beat, a single scene showing the lives changed by the fantastic events.

A film can have too many denouements as well as lacking one. Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Return of the King has often been critiqued for having too many endings, but the film has only one ending: the quest to destroy the ring is concluded with the ring of power’s tumble into lava. What this film has is too many denouements. Frodo and Sam are rescued, the Fellowship is reunited, Aragorn is crowned King, the Hobbits return home changed by their experiences, and finally Frodo sails off with the last of the elves to the undying lands. That’s five denouements for a film that already tested it audiences with an extensive running time. While a novel, particularly a long one, can take time with the denouement, film is a swifter medium and demands a swifter conclusion, including its denouement.

When crafting a tale, whether in prose, poetry, song, or film, give serious thought to not only the nature of the ending but of the denouement and the final emotional note that you leave on.

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Why Was Andor So Good

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It’s been a year since the Star Wars franchise spin-off of a spin-off Andor completed its second and final season with the last episode flowing seamlessly into Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and for many people Andor represented the best material since the original trilogy.

But why is that? What makes this limited series of just two dozen episodes so compelling and so vibrant compared to the rest of the vast and sprawling additions to that ‘galaxy far, far away’?

I think the answer lies in part in the cultural environment that the series was released into. Star Wars hit the box office in the late seventies, a period when the old Hollywood studio system was effectively dead before the mega-corporations took control, when the ‘young Turks’ and their Producer Unit system dictated the industry. These young, rebellious filmmakers explored themes of loss and cynicism with films that dominated the public’s attention. Even when the protagonists of these films claimed victories at the end of their struggles they proved to be Pyrrhic ones. Michael becomes everything he did not want to be at the conclusion of The Godfather, or their victories came at terrible prices such as the death of Father Karras in The Exorcist. These examples don’t even touch the cases where there was no victory, only soul-crushing defeat for the characters, such as at the end of The Stepford Wives.

Star Wars, a straightforward tale of good vs evil where it is unquestioned that evil will fall, exploded into the setting with an undeniable dynamism and optimism. In a nation that still reeled from political turmoil, senseless violence in its cities, and the unfathomable loss in a distant Asian country, this film, which at first blush appeared to have no cynical subtext, was received like a miracle cure for the ailment dogging the American spirit. In combination with Jaws two years earlier, it created the summer blockbuster and reshaped not only film production and distribution but the course of the culture for the next few decades. Studio after studio and production company after production company chased the enormous dollars that seemingly lay in simple adventures, clearly defined good and evil characters, and hopeful narratives leaving the darker, moodier, and more challenging stories from Blade Runner to The Thing to fail at the box office and only be recognized for their artistic merits many years later.

So how does Andor, a story where our protagonists commit murder as the easiest path out of their troubles, kill allies that they perceive to be a threat, willfully allow others to fly to their doom in order to protect their secret, and whose ‘villains’ gain our sympathies as they struggle against the same impersonal bureaucracy that enslaves the galaxy even as they viciously and ruthlessly hunt our ‘heroes,’ compel such admiration and love from its audience?

By the time Andor came to production, the American culture had changed quite dramatically, coming full circle from the 1970s back into a wary and tired cynicism, but after decades of hopeful, optimistic media the public taste for something that reflected the world they knew had grown quite intense, setting the table for something as ethically questionable as Andor to satisfy that hunger. Where audiences in the 70s needed escape from the bleak times, audiences of the 2020s wanted to see their times reflected back at them, but with the promise that victory, even if costly, remained a possible outcome. The enemy’s competence, once a source of derision such as with the marksmanship of the Imperial Stormtroopers, could be recognized even as their villainy remained patently obvious.

And that brings us to the second element that I think contributes greatly to Andor’s success in these times: the depth of the characters.

It is wrong and an injustice to both Andor and Star Wars to label their characters as either ‘complex’ or ‘simple.’ The truth of the matter is that these are very different genres of storytelling, and I do not mean science-fiction or fantasy, but something much more basic than that. Star Wars is a fairy tale, even opening with a revised version of ‘Once upon a time …’ with ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …’. Andor is a drama, not a fairy tale.

In a fairy tale characters are presented with far less depth, often representing archetypes instead of fully realized humans. The Princess, the Knight, the Thief with a heart of gold, The Mentor, the Dark Knight, and the villainous, corrupt King: all these are stock representations of character and not characters in and of themselves. These archetypes often lack depth but that does not make them bad characters, it makes them the right characters for the story that is being told.

Dramatic characters tell different stories: they do not tell fairy tales but stories of relatable characters facing relatable issues, even if the environment where they face those issues is fantastic. Andor’s Dedra Meero is a villain. She tortures prisoners, and is willing to murder entire populations, but she also is conflicted by some of her actions, she mourns the cost of her dedication, and weeps at the loss of a love she thought she had won. These elements of her life do not make her ‘superior’ to Star Wars’ Grand Moff Tarkin, who displays not a moment of doubt and slaughters entire planets as a mere display of power. Both characters serve their respective genres. Cassian Andor, when faced with the accidental death of a corporate police officer, does not hesitate to kill a survivor, an action that Luke Skywalker would never even consider, much less commit.

Andor is not better than Star Wars; to compare the two is like comparing a painting to a sculpture. The reason so many people took Andor to heart is because like Star Wars in the 70s it is what they hungered for, even if they did not know it.

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This is Not a Review of The Odyssey

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Sunday morning, after finally shaking off the effects of a two-day migraine attack that lasted from Thursday through Friday, my sweetie-wife and I caught an early morning screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. I wish I could tell you how I really feel about this film, but I cannot because of its presentation.

First, a little background on my sweetie-wife’s and my moviegoing habits. Her hearing is fairly sensitive and as such she finds modern movies are played too loudly for her comfort. To combat this she brings a set of cushioned headphones to wear to cut down on the sounds of the film. Most of the time I do not, but the last movie we went to together, Supergirl, I too found the volume overly loud and uncomfortable. Due to that experience and knowing that Nolan has a penchant for making his sound mix loud, I brought along a pair for myself, just in case.

It was not enough.

Universal Pictures

The Odyssey was far, far too loud and in particular the bass which played frequently and with such intensity that it obliterated from my mind and perception everything else in existence. My mind was too concerned with the discomfort of the soundtrack to ever slip away into that dream-like state where the characters and events on the screen took on their own form of reality. I was much more concerned about my seating than I was about any machinations or palace intrigue that took place in Ithaca. Thoughts of dealing with the bass that sliced through me like a phaser pushed from my attention any feelings I might have had for the character lost at sea or the poor doomed Trojans slaughtered in the night. I was present when The Odyssey was screened but I cannot truly say that I actually watched it with any real attention. In the film’s penultimate act, when a terrible storm batters Odysseus, I had to physically cover my eyes because the pounding the audience had suffered at the hands of the audio mixer pushed me once again toward a migraine and the flashes of lightning were simply unendurable.

I can report that The Odyssey does not drag, even during its nearly three-hour runtime; Nolan is too talented a filmmaker to let that happen, but his devotion to an overpowering soundtrack undermines what might have been an enjoyable feature.

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Thinking About The Batman

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Bruce Wayne, AKA The Batman, is an enduring character that first emerged in 1939 from the pages of Detective Comics and has been with us in some form ever since. Recently, I have been noticing a number of posts that seem to place the version of the character presented in the Zack Snyder films as the ‘best’ version. Now, Snyder’s fans are vocal and intense just as fans, which is a perfectly fine expression of devotion, but I cannot find myself in agreement with them on this. One of the clips that they post and re-post is the fight between Batman and a number of thugs in a warehouse where Batman has come to rescue a woman held under a threat of being murdered.( I am being vague for those who have not seen Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.) This to me, and that film in general, do a disservice to the essential nature of the character.

Batman, despite predating the term’s general use in fiction or film, is for all purposes a noirdetective and that is what resides at the heart of the character. He investigates and exposes crimes and criminals with his brilliance, but like another fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, is adept at combat in all its forms because his opponents are never shy about employing violence. It is perhaps a strange quirk of fictional evolution that over time the two characters, Holmes and Wayne, who shared so much in skill and ability, diverged until what is glorified in each comes at the cost of their full skill set. Holmes, despite in the text as being proficient in so many forms of combat, becomes primarily an intellectual and Wayne, despite being brilliant, is noted for an impressive array of martial arts, his devotion to deduction mostly forgotten.

This reaches its apotheosis in the clip posted and re-posted by the Snyder fans. It is from a film in which Batman’s intelligence and detective skills are utterly forgotten as the character is manipulated and led to plainly false conclusions by the film’s principal villain.

Perhaps this is why my favorite cinematic Batman is Matt Reeves The Batman which, while showing elaborate hand-to-hand skill, is much more of a film noir than a martial arts experience. Even when Bruce Wayne fails to grasp the true nature of a clue he remains at heart a detective, untangling a complex web of cause and effect and ultimately not only uncovering the villain but his true self at the same time.

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People in 1941 Were So Dumb

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Anyone who listens to the wise, educated, and informed opinions of right-wing podcasts and revisionist historians, who possess the courage to dismiss all the collective judgment and scholarship of their peers, knows that it is an unquestioned fact that communism and fascism are two very similar branches of the same tree firmly rooted in the politics of the left.

What is surprising is that the people of 1941, who were living with the active and expanding aggressive wars of both the fascists of Italy and Germany, were so ill-informed as to make the same blundering error as the woke-infested historians of our days and see communists and fascists as somehow opposites, as left vs right. This shallow understanding of true political knowledge is perfectly displayed in what many scholars of cinema call the finest motion picture ever produced, Citizen Kane.

The film opens, after the on-screen death of Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), with a newsreel covering the man’s public life. (In the days before television, short films of the nation’s and world’s news played in theaters before the cartoons and movies.) To dramatize how the fictional character was seen so differently and in directly opposite natures by so many millions across the nation two clips are used, one from a banker and one from a labor leader. Here is that clip.

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The filmmakers, the screenwriters, and the audience were far too ignorant to understand that communists and fascists were the very same thing, even as they watched the events of the Second World War unfold around them; they remained dumb to the reality of those events which only a few very special people today can perceive accurately.

Of course, it is not even remotely possible that these conservative posters and revisionist historians have their own self-motivated reasoning that draws them down this path of equating the two philosophies. They are far too noble, too objective to fall prey to such human frailties. This forgotten relationship between communism and fascism is not the product of conservatives trying in dire desperation to distance themselves from the mass murderous thugs that populate their history. The postings and tweets from real Americans sharing the depictions that make it plain that the images of the hammer and sickle and of the swastika are in fact completely equivalent are not convoluted rationalizations.

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Still Not My Skill Set

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Let me make this clear with upper case characters in bold:

I WOULD NEVER USE AN A.I. GENERATED BOOK COVER.

What I will do is use A.I. to mock up an idea for a cover, one I would use as an example of my thinking with a human artist who could then help me realize my vision or dissuade me from making a noob mistake. So, should I be so fortunate as to work with an artist to craft a cover for my ’80s, cinephile, gay, ghost story, here is a starting point for something that might work as a cover. (Note, A.I. added the text ‘A Novel of Old Hollywood’ which this is not, despite a passing reference to ‘Poverty Row’ studios .)

A.I. Generated

To prompt this image, I used a photograph of the now retired Ken Cinema located here in San Diego California which served as inspiration for the fictional Kensington Theater the main character’s joy and life and the source of his terrifying troubles. I think if I were working with an artist, I would ask them to remove the generic city skyline from the background, give us more of the sky, and make it night with nothing but stars overhead. I would also ask that the sidewalk in front of the Kensington be lightly populated with people in costumes waiting for the midnight screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. But, in general, I kind of dig this concept for a cover.

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Excited for and Dreading Next Weekend

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So, next weekend, July 17th, is the release of Nolan’s next film, his adaptation of The Odyssey. A

Universal Picture

movie that has already drawn fire from idiots online who believe that true beauty can only be represented by fair skin, blonde hair, and sky-blue eyes and has reignited the, from what I can tell, unjust attacks on Emily Wilson’s translation of the epic. I can’t see this two-bit controversy causing any damage to a film by Christopher Nolan and creator who managed to make a lengthy feature that focused on testimony in bland little rooms into an award-winning and box office monster. No, The Odyssey will do just fine, and my sweetie-wife and I will be there Sunday morning to see it on its opening weekend, but it will be a test of endurance as the reported running time is a staggering two hours and fifty-two minutes.

Clearly Nolan cares as little for his audience’s bladder health as he did for their respiratory health when he pushed Tenet into theaters while the COVID pandemic, a pandemic that killed a million Americans, still burned hot. Because the studio, Warner Brothers, delayed the film’s theatrical release, from its original July 2020 until September of that same year, Nolan severed his relationship with them and has since camped his productions at Universal.

Three hours without an intermission is hardly in the same category as expecting people to flock into a confined space while an airborne disease burns its way through the population, but it is also a sign that the filmmaker has little regard for the comfort of their audience. AMC theaters will be a little unhappy because while I plan to see this film, I have adored most of Nolan’s projects (Following is dumb and Interstellar is an overly cynical derivation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.) I will not, for my own comfort, be purchasing any size of diet soda from the concession stand.

When Quentin Tarantino released his nearly three-hour feature, The Hateful Eight, an enjoyable but ultimately lacking film, he included a limited run of a ‘roadshow’ release where the film was presented with an intermission. Nolan isn’t even giving us that. It’s a large-format film and nearly three hours but without a break for the audience.

Nolan is a talented director and writer, someone willing to challenge audiences with complex plots presented usually in a non-linear fashion, but I wish to the gods that he did not also challenge our biology as well.

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