Category Archives: Fantasy

Movie Review: Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania

 

 

The Marvel Cinematic Universe released its 31st feature film with Ant-man & The Wasp: Quantumania boasting an impressive cast, a fantastic adventure, a realty-twisting setting, and lacking in emotional weight.

As shown in the trailer, our heroes as pulled into the fantasy setting of the Quantum Realm by an ill-advised experiment and there must discover a way home while dealing with a new threat to the MCU.

Directed by Payton reed who helmed the previous two, and quite enjoyed, Ant-Man entries into the MCU, and written by Jeff Loveness, as his feature film screenwriting debut, Quantumania has action but feels empty. The element that had elevated MCU movies above other attempts at silver screen adaptations of comic book heroes is the devotions to characters and story. Even,

Disney Studios

or perhaps more importantly, the lighter films such as the Ant-Man franchise have never forgotten that it is related characters with relatable issues that engaged the audiences. In the first film Scott Lang certainly battles and defeats villainous characters but it is in healing his relationship with his family that mattered. In the second movie family again is at the heart of the story with the rescue of Janet from the Quantum Realm and the found family of Bill Foster and Ghost.

Quantumania has no such theme. The characters enter and exit their adventure unchanged, showing no arc, no growth, no emotional scars for their challenges. This movie, like a bad Bond, is all plot (How do we escape? How do we win?) and no story (Who are we and what does this matters to us?).

Screenwriter C. Robert Cargill who wrote the first Doctor Strange film when asked about how much integrating he was told to do for that movie reported that the directive was write the best Doctor Strange movie he could, and the studio would worry about how it all fit into the MCU.

Quantumania feels the exact opposite of that. It is all set-up, exposition, and establishment for further franchise forays and sacrifices everything on the screen that might resonate with an audience for that overarching goal.

When I walked out of Quantumania and had lunch with my sweetie-wife I placed this film in the third quarter of the MCU’s feature film but as the days have passed and less and less of the film remains in my head to any impact, I must categorize this is belonging in the lowest quarter of the MCU. I have seen worse big budget massively produced movies but for Marvel this is a miss.

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Norwegian Kaiju Fun: Troll (2022)

 

While the Japanese film industry reigns undisputed as the global champions in giant monster, AKA Kaiju, cinema other nations have gotten in the act and this year brought a treat from the Nordic North, Troll.

Construction of a new railway line through the mountains of Norway awakes an enormous troll Netflixthat wrecks destruction throughout the countryside as the meanders South towards the nation’s capital, Oslo.  Am assembled ragtag team must battle the troll and bureaucratic interference along with familial trauma to save Norway from the ancient pre-Christian curse.

Troll, directed with a firm talented hand by Roar Uthaug and with sharp, lovely cinematography by Jallo Faber, is a fun, fast, and thoroughly enjoyable film. Screenwriters Uthaug and Espen Aukan, perfectly balance the spectacle effects of a 40- or 50-meter-tall troll cutting through countryside and city environments with just enough human scale story to give the film dramatic weight without sliding into melodrama. The characters, while not blindingly unique, are drawn well-enough to present as believable people, engaging the audiences emotional connections. It is also pleasant that despite the mixed-gender cast there was no attempt at a love triangle or even a romantic subplot, just associates, friends, and family working in common purpose. The films ending is reminiscent in mood to the grandparents of Kaiju cinema, King Kong (1933) and Gojira (1954.)

I am going to talk about two elements Troll in a generally non-spoiler manner.

Frist something that amused me. During the movie’s second act the Troll moves through an Amusement Park, food, games, rides, including the obligatory fake rapids water ride. The day the troll arrived the sky was overcast, a cool day, and still the water ride was full of Norwegians wearing heavy long-sleeved shirts. Clearly the Norwegians have a different standard when the weather is appropriate for getting drenched.

The second damaged by suspension of disbelief but not so badly as to kick me fully out of enjoying the movie. It is strongly suggested, but never explicitly. stated, that the Norwegian military considers a nuclear strike against the troll, but Norway is not among the 9 nations known or suspected of possessing nuclear weapons. Nor does the movie suggest that they are borrowing one from NATO.

That said Troll was a fast, fun movie that played quickly and never failed to entertain. For fans of giant monsters on a rampage Troll should not be missed.

Troll is currently streaming on Netflix.

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The Unlearned Lesson of Black Panther

2018’s Black Panther, written by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, and directed by Coogler, was Marvel’s expansion in Afrofuturism exploring a mythical African kingdom, Wakanda, with incredibly advanced comic-book technology and wholly untouched by historical colonialism. An incredible box office success Black Panther gave a new myth to millions around the world while exploring the theme that isolationism, both for individuals and nations, solves no problems but merely leaves them to fester and grow. Its lesson that through interconnectedness can we heal the harms of the past is a valuable one.

However, there is another lesson in the plot of the film that none of the characters learned or even took note of its existence.

(Some spoilers follow)

After Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (Michael B. Jordan) defeats T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) in ritual combat and claims the throne of Wakanda as his own he launches a campaign to wage war on the rest of the world seeking to ‘liberate’ the African diaspora around the globe. (I place ‘liberate’ in quote because his statement that ‘the sun will never set on the Wakandan Empire’ makes clear not only the historical analogy that he has become the colonizers he so despises but that liberty’ is far from his goal.)

Despite the Wakandan royal court knowledge that this will lead to millions upon millions of deaths around the world King Killmonger’s plan is put into immediate action. The King of Wakanda is an absolute monarch, ruling by decree and without any limitation.

T’Challa and the other heroes of the tale foil Killmonger’s plan for a global war and return the film’s protagonist to the throne.

But there is no hint in this film or the ones that followed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that the Wakandans even took notice that an absolute monarch is a plan for disaster.

Never create a political power you aren’t willing to see in the hands of your enemy.

There are other kingdoms in the marvel Universe, the films have already introduced us to Asgard, and it certainly looks like the sequel to Black Panther will introduce thew kingdom of Atlantis and it is doubtful that either will see limitations of the king’s authority, but Wakanda and Black Panther is different than those other stories and settings. Black Panther is a commentary on the real world, real history, and real evil that was visited upon the African continent. While superheroes with their magical and physics defying powers are modern fairytales and myth if you make such a direct and applicable statement on modern political systems and power then ignoring the dangers of absolute monarchy, of too much power concentrated into one person hands, is a disservice.

The unlearned lesson of Black Panther is power must be distributed and checked or will eventually be abused.

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Enigmatic Estonian Folk Horror: November (2017)

By way of the YouTube channel Dark Corners Streaming Review my Sweetie-Wife and I discovered the Estonian film November.

Adapted by writer/director Rainer Sarnet from the novel Rehepapp ehk November by Andrus Kivirähk November set in an isolated Estonian village in the 19th century and the story

Homeless Bob Productions

principally concerns a love triangle between Liina (Rea Lest-Liik) a peasant girl, Hans (Jörgen Liik) a peasant boy Liina adores, and the baroness (Jette Loona Hermanis) daughter of the local baron and with whom Hans is deeply infatuated. Both Liina and Hans, desperate for the love and attention turn to supernatural aid to win the attention of their loves.

Films often break down into two vast categories when dealing with the supernatural. In one case the supernatural is in intruding, unknown, force that shatters to the existing order and introduces chaos which by the end of the tale must be dispelled to restore or create a new order. A Vampire moves in next door and until it is destroyed there is chaos.

The other great category is a subtle one where the events can be interpreted as possibly taking place in reality, though the evidence is quite thin, or possibly the tale is the product of a deranged mind and there is no supernatural at all. Are there ghosts haunting the children or has the nanny gone mad?

November defies both categories.

From the film’s opening scenes, it is clear that the supernatural exists and is a part of the peasants daily life. The dirty, squalid, and tenuous lives of the peasants is infused with the supernatural. Ghosts, werewolves, devils, witchcraft, and animated golem-like creations composed of farm equipment are all routine and accepted by the peasant as ways of surviving their brutal environment. Visitations by the dead is as routine as stealing from the Baron.

Curiously the supernatural’s integration doesn’t extend to the local lord. At no point in the story does the Baron or his daughter make use of or acknowledge to spirit world with the same level of acceptance as the peasantry.

Cinematographer Mart Taniel captures the world of November is stark, high contrast, black and white. Fog glows with a spectral inner light, moonlight is diffuse, and the shadows are dark, deep, and threatening. I suspect that Taniel and director Sarnet also employed filters in a manner similar to Eggers’ The Lighthouse so that the skin of the peasantry took on a dark and unhealthy appearance while keeping the nobility clean and pristine further dividing the classes.

November is far from a standard horror film. It is atmospheric and moody focusing more on tone that scares. It almost but not quite follows a nightmare or dream logic reminiscent of David Lynch but with a more linear and straightforward narrative. It is not a film that gets your adrenaline pumping and one that sets your heart racing, but one that rather lingers in your mind like a half-forgotten dream.

November is available on VOD, Kanopy in the US, and Amazon Prime in the UK.

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Quick Thoughts: House of the Dragon and Rings of Power

Two new shows arrived recently, House of the Dragon a prequel series for Game of Thrones on HBO and Rings of Power a prequel series for Lord of the Rings streaming on Amazon Prime.

Both shows are following in the footsteps of massively popular that also made mistakes and missteps of their own. Lord of the Rings had it’s disappointing if financially successful Hobbit trilogy and Game of Thrones fell off the narrative cliff with its final two seasons.

House of the Dragon, set just over a hundred years before the events in Game of Thrones is concerned with a civil war among the ruling houses of the seven kingdoms and so far, has failed to emotionally engage me or cause me to care about any of the characters. Unlike Game of HBOThrones there are no characters to root for or identify with and the characters as presented are far too bland to be engaging as interesting characters. The series feels more plot than story with events pushing the characters about rather than being driven by their choices. I don’t dislike the show but neither do I like it.

Rings of Power is much more engaging. While it is set thousands of years prior to The Lord of the Rings, due to the immortality of the elves we actually have character continuity between the properties. Character have much clearer and well-defined motivations and personalities that Amazon Studiosmake the series easy to emotionally care about. I know just enough of Tolkien’s lore to see some of what is happened but not so much as to be offended by any liberties taken with the text. And as to the ‘controversy’ over the casting of some of the characters? Piffle. Elves and Dwarves are not real and therefore it is immaterial the race of any actor in the part.

I like and I am enjoying Rings of Power and look forward to where the show may take us.

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Movie Review: Three Thousand Years of Longing

George Miller, a filmmaker whose filmography is so eclectic as to encompass both the Mad Maxfranchise and Happy Feet, released last week, Three Thousand Years of Longing a story about Djinn (Idris Elba) and scholar of stories (Tilda Swinton.)

Alithea (Swinton) while in Istanbul for a conference where she delivers a talk about how stories once explained the natural world, but the gods and heroes are reduced to simple metaphors. (With a sly visual reference to the D.C. Property of comics, possibly a nod to the never made George Miller’s Justice League.) While shopping for a memento in the famous Grand Bazar she

Filmnation Entertainment

purchases a delicate glass bottle that she later learns contains a trapped Djinn (Elba.) the Djinn desperately wants Alithea to speak three wishes from her heart as that will free him from his imprisonment but Alithea as well-versed in the dangerous nature of wishes as any experienced D&D players is reluctant to make any wish fully expecting once fulfilled it will twist and transform from benefit to bane.

The deadlocked characters are the heart and soul of Three Thousand years of Longing with each trying to discover the truth of the other’s nature. Is the Djinn really a trickster seeking to twist her wishes for malintent? Is Alithea as fully contented with not heart’s desire as she professes with nothing that she truly wants to wish for? To answer these questions the characters tell each other their stories transporting each other and us to distant lands and peoples rich with tradition and astonishingly lovely, and yet the throughline for both is loss and yearning.

While director and co-writer George Miller and Cinematographer John Seale has composed a visually stunning film rich and vibrant with color and texture the real reason to watch Three Thousand Years of Longing is Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in a room, acting off each other. Strip away the special effects and the fantastical elements of plot and the story reduced down to two characters talking and eventually exposing their true selves to one another. With actors as massively talented as this pair that becomes compelling far beyond fantasies of djinn and magic.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is a story about stories, the power of stories as well as the fantasies we tell ourselves when reality proves too harsh to face. It is a film about loneliness, betrayal, and how in the end we can never be sure when that magical touch will appear and transform our live and ourselves.

Three thousand Years of Longing is currently playing and theaters and while it has none of the action of Mad Max: Fury Road it deserves every inch of the big screen as Miller’s thrilling post-apocalyptic fables.

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Series Review: The Sandman

 

Sorry for the lack weekday updates this week. Tuesday evening, I got to experience something new to me, a gout flare. Wednesday was spent in quite a bit of pain and many hours at the kaiser Urgent Care, and by Thursday night it had nearly all passed. So now when I watch the musical 1776 and Franklin is wishing that King George felt like his big toe, but all over, I fully understand the kevel vitriol he is throwing in the crown’s direction.
Last night my sweetie-wife and I completed the Netflix series adaptation of Gaiman’s The

Netflix Studios

Sandman. The 10-episode series follows Dream/Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) one of the Endless, personifications of enduring concepts interregnal to humanity. Morpheus is the Lord of Dreams and some of the other Endless are Death, Desire, and so on. Following a century long imprisonment when human sorcerers were attempting to capture Death, Morpheus embarks upon a quest to reclaim stolen items of power, rebuild his decayed kingdom of The Dreaming, and recapture escaped nightmares of major Arcana who has in his absence troubled the waking world.
I have never read the original Comic run from which the series is adapted and as such I cannot speak to the quality of transformation but merely react as it is currently presented.
I like the show. It’s fantastic elements meld with the reality of the ‘waking’ world quite nicely and rarely does the show lose itself in deep lore and heavy bouts of exposition. (Always a tricky balancing act with genre fiction.) The cast Are quite engaging and well placed in their parts. (There has been controversy over the gender-flipping nature of some of the parts but I found no issues with any of the cast.) Sturridge had a particularly difficult task; he is the show’s lead and central character, and he must carry the show while playing a withdrawn and more silent than not personification. The part required that subtle tics and posture inform the audience to the character’s inner turmoil and crisis a challenge that Sturridge proved equal to.
The story slides easy between sweet fantasy and disturbing horror, particularly in episode 5 which centers on the horrific events over a single day and night in a diner where a troubled man lifts the veil of lies that often makes life bearable to terrible consequences.
Over all the series is well worth a watch and here’s hoping that it is successful enough for Netflix to engage another season.

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The Muse Has Returned to Olympus

Yesterday the word spread officially that singer, actor, and activist Olivia Newton-John has died. With a performing and philanthropic career that spanned five decades ONJ left an indelible mark on popular culture by far not the least of which was her role as Sandy in the feature film production of the musical Grease.

I cannot remember the first album I purchased back in the 70s, but it was almost certainly either Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits or Olivia Newton-John’s Greatest Hits. As a fan of easy listening, great vocals, and romantic songs, her music has been with me since adolescence. It was not easy being a teenage male in the 1970s and preferring love songs and pop when the rest of the world seemed consumed with rock and hair the coming of the hair bands.

Those who know me know that my favorite film was one in which she starred, Xanadu. Now, Xanadu is in fact a terrible movie. Starting production to participate in the brief roller-disco craze of the late 70s it suffered constant and extensive rewrites throughout filming and lacking in strong central narrative or character growth the film bombed at the box office while igniting

Universal Pictures

the musical charts with its soundtrack of Electric Light Orchestra and ONJ songs. The feature found additional life as a cult movie and eventually an Ironic stage musical. Underneath the trashed production, inconsistent plot, and truly ineffable ending the film touched hearts due to it sincere adoration of dreams and dreamers wrapped up in its theme that ‘Dreams don’t die. Not by themselves, we kill them.’ Like Tinkerbell, the dream survives as long as you believe. Olivia has passed, her dream and ours remain.

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A Space Opera Advantage

There is no doubt in my in mind that FGU’s role playing game Space Opera has one of the worst edited rulebooks from a major game company. Typos, contradictory rules, vital rules dispersed in various sections, and the lack of any index at all produce a set of rules that without ‘search’ when using the PDFs would make running the game quite challenging.

That said I do adore the game, its bold attempt to sweep in rule for nearly every conceivable SF setting, and its sheer naked ambition.

Recently, in the campaign I have been running since May 2019, I have come to appreciate another advantage to Space Opera, the lack of an experience point system for character abilities.

In Dungeons and Dragons players begin the game as low-level adventurers, dealing limited damage, easily killed, and marginally skilled. With each adventure the Dungeon Master awards Experience Points to the characters that advance their skills and capabilities, no adventure, no experience points, no advancement.

Space Opera using skill learning. Characters devote themselves to study and practice to become better at their skills and advance in capabilities from piloting to the sciences. As long as the character can continue their studies they can continue to advance.

This is an advantage when the real world collides with the role-playing world. Is a player in a D&D game misses one or more adventures, their character fails to gain experience points alongside their compatriots, falling behind in skills and toughness that may be fundamentally unfair. Real world responsibilities should always outweigh play. It is a mark of adulthood.

With Space Opera the missing player’s character, while not investigating the slave clone trade can continue to study and practice the skills they have committed themselves to advancing. When the player returns to the table, they suffer no in game penalty for attending to pressing real world duties. As long as the gamemaster is keeping careful track of the time passed, for which I have spreadsheets that have proven invaluable, and when the player is eligible to advance their skills, the system is fair to all players.

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The Strangest James Bond Film

Since the release of Dr, No in 1962 EON production’s James Bond films have taken the character on wild adventures. Some were smaller in scale, From Russia with Love and For Your Eyes Only, some have threatened the world and have seen the character in orbit above the Earth. For my money that most unusual entry into the franchise that introduced the wildest element was Live and Let Die.

Released in 1973 and riding on the cycle of Blaxploitation cinema this movie presented a new

Eon productions

Bond, Roger Moore, and small threat. Instead of a world ending or dominating plot Bond works to stop a Caribbean criminal from dominating the New York heroin trade.

Now, none of this, while different from many Bond adventures, is terribly unique but there is an element in the film that had not appeared in previous movies would never be revisited.

Magic is real.

The villain, Kananga, has a virgin priestess Solitaire, a strangely non0suggestive name for a Bond Woman, who, with tarot, can accurately predict the future and far see distant events. This is not a delusion or cold reading trick. Solitaire repeatedly and correctly advises Kananga of coming threats and dangers. her prescient powers are tied to her virginity and when Bond seduces her, as he is wont to do, and her life is no endangered by Kananga, Solitaire flips and aids Bond.

Just to make sure that it is not missed that magic and the occult are real in the Bond-verse, one of Kananga’s henchmen costumes himself in the manner of Baron Samedi a supernatural being of Haitian culture with association over the dead and resurrection. During an action sequence near the film’s end Bond throws this particular henchman into a coffin of venomous snakes where he is killed.

And yet at the end of the film the character, played by the same actor, Geoffrey Holder, appears laughing and very much alive at the front of a speeding train. Apparently, we are to assume that this was not a henchman costumed as Baron Samedi but actually Baron Samedi himself.

While Bond has broken free of the constraints of physics and natural law before and after Live and Let Die, the films have never again addressed that they take place in a universe with magic and supernatural spirits.

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