Category Archives: Fantasy

The Marvel Show That Sailed Away

The Marvel Cinematic Universe had run a fairly tight ship continuity-wise. There have been a few misstep and clues dropped that led to nowhere, such as The Ten Rings reference in Iron Man that never paid off but overall the studio has done a good job presenting its properties as taking place in the same share setting.

And then there’s Marvels’ Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. which ran on ABC from 2013 thru 2020 for 136 episodes and followed the turbulent lives of a few SHIELD agents as they navigated personal, professional, and powered challenges in a world suddenly infused with enhanced beings and aliens.

For the first season the program hewed close to the events of the MCU, the agents were dispatched to the UK as part of the clean-up and follow-up crew in the wake of the destruction unleased by the conflicts of Thor: The Dark Worldand the agency was toppled by the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. But as the series progressed the connections between the feature films and the events the television characters encounter weakened until finally the most massive event of the MCU, Thanos’ eradication of half of all life in the universe, is never referenced and for all practical purposes never happens.

Agents of SHIELD did play with a number of concepts and characters from Marvel mythology with the introduction of Life Model Decoy, android replicas of characters, the best onscreen portrayal of the Ghost Rider character, and the introduction of the Inhumans as a stand in for mutant powered individuals as that ‘term’ for enhanced superpowered character was tied up with the right to the X-Men franchise with Fox studios.

All seven season of Agents of Shield are available for streaming on Netflixand I am currently doing a front to back re-watch of the series.

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Captain America and Magneto: Marvel’s Original Anti-Fascists

It is interesting to contrast Marvel’s best-known Anti-Fascists, one nearly the Platonic Ideal of a modern comic book hero, Captain America, the other a genocidal villain driven by trauma and terror, Magnet. Both gained their anti-fascism during fascism’s original run, World War II but reacted in diametrically different manners. In discussing these two characters I will be referring to their cinematic presentations, Caps’ from the very successful Marvel Cinematic Universe and Magento from Fox’s more erratic X-Men franchise and associated films.

Steve Rogers was an underweight, under-sized, unhealthy man when American entered the war but driven by his intense sense of justice he desperately wanted to serve in the US Armed Forces despite being categorized as ‘4-F.’ After coming to the attention of Dr. Erskine Rogers was recruited into an experimental program to enhance human ability and attempt to create a ‘Super Solider.’ It’s important to note that in his interview with Erskine when asked if he ‘wanted to kill Nazis’ Rogers replied that he didn’t want to kill anyone but that he doesn’t like bullies. With an ideology that was already solidly anti-fascist Rogers also already possessed his most heroic qualities. The Super Soldier Serum may have granted him transhuman capabilities, but it was his moral code that defines his anti-fascism and also governed it limits.

Erik Lehnsherr a Polish Jew who would eventually take up the alias Magento was subjected to the horrors the Holocaust by Germany’s genocidal Nazi regime and while his mutant ability to manipulate all forms of metal was already present its development and his control were insufficient to protect either himself or his parents. Surviving the mass murder of Jews only because the attention of Dr. Klaus Schmidt aka Sabastian Shaw, Erik comes to his anti-fascism as a reaction to the brutal treatment of himself, his family, and his fellow Jews rather than from an innate moral code, despite as a younger man being a man of faith. Following World War II Erik adapts a personal mission as a NAZI hunter particularly interested in finding and taking revenge on Dr Schmidt. After successfully preventing nuclear war in an alternate history version of the Cuban Missile Crisis and targeting for destruction by the government that fear his and other mutant’s powers Erik adapts the name Magneto and identifies more as a mutant than with his Jewish ancestry. Taking the lesson he learned at the hands of Nazi brutality that humanity’s prejudice will lead it to always destroy those who are different he makes mutant survival and dominance his objective. Eventually Magneto attempts a massive attack to transform many of the world’s leaders into mutant regardless of the danger and death his machine will unleash because his objectives have transformed in obsessions.

Here we can compared critical moments between the two characters and how character plays into the importance of these moments.

Rogers, still a scrawny specimen without the benefits of Erskine’s serum, is suddenly confronted with a grenade during training, unaware that is a practice dummy round and while the rest of the trainees run for safety, he throws himself on the device attempting to shield everyone from the blast. He understands on an intuitive level self-sacrifice.

Magento’s mutant creation machine requires his unique abilities as a power source and the power levels needed are likely to kill him. Rather than subject himself to that risk and danger he kidnaps a teenage girl with the ability to steal his power and forces her to bear that risk. Erik’s terror and trauma has transformed him into his own version of fascism sacrificing others for his own goals.

And therein is the critical difference between the character and the moral difference in ways to combat fascism. You cannot adopt fascist ways without becoming a fascist yourself. It is noble to offer yourself up for the cause it is evil to offer up others.

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Blu-Ray Review: The White Reindeer

 

A few weeks ago as my sweetie-wife and I relaxed watching Travel Man, an amusing show that spends 48 hours in various cities and well worth a watch on Hulu, I came across a tweet suggesting that people need to watch this older Finnish film about a woman that becomes a were-reindeer luring men to deaths. I shared the information with my sweetie-wife who instantly wanted to see it. (She has a love of things Finnish.) Searching failed to find any site hosting The White Reindeer for streaming and because my own curiosity grew quite elevated and I ordered a Blu-ray of the film from Germany. (It’s a joy owning a region free Blu-ray player and being able to view discs from literally anywhere in the world.)

Several weeks later The White Reindeer arrived in our mailbox.

With a running time just over an hour The White Reindeer fits nicely into the sort of time slot that from the period would have been a ‘B’ picture but its quality is in no way associated with that ter. Starring and co-written by Mirjami Kuosmanen The White Reindeer’s protagonist is Pirita a young woman who find her newly married life to reindeer hunter Aslak more dull than she had expected as he is required to spend significant time on distant expeditions. In desperation she turns to a local wizard for magical help to make her irresistible but due to either the unusual nature of her birth or the malicious actions of the stone god that grants the power Pirita becomes a shapeshifter transforming in a rare white reindeer that no hunter can resist chasing to their doom.

The director Erik Blomberg avoids the typical transformation effects of the age and instead of lapse dissolves uses clever edits and cuts to suggest the change and promotes the fantastic feel of the film far better than if we had watched Pirita become the reindeer.

The White Reindeer won Best Fairy tale Film at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film in 1956.

More closely related to horror cinema that fantasy with clear mirroring of Universal’s The Wolf-Man without being derivative The White Reindeer is essential viewing for lovers of international horror films.

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Series Review: Lovecraft Country

Sunday night saw HBO’s premier of the long anticipated series adaptation of Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country.

I have not read the novel so my impressions of the series and the only ‘aired’ episode so far is driven entirely by the onscreen material.

Episode one centered on Atticus ‘Tic’ Freeman (Jonathan Majors) an army veteran recently discharged following the Korean War’s armistice as he travels home to Chicago because his father has gone missing. Uniting with his Father’s brother George (Courtney B. Vance), who travels researching his guide to safe travels for Black people in Jim Crow America, and childhood friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett), he travels to ‘Lovecraft country’, rural Massachusetts, following clues to his father’s disappearance and hints of an ancestral legacy.

Aside from a vivid dream sequence at the episode’s opening Lovecraft Countytakes its time revealing its cosmic horror nature instead rightly focusing on character, mood, and critically environment creating a believable and frightening world with terrors drawn from history as well as the imagination. Jonathan Majors is well cast as ‘Tic,’ the bookish young man with a love of pulp adventures now grown into a handsome muscular man but with those same doubts and self-image issues waiting just under the surface. Jurnee Smollett’s Letitia while seemingly a woman who appears primarily as a sensualist also possesses depths and intellect that in the first episode promise greater things for her character and Vance’s Uncle George brings a sense of wisdom and hard-earned experience to the trio.

The cinematography fills a night encounter rich saturated colors from blood red flares while daylight excursions have a washed out colorless and joyless oppression to them, reflecting well the dual nature of the story and the show, fantastical weird apparitions existing alongside with banal historical evil. The show’s soundtrack is a mix of period and modern music and that I found a little jarring but other viewers are less likely to have their suspension of disbelief bumped by the choices.

It is nigh on impossible to adequately judge a story by just 10 percent of its content other than to say that the characters and encounters are all laid out in a pleasing, engaging manner and if the entire series maintains this quality, we are in for one frightening ride.

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Revisiting Sleep Hollow

Last night, with a big bowl a buttered popcorn, I put the DVD into the machine and settled in to enjoy 1999’s Sleep Hollow. Directed by Tim Burton, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, and starring Johnny Depp. Sleepy Hollow was less of an adaptation of the classic tale by Washington Irving and more of an excursion by Burton into the lovely lush landscape of a classic Hammer Horror movie.

Hammer Studios was a UK film company that produced many genres of movies but is perhaps best known for their impressive run of horror film starting with The Quatermass Xperiment a feature film adaptation of a live television play and running through the dismal and tired To the Devil a Daughter. Between those films Hammer discovered and promoted actors who would go on to be some of the biggest genre stars in the world, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Bring color to Frankenstein with their production The Curst of Frankenstein Hammer studios leaned into exploitive film styles with garish blood and explicit imagery of human organs that previous studios had obscured with edits.

Sleepy Hollow, though with a muted color plate save for vividly bright blood, is thoroughly a throwback to these Hammer Films, Burton has populated the cast with distinguished British actors and a small speaking part for Hammer’s star Christopher Lee as a New York City judge. While the film is supposedly set in New York state the manner, accents, and culture of the cast and characters scream a British environment. The set design in this movie doesn’t reflect Burton’s usual obsessions with German expressionism but reflects a more grounded realistic approach to the setting something I think may have come from the producer Francis Ford Coppola who just a few years earlier had experiment himself with classic horror directing his production of Dracula.

In this film inspired by the classic story Ichabod Crane isn’t a schoolteacher but a young police detective dedicated to science and reason as the sole methods for solving any crime’s mystery. He is dispatched to the isolated settlement of Sleepy Hollow to investigate a series of murders by beheading. Upon arrival the town’s leading citizens advised him that these are no ordinary killing but rather the supernatural vengeance of a hessian mercenary slain during the Revolutionary War. Dismissing the stories of ghosts and goblins Crane finds himself in a tangled mystery of greed, forbidden love, and undead mercenaries while discovering the truth of his own forgotten history.

Sleepy Hollow is an enjoyable film that doesn’t put on airs with a greater meaning buried in its subtext. It is an entertaining tale of love, greed, and vengeance that uses the Washington Irving story for a few moments of imagery but lives and succeeds on its own terms.

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Leave Fiction in its Period

Last night my sweetie-wife and I watched a portion of the BBC’s live presentation of The Quatermass Experiment. Written by Nigel Kneale and originally produced as live television in 1953 the shows centers on Bernard Quatermass and Britain’s first men into space with the disastrous and horrifying consequences of that first rocket flight. Kneale is one of my favorite television and film genre writers who produced material that was both thrilling and thoughtful. His ghost story The Stone Tape remains a beloved production to me.

In 2005 the BBC recreated the energy of live television with this new production of The Quatermass Experiment. Transposing the action to the modern-day United Kingdom. Instead of Quatermass’ Experimental Rocket Group being part of the British government it now stood as a private space launch concern. However, much of the dialog and drama revolves around the concept of a first flight into space and for 2005 that’s a concept that simply doesn’t carry a lot of sense of the unknown. The mystery of where the spacecraft flew to simply can’t be sustained in our current technological world. And while 500,000 miles is further than any manned flight actually flown it’s still in our own neighborhood and unlikely to yield up a story about aliens and monsters.

The Quatermass Experiment belong to its period just as numerous other stories that shouldn’t be ‘modernized’ such as The Manchurian Candidate or Fail-Safe, another experiment into revitalizing live television.

Works of art are products of their time, the social pressures and environments that both inspired and constrained the artists as they created and it is in their time they should remain.

 

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Streaming Review: The Old Guard

This month Netflix added to its catalog the adventure The Old Guard. Starring and produced by Charlize Theron The Old Guard is an adaptation of a comic book about a band of warriors who are nearly immortal.

Theron plays ‘Andy,’ the leader of the mercenaries and the eldest having been at this since antiquity. Kiki Layne plays Niles Freeman a U.S. Marine and she is the newest addition to the squad providing an audience surrogate and a handy target for backstory and exposition. Attempts to stay in the shadows of the modern world fails for the Andy and her team leading to confrontation with a greedy pharma corporation and the discovery that truly are fates worse than death.

The Old Guard is a solid action movie without any glaring flaws or shortcomings. Theron plays both action and emotional beats with skill and as a producer she has shown a talent for bring in productions that have a deeper construction than a surface gloss. All of the performances in the film are competent and the script moves at a pleasing clip. There are turns and reveals in the story and it may be because I am a writer myself but none of these were truly surprising but neither are they damaging to the movie’s dramatic narrative. The combat is brutal and the effects of violence, even on those who heal magically, is never ignored. A moment at the film’s resolution echoed another film about immortality Chronos but aside from that I thoroughly enjoyed by hair of two hours it took to watch this film.

Overall if you have a Netflix account and enjoy films of the fantastic this is worth your time.

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Perilous Pedestals

Placing people particularly artists upon pedestals is an action inviting disappointment and hurt. People are flawed and when some are exalted it nearly always turns out in addition to their better natures, they possess darker ones as well. Artistic people are no more immune to this condition than political ones, contemporary or historical.

Roman Polanski is a brilliant filmmaker and apparently a rapist preying upon little girls.

HP Lovecraft blazed a trail into cosmic horror that people still follow today and was a virulent racist and xenophobe.

Joss Whedon championed strong, complex female characters and was a philander and an apparent control freak.

Orson Scott Card created a series that plead for understanding of the other and called for the suppression of the rights of gay people by ‘any means necessary.’

The list, sadly, is nearly endless of artists and creators that wielded considerable talent, adored by many, and then revealed corroded souls. Which brings us to the current participant in this sad parade, J.K Rowling author and creator is the massive franchise Harry Potter and The Quest for More Power.

Rowling’s recent comments, tweets, and postings on her stance attacking the rights people of the transgendered community have provoked pain, suffering, and emotional trauma among not only the target of her tirade but among her devoted supporters many of which have grown to adulthood with her fictional creation Harry Potter.

I believe that the hurt from Rowling’s abhorrent stance is amplified by a couple of factors. One, the sheer scope and penetration of her creation into the popular culture. There is scarcely a corner of our nation or world that has not been touched by Harry Potter and the wizarding world. The sheer number of fans is simply staggering gifted her with tremendous reach and power to influence.

Secondly, people crafted a tremendous mythology around Rowling and her life. The single mom who became a billionaire and then gave away so much money to charity she lost that status. The repeated assertion that the core theme of the work as a plea for understanding and a denunciation of hate. (A theme that, in my opinion, the work does not fully succeed at, but this is not a place for my issues where Harry Potter artistically fell short.)

It is that second factor that I think powers the real hurt felt by the fans. The idolization of Rowling, her morality, and the power of her myth not only lifted the artist onto a pedestal but bathed her fans in a reflected glow of morality. That they shared in her goodness by being such devoted fans so when it turns out that she has darker less admirable beliefs that too feels as though it is reflected on her fan base.

Both glows were illusionary.

Your morality is your own.

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Why Love Some Bad Movies and Not Others?

Recently I re-watched on HBO, though I own the Blu-ray, 1980’s Xanadu. This film along with Can’t stop the Music is credited with the inspiration that created The Golden Razzie award for bad cinema. Now I can both recognize that Xanadu is in many ways a terrible film, miscast, no character arc, very nearly plotless, but it is also a film that is near and dear to my heart. It is a romantic film centered on dreams and the message that dream don’t die we kill them. And what Xanadu is to me other bad movies are to other people, but it’s the rare bad film that really generates this sort of feeling.

Star Trek: Insurrection is a terrible film that is also essential a romantic film, not in terms of Eros but in rather prioritizing inner emotional life over reason, with a central message but that movie is a tedious bore and its message if examined closely is one that advocate murdering those who do not think as you do.

There lies the answer to the conundrum, it is in the emotional resonance that a bad movie can rise to something special. There are those for whom Star Trek: Insurrection is a beloved film, no doubt due to deep emotional connection to the characters of the cast. (I’m an old fart and more emotionally tied to the original series than and subsequent entry.) So, while Xanadu is mostly a string of expository scenes linking musical numbers it is in my own heart that its emotions truly lie. I love the film not because of what it is but because of who I am.

 

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Looking Back on Star Wars

Today, May the 4th, is the date that fans traditionally celebrate the Star Wars saga of movie.

Star Wars was released in 1977 into a cinema environment so different from the current one, COVID-19 issues excluded, that fans today could have a distinctly difficult time envisioning it. When the first film appeared, it was not the standard practice to open in thousands of theaters across the country and now the  world on the same date. Rather movies opened in perhaps a few hundred locations and then the printed moved from city to city making people wait for highly anticipated films. So, it was weeks and weeks after the movie’s premier before I saw Star Wars. I was already a science-fiction fan and thoroughly enjoyed the movie despite it being more akin to fantasy than any sort of SF. Few could have foreseen that this adventure film was going to radically change motion pictures.

1980 brought The Empire Strikes Back and proved that the audience reaction to Star Wars was not a fluke. Despite a darker theme a different director, and lacking a proper ending, the sequel proved as successful of the original and planted the seeds for a fan community with both good and bad actors and rampant plot speculations that we live with today.

Return of the Jedi arrived in 1983 and concluded the central plot of the three films. Though the weakest of the original trilogy with many of the characters reduced to simplistic versions and its climatic final battle a  thinly disguised commentary on the Vietnam war, one that misunderstand how that war was finally resolved, Jedi produced an emotionally satisfying resolution to Luke’s character arc leaving him in a place of emotional maturity and moral soundness.

16 years after the trilogy’s conclusion Lucas returned to theaters with more films set in the Star Wars universe, a set of prequel movies dealing with the backstory of Darth Vader and the disintegration of the Republic into the Galactic Empire with the movies The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith. These films proved to be a disappointment. Abandoning the earlier, ‘lived in’ art direction from the original trilogy for a polished, metallic, façade that had no life of its own and with characterization reduced to nothing for the sake of plot propulsion. Still a younger generation of fans embraced the new movies and the franchise proved to be economically a powerhouse in two different centuries.

2015, ten years after the conclusion of the prequel trilogy and the sale of the property to Disney Studios, a new slate of Star Wars movies began with The Force Awakens. Set a generation after the original films the movie returned to the space opera roots of the franchise and repeated core plot elements of Star Wars while introducing a new cast. This was followed by the divisive but brilliant The Last Jedi a film that divided the fan base inciting heated, passionate commentary from admirers and critics of the new thematic ground it broke. 2019 saw the end of the Skywalker Saga with the release of The Rise of Skywalker a movie that was more chase and escape that character and theme. Along with the release of two standalone feature films, Rouge One a film that in mood had more to do with the 1970s that the original Star Wars and Solo another backstory and backfill installment the franchise took in more than 10 billion dollars in box office revenue no counting television, specials, shows, and a flood of merchandising but the long last effects of this amazing profitable franchise will not be found in the growing bank accounts or the endless derivative cinematic followers but in the changing technology of film production. Non-linear editing enhanced theatrical sound systems, photorealistic digital effects, and digital projection are just some of the breakthroughs pioneered by Lucas and his companies. No matter the varying quality of the films as cinema Star Wars and all of its spin-off and sequels have created a new and limitless world for all of us.

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