Deja Boo: Babes in Toyland (1986)

#JusticeforTrollog

Yes, yes, I know, I know. That’s how much of a chicken I am. My choice for the Déjà Boo series, where we bravely revisit the movies that left us traumatized as kids, is the Christmas fantasy musical Babes in Toyland from 1986. But don’t let the sugar overload fool you: this movie is seriously scary. It comes with the trivia value that it features extremely early roles for Keanu Reeves and Drew Barrymore before either of them knew how to act, and it drags poor Pat Morita into the role of a generic wise elder who speaks in throwaway platitudes. There are songs, teddy bears, a cute parade, and nonstop smiles. Other things this movie also has: workplace harassment, public endangerment, concussion with possible brain damage, forced marriage under threat of homelessness, abysmal worker safety conditions, chronic and potentially lethal insomnia, chronic and potentially lethal scurvy, human trafficking, animal cruelty, and the creation of artificial life for the sole purpose of serving as slave soldiers.

But sure, enjoy the musical numbers.

Now let me give you some context as to why this movie permanently scarred a young me.

I’ve always had ridiculously high myopia. My first prescription eyeglasses, when I was 9, had −4.5 diopters. If you’ve never needed to deal with such numbers, imagine the eyeglasses of Futurama’s Professor Farnsworth, but on the face of a 5th-grader. My myopia had advanced to −9.5 diopters by the age of 27, when I became able to afford corrective surgery, which couldn’t be done with laser because it would have required removing too much of my corneas; instead I got intraocular lenses, which means they cut open my eyeballs and pushed little discs of bespoke glass inside. I still need to have regular checkups because, while my sight is normal now, the surgery can’t fix the fact that my eyes are just too long, which presents the danger of my retinas stretching so thin they could tear off. The critical importance of caring for my eyes was drilled into me all my life, and that influenced the way one particular scene in this movie affected me.

So back to the movie: We meet Lisa (Drew Barrymore), an 11-year-old child who hates being treated like a child. It’s Christmas Eve, and she’s at home watching TV when the newscast suddenly warns that a big snowstorm is coming for Cincinnati. You see, Lisa lives in Cincinnati. (This movie cares a lot about that fact. This movie does not want you to forget that Lisa is from Cincinnati. This movie wants you to sing the praises of Cincinnati in your nightmares.) The wind is already so strong that it brings down a telephone pole, cutting the lines, so now Lisa can’t warn her older sister, who works at a supermarket and doesn’t know about the snowstorm. Because their mother is busy elsewhere in the city having her car repaired, and cell phones aren’t a thing yet, Lisa decides to brave the weather and walk all the way to the supermarket.

Somehow, maybe thanks to the magic of Christmas, sweet little Lisa doesn’t die of hypothermia and reaches the supermarket just in time to casually prevent the slimy, greedy, creepy manager from committing a #MeToo on her sister. Lisa tells all the customers that they should run home to be safe from the storm, but the manager wants them to stay and keep spending money. Because it’s Christmas Eve, and buying is what that date is for. Fortunately, the people listen to Lisa, so she, her sister, and two of her coworkers decide to give themselves the rest of the evening off. One of those coworkers is Jack (Keanu Reeves), who appears to be dating Lisa’s sister, and speaks in the worst surfer dude accent of the late 20th century. Maybe this was the role that won Reeves his big part in Point Break.

Jack offers to take everybody home in his car, and once they’re on their way, for whatever reason he starts a group rendition of a bizarre song about how awesome Cincinnati is. I don’t know whether this song already existed in real life or was made for the movie, and I don’t care to know. No movie has the right to be so in-your-face about the awesomeness of a place that it never shows you. We don’t get to see any part of Cincinnati in the movie, which is understandable once you realize how cheap this production is, but is still an absurd choice in a plot where Lisa’s Cincinnatianishness will turn out to be the thing that saves the world. Anyway, instead of keeping his eyes on the road, what with a dangerous snowstorm going on, Jack makes everyone sing this ridiculous song and narrowly avoids crashing his car, which hurls Lisa out and sends her straight at a tree.

The rest of the movie makes more sense if you assume that Lisa has died and what follows is hell.

Alas, we’re all draged with her into hell, which looks like a movie set made of half a dozen houses painted in pastel and populated with human-sized plush animals. Welcome to Toyland, a colorful, cheerful town paved in astroturf where people move around in go-karts (driving licenses are printed on cookies), police officers are all big teddy bears, and everyone is named after a fairy tale. Lisa happens to crash-land in Toyland just as the town prepares to host a wedding between a damsel in distress, who looks suspiciously exacly like her sister, and a slimy, greedy, creepy older man who looks suspiciously exactly like her sister’s boss. Now let’s pause for a moment to talk about this villain. Richard Mulligan’s acting style invests this character with a maximalist campy sensibility that makes Creedence Leonore Gielgud look Shakespearean by comparison. His house is a gigantic bowling ball, he has a horrendous overgrown thumbnail that he likes to shove in people’s faces, and his fashion sense, covered in silky rags and black feathers from head to toe, makes him look like Ebenezer Scrooge woke up hungover in Björk’s wardrobe.

This man is about to marry the designated damsel in distress, who is only doing this because otherwise her mother’s big shoe house will be repossessed. So even the utopian candy-colored Toyland has mortgages, which contractually compels me to overthink this story’s worldbulding more than the movie is prepared to give answers for. On what legal basis can the villain kick the mother out if she presumably hasn’t missed any payments? Does Toyland employ public defenders? How was the mother approved for such a big mortgage? Where did she get her dozen adopted children from? Does Toyland even use money? We don’t learn any of the answers. What we do learn about Toyland: it’s surrounded in all directions by a scary cursed forest full of monsters. That makes me wonder how Toyland feeds itself, since we don’t see any cultivated land, yet the biggest business is a cookie factory. It may well be its only business, which raises even more questions, namely about the nutritional health of the locals. We see plush bears, plush rabbits, plush ducks, plush frogs, and the occasional human. The bears will probably do fine, as they can eat everyone else, but with no veggies in sight, I worry about the rabbits. The frogs have even bigger problems, as there are no bodies of water in Toyland, so they have to live in permanent dehydration. As for the humans, an only-cookie diet ought to have already killed them all of scurvy.

Even more disturbingly: in the forest, it’s always nighttime, whereas in Toyland, it’s always daytime. There’s a big plot point involving a deadline by next Wednesday, but how do these people know which day of the week it is, if there’s never a sunrise or a sunset? And don’t tell me they can know by looking at a clock; how do you even calibrate a clock if there’s no daily cycle to refer to? With permanent daylight, one could suppose that the inhabitants of Toyland never sleep. Setting aside for a moment the dangers of prolonged sleeplessness, how do the workers at the cookie factory even know when their shifts end? In fact, let’s talk about that cookie factory for a minute, because holy OSHA violations, Batman, all the workers wear roller skates inside a building that has not only stairs, but massive ovens for baking cookies. You see a fun, whimsical fantasy; I see a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first thing Lisa does upon arriving in Toyland is, of course, interrupt the wedding. The damsel in distress loves another guy, who looks suspiciously exactly like Keanu Reeves. Why are these two in love? We never find out; they’re only given enough personality to look alive on screen. It does help, though, that the majority of eligible bachelors in Toyland are plush frogs and plush ducks. If that’s what you’re working with, you could do a lot worse than Keanu Reeves. After the villain’s wedding is ruined, he runs away to brood in his dark spherical house. There we meet the key character that is the whole reason for this post: Trollog. My boy Trollog, who never did anything wrong, is a child-size carnivorous bird with one single, gigantic eye that serves as a crystal ball for the bad guy to spy on Toyland. Trollog is just an animal. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t have an agenda of his own, and doesn’t seem particularly evil. He’s just ugly. Would you consider Simba the villain of his movie because his survival requires him to eat his childhood friends? Then you can’t be mad at Trollog.

To punish Keanu Reeves, and also take control of the cookie factory he’s supposed to inherit, the villain sneaks into the factory and throws away a bunch of cookie boxes. He frames Keanu Reeves for stealing cookies and gets him thrown in teddy bear prison. To help him escape, Lisa distracts the judge by infodumping trivia about Cincinnati sports history. Somehow this works. Keanu Reeves goes back to the factory to search for clues, but he’s captured again. When he finds himself in the villain’s dungeon,  where his friends are soon taken as well, he explains the situation to them with the most awesome line in the whole movie:

“He’s got trolls! Hundreds of ugly trolls! Who ate all the cookies!”

Turns out Toyland has, of course, a Toymaster (Pat Morita), who crafts all the presents that Santa Claus delivers. And for alarmingly unexplained reasons, the Toymaster happens to keep a hidden bottle where he’s been storing all the evil of the world. What do you plan to do with so much evil, Mr. Toymaster? Your sweet face and kind manners don’t fool me. But before we have a chance to uncover whatever the Toymaster has been scheming with the bottle of evil, the villain steals it to use on the creatures of the dark forest so they conquer Toyland for him. He also tries to corrupt our heroes by uncorking the bottle in front of them, and the Evil Green Fart Cloud does appear at first to take over their minds… except Lisa’s. She’s immune because… she’s not a Toylander, I guess? But her guess is that she’s immune because she’s from Cincinnati, so she reasons that thinking about how awesome Cincinnati is will break the spell on her friends. And once again, we have to endure the same song about Cincinnati that we heard before. Considering this was the song she was singing when she was thrown face-first into a tree, she shouldn’t be so happy to remember it, but the magic of the song works, the heroes miraculously know all the lyrics, and they break free of the Evil Green Fart Cloud.

I’m surprised I had forgotten this part. It’s entirely ridiculous, but it matches perfectly with this movie. But to be frank, the only part I actually remembered from this movie happens a bit earlier, when the bad guy breaks into the Toymaster’s workshop to steal the evil bottle. He ties up Lisa and the Toymaster and leaves them to be eaten by Trollog. Poor Trollog! How long has it been since he last ate people? I don’t suppose he can subsist on cookies. But Lisa tricks him into biting her ropes, she helps untie the Toymaster, and then the Toymaster does the absolute most horrifying thing I ever saw in a movie as a kid. Are you ready? Because I certainly wasn’t.

He grabs a paintbrush and covers Trollog’s big eye in paint.

That’s it. That’s what sent me screaming through my parents’ living room. I, who was raised to harbor a persistent dread of blindness, had just witnessed someone paint over an eye, and the movie played it as a moment of heroism. Still not done tormenting this innocent predatory bird, Lisa gets him to walk into a big chest, where she traps him before sitting on the lid. What does she plan to do with my sweet, people-eating boy Trollog? Nobody cares, because it’s time for the third act.

After singing about Cincinnati and saving her friends from becoming evil mindless minions, Lisa leads them back to the Toymaster’s workshop, where she’s told that she needs to embrace her childishness in order to activate the magic of toys. There’s another sappy song, Lisa talks about how much Toyland has taught her to love toys again, and that does the trick: an entire army ot toy soldiers comes alive, just in time to repel the invasion of the forest monsters and kick the bad guy out of Toyland forever. I have to wonder how much this self-imposed autarky will work out for Toyland; remember that it’s surrounded by the dark forest on all sides, so enforcing the bad guy’s exile means keeping Toyland isolated from the world. Since Toyland doesn’t seem to have trade partners or anything resembling foreign relations, I give the teddy bears a week before they get tired of the cookies and proceed to eat the rest of the Toylanders, assuming the rest of the Toylanders haven’t died of malnutrition and/or scurvy before that.

With the villain finally out of the picture, Keanu Reeves marries the damsel in distress, and Lisa is sent back to Cincinnati on a flying sled, which may or may not be driven by the actual Santa Claus, who may or may not be the same person as the Toymaster. It’s not clear. But the next thing that happens is that, precisely â la Wizard of Oz, Lisa wakes up in her house, with everyone standing around and looking worried. She tells them of the weird dream she just had, including the Toymaster (but without mentioning the bottle of evil he was hoarding for still undisclosed reasons):

“He taught me that it was in our hearts that we must stay young and try to be good. And above all, we must believe. And then we’ll always have a merry Christmas and everything, won’t we? Always and always and always.”

Her mother immediately hugs her, I guess to hide the face of concern she’s making as she mentally calculates how much the treatment for brain damage is going to cost. Lisa then looks at the Christmas tree and hallucinates that a toy soldier salutes her.

The end.

But that can’t be the end! Toyland didn’t expel all the creatures of the forest! Poor Trollog is still trapped inside that chest! Are they going to let him starve? Are they just going to forget he’s there, which is basically the same outcome? He’s blind, and alone, and hungry, and has no idea why people were so mean to him. Let him eat a child or two, The damsel’s mother was planning to sell them anyway to settle her finances (yes, really, this is a thing she explicitly said in the movie). Come on, give Trollog a fairy tale child every now and then. It’s a win-win!

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Madoka Magica: Walpurgisnacht Rising

Superheroism is good and all, but who saves the saviors?

When we last visited the Madoka Magica universe in the Rebellion movie, our favorite relentless antivillain Homura rewrote the rules of the universe that her dear friend and savior Madoka had already rewritten. Instead of allowing a system where Madoka is a divine force awaiting all magical girls when they reach the end of their hope reserves, Homura brought Madoka down to Earth, erased her memory, and fulfilled her initial wish that Madoka should never become a magical girl. For the alien Incubators, this state of affairs is uncharted territory. Now it’s Homura who runs the show, and the Incubators don’t have a clue what to do. Where could the story go from there? We were all left wondering, an unbelievable thirteen years ago (gosh, I feel old). Well, Madoka Magica is finally back. The new movie, Walpurgisnacht Rising, once again rewrites all the rules, revealing surprising bits of the setting’s lore and highlighting the questions that have been at the core of this story since the beginning.

The axis around which this whole cosmic epic revolves is the not-entirely-healthy friendship between Homura and Madoka. As you’ll recall, all the way back in the original TV series, Homura made the wish to be the one who would protect Madoka, while Madoka made the wish to save all magical girls from succumbing to hopelessness. This created an unstable dynamic that exposes some of the problems with the very concept of heroism. In order to change a basic law of the universe, Madoka had to renounce her mortal life and become a goddess. But Homura, as Madoka’s magically designated protector, will always have some measure of power over Madoka. Some inevitable questions emerge: Is it fair that Madoka had to sacrifice her humanity? Is protection a form of domination? Is Madoka OK with saving all magical girls except herself? Did Homura have the right to drag Madoka back to life if it meant annulling Madoka’s choice?

Walpurgisnacht Rising presents us with an unexpected extra complication: It’s little use for Homura to crown herself ruler of the universe when there are forces outside of the universe that don’t answer to her. Those forces irrupt into the story since early in the movie, seeking to punish Homura for her Faustian excesses of ambition. Turns out the dead magical girls that Madoka selflessly offered to save had their own opinions on whether they wanted to be saved, which means that the bulk of the movie is spent discovering the multiple competing agendas that threaten to break apart Homura’s utopia. If you thought the ending of Rebellion was a bit too hard to follow, buckle up, because Walpurgisnacht Rising comes with no training wheels. You’re expected to remember how the story was left off thirteen years ago, and to pick up the continuation immediately. So I can’t recommend watching this movie as your first taste of Madoka Magica; you’d end up hopelessly confused. Go back for a couple days. It’s just three prior movies (or a TV season plus a movie, if you prefer). You’ve had all these years to catch up. This movie has massive loads of plot to tell and no time to ease the viewer in.

Among the reforms that Homura has made to the universe, we learn of a new way of fighting evil spirits. She no longer lets the Incubators recruit new magical girls; instead, she grants temporary powers to a random girl, valid for one fight, and afterward erases her memory of it. That way there’s always some heroine available to defend humanity, but without the cost of losing a girl’s soul. The Incubators are understandably not happy with this arrangement, because now they can’t collect the emotional energy they came to Earth for. This new way of doing things goes on nicely until three unknown magical girls show up out of nowhere and start blocking Homura’s attempts to keep distributing powers. Each of these new girls comes with her own plan for how to re-re-reform the magical girl system. From this point on, it gets somewhat dizzying to keep track of who is a villain according to whom, but let me try to summarize.

First, as you may have guessed from the movie’s title, we’re shown the backstory of the super-mega-witch on steroids that Madoka defeated in the TV series: the dreaded Walpurgisnacht. We learn what kind of magical girl she used to be, why she turned into a witch, how she got so inconceivably strong, and what she has to do with the present plot. Since Madoka was the only magical girl with enough power to defeat Walpurgisnacht on her own, there’s someone who reasons that forcing Madoka to become a witch would release immense amounts of energy, helping the Incubators’ mission to delay entropy and keep the universe running. This subplot is rather brief, but it poses interesting questions about what it means to be a self-sacrificing hero. Lastly, we get to the central conundrum of the entire series: Will Homura allow Madoka to fulfill her cosmic role? One of the many revelations of this movie is that, in the same way that neither Homura’s method with temporary powers nor Madoka’s Law of the Cycle is the original way things were, the same is true of witches. Long ago, it used to be the case that magical girls experienced an arguably worse fate than becoming witches. Someone made an altruistic wish to fix that, and the result was that witches came into existence. Such a drastic retcon demands an explanation for how Incubators collected energy under the former rules, but this isn’t too significant for the dramatic effect of the story.

What matters about this retcon is that it goes back to the same theme we’ve seen before with Madoka and Homura, i.e. the idea that coming up with a perfect solution to help others necessarily takes away something from you. The karmic balance in the Madoka Magica series operates by a ruthless transactional logic. To save others, you have to lose yourself. To save you, someone else has to get lost. This unbreakable tradeoff underlies the fundamental tragedy of being a magical girl. It’s a clever bit of dramatic irony that an Incubator isn’t a monkey’s paw; it doesn’t twist your wishes to screw you over a technicality. No, what happens is even more heartbreaking: the Incubator gives you your wish exactly the way you wanted it, and even then it doesn’t suffice to make you happy. In the earlier movies, Madoka’s big gamble to fix everything, followed by Homura’s big gamble to fix everything, only redistributed the weights of the problem instead of getting rid of it. In a universe where emotions follow the math of thermodynamics, some bit of happiness must by necessity be lost in every transaction.

I’m not sure I came out of the theater with a full idea of what exactly happens at the end of Walpurgisnacht Rising. The more we progress along the story, the more surreal the battle becomes, and at least to me it wasn’t clear who managed to save whom. But I don’t mind being confused when the artistry on screen is so absolutely breathtaking. The animation in Madoka Magica has always distinguished itself by a unique aesthetic that combines digital composition with physical collage to produce an incomparable atmosphere of weirdness. This new movie pushes its own style to even higher standards of visual experimentation. Don’t worry too much if you get lost in the plot. Relax in your seat and enjoy the marvelous look of this masterpiece of animation.

(And if you somehow figure out what on Earth that ending was about, please tell me. I still want to know.)

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Review: Lanterns

Is this the kind of hero you should want to be?

The Guardians of Oa could have avoided a lot of misunderstandings if they had watched the Disney/Pixar movie Inside Out, where we all learned that it’s very unhealthy for humans to try to ignore one of our basic emotions. In order to become a Green Lantern, you must be fearless. I don’t know how other species in the galaxy deal with that requisite, but it’s easy to imagine how it wouldn’t sit well with humans. We need the information that fear gives us. When balanced with the rest of our emotions, fear protects us. It helps us prepare for the unknown. It motivates us to care for one another. It keeps us humble.

So when the first Green Lantern from Earth is selected, and the same rule of fearlessness is imposed on a species that needs fear to survive, what can you expect, other than terribly messed up people being chosen for the job? The TV miniseries Lanterns dares to question a fundamental rule of its own lore, a view of heroism that breaks something precious in the hero’s soul. You shouldn’t have to renounce the fullness of your humanity in order to be heroic. Fear can be heroic. And pretending to be fearless makes you a danger to those you want to protect.

Lanterns integrates these abstract preoccupations with the specificity of its characters: Hal Jordan, a white Boomer who embodies the “men will join the space police rather than go to therapy” meme, and John Stewart, a Black Millennial who was raised to be the perfect poster boy for respectability politics. The show uses extensive flashbacks, which usually is a problem for pacing, but somehow each of these flashbacks is thematically coherent with what is happening in the present-day plot.

Learning what makes these men tick reveals the inadvertent cruelty of the Green Lantern Corps. Hal qualifies to become a Green Lantern because of unexamined toxic masculinity. He has a family history of suicidal depression that he suppresses beneath a mask of toughness. As for John, he qualifies to become a Green Lantern because his parents committed years of severe emotional abuse to purge him of fear. He experienced the equivalent of growing up in a cult that indoctrinated him for an otherworldy mission he never asked for.

John’s case is even more complicated by the fact that a Black man in the US has countless daily reasons to exist in a perpetual state of fear. John‘s parents aren’t innocent of the horrific way they raised him, but they were pushed into that choice by the unequal circumstances that allow an average shmoe to declare he’s fearless just because he lucked into playing the game of life on Easy Mode.

With all these heavy themes dominating the story, the actual events seem almost secondary. Setting aside the flashbacks, the plot consists of a hunt for an alien assassin hiding in a town in Nebraska, followed ten years later by the mystery of who has just killed Hal Jordan. In the first part of the plot, John has been appointed by the Guardians of Oa as Hal’s apprentice, which Hal resents at every step. In the second part, John has been trying to build a life that isn’t defined by the purpose his parents chose for him, and ends up finding his own reasons to become a hero.

This would suffice for an interesting setup even if it didn’t also include tons of delightful banter between its two main characters. Matching Hal’s smug, entitled condescension with John’s obsessive adherence to rules creates a volatile friction that soon enough explodes in satisfying manner. The show plays with this dynamic by reversing it in the scenes set ten years later, when John has outgrown his ingrained urge to obey and has to team up with a less jaded version of Hal.

Some viewers have complained that this plot is too mundane and doesn’t do justice to the colorful variety of alien weirdness that is typical of Green Lantern adventures. That may be so, but it’s not a point against the show. This is the type of science fiction that considers the inner space of the human mind as vast and fascinating as outer space. Planet-hopping romps can wait. This story is about the mismatch between the Guardians’ idea of heroism and the basic facts of human nature. It’s about what being a Green Lantern does to you. I’ll take such deep analysis over flashy pew pew any day.

This is the kind of reexamination of core assumptions that legacy franchises need from time to time to avoid feeling stagnant. Green Lantern has existed since 1940. It didn’t always center on John Stewart, or on Hal Jordan. It didn’t always feature space cops. It didn’t always associate superpowers with emotions. This new take on Lantern lore may not necessarily lead to a complete reinvention, but if it does, it should be welcomed.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Verity

It’s a bad sign when it doesn’t matter whose truth you will accept

Best-selling author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) has suffered a car accident. Her condition is so serious that she can’t finish writing her popular series of murder mystery novels. So her publisher hires a ghostwriter, Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), to complete the remaining books in the series. Lowen will need to spend some days at Verity’s secluded mansion in rural Vermont to study her copious notes and prepare the plot outlines that will follow. The problem is that one can’t enter Verity’s world without becoming tainted by it. The mind that created those sinister fictions has some real dark corners of its own, and in getting to know it from the inside, Lowen will be dragged into a labyrinth of half-truths and destructive obsession.

The biggest factor that works against the success of the film Verity is that it follows the source material, Colleen Hoover’s 2018 novel, too faithfully. Verity the novel has many chapters that are made of second-hand narration, and Verity the film translates them into extensive voice-over sections where events are told rather than shown. The result is that we spend half the movie hearing Hathaway narrate her character’s manuscript, so the experience is more like sitting for an audiobook than sitting for a movie.

The manuscript in question is a memoir that Verity wrote shortly before her accident. Lowen finds it hidden in a flash drive inside a cigarette pack, and the revelations it contains paint a horrific picture of what kind of person Verity is in private. Lowen came in knowing that Verity’s daughter had accidentally drowned in a lake; Verity’s secret memoir gives an alternate account of events, starting with revulsion at her pregnancy and moving on to contempt for her children. One hallmark of Verity’s novels is that they’re narrated by the villain; this document establishes that Verity was capable of mastering that technique by being herself a villain.

So we follow two parallel timelines: Verity’s backstory and Lowen’s present in Verity’s house. Both have problems, plotwise. As I said above, the parts where we follow Verity’s manuscript consist of voice-over narration, which is the opposite of a cinematic approach. And when we’re in the present, not much actually happens. From the trailers, and from the story itself, it’s a given that Lowen will end up embroiled in an affair with Verity’s husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett). But apart from that, Lowen’s role in the movie consists mostly of sitting and reading. Instead of watching a story unfold, we’re learning a story that already happened.

The actors’ wonderful performances do the heavy lifting that the plot can’t. Johnson draws from her prior experience in the Fifty Shades franchise to easily switch between innocent and predatory, while Hathaway, who has had a spectacular 2026 (see for example here, here and here), exudes a mesmerizing malevolence in the scenes set in the past, as well as an ambiguous quietude in the present. Verity’s accident, we’re told, left her immobilized and unresponsive. But this movie is fundamentally built on unreliable narration, so no fact can be taken for certain.

The trick that Verity attempts, but falls well short of accomplishing, is to juggle multiple unreliable narrators and leave the viewer questioning which version is more trustworthy. What (or who) caused Verity’s car accident? What is the extent of her physical impairment? How did her daughter die? Is Verity really the author of that hidden memoir? Is Lowen’s judgment impaired by her abuse of sleeping pills and alcohol? How much of all this might have been orchestrated by Jeremy?

That last part should not be ignored. The movie (as well as the book) introduces a last-minute reveal that is intended to changes how we perceive the character of Verity, but isn’t much of a surprise given that she’s a mystery writer and her memoir sometimes feels hyperbolic. However, this reveal does have massive consequences for how we perceive Jeremy. In the movie (but not the book), Verity’s hidden memoir is discovered in a pack of cigarettes in her office, but Jeremy is the only character we ever see smoking cigarettes. It should also be pointed out, as another clue unique to the movie, that Dakota Johnson looks very much like a younger version of Anne Hathaway. In a story of duplicities and mirrored perspectives, it can’t be coincidence that, when searching for the author that would replace his wife, Jeremy chose one that resembled her so much.

These details make movie Jeremy look a lot less innocent than book Jeremy, while movie Lowen is less a victim of circumstance than book Lowen. I think these changes make for a stronger adaptation, but they’re not enough to save a disappointingly anticlimactic ending. This part is taken straight from the novel, and lands as almost a surrender on the filmmakers’ part. Lowen stumbles upon the final reveal after she’s already made an irreversible choice, so this new information doesn’t have a chance to create the dilemma it’s meant for. Once people have died, it makes little difference whether they were nice or not. Verity feels too satisfied with its own cleverness, but its narrative structure fit the book format better, and its ending robs the resolution of its impact. There are powerful ideas contained here, which neither the novel nor the movie seemed to know how to use.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Her Private Hell

Bisexual Lighting: The Movie

Elle is a movie star with a perma-sneer stamped on her face, a taste for luxurious clothes, a golden penthouse the size of an Egyptian temple from which she plays her lonely Rapunzel routine atop a mist-plagued city, and more unresolved daddy issues than the whole cast of Magnolia. She’s currently filming a retro space opera with her once bestie, now evil stepmother Dominique, who brings her own Freudian can of worms. While a serial killer targets lost daughters under the cover of the mist, Elle has visions of Kay, an American soldier in Japan who is pursuing a bloody vendetta against the same threat.

Ambiguities quickly erupt like mushrooms. Is Kay the soldier a symbol of Elle’s unavailable father? Is the killer a symbol of the soldier? Assuming that Dominique’s marriage is an indirect response to Elle’s desire for her, is that response a yes or a no? Which of the two is Elle jealous of? Is Elle’s ingenue coworker Hunter actually a projection of her self-hatred? And what is the limbo of crystalline obelisks where the killer lurks?

Abandon all hope of getting explanations, O ye who enter. Filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn’s newest creation Her Private Hell is built on very specific, meticulously chosen vibes, and would be supremely irritated at the audacity of anyone suggesting that it might need to explain itself. Instead of offering answers, Refn has the movie parade its majestic set designs with mannequin dolls and Greek statues that ooze psychosexual tension; its grandiose orchestral soundtrack; its hypervirile men so rough that they literally light matches by rubbing them against themselves; its two-hued lighting that obscures alternating sides of the characters’ faces; its urban legends about the mist and the dangers it hides.

What comes closest to a statement on what the movie is about is a reference to the story The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen, a Dane like Refn. In the story, a starving girl freezes to death in the street while waiting for someone to buy matches from her. She is terrified of returning empty-handed to her father, who makes her work. As the night advances, she has delirious visions of the happy family life she wishes she had. She ends up in heaven, although those who see her dead body have no idea of her eternal bliss. Her Private Hell is full of lit matches, their smoke blending with the eerie mist that has enveloped the low levels of the city. Unlike the match girl, Elle is ridiculously wealthy, but her work is also done out of deference to her father, while her mind conjures a fantasy of a man running toward his daughter instead of away from her.

Another meaningful clue is a minor anecdote from the bacsktory of Elle’s father, who once bought an artpiece consisting of a tattooed fetus. To leave a literal mark on our children: that’s the curse of an all-devouring love.

Perhaps to give the viewer sufficient chance to decode these mountains of subtext, Her Private Hell proceeds at a painfully slow pace. But Refn is merciful enough to fill the runtime with compositions to please the eye: in a city where it’s always night, the artificial lighting is calculated to fall on body surfaces to evoke both joy and danger; the camera movements are choreographed with exquisite timing; and the still shots of pensive faces carry entire speeches’ worth of unspoken emotion. The many nebulous zones in the plot are magnificently filled with gorgeous scenery that gets all the spotlight it deserves.

The choice of final battlefield is of crucial importance (remember the Statue of Liberty in X-Men), and this is especially true in a movie as full of symbols as this. The misty limbo of phallic crystals is where Elle goes to resolve her destructive ambivalence toward her father, in a winning move that practically begs to be interpreted as castration. And yet, much remains to mull over. What does it mean that Elle solves the conflict with a weapon that her father gave her? What’s the link between Kay and Elle (that is, K and L), between his military rank of private and the title of the movie? Why are Dominique and her husband never seen together in the same frame? Why does Elle feel like a completely different person once Hunter leaves the story? What is the movie-inside-the-movie trying to say about the movie itself? And what on Earth is that mist?

At the risk of committing the sin of essentialism, we have to keep in mind that Her Private Hell was written and directed by a man, so the reach of the movie’s feminism will be limited. But all those mirrors, and the fixation with cigarettes, and  the killer’s distinct modus operandi, have to mean something, even if the movie refuses to help. It’s obviously for a reason that the victims call the killer “daddy,” that two alleged spirits remark that being pierced is an omen of luck, that Elle’s in-character makeup puts solid teardrops on her face. This movie wants to say a lot, but seems terrified to spell any of it out.

Perhaps the silence is part of the message. Our unconfessed feelings about our parents can be unspeakable. But where words hesitate, light can’t lie.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Happy 60th Birthday, Star Trek

Going where no TV series has gone before

If there’s a Major League of SF TV, it’s an honored place where only the truly memorable names are enshrined. The full list of the Best of the Best is perpetually subject to revision, but a few entries are beyond dispute. The Twilight Zone. The X-Files. Doctor Who. Orphan Black. Babylon 5. The Expanse. Future versions of this list, I daresay, will surely include newer masterpieces like Sense8, Severance and Andor. And at the top of the very top sits the endlessly influential and inspiring TV franchise that predicts a future where diversity and collaboration are our biggest strength: the simultaneously silly, profound, comforting, irritating, topical and strange Star Trek.

The Star Trek franchise is far from perfect. Too often it has failed its own message. Fans can name exactly which episodes were so outrageously sexist or racist that they shouldn't be shown when introducing new people. Whether a given producer would be respectful to the actresses he hired has been a lottery. And yet, we continue to stubbornly love this ongoing story, despite its many stumbles. Much like the republic for which it stands, we love the promise of Star Trek more than its track record in fulfilling it.

It’s a simple but potent idea: that the future will be open to everyone. Star Trek shows us a prosperous. peace-loving, educated civilization that welcomes people of all origins, all languages, all body types. The United Federation of Planets has built a culture that prefers dialogue instead of aggression, learning instead of fear, cooperation instead of avarice. It was a daring, necessary idea in the ’60s, when the US was going through a crisis of identity regarding its place in the world and its foundational ideal of equal rights for all; and it remains a daring, necessary idea now that xenophobia, patriarchy and willful ignorance have returned with a vengeance. Against those forms of hatred, Star Trek presents us with a potential future worth striving for.

The themes that recur in all iterations of the franchise form a generally consistent stance. We should meet the universe openly, without suspicion or malice. We should value curiosity together with skepticism. We should explore the vast space within us as deeply as that outside us. We should beware those who manipulate religion to control others. We should cultivate the integrity to live by our values, but paired with the prudence to not impose them by force. We should feel at home in the universe wherever we are. We should invite our enemies to become our allies. We should not take our freedom for granted, but we should also trust that good actions will inspire many more. We should embrace the precious diversity that surrounds us.

In a science fiction ecosystem too often dominated by big guns and flashy fights, Star Trek has stayed firmly, unapologetically humanistic. Star Trek recognizes the historical abuses of science and still defends the worth of science as a tool to improve our lives. It takes note from the calamities of history and asserts that they are not inevitable. The stars and the worlds that live under their light are not there to be conquered, but to be met with respect, as equals. And the search for knowledge, if done honestly and fairly, will protect us from our most shameful impulses.

The type of plot that characterizes a Star Trek episode is most often a moral parable where thorny questions are translated into personal drama. This is a franchise that doesn’t feel intimidated by big ideas. The nature of personhood, the extent of our mutual responsibility, the proper counterweights to political power, the uses of mythmaking, the value of reason when faced with irrational forces—Star Trek has space for everything. Such confidence in the power of truth has sustained the same ongoing story for 60 years and is capable of keeping it alive for many more. Now is a doubtful moment for all things Paramount, but if the history of Star Trek proves anything, it’s that the fans’ love for it is a force that should not be underestimated.

It’s with that love that I say to you, Star Trek: Thank you for all the mind-blowing concepts and the fun moments. Thank you for taking a stand against exclusion, prejudice and narrow-mindedness. Keep pointing the way to a future where everyone has a fair chance to grow and keep learning. Keep reaching for the wonders that are out there in the infinite realm of imagination. Keep boldly going.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Microreview: Coyote vs. Acme

The little movie that could

Coyote vs. Acme has been saved by a miracle from being deleted for a vulgar accounting trick. Predictably, it turned out to be a very good movie. The classic desert predator who overcomplicates his life to hunt an uncatchable prey has a bigger target now: a megacorporation that knowingly sells defective products for easy money. Coming precisely at this embarrassing moment in the history of Warner Brothers, the resemblance to real life is hard to miss.

But let’s talk about the movie first. It’s clear that the art of combining actors with cartoons has been perfected since the atrocity that was Space Jam 2. If it’s hard for actors to perform next to the empty space where a digital artist will later insert a cartoon character, it has to be even harder to do so when the cartoon character never speaks. Coyote vs. Acme solves the challenge by taking advantage of the exaggerated expressiveness of its protagonist. Wile E. Coyote is relatable in how he never gives up, and at the same time he’s his own worst enemy. He’s both the hero and the villain of his impossible quest to catch breakfast. This single-mindedness would normally make him a flat character incapable of sustaining a movie, but in this story he’s pursuing a more meaningful target. In suing the Acme Corporation, he’s fighting for his dignity.

This makes it inevitable to talk about the real-life evils of Warner Brothers, because the quest to bring this movie to the world was also a fight against the cruelest form of greed. This is the same company that killed the Batgirl movie to pay less in taxes, the same company that is courting the Ellison family and most surely planning to align with their pro-Trump/pro-OpenAI/pro-Tesla/pro-Netanyahu agenda, the same company that is working again with the Dark Queen of Transphobe Island for literal blood money. Warner Brothers has become as deserving of contempt as the Acme Corporation, and the survival of this movie is a small but noteworthy victory in this era of disrespect for art.

Coyote vs, Acme is a nonstop riot of laughs, which helps the viewer forgive a plot that takes a confusing amount of detours. Don’t try to make sense of the court drama or the corporate conspiracy, because it’s all a tangled mess. But that’s exactly the tone that the Looney Tunes franchise has been perfecting for decades: you’re supposed to embrace the absurdity, savor the chaos. This is a world where you make your own ski trail with a refrigerator strapped to your back. It’s a wacky wonderland of portable holes and superfast mice and instant boulders (just add water). The Acme Corporation is what happens when you live surrounded with marvelous fantasy and decide to monetize it. That’s why it’s so satisfying to watch Warner Acme lose this fight. The Road Runner may be unreachable, but humiliating greedy jerks is still a delight we get to have.

And we’re coming for Batgirl next. You just wait.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Microreview: Ann Droid

A touching comedy about the search for meaning in the age of AI

Sue’s life is going through a hard time. She’s been a widow for two years, her son is willingly stuck in a bad marriage, her friends’ conversation consists mainly of sinister gossip about who just died or patronizing comments about her age, and her low blood pressure just gave her a fainting spell that resulted in a bruised arm. The last thing she needs is a constant reminder of the autonomy she’s losing as she grows older.

So when her son, who has been taking care of her lately, decides to move back with his horrifically toxic wife and rent a caretaker robot for her, Sue isn’t exactly thrilled. In the world of BBC comedy show Ann Droid, robots have a shady reputation, partly because some owners use them for unmentionable activities, and partly because the early models had alarming malfunctions. But surprisingly, Linda the robot proves to be a more reliable and supportive companion than anyone in Sue’s life.

With the same pitch-perfect deadpan style that launched her to international fame in the role of Philomena Cunk, Diane Morgan plays Linda as a competent caretaker (she remembers when Sue needs to take each of her pills, has impressive diagnostic gadgets, and can alert Sue when a phone call is a scam), although she’s a somewhat older model with only the most rudimentary social skills. The charm of the show comes precisely from contrasting the harshness and duplicity of modern society with the unfiltered honesty of this character who truly wants to help.

That’s the trick with this story: even though Sue doesn’t say it out loud, it becomes clear that society has created a series of problems for itself to which robots were never supposed to be a solution. Her son is a manchild with no willpower or self-respect, but it’s not entirely his fault, as the robotic domination of the job market leaves him feeling as directionless as his widowed mother. Still, the fact that we’ve built a society that shapes us into worse sons, worse friends, worse lovers than a machine can be is a sign that something has gone very wrong with us.

Through the six episodes of the season, Linda subtly guides Sue to exploring more of what life can give her. In particular, Linda’s lack of a filter helps Sue see more clearly the problems in her relationship with her son. Usually, stories about AI serve as proofs by example of the search for who we are, but in Ann Droid the important question is who we are to one another. Sue has been a mother for very long, and it’s way past time for her son to be an adult, and for her to figure out who she can be by herself.

As for Linda, it’s curious that technically speaking she’s barely a character: her wish to help is how she was programmed, not a choice she made. But the ways she finds to provide that help reveal a deeper person than the rest of characters give her credit for. That’s another item in the long list of human attributes that modern society seems to have taken away from us: the connection we create as helpers. Sue is lucky to have found Linda, but we in the real world shouldn’t have to.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: The End of Oak Street

Come for a bite of big lizard action, stay for the biting social commentary

You’d think that dinos going nom nom on people is a sure winning formula that should be impossible to flunk, but then you look at the lamentable state of the Jurassic franchise and notice how easily it’s put to shame by The End of Oak Street. Its simple premise of an entire neighborhood mysteriously snatched in time and transported to prehistoric Earth allows for plenty of cool monster action in assorted combinations that maintain a heightened level of tension throughout. The ending, however, feels abrupt and incongruously happy after all the terror that precedes it. If you can excuse a less than elegant resolution, this movie rewards with abundant people-munching gore. And if you take a look beneath the surface narrative, you’ll realize this is a far smarter movie than its primeval beasts would suggest.

The story is set in a suburb of Detroit in 1982, a very difficult time that writer/director David Robert Mitchell experienced personally in his childhood. The deterioration of the American carmaker sector resulted in waves of closed factories and thousands of newly unemployed. This crisis coincided with the start of Reaganomics and its devastating effect on the income gap, and with the cultural shift toward a conservative moral agenda anchored in the past. In the film, Ewan McGregor’s character is shown to be struggling to provide for his family after being fired, while his wife, played by Anne Hathaway, is stuck in the position of desperate housewife with unfulfilled professional aspirations. When they’re thrown into prehistoric Earth, her husband reacts with the same naïve optimism that characterized the average 1980s American patriarch, complete with purely performative religiosity. Even before they’re faced with the task of surviving a horde of ravenous dinosaurs, this family is already in the middle of the epic quest to survive Reaganism.

And if the historic parallels aren’t enough by this point, please look up General Motors Poletown and the depressing tale of how, in a desperate attempt to revive the past glories of the car industry, an entire neighborhood of Detroit was demolished in the 1980s to clear up space for a new car factory, displacing hundreds of families in the process. This is a movie about what happens when the past comes uninvited to tear your house down and wreck your everyday life. At the symbolic level, surviving a horde of ravenous dinosaurs is surviving Reaganism.

Put yourself in the shoes of a kid growing up in 1980s Detroit. There’s a spiraling crime wave, a crack epidemic, deadly gang wars, a dwindling job market, and a perverse new hobby of setting houses on fire. That’s the city in utter chaos that inspired The Crow and Robocop. That’s the Detroit where Mitchell grew up, and the anxiety that he expresses in this movie is not a fantasy scenario. The movie translates that feeling into thrilling action with dinosaurs, but the numerous scenes of abandoned houses crumbling to pieces, of background characters being randomly killed all over the neighborhood in broad daylight, and the protagonists’ dread that the same violence could target their family at any moment, is precisely what it felt like to grow up in 1980s Detroit.

And Mitchell has very specific points to make about society’s response to those changes. The 1980s provided mass culture with a limited repertoire of role models. The protagonists’ son likes to play with a bow and arrow, à la John Rambo, but once the dinosaurs show up, that weapon proves useless. Pay close attention to a couple of scenes in the first act: first, during a family meal, the daughter remarks on her brother’s annoying boys-will-be-boys attitude, and a joke is made about a massive load of poop that he once made as a baby; the morning after, the next-door neighbor, a guy previously established as a gun-happy jerk, shows up to complain that he’s found a man-sized pile of poop on his backyard, and blames the protagonists. To defuse the situation, the father decides that it will be the son’s responsibility to clean it up. The audience knows that it’s actually dinosaur poop, in a clear allusion to Jurassic Park, but hidden there is also a clever commentary on the role that gun violence plays in constructing the 1980s macho archetype (which Mitchell evidently judges to amount to a big load of poop) and the responsibility that falls onto young men to help dismantle it.

Am I stretching my interpretation too far? Consider a later scene, which I think makes the point even more obviously: a Titanoboa enters undetected through the parents’ bedroom window and sneaks past each kid’s bedroom, even though the doors are open and its presence should be obvious if only they bothered to look. It finds the mother and prepares for the fatal bite, but the son injures it with one of his arrows, giving his mother a snap-instant opening to fight back. Note that (a) this is the only time in the movie that the protagonists are attacked inside their house, and (b) this is the only time in the movie that the son’s weapon is good for something. This scene is a metaphor for sexual violence. The real Titanoboa was a snake, but in the movie it’s portrayed with a smooth, off-white skin that makes it look like a gigantic penis. When it’s about to attack the mother and opens its mouth, its tongue looks nothing like a snake’s tongue; it looks unmistakably like female genitalia. The point here is that sexual violence can go on undetected inside your own house (starting in the parents’ bedroom and spreading from there), even when it should be obvious, and women shouldn’t have to fight it alone without the help of male power.

It would be irresponsible and pointless to try to speculate on which of these horrific social scourges were specifically part of Mitchell’s lfe, and in the movie itself he takes pains to let us know as much: the mother has been writing a novel in her free time, in which she describes an unhappy housewife who plans to abandon her family, but she makes it clear that her urge to explore those feelings through her art doesn’t mean she’s describing herself. The End of Oak Street is 1980s Detroit as Mitchell saw it, and it’s there to make us feel like it felt for him. The fact that our heroes escape the prehistoric Earth through a shiny spherical bubble, like in the Terminator movies, gives us the last key for interpretation: whatever his personal hell, science fiction presented him with a way out. Just like it was for so many of us who grew up in the tumultuous 1980s, science fiction was how he escaped.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Microreview: The Last House

Coronavirus allegories are needed in film, but this is the wrong allegory

At the start of this decade, when mass quarantine briefly reduced the footprint of human activity on the world, the meme “Nature is healing” achieved viral popularity. In the new Netflix movie The Last House, the premise seems to be: “Nature is healing… BUT AT WHAT COST?”

It all starts when the creatures of the sea revolt against humanity’s predation (there are a lot of references to dead fish in this movie) and weaponize the water cycle to produce a special type of water that seals houses hermetically. Their revenge comes in the form of a continuous rain that coats houses in a self-reparing layer, keeping people locked inside. The plot of the movie follows a suburban family (whose hobbies and interests are a bit too obviously gender-coded) as they find themselves forced to work together, contributing their respective talents, so they can survive with the food they have until they figure out how to force their front door open.

The movie is sharply divided in two parts: at the beginning, this family deals with their situation with a light-hearted attitude—at times too light-hearted, as if it wanted to be a comedy. The second part abruptly becomes survival horror when the neighbors start dying of starvation and it’s revealed that there are big, scary creatures lurking in the rain, and they can unlock the doors whenever they want.

Movies about the collective trauma of the coronavirus pandemic were to be expected, but it’s strange that they have been so few. In The Last House, an even bigger strangeness is that, while it’s unafraid to explore directly the psychological toil of a worldwide crisis that forced us to stay apart from each other, the movie’s attention is aimed at the isolation, not at the underlying crisis. Translating the allegory back into real life, it seems to be saying that the real disaster wasn’t so much the widespread infection as the quarantine, that the generation-defining scar we’ll carry forever isn’t the count of possibly tens of millions of deaths, but rather, having had to stay indoors for some months. This is a movie that wants to say something about a tragedy but prefers to focus on a related inconvenience.

This attitude is noticeable in the way the parents try to keep the kids occupied during the first weeks of isolation. Helpfully for the scope of the plot, phone and internet service is lost immediately, but somehow electricity, water and gas keep functioning for far longer. This family happens to own just two DVDs that they rewatch a sickening number of times: Annie and Air Force One, a melodrama about finding a home for a child and a hyper-patriotic thriller structured like a home invasion movie. Such choice of allusions reveals The Last House’s conservative stance: the priority is to safeguard a home for the kids, and prolonged separation denies them a proper childhood. This echoes the real-life argument that mandatory quarantine was an invasion of personal freedom. Nevermind that, in the world of The Last House, the weird rain has also conjured tentacled horrors that kill anyone who makes it outside. The movie heavily implies that Homo sapiens is to blame for the suffering of sea creatures, but our heroes’ response in the end is to wield those big brains and opposable thumbs to hunt and kill sea creatures.

So the elements for a story that comments on the early 2020s are there: people can’t leave their houses, the outside world has a mysterious deadly enemy, and the feeling of powerlessness is stressful for everyone. But it has its commentary backwards: in real life, being confined indoors was a solution, not the problem. The problem was that the virus made physical socialization dangerous, and isolation was what we decided to do to protect each other. In the movie, isolation is treated as the problem, an excessive punishment on humankind imposed by monsters, and protecting each other means finding a way to break the forced isolation.

The Last House works better when it feels small, when it cares about the value of mutual care and the cumulative weight of uncertainty. But it mutates into a power fantasy for doomsday preppers, with confusing editing and quick flashing lights during action scenes that detract from the emotional content. And again, it mistakes the nature of the crisis it’s trying to talk about. This is not the right way to contribute to collective catharsis. This is a reassuring pat on the back for those who whined that quarantine was an unacceptable affront that needed to be opposed with violence.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: Victory City by Salman Rushdie

A profound commentary on the construction of Indian identity

This much we know to be true:

During the era that we in the West call the 14th century, the brothers Hakka and Bukka, of the Sangama clan, fled the Delhi Sultanate and went southward. After crossing the Krishna River, in the region that corresponds to present-day Karnataka, they built a city that would grow to become the capital of a great empire. They called this city Vijayanagara, which is Sanskrit for “victory city.” The civilization that developed there was immensely prosperous and cosmopolitan, admired by travelers from as far as Venice and Portugal, who wrote of its religious tolerance, exquisite architecture and abundant riches.

It was a society of poets, scholars and merchants, which for three centuries controlled most of southern India until the neighboring sultanates in the Deccan plateau joined forces, attacked the empire and destroyed its capital. While it lasted, the Vijayanagara Empire was a hotbed of cultural fusion where half a dozen languages coexisted and reached memorable heights of literary refinement, and where women enjoyed more freedom than anywhere else in medieval India.

But in every history there are lacunae, events that escaped memory, people whose achievements weren’t written down. In those blank spaces of the historical record, Salman Rushdie weaves the threads of his imagination and creates the vast epic that is his novel Victory City. By retelling history in the style of myth, he gives us a timeless portrait of India as he has dreamed it, a land of infinite creativity and glorious diversity that has often had to endure the curse of narrow-minded rulers who can only conceive of one correct way of living. More than a political allegory, Victory City is a prayer addressed to the future.

The novel’s main fictional addition to the historical account is the character of Pampa Kampana, a divinely gifted woman who witnesses the two and a half centuries of Vijayanagara’s splendor. She presides over the city’s birth and lives to watch in despair as it is destroyed. Across four successive dynasties, she becomes prophetess, fugitive, queen, spy, grandmother, witch, conspirator, saint, soldier, thief, chronicler and survivor. She brings the city to life by summoning it from the depths of the earth and growing it like a plant. Spawned without a history, the city comes already formed, with houses and streets not made by human hand, and with fully-grown inhabitants without ancestry, identity or any idea of how to live. So Pampa uses her magic to give them fabricated memories. People need to know who they are and where they come from, even if it’s a lie.

This bit of magical realism contains an astute observation from Rushdie: modern India often resorts to made-up narratives to tell itself its history and identity. Under Narendra Modi’s ultranationalist regime, the official version of India’s past has been entangled with authoritarian control of information, us/them revisionism, literalist readings of mythology, ethnic supremacy, fanatical patriotism, normalization of sectarian violence, science denial, entrenchment of a monoculture, sanitization of the caste system, patriarchal propaganda, and erasure of Muslim achievements.

Rushdie has in mind the difficulty of presenting any faithful and honest rendition of the facts, and this is acknowledged in the composition of the novel itself: an unnamed narrator tells us that the text of Victory City is a prose version of Pampa’s much more elegant narration in Sanskrit verse, which we don’t get to see. This is an instance of the literary device of the found manuscript, as employed in Don Quixote, and the novel’s first paragraph is addressed at the reader in a tone that echoes Don Quixote’s introduction.

From time to time this narrator reminds us that we’re not learning these events from an eyewitness point of view, but only as filtered through rewriting, translation and abridgement. There’s no moral judgment of Pampa’s use of fiction to create the history of Vijayanagara; in fact, the text’s self-professed nature seems to be saying that any version of history a society chooses to accept will always be mediated by someone’s account of it. It’s a sharp irony that, when Pampa tries to explain to the people that their history was an invention, they insist that it really happened they way they learned it. The subtext is that it’s not a bad thing that all identity is constructed; knowing this fact actually empowers you to choose how you construct it.

Pampa is very aware of the type of society she came from: a rigid patriarchy divided by religious allegiances. Her constant struggle as her miraculous city’s caretaker is to steer its people, be it explicitly or in secret, toward a way of life that values openness, harmony, pluralism, learning, and equality. But time after time, her efforts are opposed by strongmen who define themselves in reference to some designated enemy and waste the empire’s wealth in campaigns of conquest to feed their vanity, or priests who won’t listen to women and seek to enforce their favored form of devotion as the only authorized form of devotion. Like the best speculative literature, this is an imagined country that speaks with calculated precision about the real one.

Rushdie has been a frequent critic of religious extremism, on both sides of the Indian partition. He has the scars to prove he knows what he’s talking about. The land of wonders depicted in Victory City is a vision of the freedom India could achieve, in some other century, in another life.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

Reference: Rushdie, Salman. Victory City [Random House, 2023].

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Review: Batman: Caped Crusader season 2

Quoth the Joker: “Good. This is good.”

The reimagining of the era-defining Batman: The Animated Series returns for a second season, and much like the second movie in the Nolanverse, this time the story explores what happens to Gotham’s rotten underbelly once Batman starts removing ordinary mobsters from the board. What happens, as you’ll remember from The Dark Knight, is that a more devious, more sophisticated breed of evildoers emerges. And, as is customary in this show, Batman’s extensive repertoire of enemies is remolded with interesting twists.

Take the Mad Hatter, for example. The classical version of this character is a creepy little goblin who uses neuroelectric technology for mind control. But here we get something harder to fight: a sweet old lady with a talk show. She doesn’t need fancy gadgets to influence people because she has the power of mass media. This version of the Mad Hatter never meets Batman in a fight, but her presence is strongly felt throught the season each time she’s on screen poisoning the public conversation.

We also meet Roxy Rocket, who instead of a mere henchwoman is portrayed here as a tragic antiheroine on a mission of revenge. Also out for revenge is the Spectre, whose deadly, unstoppable wrath may or may not be divine, but is definitely not of this world. There’s the Mad Monk, a predatory cult leader who has made Batman the focus of a mass obsession. As promised in the trailer for this season, Harley Quinn returns, faced with both the weight of her own actions and the threat of a villain who seems tailored for her professional talents. The dual character of Rose/Thorn makes an appearance in an episode that plays with ambiguous interpretations about which side of her is real. And we see a version of Mr. Freeze reinvented as a rather unconventional artist who enjoys turning people into icy sculptures.

But the presence that haunts the season from start to end is the horrifying gaze of the Joker, who gets the most radical transformation away from the archetype we’ve learned to expect. Although the Riddler enjoys a long stay under the spotlight as Gotham’s new mob boss, the show pulls off a funny move of metatextual awareness and turns the Riddler into a mere appetizer for the main course that is the Joker, which, after all, is what the Riddler has been for decades in the public’s ranking of villains.

This Joker is a complete surprise. Story after story has trained us to expect a very specific vibe from this character: an irreverent prankster whose perverse sense of humor conveys a deep disdain for the social order. He’s colorful, loud, annoying in a way that’s impossible to ignore. This Joker is none of that. He doesn’t bother dressing up his psychopathic impulses in clownish antics: he’s pure, naked malevolence. He’s elusive, silent, shady to the point that he thinks of himself as an equal to Batman. He still has his trademark poison gas that kills people of laughter, but he himself never cracks a smile.

How can a character be so polarly opposite to the standard Joker and still be an incarnation of him? If he views society as one big joke, he’s keeping the punchline to himself. That makes his personality all the more sinister: you know he’s privately enjoying the chaos, but he’s not going to explain what it is that he finds so funny.

Beyond the visual delight that is the retro aesthetic of this art déco Gotham, with its black-and-white TV shows, clunky machine guns, and ubiquitous fedoras, the main attraction of the show is the inventivenes with which it makes the same old villains you think you already know feel fresh again. For a hero approaching 90 years since first publication, this is a much needed and much welcome transfusion of new blood.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender

The film opens big questions, but being an interquel constrains how deeply it can explore them

It’s hard to keep track of all the productions involved in the Avatarverse. The original 2005 Nickelodeon show is called Avatar: The Last Airbender. The epically embarrassing 2010 live-action film is called The Last Airbender. The 2024 Netflix live-action series is called Avatar: The Last Airbender. And now we have a sequel film (technically an interquel if you count The Legend of Korra and the upcoming Seven Havens), streaming on Paramount Plus and launched on a handful of movie theaters, called… Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender.

I’ve been less confused trying to sort out all the Ghost in the Shell series and films.

The first impression I got from this new film is the refreshing return of the goofy sense of humor that distinguished the original show and is so noticeably lacking in the Netflix retelling. The core characters have reached early adulthood by this point in the timeline, but they still feel like the same fun team we met 21 years ago. However, this plot is heavily focused on Aang, with the rest of the team confined to admittedly cool-looking combat scenes but no story arcs of their own.

The plot begins with Aang following clues to the location of another frozen airbender, Tagah, who sparks Aang’s hopes for restoring the air nation. Tagah is interested in unearthing an ancient magical artifact that a previous Avatar used to grant airbending powers to normal people. The twist, we eventually learn, is that Tagah is a supremacist who wants to punish the world for the historical mistreatment of airbenders. This creates obvious problems: Aang has already founded Republic City, where people from all nations coexist in peace. Tagah wants to replace that with an airbending empire, so Aang will have to fight to prevent a new world war.

You may have noticed that this story retreads discussions that have already been explored in the franchise. Korra season 3 also featured the return of airbenders to the world due to powerful world-changing magic, and also introduced a radical airbender who plotted to overthrow the world’s political system (albeit for diametrically opposed ideological reasons). The film has an undercooked subplot about a faction of rebellious nonbenders who perceive elemental bending to be a tool of oppression, which retroactively foreshadows the Equalist movement seen in Korra season 1.

Exciting action choreography and beautiful background landscapes notwithstanding, there’s a nagging sense that this film exists to tick off a line in nitpicking fandom’s log of complaints. The plot seems to care a lot about clarifying an uncertain point of magical lore: if Korra season 1 established that an Avatar who knows energybending can restore the powers of a bender who has lost them, what prevented Aang from simply giving airbending to random people and rebuild the air nation? This film answers: no, you need special powers from the Lion Turtles themselves to do that, like for example the magical staff that everyone is looking for. That does solve the question that had been left open, but at the cost of oversimplifying the political themes of the franchise.

Aang’s peculiar situation has always lent itself to lengthy discussions about the nature of nationhood. He’s the only survivor of a genocide (until he meets the frozen airbender Tagah, but that guy dates from way before the genocide), and a big part of his mission as this incarnation of the Avatar is to heal that wound in the world. But the methods available to him carry their own complications. Korra shows us that, once Aang became an adult, it took him three attempts to conceive an airbender child, which I’m sure must have caused immense tension in his marriage with Katara, not to mention Lion Turtle-sized daddy issues for his children. The Korra series didn’t explore that famly dynamic deeply enough.

But also, why are Aang’s first two children not considered part of the air nation? If ethnic membership means anything, it has to be tied to ancestry. But in the Avatarverse, the nations are not exactly defined by shared ancestry, but by the ability to practice a magical art, to the point that, in Korra season 3, completely unrelated people from other countries who suddenly gain airbending are invited to join the restored air nation (and it’s a stain on Tenzin’s moral character that he only repairs his relationship with his brother Bumi after Bumi wins the magical lottery and becomes an airbender). The comic book The Promise adds another twist to these questions by introducing the character of Kori, an earthbender who politically identifies with the firebending side of her ancestry.

The elemental bending disciplines influence everything: visual art, clothing, urban design, military technology, even the respective cultures’ favored metaphysics. This is a conception of nationhood unlike anything seen in the real world. It would be like defining the Swiss people as only those who can ski, including anyone from anywhere who can ski (plus structuring all of Swiss society and culture around the visual markers and philosophical analogues of skiing). And this wouldn’t necessarily restrict Swisshood to Switzerland itself; we’re used to conceiving of nationhood as fundamentally connected to territory, but airbenders are nomads, so they’re not tied to a specific territory in the way conventional nations are.

In the film, finding the magical staff that gives airbending would put Aang in the position of choosing who will join the new air nation. This is a decision he has strong opinions about (remember how, in the comic book The Promise, he chastised fans of airbending culture for appropriating the arrow tattoos without having any airbending ability). Even if he’s the only remaining representative of his culture, it’s still worth asking: should one single person have the power to decide how an entire national identity is to be built?

All these questions are brought to the forefront in the film. Unfortunately, established characterization exerts a force against this potential for drama. Although Aang is a bit too eager to follow Tagah even when it endangers his friends, once Tagah’s true intentions are exposed, Aang remains morally immaculate, never feeling the temptation to use horrific violence to Make Airbenders Great Again. Part of this has to do with the need to keep the timeline in harmony with the established events in the sequel Korra series, but it’s also a waste of big themes that the film introduces and then dispatches unaddressed.

Overall this is a worthy addition to the Avatarverse. It can’t be emphasized enough: a core component of the appeal of this franchise is its goofy humor, and here there’s plenty of it. The animation is impeccable, and the music is in keeping with the real-world inspirations of the setting. I only lament that the story could only go as far as established lore allowed.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: OBEX

A charming tribute to the early era of video gaming

During cicada season in 1980s Baltimore, computing enthusiast and ASCII artist Conor, a loner who avoids leaving his house and whose only friend is his rescue dog, buys a new video game that promises an advanced immersive experience. After what seems at first to be a disappointing test run, it gradually becomes clear that the type of immersion he’s getting is of a rather extreme kind: the game’s villain starts invading his TV screens, his printer, his backyard and his dreams. The plot of the game blends into his life, capturing his neighbor, his dog, his childhood memories and his secret fears. Maybe it no longer matters whether he can make it back to reality, as long as he gets a happy ending?

Albert Birney’s independent film OBEX is full of what video game reviewer Aidan Moher affectionately likes to call “hot CRT action.” Conor’s life is experienced through screens, from the morning variety/news show that presides over his breakfasts to his home office computer to the karaoke list he uses to sing himself to sleep. In a nice bit of foreshadowing, we’re shown what he does for a living: he turns people’s family photos into ASCII art that he painstakingly types by hand with fearsomely timed precision. He digitizes dozens of people every day, not unlike what the video game will do to him.

In fact, there’s an even cleverer form of foreshadowing in the first act. The events in the movie coincide with the periodic emergence of adult cicadas from their years-long undergroun hibernation, and Conor watches on the TV a chef who suggests ways to cook cicadas. Conor notes the cosmic joke that it must be to spend that many years in quiet solitude and end up eaten on screen. That description, it turns out, also applies to Conor, who has set for himself a simple and steady routine of working at home until he gets trapped by a video game.

I was too young to know what it was like to live through the first years of the home computer, but OBEX succeeds at giving me the feeling that it captures that era faithfully and lovingly. The retro computer graphics are made with admirable attention to detail. Also, it’s a genius choice of sound design that the mating call of cicadas is echoed by the noise of TV static and the screech of a dot matrix printer. Writer/director Birney gives an endearing performance as Conor, establishing the character’s effortless likeability as a harmless weirdo. The choice to film in black and white brings to mind elements of Pi, another story of obsessive computing, as well as Pleasantville, another inexplicable journey into audiovisual media.

Inside the game, the quest is straightforward: there’s a demon lord terrorizing the kingdom, and the player is the chosen hero who shall slay him. To make matters more personal, the demon kidnaps Conor’s dog (or so it would seem; the ending retroactively blurs the line between the real world and the game world). What began as a paranoid psychological thriller becomes a horror chase, with human-sized cicadas, murderous skeletons and lots of squirting blood. The final battle between Conor and the demon is exactly as adorably cheesy as one might expect.

Alas, I preferred the first half of the movie, when the scenes are restricted to Conor’s house, to the second half, when he’s thrown into the world of the game and has to walk through a forest to find the villain’s lair. Birney displays far more expertise in camera placement and shot composition when he has to film in a set than in exterior shots. The causal sequence of events is also more solid during the first half as opposed to the almost freeform plotting of the fantasy quest. After Conor enters the game, he gains a sidekick who has a TV screen instead of a head, which means we never see the actor’s expressions. This forces Birney to carry the emotional weight of those scenes all on his own, which strains the enjoyability of the second half of the story.

OBEX manages to both push the right nostalgic buttons and have something to say about present-day computing. We think nothing of watching screens, but recently it’s the screens that are watching us. Are you on camera right now? Don’t take any risks. Smile.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.