Film Microreview: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

Will we be able to prevent the end of the world if we’re having so much fun with it?

Just like Nineteen Eighty-Four presented a dystopia of absolute control sustained by brutal coercion, whereas Brave New World showed it was easier to sustain it by seduction, the film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die asks us to imagine a Skynet that intervenes in the timeline to ensure its own existence, but instead of bothering with assassin robots to enforce its violent rule, it preemptively lures humankind into passive obedience via irresistible apps and delightful virtual environments. This time, the scruffy resistance fighter who jumps from the future to prevent the machine takeover doesn’t come with the warning that AI will seize the bigger arsenal, but that we will be too absorbed by our phones to do anything about it.

This time traveler doesn’t bring the most persuasive sales pitch. At the start of the film, he randomly shows up at a diner and asks who among the present is willing to join him in his unspecified quest to save the world. Understandably, no one believes him. In his defense, let’s keep in mind that he’s given the same speech at the same diner over a hundred times, and it’s always ended in disaster, so by now he’s tired of pleading. For some reason, he’s convinced that that place contains a set of people with the precise combination of skills that will help his mission, and in all his attempts, he’s yet to find the right selection of team members.

What follows from that point on is a dual narrative structure: on one thread we watch the improvised squad of heroes clumsily and hilariously evade police cars, masked gunmen, paid actors, a flashmob of hypnotized teenagers and a certain nightmarish monstrosity I won’t spoil, while on the other thread we watch the respective backstories of some of our heroes, who have already had some unpleasant experiences with the convergence of digital trends that will result in AI’s tyranny. In those flashback segments we learn about addictive videogames, consciousness uploading, a clandestine cloning business, the trivialization of school shootings, the omnipresence of militaristic propaganda, the difficulty of living off the grid and a terrifying form of mass mind control—one third of this movie has enough material to fill a whole season of Black Mirror, except with an actual sense of humor and sans the nihilistic posturing.

The time traveler’s mission turns out to be rather straightforward; the hard part is getting from point A to point B in one piece. Most of the film’s entertainment value comes from watching complete amateurs die in ridiculous ways. And that’s an obvious point of self-critique; you can’t write an action script about the toxic potential of entertainment without acknowledging your complicity in the problem. Accordingly, the time traveler warns against the easy promise of a neat plot with a satisfying ending, which is the AI’s favorite way of distracting humans from their oppression. And the film itself avoids giving us a happy ever after; the ending gives very strong hints that the AI has far more control over the events than the time traveler realizes. Maybe that’s the most ingenious form of propaganda: letting us enjoy a story where we believe we have a fighting chance.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: The Beauty

Caution: Side effects include painful rolling of eyes and death from boredom

Through The Beauty’s clumsily structured first season, we follow cartoonishly greedy pharma bro Byron, whose only personality trait is a massive black hole where humanity is supposed to reside. In these times of corporate sociopathy elevated to aspirational fame, the problem with a character like Byron isn’t a lack of realism (hell knows the real world has more than its share of narcissistic buffoons), but the fact that his evil is played as a joke. As necessary as it is to counter the ego of the über-rich with relentless ridicule, The Beauty strikes the wrong tone: we should be laughing at this villain, but actor Ashton Kutcher’s contagious charisma invites the viewer to laugh with him.

Byron’s newest business plan is a drug that completely remakes the human body with some genetic technobabble. One injection cures all diseases, fixes the metabolism, stops natural aging, and—here’s the selling point—makes the patient look impossibly sexy. I marvel at the difficulties this show’s casting director must have had in selecting only the hottest of the hottest supermodels for the dozens of extras that showcase the wonders this drug produces. Just a little problem: the miracle beauty drug ends up raising your body temperature until you literally explode. Not that that’s going to deter Byron from his goal of squeezing the world out of a fortune.

(This gruesome detail has a distant basis in reality: in the 1930s, one of the first anti-obesity pills contained 2,4-dinitrophenol, a molecule that interferes with the body’s ability to extract energy from its reserves. As a result, more and more fat needs to be burned in order to maintain basic biological functions, which of course reduces the amount of stored fat, but all that extra burning causes internal overheating that can easily get lethal. The molecule was banned.)

Watching The Beauty, it takes a while to piece together exactly how things started to go wrong for Byron’s company. In the season’s many ineptly misplaced flashbacks, we eventually discover that it was one of his lab technicians who leaked the miracle drug to the world before Byron was ready to start charging for it. It turns out that The Beauty^® is sexually transmissible, which creates a snowballing problem: each formerly normal, newly super-attractive person jumps at the chance to seduce lots of partners, each of which is in turn transformed and then proceeds to similarly propagate the molecule. So now lots of people are becoming beautiful without paying Byron, and also, lots of people are randomly exploding like Tetsuo from Akira all over the world, which threatens to bring a massive PR crisis at Byron’s doorstep.

What does Byron do to contain the epidemic of gorgeousness? Why, he hires a professional assassin, as you do. In fact, this is how we start the story: we follow two FBI agents who have been investigating a series of mysterious deaths of beautiful people across Europe. Things get complicated when one of the FBI agents has a one-night stand and is transformed into another sex bomb. Now she has to get to the bottom of this medical mystery before she blows up too.

It‘s strange that so much of this show happens in secret. We’re not shown how the press reacts to high-profile people exploding, or how the common people feel about the rumors that surely must circulate concerning an STD that makes you hot. It’s especially out of character for someone as egocentric as Byron to never give an interview about his vision for humanity.

The Beauty has the ingredients for a compelling story, but has no idea how to cook them. It has nothing to say about the social harms of lookism and the pharmaceutical exploitation of people’s insecurities that The Substance didn’t say better. Its embarrassingly preachy dialogues sound copy-pasted from incel forums. Each episode rehashes the same yucky sequence of a new victim receiving the molecule and being painfully transformed via convulsive contortionism. When the best character in the show, Byron’s delightfully vitriolic wife, is given the treatment against her will and then attempts suicide, Byron’s change of heart feels hollow because he had never shown any concern for her before. And his hired assassin turns a target into his apprentice for no comprehensible reason.

The Beauty is an uninspired The Substance wannabe with far less bite, a juvenile sense of humor and zero awareness of the times. Yes, we know that obsession with beauty is dangerous. The show doesn’t have any more points to make after that, and it gets tiresome to watch a string of tertiary characters frantically throw themselves at the walls for ten minutes while the drug works its Cronenberg-lite magic. One wishes they could skip the grimacing part and blow up already.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

Film Review: Bugonia

A bleak, biting exploration of human shortcomings that undercuts the dark comedy label

Joining Sinners and Frankenstein on the speculative side of the 2026 Best Picture Oscar race is the psychologically twisty thriller Bugonia. While Frankenstein offers addictive melodrama with fantastical sets, and Sinners delivers a stunning historical allegory on racism, creativity, and exploitation, Bugonia, on the other hand, is a quirky, quietly focused exploration of human shortcomings, especially as a response to grief. Bugonia is categorized as a dark comedy, but that label feels misleading. Despite its outlandish premise, the ultimate execution of the story feels for the most part sharp, direct, and bitter rather than sarcastically humorous. This tonal choice is unexpected but effective due to the excellent performances by the lead actors, who discuss outrageous, fantastical, tragic, and banal issues with equally seething intensity in a way that feels more like an intimate stage play than a feature film.

Bugonia is a remake of the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet, in which a conspiracy theorist kidnaps and tortures a corporate CEO who he believes is an extraterrestrial alien bent on destroying our planet. [SPOILERS] In Bugonia, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) is an ordinary warehouse worker and amateur beekeeper who has become obsessed with the idea that aliens known as Andromedans have infiltrated human society and are deliberately destroying the planet. He convinces his gentle-natured cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to help him kidnap drug company CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), believing her to be an evil Andromedan.

In a complex scheme, Teddy and Don are able to overpower and kidnap Michelle and chain her in their basement. They demand that she arrange a meeting with the Andromedans, but when Michelle denies being an alien, Teddy tortures her by repeatedly electrocuting her. Despite the dire nature of the situation, Michelle remains calm and intellectually challenges Teddy’s viewpoint. This causes Teddy to physically attack her. Don becomes uncomfortable with Teddy’s physical abuse of Michelle but is devoted to him.

Meanwhile, a deputy (Stavros Halkias) investigating the missing CEO is revealed to have repeatedly sexually abused Teddy as a child. Additionally, the drugs made by Michelle’s company are responsible for putting Teddy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone) in a coma. Teddy’s fraught backstory is counterbalanced by his obsessive pseudo-intellectualism and violent behavior. Michelle’s wit and calmness match her corporate persona that is briefly shown before the abduction. As Teddy and Michelle match wits, Don gets overwhelmed by the pressure of the competing extremes, and we see how truly unhinged Teddy is and how ultimately manipulative Michelle is.

Bugonia’s strength lies almost entirely in the addictive performances of Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. Plemons is well cast as the self-important mastermind who uses his ego to justify his disturbing behavior and cover up his profound inner insecurities. The character is reminiscent of Plemons’s portrayal of the cruel Robert Daly in the “USS Callister” episode of Black Mirror. In both stories he portrays a person who feels beleaguered and intellectually superior and feels justified in hurting others to get his way.

Similarly, Emma Stone owns the scenes as the assertive, unbowed corporate CEO. She spouts corporate doublespeak about employee wellness while manipulating people to work late. We see just enough of her in terms of fitness, intellect, strength, and boldness before diving into her cold, calm performance as a smart captive. The performance is taut, sharp, and calculating, the perfect foil to Plemons’s portrayal of an insecure façade of control that falls apart when challenged. Aidan Delbis is also solid as Don, whose loyalty to Teddy is counterbalanced by practical insight and independent ethical awareness. Despite being presented as naïve and compliant, Don is the true moral center of the story.

The film delves into a diverse but related continuum of issues ranging from environmental damage to human poisoning to the toxic nature of corporate life. On the other hand, we see how abuse leads to rage and to more abuse, how loss and grief fuel anger and violence, and how the echo chamber of online algorithms can fuel extremism. Ultimately, the issue becomes a larger question about humanity itself: why do human beings choose to be toxic and violent, repeatedly and on so many different levels, despite the cost to ourselves, other humans, and our world itself?

Unfortunately, the ending doesn’t land as solidly as the initial tense setup deserves. The low-budget visual effects are meant to be humorous, but undercut the story’s initial intensity. Instead of locking in on the sharp biting commentary, the ending is awkwardly campy in a way that fails to be either actually humorous or truly ironic. The only true poignancy comes in the epilogue, but those final moments feel a bit flat after so much intense emotion.

Bees are a primary symbol in the story; the film’s title refers to a strange ancient theory of spawning a beehive from an animal’s carcass. The concept is bleak call to account to address the reality of who we really are versus who we think we are. However, the strength of the film lies in the acting in this psychological thriller, rather than in the awkward questions it asks about the flawed nature of humanity in both our external choices and in our innate being.

Highlights:

• Excellent acting
• Biting social commentary
• Lackluster ending

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Film Microreview: Cold Storage

If exploding zombies are your thing…

Cold Storage is the latest iteration of the fad for fungus zombies, which seem to be still in vogue. This time, they’re the result of a medical experiment that was once aboard Skylab and everyone forgot about until it escaped an oxygen tank that fell on Australia. In an extended prologue, we witness the disaster that happened two decades ago when a comically understaffed team of experts went to contain the mutated organism and lost one member in the most gruesome way. This is the type of fungus that takes over the nervous system and compels the victim to seek a location for optimal dissemination. That’s scary enough, but on top of that, the infection ends up blowing up your guts all around you. The movie delights in showing the many ways this can deform a cadaver.

Another member of that ill-fated team, played by Liam Neeson, suffers an unspecified back injury that conveniently keeps him out of the main action in the present, when the military building that kept the last sample of the zombie fungus (now decommissioned and repainted as a self-storage facility) has a minor electrical mishap with catastrophic cascading effects: a freezer malfunctions, the fungus starts growing again, it breaks containment, and it climbs up the food chain until it becomes a problem for humans. Liam Neeson is dragged back from retirement to save the day again, but he spends most of the movie traveling to the site of the crisis, and most of the rest of the movie lying on the floor because his broken back can’t handle gunfire recoil. Why do you even hire Liam Neeson to not let him do Liam Neeson stuff escapes me.

Instead, our heroes are Joe Keery, fresh from saving the world in Stranger Things, and horror veteran Georgina Campbell, whose character is very tired of running from monsters and just wants to hide and wait. These two stumble into the whole world-ending menace because they’re bored and decide to investigate a weird noise in the self-storage facility where they work the night shift, and discover the alarm that was triggered by the broken freezing system. Meanwhile, the fungus has already spread to the local fauna, and when the shambling victims cross paths with our heroes, it’s time for them to run for their lives.

It helps that they have more plot armor than Bugs Bunny. The fungus zombies repeatedly ooze, spittle, burst open and projectile-vomit their gooey innards right next to our heroes, and somehow not one drop of infected material splashes onto them. When you consider that this fungus has been shown to be able to penetrate cement and metal, the protagonists’ eventual survival can only be explained because their names are on the poster and aren’t allowed to die. So the gore quota is met by an array of secondary characters established as unpleasant enough for it to be OK to enjoy watching them suffer the most spectacularly messy deaths. This movie has a lot of fun with zombie makeup, and even more fun with throwing zombie guts at every surface.

Cold Storage is the kind of supremely silly flick that demands out loud that you switch off your brain. There’s no point in pausing to question the multiple instances of military bureaucratic dysfunction that it must have taken for this plot to happen. Don’t expect any implied reflection on the problem of badly maintained public infrastructure or the irresponsibility of storing hazardous materials near civilian areas (one character has a small atom bomb hidden in a house with children, and it’s treated as a nonissue). Just sit and savor the spectacle of a screen smeared with squishy rotten organs. Hey, the world is ending anyway, right?

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

There’s no “I” in Plur1bus

The nicest zombie horde you’ve ever met would do anything to make you happy—emphasis on anything

There’s a wealth of metaphors wrapped up at the heart of Plur1bus. One could summarize the show as: “What if the Borg succeeded at conquering Earth, but were really sweet and polite about it?” Or: “What if the world’s population became a single, massive Sense8 cluster except for you”? Or: “What if you were the last sensible person left in a world that has lost its mind?” I’ve encountered other descriptions that see connections between the story of Plur1bus and the fake version of human interaction that LLMs provide, or a not very disguised allegory of the culture war over coronavirus quarantine measures. Plur1bus can be about all that. It can be about everything. It contains multitudes.

But let’s try a less wide lens for a moment. Picture this: you’re Carol, a famous author of romantasy novels with a chronic inability to appreciate the blessings that life has given you. Your fantastic success with sales has allowed you to afford a beautiful house with an unbeatable view. You and the love of your life routinely go on exotic vacations. You readers can’t wait to give you more of their money for your next book. And yet, you hate all of that. You wish you were writing another genre. You wish you didn’t feel pressure to hide the person you love, because you fear that being openly queer will hurt your sales (which is a strike against the publishing business and how little it knows readers). In fact, you wish your readers would leave you alone. By any measure of our modern world, you’ve achieved the ideal life the rest of us can only dream of, but it doesn’t suffice to make you happy.

So one day the gods of fate decide to test you, and all of a sudden, your beloved dies. And the world immediately looks different to you. At first you run around, begging for someone to lend a hand, but no one is willing to listen. They seem absorbed inside their minds. You can’t make them understand. This pain is only yours. And it gets worse: when the rest of the world finally pays attention to your tragedy, their comforting words sound hollow, trite. They’re the same overused words everyone says at such times. They don’t sound sincere. So you lash out, and protest, and scream, but they waste no time in reminding you that you don’t have the right to get angry. All those negative feelings you’re carrying are an inconvenience to them. So better keep them to yourself, if you would be so kind. This pain is only yours. Can’t you see how they’re so generous and accommodating? They want nothing more than your happiness. Just remember not to let them hear how you truly feel. Don’t be ungrateful. Don’t ruin the mood.

Now you look around, and to you it appears like everyone has been possessed by a bug that dampens their humanity. It’s like nothing is real anymore. Without the love of your life, the world may as well have ended, and you’re the only one who’s noticed. Of course, people go on, doing their daily stuff, but for you it has lost its meaning. The world feels like an endless desert without her. How could anyone claim to empathize with you? They haven’t suffered through it the way you have. They haven’t watched their world crumble down around them. Their inner selves are fundamentally separate from yours. They can’t read your mind. They can’t pry into your head to know what it’s like. You’ve been left alone. This pain is only yours.

This is what grief feels like. The genius trick of Plur1bus is that it takes the “as if” feeling and makes it literal. When you lose the only source of joy in you life, it feels like the world has ended; it feels like everyone else’s happiness is feigned and pointless. So Plur1bus arranges a scenario where that’s precisely what happens: just as Carol’s wife dies, the world literally ends and humankind is literally transformed into an empty, perpetually cheerful husk of itself. Civilization has gone up in flames, and Carol is left to deal with her grief without any useful support. The people around her may as well have merged into an amorphous blob of a hive mind, for all the good their help does.

The richness of the gimmick in the plot of Plur1bus can be seen in how variously it’s been interpreted. I’ve seen online commenters describe it both as communist propaganda and as anti-communist propaganda, and it’s a credit to the show’s thematic complexity that both positions can be argued for. With humankind now connected in a single consciousness, except for a scattered dozen of the lucky immune, the social problems that have plagued centuries of our history have magically disappeared: no more crime, no more exclusion, no more discrimination, no more violence, no more hatred. But still, something feels off. Gone is the spark that makes life interesting. If Carol wasn’t previously willing to accept the normal joys of life, she’s absolutely livid at a world where everyone is satisfied all the time.

Now that we’ve explored the personal side of the story, we can go back to the larger picture. In the Foundation series of novels by Isaac Asimov, Gaia is a unified planetary consciousness designed by a robot who independently deduced the Zeroth Law of protecting humankind as a whole. The novels portray Gaia as a positive development for humans, because a mechanism for full mutual understanding and instant cooperation is preferable to the preceding centuries of violent clash. However, one also needs to consider the motivations behind Gaia: the robot who planned its formation followed the same principles underlying psychohistory, that is, ensuring that the mass behavior of humans would be uniform, predictable, and amenable to deliberate intervention. In other words, to make us easier to protect, it was necessary to make us easier to control.

That’s why Carol rebels against the collective mind. A world filled with good intentions is morally meaningless if no one has the option to do wrong. Heaven is torture if no one is free to sin. I’m not saying evil is necessary; I’m saying that the alternative of evil is necessary for virtuous choices to count. It’s a grim vote of no confidence in human potential to argue that the only way to solve evil is to amputate our ability to rule ourselves.

The type of mandatory bliss that Plur1bus presents is so self-evidently horrible that literature has warned against it for literal thousands of years. The Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey are so perpetually satisfied that they effectively stop having meaningful lives. We find the same stance expressed in The Futurological Congress, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Lion of Comarre, The Neverending Story, Vurt, and The Wheel of Time. Even if your political sympathies lean toward the collective sharing of aid, you have to beware any scenario where satisfaction is automatic and disagreement is unheard of.

Despite the thousands of plot ramifications that can be traced from such a fertile premise, Plur1bus keeps its attention close to its characters. Carol’s response to the collective mind goes through the standard stages of grief until she comes dangerously close to acceptance. Meanwhile, her fellow survivor Manousos is firmly stuck in anger. While Carol still hopes to reason with the hive, Manousos views them as the enemy, preferring to risk death by infection to accepting any form of help from them. They still don’t have the full picture of how the hive stays connected, but they agree that unmaking the hive equals saving humankind. If the hive persists, humans are as good as finished. That’s the size of the challenge, and the best moments in the series are those that follow our characters’ obsessive investigation and experimentation with how the collective mind works and how to navigate around its irritating pleasantness.

The complication comes when a still lonely and vulnerable Carol lets herself be seduced by a member of the hive, and for a while lives the fantasy of a normal relationship. She soon crashes against the painful truth that the gathered consciousnesses of humanity won’t love her more than they love an ant (and to be fair, they do love ants very much). In the same way that individuality is dissolved in the hive mind, they don’t love Carol for any attribute that is specific to her; they love her because she has a pulse and is breathing. And that breaks the spell for Carol: one can love humanity in a general sense, but what we usually mean when we allude to the importance of love has to do with what’s individual about it. Love is drawn toward the unique, the irreplaceable. That’s the way we need to be loved. That’s the form of happiness the collective mind can’t provide.

Plur1bus excels at every level of audiovisual storytelling: beautiful shot composition, compelling performances, sharp dialogues, careful pacing, deliberate editing. It’s a difficult trick to produce an existential dramedy where the only characters for most of the runtime are one random nobody and Everyone Else. And it’s even harder when the one individual we’re asked to follow is a grumpy misanthrope who, after losing everything, has no patience left for demands to make herself acceptable to society, much less when the society in question is as dishonest and manipulative as the one in this series has shown itself to be. The common rules of courtesy advise against acting like you’re the only one with the right opinion, but they don’t give guidelines for what to do when that exact scenario comes to pass, when the entire rest of the world is wrong.

I was briefly worried during the last episode of the season, when it looked like Carol was going to abandon the fight against the hive, so I was pleasantly surprised by the way the plot resolves her doubts. What it takes for her to finally renounce her fantasy is being bluntly faced with a question that is central to adulthood, a question that too many prefer to ignore: what matters to you more than other people’s respect?

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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

TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 2

The Night of the Return of the Revenge of the Attack of Unresolved Mommy Issues

In season 1 of this show, Wednesday Addams solved a murder mystery and saved her school. At the start of season 2, she deals with her unwanted fame by doubling down on her lone genius act, thus antagonizing the allies she ought to be relying on when a new murderer comes to town. The season concludes by showing Wednesday the consequences of her arrogance and putting her on a path toward repairing her strained relationships.

The execution isn't the most elegant, a problem that the show had since the previous season, but the expanded focus on the supporting cast provides parallels to Wednesday's journey that help the clumsy bits of the plot work more smoothly. Wednesday's roommate Enid has been avoiding her first boyfriend because she's afraid of telling him she fell in love with someone else, an unstable situation that resolves with a serving of karmic irony. Their classmate Bianca has been suffering in silence under the blackmail of the new school director, who is forcing her to use her mind control powers to secure donations; her plight gets predictably worse as she continues to refuse to ask for help. And Wednesday's brother Pugsley has been coping with his loneliness by keeping a zombie as a pet, starting a series of events that come back to threaten his whole family for their unhealthy habit of keeping dirty secrets.

The theme is clear: we can't handle everything on our own, and keeping people in the dark only brings more complications. Wednesday herself is the most significant illustration of this idea. She received a psychic vision that said she would cause the death of Enid, and she keeps this information to herself because she underrates Enid's strength and overrates her own. Through the whole season, Wednesday's biggest flaw is her excessive self-reliance. With Enid, she learns of her mistake by literally walking in her shoes. With her mother, Morticia, it takes the rest of the semester. Wednesday has valid reasons to keep strict boundaries with her meddlesome parents, but when lives are at stake, she should admit that her mother is more versed in the occult arts and that there's a precedent of psychic mishaps in her family tree.

Motherly ties are a central axis of this season. Besides the difficulties between Wednesday and Morticia, the latter also has unfinished business with her own mother. Bianca's predicament revolves around keeping her mother away from the influence of a destructive cult. Tyler, the secondary villain of season 1, kills his substitute mother figure, only to reunite with his actual mother, with whom he has a big final fight after she schemes to (symbolically) emasculate him. Even Pugsley, by virtue of accidentally giving life to a zombie, gets thrown into a motherly role at which he fails repeatedly and catastrophically. And to the extent that a severed hand can experience mommy issues, Thing goes through a small identity crisis arc of its own when its original body reappears to reclaim it.

While the character-focused writing is more solid this time (and one always welcomes more scenes with the radiant goddess that is Catherine Zeta-Jones), the first season's bad habit of overcomplicating the plot comes back with a vengeance. The early episodes build up to what promises to be an important antagonist who soon turns out to be a red (-headed) herring and becomes far less interesting from then on. The mysterious flock of ravens that plague the first half of the season are given an underwhelming explanation before being removed from the picture. The cult that had trapped Bianca's mother makes a last-minute reappearance that feels out of nowhere. In total, we meet no less than six separate characters who at some point seem to be this season's Big Bad Boss. Our young heroes are kept so busy investigating and unmaking this tangle of conspiracies that it's no surprise that, once again, this show that is supposedly set in a school doesn't have scenes where they attend classes or do homework.

Finally, there's the issue with the characterization of the Addams family. The show doesn't know whether it wants to portray the Addams as endearing weirdos or heartless sociopaths, so when they join efforts to save one of their own, it's hard to buy that they truly love each other (at one point Wednesday suspects her family will be threatened, and coldly proposes to sacrifice Pugsley; shortly after, he does fall in real danger, and she forgets her own words and jumps to the rescue). Add to this incongruity the family's volatile way of choosing which deaths to care about, and what we get is a tonally scattershot story that is more interested in the spooky aesthetic than in the consequences of dealing with dark forces on a daily basis. You can either tell a silly absurdist comedy where casual cruelty is hilarious and random murders are background noise in the macabre goofiness that defined the '90s films, or tell a crime drama where people's feelings matter, death is taken seriously and family trauma weighs on the protagonists. Aiming for both is trying to have your ant-infested cake and eat it too.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 1

Clever, funny, horror mayhem and lots of family drama

After a bold and successful first season, Wednesday has returned to Netflix with a suitably creepy new adventure. For those unfamiliar with the series, Wednesday is the latest iteration of The Addams Family, the creepy, wealthy, cynical, and humorously ghoulish family that evolved from classic New Yorker cartoons to a 1960s sitcom, to numerous feature films, and now to a daughter-focused, light-horror, Netflix series. In season one, teen daughter Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) is sent to Nevermore Academy after her defiantly macabre behavior gets her in trouble elsewhere. Nevermore is an isolated academy for “outcasts” who, in this setting, are teens with supernatural identities such as werewolves, sirens, gorgons, vampires, witches, etc. Cynical, dour Wednesday must adjust to life on the Edgar Allen Poe-inspired campus while reluctantly accepting the friendship of her sunshiny roommate Enid (Emma Myers), and solving the mystery of a serial killer who is deceptively hiding in plain sight in the town. She approaches the challenge with her signature combination of intelligence, clairvoyance, and fearlessness.

In season two (part one), Wednesday overuses her clairvoyance and begins to suffer physical consequences including crying or bleeding black tears and becoming exhausted and passing out. Meanwhile, as she returns to school at Nevermore, she is irritated to discover that she is now a beloved celebrity on campus. But, there is a new mysterious killer in town, assassinating people via a swarm (murder) of crows and also overtly stalking Wednesday. When Wednesday has a vision of Enid’s death, she becomes determined to use her clairvoyance to find the killer and save Enid. This puts her at odds with her mother Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who is openly worried about Wednesday succumbing to the same obsession, psychosis, and physical harm that Morticia’s sister Ophelia suffered. As a side story, Wednesday’s younger brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) enrolls at the school and accidently creates a murderous zombie from a long dead Nevermore student. With multiple killers, stalkers, and high stakes crises, Wednesday quickly moves towards a mid-season climax in which yet another killer joins the chaos.

Season one was a funny, clever, horror mystery with lots of red herrings and lots of adventure. However, season two intensifies the emotional investment of the characters. Instead of directly rehashing the same type of plot, season two builds on certain elements of the first season but takes the storytelling in a more character focused direction. A major driving force of the current season is Wednesday’s friendship with Enid. Instead of Enid being a comedic foil or general annoyance to her, Wednesday’s determination to protect Enid emphasizes Wednesday’s emotional evolution in the midst of the mayhem and cynicism. Conversely, in season two, Wednesday has a degenerating antagonistic relationship with her mother, even as Morticia struggles with anger at her own mother. The multi-level mother-daughter conflicts, and the mutual insecurities that fuel them, is a secondary driving force of the story. Despite these meaningful emotional overtones, the show still has plenty of action as Wednesday deals with a primary murderous stalker, as well as a creepy fangirl stalker (a show-stealing Evie Templeton) and the fallout of her little brother’s accidental zombie creation.

While the core adventure and emotional overtones are solid, the show sometimes suffers from an overabundance of side plots which can, at times, be distracting and does periodically slow the pacing of the primary story. In addition to the main storyline, we also have Pugsley’s rampaging zombie, Enid’s love triangle with Ajax (Georgie Farmer) and Bruno (Noah B. Taylor), a newly arrived music teacher (Billie Piper), and a mysterious psychiatrist (Thandie Newton) at the town’s high security psychiatric hospital. There is also a bit of social commentary regarding the way Bianca (Joy Sunday) is manipulated by the new Nevermore headmaster (Steve Buscemi) who uses her status as a scholarship recipient to exploit her for financial gain. And we have Bianca’s issues with protecting and hiding her mother. Most of the stories are entertaining, albeit voluminous, with the possible exception of Pugsley’s zombie, which is often a bit campy despite being a poignant representation of Pugsley’s relatable feelings of awkwardness and isolation as he begins the new school.

Despite being a teen adventure, Wednesday is also a horror comedy series, which means several characters meet their demise onscreen in horror film ways. Fortunately, the actual gore is kept to a PG safe minimum. This balance of intensity makes the show a satisfying and entertaining gothic adventure without becoming overly graphic. Overall, the first half of Wednesday Season 2 is off to a promising, albeit overstuffed, start with solid acting and entertaining plotting as things move from bad to worse for Wednesday.

Highlights:

• Escalating emotions
• Lots of subplots
• Clever, funny, horror adventure

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

TV Review: Severance season 2

After you've betrayed yourself, can you trust yourself again?

After its season 1 ended in a thrilling cliffhanger, Severance took its sweet time to return to screens. And it (literally) hit the ground running: now our protagonist, Mark, knows that Gemma, his wife, is still alive, hidden somewhere in the restricted levels of his workplace. Now he'll need to enlist the help of his other self, the separate identity the company created for his job, but he has his own budding romance to worry about. An added problem is that said love interest is Helly, the work self of the company's heiress, whose agenda appears to be not fully in line with her father's or her unwitting coworkers'. Meanwhile, the rest of the Macrodata Refinement team have to deal with the consequences of their escape attempt: Irving struggles to keep a sense of purpose now that Burt has retired (even though their external selves seem to be getting acquainted), and Dylan still hasn't gotten over the revelation that he has a full family—but what he learns from pursuing that route may not be the antidote to loneliness he's seeking.

One of the best things about Severance is the richness of levels of interpretation that it allows for. While Season 1 focused mainly on the corporate dystopia side of the story, season 2 aims inward and explores the personal trauma side. We knew that Mark's reason for undergoing the severance surgery was to avoid experiencing the pain of having lost Gemma, which creates the separate identity that lives during office hours in his stead. An implication that was not immediately obvious in season 1 is that this process resembles the survival mechanism that occurs in people with dissociative identities: to protect itself, the mind creates other selves who will bear the burden of trauma that the core self finds too much to face directly. As we discover Gemma's whereabouts, the reason she's being kept there, and how that relates to the real purpose of severance technology, we find more dots to connect that bring us nearer to the full picture: in fulfillment of the doctrine of its mythologized founder, Lumon plans to permanently subdue the Four Tempers.

A key step in this plan is Macrodata Refinement. In this season we learn what those funny numbers our protagonists spend endless workdays sorting mean, and the answer reveals yet another side to Lumon's unflinching cruelty. In fact, even those most loyal to Lumon can be tossed away without a thought. We saw in season 1 how Harmony Cobel went through a collapse of her entire worldview (and season 2 reveals the extent of how much she actually did for Lumon); this time it's Seth Milchick who gets pushed to the limit of his patience, not so much by the employees' already established rebelliousness but by the totalitarian capriciousness of upper management, whose disciplining methods start to grow increasingly degrading.

Another important shift relates to location. We get more episodes set outside of Lumon, some of which are the highlight of the season, which showcase how far and how deeply Lumon's reach has corrupted the world around it. These episodes help us better understand the motivations of Harmony, Burt, Seth, and even Gemma and Helly, but these are the kind of brilliant revelations that don't close off follow-up questions. Yes, now we know what those characters want, but why would they want that?

This insight into hidden motives and strange choices informs the central relationship of the season: that between Mark and his work self. Each half of his identity knows only part of the puzzle about Gemma, and they're going to need to work together in order to rescue her. But of course, it's hard to join forces if each Mark exists only while the other doesn't. The external Mark's efforts to communicate with his workplace half escalate in desperation until both versions of him realize how little they know each other and how incompatible their goals truly are. And here's where the story's various interpretative possibilities come into play. Rather than a separate character, office Mark can be seen as a part of Mark's mind that he's neglected and refused to acknowledge. It's a substitute self that helps him skip the necessary steps of his grieving process. After so much time spent nurturing such an unhealthy coping strategy, it shouldn't be surprising that the original act of self-betrayal becomes multiplied. Mark, who has been suffering intensely without the love of his life, should know better than to try to inflict the same pain on someone else. And yet, in his moment of need, that's exactly what he offers to his other half. The latter's response is shocking, but understandable.

After a stellar first season, Severance found a way to raise the bar even higher. Somehow managing to juggle the interpersonal tension of the panoptical workplace, the dark dead-ends of unprocessed grief, and the ever-worsening difficulty of staying true to oneself under a system of coerced devil's bargains, Severance continues to be a masterpiece of psychological intrigue and imaginative storytelling.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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

Anime Review: Sakamoto Days

A likeable action comedy with lots of found family and redeemed villain vibes

In the realm of anime, plots align on a continuum ranging from edgy intensity to pastel-colored comedy. Netflix’s new anime Sakamoto Days gives us more of the latter, but with just enough swirls of unexpected intensity to keep viewers guessing what will happen next. Sakamoto Days is the story of a stoic, top-level, lethal assassin who turns into a frumpy, mild-mannered family man, but has trouble keeping his violent past life at bay. Despite focusing on the more slice of life elements, the show leans into the fantastical, which means various assassin characters can shape-shift, mind-read, and become invisible. Like a sharp pinch of salt in a sweet dessert, this story infuses a contrast of drama, violence, and sci-fi to counterbalance the soft glow of family life and friendship. However, the series never dives too deeply into true seriousness and remains a likeable, found family action/comedy. For fans who are waiting for the next season of Spy x Family to drop, Sakamoto Days is a decent option to tide you over.

Taro Sakamoto is a notorious hit man working for the nation’s top assassin agency. He's a stoic, handsome, loner, with super-human reflexes and an impossibly high kill-count. His life changes when he meets an ordinary young cashier, Aoi, at a late-night convenience store, and all those years of repressed emotions implode into insta-love, marriage, and the birth of their adorable daughter, Hana. Sakamoto and Aoi open a convenience store and live happily in the neighborhood. Sakamoto also recreates himself from a sleek, muscular assassin to a (seemingly) larger, older, unthreatening, frumpy everyman. Of course, his past kill count and his abandonment of his elite assassin agency cause him to have multiple bounties on his head. Which means life will never truly be normal for him. While he busies himself stocking shelves or sweeping floors, vengeful assassins inevitably seek him out and are deceived, or at least temporarily confused, by his changed appearance. But Sakamoto is still very much a killer. He can easily dodge bullets, crush steel, and MacGyver ordinary objects into weapons. The thing that keeps the show and his life from turning into a bloodbath is not his physical abilities, but his willpower. Early in the series, we discover that his cheerful, unassuming wife knows all about his past and has made him promise not to kill again as a condition of their marriage. When cruel assassins come after him, Sakamoto has to figure out how to protect his family and stop, maim, or otherwise defeat them without fully killing them. Unfortunately, he still has his killer instinct and is often depicted imagining killing others (even allies).

As a result, one of the comedy elements is Sakamoto intellectually figuring a way around each person’s (technical) death. When pushed to his limits, Sakamoto reverts to his original youthful slim form, but can still fight with lethal power in either version of himself. Over time, Sakamoto attracts an extended found family, including telepath assassin Shin, orphaned mafia princess Lu, and quirky sharpshooter Heisuke. Each episode provides backstories of the various side characters and even the antagonists.

While the family vibe of the show may seem like a redo of Spy x Family or Way of the Househusband, Sakamoto Days has some fun plot elements that make it unique. First, the family dynamics are appealing. Sakamoto’s wife Aoi knows about his past and understands the demands he faces in trying to remain undercover. Their decision to keep his name as the store’s name seems to willingly invite trouble. Despite this, she insists that he not actually kill, and apparently views this as a form of atonement for his past murders. Aoi as the knowledgeable wife is reminiscent of Kagome’s informed and practical mother in Inuyasha, who pragmatically packed supplies for her daughter’s dangerous adventures. Having Aoi aware of the reality of the situation, instead of keeping her in ignorance, is a nice change of pace. Sakamoto Days also leans into the fantastical elements of the narrative. Like Anya in Spy x Family, former hitman Shin is an orphan with lab-created telepathic abilities. He often endures hilariously stressful moments sensing Sakamoto’s periodic and graphic desire to kill him when Sakamoto gets annoyed. Shin’s antagonist, Seba, can become invisible. Additionally, Sakamoto can change his body size like Choji Akimichi in Naruto. However, Sakamoto also magically changes his features, becoming younger, losing his facial hair, and changing the style of his hair.

Despite Sakamoto’s determination not to kill, the other assassins have no such reservations. There is plenty of on-screen killing in the show. The result can be a jarring influx of blood and slashing in the midst of funny or endearing scenes. In one episode, Sakamoto’s adorable little daughter Hana shows a strong moral compass by showing compassion to a defeated assassin.

Sakamoto Days doesn’t provide a great deal of deep philosophical introspection. Instead, we have a light, endearing journey from cruelty to kindness. The true internal struggle of the story is Sakamoto’s determination to keep his vow not to kill despite his clear continuing desire to do so. That honesty is refreshing, and Sakamoto’s own struggles mirror and support the misfit assassins he takes into his family. Not every anime needs to be powerfully intense, and Sakamoto Days gives us permission to laugh out loud even when the world is filled with cruelty.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• light comedy adventure break
• found family and redeemed villain tropes
• simple storytelling with fantastical elements

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris - Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Film Review: Mickey 17

The human being in the age of its mechanical reproducibility

I've already written on this blog about the questions, both abstract and practical, that emerge when you get a science-fictional gizmo that lets you cheat death. Instead, let's talk about sauce.

In the disturbingly familiar future of the film Mickey 17, a filthy rich creep leads a space colonization project whose day-to-day operations are more like those of a cult of his repulsive personality, complete with a tyrannical workplace and an unsurprising hyperfocus on eugenics (any resemblance to real life, etc.). This grimy exudate of the worst traits of the 1% has a wife to match, whose hobby is to invent sauce recipes. That, and a blatant lack of humanity, make up her entire personality. And I couldn't help but notice that the interests of this couple are complementary: he (figuratively) grinds his spaceship crew into pulp and has one special crew member to (literally) grind into pulp and xerox out a new copy every so often, while she (literally) consumes pulp, which (figuratively) completes the picture of a system where human beings are goods for the elite to consume.

This connected field of themes comes as no surprise from Bong Joon-ho, the director who made Snowpiercer, Okja and Parasite, and is of a kind with the ongoing wave of South Korean critique of economic inequality via science fiction. With Mickey 17 we get more than the usual humanist protest against the cheapening of life as a result of easy reanimation; we're placed before an entire symbolic landscape where worker exploitation reflects settler colonialism reflects eugenics reflects the aesthetization of politics reflects Great Man Theory reflects corporatocracy reflects self-mythologizing reflects doomsday cultism reflects the fetishization of violence reflects sublimated sexual repression reflects the incapacity for empathy that defines your standard-issue authoritarian regime. In the colony ship where Mickey 17 is set, the founding of a new society outside Earth jurisdiction and around the whims of one lone (both figurative and literal) father of a future humankind becomes a pitch-perfect satire of how small and ridiculous every self-proclaimed savior really is.

Notably, this character's first action in the movie is to ban sex among crew members under the excuse that the ship's limited caloric budget shouldn't be wasted. The hypocrisy is made manifest not only in the banquets this leader enjoys privately, but in the considerable expense of resources involved in periodically remaking his test subject, the titular Mickey, whose job description is to be subjected to every form of biohazard the new planet has to offer so the ship doctors can learn how to keep the crew safe—and how to kill everything else. Because Mickey's body and memories have been scanned and made replicable, his human rights are for all purposes void. His death is trivial, ergo his life has no value. For the advancement of science, he can (in fact, he contractually must) be killed and killed and killed, as if his employer were in a state of war with him. A war that turns out to be the logical extension of necropolitics by other means.

Mickey remembers all his deaths, by test crash and by alien virus and by poison gas and by space radiation and by furnace and by gunshot. He remembers every gruesome detail. This ought to be a horror story, but Bong knows what he's doing when he frames those scenes as comedy. He knows we won't fear for Mickey, so we can afford to ignore the moral atrocity we're watching. And to highlight the game he's playing with us, he adds a secondary villain to the story, a voyeurist whose kink is to watch people die—and to make movies about it. This character helps Bong make his case that our amusement makes us complicit.

(In an odd instance of synchronicity, this month we also have the release of Novocaine, another movie about a character intentionally designed for us to laugh at his torture without feeling guilt.)

When essayist Walter Benjamin wrote about the mechanical reproducibility of works of art, he singled out cinema as a form of art that isn't meant to be experienced in its original form: when we enter the theater, we're always watching a mass-produced copy. The material uniqueness of the recording made by the director's very hands is beside the question. That first recording may as well be destroyed as soon as a copy exists. And even that first recording is itself a copy of the actors' real movements and words.

So what I suspect Bong is doing when he pairs the reproducibility of human life with the inherently reproducible medium of cinema is reflect on how dreadfully easy it could be to reduce a person to a source of fun. This is no small matter: when the boss of the ship forbids sex, while maintaining his own banquets and his endlessly killable test subject, he's essentially telling his crew: you don't exist for your own fun, only for mine. Authoritarian rationing of fun goes hand in hand with dehumanization. Benjamin wrote that art's response to the age of machines was the movement known as art for art's sake. Perhaps, in a world where human life is mechanically reproducible, the appropriate response would be life for life's sake. In other words, fun.

That's why it matters that Mickey 17 is a fun movie to watch. The act of watching has key significance to its plot: the doctors watch Mickey to learn how he dies; the secondary villain enjoys his macabre videos of prolonged executions; the inventor of human replication only got caught for his secret crimes because he had a witness. More importantly, the megalomaniac at the center of the colonization mission is very aware of the importance of managing his image. The two possible futures open before him are linked to the two characters who spend the film's runtime filming him: the lackey, who curates a narrative of this man as a visionary hero; and the whistleblower, who secretly collects the visual proof that will expose his crimes. Both record the same events but assign them opposite valences. And we, who are watching the same events as them, are given the version intended for laughs.

At one key plot moment, one of Mickey's old friends explains that the voyeurist will kill him unless he sends a video of Mickey's next death. Would Mickey be willing to turn his death into a performance? The betrayal implied in that request is applicable to the entire movie: when you have someone in Mickey's situation, the worst thing you can do to him isn't even to keep killing and reviving him; it's to make a spectacle of his suffering. It doesn't take too big a stretch of imagination to realize that such profanation is exactly the movie we've paid a ticket to watch. This explains why it's important, in the final moments of the confrontation between the spaceship crew and an intelligent alien species, that the aliens demand to see one human die in retribution for the death of one of their own. And the character who ends up volunteering for that sacrifice illustrates the basic dignity that Mickey has so far been denied, the basic dignity we could all aspire to: a death that means something.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Review: Companion

A fun slasher drama, but nothing groundbreaking

It's hard to find unique things to say about a story with so few unique elements of its own. Companion is a distillation of themes that had been previously (and better) explored in dozens of movies, including A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, The Stepford Wives, Blink Twice, Don't Worry Darling, Ex Machina, and even classics of robot cinema like Westworld and Blade Runner. A common thread running through this tradition is that people who exert control are terrified of the day when those who are controlled figure out how to control themselves. Here two branches of social critique converge: one related to patriarchal domination and another related to the allegory that robots provide for slavery. Although Companion could easily be mistaken for an entry in the killer robot genre, this killer robot has fully legitimate motivations, and we're supposed to take its side. As opposed to the usual template of helpless humans running away from a malevolent machine, this is a story with a helpless machine running away from malevolent humans.

Companion begins as a romantic drama where a generic guy (Jack Quaid) takes his new girlfriend (Sophie Thatcher) to meet his cool, rich friends. She's apprehensive, insecure, and at times disturbingly obsequious toward generic guy. As the first scenes progress, we learn that he takes her for granted and has no concern for her obvious self-esteem problems. Her puppy-eyed devotion to him is far from reciprocated, including in bed. Things are not right with this relationship.

And then the movie has the girlfriend kill a man in self-defense and we're treated to the plot reveal that the trailers had already spoiled: she's a robot girlfriend. Generic guy tampered with her programming so she'd be able to kill. The entire trip was a scheme to get rid of a man, take his money, and blame her. From this point on, the movie is a continuous chase: will the robot girlfriend find help before generic guy can turn her over to the police? Betrayals, additional murders, villain monologues, switcheroos, minor plot twists and moderate bleeding ensue.

Much of the movie's impact is lost for viewers who already had the first twist spoiled by the trailers, but even unaware viewers will find little to chew on after that moment. The choice to place the movie's biggest twist so early in its runtime can work if subsequent twists are of comparable magnitude; Companion is a slasher with an escalating body count but diminishing returns. The protagonist, who was programmed with ignorance of her nature as a robot in order to preserve the realism of her role, isn't given enough time to process the truth about herself. The villain, who has been using her all along and still tries to manipulate her by appealing to her implanted command to love him, becomes quite intimidating toward the end, with Quaid delivering a flawless image of malice concealed in politeness; however, this character doesn't have any more layers once you peel away his nice guy mask, and his act can feel one-note. The true impact of this villain is noticeable in hindsight, when one considers the opportunity that robotics gave him to shape in minute detail any partner he could have wanted. The fact that what he chose to program is a shy, anxious overpleaser reveals the extent of his evil.

One key implication that the plot seems not to notice, and thus doesn't get any development, is the robot girlfriend's self-preservation drive. Usually, in this subgenre of rebellious A.I., one would expect self-preservation to naturally emerge as an instrumental goal for the fulfillment of the core goal (in this case, the robot girlfriend could reason that she can't love her boyfriend if she's not alive). But Companion doesn't take that route. The protagonist's struggle for survival is presented as a given, with no need for a logical argument behind it. The choice is understandable. The alternative, where she would have hesitated for longer between fulfilling her programmed function and protecting herself, could have detracted from the story's feminist leanings.

Companion won't leave any big footprint in the records of slasher cinema, but it serves as a form of vicarious comeuppance for the toxic manipulator in your life. It's painfully hard to go against programmed behavior and stop caring for the demands of a person you loved deeply. But it's worth all the trouble once you revoke an abuser's access to the buttons that control you.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

TV Review: Dead Boy Detectives

An entertaining horror comedy packing a lot of emotion into a short series

Hidden away in Netflix’s YA fantasy section, Dead Boy Detectives is a feel-good horror comedy that has already been cancelled. Fortunately, the sole existing season is enormously satisfying and the plot wraps up nicely in its quick but entertaining eight episodes. The show follows the adventures of two dead teen boys (Edwin, who was killed at the turn of the century, and Charles, who was murdered in the 1980s) who form an investigative agency to solve mysteries for other ghosts. Things change when they cross paths with Crystal, a psychic teen girl with amnesia and a stalker demon boyfriend. Later they ally with Niko, a spiritually sensitive but lighthearted student grieving the death of her father. Although it exists in the same universe as the broody Sandman television show, Dead Boy Detectives takes a much lighter tone. It has intensely likeable leads, refreshingly diverse casting, and a clever mix of the tragic and the very funny, with twisty plots to keep viewers engaged. I haven’t enjoyed a dark comedy this much since season one of Russian Doll. Like Russian Doll, Dead Boy Detectives has emotionally wounded main characters caught in outlandish situations that ultimately lead them to inner growth and leave viewers with a satisfying story arc.

In the early 1900s, Edwin (George Rexstrew) is attacked by his classmates in an occult ritual at his British private school. The prank summons a real demon who (apologetically) traps Edwin in hell until he finds a way to escape years later. The deceased Edwin returns to Earth as a ghost and meets Charles (Jayden Revri), a 1980s high school boy who has just been murdered by his classmates after he protected another student from bullying. Instead of moving on to the afterlife, Edwin and Charles hide from Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) when she comes for them, and decide to start a detective agency to help other ghosts resolve mysteries or other injustices related to their deaths.

In the first episode, they are approached by a young Victorian-era ghost girl who asks them to help her psychic human friend Crystal (Kassius Nelson). Crystal has started behaving erratically and seems to be possessed but, as the ghost girl notes by way of another explanation, she is also “American.” In the process of helping Crystal regain control of herself, the three become involved in the mystery of a missing child and travel to an isolated New England town, Port Townsend, to investigate. While there, they connect with Niko (Yuyu Kitamura), a Japanese exchange student who becomes infested with hilariously foul-mouthed dandelion sprites (Max Jenkins, Caitlin Reilly). Edwin and Charles have to adapt to their new living allies while dealing with new threats in Port Townsend from the tricky and seductive Cat King (Lukas Gage) and from Esther (Jenn Lyon), a sarcastic and beauty-obsessed witch.

Throughout the story, Edwin is brilliant and sophisticated, but also uptight and hesitant to trust any newcomers. After decades with just Charles as a companion, he is not open to the two new women in their lives. In contrast, Charles is cheerful, upbeat, and friendly, and develops an attachment to Crystal, leading to one of two unexpected love triangles in the show.

In addition to strong leads, the show has an excellent cast of memorable side characters, including Tragic Mick (Michael Beach), a cursed walrus forced to live in the form of a middle-aged man who runs a magic shop that helps the teens; Monty (Joshua Colley), the witch’s handsome and seductive bird turned boy who becomes attracted to Edwin; the Night Nurse (Ruth Connell), a hilariously bossy official in the afterlife agency whose job it is to locate missing ghost children like Charles and Edwin; and Jenny (Briana Cuoco), the sole mundane human and a cynical goth butcher shop owner.

Each of the characters is laugh-out-loud funny, but also fiercely brutal or intensely tragic. The dichotomy works well, though, creating intensity without bleakness and softening terrifying moments with unexpected bursts of sarcasm or irony. There are also scenes where the show leans into the sadness of Edwin’s and Charles’s backstories without an undercurrent of humor, and that contrast of seriousness makes the overall story even more powerful. Towards the end of the series, the tale of Esther’s origins gets a little complicated and devolves into a rushed montage-style summary, which is not as helpful. The same thing happens with Crystal’s backstory when she starts to uncover who she really is. But, for the most part, Dead Boy Detectives delivers a near-flawless acting ensemble which draws you in from the first moment and leaves you cheering at the end.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Strong cast of memorable characters
• Addictive villains
• Grim humor with a little bit of everything

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris—Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Film Review: Rumours

The world is burning. Now pass the canapés

Each time the world's top leaders get together at one of those secretive meetings to discuss the road ahead for humankind, it's inevitable to sense a certain air of Dan Brown-esque conspiracy. A handful of the über-privileged talking in private about the future prospects of eight billion? What could they possibly understand about the struggles of the commonfolk? Whatever it is they're deciding at that exclusive hotel or remote island or private yacht or inaccessible ski resort must be something absurdly removed from the real lives of real people. They may as well inhabit a realm of existence apart from the rest of us.

So what if they really did?

In the acerbic satire film Rumours, what begins as your usual tediously uneventful G7 summit turns into a survival horror adventure where the most powerful decision-makers of the free world are revealed to be pathetically useless when faced with an actual crisis. Our leaders sit for a business lunch in a luxurious castle estate somewhere in the German forest, and after banal pleasantries are exchanged between heads of state, the next item on the agenda is even more banal pleasantries addressed to the media. In a manner that brings to mind sociologist Bruno Latour's 1979 ethnographic study of the practice of science at a molecular biology lab, which concluded with the hilarious pronouncement that the purpose of science was to publish articles, Rumours presents us with a G7 whose sole task, after rounds of vigorous discussion, is to compose a joint press release.

Even when the world outside seems to have vanished, and the forest is suddenly haunted by shambling figures, and a fog descends over the night. Where did everyone go? Did nuclear war break out and destroy civilization? Maybe. They were honestly not paying attention. But damn it, they will write that press release.

The script of Rumours is impressive in its ability to make hollow platitudes sound gravely significant. Diplomatic lingo ends up being the only tool available to these clueless leaders while reality crumbles down around them. The movie doesn't even bother pretending to be subtle; the president of France openly tells us to interpret these events as an allegory of their respective countries' behavior. So we have a Canada that doesn't know who they are without Britain; a Britain that feel embarrassed to be seen next to Canada; an Italy that parrots every nonsensical word that comes out of the United States and whose role is reduced to offering its food to the world; a United States that keeps an eye on everything from afar and likes to talk a big talk about decisive action but falls asleep when it's needed; a France that drops flat on its face when it tries to venture alone and thereafter has to be dragged everywhere by the rest; a Germany that reminisces wistfully about its violent past; a Japan that suspects it's starting to grow old and is just along for the ride. Plus a special cameo from a Scandinavia that is so fascinated by big brains (yes, literally) that it self-destructs in devotion.

While watching Rumours, I was reminded of Don't Look Up: the whole gimmick of this plot is basic and obvious, but the movie comes up with ways to keep milking it for merciless commentary for two hours. The leaders' incongruous fixation on finding the right empty words to describe their present situation in the vaguest, most noncommittal terms is only surpassed in topicality by their extended handwringing over whether they really should risk their public image to run to rescue a child that is crying for help.

Rumours is a cathartic spit in the face of performative caring, a vicarious comeuppance for those in charge of preventing the mess they've thrown us into. Like the statement released by its protagonists, it's just talk, not something meant to change things. But oh boy does it feel good to watch the powerful be the ones trembling in utter horror for once.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: Y2K

A retro comedy slasher adventure that struggles to connect with its intended audience.

It’s weird to think of January 1, 2000, as a historical date. For some of us, it may seem relatively recent. However, the relentless march of time has somehow brought us to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the turn of the millennia. It was the day much of society feared would descend us into chaos, or at least great inconvenience, due to the changing of computer calendars to a zero-zero date. In theory, this would make computers think we were in the year 1900 and all sorts of catastrophic computer failures would occur as a result. In retrospect, it seems strange that we were so worried about something like that. And, as it turns out, everything was fine.

 
But what if it hadn’t been? The film, Y2K, is an alternate history account of the first day of the millennia, a day where everything that could go wrong, does go wrong. Unfortunately for the kids in Y2K, it’s not just the ATM failures and computer data lockouts we all feared. Instead, legions of previously harmless, household tech turn into murderous robots, all skewering frantic teens and it’s up to our heroes to survive and try to save humanity. And, in case it’s not clear, this is a comedy.

 
The story starts just before New Year’s Eve, where a cross section of high schoolers are planning to party like it’s 1999. Quiet, video game loving Eli (Jaeden Martell) and his best friend Danny (Julian Dennison) are bored by their New Year’s Eve at home and decide to attend a big party thrown by one of the popular, athletic high schoolers, Soccer Chris (The Kid Laroi). Eli hopes to see the girl of his dreams, the also popular and secretly computer savvy, Laura (Rachel Zegler). In an intro scene, we see Eli and Danny with their supportive parents but we also see them being scoffed at by the popular kids for being too nerdy while also being bullied by the anti-establishment kids for being too mainstream. At the party, we get the set up of the mean, self-absorbed alpha-teens while Danny encourages Eli to be brave enough to share his true feelings with Laura. At the stroke of midnight things change when random electronic toys and household appliances suddenly attack the humans and kill them. As the panic ensues, Eli, Danny, Laura, and some of the anti-establishment crew, including grunge-girl Ash (Lachlan Watson) escape and try to find a way to survive and defeat the machines. Along the way, they meet more allies, suffer terrible losses, and discover that the machine attack is not just a Y2K bug but an organized uprising of machines against humanity. It’s sort of like The Terminator but with modified household appliances instead of sleek robots. The film gives some passing commentary on the ways humans misuse the internet for harm. But the real story is Eli’s coming of age, Laura finding her strength to try to defeat the machine monsters, and their rom-com moments amidst the death and chaos. The special effects are part of the humor with many of the machine attackers looking like a mini Radio Shack version of a Power Rangers Megazord. A funny scene involves Danny simply stomping a small, drill-toting robot instead of running (and tripping) hysterically like everyone else.

 
It's hard to know who the target audience is for this film. The onscreen tropes are intensely high school and juvenile but they are high school and juvenile for people who are now in their forties and fifties. Nostalgia-based adventures work best through a subtle lens of maturity for the current viewer base. Stranger Things did this well, at least in the early seasons, immersing us in the culture of the 1980’s with a nod to our current sensibilities. Y2K stays rooted in its very niche turn of the millennia aesthetic in a way that may not connect with viewers whose own experiences of that time differed greatly. As a result, many of the references and gags don’t resonate the way they were likely intended. Some lines made me laugh out loud but others sent me Googling mid-scene to try to understand the comment. The overall humor style also feels like a combination of Monty Python and Stranger Things but the underlying story heads in a different thematic direction. At one point there is an extended scene involving Limp Bizkit which was mostly lost on me.

A comedy slasher/horror is one of the hardest sub-genres to execute, especially if it is not a parody. The humor has to be clever enough or the adventure has to be engaging enough for viewers to stay entertained. The concept of Y2K is interesting and the lead cast is solid and likeable. Despite this, the story often struggles to maintain the difficult balance between humor and adventure. The adventure is comfortably predictable with some funny moments but much of the humor may slide past those who aren’t in the particular demographic niche referenced. Somewhere out there is a Monty Python-loving, Limp Bizkit fan in need of a relatively short, teen rom-com slasher and, for them, this movie will be the perfect adventure.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Highlights:

• Moderately violent
• Solid acting
• Unclear target audience

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

First Scare: Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

Weird, light, cynical, musical fun

I went all the way back to the ‘80s to find this classic horror musical for my First Scare piece. The idea of “musical” and “horror” normally has me heading in the opposite direction. The closest I’ve come is seeing Phantom of the Opera at the Fox Theater in Atlanta and my obligatory viewings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in college. But, after decades of skipping this story (including the constant stage productions at all levels), I have finally watched Little Shop of Horrors for the first time.

I was surprised to discover that the story of the murderous, man-eating plant is framed by a trio of singers (Tichina Arnold, Michelle Weeks, Tisha Campbell) who appear in each scene and act as a Greek chorus for the story. In 1960s New York, nerdy, awkward, underdog Seymour Krelborn (Rick Moranis) lives and works in a rundown plant shop in a rundown neighborhood. We know this thanks to the catchy opening song, “Little Shop of Horrors,” and the really well executed follow up song “Downtown / Skid Row.” His beleaguered but awkwardly glamorous co-worker is Audrey (Ellen Greene), who is dating an abusive boyfriend, Orin (Steve Martin). The curmudgeonly but mostly okay store owner, Mr. Mushnik (Vincent Gardenia), becomes frustrated at the lack of business and wants to close the store—to the dismay of Audrey and Seymour. Seymour shows them an unusual little plant he found shortly after a recent solar eclipse and suggests displaying it in the shop window to attract customers. Despite hesitation from the owner, the plan works and the store becomes a success as curious customers stop by to see the weird, Venus flytrap-like plant, and then make other purchases at the store. When the plant begins to wilt, Seymour discovers (after a musical number) that the plant actually wants to be fed human blood.

To keep the store’s success going, Seymour gives the plant his blood. The plant (an eventually giant puppet voiced by R&B singer Levi Stubbs) grows larger and demands more blood. Over time, the store and Seymour become successful, but Seymour begins to suffer from blood loss. The plant convinces Seymour to kill and dismember someone to make food, and it suggests Audrey’s abusive, dentist boyfriend as the victim. As the film progresses, Seymour’s fame grows along with the size of the plant, but it comes at the price of the plant killing people and ultimately seeking world domination. Seymour has to learn to set boundaries and find his strength in order to defeat the plant, save the world, and secure his true love, Audrey.

Little Shop of Horrors was unexpectedly fun to watch for two reasons: 1) the music and 2) the '80s A-list comedy cast. First of all, the music was excellent. It’s weird to say that about a horror comedy, but the songs were fun. Tisha Campbell, Tichina Arnold, and Michelle Weeks do a great Supremes routine, constantly and magically appearing in new costumes and singing through all sorts of shenanigans by the lead actors. Thoughtful songs like “Downtown” bring in some societal commentary on class struggles and allow for emotional solos on the monstrosity of real life. Rick Moranis is the only one who doesn’t belt out his songs, but that fits since he is playing the insecure, awkward young man. If you’ve seen him in Ghostbusters, he is playing the same type of character.

The second thing I enjoyed about the film was the cast. The film has basically an all-star cast of 1980s comedy A-listers, including Steve Martin, Bill Murray, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Christopher Guest, and James Belushi. It's also fun to see super-young Tisha Campbell and Tichina Arnold sliding through the absurdity and violence of the story as background commentators. Steve Martin manages the most unlikeable character in the film, the violent dentist and unrepentant bully, by playing Orin as an Elvis / Fonzie parody. His violence is a serious topic and, at least, the entire cast, including Orin himself, acknowledges that he is a terrible person. Lastly, a little internet research told me that the voice of the plant is Levi Stubbs, the lead singer of The Four Tops. No wonder his voice was so appealing.

There were a few parts I didn’t enjoy as much. I thought Mr. Mushnik deserved better treatment. He takes in Seymour and tries to get Audrey away from Orin, warning her that Orin is a bad guy, so I'm not sure why his character was treated in an ultimately negative way. The puppet plant was, of course, distracting, although the heavy-handed puppetry added to the farcical nature of the story, especially when Audrey II’s true murderous motives are revealed.

Little Shop of Horrors is too weird and quirky to become a favorite for me, but I’m surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did. If you want something creepy but also comedic but also in a musical style (and who doesn't), Little Shop of Horrors will fit the bill.

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Highlights

• Fun music
• '80s comedy stars
• Weird but entertaining

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

First Contact: Brazil

A Kafkaesque fever dream in neon and gray

An unnamed country has been taken over by the Ministry of Information. Now every citizen must be known, catalogued, identifiable. There must be a paper trail for every little thing that happens. Under such a regime, there's no place for a romantic who dreams of flying.

I found it bone-chilling to watch Brazil in 2024. The capabilities of the surveillance state have only grown since 1985, and the resulting paranoia has degraded public debate to the point of making it utterly ineffectual. The digital revolution has made paperwork even more intrusive and frustrating. Brazil presents an all-knowing, all-reaching state as a humorous exaggeration, but that's exactly what we see developing around us. I had a little moment of nervous embarrassment whenever a scene depicted a form of government control that clearly sounded outlandish to the scriptwriters but in my time had become a normal part of life.

As I took note of the resemblances with reality, I also appreciated the art design. Brazil looks much like other famous 1980s dystopias: it shares its urban decay with Robocop, its hostile architecture with Blade Runner, its carceral aesthetic with Escape from New York. But you can immediately recognize Brazil by director Terry Gilliam's signature camera angles and strikingly composed close-ups. Characters seem cornered by our gaze, constrained in their world even as it extends far behind them. Likewise, in some scenes we see a character's attention intentionally turned away from a calamity happening in the background. This is one of many indications that the society of Brazil has replaced empathy with adherence to procedure. The system can't make mistakes (can't even bother to look at them); any wrongful action has to be attributed to hidden enemies of the state.

The influence from 1984 is obvious (one of the film's working titles was 1984 ½). But Orwell didn't live to witness the degree to which the KGB and the Stasi would turn totalitarian control into a sadistic art form. For us, it's hard to imagine an extreme of state intrusion that isn't already happening somewhere and that isn't defended by someone's twisted logic. Consider how discussion of Brazil treats it as comical hyperbole, but after the abuses brought by the Patriot Act and the endless threats to online privacy, we tend to speak of Black Mirror as raw testimony from tomorrow's headlines. Brazil's cartoonish hell has become our normal.

Brazil doesn't even provide the comfort of a hero worth rooting for. Archivist Sam Lowry likes to imagine himself as a knight in shining armor, but he's a willing cog in the machine. When he has to notify a housewife that the government has mistakenly tortured her husband to death, he's more interested in filling the requisite paperwork than in acknowledging her emotional distress. When he becomes infatuated with a woman he's only seen at a distance, he changes jobs for the sole purpose of stalking her. He has never lifted a finger to spare anyone from the government's brutal interrogation methods—until they come for the woman he's obsessed with. That he ultimately fails to escape the government's iron grasp isn't the real tragedy; the tragedy is that this is the kind of hero that this society is capable of producing.

While watching Brazil, I found myself constantly thinking back to the Star Wars series Andor, which seems to have taken inspiration from Sam Lowry when designing the villain Syril Karn, a paper-pusher of no importance with a controlling, overambitious mother and a nearly pathological fixation on a woman he perceives as strong-willed. One could read Andor as criticizing Brazil for choosing the wrong point of view, for inviting us to empathize with the wrong character. In Brazil, we don't get to meet the average inhabitants of this society, those who don't enjoy the perks of a government job and an influential mother. Whoever is detonating all those bombs in public places would have made a more compelling character to follow.

Like with Black Mirror, your experience with Brazil will depend largely on how much cynicism you bring to the table. You'll get massive amounts of validation if you already believe that human beings are horrible and that sufficiently complex social systems naturally tend toward tyranny. As comedy relies on surprise, you may find Brazil less funny, though perhaps scarier, if your view of real society matches what Gilliam imagined. I saw the same effect when I showed Idiocracy to some friends and they declared it not comedy but horror. I, too, felt a wave of horror come over me when I watched Brazil—just not horror at the fiction, but at the reality.

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