Film Review: The Dog Stars

Artsy vibes in a slow-paced, post-apocalyptic search for meaning

Post-apocalyptic adventure is always in abundant supply. Shows like Paradise and The Last of Us, films like A Quiet Place and Leave the World Behind, books like Station Eleven, and even dark comedy anime like Zom 100, are among many that torment us with difficult questions and terrifying imaginations. These stories imagine contemporary society decimated and desperate, struggling to survive by using long forgotten skills. And, we have the irony of characters longing for their lost society while realizing the greatest danger, in their new devastation, is often other humans. The Dog Stars is a new film from Ridley Scott which explores this familiar territory from a slower and more character focused pace. Rather than concentrating on the typical screaming and running (which are also present), the film has long stretches of quiet memories, contemplation of the stars, and simple acts of work and fellowship. This storytelling style is appealing, at least initially, for those who want a quieter story. However, it becomes harder to sustain as the story makes unusual narrative choices.

In the near future, a pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, leaving much of society and the societal infrastructure decimated. In a mountainous area outside of Denver, Colorado, a kind-hearted young mechanic named Hig (Jacob Elordi), manages to have a comfortable, subsistence existence in partnership with a grumpy, ex-military survivalist, named Bangley (Josh Brolin). Hig is also a pilot and periodically flies his beat up small plane into the remnants of Denver to scavenge supplies and to visit his former small home to grieve his deceased wife. He also visits and supplies an extremely isolated Mennonite community whose leader (Benedict Wong) has taken in various orphans. Hig’s only connection to his former life is his dog Jasper. In the aftermath of the devastation, the greatest threat is other survivors, who Bangley nicknames “rats.” They move in mobs and attack and destroy at random. The “rats” are treated as inhuman, almost zombie-like, although they are not zombies. After a falling out with Bangley, Hig flies away in search of a mythical town called Grand Junction, hoping to find community and meaning for his life. However, a crash landing connects him to an isolated farmer, Pops (Guy Pearce), and his daughter, Cima (Margaret Qualley), a former New Yorker and med student who came home to Colorado just before the pandemic. The film follows Hig and his various companions as they search for meaning and navigate survival amidst the danger and devastation of their new existence. 

Surrounding this narrative is the rural, mountainous terrain often seen from Hig’s small plane. The slower pace is comparable to a film like Train Dreams, last year’s Oscar best picture nominee, in which an ordinary person accepts extraordinary changes with sorrow, calmness, and introspection. While Train Dreams had an ultimate message that was poignant and powerful, The Dog Stars is a journey with jarring changes in tone that make its ultimate message unclear. 

The film’s greatest strength is the powerful but understated acting of the four leads. For the most part, the story is told primarily through the protagonist Hig’s perspective. Hig is a kind-hearted hero, grieving his wife, helping orphans, and catching the eye of the farmer’s daughter. The film also connects us to Cima, Pops/Jack, and Bangley who also all feel like archetypal characters. Bangley is the angry, loner, warrior. Pops is the salt-of-the-earth protective father. Cima is the strong, attentive, caretaking love interest. All of the characters feel historical rather than futuristic. This vibe is unexpected but it does fit with the theme of society unraveling and returning to its earlier periods. Of the four leads, Cima is the closest to a contemporary character and, in many ways, is the most relatable with her longing for coffee shops and commute playlists, rather than comfortably settling into their new life of subsistence farming and isolation. The slow paced storytelling works in the first half of the film due to the understated but powerful acting of the four leads. The authenticity of the characters draws you in and creates meaningful and engaging tension.

However, as the film progresses, the narrative begins to take strange turns that undermine the original literary feel of the opening scenes. Eventually, the story starts to feel like more of an old-fashioned Western than a speculative post-apocalyptic survival film. The repeated moments of the settlers trying to fight off the uncivilized marauders start to feel uncomfortable, as if we are suddenly watching a different movie with a different theme. Then, the movie takes an even weirder turn when the group encounters “civilized” people who are equally cruel and barbaric, and are weirdly costumed in the style of the residents of the Capitol in The Hunger Games. The messaging seems to be that both “city” people and “wild” people are evil, and at some point it’s unclear who the target audience is for this story.

As someone who enjoys slower paced character exploration, The Dog Stars has a lot of appeal. Especially since the acting is excellent, and there is a bit of romance and a classic green flag hero. The theme of finding joy and community in moments of devastation is one that seems particularly resonant. However, the overall storytelling is, at times, undercut by some unexpected narrative choices and significant thematic shifts. While the story strives to be ultimately optimistic, especially in the last scenes, the thematic inconsistencies likely mean that, at the end of the film, viewers can’t help but feel uneasy, on multiple levels.

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The Math

Highlights:

• Slow paced, post-apocalyptic journey
• Strange and jarring thematic choices
• Solid acting and archetypal characters

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

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

Film Review: Mother Mary

A song is a prayer is a spell is a confession is an exorcism is a spectacle is a revelation is a birth

From time to time, horror writer Gabino Iglesias reposts this litany on his Bluesky profile:

Many people have a book in them,
but it takes a special kind of freak to leave the Land of Laziness,
cross the Plains of Procrastination and Insecurity Mountain,
find the Blade of No One Made You Do This,
and use it to cut your chest open and yank that book out.

Such is the view of art that permeates David Lowery’s film Mother Mary. The story sounds deceptively simple: Mary, a dance/pop diva in the middle of a creative crisis, returns to the workshop of her former costume designer, Sam, to apologize for breaking their professional partnership and beg for a new dress. Most of the film consists of this single conversation, like a one-act play that reveals entire inner lives as the two lead characters tear down their barriers and take off their veils. Within the space of a small interpersonal drama of wounded trust and unspeakable regrets, Mother Mary weaves its statement about what it takes to produce any genuine art.

Anne Hathaway’s performance as Mary, which includes providing her own voice for all the songs, balances, on one hand, an irresistible scenic presence capable of commanding the adoration of masses of fans (her character is presented as a world-class star on the level of Lady Gaga or Beyoncé), and on the other hand, when she’s off stage, a consuming sorrow that overwhelms her words and movements. Both facets of this character convey the same vulnerability, but it’s fascinating to see how differently she expresses it before a full stadium versus in private conversation with her artistic collaborator. Sam, as played by Michaela Coel, is like a bird with a broken wing, but a bird of prey with eyes that miss nothing and a deadly beak. She takes delight in the return of her muse, but can’t just shake off the years of hurt. This creation is going to be personally costly for both of them.

I often say on this blog that the best stories are those about stories. Mother Mary is something very close: art about art—barely a story, more a portrait that’s being painted as you watch. The emotional bond between Mary and Sam is kept tight, on the verge of snapping, under looks of compassion that shoot daggers and poisoned recriminations coated with sweetness. Mother Mary isn’t trying to convince you that artistic creation has to hurt; it just assumes that it already does. So it’s fitting that Mary shows up on a Thursday to request a dress for the Sunday: the exact timeframe for a full Via Crucis and resurrection.

In a film like this, filled to the brim with Catholic imagery, the fashion designer’s name, Sam Anselm, has to be read as an allusion to the 11th-century Burgundian monk and philosopher St. Anselm, whose method of theology put faith before reason: in his system, you first assent to the revealed truth and then seek to understand it. That’s how you’re meant to experience a film like Mother Mary. It defies logical analysis unless you first accept it on its terms. Instead of arguing for a point, what it’s doing is push out a raw feeling through a scream drowned in sobs.

The connections between the religious experience and the mass ecstasy of pop music have been noticed since before “Madonna” became a stage name. In keeping with the theme of death coming before resurrection, Mother Mary links the act of creation to a demand for bloody sacrifice, an interchange of equally sincere love and hate (think Black Swan, Farinelli, Amadeus). This pain is physically inscribed on the two protagonists: when she’s not performing, Mary is shown with plain, shoulder-length hair, evoking the image of a suffering Jesus, while Sam wears her hair in rigid, pointed locks, arranged like a crown of thorns. The turning point of clarity, when the nature and shape of the new dress is revealed, arrives by a succession of stigmata, confession, forgiveness, and angelic visitation. The film opens with a song about a burial and closes with a song about a cradle, in a moment marked visually on the screen by a line that literally goes full circle.

But then, the end credits conclude with a puzzling statement: a shot of a human skull on a shelf, a common motif in Western painting that retroactively casts the whole film as a vanitas piece. The traditional function of this motif is to remind the viewer that eternity outweighs worldly pursuits, and ultimately anything we build here turns to dust. And yet, Mother Mary exists. It’s a complete experience of rhythmic beats and color and dance moves and ritual and brightness, as if defying the verdict of time. All is dust, but some of that dust is glitter.

To the extent that Mother Mary is articulating someting, as opposed to inviting you to feel it, its verbalizable content is dressed in swirling, uncut drapes of black and crimson. Image here is paramount, which makes it easy for viewers more inclined toward tangible substance to dismiss this film as too enamored with its own aesthetic. Meanwhile, in the real world, Madonna has just released a new album, Confessions II, whose third song, “One Step Away,” contains this spoken monologue:

People think that dance music is superficial. But they’ve got it all wrong.
The dance floor is not just a place. It’s a threshold,
a ritualistic space where movement replaces language.

So go into Mother Mary as you go into a holy ceremony. You have my blessing.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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.

Film Review: T.I.M.

Or, Tediously Imitative Movie

The British robot thriller T.I.M. was released in the year after the first M3GAN film, and it seems to be interested in some of the same questions about the bond we form with our electronic assistants, but the way it goes about it doesn’t reach the same skill level. Whereas the titular robot in M3GAN has as its primary function the protection of a child, and then takes the meaning of “protection” to horrifying extremes, the robot in T.I.M. is a more vaguely defined “manservant” who one day becomes fixated on the concept of love and suddenly decides that his owner doesn’t need her husband anymore.

Our protagonist is Abi, a robotics engineer who has started a new job at a Big Tech company that is planning to launch a new model of human-sized and -shaped robot assistants. Her assignment is to fix the fine motor skills of the mechanical hands, which still can’t control their grip with enough precision.  As part of the perks of her new position, the company has provided her with a luxurious smart home in the countryside and her own domestic robot to test. This doesn’t make her husband, Paul, too happy: he’s currently unemployed and going through a personal crisis of purpose, and it doesn’t help that T.I.M. performs better than him at satisfying Abi’s every need as a cook, gardener, shopping advisor, and foot massager. Paul begins to resent T.I.M.’s presence because it makes him feel redundant, and soon enough, T.I.M. comes to share the same opinion about Paul.

Australian actor Eamon Farren does a convincing job at portraying T.I.M.’s deceptively polite demeanor, letting its inner aggressiveness show only in the tiny twitch of an eyebrow or a lip. The rhythm of speech he chooses is too distractingly reminiscent of Brent Spiner’s carefully neutral delivery for the character Data, but the resemblance ends there. T.I.M. has no admiration for humans. Its only desire is to serve Abi—whether she likes it or not.

T.I.M.’s turn to full villainy is the movie’s weakest point. It was a more interesting character when it maneuvered behind the scenes to sow mistrust between Abi and Paul, planting clues here and there to lead her to suspect infidelity (which we learn has happened before). After its scheme is exposed, however, T.I.M. resorts to clichéd villain lines (“It doesn't have to end this way,” “You’re only delaying the inevitable,” etc.) that don’t sound believable.

In fact, T.I.M.’s motivation is confusing since the beginning. The scenes at Abi’s workplace show that her boss likes to skip quality checks to speed up production, which gives a hint that T.I.M. may not be following a very carefully written code, but even taking that into account, there’s no conceivable reason why it would harbor erotic desires for Abi. After a very basic conversation about the topic of love, T.I.M. starts stealing glances at her while she’s dressing, changes its hairstyle to match her browsing preferences, and adopts a creepy habit of smelling her clothes in private. Again, within the stated rules of this world, nothing points to T.I.M. having even the capacity for that type of desire. Its obsession with Abi happens because the movie needs something for you to be scared of.

It’s irritating to watch Abi’s continued refusal to believe Paul’s increasingly solid proof of T.I.M.’s true intentions. The broken trust implied in the backstory of their relationship can only go so far toward explaining why she’d be so slow to notice the obvious. The movie goes out of its way to set up the many ways T.I.M. can falsify images and sound, but somehow Abi forgets that information until her marriage has reached an irreversible state of crisis. T.I.M. is quite proficient at making Paul look like an incorrigible adulterer, but Abi’s obliviousness to the double agenda of its precisely timed malicious remarks stretches credulity.

There’s a hint of an interesting development regarding the enmity that grows between T.I.M. and Paul, in that Abi is trying to get pregnant, the one task at which T.I.M. can’t substitute Paul. But the script doesn’t flesh out T.I.M.’s personality with enough depth to explore that side of its jealousy. Also, Paul’s replaceability at home could have been better contrasted with Abi’s replaceability at work, given that we hear her boss explicitly describe her as a diversity hire, but the movie doesn’t do anything with that idea either.

T.I.M. is a mystery with no surprises, scary enough to justify giving it 1:41 minutes of your life, but not imaginative enough to be worth remembering afterwards.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

TV Review: Bet

A live-action version of the quirky anime

Gambling as a passion, an addiction, or as a means to an end is the theme for the new Netflix series Bet. Bet is a live-action version of the quirky anime Kakegurui, a story of an elite private school where intense gambling is encouraged and the results are dangerous and cruel. However, new arrival Yumeko is serenely and eerily comfortable with the wild atmosphere. She fearlessly engages with the most sadistic opponents while building a bewildered crew of friends who try to avoid becoming collateral damage. The original show is a psychological thriller—creepily intense and substantially deranged. The live-action adaptation has a similar vibe, especially initially, but eventually evolves into a traditional Mean Girls-style teen drama.

In Bet, Yumeko (Miku Martineau) is a new student at St. Dominic’s, an elite private school where wealthy families send their children to learn cutthroat leadership skills via nonstop gambling. Yumeko’s sweet and seemingly friendly nature stands out in sharp contrast to the other cynical students, who range from terrified or cautious to lethal and cruel. But beneath her charming exterior, Yumeko is also a fearless and consummate gambler. At St. Dominic’s the top winners financially earn a spot on the manipulative student council, while those with the highest losses and debts become degraded servants known as “house pets.” Shortly after arriving, Yumeko gains an ally in Ryan—Ryoko in the anime (Ayo Solanke), a house pet she is kind to and for whom she uses her gambling winnings to free from his bondage to the cynical and cruel Mary (Eve Edwards), who also becomes a reluctant ally and frenemy. However, in Bet, unlike the anime, Yumeko is more than a gambling addict: she is driven by revenge. Despite her talents, she is opposed by the colorful characters on the student council, including violent Dori (Aviva Mongillo), dramatic Suki (Ryan Sutherland), self-absorbed Chad (Dorian Giordano), mysterious Riri (Anwen O’Driscoll), and her sister, the dictatorial Kira (Clara Alexandrova), the president of the council. In her quest for revenge, Yumeko secretly enlists the help of a loner classmate, Michael (Hunter Cardinal), much to the dismay of the now lovesick Ryan. Michael becomes a confidant in Yumeko’s true strategy, even as his own motivations remain unclear.

Unfortunately, the story takes a turn, moving from a quirky, engaging character study to a straightforward assassination plot that feels strangely superficial and decidedly juvenile. As the series progresses, the plot requires a willing suspension of disbelief as the story drifts towards hijinks rather than more abstract psychological intrigue.

Recreating an anime for live action is always a challenge due to pressures of fan expectations, the difficulty of creating believable visuals in a real-life setting, and the challenges of executing an appropriate acting style. Bet does a nice job of capturing the essence of the original lead characters, including the confident and mysterious Yumeko, insecure but loyal Ryan (Ryoko in the anime), and cynical and pragmatic Mary. Miku Martineau’s Yumeko is particularly appealing with her thoughtful portrayal of a consummate manipulator. However, although the premise of Bet remains the same as Kakegurui, the plot has some significant changes. Michael is a new character who adds additional complications to the story. Yumeko is addicted to the rush and danger of gambling, but in Bet, she uses gambling as a specific tool for revenge for the murder of someone she loves. Having this new layer of motivation would normally be a great way to create more emotional investment and suspense, but the execution would have been better served by leaning into the subtlety and psychological thriller elements of the source material. Instead, the live-action version descends into direct and less suspenseful assassination attempts. The initial edginess of the show’s adult language and sexual inuendo is eventually undercut by the PG nature of the crimes that occur. Additionally, Kakegurui uses fantastical effects to explore the inner workings of the characters’ thoughts and their intensely passionate responses to risk. In Bet, this visual technique is mostly omitted, so the fantastical elements of the story are primarily displayed through the unusual character visuals.

Despite these changes, Bet is still a better adaptation of Kakegurui than prior versions. The acting and creative casting of Bet makes the series reasonably enjoyable. However, fans of Kakegurui will likely be disappointed by the shift from the edgy, disturbed, magical realism elements of the anime. Instead, we have an interesting premise that ultimately abandons psychological terror in favor of a more direct and traditional murder. By playing it safer with the writing, Bet ironically avoids the risk of telling an unusual story in an unusual way.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• Creepy academic setting
• Disappointing stylistic shift midseason
• Engaging characters

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

How come I never knew The Fall existed?

This very thing, right here, is what cinema was invented for

Somehow it never occurred to me, after watching the criminally underrated medical/surreal/thriller The Cell, that its director Tarsem Singh might have gone on to make more movies. Maybe it was because The Cell has ended up unjustly ignored in the public consciousness, overshadowed by the more explosive blockbusters of the early 2000s. But this year, out of nowhere, Mubi announced they'd rescued from oblivion Tarsem Singh's second movie, 2006's The Fall. With this decision, they not only do a service to viewers, but to the archival memory of cinema.

The Fall tells the best kind of story: one about stories. It openly admits its massive debt to the 1981 Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho, but the same core plot is dressed this time in majestic clothes: a colossal, unbroken dune that burns the screen in dark orange; an entire city painted in blue; a burial robe dripping in vivid red; a hidden pasture so alive with green that you forget the endless desert just outside. Tarsem applies here his exquisite sense for location scouting and invests with epic grandeur what on its surface should be a ridiculous tale to keep a child enthralled.

The frame story, set at some point in early 20th-century Los Angeles, centers on Alexandria, a little girl recovering from an arm fracture at a hospital, where she meets Roy, a movie stuntman recovering from both a paralyzing injury and a broken heart. In the middle of his suicidal depression, Roy decides to trick Alexandria into getting him enough morphine for an overdose. To gain her trust, he makes up a whimsical tale of adventure, danger, romance, betrayal, mystery, honor, heroics and tragedy. The actual plot is extremely basic, but Roy, experienced in the magic of moviemaking, knows the tricks to make the story breathe. Without meaning to, he becomes a reverse version of Scheherazade: he's the one who wants to die, but he sparks Alexandria's interest in the tale so much that she wants him alive to keep telling it.

The cinematic version of Roy's story is peppered with elements from both his and Alexandria's imagination. The interplay that develops between them as they contribute their respective plot ideas is the most fascinating part of the movie: faces and clothes from their real life are transmuted into protagonists and battle uniforms in the narration. The dreamlike landscapes that fill the screen feel all the more fantastical when you remember they're actual locations. Moreover, as Inception taught us, the narrator cannot keep his personal demons out of his story, so through Roy's invention we gradually learn small details about the circumstances that led him to that hospital bed.

His emotional arc is simple but effective. After losing his mobility and his girlfriend, Roy is convinced he no longer has anything to live for, but his manipulation of Alexandria pushes her toward a kind of danger he realizes he can't inflict on a child. She will probably never know how powerfully she cast her own spell on him to the point of saving his soul. With a child's capacity for genuine wonder, she makes Roy's tale hers and gives it a new ending.

The stories that Roy knows how to tell are adventure movies, so let's take a moment to reflect on what The Fall seems to be saying about the magic of moviemaking. As a stuntman, Roy is one of the most artificial parts of the craft; he makes us believe in real danger. We fear for the hero, but Roy is the one who takes the bullets, the punches, the kicks, the falls. His task is to offer his real body in sacrifice to create an illusion. The Fall seems to be saying that to tell a story capable of capturing your audience's heart requires you to risk something of yourself. You can use all the artifice you want, but what you say with it must be honest, must expose a vulnerable part of you. The one thing you must not do, the mistake Roy makes with Alexandria, is let another take the fall for you.

Watching The Fall is a delight on every level. Lee Pace's acting as Roy is a punch in the guts: he's charming and devious, as convincing in his lovability as in his self-loathing. Catinca Untaru as Alexandria is a literal bundle of joy, effortlessly enrapturing the viewer with her spontaneous bursts of feelings and her insatiable curiosity.

And then there's the pure visual pleasure. The Fall abounds in unforgettable images that make you feel lucky to live at a time when movies exist: a temple full of swirling dervishes; an aquatic ride on an elephant; a bottomless pit made of crisscrossing stairs; a communal dance that makes a map appear on the body of a half-dead man; a mystic, born of a burning tree, out of whose mouth birds fly to freedom; a coral reef in the shape of a butterfly; a blood-red pennant, as tall as fifteen men, flapping in the desert wind. The Fall is a feast for the eyes, a balm for weary spirits, and without one mote of exaggeration, a monumental entry in the history of movies.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Microreview: Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend

After surviving the worst of breakups, can you ever feel human again?

The usual list of vampire superpowers happens to match pretty well with the traits of abusive partners: they manipulate your mind, drain your lifeforce, change forms between a breathtaking charmer and a furious beast, leave you empty on the inside, and lack any reflection. They're practical devices for a writer who wants to explore the ways in which the dynamics of desire and surrender can end in disaster.

The Nebula short film Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend, written by actress and philosopher Abigail Thorn, centers on a catch-up meeting over dinner between old friends: Fay, who chose to walk away from the tumultuous elite lifestyle involved in dating the literal Dracula and being part of his multinational fashion business; and Belladonna, the new girlfriend who takes a perverse pleasure in rubbing her status in Fay's face.

Except Fay can't be shamed by Belladonna's boasting. What's really happening is that Belladonna is desperate to confirm that Fay wants what she has. But Fay is past that, no longer under Dracula's spell, and hoping to shake Belladonna out of the harmful delusion she's willingly jumped into.

The tagline for Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend is "Bit people bite people," a recognizable allusion to the common refrain in trauma therapy circles, that describes the pattern by which cycles of abuse can perpetuate themselves. Here the effects of the vampiric bite are a metaphor for the lingering hurt that a victim can carry inside and sometimes inflict on others. During the dinner, Belladonna narrates with glee her adventures drinking the blood of unsuspecting strangers. Fay responds by mentioning that she's now in a healthy relationship built on respect, which Belladonna finds horrifyingly boring.

The emotional tone of the conversation is helpfully highlighted by changes in the illumination of the scene. Since this is a conversation between vampires, it's not beyond belief that the turbulent passions deployed in their clash of viewpoints would color the air around them. However, even for a film as brief as this, multiple repetitions of the same trick of lights can get tiresome.

Where the true brilliancy of the film lies isn't in its direction, but in its razor-sharp script. Thorn uses the trappings of vampire romance to comment on the many predations we bring upon each other: if we're sufficiently poisoned by inhumanity, we can drain our fellow humans of their time, or their money, or their devotion, or their labor, or their dignity. It took a massive effort for Fay to start healing from what Dracula did to her, and it's going to be at least as difficult to make Belladonna start to see the truth of her situation.

In fact, this dinner occurs at a delicate moment in Fay's new relationship, when she's just on the verge of reproducing Dracula's behavior. While Belladonna needs what Fay has to say about knowing when to escape from a toxic partner, Fay also needs to hear herself say it before she becomes what she struggled so hard to leave behind.

There's a conversation near the end, which on a superficial level may seem unrelated to the story, but which actually summarizes its theme. Fay explains her newly acquired smoking habit by enumerating the important moments in her day that are connected to each cigarette. When put like that, it has nothing to do with Dracula. But what the script is doing here is to repackage the strangeness of a supernatural premise and translate it into terms that human viewers can relate to. Cigarettes will eventually kill you, but they feel so good right now. Just like a lover that you know isn't good for you, that you know will break you into pieces, but for whose momentary delights you keep shutting down the part of your mind that screams warnings at you.

Dracula himself doesn't even make an appearance, but his dark shadow dominates the entire plot. It's amazing how a film made of just half an hour of dialogue can contain so much meaning, so much raw intensity. This short is a slap in the face by a well-meaning friend. It's a much-needed dose of tough love. It's a blunt reminder that we can turn into our own worst enemies when we get addicted to lying to ourselves.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: Tuesday

Death comes for us all ... in bird form?

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, says the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer. As my seventh-grade history teacher (a man who, in retrospect, influenced me perhaps the most of any teacher I had) memorably said, you have a one hundred percent chance of dying. We are so afraid of death that we want to anthropomorphize it, in any number of ways so we can feel like we are hating an entity and not a process, not an inevitability. Such is the core anxiety of the film Tuesday, released in 2024 in American cinemas, co-produced by A24, the British Film Institute, and the BBC, and directed and written by Daina O. Pusić.

Tuesday is set in contemporary London, starring an exhausted mother named Zora (Jula Louis-Dreyfus) caring for her teenage daughter Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), the latter of whom is disabled, requires a wheelchair and spends much of her day in bed, dying of an unspecified terminal illness. There has been a widening gulf between the two, as Zora spends more and more time outside of the house working (or so she says), leaving Tuesday to her own devices and to the care of Nurse Billie (Leah Harvey). Tuesday, understandably, has begun to grow resentful, wishing to spend more time with her mother. This is the situation that has come to pass when Tuesday meets a talking macaw (voiced by Arinzé Kene), capable of growing and shrinking at will, that is essentially an avian grim reaper. Perhaps a bigger cause of concern is that he brings bad news: Tuesday’s time has come.

What ensues is a deeply weird but nevertheless enthralling examination of how people cope with death (or, more often than not, try to defy it, all for naught), and also that of family. When I tell you that the grim reaper is literally a bird, I assure you that is not even the most bizarre thing in this film. I am uncertain, while I write this, how much of this weirdness I should reveal, but take my word that it is goddamn bizarre, and I say that in the most complimentary way possible. Wikipedia calls this film a ‘fantasy drama,’ but I think there’s a good argument for horror; many scenes are deeply unsettling, and may be too intense for those who are averse to some things. There is some gore, albeit relatively tame, and something that could be called body horror if you tilt your head to the side, and overall that horror is more existential, more about reminding you that your day, too, will come.

On one level, this is a story about family, and how families can become deeply toxic. Tuesday is a teenage girl who, through no fault of her own, cannot be independent, at least in her current state. Her mother brings in the house’s income, prepares her food, and even helps her bathe. As has happened with many caretakers of children who are disabled (including those such as autism, like myself), Zora has something of a martyr complex, an overweening sense that she possesses her daughter, and has elevated that possession into a core of her identity. This becomes problematic whenever she has to confront the fact that her daughter is a human being with her own wants and needs and view of the world. This is what renders the arrival of Death, in bird form, so stark: Tuesday has accepted her fate, more or less, the sort of acceptance that comes with living with a disability day in and day out. It is Zora, not Tuesday, who has to rage against Death incarnate, with very strange results.

I appreciated how Tuesday, the film’s disabled character, was never reduced to a stereotype. She is not turned into inspiration porn; indeed, she is at her end, as so often comes early with disabilities, and she has the sort of wry exhaustion that comes with living with disability that doesn’t get portrayed in the media much. Yes, we know that our lives are often miserable, but we want to live through them on our terms, not the able-bodied, neurotypical world’s standards. She has a mischievous streak, and a clear resentment towards her mother that I found her to be totally justified in having. She is a victim of circumstance and of parental abuse, but she has found a way to be fully human in spite of all it.

There’s something about making Death a macaw that is so effective and so eerie, in a way I can’t quite place. It is also the source of so much of the film’s awkward, vaguely surreal humor, such as when we discover Death’s musical tastes. There are a number of amusing moments (and some more unsettling moments) involving how Death can change its size, a metaphor perhaps for the myriad ways death can come for us. It can be gradual, or it can be sudden, or it can be bit by bit and then all at once, but it comes all the same.

There’s a truly sterling bit in the middle of the film that I don’t want to spoil, but it comes after Zora has tried to do away with Death. It is a very high-concept sequence that brings out the theme of death and its importance in humanity’s entire set of worldviews. It is a sequence about how everything ends, and how we need to accept that, as the alternative leads to all sorts of pain. It is hands down the most unsettling part of the film, with a particular unmoored sensation to it that reminded me of the best SCP articles, particularly the reality benders. My desire to let the viewer find out for themselves at complete odds with me as a critic here. Perhaps that’s a good sign.

Tuesday is a heavy film, a peculiar film, an odd film, an unsettling film. It’s fittingly so, as death is all those things. It is a film that I found to be absolutely worth the money, but it is one that may be overwhelming for some people. But perhaps that is also fitting, as death is, in some ways, an overwhelming of the bodily systems that keep us alive, by time or by chemicals or physical force or by whatever else befalls us.That’s what made Tuesday such a captivating film. If you have the stomach for it, I highly recommend it.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.