Film Review: The Conjuring: Last Rites

It isn't exactly scary, but it will appease fans looking for an emotional finale for their horror mom and dad

The first Conjuring movie (2012) is an absolute master class in dread, horror, and freaky vibes. It's not only my go-to spooky movie, it's also one of my favorite films just in general. The other movies in the Conjuring universe—the sequels and movies like The Nun and Annabelle—are kitschy at best, and they're ones I'll rewatch only occasionally. But the o.g. Conjuring is near perfect.

Flashforward to my anticipation of The Conjuring: Last Rites. It's meant to be the conclusion to this fictional film series based loosely on the investigations and experiences of famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. I always take the "based on" with a grain of salt, as ghosts do not exist. The cinematic portrayal of them, however, is extremely likable. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are absolutely delightful as tortured ghost hunters, and their chemistry is palpable. It's rare that you see on-screen characters that seem to truly love each other, and Ed and Lorraine do just that.

What sets Last Rites apart from the other films in the franchise is that this movie is about them and their family, not the tortured families who happen to inhabit deeply possessed buildings and their paranormal struggles. Here, we're in the 1980s, and the Warrens' daughter, Judy, is starting to become embroiled in their investigations. Like her mother, she is also an empath and possesses psychic abilities. As the family becomes concerned when she gets engaged to her boyfriend, Tony, the family is pulled into another paranormal case—this time one that the Warrens first encountered decades ago.

The Smurl family lives in a coal-mining-soaked town in Pennsylvania, and their demon origin story begins with a haunted mirror, one that the Warrens have experienced before. It seems like the setup of every other Conjuring story, yet something is missing. The haunting that's taking place at the Smurl house is creepy, to be sure, but it never really feels threatening. The stakes never feel high. I think this could be because the house is small, and its neighbors are jam-packed around it—there's only about six feet between them. I have strong opinions on what houses work well within the haunted house trope, and these babies need room to breathe. They need at least a few acres or so, and they need isolation. It's why you'll never see a haunted studio apartment or a haunted beach condo. You need to be able to climb a staircase and feel absolutely alone, and hear echoes and shouts from across the building that you can't readily identify.

When it comes to the scares in The Conjuring: Last Rites, there are a couple of good ones, but nothing that stands out like the spooks in the original. You learn the routine pretty quickly: A character is alone, the music stops, and then you get a jump scare of some unidentified demon.

We never learn the backstory of the demons in the Smurl house, unlike the tortured witch Bathsheba in the original. I think this greatly detracts from the emotional heft of the haunting. Turns out the demons lived on the "land" that the house occupies, so the lore is downgraded, and you never feel any stakes. Also, unrelated: One day I will write a paper on haunted houses as a metaphor for working-class people and the failures of capitalism, but today is not that day. It will revolve around how even though a family feels physically threatened, being unable to afford a non-haunted house or even to escape the mortgage of a haunted house is truly the most horrific part of this beloved genre.

You do get Easter eggs throughout the film, however, so hardcore fans of the Conjuring universe will appreciate that. At one point, you see the evil doll Annabelle blown up to 15 feet tall in a scene that made me laugh more than anything else. Speaking of laughter, I saw this movie in 4DX, which is the interactive, shaking-seats-and-gusts-of-wind experience. It is not, in fact, interactive, and it mainly just made me laugh. It takes you out of the experience, especially when the man next to you is shaking and spilling popcorn in his seat.

I wanted very badly to love this movie, as I've mentioned before, because I've been chasing the high of seeing the first Conjuring since 2012. Perhaps it was lightning in a bottle, or maybe I've become so much of a horror movie cynic that I'm incapable of being truly scared. There are moments of true high camp in this, and I found myself laughing more than shuddering despite the multiple different pools of blood, demonic jump scares, and priests hanging themselves.

This movie does work as a denouement to the fictional Warren storyline, though. The characters of Ed and Lorraine, and now Judy, are good people, and you're always rooting for them to save another family, even when they're so ready to be retired. When the Warrens are faced with possession and death, the stakes suddenly become much higher. I did find multiple parts heartwarming, especially towards the end, when they look toward the future and a life without ghost-hunting. If you're not into sentimentality for these characters, you'll be extremely bored at multiple points.

Judy and her boyfriend are (seemingly) set up as perhaps the next generation of demon hunters, but I suppose time will tell. In the meantime, I will be watching the original Conjuring every spooky season like clockwork, when the leaves start to fall and the temps get a little chilly.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Film Review: Elio

Disney loves to write orphans, but doesn't seem to understand them

Recently orphaned Elio Solís has been adopted by his aunt Olga, who has a busy military job and had to give up a chance for career advancement in order to take care of him. She's struggling to adjust, but hasn't said one word that would imply she resents him. Still, he feels unwanted and unwelcome. This misunderstanding on his part sparks an entire allegorical journey in which he meets a distorted mirror version of himself (no, I don't mean the clone) and learns that he isn't as alone as he thought. The message is sweet and valuable, but the way it's expressed through the narrative is sometimes muddled, which is unfortunate in a movie that focuses so much on efforts to communicate.

What sets things in motion is Elio's visit to a space museum where he learns about the search for alien life. After reasoning that there's no one on Earth who loves him, he becomes obsessed with contacting aliens, hoping to be taken by them. Any viewer who grew up with terrible parents will recognize this fantasy of adoption, but it's hard to understand in Elio's case, because his aunt is in no way whatsoever mistreating him. It's Elio who convinced himself that his presence is bad for her life. He takes too long to figure out that her choice to pause her career plans is not something he inflicted on her but something she willingly did for his benefit.

All right, she does make one mistake: she signs him up for a summer camp that teaches military discipline, which ranks very, very low on the list of things you should do to a kid who already feels lonely and expects to be abandoned. He soon gets dragged into a fistfight with other kids, which the movie treats as a pivotal moment in the course of his life.

From this point on, the emotional trajectory of Elio is best understood by placing in parallel the plotlines of the human kid Elio and the alien kid Glordon. They don't even meet until well into the runtime, but Glordon's story is basically the heightened, hyper-dramatized version of Elio's. From Elio's perspective, Olga has dumped him in that military summer camp because she's had enough of him, and also because military life is all she knows. In Glordon's case, his father, Grigon, is an interstellar tyrant who expects him to one day wear the battle armor that is traditional in their species. The armor is full of a ridiculous variety of deadly devices, and it hides, constricts and pierces the creature's soft skin. It's meant to be worn permanently. What this prospect means, when translated back into Elio's life, is that he has before him the option to deal with his complicated feelings by squeezing them under a mask of toughness. But the kind of person who would make that choice, as the movie illustrates rather literally, is not Elio's/Glordon's authentic self. It would be a disturbingly people-pleasing version of him. Olga wants a polite, obedient child, as the warlord Grigon wants a ruthless conqueror, but that's not who Elio/Glordon is.

Where this beautiful allegory falls apart is in the manner of its resolution. Elio's injury from the fistfight at the summer camp shows Olga that she was wrong in trying to steer him into her steps; Glordon's almost-death shows Grigon that galactic conquest isn't worth losing his child. The problem here is that Elio is the one who needs to change his incorrect beliefs (the movie even literalizes this point by giving him an eyepatch during the entire second act to represent his limited perspective), but the allegorized version of his struggle has the parental figure be the one who learns a life lesson (notice how it's the battle armor which has eyes, in the manner of a reverse blindfold, while the actual alien body has none). The emotional resonance is pointed in the wrong direction. Grigon's neglectful, harsh style of parenting is not the proper translation of how Olga behaves toward Elio. A charitable reading would say that Grigon stands for Elio's distorted idea of Olga, but even in that case it would still be Elio who needs to learn and grow. This thematic misfire brings to mind the better execution of the same dynamic in The Lego Movie, where the villain and the father follow neatly parallel arcs.

Despite this confusion in the handling of its ideas, Elio is not without highlights. A thrilling scene in which Olga and Elio have to pilot a spaceship through floating debris reaches a triumphant peak when they get unexpected help from random strangers, which is a better thematic conclusion to Elio's yearning for a community where he fits. Maybe he won't join the diplomatic elite of the universe, but there's plenty of excitement to be found on Earth.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Film Review: The Phoenician Scheme

This is a solid, well composed entry in the Wes Anderson canon, though it lacks the emotional depth of some of his older films

Critiquing Wes Anderson films, in all their symmetric and stylized glory, has become similar to critiquing genre films—you have to understand and at least appreciate them to make a fair assessment. If you hate gore, spooky nonsense, and final girl tropes, you probably won't like a new horror movie. Similarly, if you despise Anderson's twee and color-saturated aesthetic sensibility, you'll probably never jive with an Anderson joint. And that's okay! We just have to know what we're getting ourselves into.

All this to say, of course, that I'm an O.G. Wes Anderson fan. I've been chasing the high of seeing The Royal Tenenbaums for the first time ever since I was 19 years old. Over the years, I have looked forward to whatever new and weird thing he's doing, resting assured that he's maintaining his style and peculiar sensibility.

The story

2025's The Phoenician Scheme is the latest entry in his oeuvre, and it centers on a ruthless business magnate named Zsa-Zsa Korda (played by Benicio del Toro). After a failed assassination attempt, he reevaluates his life, reaching out to his estranged daughter, Liesl, a novitiate nun played by Mia Threapleton (a nepo baby, I recently found—Kate Winslet's daughter!). As they reconcile, they hit the road to acquire some investors, accompanied by a Swedish entomologist named Bjørn (played by Michael Cera, but more on this development later). Traveling around the world, we encounter classic Andersonesque bit characters, from the elderly-yet-spry Sacramento Consortium to the classic Frenchness of Marseille Bob.

Like in Anderson's other films, there's a very strong Dad element to the plot. In this case, Liesl is coming to terms with her less-than-moral, long-missing father, who for some reason wants her back in his life. It's very clear throughout the movie that Korda is trying to make amends, though it comes across as a bit heavy-handed. Case in point: showing that he's growing as a character by saying lines like, "Fine, I won't use slave labor."

As you'd expect, there is the usual treasure trove of running gags, from Liesl's bejeweled corncob pipe to the dainty basket of artisanal hand grenades that Korda offers to everyone like fine cigars. These small bits absolutely scream Wes Anderson, and their inclusion helps make the world more whole. (The artisanal hand grenade bits reminded me of my love for Portlandia and the sketch with Jeff Goldblum selling handmade decorative knots.)

The characters

Del Toro's Korda just doesn't do it for me. It may be because I don't think he has a sense of humor. The entire time I just wished that Gene Hackman or Owen Wilson was steering the ship as Korda. Also, it could be something to do with portraying a selfish, Art-of-the-Deal-type protagonist in the current climate that makes it hard to escape into a fun movie.

The best characters that appear on screen are Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston as two business brothers from California. Korda challenges them to a game of basketball/HORSE with the winners fronting money for the scheme, and the resulting 5-minute scene is hilarious, charming, and almost surreal. The two brothers, sporting '50s-era Stanford and Pepperdine workout shirts, go to town on Korda and his associate, talking smack and taking names.

Because of Korda's near-death experience, he dreams often of heaven, God, and judgment, and in these brief black-and-white sequences, you can occasionally spot a silent Willem Dafoe, an enjoyable task kind of like finding Waldo in an artsy movie. In my screening, people were literally laughing and pointing every time he appeared.

Michael Cera's big Anderson debut

Just as Voltaire once said, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him," so too, "If Michael Cera didn't exist, Wes Anderson would have invented him." I can't believe it's taken nearly 30 years to get him in an Anderson movie, but to be fair, in the early 2000s he was only a teenager.

In The Phoenician Scheme, he does a lot of heavy lifting, playing first a heavily accented, bespectacled Swedish tutor, then, it's revealed, an American spy, complete with a manly swagger and cigarette. He's an absolute delight, even when he's just standing awkwardly around in the background of different scenes—an anthropomorphic set piece expertly curated like so many other parts of the movie.

The music issue

Alexandre Desplat is (as usual) in charge of the music in The Phoenician Scheme, but his score and picks skew more classical than modern pop. I know this was probably done intentionally, but when I think back to my favorite moments from Anderson films, they're tied irrevocably to absolutely cinematic and top-tier needle drops, from Nico's "These Days" in The Royal Tenenbaums to the plaintive chords from Seu Jorge's Bowie tributes in The Life Aquatic. Even Asteroid City has some classic Western bops to tie us into the setting's place and time. The Phoenician Scheme lacks all that—and consequently a firm grasp on the exact time period, as well, again most likely on purpose—resulting in much less emotional heft for me.

Overall

It was perfectly fine, though I didn't laugh nearly as much as I was expecting to. There are so many characters and plot throughlines that nothing gets very much explanation—everything is a mile wide and an inch deep. To be fair, though, this movie does a lot.

The end of the movie sees Korda's Phoenician Scheme to completion, with him sacrificing his wealth to make it work. As as result, he's lost all his money, and he, Liesl, and his sons move to Paris to open a bistro. Honestly, I was way more into this tiny aspect of the story, even though it was only on screen for a few seconds. I'd love to see the misadventures of a titan-of-industry-turned-chef and his ex-nun daughter running a successful restaurant in France, like a Wes Anderson version of The Bear. Who knows? Maybe that's next.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Goodbye, Fifteenth Doctor. Hope to see you soon, Doctor Who

A clumsy finale should not overshadow a cleverly written season and a fantastic protagonist

Recency bias being what it is, viewers of this season of Doctor Who (season 2 or 15 or 41, depending on how much of a completist you want to be) will probably keep a stronger impression of the subpar conception and execution of its finale than of the much better ideas explored through the preceding episodes. This is unfortunate at a time when the show's future is still an open question. There's the upcoming miniseries The War Between the Land and the Sea, but how BBC and Disney executives will end up weighing the worth of the franchise is anyone's guess.

The first half of the finale, "Wish World," is actually a strong start, which if anything worsens the disappointment to follow. In this episode, the Rani locates the most powerful of the gods, the one who grants wishes, and pairs him with a disgruntled conspiracy theorist who embodies all the annoying traits of the manosphere. Together they transform Earth into a cisheteronormative dystopia so transparently fragile that mere disbelief destabilizes the foundations of its reality.

This is an interesting way of exploring the incongruity of contemporary fascism: it is so contrary to human nature that it needs a continuous, exhausting pretense to stay barely functional. Of course, the Doctor (particularly this Doctor) loses no time in rebelling against such a bland and boring life, and that's precisely what the Rani is counting on: the Doctor's disbelief has the power to completely break down reality, and beneath the cracks is the hidden dimension from where she hopes to rescue Omega, the banished founder of Time Lord society. This reveal leads to "The Reality War" and the quick unraveling of what up to that point was a promising plot.

The Rani and Omega are so underutilized in this two-parter that they could easily have been replaced by new characters without changing anything about the plot. It's not like these two had a lot of runtime in classic Doctor Who, but their weight in terms of lore deserved a more expanded treatment in their reintroduction. Instead, we get a rehash of "The End of Time" from 2010, when the Master almost helped the Time Lords return to our universe, only for the Doctor to slam the door in their faces. Replace "Master" with "Rani" and "Time Lords" with "Omega" and you get the idea. Once that problem is dispatched, there's still a lot of episode left, and it's dedicated to what actually mattered all along: the fate of Poppy, the little daughter of this season's companion Belinda.

We first met Poppy in "Wish World" as a putative child of the Doctor and Belinda, and the dilemma at the end of "The Reality War" is that restoring the baseline reality might delete Poppy from existence. After a barrage of technobabble, the Doctor saves both reality and Poppy, at the cost of one of his lives, and then learns that Poppy isn't actually related to him. This is a notable difference between the style of current showrunner Russell T Davies and that of his predecessor Steven Moffat: whereas Moffat relied too often on giving supporting characters a cosmic destiny, Davies is more comfortable with letting them be ordinary people. Even when companion Rose Tyler became the Bad Wolf, or companion Donna Noble became the DoctorDonna, they immediately had to be depowered for their own protection.

Also, the resolution of Poppy's story follows a thematic line that has been present since Davies's return to Doctor Who: stories about lost children. Episodes like "The Church on Ruby Road" and "Space Babies" were the most obvious examples, but if you look closely, all through these two seasons with the Fifteenth Doctor there have been various iterations of a child separated from their parents or vice versa. Davies has taken the thread left by the Chibnall era, which redefined the character of the Doctor as a lost child, and extended it to a point where it could connect with one of Davies's own signature moves: giving the Doctor a cosmically small but personally meaningful reason to sacrifice his life. In 2005's "The Parting of the Ways," after the Daleks have already been defeated, his Ninth Doctor still chooses to die to save Rose. In 2010's "The End of Time," after the Time Lords have already been defeated, his Tenth Doctor still chooses to die to save Wilfred. Likewise, in "The Reality War," after Omega has already been defeated, his Fifteenth Doctor still chooses to die to save Poppy.

Despite this neat bow with which Davies ties up the seam between Chibnall's work and his own, the execution of the season finale is too chaotic to be satisfying. The Time Hotel from "Joy to the World" makes an entrance as a deus ex machina, only to quickly be swept to the side for the rest of the episode with no more function than dropping an obvious tease for future plots; Rose Noble literally appears out of thin air as a didactic device and does nothing else; Susan Foreman's random appearance in "Wish World" is left hanging in the air; and Belinda is put in a box for most of the final battle. In fact, the way Belinda's arc concludes comes off as too underwhelming for the symbolic importance it should have. During the entire season, she provided an interesting counterpoint to the usual Doctor/companion dynamic, in that she very emphatically did not want to explore the universe. Her vehement urge to return home raised the question: what could be so important in your normal life that you'd throw away a trip through time and space? The finale answers: she has a child, and that's more important to her than billions of galaxies. It's for that child's sake that she can't wait to leave the TARDIS. It's for that child's sake that the Doctor gives his life. It's a potent statement to close the season with. And yet, the final scene in Belinda's home, once the proper reality has been restored, presents us with a muted version of Belinda, without the energy and the spark that distinguished her character. She is more interesting to watch in all the episodes preceding the finale, which deserve a rewatching as great pieces of science fiction in their own right.

Finally, the return of Billie Piper in the last shot of the finale feels like a desperate choice, on the same level as David Tennant's return two years ago. Don't get me wrong; she's a great actress. But bringing her back at this precise moment gives off the vibe of a calculated tactic to wish the show into continued existence. It's hard to tell whether this idea came from Davies or from Disney; Davies has a known tendency to repeat himself, and Disney has a known tendency to be self-sabotagingly risk-averse. The worst thing that can happen to a show about an alien who can cheat death via endless reinvention is to get stuck replaying its greatest hits.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: Lilo & Stitch

If Disney live-action remakes were generally this good, they would still be making them

After the live-action Snow White bombed, Disney announced that it would be halting development on all future live-action remakes of its animated films. These live-action films were transparently cash grabs. Under capitalism, all commercially published art is a cash grab to somebody (not necessarily the artist); we know this, and for that reason, one of the greatest sins a film can make nowadays, in the age of digital reproduction à la Walter Benjamin, is to be an obvious cash grab. In that regard, the live-action remake of Lilo & Stitch is something of a zombie, the last shambling remnant of something that was vaguely abhorrent to begin with, and is clearly about to die. Even so, we are tempted to gawk at its remains, and even so, we go to see Lilo & Stitch in theaters.

When watching the opening scene on the Galactic Federation’s capital ship, the whole thing feels like it was made on a sugar high. It feels cartoonish, more so than the rest of the movie, as it is almost totally CGI, and more gallingly, the editing is extremely rushed. As soon as a line of dialogue ends, with a quip more often than not, the film cuts to the next shot. This is a persistent problem throughout the film, but it is most pronounced in the opening sequence. The camera, and by extension, the viewer, is given very little opportunity to breathe. Later in the movie, some shots could have been allowed to bask in the Hawaiian scenery, or have a moment of intimacy with any number of its characters. The film runs about 01:45, but after seeing this cut, I feel like another 15 to 20 minutes would have been justified so as to not feel like the film is running a sprint.

The plot, in broad strokes, is similar enough to the original for most of its runtime; it is the characters where there have been more substantive tweaks. I really liked Maia Kealoha as Lilo. She has superb comedic timing, without which several jokes simply would have crashed and burned in a manner not unlike the pod Stitch arrived in. She is also capable of great pathos, giving gravitas to the more sensitive moments, while still being a hellion as all children her age are (indeed, the way she gets back at Mertle in this film’s version of the beginning at the hula performance is, if anything, far more vicious than the original). She is a very good foil for this three-dimensional version of Stitch (a returning Chris Sanders, who provided his voice in the original film), who if anything is even more of a walking agent of chaos than before. It reminded me of James Mowry, protagonist of Eric Frank Russell’s 1958 novel Wasp, who is dropped on an alien planet with the express order of being a terrorist. Stitch, designed as a weapon, is something of an unwilling Mowry, but his orders, encoded in his DNA, manifest in his behavior anyway. He is also, fortunately, far more entertaining and far less goddamn irritating than the version of him seen riding a roller coaster in the previews at Regal cinemas.

This film changes the bumbling alien sidekicks Jumba and Pleakley from being obvious extraterrestrials in human clothing hunting for Stitch into technologically aided shapeshifters who don’t exactly understand how human beings behave. This change, I think, was ultimately for the best. There are bits in this movie where antics that would be funny in animation just look cartoonish (and not in a good way) in live action, but making these two characters apparent humans allows a new comedy of manners to enter the picture. I’m not entirely sure what to make of the fact that Pleakley, a male alien, is no longer in drag for his disguise in this film; I’m not sure how it could have been done tastefully to begin with.

Sydney Elizebeth Agudong portrays this film's version of Nani, who of the main characters is perhaps the most faithful to the original. She has the right balance of sharp adolescent wit, caustic fury at injustice, and deep, deep anxiety over her own fate that the role needed. But if her character is much the same, her arc is tinkered with, first subtly, then massively. One very good example of this is when the social worker says that she needs a new job or she will lose custody of her sister; in this incarnation, she finds a job doing something she loves, which is a key bit of support for her broader arc. It also recontextualizes one of the songs from the original movie, and in the best way possible.

Some characters are either added or changed in a substantial manner that moves them out of the way. Gantu is, regrettably, gone. There is a new social worker (Tia Carrere), who gets some good lines and makes the authority of the state seem not quite so horribly bleak. Fortunately, a version of Cobra Bubbles is here (Courtney Vance doing a pretty good Leslie Nielsen impression). One of the great writing missteps was giving this film’s version of David (Kaipo Dudoit) not much to do beyond saying funny things at the designated times; the banter and flirting between him and Nani in the original is much reduced here. He is made up for, fortunately, by a new character: David’s grandmother Tūtū (Amy Hill), who is established as an old family friend and neighbor of Nani and Lilo.

Now, I am going to spoil the ending, because there has been a lot of discourse about it, and it is worth discussing in some depth. In the original movie, Nani succeeds in keeping custody of Lilo, and overall Nani’s arc is primarily about being a caregiver and secondly about David. Here, she is given more depth as to her aspirations for her future, such as initially turning down a full ride to a prominent university on the American mainland so she can take care of Lilo. This is what sets up the change that has ultimately been the most controversial, for at the end, Nani ends up forfeiting custody of Lilo to Tūtū, leaving Tūtū, Lilo, and David to share a house while Nani goes to the mainland for college to study marine biology.

This has understandably made many fans of the original upset. Much of the original’s thematic skeleton is the Hawaiian idea of 'ohana, where families stick together and nobody is left behind. The new sequence of events does, on its surface, look like an abandonment, but I think that is a simplistic reading. Much of the social media discourse around the ending frames it as the state government ‘taking’ Lilo away from Nani, but the film portrays it as a far more mutual process that is built up to, through a new thematic emphasis as well as through Nani’s new narrative arc.

Much of the new film’s thematic work is about the crushing weight of poverty. After their parents died, Nani and Lilo live in a dilapidated shack where the former has to work several dead-end, degrading jobs not just to survive, but to raise a child. You see near the beginning that their house does not have a lot of food, for one, and few luxuries, so nothing like tea (as a joke in that sequence calls attention to). To be poor in America is to have your life interfered with in a million small ways by society and the state; the social worker is consistently an irritant, but she rarely brings with her anything that could actually alleviate this family’s poverty. You can see the pain in Nani’s eyes as she throws her full-ride scholarship letter in the garbage, knowing that a potential way out of poverty will have to slip from her grasp because of the immediate demands of childcare.

This is where I will risk sounding callous: the ending of the original movie was essentially a sentence of lifelong poverty for both Lilo and Nani, if we are being realistic. As native Hawaiians, they are more likely to be impoverished by other inhabitants of that archipelago. The demands of childcare would mean Nani would not have many opportunities to upskill for several years at least, and any path to do so may risk crushing debt. Furthermore, it did what a lot of Disney animated films have unintentionally done by encouraging a sort of martyr complex among young girls, telling them that their only value is in the care they give to others. Care is good and valuable, yes, but girls and women can, and should be encouraged to, have their own passions and their own ambitions for their lives beyond the domestic.

Much of Nani’s new arc is about just how taxing her life is, having to deal with the travails of poverty, of raising a child, and of dealing with the new arrival in her life, namely a furry blue alien terror weapon (as well as those who would like to take him away, and will hurt her and those people she loves to do so). Her entire bearing through this film is one of exasperation and of downright exhaustion. She, rationally, wants a better life than this, and she is almost denied, quite cruelly, a way to a better life. This is why I object to the characterization of the state ‘taking’ Lilo, for it is more accurately described as Nani realizing, correctly, that as a nineteen-year-old orphan, she is in far over her head in her current situation, and that she can do better for Lilo in the long run.

The reason why this new ending works is partially due to Nani’s new arc, but also due to the new character of Tūtū. The latter is a grandmother figure to both Nani and Lilo, as well as being a literal grandmother to David. She is already a member of the broader chosen family by the beginning of the movie, and so there is now another person who could naturally (by narrative logic) take stewardship of Lilo. She is what a lot of online conversation in this film ignores, for she is really the character who makes the whole thing plausible. She is trusted and loved by Nani and Lilo and is blood family with their friend David. As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child, and Lilo accepting Tūtū’s help ultimately comes off to me as a very mature decision, as much as it hurts in the moment. As a message to a young audience, it shows that it is okay, good even, to ask for help, and to accept help, and to know when you are being overwhelmed, for that is kinder to both yourself and the people around you.

In the long run, I can’t help but think that the ending is the kinder one for Lilo. Sure, they may be physically separated, but with modern telecommunications they can talk regularly. Like many Hawaiians, Nani is going to the mainland to better her future, and with her new education she may well get a job where she can not only afford to live comfortably, but also care for Lilo far more effectively. If Lilo is six in this film, Nani will graduate when she is ten or eleven, which means that it is very possible that Nani will be able to provide her younger sister with an adolescence far more comfortable than her childhood. This is not nothing, given the brutality of poverty, as well as Hawaii’s current housing crisis. It is, I dare say, a great kindness.

I expected to write a brutally negative review of this movie. Walking out of the theater, I was surprised I didn’t hate it. The film ultimately ends up justifying its existence artistically (financially, I’m certain Disney is very happy right now, as this has already outgrossed Thunderbolts*) in a way many remakes simply don’t. Thematically, I would argue it is more adult. Visually, it takes advantage of both live-action and CGI to make Hawaii absolutely beautiful, and its performances provide an energy of their own. If all remakes Disney made were as good as this, they would still be making more of them, which is both great praise for this film, and great condemnation of Disney for getting into this mess in the first place.

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

Film Review: The King Tide

What if we were really nice to the kid in Omelas?

Life has proceeded uneventfully on a secluded island of fishermen, somewhere in Canada, for many generations. But one day, during a storm, a boat crashes ashore, carrying only a baby. The villagers are amazed to discover that this baby has magical healing powers, and decide to keep her a secret from the rest of the world. In just a few years, she becomes the center of their faith and the guarantor of their prosperity. As long as she's around, no one gets sick, the boats catch abundant fish, and all goes well. She's a happy child with loving parents and an entire community devoted to her. Sounds like utopia.

Except that the meaning of an "uneventful" life has been warped. In this version of utopia, to keep the miracle to themselves, the islanders have cut off all contact with the mainland. The village doctor is now a jobless drunkard, the school doesn't teach about the exterior world anymore, the men hold bloody brawls for fun because they know any broken nose will be fixed, and the children routinely play with poisonous plants. No risk matters anymore. There are no consequences. But this time, the price of utopia isn't a tortured child: everyone is unfailingly kind to the miraculous girl. They ritually thank her for her gifts. She doesn't have to suffer for their happiness. She just has no clue there's anything more to life.

Among many possible readings, the film The King Tide seems to suggest that one of the dangers of religion is learned helplessness. Why make any effort, when you're guaranteed infinite blessings? Perhaps God is wise to keep his distance and stay invisible to us. We might not want to let him go.

Soon enough, the islanders get a glimpse of what they could lose. One day, while the girl is busy elsewhere, a kid dies. She arrives too late to heal him, and it turns out her gifts don't include raising the dead. The shock is so heavy on her that the magic seems to go away. People's wounds stay open. Hangovers won't go away. The sea carries no more fish. The village doctor may even have to reopen his old clinic. But don't worry: they still love the girl. They love her so much. They keep standing in queue every day to see her for a few minutes. They haven't lost hope. They won't countenance the thought of going back to the way things used to be, when health and prosperity took effort.

It's often said that people reveal their true face when they're given power. At first, you don't feel like the people of this village have changed. They don't think so, either: as far as anyone can tell, they're all smiles and polite words. But just because they don't mistreat the child, as in Omelas, doesn't mean she's any less exploited. That's the most chilling part about this film: until almost the very end, you won't find a sinister attitude in any of them. It's with the most level-headed, measured tone that they discuss the extremes they're capable of going when they discover that the girl can still work wonders when she's sleeping.

The King Tide examines how alarmingly easy it is for people to lie to themselves with open eyes in the name of sincerely good intentions. This time, the price of utopia isn't paid by one child. It's paid by everyone else, once they get used to actions not having consequences. They have so lost themselves that they react to the possibility of having their perfectly normal lives back as if it were the end of the world, and that panic makes them willing to turn their placid, guilt-free luckily-not-Omelas into a totally-definitely-Omelas if that's what it takes.

But there's another angle to this situation: the reason why the sea has no fish left is that industrial fishing leaves nothing for the villagers. They aren't to blame for their suffering. But since the girl's arrival, they've been buffered from it. Of the available strategies to deal with the ills of modern life, they've chosen denial. You don't need to help fix a broken world if you have your own personal Jesus who can multiply fish on demand. Over the years, the island has developed a strong local identity, but there's a difference between proud self-reliance and uncaring isolation.

That's the thorniest question throughout the film: every increasingly awful step these people take to preserve their little magical corner of the world is ostensibly done to protect the girl from what the modern world would do to her. And yes, it sounds reasonable to want to prevent her from becoming a lab rat. On the island, she plays with other kids, goes to school, is lovingly cared for. But the loss of her gifts reveals that love as conditional. The implication is left unspoken, because it burns the tongue: would you still love God if you didn't receive any blessings?

This is not the same question as the one asked in the book of Job; I'm not talking about a miserable life. I'm talking about an ordinary one, where you rely on what your hands can hold. If nothing terribly catastrophic were to happen to you, but you had no promise of eternal, painless bliss, would you be satisfied? Or more poignantly: if you had experienced a brief taste of that heaven, would that be enough for you? In the film, the villagers do have the impending disaster of running out of fish, but the script goes out of its way to highlight several times that at any moment they could simply move elsewhere. The danger isn't inevitable. It's by choice that they don't bother to interact with the mainland and possibly push for a better deal with the fishing industry. They have plenty of mundane options for fighting that injustice. But with a miraculous child, they can afford inaction. And it's very seductive to have a life that allows and even rewards inaction.

The thought experiment proposed in Omelas is usually framed in these terms: Is it ethical for all to enjoy infinite happiness if it requires the infinite suffering of one person? It's less common to find it in these terms: If one person could provide infinite happiness for all, is it ethical for that person to refuse? In other words, would you demand that Jesus die to save humankind?

It's subtle, but you can notice that it never occurs to the people in The King Tide to inquire what the girl wants. On one hand, it's unfair that people take her for granted. On the other hand, it looks like it pleases her to help people. On the other other hand, she's legally a minor who has not made an informed choice on the matter. The film wisely stops before she has the chance to walk into the exterior world, so these questions are left hanging for the viewer to mull over. It suffices to explore what our endless asking does to God. It's up to you to ask yourself what it does to you.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Book Review: Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

A breathlessly intimate story about the irrationality and grossness of being an embodied person, and how that intersects with transness, love and living through history.

You know how sometimes you put a book down on finishing it and the world looks different, like the flavour of the prose has bled up into your thoughts, your perception, so for a little while you've been translated into its grammar? That is generally my experience of reading the work of Isaac Fellman, and Notes from a Regicide, his newest novel, is no different. But when I try to encapsulate the substance of the story into a blurb, to cup something tangible about it in my hands so I can offer it up to you to share, it slips between my fingers, leaving only fragments. Despite being a book utterly grounded in the flesh and the tangible world, it is itself surprisingly evanescent.

There are two stories, interleaved. The first, of Griffon, who escaped a violent father to live with Etoine and Zaffre, in whose house he felt safe enough to be a boy, finding in them new parents. The second, the story Griffon constructs from Etoine's notes years later, of his and Zaffre's life in distant Stephensport before and during their revolution. Which is ultimately the crux of it, but gives away nothing about why this is either speculative, or so wonderful.

I'll start with the speculative elements first, because they are the easiest to grasp (while being insubstantial). Most of the content and action of the novel is focussed in on relationships and the interactions between characters and each other, or their own self and story. No one in the foreground does anything inherently SFFnal. But as the story progresses, it becomes more and more obvious that all these fairly realist events are taking place in the distant future, in a city that does not currently exist (or if it does, not in any way a recognisable form from Stephensport in the story). We learn more about it, about the buried electors who, revived at intervals, select the city's new leader and namesake. About the gulf of centuries that exist between the story-time and now. About the subtle and less subtle differences between Griffon, Etoine and Zaffre's world and ours. Most of these come in glimpses and references, incongruous moments of a thing where it's not supposed to be. But together they built, quietly, into a picture of a future I am fascinated by and prevented from fully grasping. And its absence is part of its success - the world is the world, for the characters in the story. It is real and normal and graspable, even if Stephensport is a mystery to those outside its boundaries. And so, for those living in a place, the place is not remarkable in its mundane details. Thus, not remarked upon in their notes or diaries. Stephensport is most clearly shown by Griffon, who has never been there, but yearns to understand this understated thing in Etoine's words.

That mystery is never fully resolved. It is not a rich world to be tour-guided around, more a backdrop. But for something that never comes into focus, there are some extremely interesting choices in its construction, especially socially and structurally, nonetheless.

Why it's wonderful is a rather harder matter.

If you like realist writing, or litfic - which I do - there is much to be said for the sort of immersion in a character and a moment of being that Fellman excels at. Griffon and Etoine both write with an obvious, idiosyncratic voice, and become more and more real as their writing continues through the book. But Fellman has a particular knack for catching them in their most human moments, especially Griffon - when he's stuck in a thought or a doubt. There's all the irrationality of the deep interior thoughts that never seep out into the world, the odd comparison, the habits, the weird connections.

But where this really comes to the fore is in the way those fully realised characters interact. Because there are these two interleaved narratives, and we get the narration and interiority of both Etoine and Griffon, we can triangulate around the points of their relationship with each other and Zaffre, and gain a depth of it that could never come from seeing each alone. Etoine in his own words has a different shape when we first meet him through the awestruck gaze of a teenage Griffon. And as the story goes on, the thing we are told at the start - that Griffon loves his found parents - comes closer and closer to the surface, becoming almost painful in its brilliance.

I do not think I have ever read anything that captured the idiosyncracy, the mundanity and the marvel, of love like Notes from a Regicide does. It is a love story, of a child to parents, of a man to his wife, and of a whole family, each for each other and themselves. It captures a love that includes the flaws, the boredom and the habit, the mysteries. And these all make it feel deeper and more richly true by the end.

From the beginning, we know this is a story of grief, written by Griffon after Etoine's death. But the depth of that tragedy only becomes real once we have come round full circle to it again at the end, having experienced life through their own eyes.

That alone would be wonderful enough, but there's far more at play here. I could talk about the way Fellman portrays the revolution, backgrounded and looked at sidelong, until it cannot be ignored, all while Griffon is desperate to know more about it. I could talk about the way both Etoine and Zaffre look at and talk about art. Both could take up whole essays of their own. But the thing I found myself lingering over most, as I was reading, was simply the beauty of Fellman's descriptions, and so it is this I shall focus on instead, having filled five pages of notes with quotes of them.

For example:

I went through his desk when he died and found all of these writings (Zaffre left none behind, or vanishingly few). They are the ingredients for the book I am writing now. He would find that metaphor too homely, but I, unlike my parents, am a cook. They look like ingredients too: notebooks thick with interleaved drawings, wrapped in shiny brown leather like chicken skin; small parcels of old paper tied with string like roasts ready for the oven.

or:

But by the time I met him, he really was cold. The kind of cold that preserves things, like the way you keep your beer in a sealed bottle in the snow or the stream when camping.

I realised, as the story went on, that the descriptions served a purpose beyond themselves - Fellman leaves them long, sprawling, unnecessary, in a way that forces you to slow down. They're a tool to force you to acknowledge certain aspects of the world, often the mundane details that build up a person.

And then of course, it becomes obvious that Fellman is doing this all over the place. The word that most vividly comes to mind when I want to talk about this book is "lingering" - the prose does it everywhere, highlighting and pacing you as you go, like so:

Words have colors and colors have words. At times, when a word has been on my mind too long, they take on shapes and actions. Regicide is a blazing bar of iron whose brassy heat I grip firmly between the teeth, as an obedient dog does a bone. I can't say why, or why I can so clearly imagine the sear of that bar in my mouth, its brief taste of blood - but I do.

And a picture builds up, in all that lingering, of what matters in this world, and to these people.

It's not always beautiful, mind. Some of Fellman's best or most memorable turns of phrase are to the grosser parts of being human.

I was a mass of strong smells tied together in a crude packet of skin.

Some of them feel universal, the sort of thing everyone can relate to, but many are deeply idiosyncratic, tied up in the very specific experiences these characters have, especially with their bodies and change in their bodies. All three of the family are trans, and all three experience and discover it, navigate it, in their own ways, but all wear it in their physicality, and have it read by the other two. Skin and hair, clothing, binders, the way of walking, posture and voices, all are handed out in these lingering moments to the reader, to try to see this family the way each see the others, full of love and the close attention we only give to those closest to us.

One of the things most clearly encapsulated by all of this is the scars they all three live with. Some of this is physical - Etoine walks with a cane and has significant damage to his feet. But much of this is psychological, the ghosts of the lives they've lived and the places and people who have shaped them. Stephensport is most visible in the story not as a place described, but a scar on the person of Etoine and Zaffre, whose experience of the revolution there can never be escaped, only endured.

And that's the crux of what Fellman does well here - a portrait of the fullness of humanity. Which is apt, when a large part of the story webs around a painting made by Etoine, that captured a woman so perfectly it helped him unwittingly kickstart a revolution. With a deliberateness that Etoine lacks, Fellman has done that same act, capturing a perfect slice of a person - or three people - for us to appreciate. Like the portrait, it is necessarily artificial, built of obvious brush strokes and quirks of writing, but they make it all the more impactful. The art of it is the point, the beautiful writing worthy for its own sake, as well as for the whole portrait they leave us with at the end.

--

The Math

Highlights:

- gorgeous descriptive prose
- fascinating backdrop
- some of the most vivid portrayal of love I've read in fiction

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10

Reference: Isaac Fellman, Notes from a Regicide [Tor Books, 2025].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

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: The Parenting

Hell is other people... 's expectations.

You know how conservatives keep saying that queer people are possessed by demons? Well, the new HBO Max horror/comedy/romance film The Parenting turns the tables and argues that the actual demon is intolerance. Picture this scenario: you're nervously introducing your boyfriend to your family, hoping that they'll like each other, and all of a sudden, the loving father you've known all you life turns out to harbor a hateful spirit inside of him, one that spews homophobic slurs and even attacks your boyfriend physically. In our supposedly modern times, that's a nightmare queer people still dread. That's why a jocular title like The Parenting is quite clever: although the format of the story is that of spending a vacation weekend at a remote haunted house, this is really a movie about being terrified of your own parents. While it draws copiously from the usual tropes of the haunted house genre, as well as the meet-the-parents genre, the movie wouldn't work without the queerness element at the center of it. This is a specifically queer fear that can only be faced and overcome through queer means.

The movie starts with a prologue in the 80s, on the night the series M.A.S.H. broadcast its final episode. That's an important signpost: although it was set in the Korean War, M.A.S.H. was widely perceived as an allegory for the Vietnam War and for the heated sentiments it sparked among Americans. The end of M.A.S.H. coincides with the end of an era of countercultural experimentation and the rise, in its stead, of the conservative nightmare that still haunts the American consciousness. And in that prologue, the manifestation of that nightmare is juvenile disobedience, which of course was tied to the Satanic Panic and the cultural anxieties about the fate of the nuclear family. In a deceptively simple scene, we see a mother struggle to get her kids to come to the dinner table, only to be dragged to the underworld by something sinister. It takes the son too, and lastly, the daughter, who until that moment had been locked in her room with as-of-yet unspecified female company. It's a very subtle hint, but yes, this character is definitely queer. A possible reading, given the events that will follow, is that this specific demon is one that consumes families where someone is queer, which is why it's significant that this prologue happens in the 80s. (We learn later that said female company is the quintessential incarnation of everything Reaganites were scared of: a sexually unafraid teenager with a goth-ish/punk-ish aesthetic and pagan leanings. It's this archetypal bogeyman that brings the demon into the house, which strikes me as a fitting encapsulation of the way the conservative mind blames the culturally deviant for the hatred thrown at them.)

Fast forward to the 21st century, and we meet our actual protagonists: two young gay men, very cute, very much in love, and very nervous about the special weekend vacation they've organized for their respective families to meet for the first time. As it happens, the house they've rented is the same one from the prologue. And sure enough, after night falls, things start making strange noises. So far, so normal for a haunted house movie. Except this is too similar to the sound of, as a character puts it, "interplay." Each couple believes the other couple is doing it, and the movie extends this joke for as long as it will give. Here we get our first impression of the precise nature of this form of queer fear: telling your parents about your significant other implies making your parents aware that you are a sexual being. This is true of any pairing of orientations, but parents of straight children have the privilege of not having to imagine other forms of "interplay."

This fear reoccurs later, when one of the couple's parents, already possessed by the demon, starts throwing around the kind of hurtful remarks that people with little imagination use against queer people. And bring up the problem of having little imagination because, truly, it seems to break queerphobes's brains to think about a gay couple having a sex life. In a curious reversal, other scenes in the movie push the two young gay men to think of their parents as sexual beings, in awkward reenactments of the Freudian Urszene where children happen upon their parents' naked bodies. In themselves, these scenes are well executed jokes. But in the context of the implicit sexual humiliation that the demon inflicts on our protagonists, the choice to cast the same gaze back at the parents exposes the absurdity of the intended attack.

So how do you defeat this demon? To complete this analysis of the movie's themes, I'm going to have to spoil the ending. One of our protagonists, saddened by his father's deteriorated state, decides to invite the demon into himself and then ask his boyfriend to kill him. Let's untangle what this choice means. As I said above, the actual demon is intolerance. Inviting the demon into yourself for the purpose of taking it down with you is the movie's way of representing a case of internalized queerphobia leading to suicide. Now let's take the metaphorical eyeglasses off for a moment, because this is the core message of the movie. In the nightmare scenario where you take your boyfriend to meet your parents and they react violently, internalized queerphobia leading to suicide is one of the possible outcomes. It has happened and keeps happening in real life. Fortunately, in the movie this plan does not succeed. As our protagonists discover, the true way to destroy this demon (of intolerance) is to starve it of a human host to invade.

You shouldn't expect any new tricks from this movie, either comedy- or horror-wise. But it works. The performances are enjoyable, the leading couple has a sweet chemistry, and the dialogues ring true to the everyday dynamics of a queer family. Only a content warning is warranted for dogs that die of slapstick shenanigans during the movie. Otherwise, you'll spend a fun time laughing and/or screaming at The Parenting.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Review: Dog Man

Let's pretend the unsanctioned decapitation didn't matter, and let's have a deep conversation about parenthood and growth

First, a confession: it's been a long time since I've tried a story targeted specifically at very small children. I'd forgotten the tons of suspension of disbelief required to simply sit and enjoy the mayhem. But apparently, from what I can gather, there's been some great storytelling going on in that area, with the likes of Peppa Pig and Bluey straddling the line between wholesome and topical, and even commentators finding fuel for discussion in the politics of Paw Patrol. So I guess I should start paying more attention to that segment of SFF.

Another confession: what drew me to the new DreamWorks animated film Dog Man wasn't this realization of a gap in my screen watching record, but simple morbid curiosity for how a production for kids was going to handle its spectacularly gruesome premise: the titular hero is a Frankenstein-ish monstrosity built by sewing the head of an almost-dead dog onto the body of a (now most definitely) dead man. Dr. Vladimir Demikhov would be proud. Because this is a fun adventure in bright colors, the movie cheerfully brushes away the obvious questions about animal cruelty or the fact that a man has been decapitated to create this abomination. Look, a dog walking on two legs!

Following the long and rather strange tradition of severely injured characters technomagically transformed into obligate crimefighters (think of The Six Million Dollar Man, Robocop, Inspector Gadget, M.A.N.T.I.S., Max Steel, or Adam Jensen from the Deus Ex games), Dog Man promptly resumes the frenzied chase for an evil cat called Petey, whose crime is... getting revenge on Dog Man, I guess? We aren't told what was the original misdeed that kickstarted this cycle of dramatic arrests and creative prison escapes, but the sequence is undeniably funny.

(Also, let the record show that I protest this slander against cats.)

This first part of the movie goes like a breeze and helps the viewer get used to the lightning pace of the story. Not only are we treated to a beautiful picture-book art style, with clouds that look like crayon scribbles and canine howls that visually reach from one scene to the next; we're asked to switch off our brains and delight in the rapid succession of cuteness and absurdity and pathos and newfound joy.

Petey the cat only changes tactics when he runs out of ideas for increasingly wackier doomsday machines (I am impressed by his seemingly infinite R&D budget), and when he tries to create a duplicate of himself, he ends up with a child duplicate of himself. And that's when the actual theme of the movie is presented to us. This is more than a slapstick series of loud, splashy cartoonish antics. If it were only that, it already does it pretty well. But what Dog Man is actually about is the question of inborn tendencies vs. conscious choice.

Little Petey is sweet, friendly, optimistic, and without one drop of cynicism. He can see the best side of the worst people. Adult Petey, the typical jaded edgelord, wants to teach him that life is the opposite of that. But after a messy series of mishaps, Little Petey gets the chance to spend some days living with Dog Man. And Dog Man is going through the same identity crisis: does he want to be a policeman with serious obligations, as his human part, or a fun-seeking dog, as his other part? His canine instincts have already interfered with his duties too many times by now, but he doesn't know what other job to do.

I find it reassuring that Dog Man acknowledges the difficulty of this question. It even introduces a quick subplot about adult Petey's father that helps the young audience get a sense of how learned mistakes can be perpetuated across generations. Evil, as the plot demonstrates, is more a matter of actions than one of immutable nature. So is love. That's a precious message to present to the children who will be too amused by the endless gags to notice upon first watching. But a few years from now, when they want to revisit the immensely entertaining experience that was Dog Man, they'll find the strong heart that was beating at the center of it.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

On the gentle fantasy of Linoleum

A mindtrip to the Moon and back

You've seen this movie before: a moderately successful family man with a big house in a placid suburb realizes he's unhappy with his life, so he takes a sudden detour for a seemingly immature but actually deeply important self-exploration. His wife, a career woman hyperfocused on being taken seriously, finds his antics increasingly irritating, while their teenage daughter has begun an unusual friendship with the new neighbor, a sensitive boy with an authoritarian father. This situation will not end well.

You've seen this movie before. It's called American Beauty and it premiered in 1999. At first it was highly praised for its critique of hollow bourgeois aspirations, but over the years it has been reevaluated and criticized for its simplistic melodrama and its uncritical centering of the male perspective. And when Kevin Spacey's history of sexual misconduct was exposed, the movie turned radioactive. No one dares touch it. Which is a pity, because American Beauty, underneath all its creepiness and its self-serious attempts at edginess, did have a few valuable things to say about the search for happiness.

Enter the 2022 movie Linoleum. It was never advertised as a remake, but it so cleverly deconstructs the plot of American Beauty that it might as well have openly acknowledged the extent of its debt. Similarly set in the late 1990s, it proposes a more empathetic alternative to the earlier movie's cynicism. And from this point on I'm going to need to spoil the secrets of Linoleum.

Imagine if the plot of American Beauty were told by the protagonist of the 2005 movie Stay, and you'll get the gist of what Linoleum is doing behind the curtain. And that's the last warning before full spoilers.

The ending of Linoleum reveals that the husband, the husband's father, and the neighbor's son are symbolic incarnations of one single person, an old man with dementia whose memories are chaotically remixing themselves in his last moments. He's been telling himself a story where the events of his youth, his adulthood and his old age are reenacted by different characters at the same time. At the core of his jumbled memories is the night his real father tried to kill him and instead died in a crash.

What this does for Linoleum's intertextual relationship with American Beauty is expand the perspective we're being asked to consider. American Beauty is a very selfish story, one in which the husband's worldview provides the dominating voice that defines the terms in which the plot is meant to be understood. In Linoleum, the fact that the core characters are the same person means that their separate perspectives are equally significant. This is not only the story of a middle-aged man seeking to reignite his enjoyment of life, but also the story of a boy struggling to find his own path beyond his father's shadow, and the story of an old man who is losing the sense of who he is. These parallel looks at three stages of the same life story complete the theme that American Beauty could only portray at one moment: the chain of circumstances that feed our satisfactions and our regrets.

While the husband's chosen method of correcting the course of his life in American Beauty is to become a jerk and a sexual predator, in Linoleum the unhappy husband embarks on a more wholesome pursuit: he's going to build a rocket in his garage. He has always wanted to be an astronaut, and he can't let his better years go by without achieving that dream. Now, let's remember that this plot point is part of the deathbed hallucination, so it should be interpreted as a stand-in for whichever aspirations the actual protagonist may have had. Being an astronaut is the stereotypical dream of every child, and in the movie's narrative it's used to represent the yearning for personal self-realization. So the literal text of the story shows us a man building a rocket in his garage, but the meaning of the story is about daring to dream big, about aiming for the stars.

Another way Linoleum improves upon American Beauty is in the character of the wife. In the first movie, she's an obstacle in the husband's quest for meaning. We're meant to agree that he's right to despise her, because everything about her personality and her goals is fake. Clearly, this is a very male-centric way of writing a marriage in trouble. Linoleum opts for a more nuanced look. This husband (again, inside the badly remembered story) genuinely loves his wife, but they've gradually lost the capacity to respect each other's wants. There was a time when they dared to dream big, but the big things that were supposed to come to their lives never did, and now they feel stuck. The epiphany that begins the reparation of their relationship is the wife's refusal to live by someone else's expectations. The fact that she also turns out to be a multiple character in the hallucination gives her equal rank of thematic importance as the husband.

Live enough years and you'll become intimately familiar with regret, with the longing for the road not taken. The ending of American Beauty resolves this problem by offering its protagonist a terrible choice that he ultimately rejects. And at that moment his life is ready to end. Linoleum refrains from pretending that we're ever ready to end; it doesn't even try to resolve the problem of regret. What it does propose is that, from a broad perspective, regret is a matter of how we remember our lives. And if we end up remembering differently, we may find unexpected forms of contentment.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

One Hundred Years of Solitude, or how to film the unfilmable

For a massively revered classic, a faithful rendering may not suffice

As nation states go, these we have here in Latin America are rather young. The Westernized portion of our history only covers a few centuries, and the much longer Native portion barely survives in mutilated fragments. Unlike the Greek or Chinese or Icelandic peoples, who long ago developed a solid sense of who they are, we're still in the middle of figuring ourselves out. It would seem pointless to attempt to write a national epic about us when "us" still has many blank spaces awaiting definition.

And yet, the multigenerational saga One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez succeeds at both transmitting and creating a portrait of the Colombian nation. Like Don Quixote, it narrates the chaos that follows men when possessed by an idea. Like the Iliad, it laments the escalating destruction that can result from an unyielding sense of honor. Like War and Peace, it traces the ways individual lives intersect with big history. Like the Divine Comedy, it creates its own cosmology and makes the reader take it as true. Like Macbeth, it dissects the forces that lure men toward excessive ambition. Like the Old Testament, it bridges the passage from mythic origins to known history. It's an ostentatious book, the kind that requires a writer to err on the side of overconfidence. Such a bet is risky, but that's the price of admission in this game: you simply can't pull off something of the monumental scope of One Hundred Years of Solitude if you have any humility left in you. You must think yourself worthy of it.

The Netflix adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, released just this month in a first batch of eight episodes out of a planned total of sixteen, faced a comparable challenge. And on the technical level, the challenge is met with the highest excellence: period-accurate costumes, meticulously researched set design, authentic 19th-century furniture, handcrafted props, true-sounding accents, and multiple full-sized versions of the entire town of Macondo. The production's stratospheric budget is noticeable in every scene: in exquisite cinematography, in pitch-perfect casting, in brutally honest war scenes, in taking every opportunity to boast Colombia's gorgeous geography. If the series can be said to commit any fault at all, it's only in its absolute reverence for the source text, precisely the kind of humility with which it couldn't have been composed in the first place.

This degree of allegiance to the source text is understandable given the impossibly high expectations placed on the project. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a sacred cow of our literary canon, so there would have been a loud backlash had the scriptwriters and directors hired by Netflix dared introduce a more personal touch into the story. So what we get is an almost word-for-word translation of the novel, to the point that a voiceover narrator is used (in fact, overused) to explain the plot to the audience.

Now, before someone accuses me of being inconsistent: I'm aware that I praised the film adaptation of Pedro Páramo for staying strictly faithful to the book. So why do I see the same choice as a defect this time? The difference is that, despite being much shorter, Pedro Páramo is a far more experimental book than One Hundred Years of Solitude. The disorienting effect of hearing so many voices at the same time already gave Pedro Páramo (the book) some of the qualities of the audiovisual medium, which made the task easier for Pedro Páramo (the movie). With One Hundred Years of Solitude there's a bigger maneuvering margin to build upon the book, but the directors don't take advantage of it. To rely heavily on a voiceover narrator isn't as jarring in Pedro Páramo (the movie) because Pedro Páramo (the book) is composed as a continuous conversation: the protagonist is being told his father's story in the voices of the dead. So it makes sense for the movie to also be composed as a conversation. One Hundred Years of Solitude uses a more traditional formula (omniscient third-person narrator who is not part of the plot). Giving the narrator such a prominent position in the adaptation feels like an intrusion, almost an admission that the directors didn't trust the images' ability to tell the story. Watching a dramatized adaptation of a book shouldn't feel like a read-along of the book.

This deferential attitude toward our canon has already been defied in literature; audiovisual media shouldn't have to recapitulate the whole progression that went from the generation of writers who prayed at the altar of García Márquez to the generation of writers who spat in the face of García Márquez to today's generation of writers who are neither for nor against García Márquez and are just focused on doing their own thing. For example, in the Anglo world, iconoclastic reinterpretations of Shakespeare are a long-established and respected tradition. García Márquez himself was no stranger to that kind of transformative creation: he wrote the screenplay of a retelling of Oedipus Rex set in the violent 1990s of rural Colombia. It shouldn't be seen as blasphemy to do a less than faithful adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, as long as the core theme is treated with respect.

And what is that core theme? The same as in every national epic: This Is What It Feels Like To Be Us. However, García Márquez wasn't merely reporting on an already existing sense of nationhood; he was codifying it. The earliest Colombian novels were meant to serve as almost ethnographic descriptions of social customs, but the generation of writers to which García Márquez belonged had a much clearer idea of that task. By reading him, we learn to be Colombian. We learn to pay attention to what is at stake in our embarrassing saga of repeated errors. Particularly in One Hundred Years of Solitude, we learn about the folly of putting abstract allegiances above universal human needs, about the dangers of forgetting basic truths, about the poisonous consequences of imposing artificial obstacles to love. Above all, we learn that the one thing you should never be afraid of is love.

One isn't required to 100% agree with the guy's ideas about love, though. His oeuvre was uniformly influenced by outdated and sometimes very harmful views on gender dynamics. In his interviews he blamed women for the problems of sexism. The last book he published before his death is a romanticized account of child prostitution. When approaching his writings, one must keep in mind both his exceptional talents and his abhorrent opinions. Even One Hundred Years of Solitude, the book that got him the Nobel Prize, is replete with instances of unchallenged, as in authorially endorsed, sexual misconduct that can't be easily removed in an adaptation without unraveling the rest of the plot.

So what can be salvaged from One Hundred Years of Solitude? What justifies its continued place of honor in world literature and the undeniably beautiful adaptation Netflix threw bucketfuls of money at? I've already mentioned how it conveys the general feeling of what it's like to be Colombian. Let me give a more concrete example: a few years ago, when I reviewed Encanto, I briefly considered mentioning a factoid that existed in parallel with the announcement of the movie but was completely unrelated. What happened was that, on the same day that the first trailer for Encanto was released, it was reported in the news that the murderers of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse were Colombian ex-army mercenaries. I didn't include that bit of news in the review because it was already long enough, but it's relevant here: Encanto was offering me a rare occasion to feel good about my country, but it was instantly ruined by the revelation about the murderers. That whiplash of incompatible emotions, that corrosive question in my head (Why did I bother getting excited?), that millionth refusal by history to let us feel proud of anything, that abrupt cold shower of pointlessness—that is what it feels like, every day, to be Colombian. And the biggest artistic merit of One Hundred Years of Solitude lies in capturing that infernally complicated feeling and exploring how we live with it and through it, and how we stubbornly keep looking for a way to someday live past it.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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