Another month down the gurgler.

I’m kidding. That makes it sound super-depressing, like the whole month was a waste of time, which it certainly was not. It was quite a busy and active time, actually, and on the whole was pretty good I thi/nk.

The dynamic in my home went through a massive change when my youngest daughter flew overseas for a missionary training course and outreach. She’s vibrant and highly social part of our family, so her absence is very noticeable. But she’s doing well and we’re excited for the things that are happening in her life.

Her departure happened to coincide with the arrival of a friend of ours (as well as two of his sons). He stayed with us for the week which made it all busy though fun. He has a reasonably insatiable appetite for games, which his sons also enjoy, so during the week I ended up playing a lot of different games, including Sentinels of the Multiverse, Puerto Rico, Wingspan, Chronicles of Crime, Ticket to Ride, Fuse, Tiny Towns, Everdell, and probably a few others.

That was fun. I enjoy games, but I feel like I don’t do well at them more frequently than I’d like. Maybe it’s why I so enjoy cooperative games!

Another thing that I did was finally finish the post-production work on Finishing Touches, a short film that my team and I produced an embarrassing nearly three years ago. I think, by and large, that’s too long for the post-production on a 27 minute film to take. The work itself didn’t take that long, of course–a lot of that time was eaten up in delays of one sort or another, whether that’s long stretches of time where we were all just too busy to do the work, or where we were figuring out how to do the work. But I think in some ways that makes the delays even more egregious.

Anyway, I posted it on this site here, so you can go and watch it if you want. It’s all about a filmmaker who finds himself challenged to do a better job on his movie, by his own character. The character wants to change the outcome of the story she is in for reasons that are quite noble and heroic, but in the “real world” that means the filmmaker has to do the extra work to make that possible. There are some interesting ideas at play there that I think end up being reasonably well realized, although I do fear that it’s just kind of long. Oh well, have a look if you are so inclined and decide for yourself.

Another notable thing about July is that it included more visits to the cinema than I can remember doing in a looooong time–we saw three movies on the big screen. This is largely due to the one-two punch of Superman and The Fantastic Four, which have already got their own write-ups on this blog (just follow the links!)

But my cinema visits are not entirely due to those two superhero epics, because I also went and saw…

Materialists

…which in spite of the fact that it stars Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal, is not a comic book adaptation.

Spoilers Ahead, for all the headlined things

Instead, it’s a romantic comedy-drama by director Celine Song, whose previous film Past Lives received a lot of acclaim, but which I have not seen. My wife and I went to see Materialists for our anniversary (24 years!) which was near the start of the month. It turns out that a situation like this (going to the cinema for the anniversary) was the perfect context for me to take this movie in, since if I weren’t looking for something that both my wife and I could appreciate, and hadn’t been watching it in the cinema, I’d probably never have picked it and more than likely would have bailed out on it somewhere in the first half hour, opting instead to find something catchier on one of my other streaming services.

That is not to say that Materialists is bad, necessarily–it’s more of a comment on the general shallowness of my viewing habits. Rather, Materialists is actually quite thoughtful and does some interesting dwelling on modern dating and relationships, which makes it worth watching, even though it took a while before I was convinced of this.

The plot sounds like something out of any classic rom-com. Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a professional match-maker who is largely shut-down in her own emotional life by her materialism-centric way of looking at things. Her works has her constantly evaluating people for their marketability, and in her own life her greatest desire is not to be poor. Her long-term relationship with John (Chris Evans), ended years ago because of his lack of concern for these sort of practicalities (he’s a struggling actor living in a terrible apartment with terrible roommates who drives a terrible car, for instance.)

Into her life comes Harry (Pedro Pascal), who she recognises quickly as a perfect guy, according to the metrics of her work: he’s rich, handsome, tall, charming and successful. She just can’t understand why he would pursue her, rather than someone younger, prettier, more successful, etc, since that is the kind of person he could attract if he wanted to. The movie proceeds to unpack Lucy’s motivations for getting together with Harry, and eventually gets her to re-examine her priorities.

The problem with the film is that for a good portion of the beginning, there isn’t much going on with Lucy to make her interesting. By that, I don’t mean likeable or sympathetic–it’s perfectly fine for a character to be unlikeable but still compelling–I just mean there’s nothing about her that makes her someone I want to spend time watching. She’s so disengaged with her life and not facing any compelling challenges that she made me feel bored for an extended amount of time. And I didn’t connect with Dakota Johnson’s performance–I’m not sure what she should have done to bring the character to life more effectively without betraying who Lucy is written to be, but whatever it is she doesn’t do it.

Eventually, things shift and the story breaks open. Things happen to and around Lucy that got my attention and made me care, but it just took so long to get there. So yeah, in the end I do appreciate the movie and think it has some interesting comments to make about dating and life, and I think both Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal (and eventually even Dakota Johnson) give meaningful performances, but for a long chunk of the film I thought I’d be ending this write-up on a much more sour note.

That’s it for my cinema experiences this month, but thanks to streaming services and home media, those aren’t the only movies I watched.

Madame Web

On my viewing-goals list this year was Madame Web, mostly because I wanted to see if it was as bad as it looked. Amusingly, this movie also stars Dakota Johnson, and is also the second ever film that I’ve seen her in, so so far my experience of her as an actress is not very impressive. (Hopefully I’ll never have reason to see her most famous role). But nobody is impressive in Madame Web, so it’s hard to blame her specifically for this.

Madame Web is one of those Spider-Man-adjacent films that Sony made after they made whatever deal they made with Marvel to put Spider-Man into the MCU. Presumably the deal precludes them from making actual Peter Parker as Spider-Man movies (at least in live action) so they busied themselves with movies about villains and supporting characters from the comics (Venom, Kraven, Morbius).

I don’t know much about Madame Web from the comics but my impression is that she is some sort of mystical blind spider-avatar who can perceive the universe through some sort of cosmic “web” that connects everything. In this movie, she is a New York paramedic whose tragic backstory involves how her pregnant mother took her to South America in a quest for some rare and special spiders, and for her troubles got herself fatally shot by a guy she hired who wanted the spider for himself. A mysterious tribe of jungle spider-people (really) attempted to use the spider’s properties to save her life but failed, but they did save her baby.

Off-screen that baby was returned to New York where she grew up in Cassie Web (who is partnered as a paramedic with one Ben Parker, played by Adam Scott) who suddenly finds herself experiencing confusing visions of the future. This eventually turns into visions of a vicious spider-powered guy (the dude who killed her mother) murdering three teenaged girls. It turns out that after gaining spider-powers, he’s had visions of these three girls as adults, where they all have powers and spider-themed outfits, killing him, and so he’s decided to track them down in the present and kill them first. Thanks to Cassie’s visions, she is able to rescue them, but the process is laborious because their script-demanded stupidity keeps putting them into danger.

Madame Web is a bad movie for a lot of different reasons. The characterisations are mostly flat and uninspiring, except maybe for the bad guy who is cartoonishly silly, but not in a fun way. The plot does depend on people acting pretty stupid a lot of the time, mostly by needlessly putting themselves in danger (even the bad guy isn’t immune to this–twice in the film Cassie attacks him by driving a vehicle into him, but the second time he seems to deliberately leap into its path).

And the whole world of the movie seems crazily inauthentic. At one point, Cassie is doing CPR on someone, and then just casually tells them that they will be okay and gets up to do something else, even though the movie later makes a big point of how you never stop doing CPR on someone until someone else has come to relieve you. At another point, Cassie, a woman wrongfully wanted for kidnapping the three girls, casually flies to South America to check something out, which seems to be as easy for her as taking a bus across town. We don’t see her get on a plane or anything, it’s just the next scene and she’s walking around in the jungle somewhere. It’s like the world Cassie lives in lacks any sort of depth.

The action scenes of the film are reasonably staged, I guess, and the brief visions that we get of the three girls in the spider-themed identities look like there might have been a more fun movie lurking in the background of this one. There is also a nice moment where Cassie learns that her mother went on this seemingly reckless trip to South America so she could find a cure for some debilitating disease that unborn Cassie was diagnosed with, but that’s about it for the positives. It’s not the worst superhero film I’ve ever seen, but it’s definitely one of the bad ones.

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

On the opposite end of the spectrum from Madame Web on almost every conceivable metric is The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, a 1944 classic screwball comedy from writer-director Preston Sturges. It’s one of my favorite movies, landing at #10 in my 101 Movies That I Love the Most listing from a few years ago. Betty Hutton plays Trudy Kockenlocker, a wannabe party girl who uses hapless Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken), a local boy who is smitten with her, to trick her hard-nosed father (William Demarest) so she can go out dancing the local soldiers before they ship out for war. She comes back late and severely hung over, and also married and pregnant, but with no idea to whom. Extensive hi-jinks ensue.

If you have never seen anything by Preston Sturges, do yourself a favor and go check out this movie (or alternatively The Lady Eve or Sullivan’s Travels or Palm Beach Story or something). It’s a firecracker of snappy dialogue, outlandish plot twists and strong characterisations which played fast and loose with the Hays Code restrictions that were in force at the time (preventing depictions of things like an unwed mothers, for instance). The movie delivers consistent laughs all the way through, while also making the characters sympathetic and their plights meaningful. I can’t recommend it enough.

Dept. Q

Moving beyond feature films, I ended up watching the British series Dept. Q on Netflix, about a troubled detective heading up a new police department devoted to cold cases, when I walked in on my wife watching the first episode. I casually paid attention until the end of the first episode, when you suddenly realise that one of the parallel storylines you’ve been watching, about Merritt Lingard, an ambitious prosecutor and her work and family troubles, was actually set years in the past, and in fact was the basis of the cold case that the show was going to focus on. That case involves Merritt disappearing without a trace, but it turning out she’s still alive and being held prisoner in a baryonic pressure chamber for the previous four years by, well, someone with a grudge. At this point, the show had my attention, and it held on for the rest of its 9 episodes.

The show works really well because the mystery is gripping and engaging, but at the same time the character work is incredibly strong. Matthew Goode plays DCI Carl Morck, the lead detective who is coming off the trauma of being shot in the line of duty, in an incident which killed a young officer and paralysed Morck’s own partner. All of this leads to guy with lots of troubles–with his co-workers, his step-son and his work-mandated therapist–and makes him just as gripping a character to watch when he’s off-work as much as when he’s on. The supporting cast, both in and out of work, are all consistently good as well, especially Chloe Pirrie who is certainly put through her paces as Merritt. But the standout character is definitely Arkam Salim (Alexej Manvelov), a Syrian refugee turned police administrator who is definitely operating below his skill set.

Dept. Q is a new show that has just had its first season. It’s rock solid, so hopefully it comes back for more.

I feel like there were other things I probably watched this month but I can’t remember them at the moment, so let’s move on to comics, which this month all came from the library.

Batman ’66 meets Wonder Woman ’77

This collection is exactly what it says on the cover–a meet up between two of DC’s most popular television adaptions from the days of yore, with the Batman of the 1960s TV (as in Adam West, Burt Ward and the like) mixing it up with Wonder Woman from the 70s (ie Lynda Carter). As a general appreciator of both series, it’s fun to see this mash-up, even if the results are a bit mixed.

The creative team here is writers Jeff Parker and Marc Andreyko, penciller David Hahn and inker Karl Keel. A lot of work goes into just getting the two main characters together in the same time period. As such, its divided into three sections–the first showing a flashback time period of Wonder Woman‘s first season, during World War II, to the day Wonder Woman visited Wayne Manor prior to the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents. The second part takes place in Batman’s present day and involves Batman visiting Paradise Island, where Wonder Woman was canonically living at the time. And the third part takes us to present day of the latter seasons of Wonder Woman, in the 70s, and shows us the future of Batman and his colleagues.

Tying this all together is a plot involving Ra’s al Ghul (a villain whose virtual immortality makes convenient for stories that take place over long periods of time). It’s reasonably enjoyable, but it’s hard to look at it and not be distracted by fan-servicey references sprinkled in. But given the fact that the whole reasons for these series to exist at all is to tickle the fancy of people’s nostalgia, I guess I can hardly complain. But still, the creative choice to use the likeness of all three actresses (Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt and Lee Meriwether) who played Catwoman in the 1960s live action Batman in different parts of the comic can hardly be said to serve the story in any way.

But potentially the most jarring part of the series is something where the comic diverged wildly from the show it’s based on, as when we get to the future-vision of Gotham City, we find that Bruce Wayne has retired from crime fighting over the guilt of having murdered the Joker. It’s a bit extreme for the comedic take of the 1960s TV show. I don’t mind, per se, but it makes it more challenging for me to stay immersed in the illusion that these are the versions of the characters that I’m familiar with on TV.

Lex Luthor: A Celebration of 75 Years

This, again, is just what it sounds like–a collection of Lex Luthor stories fro scattered throughout the characters 75 year (at that time) history. Some of these I’ve read before, some were new, but it was a fun collection which I read through very quickly. It includes a story I remember from Superman #164–The Showdown Between Luthor and Superman! by Edmond Hamilton and Curt Swan, in which Superman and Lex have a showdown fist-fight on a red sun planet. As things continues, Lex ends up meeting the native people and becoming a hero to them. In the end, the experience impacts him deeply, and he gives up the chance for conquering Superman so he can not shame himself in front of these people, and even goes out of his way to convince Superman to save them by providing for them a needed water supply. It’s a cool story that shows the type of complexity that was possibly in the relatively light-hearted silver age of comics.

This is offset, however, by a particularly heavy story from later in the book. Reprinted from Action Comics #544, Luthor Unleashed! (Curt Swan again, this time with writer Cary Bates) has Lex returning to this other planet (not for the first time) and being reunited with his love, Ardora, and finding out he has a son! He returns to his life as a beloved hero to these people…but finds that his hatred for Superman and his desire for vengeance against him isn’t so easily put aside. In the end, he gives up everything he has gained to try to destroy Superman, but his obsession ends up spelling the doom for his new home planet, including his wife and infant son! The story ends with Luthor having survived the destruction of the world thanks to his new battle suit, refusing to take any responsibility for the tragedy that has taken place, and swearing an even more cruel vengeance against Superman than ever. Dark, dark stuff.

Star Trek: Lower Decks – Warp Your Own Way

And finally, there is this Star Trek book, based on the Lower Decks adult animated series that ran for five seasons, a which I mostly enjoyed (though I thought it wore out its welcome in the end). Warp Your Own Way, by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio, is a choose-your-own-adventure comic, in which you guide main character Beckett Mariner through her day, making such mundane choices as which coffee is she going to drink or which of her colleagues on board the USS Cerritos is she going to try to get into mischief with.

Of course, since this is based on Lower Decks, every choice leads to a ridiculous deep-cut of legacy characters or situations coming back to rear their ugly heads and threaten the Cerritos. In short order I had little mini-adventures that involved Khan, the Gorn and Dionysus (of the same ilk as Apollo from the original series episode Who Mourns for Adonais?) Strangely, each adventure ends with someone demanding they need the Cerritos‘ prefix code (a series of numbers needed to remotely control the ship’s computer), and Marriner dying when she is unable to give it. It quickly becomes apparent, therefore, that the “Choose Your Own Adventure” format of the book is actually part of the story. In early read throughs you might think it was some sort of time loop or holodeck simulation, but the truth turns out to be a bit darker, and yet still built out of Star Trek lore.

It’s a fun book that makes good use of the format to tell a unique sort of story. It also manages to sneak in a tiny bit of “escape room” dynamics as you have to use a hints to come up with alternate choice to the ones you are obviously presented with. There’s not much of this, but it’s a nice touch.