I’m on my own time machine, and it won’t move backwards.
That’s a paraphrased quote (as best as I can remember) from the subtitles of one of my favorite movies, and my absolute favorite Japanese time travel slapstick comedy, Summer Time Machine Blues.
And it’s a little how I feel. Time marches ever forward, as relentlessly pushing each day toward the end of the year, and I guess by extension, the end of my life.
Hopefully those two things aren’t coming at the same time, though! Otherwise what on earth have I been doing with my life?!
I’ll tell you what. I’ve been saying goodbye to our beloved cat…
Soxie. I shared about this before, but it was quite sudden. One moment we had a cat, the next he was being put down in an act of heart-breaking kindness.
But you know what else we’ve been doing? Getting these two girls…
That’s Banksy (or actually, Banksia) on the left and Keiko (on the left). They aren’t sisters, but both were rescued at the same time and consequently are pretty bonded with one another. The daughter of a friend is a vet and was looking for an owner at the same time we were looking to replace the Soxie-shaped hole in our lives.
There was a whole process that went into naming them, which involved a lot of group-chatting with my oldest daughter who is away overseas at the moment. Many many many names were suggested. I kind of latched onto “Molly” for a while as one I was interested in, and later the name “Keiko” came from one of my kids, in reference to our Japanese heritage (I’m half-Japanese).
That would have been funny, wouldn’t it? Keiko and Molly? Maybe even cringey, if you know Deep Space Nine.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, Molly didn’t stick, but we all liked Keiko. Briefly we were referring to the two kittens as “Fun Keiko” and “Cute Keiko” depending on their personalities. Eventually, Banksia was suggested, which worked for me as long as I could call her Banksy. “Fun Keiko” became Banksy, and “Cute Keiko” became just “Keiko”, though we’ve since found out that she’s also pretty fun.
Anyway, we love them both and are currently in the business of acclimating them to our dogs and vice versa. As a result they currently live most of the time in our bathroom, but I’m trusting they will soon have free reign of the house and will be the little random event generators that I want them to be.
What else have I done this month? Well, I’ve done some writing, I’ve done some editing, and as is usually the case, I’ve done some watching.
Music by John Williams
If you are like me and grew up in the 70s and 80s as a fan of science fiction and superheroes, then movies like Star Wars, Superman and Raiders of the Lost Ark were big parts of your life, and if that was true, then you probably also remember and were impacted by the work of composer John Williams.
Williams was the creative master behind the scores for all of those projects, as well as many, many more–Jaws, ET, Jurassic Park, Home Alone, Schindler’s List, Close Encounters, Harry Potter…just a multitude of iconic movies. There are of course lots of other great film composers, but Williams stands out as a master of the orchestral theme–those pieces of music that are easy to hum along, that rouse us up to the highs and lows of a movie’s emotional tones, and linger in the ear and in the mind long after the movie is over.
Music by John Williams is a documentary film which explores the composer’s career. The movie features interviews with Williams himself, as well as comments from many of his collaborators and appreciators, most notably Steven Spielberg. There are lots of stories about his Williams’ life, family, and career, and many comments about how his work impacted other movie and TV storytellers. It’s not a “hard-hitting” documentary by any means, but rather an inspirational “feel-good” celebration of the music that already makes a lot of us feel good whenever we hear it.
If your a fan like me, and have a couple of hours to kill like I did, then it’s well worth your time.
Supacell
With our access to Netflix renewed thanks to my daughter’s commitment to watch the latest season of The Dragon Prince (or something or other), I decided to have a look at a new British series called Supacell that the streaming service’s algorithm decided to recommend to us. Supacell is a six episode superhero story, featuring a disparate group of characters from the same part of London who all suddenly develop powers. The show takes a while introducing each one of them, showing them try to understand their new abilities, eventually coming together to face a common threat at the end. It’s basically a mash-up of Stranger Things and Heroes (it even features a mysterious secret laboratory, a time traveling warning from the future about bad things that are coming, and a villain who can mimic other people’s powers) in the but set in South London and featuring a nearly all-black cast.
I was going to write something about “what keeps all this from being formulaic” but I realized that that is a wrong way to describe it–I think it’s better to say, “What makes all this excellent in spite of how formulaic it is” is well the whole thing is designed and executed, particularly the writing. The five lead characters are all very clearly defined, we perfectly understand their motivations and their conflicts, and each one is an utterly compelling character to watch. Even though one could argue the “point” of a this sort of story is to watch the heroes use their powers in innovative ways, in this case that’s maybe the least important part. Rather, when the powers enter the story, it’s already fascinating to see Sabrina trying to save her sister from toxic self-destruction, or Andre trying to do right by his teenaged son, or Tazer dealing with the rivalry between his street gang and that of his former mentor. There are five separate storylines here (at the start, the characters have never even met each other), but unlike a show like The Defenders, for instance, those stories are strong right from the get-go.
Unfortunately, this is only true up until the start of the last episode. This finale, in which those story threads are finally all together, is by far the weakest part of the whole series. Things go from being absolutely dramatically meaningful to being forced, contrived and awkwardly staged. It’s not terrible, exactly, but for the first time in the show nothing rises above the formula, and what is supposed to be the big dramatic set-back of the season doesn’t ring true because it seems it should have been so avoidable. It doesn’t exactly ruin the show, but it does seriously lower its chances for real greatness.
Oh well, the show has already been renewed for a second season, so we’ll see how that goes.
Incidentally, the only cast member in the show that I actually recognize is Tosin Cole as Michael, the show’s ostensible lead. He gets more characterization in the first fifteen minutes of this series than he had in the entire two years of Doctor Who that he appeared in as Ryan.
Deadpool, Deadpool 2, and Deadpool & Wolverine
After all this time, I finally dove into the cinematic world of Deadpool, the crude, snarky, hyperviolent, trash-talking, fourth-wall breaking mercenary with no real fear of death (thanks to his carte blanche healing factor) played by Ryan Reynolds. The first movie was from 2016 and was more-or-less in the same universe as Fox’s X-Men movies (whatever that means, considering that franchise’s completely off-the-wall approach to continuity or just general making sense). This was followed by two sequels, one in 2018 and one this year which brought the character into the Marvel Cinematic Universe after Disney’s acquisition of Fox.
The first movie shows the origin of Deadpool, with freelance mercenary and ex-special forces operative Wade Wilson falling in love with a woman named Vanessa (Firefly‘s Morena Baccarin), discovering he has cancer, taking part in an experimental procedure and becoming mutilated as a result, but also gaining his healing factor. He then goes after the person responsible for the experiment whom he believes can undo his mutilation, and then takes vengeance against him when that turns out to be false.
The movie is gross and unpleasant but well made. It is funny, and there are some moments of heart…a surprising number of moments, actually…but it’s not enough to make me actually like it or want to revisit it any time soon, or really any time ever. But I can understand the appeal of the character and the actor that plays him.
In Deadpool 2, Vanessa is killed off right at the start in a death-by-sequel moment, bringing her into the same family as the original love interests of The Bourne Identity and Austin Powers. This sends Deadpool into a depression which causes him to be mean to a young mutant played by Julian Dennison. As a result he becomes fated to grow up into a ruthless murderer, which prompts the time-traveling hero Cable to visit from the future to kill him as a child, which in turn forces Deadpool to wake up and start caring again. It’s gross in slightly different ways to the first movie, is still funny and a bit more high-concept, tipping even more into the sillier side of things whenever things threaten to become too meaningful (maybe preparing the character for his entrance into the MCU).
Oh, and then Vanessa comes back to life in a post-credit scene, and then by the third film they have broken up, but at the end of the third film it’s implied they might get back together again. Blah blah blah.
Deadpool & Wolverine is why I watched all these movies in the first place, not because I was hopeful that I’d actually enjoy but because I am an unfortunate sucker for the sort of continuity- and nostalgia-porn that this movie is, with it’s overload of cameo appearances from previous films. I don’t expect to like it, but I still want to see it, which is a probably a pretty self-defeating attitude.
Hugh Jackman is back as Wolverine, which is fine, I guess, although I’m not enthusiastic about Marvel Studio’s apparent approach to gaining the rights to X-Men movies, which seems to be to just bring the actors back from the Fox films and to either revisit that universe or introduce multiversal variants, rather than to do anything actually new. I mean, Hugh Jackman is a good actor, obviously, and he’s good in the part, but after pushing things to the limit in Logan there’s really no where else for the character to go that takes it beyond an experience of just comfortably familiar viewing, even if he is wearing a more comic-book inspired costume.
The plot, such as it is, involves Deadpool finding out from the TVA (a timeline monitoring organisation introduced in the Loki series) that his universe will soon die because Wolverine died (in Logan), and then trying to find a way to stop this from happening. This involves finding another Wolverine to help him, this one pulled from a universe where Wolverine was a big failure. They end up in the Void (an out-of-linear-time limbo also introduced in Loki) where they run into a bunch of cameos from previous movies. These include Chris Evans as Johnny Storm from the two 2000s Fantastic Four movies (both bad movies), Jennifer Garner from Daredevil and Elektra (both bad movies), Wesley Snipes from the Blade trilogy (which I have never seen), Channing Tatum as Gambit (an unproduced movie), and more. There’s also a whole bunch of alternate versions of Deadpool, including a woman, an Indian guy, some kids, a dog, etc. It’s basically a mash-up of all the worst things that the recent focus on multiverse stories keeps giving us, which seems to be fun when it involves Spider-Man, but not at any other time.
Because Deadpool’s whole thing is self-referential snark, there is some fun to be had here, but mostly it’s kind of tedious. I guess I’m glad to have watched the movies, but the prospect of Deadpool (and maybe even Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine?) returning for future Avengers movies does nothing to re-ignite my wanting interest in the MCU.
The Tomorrow War
And speaking of mediocre (we were talking about that, weren’t we?) I streamed The Tomorrow War this month, which was a big deal of a film on Prime a couple of years ago. Watching the movie’s Pitch Meeting (a Youtube series I like you can find it here) made me not particularly interested in watching it, but then I found out that the co-star is Yvonne Strahovski, who also co-starred in Chuck, a goofy but comedy-espionage show that I recently binged my way through. That prompted me to have a look.
Well, The Tomorrow War is as silly as I thought it would be, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but its execution is pretty flat, and so the movie never rises above serviceable. It’s got a likeable star in Chris Pratt and a silly but innovative concept (human soldiers from the future come to present to recruit more manpower in its war against aliens), and competent action scenes.
But the movie never goes anywhere interesting with any of this. The aliens are the standard dime-a-dozen ruthless murder machines that we always get in these stories (see also Alien, A Quiet Place, Fallen Skies, Starship Troopers, etc) including a Queen Alien that all the males will do anything to protect, and if you kill it you can more or less put an end to the threat. The characters are flat and unengaging, with only J.K. Simmons (unsurprisingly) as the estranged father of Pratt’s character showing any conspicuous personality.
Where it tries to be interesting is by having Chris Pratt’s character Dan Forester (a former Green Beret and biology teacher) have to team up with his grown daughter in the future (Strahovski), and that being hindered by her resentment of him abandoning their family, which from his perspective has not happened yet, and which he can never imagine doing. The film aims for an emotional payoff at the end when Pratt returns from the future committed to not allowing his family to break down. But it doesn’t make much sense because we or he never know why he left his family in the “first place”. For all we can see, everything was going great with them, and at the end of the movie, that hasn’t changed at all. Thus his newfound resolve to never abandon them just reads generic good wishes, presumably the same sort he had when he got married in the first place.
There’s a lot of other things that are just silly as well. For instance, there’s a malfunction when Pratt and the rest of his squad are being sent into the future, and they end up arriving hundreds of feet into the air, causing most of them to plunge to their deaths. But fortunately, Dan and his friends (who are all standing together) fall into a rooftop swimming pool which means it makes perfect sense that they survive falling from hundreds of feet in the air.
And then at another point the main characters have to critical information about how to save humanity from an alien apocalypse from a kid in Dan’s science class who is really into volcanoes, while little things like the government or the US military prove to be nearly useless.
It’s all so ridiculous. But all of that would have been manageable if the storytelling itself was more dramatic, more fun, more emotional, more…something.
Tales of the Batman: Gene Colan vol. 1
In the world of comics, I picked up some stuff at the library, including this Batman collection featuring artwork by the great Gene Colan. The stories are from the early 1980s, and are by mostly stalwart Gerry Conway, but also the likes of Doug Moench and Paul Levitz. It’s fun stuff but because it only collects the issues that Colan actually worked on, there are various stories that you only get portions of–like part of Poison Ivy’s scheme to take control of Bruce Wayne’s company, or part of a bunchy of business with Man-Bat. There is a full blown vampire story in which both Batman and Robin become full-fledged vampires for a little while, which is kind of wacky. Anyway, it’s fun to read, but I’m glad I got it at the library rather than spending lots of money on it.
Planet Hulk vol. 1
And I almost forgot about this but I also read the first half of the Planet Hulk saga from my Ultimate Graphic Novel Collection of Marvel books that I got a while ago. Unfortunately, my collection is a bunch of random purchases and I don’t have the second half, but given that I almost forgot about this book completely when putting together this post, I guess I won’t be that cut-up about it. Anyway, this is the book about what happens when a bunch of the Marvel brain-trust decide that the Hulk is just too dangerous and send him off to space to live on an idyllic planet by himself. Of course he gets knocked off course and winds up serving as a big-time space gladiator. It’s the story that was very loosely adapted as Avengers: Age of Ultron and Thor: Ragnarok in the MCU.
What do I think of the comic? It’s fine, I guess. There’s a lot of pulp sci-fi nuttiness, there’s some pathos, and there’s loads of Hulk smashing. But it’s been a long time since the Hulk was a favorite character of mine (we’d have to go back to the days when Bill Bixby was wearing his stretchy pants on prime time TV for that), and in general the stories that I want to read aren’t the sort of stories that naturally fit well with the Hulk as a protagonist. Overall I’m happy to have read it but it’s unlikely I’ll go seeking out Part 2.
Maybe if it shows up at the library or something.
And that’s it for now. We’re well into December as I write this which means that Christmas is nigh. With our particular family schedule at the moment, this actually will constitute things slowing down rather than speeding up, so I’m looking forward to it on multiple levels!
I hope this month and all that it involves is something you are looking forward to as well, and will catch up again next time on all my random viewings.
