Another crazy month.  

I mean, life always feels crazy, it always feels busy, but in August I actually went on a trip to India at the same time that my wife went on a trip to Africa. I came back before she did, so I was mostly just hanging out with my daughter who is the only one (out of the three) who is currently living at home.  And yeah, doing work and stuff like that.

And I watched and read stuff. But before I get there, look at this nutty graffiti I saw in India.

Darth Vader is looking like some sort of wrestler, isn’t he?

Anyway, amongst other things, the month included opportunities to revisit two of my favorite movies.

Isle of Dogs

Before this last month, I’d only ever seen this movie once, on the plane. I loved it then, and I’m happy to report that after rewatching it, I love it still. It’s a stop-motion comedy-drama which takes place in a near-future Japan where a disease prompts voices in the government to banish all dogs in the country to “Trash Island”.  The story is about how the nephew of the official behind the decree sneaks to the island to find his dog, the first one who was ever sent there.  The boy, Atari Kobayashi, ends up adopted by a pack of dogs (Chief, Rex, King, Duke and Boss), who take it upon themselves to protect Atari and try to help him reunite with his beloved pet.

The heart of the story is Chief, voiced by Bryan Cranston, a stray dog who has a painful relationship with humans, who in spite of himself is comes to see Atari as his boy, and himself as Atari’s dog. 

All of this is on the backdrop of a world that as Wes Anderson as anything else you might find.  Anderson is a filmmaker that brings a strong look and tone to his work, and that’s evident in Isle of Dogs (it seems that the stop-motion animation approach really allows for that).  The story is quirky and imaginative but with the right amount of heart.

In addition to Bryan Cranston, the voice cast includes such luminaries as Bill Murray, Ed Norton, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johannsen, and lots of others, including Yoko Ono, of all people, as a character called Yoko Ono, thought herself.

Superman, the Movie

In the wake of James Gunn’s recent Superman movie, my son-in-law, a young guy who is by no means a movie or comic book aficionado, expressed interest in this classic presentation of the character from the 70s, starring Christopher Reeve.

If you are like my son-in-law, you might not know how much of a big deal this movie was back in the day. Personally, I prefer the more modern portrayals of Superman that you get with David Corenswet and Tyler Hoechlin, but there is no disputing that Christopher Reeve is by far the most iconic adaptation of the character.  And his performance is rightly lauded for how skilled it is—he does an excellent job distinguishing his two personas, and it’s especially impressive to see how smoothly he transitions between the two in a moment where Clark briefly considers revealing the truth to Lois. 

This movie is the very first big budget blockbuster comic book movie.  There had been other cinematic depictions of characters like Superman and Batman and others before this, but this was the first one that was made in the post-Star Wars world, where science fiction special effects had taken a big leap forward in creating genuinely fantastical visuals in a way that felt real and immersive.

I think Reeve, and director Richard Donner, did the very best job they possibly could have given the character that Superman was at that point in time. The more grounded take where Clark is actually the “real” person didn’t come along for another decade or so. So given that, the movie does an excellent job bringing Superman and his world to life. There is a genuine humanity, optimism and hope to things that I love.  Other superhero films that have come since have gone further with all of these things, but Superman, the Movie is really where it all started.

KPop Demon Hunters

You may be aware of this little mini-cultural phenomenon.  KPop Demon Hunters is an animated movie that came out this year on Netflix and soon became that service’s most streamed movie ever.  It’s about a three-person K-pop girl band called Huntr/x, who are the latest iteration of a legacy of guardians who protect the earth from demons using a combination of music and martial arts.  However, secretly one of the girls, Rumi, is secretly part demon, a fact she keeps hidden from her bandmates, holding on to the hope that when the demons are fully defeated it will erase this part of her heritage.

As Huntr/x approaches their ultimate victory, a complication emerges in the form of the Saja Boys, a competing K-pop act made up of five boys who are secretly demons, come to steal away Huntr/x’s fans (a main source of their power). The Saja Boy’s leader is Jinu, a former human with a haunted past, who may or may not be on the road to redemption when he and Rumi begin to fall in love.

It’s all profoundly goofy, of course, but there is a lot to recommend about this movie. It’s got great animation, a very catchy soundtrack (some of the songs have just been in my head when I’ve woken up from time to time, and I don’t actually know them very well) and does a nice job dealing with themes like shame, depression and identity. I don’t feel like watching the movie has swept me up into its cultural craze, but I appreciate the experience and the loving pressure from my daughters who wanted me to watch it.

Elementary

Aside from movies, I started watching this series on a semi-whim, and have gotten halfway through the first season. This the other modern-day take on Sherlock Holmes to come out in the early 2010s (debuting a couple of years after Sherlock), and features Jonny Lee Miller as the famous detective, in this case a recovering drug addict whose father has shipped him to New York and employed a “sober companion” to help him in his recovery. This turns out to be Joan Watson (Lucy Liu), a disgraced surgeon who now works helping addicts in the initial stages of finding their way I life after getting off drugs. Of course, in Sherlock’s case, this involves accompanying the man in his work consulting with the New York Police Department, using his extraordinary powers of observation and deduction to help solve crimes.

Just as much as Sherlock came out of the British TV tradition of movie-length mystery stories packaged in short seasons that came out every year or two, Elementary is very much a product of the media landscape around it. It’s an American show produced for network TV, and so it ran for seven seasons on a fairly regimented schedule for 20+ episodes each. Episodes generally tell done-in-one mysteries while slowly building larger storylines about the characters and their backstories. I haven’t finished the first season yet, so I assume that the series will also develop season-long plot lines that burn slowly for most of the year but then hit major turning points at the season finales, but that remains to be seen.

Anyway, shows like this depend a lot on the chemistry of the actors, as much or more so than how well the individual mysteries work. So far, Elementary is working pretty well. Miller’s Sherlock is an incredibly annoying person, and Liu’s Watson has the patience of a saint, but both are interesting and watchable characters. And the mysteries have usually got enough surprises in them to keep your attention. It’s nowhere near as flashy as Sherlock was when it started out, but we all know how that show sort of fell apart toward the end, so who knows, maybe slowi and steady will win the race.

DuckTales

After my daughter successfully got me into such animated fare as Avatar the Last Airbender, Gravity Falls, Infinity Train and Over the Garden Wall (and to a lesser degree, Clone Wars), somehow we started watching the 2017 revival of DuckTales. Rebooting a series that I remember watching from time to time back in the 80s. The story of both shows involves the misadventures of Uncle Scrooge McDuck alongside his grandnephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie. Unlike the original, the revival features different actors and distinct personalities for the young ducks, which took me a bit to get used to, but once I did I think it works pretty well. Just like with Elementary, I’m about halfway through the first season so far (of three), and it’s clear that while episodes generally tell fun self-contained stories there are several plot lines that are building up which presumably will pay off before the season ends. All that to say, I’m enjoying the show–it provides conveniently bite-sized entertainment that is a lot of fun but not particularly taxing.

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret by Benjamin Stevenson

I also read a book! Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret is a mystery by Benjamin Stevenson. I had previously read his Everyone On This Train is a Suspect, and as you might guess this is another work in the same series, in which mystery writer Ernest Cunningham narrates his experience with the mysteries that life throws in his path. Stevenson via Cunningham constantly talks about the tropes of mysteries in these works, pointing how even when things develop in surprising ways in his stories, they still follow the rules that readers have come to expect. In this case, those rules aren’t just those of murder mysteries, but also of “Christmas specials”, as the story describes itself as just that.

I won’t go too much into the plot right here except to say it’s got all the elements you’d expect–impossible murders, suspicious suspects, escalating investigations and clever deductions. It’s a breezey read and I basically finished it in a day or so, mostly as I travelled home from India. Lots of fun.

I also read some comics this past month–Star Trek comics, read digitally, from a pack I bought recently on Humble Bundle.

Star Trek New Visions

Thos comics included the entire run of New Vision stories by writer-artist John Byrne, released back in 2014-2018. These were actually “photo novels” which used remixed and edited imagery from the original series to tell brand new stories. The comic series roughly mimicked the format of original Star Trek show by featuring largely standalone adventures episodes, mostly one per issue.

The results are pretty impressive–it’s easy to imagine a lot of the time that what you are reading is actually from an episode of the show, and a lot of the adventures are compelling in their own right. Of course, as is the case with a lot of tie-in comics, there is a strong “fan fiction” vibe that comes across, as many of the stories are sequels or tie-ins to real episodes. So as a result the stories are full of appearances of the likes of Gary Seven, Gary Mitchell, Number One, Leila Kolami, Harry Mudd and lots of others.

This of course is not what the original series was like.

But, I am a fan of the show so I do enjoy content like this, at least to some degree, when it’s done well. But after reading a whole bunch of issues in a row (there are 20+ issues here), it gets a little tiring.

Star Trek vol 1 – Godshock, Star Trek Volume 2 – The Red Path, Star Trek Defiant volume 1, Star Trek Day of Blood

Way more fan servicey and with much more mixed results is a few volumes that collect issues from a couple of concurrent series that tell connected stories, written by Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing (on one title) and Christoper Cantwell (on the other), with a variety of artists. The primary thrust of things is that Kahless, the emperor of the Klingons who is the clone of the founder of the civilisation (who debuted in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation) has gotten into his head to seize the powers of the various god-like beings that lurk around the Star Trek universe and use them to conquer everything. Consequently, the Wormhole Aliens (aka the Prophets from Deep Space Nine) return Benjamin Sisko the regular universe (following his fate at the end of his series) to deal with it. He gathers a special hand-picked crew and gets access to a nifty new ship, the Theseus, to carry this mission out. Worf is with him at first but a disagreement causes him to spin-off into his own series, Star Trek Defiant, where he has his own hand-picked crew with the goal of addressing the problem in his own way. Both series come together for the Day of Blood crossover, which resolves the whole Kahless story and sets up all the characters for their continuing adventures (as both series were ongoing).

Anyway, all this plot is fine for what it is, and it is certainly dynamic and exciting, but what takes this from a Star Trek story that I can take seriously to one I have a hard time with is the overwhelming focus on legacy characters who don’t necessarily feel like they fit into the story. So for instance, Sisko’s crew includes Data, Beverly Crusher, Tom Paris, Scotty, a descendant of Hoshi Sato, and Shaxs (from Lower Decks). Worf’s crew, on the other hand, includes Spock, B’Elanna Torres, Ro Laren, Sela (alternate-timeline Tasha Yar’s half-Romulan daughter) and Lore. There are a couple of other original characters, but hopefully you can see what I mean by just how overstuffed it was, and you can imagine how many narrative hoops had to be put into place to get the likes of Spock, Sela and Lore onto Worf’s ship!

On top of that, some of the characterisations of the crews are handled incredibly clumsily. Ro and B’Elanna spend their time sniping at each other for their differing relationships with the Maquis, which is annoying given the life and death circumstances everyone is in. And B’Elanna and Tom are like this as well, when they each discover that the other one join their respective crew without talking to each other first.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Too Long a Sacrifice

A story I liked better was this Deep Space Nine miniseries from 2020, written by brothers Scott and David Tipton, with art by Greg Scott. This just just told a “regular” Star Trek story, set during the course of the Deep Space Nine TV series about an investigation of a murder that has some link to the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. This is precisely the kind of story that could have been an episode of Deep Space Nine, involving the whole regular cast but featuring Odo particularly, with special emphasis on his relationship with a guest character–a Betazoid (ie telepathic) Federation investigator assigned to assist Odo solve the crime.

Of course, there is tension as a result, and ultimately the characters work through their differences and unravel the mystery, revealing a reasonably clever solution at the end. It’s not revolutionary, but nor is it just taking the opportunity to use the comic to tour around the Star Trek universe to make nerds like me get all excited about things. Instead, it’s an entirely original story that is just set in the familiar world of Deep Space Nine (sometime from the fifth season onward, based on the uniforms), which is pretty much exactly what I want from a comic book called Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Plus it’s got some nice moody art which fits the vibe well.