"Accomplishments"
In theaters: With the conflict in Gaza boiling over in the news, Dune Part Two of course takes on a certain "current affairs" resonance, but obviously, this was going on even when the original book came out in 1965. Denis Villeneuve didn't set forth to discuss that particular piece of the Middle East's history (not at the pace such movies are made), but he DID set out to make a Dune adaptation for our time, and one grounded in Frank Herbert's actual themes. The old joke, of course, is less aware audiences thinking Dune is a Star Wars riff, but I think Villeneuve amplifies just how Herbert was making an anti-Star Wars, or rather, an anti-Hero's Journey. He was on record saying he hated Campbell's reductive opinion of story-telling, and when you compare Dune to its closest surface analog, Star Wars, which is BLATANTLY working from Campbell's formula, you'll see what I mean. It's not that Paul doesn't want to answer the hero's call - this he fulfills willingly - it's that he refuses the call to become a TYRANT. The character changes made to Chani are the overt voice of this idea, convinced that all this Messiah business is propaganda and that the concept of a Messiah is dangerous and radicalizing (providing the most humor this time around is Javier Bardem's Stilgar, but he's the zealot who brings this idea out the best). Indeed, the "Chosen One" narrative is explicitly propaganda in the book and film, an artificial construct designed to rule through religious fervor. Ultimately, Paul does have to answer the call and we're supposed to take a step back. He's no longer the hero our Campbell/Hollywood-trained minds made him out to be. The novel's purists will hate the changes made (although I think what they did with Alia was clever and made the story more immediate than spreading events over years, but am still not sure why changes were made to the final fight), but I think they're made to speak to the moment (good), or to set up a third chapter (not so good, but let's unpack that). If there is to be a Part Three, which is certain given this one's reception, it will likely have elements of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune (why else secretly cast an adult Alia?), and Part Two's changes do seem to prepare the way for elements in those books in a way the original novel didn't. It does also mean that the film ends with a lack of closure, just like Part One did. Still, these are immaculately constructed films, making some dense material understandable and even, judging from the current meme-frenzy, iconic.
At home: The DCEU's Aquaman was already a lot like the MCU's Thor, so it makes it even more obvious than otherwise that they're doing The Dark World with The Lost Kingdom. Like that turned out so well. An evil ice kingdom, Arthur having to break his evil brother out of jail and team up with him, we've been here before. At times, the Aquaman sequel feels like a parody - the opening Aquadad montage, the cartoony non-human undersea characters, that super-cringy last shot before the credits - but it does have some fun with Topo and Orm not being used to operating on land (and there's a LOT of land in this, did anyone check if Arthur was out of the water for more than an hour?). Ocean Master, in fact, comes off better than Aquaman himself, and not just because Patrick Wilson is the better actor. He's just getting better action beats too. Dolph Lundgren is the opposite, a real drain whenever he's on screen. But the weak script asks the audience to take a lot of things as given, with logic and physics at times swimming right out the window. The dialog is extremely poor, veering into nonsense (if you have a crustacean using "spineless" as an insult, you're just not thinking things through). Tons of lazy exposition at various points, cheesy sentiment, and a real lack of wit. The comedy falls flat 90% of the time (Aquaman drinking piss? ha). There are some pretty pictures, sure, but when so much of a movie is CG, there's gonna be rough spots too, and the CG puppets that replace actors in action scenes really call attention to themselves. And so, with this, the DCEU finally dies, drowned in a bathtub. Been a long time coming.
The 2006 Aquaman TV pilot, often referred to as "Mercy Reef", features the FIRST surfer dude Aquaman in what can only be called a combination of Smallville and Baywatch. It's got its charms. They convincingly have a man swimming with sharks, and the superhero action (fast swimming mostly) isn't any better or worse than shows of its day. Had it gone to series, it would have had a couple of capable stars on board - Diamond Lou Phillips as Arthur's--pardon, "A.C.'s"-- human dad and Ving Rhames as his Atlantean mentor. Adrianne Palicki can count another notch on her geek cred punch card playing an evil mermaid assassin. There's an intriguing mystery concerning the Bermuda Triangle, even if the "Man in Black" in charge is a walking, talking trope. The weak spot is, well, Aquaman himself. Justin Hartley isn't a strong actor, even if you accept his rebel without a cause version of the Sea King. Like Smallville before it and Arrow after it, this would have been a series about BECOMING the hero of comics lore, so allowances have to be made for that. But questions remain as to whether Hartley could have carried the show on his swimmer's shoulders.
Part of Disney's unsuccessful early 2000s 2D animated output, Atlantis: The Lost Empire thus stands as an underrated adventure that blends Mike Mignola designs with a Moebius and Miyazaki aesthetics (the plot makes me think the makers definitely saw the latter's Castle in the Sky) in a steampunk-adjacent story that takes no prisoner, and indeed, may have the highest death toll of any Disney animated feature. It's a lot more adult than most (smokers, violence, a freaking femme fatale, and the looming shadow of the first World War. And while the adventure elements are strong, as a rag-tag group of explorers go down into hidden caverns under the Earth's surface to find the elusive lost world, it's really very funny too. Florence Stanley's iconic as the old bat who runs coms, Don Novello brings his "Father Guido Sarducci" voice to the explosives expert, and Phil Morris is surprisingly amusing as the Adonis-like doctor. James Garner, Leonard Nimoy, Jim Varney, John Mahoney, Claudia Christian... It's a great cast at the center of which is a great voice performance by Michael J. Fox. Some of the sharp turns at the end could have been foregrounded more, but most of the twists are shocking and well-earned, so it's a damn shame this didn't find its audience at the time. But that just means it's meant to be rediscovered.
Remedial in every way, Raiders of Atlantis isn't even streaming correctly - wrong aspect ratio and dumb AI-assisted subtitles - but I do have to give it points for having the temerity of producing this bonkers a plot. 11 years in 1983's future - for no real reason - Atlantis resurfaces and attacks rural Florida (actually, the Philippines), but how this premise quickly turns into a Mad Max rip-off, I'm not sure I'll ever truly fathom. From there, it's just wall-to-wall mayhem, guns and explosions with the occasional gory kill shot, sometimes using rubber heads that are too fake to be on screen that long. Lots and lots and lots of action to the point where you become deadened to it, so good thing Christopher Connelly and his partner are, I'm not sure what, some kind of mercenaries or something. The acting is poor, with bad dubs replacing certain voices, but I'm not sure the dialog can be said convincingly even by an Oscar winner - it's complete nonsense. Perhaps lines like "We're going around in circles." "What's wrong with circles?" could have pushed Raiders to cult status, but it's so badly MADE that I can't quite give it the "so bad it's good" label, especially since there's so little respite from gunfire. Just too dumb and loud.
Because My Lucky Stars is one of four Jackie Chan movies to come out in 1985 (including Police Story), you can well understand why he only shows up for the action scenes and is otherwise missing from the picture. But if he's in a scene, then you know it will be good. If he's not... ehh. Technically the second "Lucky Stars" film (a series of seven movies only connected by their cast, not their characters or plots), this one has director-actor Sammo Hung assemble his old gang from the orphanage to help Jackie save his partner who's a prisoner of a Tokyo crime gang. The comedy is broad, as you can expect from Chinese films of the era, but there are a lot of performers I like in there including Richard Ng, Eric Tsang, Yuen Biao and Bolo Yeung in a cameo role. However, the humor is also cringy as hell, with extended sexual harassment scenes after the boys meet Sibelle Hu's lady cop. The middle of the film sags as a result. But in terms of action, the so-called "Little Fortunes" really deliver. There's a Five Venoms joke I dearly love and the action beats, especially in the final confrontation, have a lot of ingenuity. This was a massive success in 80s Hong Kong, but in my 2020s living room, it hasn't aged so well.
In 2018, the Korean-Chinese story co-development project produced two films with the same premise - screw-up narcotics officers buy a restaurant as a cover to crack a case and have more success in the food biz than police work - which in Korea gave us the box office smash Extreme Job, and in China gave us Lobster Cop, which is weaker in every way. It feels like the Korean production saw this as a prestige film and filled it with name actors, gave them fully developed characters, and strong action beats. In comparison, Lobster Cop is like the abridged exploitation version. Its characters are shallower, its villains (almost all gay-coded for some probably ugly reason) don't have the clever plan despite it being suggested in the animated opening credits, and its comedy is broader and duller. Never mind the obnoxious soundtrack. It can't stand the comparison, but even if I hadn't seen Extreme Job, I would still object to a lot of this. I mean, they don't even make lobster, those are prawns. Pretty forgettable.
Cross The Mummy with Jurassic Park and West World and you get The Mummy Theme Park, which looks so homemade, it's a good thing it doesn't take itself seriously. As a spoof, it almost works, but eventually, its low resources bring it down. Despite starring American actors, they're all covered by bad dubs (cheap Italian cinema, amirite?). The protagonists are unlikable. The adolescent script gives us a lot of gratuitous nudity and the mummy is horny AF. The action is incredibly weak and the film is laden with bad models and even worse green screen. The editing is abrupt and amateurish. The music, annoying. If the movie has some redeeming value it's in its gonzo premise. A venal sheik unearths an Egyptian tomb and turns it into a theme park, complete with the actual mummies given life with science! (The movie doesn't seem to know mummies no longer have brains, that's the level this is playing at.) Of course, things go wrong, and the climax has some weird effects, but while I do like how slimy the gore is, a lot of those gore effects don't actually pay off. I've loved impossibly cheap horror comedies before, but it's a tightrope act to keep the audience invested. The Mummy Theme Park falls off the wire, unfortunately, but watch it with friends and it'll at least break its fall in a net.
Fata Morgana is the term for those heat mirages that make the landscape go blurry. It's also a Werner Herzog documentary (although, I often feel "non-fiction" would be a better label for his docs) that retells a Mayan creation myth, in German, using Saharan landscapes. The odd juxtapositions, an attempt to shoot a mirage of sorts, that of human history according to myth (Creation - Paradise - The Golden Age), Edens lost to eternity. The result is nature/archaeological photography, but including modern effluvia, objects despoiling the desert playing the roles of relics. It's the ancient world, but we're from the 100th Century. Herzog progressively includes more human beings - absent in Creation, then able to speak, and finally, performing - but it's in the absence of things that the film is most interesting. Not even so much the lack of people as the lack of CONTEXT. You're often asking, what happened here? And he gives you the time to reflect on the images and what they mean. Herzog sometimes takes breaks from the narrated tableaux for interviews with zoologists, and these moments are at odds with the rest (no matter how much I like watching a monitor lizard do its thing). Just Herzog being Herzog and getting distracted by stuff that suddenly interests him, I suppose. Bonus points for the Leonard Cohen tracks.
And now, this week's Companion Film. It had to be a short, I'm afraid, due to slim pickings... Robbie, British Transport Films' 13-minute second attempt at a PSA about not playing on the train tracks is apparently less gruesome than the original (I guess I gotta track down The Finishing Line now, or maybe not), but even when it cuts away at crucial moments, it's to let your imagination do the work instead, which might be as bad. Doctor Who's Peter Purves acts as presenter (so he's more appropriately called Blue Peter's Peter Purves) about a boy who loves trains, but gets hit by one after his friends call him a sissy or something. It's maudlin as all get out, and I hate that they covered the kids' dialog with Purves' storybook narration, and yet didn't do it to the mom and the "coppers. I mean, here in Canada, we had our own train crossing PSAs, but there wasn't THIS MUCH fearmongering. Then again, I did play on the tracks a lot, so British Transport may have a point. Might be worth it for the "I can't believe they just did/said that!" moments.
Books: Charles Yu explores Asian-American identity in Interior Chinatown, a novel that uses the script-writing format to cleverly confuse the roles given to Asian actors in American film and TV with racial dynamics in the real world, and the possible impact those dynamics can have on one's identity. Tending to the more universal then, do you consider yourself the protagonist of your own story? Or are you just a special guest star in someone else's? Or even... an extra? And does your personal privilege (if you're white, male, straight, etc.), or lack thereof, dictate how you perceive your role? It's absurdist comedy and a fun satirical take on mainstream TV (using a reductive cop show called Black and White to frame the main character's story, ambition and disappointments), but it's also a personal story for Yu (is this why it's written in the 2nd person, a pun on "you"?) who brings his family issues into the narrative as he did in the previous How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. Yu takes no prisoners and even attacks his own point of view in open court by the end. A very clever postmodern piece.
In Nino Cipri's first novella about an IKEA-type story that is the locus on all dimensions, Finna, we heard about Derek, an employee who SHOULD have been on the adventure, but failed to show up for his shift. Defekt is his story. You might assume that the disliked Derek would be the bad employee, contrasting with Finna's heroes, but no, come to think of it, they were very bad employees. So Derek is the model employee, the one who shows deep set company loyalty. His point of view reminded me of Convenience Store Woman's, but this is the "LitenVerse", so the reasons for it are naturally weirder. After Derek misses his first day of work, and all the interdimensional chaos, he's assigned to a team of specialists who track down furniture that's become alive in the wake of such events. Like I said. Oh and the entire team is made up of variant Dereks. In the underlayer, Cipri is also telling a strong story about identity, the dangers of tying it to your job, and how one person's defective is another's uniqueness to be embraced.
Collecting issues #241-250, Fantastic Four Visionaries: John Byrne Vol. 2 sees the writer-artist find his groove around issue 246, with a Doctor Doom two-parter that restores him to Latveria's throne and introduces Kristoff, his to-be-adopted son. After this (inclusively), the action is ramped up significantly, and Byrne seems to have more fun with the big, giant concepts. My impression is that he tried and failed to play with the toys as they were before this point (despite some strong adventures collected in the previous volume). A deposed Dr. Doom needed to be fixed, but what really drains the early issues in Vol.2 is the inherited character of Frankie Raye, a possible member after he gives her powers, but as part of a longer game to create his own Silver Surfer. She is irritating as all get out. The Thing reverting to a mud monster goes nowhere, as if he had to walk back this change when readers responded badly to it (he just never found a way to draw this version of Ben in an engaging way - just looks like an old man who lost his dentures. The "Outer Limits" style one-and-dones are middling. Where Byrne is more confidant is when involving powerful antagonists like Doom, Galactus and Gladiator. I started collecting the FF in the middle of his run, and the Visionaries collection is only now starting to show the promise of the issues that made me a fan.
RPGs: We've had a couple of action-plotty sessions of Torg Eternity lately, so it was time to give the players a bit of social. Last time, they discovered their official videographer was a Pan-Pacifican villain and now they're being chewed out by their boss because deepfakes have surfaced showing them involved in war crimes. So they're sent to a millionaire resort on China's Hainan Island, near the commercial campus where the fakes seem to have originated to clean up their mess (find proof that the images were manipulated and hopefully do so without drawing attention to themselves). This was inspired by an adventure called Deepfake in the Pan-Pacifica Delphi Missions book, but that scenario doesn't make the hotel resort setting and suggested NPCs to the investigation, so I had to build much of that from scratch, giving these a story reason to exist, either as complications or as helpful informants (but who was which?). The players had a great time play-acting as a douchebag tech bro and his entourage, I think, and solved the case without drawing a gun, even with Kanawa forces bearing down on them at the end. It's all because of a Betrayal cosm card, actually. These HAVE to be played when drawn, and so I kept an eye on who that player interacted with - who were HIS allies that could prove duplicitous. While I desperately wanted to make the old widow who took a shine to him some kind of deadly assassin, it couldn't work with the timeline, so it had to be the SHIFT agent assigned as their majordomo. And because they spot him colluding with the bad guys just before their exfil, they know not to run to the jetty where he was supposed to have left a boat, instead run back to the resort through the jungle and steal one for themselves... avoiding the police chase, the scripted Kanawa ambush and the big fire fight at the end! (It was time for bed anyway, so that worked out well for all concerned.)
Best bits: The Super-Wrestler saves a drowning dog by jumping into a pool from an upper level (while the douchebro - I mean, the Realm Runner - films it on his phone (keeping his cover). The Realm Runner zealot had not taken well to the chewing out and gave the bawss (Sebastian is in fact his uncle) a rant about how the missions seemed to have nothing to do with ousting invaders, so he had to be put in his place about not seeing the big picture. On the mission, it's the Monster Hunter who was most disgruntled. The others were partying and maintaining their cover while he was doing all the grunt work. The dudebro might have gotten useful information, but he was stuck with a gold digger while the Wrestler was keeping the other tech bro busy, never getting the signals that dudebro wanted their positions reversed. Hey, Wrestler just thought Runner needed a bit of female attention, having been raised in a bunker and all. It mostly played as a comedy, honestly, my favorite bits to play being the gold digger's frustration every time she sidled up to someone to find out they either weren't rich or not interested, and the token on the board simply called "Korean Guy" who was based on the K-pop singer Rain (called Storm, it's Torg, after all) frustrated that no one ever recognized him. The Monster Hunter managed to get a key card over a bunch of drinks, making infiltration much easier, and then once inside, the Realm Runner rolled high enough to also place a virus in the enemy's systems that corrupted their whole system.
Gaming: According to my notes, it was 10 years ago that I almost finished Lego Marvel Super Heroes, but had to quit due to bugs that prevented some tasks from being completed. This time, I'm tapping out at 99.3% and 8 gold bricks to go because they're all races, and I freaking hate Lego races. The controls are way too twitchy for them to be anything but frustrating, and I don't play games to RAISE my stress level. Air races races, and to a certain point, acrobatic ones feel absolutely impossible, though I'm sure with trial and error, I could eventually win them with the Silver Surfer (for road races, Ghost Rider's bike is easily the best). There's also a remote control car race that uses the OPPOSITE controls from every other race, baffling. But to give this old game a bit of a review: Like other Lego games, it's usually fun and amusing, with plenty of inside jokes for both comic and movie fans. In addition to the storyline levels, collecting bricks unlocks mini-missions in places like Dr. Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum and Marvel's offices. There's fighting, but you immediately respawn anyway, so they're more about creating obstacles to your puzzle solving. Aside from those dang races, I enjoy the game play, and love unlocking new mini-figs (Squirrel Girl shooting little squirrels is very fun, but you also get purse-fighting Aunt May and a Stan Lee that can Hulk out). I do hate the background music that plays in the city - it haunts my nightmares and I've taken to putting the TV on mute during free roam. 99.3% isn't bad; let's try again in 2034.
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