wasting time

Even More Seen for Halloween

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Hey, it’s Halloween time, which means I’m watching Halloweenish shows and movies. And I have even more opinions here in part 3, also known as “part last”. (Spoilers for everything)

The Innocents: This  from 1961 and stars Deborah Kerr. It’s adapted from the Turn of the Screw, just like Haunting of Bly Manor, but this keeps the original ambiguity about whether the ghosts are real or figments of the nanny’s imagination.

It’s pretty bloodless, in every way. Beautifully shot and acted, but bloodless.

Beyond the Black Rainbow: As a fan of Mandy, I dropped the director’s first movie into our Netflix queue right after we watched it. I loved this weird little art (school) movie, even though it’s full of wacky lighting and design choices. Plus, it features to slowest escape in the history of escapes. It’s more interesting than scary, and more fun than thrilling. Worth seeing on a quiet night.

Dracula (1979): Frank Langella is the sexiest Dracula of all time, pushing the plot of this film through all the usual beats with energy and presence that’s too often missing from these remakes. Plenty of actors go for, I don’t know, “stately.” But Langella gives the undead count real life.

Laurence Olivier plays Van Helsing, and his confrontation with his undead daughter is the most effective scene in the whole film. One of the better versions of this particular tale.

Horror of Dracula: Not the greatest version of this story, but it gets bonus points for being energetic and extremely clean. This movie has the tidiest Transylvanian vampire castle and the fakiest blood in movie history.

It’s still fun. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing would never seem to be having this much fun in later movies. Worth seeing, I guess.

Something Wicked This Way Comes: I’d seen this several times on cable when I was younger, and while I’d remembered the plot pretty well, I’d forgotten how beautiful this movie is. Autumn hillsides, golden sunsets, steam trains in the night, leaf-blown streets, and the fanciest library small town America has ever seen.

Storywise, this is about an autumn carnival that visits a small Indiana town, granting people’s dearest wishes in ways that curse them and make them part of the carnival. Those elements are a little smug and moralizing, but the rest of the film makes up for it.

The dialog is self-consciously homey and elevated, and the adult actors really make a go of it. Jonathan Pryce, playing carnival owner Mr. Dark, really makes his mark with the lines he’s been given. The two child actors, the actual leads in the story, don’t fare as well, but they’re still a lot of fun.

It’s an odd movie, and I wish someone would remake it, self-conscious dialog and all.

Warlock: This was a big hit when it was released, and it still holds up today. Julian Sands is a warlock in pre-Revolution Boston who escapes to the future, and Richard E. Grant is the Witchcatcher who follows. Lori Singer is the bright, energetic, midriff-baring modern woman who gets caught in the action.

Plot wise, it’s a standard mix of fish-out-of-water and thriller elements, and the unusual magic makes the plot surprising. I honestly thought this movie would make a top-tier movie star out of Julian Sands, but oh well.

It’s not a horror movie, really, but it is dark urban fantasy, and it still holds up.

Border: Not sure why someone put this on a list (at #2) of best horror films of the last ten years, but it’s absolutely a good film. Not horror, but genuinely good.

Tina is a Border control agent who is prosthetics-ugly and who has the ability to smell people’s fear, shame, and other emotions. She believes she’s been born with chromosomal damage that has left her deformed, but one day she meets someone just like herself, and slowly comes to realize she’s not human at all.

This is more drama than fantasy, and more fantasy than horror, but it’s a terrific movie. Thank you, northern Europe and your fascination with trolls.

More Seen for Halloween

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Hey, it’s Halloween time, which means I’m watching Halloweenish shows and movies. And I have even more opinions here in part 2. (Spoilers for everything)

His House: If it weren’t for the next film on this list, this would have been the best Halloween movie we’ve seen this year so far. It was impeccable.

The story centers on two Sudanese refugees seeking asylum in England who are given a space in a run-down housing project while they wait to hear if they’ll be sent back home to die. Except this little flat is full of ghosts, and it takes a while for the refugees to realize the ghosts arrived with them.

Most of the incidents and visuals related to the hauntings are familiar, but the story context added real meaning to the common tropes, and the way their memories and hallucination sequences were shot were startling and beautiful. Highly recommended.

The Devil’s Backbone: We were a few years late to this one, and it’s easily the best thing we’ve seen for this holiday (so far). More of a slow-burn thriller than horror film, the story takes place in a Spanish orphanage, surrounded by dry, barren fields, near the end of the Spanish Civil War. The orphans are the children of leftists fighting a losing war against the fascists, and they have few teachers, little food, and even less hope.

And right in the center of the courtyard is an unexploded bomb.

What’s more, one of the boys that the teachers believe has run away, has been murdered and is haunting the place.

This movie is beautiful in an austere way, and it’s full of wonderful characters. If you haven’t seen this yet, check it out.

The Call: South Korea has been hitting it out of the park in the last couple of decades, and they’ve been doing it without the reliance on established IP that has everyone complaining about modern American films. This movie is about two women, one living in the past and one living in the future, who can talk to each other over a single phone line. One is a virtual prisoner inside her home. The other wants to help her be free.

The girl in the future has nothing to offer except information. She can play new music from the girl in the past’s favorite band into the receiver, or look up news articles or whatever. She can tell her new friend what’s about to happen.

The girl in the past has all the agency. She can save lives, change history, do whatever she wants with the information her friend gives her. Except the girl in the past is actually deeply troubled–there’s a good reason she was kept locked away–and once they stop being friends, the girl in the future has no defense against her except the information she gives.

It’s clever as hell and a lot of fun. Check this one out.

Nightbooks: This is a terrific little horror movie aimed at kids—”gateway horror”–some have called it, and it thankfully doesn’t lean too hard on the moralizing and just-so lessons that often plague supernatural tales for kids. 

Starring Krysten Ritter(‘s wardrobe), it’s the story of a boy who loves horror who gets abducted by an evil witch’s magical apartment. Ritter, as the witch, demands a scary story every night, and the boy (along with another abducted kid who’s stuck with all the household chores) spend every day exploring the mysteriously expansive apartment, searching for a way to escape, when he should be writing.

Which, in its way, is like me and the internet.

This one is great for kids who are comfortable being scared, and also for adults who don’t mind kiddish things and/or love fantastic costuming and production design.

Come True: Ever watch a movie that was wonderful–not because they threw around a bunch of money, but because it was full of interesting ideas and visuals you had never seen before, and it seemed to be leading to something wild and profound…

Only to have it absolutely shit the bed in the last scene?

I really wanted to recommend this movie. it’s beautiful. It has a bunch of haunting visuals, and the set up is fascinating.

Essentially, a homeless teenage girl, who suffers from strange nightmares, signs up for a sleep study because it would give her a little pocket money and a place to sleep indoors.

But of course, there’s more going on than she realizes. Than any of them realizes. And there’s an extended scene at the end, where the girl is sleepwalking, that is so interesting and original, so beautiful in the way that it’s shot–and eerie, too–that I really hoped for something strange and profound at the end.

Nope. 

So very disappointing.

Wildling: There have been a number of movies since The Frighteners where a girl is being held prisoner there, and you root for her to get her freedom, only to discover that, whoops! she’s actually a deadly killer and her captors were right to lock her away. I just talked about one above.

It’s a fun twist the first time you see it, but as it comes around again and again, it sort of starts to feel gross. 

In this film, the girl turns out not to be a sadistic murderer, but a sort of werewolf who never changes back. After hinting strongly that this young girl, newly set loose on a small town, is some kind of threat, the film quickly pivots to Actually, it’s people who are the REAL monsters. 

Which is fine. That works for me, sometimes. 

The climax centers on our teenage monster girl–now a few months pregnant–evading a group of good ol’ boy hunters who make it their business to exterminate Wildlings whenever they turn up. And of course their leader is the same guy who held her captive all her life, now convinced he was wrong to try to rehabilitate her. And all our wilding monster girl wants to do is escape with her baby to the far northern tundra, which is apparently a wildling’s natural habitat. 

But the whole time I was watching the end of this movie, I was thinking main character’s love interest. Someone, somewhere, was going to ask him about his first time, and he was going to be either drunk enough or dumb enough to tell the truth, starting with “Well, she’d just been rescued from the attic prison where a creep had kept her locked away her whole life, and my family was the first people besides her captor she ever talked to,” and it would end with “then she sprouted fur and fangs, and fled into the wilderness with our baby.” 

I mean, I’m almost more interested in a movie about that.

A Chinese Ghost Story: I’m spending the entire month of October watching Halloween movies, and I’m sure there are horror fans out there who think much of what I’m watching isn’t actually horror. I’ve met my share of “If it’s not rated R, it’s not horror” folks and lets just say we don’t agree on much.

This movie has ghosts! And an ancient tree demon! And reanimated corpses! And wandering murderers! 

It’s also a comedy and a romance, plus, it has Daoist monks who can do magic, wire fu sword fights, a clueless but good-hearted hero who blunders through magical dangers, not to mention the odd bit of elaborate slapstick.

it’s great fun, and pleasant to be reminded of 80’s Hong Kong films, where every forest path had a blazing blue light just over the next rise. 

One Lane Bridge: This six episode series out of New Zealand combines supernatural elements with a police procedural, which are chocolate and peanut butter to me. Season one covers the arrival of a new junior detective to a small town with absolutely amazing landscapes and a bridge that causes some people (including our new protagonist) to have prophetic visions.

Will these visions help our hero solve the murder that opens the season? Well, a little. Mostly, it will send him visions that he will misinterpret, make him think he’s losing his grip, act out recklessly, and nearly tank his career. 

I’ll confess that I occasionally had a bit of trouble telling characters apart, but that’s a common issue for me. It’s a solid show that gets a lot of things right. 

Seen for Halloween

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Hey, it’s Halloween time, which means I’m watching Halloweenish shows and movies. And I have opinions. (Spoilers for everything)

The Shining (1980): Supposedly one of the greatest horror movies of all time, this really hasn’t held up. Kubricks’ direction is terrific. The long, slow steadicam glide is unsettling here in a way it just isn’t in other films (and I don’t understand film well enough to know why. Soundtrack, maybe?). The performances are solid… except for Jack Nicholson.

When I was younger, people loved Jack Nicholson because he was doing that Jack Nicholson thing, with the raised eyebrows and the snide way of talking. Late in the movie, when he’s slipping into full-blown family killer mode, it works. Earlier scenes not so much. Kubrick let him mug his way through scene after scene, and instead of enjoying a movie I hadn’t revisited in a while, I sat there wondering how this dude managed to remain a movie star, and how he kept pulling in so many Oscar nominations.

Give me the Nicholson of Chinatown, not this. 

Insidious: I was surprised to see this was made for only one and a half million dollars. Watching it a second time, I was disappointed in how it looked–even Stranger Things put more effort into their otherworldly environment. But on a million and a half dollar budget? Hat’s off. 

It was also full of terrific performances, and the scares were clever, esp compared to the torture porn films this picture made unfashionable. And that scene with the mask? Thumbs up: solid scares.

Muppets Haunted Mansion: Here’s the deal: you watch this, you get great puppets, dad jokes, cute songs, and fantastic design. It’s the same thing the Muppets have been doing on screen for decades, and if you liked it in the past, you’ll like it even more now that the money they’re spending goes so much further. Plus celebrity guest stars having a blast playing broad comedy.

My only gripe: they mixed the music too loud, so it could be really difficult to make out the lyrics of the songs. I can’t tell if that’s a currently fashionable production choice (since it seems to come up in lots of different shows) or if it’s a problem with my aging hearing (since it seems to come up in lots of different shows).

Midnight Mass: I know reaction has been mixed on this, but I thought this was brilliant. Lot of folks thought it was talky, but sometimes I want to hear quality dialog, even in the horror genre. Reveal the characters with it. Create verisimilitude with it. Give the actors something really juicy to do. That’s why Child of Fire was so full of people telling their own stories, after all. I love books and shows where the characters tell stories that reveals who they are. 

Another thing it had going for it was that it was gorgeous. Too much horror ignores visual appeal–or goes in the other direction to show only things that are repellant–but Mike Flanagan wisely seized on the opportunity to show truly gorgeous skies over Crockett Island, and that’s important. It establishes a world is worth fighting for, or at least living in, and it provides the contrast that makes the gross and/or repellant stuff stand out.

More beauty with terror, please. Make the forests look deep and green. Make the castles gothic and beautifully ruined. Pay attention to the environment. Too many horror movies cast good looking actors, then make everything else ugly or gross. 

The Changeling (1980):

In a previous blog post, I’ve complained about ghost-oriented murder mysteries, because having a detective who depends on clues fed to them by a vengeful spirit makes your detective seem like they don’t detect very well. (I was writing specifically about the new Nancy Drew show, which I have since revisited and will talk about in another post).

However! When the lead character is not a detective, but is still driven by a haunting to look into a terrible crime, well, that’s a genre I really like.

In The Changeling, George C. Scott is a famous NYC composer who suffered a terrible tragedy and retreats to Seattle, to teach at the UW and compose in an overlarge house maintained by the Historical Society which turns out to be haunted by the spirit of a murdered child. 

The haunting stuff is all the ordinary things you’re used to seeing in a ghost house movie–opening doors, secret rooms, the works. It’s the murder mystery where this movie stands out. 

I should say that I like George C. Scott, but he never seems all that affected by the moving objects or thumps in the night. If Shelley Duvall’s Wendy Torrence lands on one end of the “frightened by all this spooky shit” bell curve, with her goggling eyes and wavering, one-second-from-fainting body language, Scott’s John Russell lands at the other end. He might be the most self-possessed hauntee in the history of non-comedic films.

Malignant: I really enjoyed this movie, but not as much as I should have. The buzz about it was that it had this gonzo twist that split audiences between those who noped out and those who thought it was new and weird and a goddam delight.

We fell into the second category. Unfortunately, it also felt a little flat. My wife kept saying “This is very TV” throughout, and not just because we kept recognizing the cast from Canadian SF shows. 

One of the downsides of enjoying scary movies is that you end up seeing a lot of the same things over and over. The figure in the mirror. The door that creaks open on its own. The frightened co-ed sprinting through the woods. I’ve talked often about having to forgive books, movies, or TV shows in order to enjoy them, and these old tropes are high on that list. Malignant managed to put shit on screen that I hadn’t seen in a horror movie before.

Then you have a climactic fight that feels small and same-y. When most of the participants are also character I don’t know and am not invested in, it takes the energy out of me. 

So, loved the movie but not as much as I wanted to. 

The Old Dark House: Before James Whale did Bride of Frankenstein, he made this little gem, about unlucky travelers forced to seek shelter from a (vividly portrayed) thunderstorm in a house filled with dangerous weirdos. 

It’s beautiful and a lot of fun. The camera work is inventive (for 1932) and we loved the characters, even the aggravated married couple. Great cast with terrific dialog (when they were given some, sorry Boris) and even though it’s not a horror film exactly, it was a perfect fit for the season. 

Binge-demic 3

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Continuing my Binge-demic posts, let me move backwards to the show I watched before Veronica Mars.

STRANGE LUCK

It’s weird that this show has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Not that it’s bad. It’s not. You could even call it pretty good. Still, a hundred percent? If I had to guess, it’s a distortion created by the fact that the show predates the site, but a number like that promises more than Strange Luck can deliver.

Simply put: It’s the 90’s, and every place anyone goes to is actually Canada, where they hose down the streets at night so the puddles reflect the multi-colored lights. Chance Harper is a freelance photojournalist who drives all over the city in his beater, snapping pictures of the stories he stumbles across. And he tries to help people.

As the sole survivor of a plane crash–in fact, he had no injuries at all–Chanse has been cursed by powerful luck. Not good or bad, but powerful. Where ever he goes, weird and/or dangerous shit happens, and he does whatever he can to help (and get a shot he can sell). To quote main character: “If I go to a restaurant, somebody chokes. If I walk into a bank, it gets robbed.”

I’ve said one thing over and over in in these posts: one of the most important aspects of these shows is the relationships between the series regulars. Strange Luck has only two regular supporting characters: his ex, the hot newspaper editor who buys Chance’s photos and the hot owner/operator of his favorite cafe who has a crush on him. And they’re both fine, although the cafe owner gets more interesting story lines.

Anyway, there are a lot of pitfalls for a show built on a premise of coincidences, but Strange Luck avoids all of them. It’s too bad it only lasted one season. With a larger, crunchier supporting cast, I think it would have done well. Past time for a remake, I think, with shorter seasons and the obligatory modern mythology.

Finally, at least one person has asked me how I watched the show, since it’s not available anywhere to stream. Sadly, I had to go to YouTube. It wouldn’t be my first–or my fifth–choice, but it wasn’t available elsewhere.

KIPO AND THE WONDERBEASTS

I knew what I was hoping for when I put on this show (based on online recommendations–all the new shows that I watch, esp the cartoons, drop into the schedule because people rave about them). I expected what I got. But I didn’t expect I would get so much, or that it would be as fun and charming as it was.

Let me clarify: I expected a kid-friendly apocalypse, unusual “monsters”, and a heroine who makes the world better by doing what everyone around her thinks is impossible: finding common ground with her enemies. What I got was exactly that, but in a charming, inventive, and enjoyable way.

BREAKING: Cartoons are so much better now than they were when I was a kid. Maybe it’s because modern shows have to compete with video games, so they can’t half-ass it the way they used to? Or maybe the half-assed cartoons are still out there, invisible to an old like me because they’re aimed at very young viewers, but modern creators trust older kids with more complex story lines?

But there’s no way that kid-me would have been offered a show with astronomy-loving wolves lead by a wolf named Billions (voiced by John Hodgman) and a second wolf named Billions (voiced by GZA). Nor would I have gotten a surprisingly good song listing everything the wolves have learned about the stars.

The visuals are solid. The circle of regulars have great relationships. The music is a goddam delight. If you have any stomach at all for kids animation, check this out. The third and final season comes out in less than a month.

BLACK LIGHTNING S3

I was going to keep this to two shows per post, but what the hell.

I also binged the latest Black Lightning season once it hit Netflix. Here’s the thing about this show. The actors are great. The premise of a family with several members having/struggling with superpowers is absolutely solid, and the series regulars have that powerful web of relationships I keep talking about.

Also, the overall plot of the season, involving a government crackdown on the small city of Freeland, where the show is set, is just right for this particular political and cultural moment.

I’ll admit that I’ve mostly given up on the DC superhero shows. At least, the 20+ season, one-a-week broadcast shows like Arrow, Supergirl, or The Flash. Those shows started off with a touch of joy to them. Even Arrow, which was grim from the start, had moments where Oliver used his skills in a way that gave the audience a little thrill. After all, part of the appeal of the superhero genre is power fantasy.

New shows like Stargirl brim with that sort of joy. Doom Patrol subvert the power fantasy expectation in funny and interesting ways. Black Lightning has always done a good job managing the precarious balance between enjoyable power fantasy and credible threat to the main characters.

This third season, with its government occupation, illegal experimentation, and foreign superpowered commandos, leans heavily toward the latter.

Still solid, though. I’m waiting for season four.

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Also, in case you didn’t know it, there are only a few days left to pick up ONE MAN, my dark fantasy crime thriller, as a $1.99 Kindle Monthly Deal. If you like books about desperation, magic, intrigue, expeditions to mysterious islands, giant skeletons, people living inside giant skeletons, creatures made of burning iron, vampire hobbits, and also the fear of failing the one person in the whole world who relies on you, take advantage of that deal right away.

Also, redux, the audiobook for Circle of Enemies drops on the 29th. More on that, including links, when I have them.

Binge-demic 2

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Continuing my Binge-demic posts, let me move backwards to the show I watched before Korra.

BURN NOTICE

There was every reason for this show to be a forgettable one-and-done gunfight and bikini action series. It was on the USA network, it’s set in Miami, fills scene transitions with shots of beautiful young girls in swimsuits walking near water, and follows all the Action TV Show Gunfight Rules. 

Some of those rules:

  • Concealment = Cover, except those times when Concealment =/= Cover is cooler.
  • Everyone has terrible aim, except highly trained badasses (and their pals).
  • It’s pretty much impossible to shoot someone while they’re running, even with automatic weapons.
  • Every gunman, no matter how angry, sadistic or psychotic, will give their enemy time to say one more thing before pulling the trigger.

Person of Interest, mentioned in the previous post, had some of this too, but even that show didn’t compare to the number of bullets and bombs unleashed on Burn Notice. 

What makes Burn Notice a great show is, first of all, Jeffrey Donovan. He’s electric in the lead, and to this day I don’t understand how he didn’t immediately pivot to a starring role in something else. Maybe the dude was tired and needed a break. Maybe he found greater creative fulfillment as a character actor in supporting roles, and in a Hulu series that I’ve never had the chance to see. [Added later: he was exhausted when Burn Notice ended. He was in most of the scenes, did a lot of his own fights and stunts, and was utterly worn out by the time the series wrapped.]

The premise is straight forward: Michael Weston was a spy until the CIA burned him, freezing his bank accounts and cutting off all contact. He has lost the work that defined his whole life. The subplot of each season concerns Michael’s efforts to clear his name and get himself reinstated. For the main plot In each episode, Michael uses his skills as a spy to help some ordinary person in trouble. 

That makes it a heroic con artist show with car chases. 

Plus, at a time when Jack Bauer was still running around interrogating people under threat of torture, the makers of Burn Notice put a little more effort into it than that. They made it clear that these weren’t bad guys being bad for good ends. When Michael and his friends were forced to do something terrible, the show never portrayed that as heroic, and the characters always paid a price.

I love the second-person voice over, the split screen sequences, the humor, the whole deal. Gabrielle Anwar is great, once she drops the accent they asked her to do in the pilot. Sharon Gless is great as Michael’s chain-smoking mother. Bruce Campbell is great and also, on occasion, subtle (if you can believe it). 

So great. Love this show.

VERONICA MARS

But not as much as this show. 

I have all of Veronica Mars–original series, film, revival series–on disc, (rare for me–I was never a collector of dvds) and I used to own the two terrible novels. (I donated them to the library, which is how I throw away books.) One of the benefits of watching the discs is that the pilot episode is slightly extended, starting at the no-tell motel (first line is Veronica in voice-over saying I am never getting married.) instead of the school parking lot, and for once the extra scenes don’t feel like a waste of my precious time.

And yeah, that first season is iconic. The pilot has a little too much backstory to set up, and the second episode is marred by a bit of stunt casting, but both are still great. After that, it takes off running and doesn’t look back. 

It was renewed for two more (excellent) seasons, despite being near the bottom of the ratings every year. I sort of hated the way the third season ended, but this was a show that put its characters through the ringer. If the last thing it made me feel was Veronica’s regret at a harm she’d caused that could never be made right, that was perfect for the overall tone of the show.

Then came the Kickstarted movie. The show had been a critical darling and retained a dedicated fanbase, so the fundraising campaign was a rousing success. And sure, people complained that the movie that came out of it had too much fan service, but it would have made a fitting (and happier) ending to Veronica Mars’s story. 

But I guess the success of the crowdfunding campaign convinced someone there was an audience to be micro-marketed to, so we got two terrible novels that did not seem to understand the appeal of Veronica Mars as a character, then a new series on Hulu featuring Veronica as an adult.

Unfortunately, by the end of the Hulu series, every aspect of the original show had been brushed aside except for Veronica’s profession and her relationship with her father. Gone was Neptune High as a place where the young rich collide with the young poor. Gone was unincorporated Neptune, the place without a middle class. Gone was Wallace, Veronica’s first healthy peer relationship on the show, who is left behind in Neptune when she drives up the coast to a new case. Gone was Logan, the OTP that obsessed the most dedicated fans of the show. 

Killing off Logan seems to have squelched any hopes of a fifth season. The fans were furious, and I can’t really blame them. Thomas seemed to think that the romance elements were supposed to be a C-plot, bringing a modicum of soap opera conflict to contrast with the mystery plots. No one seemed to believe Logan could function as a support character like Keith, so out he went. 

Which is a shame. The setting and network of relationships are a big part of what we love about a show. You can’t just strip away that context and expect the character to thrive. If you want a brilliant, tough female private investigator in a new context, create a new one.

But still, Veronica herself is a wildly appealing character. In those first three seasons, she’s not just brilliant and funny, she’s fearless, too. Not, I mean, physically fearless. Threats of violence still terrify her, as they should. No, she’s been socially ostracized and come through it with exactly zero fucks left to give. Even when mortifying things happen to her, she refuses to be made ashamed or to back down.

That’s a powerful thing, especially for people of high school age (and near-high school age). I remain convinced that’s the secret sauce of Veronica’s appeal.

Anyway, I recommend the show, obviously. The first three seasons are genius, and the movie makes a nice little bow tie at the end. And, if you still want more of Veronica and Keith and Logan and Leo and so on, season four is only eight episodes long and has all the brilliance and wit of the previous incarnations, even if it does fundamentally break the old show and create a new one in the last twenty minutes or so. 

Up next: Strange Luck and Kipo and the Wonderbeasts

Also, in case you didn’t know it, there are fewer than ten days left to pick up ONE MAN, my dark fantasy crime thriller, as a $1.99 Kindle Monthly Deal. If you like books about desperation, magic, intrigue, expeditions to mysterious islands, giant skeletons, people living inside giant skeletons, creatures made of burning iron, vampire hobbits, and also the fear of failing the one person in the whole world who relies on you, take advantage of that deal right away.

Binge-demic 1

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Here’s my COVID lifestyle: I wake at 9am, then stumble out of bed for coffee and breakfast. With any luck, this involves some sort of sandwich. I’m a big fan of sandwiches.

Then it’s chores and writing. I’m currently revising The Iron Gate, and if I hit my daily goal, I reward myself with a little writing on something else, like bluebooking for a tabletop rpg or brainstorming The Flood Circle which is the next Twenty Palaces novel. Then, a little reading.

After dinner, my wife and I settle in and watch a few shows. My wife hates binge-watching anything. Occasionally, she will watch two episodes of a show on one night, but I only rarely. Too much of one show bores the shit out of her.

At 9:30, she goes to bed at 9:30 and I get my alone time. Which I need. At the end of the day, when I’m alone in my darkened living room, I binge-watch shows. 

And I feel an inexplicable urge to talk about them. So, for a couple of blog posts, I’m going to write about them, starting with the most recent and working backwards.

Person of Interest:

I was talking about the characters on Person of Interest with someone on Twitter, and I was admiring the way the show used exaggeration in building its characters. Reese isn’t just hired muscle, he was once the CIA’s most deadly assassin, an American James Bond (on a TV-crime-thriller budget). Finch isn’t just a computer guy, he’s the reclusive genius who spent his whole adult life living under false identities and who created an artificial intelligence capable of monitoring everyone on Earth.

Reese knows very little about computers. Finch suffers from an unhealed injury he won’t discuss, which leaves him unable to fight or sprint. So it’s not just that each is an expert in their respective roles. They’re also incapable of filling each others’ roles. They compliment each other perfectly. 

It’s the same for the two cops on the show: Fusco is a corrupt homicide detective under the thumb of other corrupt cops, and Carter is the honest, empathetic one. One is being blackmailed into helping Reese. The other wants to arrest him. Both are extremes and opposites, and that naturally creates drama.

The person I was talking to called the characters archetypes, which I don’t think is a good description. To me, calling a character an archetype is an insult. It means they’re a copy of another thing, not an individual in their own right. If these were archetypes, I wouldn’t like the show as much as I do.

In its first season, PoI plays out as a well-made CBS procedural with an unusual and intriguing premise: A surveillance AI called, simply, “The Machine” sends Finch the social security number of a person who will be involved in a murder, either as victim or perpetrator. The team has to work out what’s happening and save a life, possibly several. There’s no season-long subplot, but the seeds of upcoming subplots are planted here and there.

In the second season, the extended story arcs begin, and by the third season, the show becomes positively addicting. The procedural elements are slowly, season by season, eclipsed by the underlying story of The Machine itself, the dangerous bureaucracy around it, and the battle with a rival AI. It’s tremendous fun.

Normally, I’d suggest skipping ahead so you could jump to the fun stuff, but I already tried that myself. As the show was airing, people in my timeline were praising the second season so I tried to jump in at the third. It didn’t work. PoI trades on the relationships between the characters formed over the previous two seasons, and without that background, it’s hard to care. If you’re tempted to watch this, don’t skip ahead.

I know that sounds like weak praise. “It gets good after [X] episodes” is the death song of many a Netflix show. But the early episodes are very good. The later seasons are fantastic. 

I just wrote way more about this show than I intended.

On Netflix until 9/22. If you’ve never seen it, it’ll take a mighty binge to finish it before then. Me, I have the last four episodes set aside for tonight. 

Before that: The Legend of Korra

I originally let this show pass by because I heard good and bad things about it. Fans liked/hated the main character. They hated that Aang, as a grownup, made mistakes and was not the greatest father in the world/or they were comfortable with that level of fallibility. They loved/hated the pseudo-steampunk setting. They loved/hated the way the show expanded the magic and world-building. So I wasn’t in any rush to watch this.

Honestly, I don’t understand what people are complaining about. I thought it was genius, and I’m currently re-watching it with my wife (one episode a day, as I mentioned above).

It’s gorgeous. It’s funny. The fight scenes are inventive, which is no small feat over so many episodes. Korra herself is flawed in the best way, making the show inherently more complicated and interesting than the original (even if it isn’t as charming). I loved it. 

Of course, the ending of the series is famous now. I knew the final scene where Korra and Asami head off to start their lives together as a couple was coming, but I didn’t know what to expect. When I saw it, all I could think was, “That was it?” Considering the attention that ending got, overwhelmingly but not exclusively positive, I thought for sure there’d be a kiss or something. Maybe just the two characters leaning toward each other, fade to black before their lips touch. 

Nope. This is the level of representation that LGBQ fans had to be satisfied with back in 2014. Just six years ago, it was considered brave and groundbreaking. 

I probably should have watched this before I watched She-Ra. 

Coming up next time: Burn Notice and Veronica Mars

Also, One Man is currently the Kindle Monthly Deal. If you read ebooks and think you’d enjoy a high fantasy crime thriller, check it out. 

Quarantined

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Like a lot of people, I’m spending more time than usual inside my home. What’s extra weird is that my wife’s workplace has shut its doors until the end of the month so she is stuck here, too. Me, I like being at home. She’s currently on day two and is already a bit stir crazy.

But there are only so many evenings you can while away with board games. To that end, a self-quarantine is an excellent time to binge the TV shows you meant to watch but never got around to. And for this list, I’m only naming shows that cost only the price of a subscription. Lots of us are struggling to find work at the moment, after all.

I have suggestions:

Amazon Prime:
This isn’t the first streaming service I think of when I fire up the TV, but for quality shows of the (recent) past, it has some serious heavy hitters, such as

The Wire
The Sopranos
The Americans
Deadwood
Orphan Black

Not all their offerings are so critically acclaimed, though. Space: 1999 is a seventies cheese fest and a lot of fun. Dead Like Me captures that disaffected 90’s slacker style that is overdue for a come back. And Eerie, Indiana is pure and adorable in its low-budget earnestness. Concentrated comfort food.

Netflix:

Netflix doesn’t lean as heavily on the critical acclaim, but they have some solid gems, like

Original Twilight Zone
Mad Men
Monty Python
Twin Peaks

When people want to know if I prefer Star Trek or Star Wars, I tell them Person of Interest. The first season is fun but not promising. By the midpoint of season three, we were shouting at the screen. Also, all the Star Treks are here, too. For lighter fare, they have Pee Wee’s Playhouse, which is anarchic fun (and also my wife worked on the NYC set, building several of the props, including Conky the Robot and Chairy, which is why I have a soft spot for this weird show). If you’re feeling stir crazy, Ash vs the Evil Dead is bloody and hilarious and over the top. If you need to be soothed, Father Brown is concentrated gentility.

Hulu

If Amazon Prime is home to Big Prestige TV About Terrible Dudes, Hulu offers a wider variety of stories with a wider variety of leads.

Killing Eve
Veronica Mars
Atlanta

They also have Legion, which is BPTATD, but has a non-naturalistic flair that I thought was fascinating, even when it didn’t totally work. Also, I know lots of folks binge Law & Order as a sort of comfort view, but that’s not streaming anywhere at the moment. However, Hulu has Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Finally, if you need something gentler, you can find Steven Universe here.

Disney Plus

Then you have this channel, where you can find… all the Star Wars cartoons? Agent Carter is lots of fun, but they never really let that terrific lead character shine. And… what? The 90’s X-Men cartoon? Gargoyles? If I’d written this post about movies, D+ would have more to offer.

Anyway, I’d originally planned to only list shows that had finished their run, but then I saw Killing Eve and that went out the window. Personally, I’d love to binge a few of these myself, but my wife hates to binge shows, so I’ll have to enjoy them vicariously through you guys.

One a personal note: We’re self-quarantined until the end of the month at least, and we’re taking the time for family and art-making time. One Man was released a few months ago, so we’re expecting that money to come in at the end of the month. So, yeah, this is going to hurt long term, but in the short term we ought to be okay.

But the economy is going to take a big hit. It might be time to rethink your Patreon and Kickstarter pledges. I appreciate the support I get through Patreon, for example, but I want everyone facing hardships of their own to cancel their pledges before they come due at the end of the month.

Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.

Stop Killing the Redeemed Bad Boys: Veronica Mars and The Rise of Skywalker

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Spoilers for Star Wars and of Veronica Mars. FYI.

Before we get into the meat of this post, I want to point out that, four years ago, I made this awful prediction:

Along with a few ten thousand other people, but the important thing to point out is that this was supposed to be a joke. Seriously, I thought making Rey a Palpatine was a ridiculous idea, and it turned out that I was right.

But there’s no idea so ridiculous that someone won’t rub their chin and go “hmm”. Sometimes, on Twitter, there will be huge hashtag pitch sessions where people will tweet out a log line for their screenplays, and I used to make up ludicrous story ideas for it. No matter how outlandish, there was always someone interested in something I made up.

Terrible ideas! They’re everywhere!

Let’s seque back to the new season of Veronica Mars, on Hulu. Personally, I enjoyed it, but many die-hard fans were furious at the way they killed off Logan, Veronica’s true love.

After three full seasons, the show felt unfinished. With the Kickstarter-funded movie, Rob Thomas brought things around to an ending the fans could get behind. Veronica was a PI again. Logan had his shit together. They re-started their romance as adults. Boom. Ending. They even left things open for those awful novels.

But once Hulu came knocking for S4, Thomas didn’t know what to do with Logan. He has this idea that a romantic relationship had to be about the conflict. What would they do with Logan now that his issues with Veronica were resolved? He said he didn’t want to include Logan in the mystery of the season–nevermind that he did exactly that for S4 and it worked out fine. Nevermind that Veronica has plenty of other low-conflict relationships with people she loves. Thomas wanted her to be free for upcoming seasons, which meant Logan had to go.

And when he went, the fans went too, and they weren’t quiet about it. They were furious, vowing that they were never going to watch again.

The fallout? No Current Plans for Season Five at Hulu

There was similar fan interest for sexy villain Kylo Ren/Ben Solo to be redeemed during TRoS and have the romantic relationship with Rey that almost came about in The Last Jedi.

Personally, I thought TLJ settled that plot point. They had an opening for romance. Each thought they were going to turn the other to their way of thinking. They were wrong. Ben Solo chose to be Kylo Ren, and he was not going to give up his giant fascist army. He even declared himself Supreme Leader. Kylo Ren was established as the villain.

But the fans wanted Kylo and Rey to come together, which meant Kylo had to turn into a good guy, which meant they needed a new villain for the third act, which meant they brought brought Palpatine, which is why they decided to connect him to Rey by blood and undo the very best scene of The Last Jedi (“You’re nothing… but not to me.”)

But after fighting on Rey’s side and saving her life, Kylo gets a single kiss from Rey. and then he dies.

The replies to that tweet are a catalog of misery. Fans wanted the poor, abused, handsome young guy to be redeemed and have a happy life. Preferably with Rey. They didn’t get that.

Now, I’m not sure I’ve ever shipped a pair of characters, ever. Not Sam and Diane. Not David and Maddie. It just doesn’t occur to me. But lots of fans engage with shows this way, and they do not endure disappointment quietly. And there’s something–don’t ask me what–about that reformed evil boyfriend trope. People find it wildly compelling. (And yes, a small percentage can be over-the-top about their favorite ships. I’m not interested in using outliers to represent a group as a whole.) There’s nothing wrong with that, but any really vocal segment of an audience can have an outsized effect on the future of a show.

And this new Star Wars movie is making lots of money, but reviews have been dire. The movie is pretty, it’s fast, and it’s filled with peril, but the story is a disaster, and the even the lead actors just seem done with the whole thing.

Remember the energy and excitement in The Force Awakens? Remember Rey and Finn together? How much energy they had?

Well, all that is gone, and they couldn’t even redeem their sensitive bad boy correctly. The ReyLos and the LoVes are not happy.

Mysteries, Ghosts, and Doubled Narratives: Why the New Nancy Drew Series Doesn’t Work

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Every whodunnit mystery has two narratives. The first is the crime at the center of the story. How the murder was planned and carried out. The history between killer and victim. The red herring clues that point to innocent parties, and the backstory that makes those parties credible suspects. And so on. All of that comprises a complex narrative that, at the beginning of the book, is hidden from the reader and the protagonist.

The second narrative is the one the reader reads, in which the protagonist investigates and uncovers the first narrative.

Many ghost stories have a similar structure. There’s a hidden narrative of a terrible crime or crimes that created the ghost(s) and the specific details of the haunting itself. The story of the people who experience the haunting often depends on the revelation of that hidden crime for its resolution.

You might think that similarity in the two structures would mean they’d combine well, but the new CW series NANCY DREW shows how difficult that can be.

A lot of folks think that the main pleasure of a whodunnit (or any kind of mystery, really) is that things are be set right at the end. Something awful happens. Someone uncovers the culprit. They’re arrested or killed. Order is restored.

I dunno. I’ve never experienced them that way. For me, the main pleasures of a mystery are the characters, because you need a lot of contrast to tell all those suspects apart, and the hard work.

Me, I wasn’t much of a Nancy Drew fan until after VERONICA MARS showed me that the whole teen detective thing could have real bite to it. Then Emma Roberts appeared in the 2007 NANCY DREW, and I thought that movie was delightful. Much lighter than VM, but it still portrayed the protagonist as intelligent and hard-working, someone who kept digging for clues long after I would have given up.

But ghosts take all that away. Characters don’t have to act on their own initiative because they are terrorized by the supernatural elements of the story to take action. Ghosts push them toward clues. Visions of the past reveal the hidden narrative.

In other words, what would be revealed through the brilliance and diligence of the main character in a whodunnit is now forced upon them.

For example, in the most recent episode, a ghost keeps breaking screens in Nancy’s house. Only after the third one, on her laptop, does Nancy realize they’re all breaking in the same pattern. Nancy, being brilliant, recognizes her small town in the edges of the pattern, calls up Google Maps, and realizes the breaks are pointing toward a specific place: her high school.

Cut to a scene where she’s breaking into the school, complete with black knit cap and flashlight. A ghostly glow directs her to the trophy case/memorial/(?) where she finds a photo tucked away that proves another character lied to her in Act 2 of the episode.

So, sure, it’s smart to recognize the pattern and it shows initiative to break out the lock picks (by my count, Nancy has done a B&E in three out of four episodes this season and she really ought to be better at it) but it still feels like the mystery is being handed to her. Check out the school. Look in the case. In the first episode, a medium tells her to look in the attic, where she finds a bloody dress locked away in a trunk. It’s just another example of “Go here. Find clue.”

Not only is this sort of plot easier on the main character, it’s easier for the show’s writers. You don’t have to brainstorm a reason for Nancy to hunt for that photo at the school. You just have to brainstorm a way for the ghost to point the way in a spoooooky manner.

See also, the movie ODD THOMAS, which is a reasonably effective thriller as long as you don’t think too hard about the way Odd’s magic powers lead him by the nose from one plot point to the next.

See also, redux, this quote: (Source)

The Force is really The Plot

I don’t object to the way the Force is used in STAR WARS any more than I object to Eleven’s powers in STRANGER THINGS. It keeps things moving and doesn’t take away from the story. But then, the heroes in those stories aren’t detectives. I’m not watching because I’m hoping to see brilliance.

Honestly, I think I’d like NANCY DREW a lot more if the main character wasn’t named Nancy Drew. I wouldn’t have come to it hoping to see a bright, energetic young person doing the work that the older generations couldn’t.

The ghosts are fun, though. Maybe in the back half of this first season or in season two, they’ll have ghosts who mislead or interfere rather than help. I hope so.

If you’ve read this far down, you should hear a few facts: Progress on THE IRON GATE continues, although not as quickly as I’d have hoped. In fact, I was all set to take part in NaNoWriMo this year for the first time ever, but then I took a close look at the actual numbers and chickened out. Still, even if I’m digging a ditch with a shovel instead of a backhoe, that ditch is going to get dug.

ONE MAN continues to be delayed. Maybe I should set a definite release date to stop myself from fussing with this and that and just releasing it.

Some Quick Reviews of S3 Stranger Things, S3 Jessica Jones, and other stuff I guess

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I’ve been meaning to do this for a while so I’m just going to throw these out there:

Stranger Things Season 3

I’ve been a vocal fan of this show (Not as strong a fan as *some*, because I don’t want to be scary, but still) since I first watched it, but season three started off very badly. Characters I’d liked and who should have grown together were now snickering and making fun of each other. Hopper had become a complete mess. He’d gone from real life hero to obnoxious buffoon.

It took me a while to realize what they were doing. Season three had become an homage to romcoms, so we get clips of Sam and Diane, and we get endless bickering between characters who are attracted to each other but can’t admit it. And a show so used to leaning on homages ought to understand that homages of old jokes is just recycling an old joke. It’s not actually funny.

So yeah, that part wasn’t fun.

Everything else about the show? Loved it.

As the kids are getting older, the horror is getting scarier, more action-oriented, and gorier, too. And being Stranger Things, they nail it.

So, yeah. Not my favorite season, except for the parts that very much are.

Jessica Jones Season 3

One of the least interesting story lines a superhero show can tell is the “What does it mean to be a hero?” thing. Usually, it involves getting up off the ground after a round of grueling physical punishment.

I’m looking at you, Spider-Man, into the Spider-verse.

Of course, in superhero stories, the consequences of most fights are to make people feel a lot of pain, and also to make them incredibly tired. That’s why it’s such a struggle to get off the ground. To prove themselves to be heroes, protagonists need to stand up despite the pain and punch-induced exhaustion to return immediately to their pre-fight levels of physical capability, and finally make the bad guy super tired. Through punching.

Jessica Jones (the show, I mean, although the character, too) flips this on its head. When this show asks the question “What does it mean to be a hero?” they don’t mean putting on a mask and beating up “bad people.” It means finding evidence, getting confessions, capturing the criminal, and turning them over to the courts.

Based on her performance in this show, Rachel Taylor really ought to be getting a lot of high profile stuff. If you were annoyed by the way the writers portrayed Queen Whatshername’s descent into murder and darkness, check out the long, slow, tragic journey that Trish Walker makes from Beloved Celebrity Who Pulled Her Live Together into a Villain Who Thinks She’s Doing Right. Trish is all the worst instincts of the superhero genre, and because it all comes from her, and from the depths of her character, it never feels like a cheap commentary.

What I’m saying is, the last season of Jessica Jones might not have been the MCU/Netflix signoff/victory lap/low-budget Endgame remix that people expected, but it’s excellent in its own right.

C.B. Strike Series 1-3

I liked the books (I like private eye novels) and I liked the shows. Things are shortened and simplified, obviously, but these are solid PI stories.

What puts them above (and warrants mention here) is Robin’s subplot throughout. She has always wanted to be an investigator of some kind, and has everything stacked against her. But she is determined.

And I loved it. Everyone who has ever worked really hard for a dream that seemed unreachable ought to feel that pull. It’s a small part of the series, but it’s what put that show over the top.

Tolkien

Two terrific scenes, a bunch of great performances, and an otherwise dull movie.

Doctor Who Season 11

I’d given up on this show years ago, but thought I’d give it another shot with a new show runner and actress in the lead role. Verdict: I liked it. Very little frantic nonsense, a fair amount of actual drama and tension. We’ll be watching more of this.

Us

Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Wow. Loved it. I guessed the twist pretty early, but I loved it.

The Boys Season 1

I didn’t like the comic so I was planning to skip the show, but enough people liked it that I gave it a chance, and I’m glad I did. Like the comic, it was dark but not in a childish way. The characters felt real, and so did their problems. If you don’t mind stories about violence, murder, and sexual assault, The Boys was effective.

Hannah Season 1

Based on the movie, which was decidedly more ruthless and brutal than the show. It’s one of the rare spy shows where the characters did things that were better than what I’d expected. Solid stuff.

Boom.

Done.

The Kickstarter campaign for additional Twenty Palaces novels is still ongoing, but it ends Friday. You have until then to secure two books for a minimum of $4.