X-Men ’97 is Good Eating

Finally, some good fucking food.

Editor’s Note: Spoilers Throughout

I don’t need to go through m y whole torrid relationship with comics, but I can say that I love them more than I read them and that the reason I care about comics is because of Fox’s early X-Men movies, Sony’s Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, Burton-and-Schumacher Batman, and the cartoons of the 1990s that came out starring these same characters and which were replayed on Disney, Cartoon Network and their spinoff channels when I was a lad. X-Men ’97 is a worthy successor to the X-Men show of the 1990s to which it is a direct sequel (complete with mainly copying and slightly updating the iconic theme music) and to the other X-Men series that have come out in the intervening years. It is much better than I have any expectation of the MCU X-Men being, and it is a successor to a children’s show which feels like it respects that its audience is adults. It doesn’t just pander to our need for nostalgic comfort, it also challenges our expectations by asking the sort of poignant and controversial questions that the X-Men’s stories always have, creating an emotionally challenging and mature adaptation of several comic runs. Moreover, by deign of its maturity, adolescents (who *should* be the intended audience) will find it does not condescend.

I sort of avoided it at first, having no expectation it would really deliver what I needed or wanted from it. Then I heard about the carnage of the fifth episode and dove in, knowing that what we were getting wasn’t just an adaptation of X-Men comics, but a show that took seriously the dark depths of its themes. By the time I got to episode 5, “Remember It,” I remembered something very bad was going to happen but was not certain of the details; into the final minutes, I was thinking I must have misinterpreted what I read, until the final death. I watched it on May 1^st and was left speechless for fifteen minutes of its thirty-minute runtime; I rewatched that second half later that night.

It’s only ten episodes which isn’t enough to truly satiate my craving for quality superhero output, but it does whet my appetite for more X-Men; revisiting the predecessor show to fill in backstory I forgot or never knew, maybe revisiting some of the mixed bag of Fox films. Regardless, X-Men ’97 is an exceptionally well-executed ten episodes as it is, with a spectacular three-episode finale.

It’s drawing on Grant Morrison, Chris Claremont, and other X-Men runs I’m not personally familiar with to show the X-Men, as ever, fighting to protect a world that hates and fears them. The show begins with wealthy telepathic geneticist/psychologist Professor Charles Xavier presumed dead, willing all his earthly effects and his control of the X-Men to longtime friend and nemesis Magneto. We meet Roberto Da Costa, filling in the new audience member role that Jubilee provided in the original series. Morph returns, shapeshifting powers tuned way up and used to do visual Easter Egg cameos with other Marvel characters in a way that has practical viability in the many excellent combat sequences. Truly, the fight scenes are engaging and exquisite.

Like, the animation is just so cool and enticing and reminds, occasionally, of a resolution-improved version of the Marvel vs. Capcom arcade game, but mostly of the comics come to life. But, as I believe the hosts of Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-men have said, the comic is a mutant soap opera. And here, things are about to get a bit difficult to parse if you don’t recognize any of the character names…

So, in this series we meet Jean Grey’s doppelganger Madelyne Pryor through intense circumstances of Jean showing up on the doorstep of the X-Mansion at the end of the first episode after Scott and who we thought was Jean were planning to leave the team. The revelation of her existence throws Cyclops and Jean Grey’s relationship into turmoil while Magneto is trying to honor Professor X’s vision of mutant-human coexistence. While we, perhaps strangely, never see Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants outside of the opening credit sequences, his very presence on the team creates tension, throwing a wrench into Rogue and Gambit’s fraught relationship. In the second episode of the season, Storm loses her weather witch powers while taking a shot from an anti-mutant vigilante’s de-powering gun. Magneto shows mercy upon mercy and is punished for it.

As Storm travels and meets Forge, she does battle with a psychic monster and regains her powers. Meanwhile, Jubilee and Sunspot deal with Sunspot’s wealthy parents and his evasion of the spotlight. The mutant metaphor of special people oppressed by the dominant group while a few members of the minority are able to excel and attempt to bring everyone up by being palatable superheroes has become more tightly tied with queerness than ethnicity over the past few decades. It’s never clearer than when the proverbial closet enters the fray.

Eventually, we reunite with old friends like Nightcrawler and are treated to small shots of myriad minor characters on the island of Genosha, with whole romantic storylines playing out in the background. Formerly a place of mutant enslavement, a new mutant society has been established, with the likes of Hellfire Club leaders Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw requesting Magneto join them. Then, while the mutants are partying and Ace of Base’s Happy Nation plays, a devastating attack takes place, some of the most startling and intense imagery I have seen in an American cartoon targeted at adolescents. Sentinels, the giant mutant-killing robots, are deployed from a giant insectoid-sentinel that is also launching tremendous bursts of energy that act with the force of megatons of explosives. Thousands die.

The ensuing battle is impressive for its seeming futility, all the carnage intentional by the Sentinels and incidental collateral damage during the mutant response. It’s harrowing. It’s likely to remind you of images of natural disasters and of man-made catastrophes and massacres such as, it must be said, the ongoing destruction of the Gaza Strip or the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre.

The politics of the mutant metaphor (i.e. mutants for any given marginalized group, sometimes paired with the imprecise, incurious, and inelegant analogy of Xavier as MLK and Magneto as Malcolm X) can never be 1:1 exact, and aren’t intended to be, I don’t think. But the Krakoa era rested on a complicated idea about mutants developing their own island nation separate from everyone else, bribing and blackmailing on a global scale for recognition, and creating a cruel and strange social structure in many ways. I’m relatively early in the Krakoa run (it began in 2019 and just wrapped up so I have a lot to read) so I will hold my judgment on its political efficacy or aesthetic effectiveness. What I will say is that this snapshot of Genosha ties in several different stories (I heard Mutant Massacre and E for Extinction referenced on The Mutant Ages) and exemplifies a tendency throughout the show to pull stories direct from the comics and combine them in ways that respect the original creative intention while leaving room for adaptative growth.

There are two episodes of fallout as the character Bastion is introduced as the source of the beyond-conceivable-scale Sentinel army, leading into a three-part finale which ties in Asteroid M/Avalon, Magneto’s extra-terrestrial base, and ending on an incredible time-splitting cliffhanger. The X-Men eventually try to save him, as they’re bound to doing by organizational ideology and editorial decree, but only because of their great well of empathy, belief in Xavier’s dream, and after fighting him for a very long time.

Bastion is a sort of post-human that maybe isn’t *quite* a mutant but has powers tied to the creation and manipulation of technology, and plans to usher in an age of human-sentinel hybrids destroying and enslaving mutants to create a utopia. Magneto is provoked to counter his plan, throwing the world into chaos by using his electromagnetic powers to wipe out power across the country. We get even more touching moments drawn from the comics, and one incredibly violent one in particular, while the ethics of the deployment of the Professor’s psychic powers are disputed and tested. Xavier enters Magneto’s mind, helping Magneto piece together his psyche in a bar on a sort of astral plane (but not the Astral Plane) after seizing control of his mind to reverse Magneto’s catastrophe.

The show is vibrant and enticing throughout, with great voice acting[1] and terrific writing. I’m so impressed by how quickly they have used so much of the history of the characters, though paced in such a way that they still have so much yet to draw from. The relationship between Cable and his parents is teased out very well in not a lot of time, with Mr. Sinister meddling, suppressed angst inside Cable being channeled in a way that made me think of when Vegeta was Majin, and eventually an emotional reckoning and reconciliation between Scott, Jean, and Nathan. There’s more than a few touching moments; the characters are so compelling. The series ends with the mutant heroes just barely preventing Asteroid M from crashing into the planet and then being displaced in time – with many of them ending up in the 4^th millennium B.C., meeting a young Apocalypse and Scott and Jean in the future meeting a young Cable.

And with all those spoilers I’m still trying to leave stones unturned. I think the show does do some things that make you wonder “how did that happen?” but moves quickly and effectively enough that you may be too compelled to engage with what’s going on to get stuck on those questions. The second part of the finale ends with Magneto having placed his helmet over Xavier’s head to block Xavier’s powers and Magneto pulling the adamantium out of Wolverine’s skeleton. The third episode begins with Xavier in Magneto’s head. There are a couple issues like this throughout the series, but I attribute it to trying to get a lot done in just ten episodes. I hope the next season has at least 16 if not 22-26. We need full orders. I feel the show has proven its worthiness to stay around. I haven’t been this interested in an audiovisual Marvel project since I’m not sure when. When I play Marvel’s Midnight Suns, these are the sort of comic book adventures and relationships I am harkening for.[2] I think the show does enough dramatically and aesthetically to handwave some of the structural issues like that (or like the lack of millions of people dying immediately due to a global EMP; I mean, people might have, it hasn’t really been discussed). I felt the episode which spends half its time on Jubilee and Sunspot in a Mojoverse computer game is sort of the weakest except that it helps establish a connection to something else from the past and, moreover, shows proof of concept for doing off-beat episodes. Introducing the Shi’ar is crucial to Professor X’s arc at this stage, but we only get one episode with them really, and expect they will be back next season. I wonder if Cyclops’s anger at humanity will rear its head; at one point (during an ill-fated interview during “Remember It”), I expected him to end up on the more militant side, but I guess they may wait a couple seasons something like the “Schism” storyline to play out.

At the end of it all, so much of this show is relying on payoff in next season because of how much it set up, but the stellar episode 5 and they very strong episodes which followed it will give it an exalted place in critical consideration even if it doesn’t fully deliver (which seems very possible since they parted ways with one of their most prominent creative voices). But that’s how serial storytelling works; that’s why these stories work better as a television series with time to build up characters and have them interact with each other than as movies with compressed character arcs.

X-Men ’97 is a solidly entertaining show that took its subject matter seriously, which is all I could hope for and more than I expected. There were occasional moments of levity that felt misplaced, but not overwhelming on the order of most Marvel stuff. There are some cameos from other Marvel characters, but they are mostly very brief and work in the way I like for X-Men interactions with non-X-Men characters to work: angrily asking where their supposed human allies were when they were dying. Captain America is the main character to come in as a target for Rogue’s ire. Spider-Man and the Silver Samurai have a few cameo reaction shots. Black Panther (King T’Chaka) figures as a small part in the finale.

It’s just very fun to watch. I’d like to take more time and cut this down, but that’s what it comes down to. The creative team[3] utilize a bunch of comic arcs from the 90s to create a compelling story connecting them in a naturalistic way that highlights the frustrations of fighting for people that don’t love you, and the tension between respectability, assimilation, and liberation. It’s not an intrinsically revolutionary text but I don’t think anyone is really expecting that. What it does avoid is being overly conciliatory. It doesn’t lack backbone or grit. I just think it needs more time, and hope it gets some next season. There’s every chance I rewatch it before then, at least once I finish 1992-1997’s X-Men. It’s good eating.¹

Final Score: 4/5

All episodes of X-Men ’97 are now streaming on Disney+

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[1] Alison Sealy-Smith reprises her role as Storm from the 1992-1997 cartoon, as does Carl Dodd with Wolverine, Lenore Zann reprises her role as Rogue, George Buza reprises his role as Beast, A.J. LoCascio reprises his role as Gambit, Adrian Hough reprises his role as Nightcrawler. Jennifer Hale, who voiced Jean Grey in Wolverine and the X-Men replaces original series voice actor Catherine Disher. Ray Chase voices Cyclops in place of Norm Spencer, who died in 2020. Hale and Chase said they based their performances off of Disher and Spencer, respectively. Holly Chou replaced Alyson Court as Jubilee; Court said she would prefer an Asian voice actress voice Jubilee, but she does appear in a small role in the Mojo videogame world episode. Ross Marquand replaces Cedric Smith as Professor X.

[2] I also really miss X-Men Legends, but it’s been almost 20 years since a proper game in that series.

[3] My biggest concern is that creator Beau DeMayo was fired before the premiere, although writing for the second season was finished this spring.

1. Something I meant to mention, since I don’t now if I’ll ever get around to doing a post that’s just a list of podcast recommendations… The first comics podcast I listened to was Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, when I was in grad school trying to build my comic knowledge to get a job at my frequented comic shop. They go through every story in pretty much publication order, with occasional breakages, guest spots, and convention panels. Also co-host Jay Edidin wrote an excellent Cyclops story in Marvels: Snapshots. I listened to the first 300 episodes nearly back-to-back into the winter of 2018-2019 (mixed in with stuff like Davos’ Fingers), though I’ve fallen a bit behind. Cerebro is an incredible deep-dive that goes character by character featuring guests discussing their favorite characters. Battle of the Atom is really entertaining and is making a quality ranking of every X-Men issue – I haven’t listened especially recently but I’ve always enjoyed it. The Mutant Ages is analyzing and reviewing every TV and film adaptation of the X-Men comics – I haven’t listened to them as frequently recently, but they became one of my comfort podcasts last year. All these podcasts have different tones, but they’re all pretty queer, because we see ourselves in the X-Men and have for a long time. There’s also Marvelous, or the Death of Cinema, a podcast that analyzes MCU films and their impact on the film industry. One really prominent comic fan went from a special correspondent to a main host and they’ve covered some X-Men stuff. ↩︎

Dune Part Two – On adaptation and Formative Space Fantasy

When I was in elementary or middle school, I went to a birthday for a friend of mine from church. He showed me Dune 2000 and Command & Conquer: Red Alert on his PC. It was one of those formative, mind expanding experiences – the introduction to a new genre of videogame, real-time strategy. I would later spend a lot of time playing Red Alert and the original Dune-inspired Command & Conquer. Dune 2000 was my first foray into Frank Herbert’s world; I can still remember sitting in that desk chair, learning about House Atreides, House Harkonnen, and Clan Ordo, learning to get my harvesters out of the spice fields to dodge the sandworm. In middle school, one of my uncles bought me the original Dune trilogy after talking it up to me while driving my brother and I to meet my mom at my aunt’s wedding. I struggled through the first book and then left it dormant until graduate school. I finished it between 2018 and 2019, and Dune Messiah and Children of Dune in 2019. God Emperor of Dune has been sitting on my bookshelf since 2021 or 2022. I saw Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 in 2021, four years after it came out, in anticipation of his directing Dune. I remember being pleased and brimming with anticipation. I remember thinking about the intentional vacancies in the worlds he creates – the vastness and alienation, and the cleverness of that particular legacy sequel. I saw the first part of his Dune series and was absolutely riveted. It came out my birthday weekend and I watched it at home because it was straight to HBO and I was feeling a little wiped out. I wish I saw it on a big screen. I hope some day I still can.

One abiding criticism of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune was that it felt like half a movie. Villeneuve had, after all, announced his intention to split the first book into two films. I saw David Lynch’s Dune last year and it put that complaint into a new light for me. That movie’s third act is completely a rush. It *should* have been two movies, is what I thought once I saw it. Now that I’ve seen Dune: Part Two, I almost feel like it could have been three. I suppose that’s why, after all, there’s a SyFy miniseries from the turn of the millennium.

Every generation, people are reintroduced to Dune as a concept. The 1965 novel won the Hugo and Nebula prizes for science fiction novel. In 1984, there was the Lynch movie. In 2000 and 2003, there were the SyFy miniseries. In 2021, 2024, and some near point in the future, we have Villeneuve’s trilogy. People jump to call the story orientalist and a white savior story without considering that there might be any intention or deconstruction there – which isn’t to say it can’t be critiqued for exoticizing the Arab world, but it certainly means people sound silly when the story is very explicitly about the danger of a charismatic leader planning to do evil. There’s something to be critiqued there about how the story overall, in Frank Herbert’s original writing, falls into a flattening of all ideology and an evading of the utility of violence in change or a great many other political limitations of a blanket anti-government ideology. But that’s not typically what I’ve seen. And, no doubt, it gets tedious to hear people repeatedly say “just you wait” about an obvious heel turn, but it should be easy to understand that people start repeating that mantra when the laziest armchair commentators can’t be bothered to engage with a text that explicitly addresses their reflexive critiques. Perhaps that’s neither here nor there, but it feels present.

I mention all this extraneous context because Dune fascinates me, because Dune is easy to love as a huge influence on space opera science fantasy at large, and because when you see a movie at its official opening weekend instead of an advance screening and you’re addicted to social media, your perspective is wrapped up into the context of assessing your experience in comparison to that of others. Or, that’s how it is for me, anyway. I’m continuing to cultivate my taste and, for better or for worse, Film Twitter is a place I find that fun to do.[1]

I really enjoyed Dune Part Two. I found that as a result of it being an adaptation – and one in a decently long line of audiovisual adaptations of the novel – its assessment as a film is inextricably tied to what it changes and what it keeps the same. I find this especially instructive in the long shadow of the conversations last year about historical accuracy in films. Adapting a biography or a true crime/history book are different tasks than adapting a novel, but people still levy critiques along the lines of what they think is noteworthy in history and what is left out in this new form.

Are we harsher with interpretations of existing fiction than interpretations of truth because fiction often has more explicit lines where truth has to be discovered and excavated? Do we give more benefit of the doubt about the corners which need cutting or the artistic license when what you’re working from isn’t art but reality, in all its inherent counterfactual fickleness? If so, I would think it’s because fiction is more knowable, does have specific intents behind it – but, then, it’s also prone to interpretation to begin with, hence the questions.

One problem I have is that there’s a real limit to any generalized conclusion, so how do you even answer those things? Not all people in any given group (even an especially if that group is “film critics’ or “Film Twitter”) agree on the merits of any given film. So, the question of “how do we weigh this?” will always be constrained because “we” isn’t all-encompassing. Yet critical arguments or staking out how we ought to, or how we might.

I do think it’s silly as hell to act as if Villeneuve’s Dune is inherently lesser than Lynch’s as if it is some objective truth and not a matter of taste, because it isn’t as grotesque and stapled-together or because the Guild Navigator isn’t in it. The Guild Navigator isn’t in the first book either. I think it’s critically weak and in bad faith to act as if the main thing a new adaptation of a source text should be compared to is the old adaptations. It makes some sense to me to measure them against one another in quality or value or, more problematically, as which is the more pure adaptation of the source. Either way, it makes way less sense to me to act as if Villeneuve’s Dune is a reimaging of Lynch’s (no one ever mentions John Harrisons two miniseries) rather than a new adaptation of Frank Herbert’s work. And Jodorowsky’s is a figment – all potential, all ideas and what ifs, it only exists in the shared imaginary of people that watched a documentary or read a book about his plans and thought “wow, that would have been cool.”

The things people were most vocal about missing from this adaptation of Dune is his younger sister Alia as a galactically precocious child and the Sietch Tabr spice orgy. We only witness Alia as a fetus with whom Lady Jessica converses and a vision of Anya-Taylor Joy; I was fine with this. It felt like a creative choice that fit within the structure of what else was being produced and, again, I didn’t feel a need to contrast it with the other prominent movie version. I also don’t recall the spice orgy in Lynch’s Dune, but I don’t think it would have *hurt* to be in this film except that there’s only so much runtime and that I believe in the vision of the artist as presented.

What I would have liked to see is more of Paul and Jessica’s adaptation to the Sietch life from the cultural-domestic perspective; i.e., Paul becoming responsible for Jamis’s late wife and so forth. But I liked what was there – seeing Jessica seize power, seeing Paul wrestle with it. I also liked a couple things people pointed out online that I only noticed after rewatching Dune or only noticed through these discussions, respectively: (1) Paul’s visions in the first film don’t quite play out exactly as he thought when you get to the second film, in line with what he told the Reverend Mother after the Gom Jabbar test; (2) Paul, relatedly, has visions of a version of his life that never came to pass, a version where it is Jamis rather than Stilgar and Chani guiding him. It isn’t apparent from the film, and it needn’t be, whether this means Stilgar or Chani or both died in this other version of his path, but it’s interesting that he’s drawing from a world he can’t access in his decision making.

Another change I thought was interesting looking back was the place of Liet-Kynes, the Imperial Ecologist ingratiated into Fremen culture. I had forgotten that, in the book, there’s initially some confusion for Paul and Jessica about the identity of Liet and Kynes, i.e., they didn’t know that was one and the same person. The obvious change in the first film is that they’ve made Liet-Kynes a woman. But, in the books, Chani is also Liet-Kynes’ daughter. This hasn’t come up in the films and I’m not sure it will; it might not communicate well with her distaste for/distrust of outsiders, which is being underscored with the way Paul seizes power (“THIS PROPHECY IS HOW THEY ENSLAVE US!”) and the way the film ends with her feeling hurt and distrust in her eyes as she leaves.

Listening to the Socialist Shelf podcast discussing the book and the films[2], I was reminded that the book ends with Jessica telling Chani to take heart, because history will remember she and Chani as wives, and people like the Princess Irulan as “mere” concubines. I wonder how these relationships will play out in the next film (I really hope Villeneuve ends up adapting the third book as well, but I’m trying not to hold my breath). In any case, removal of that line, of Jessica’s consolation of Chani amid the political machinations happening around the imperial succession, obviously connects to Chani leaving upset. The balance of power in the story shifts some away from Paul, even as he has power over the known universe: the dynamics of the story have him and his beloved at odds, her feeling like a used tool, a manipulated person, but also therefore as a standalone, possible rogue actor instead of actually being a tool because of her willingness to just go along with things.

This has gotten away from being much of an essay and is more of me rambling. I wanted to touch briefly on the new Dune RTS, which I only briefly tried since it is on Game Pass. There’s a lot of potential for RTS games in adapting this story, but this one makes some crucial mistakes. In order to give the Fremen more agency, it makes them a faction rather than just anonymous allies. In so doing, it gives them the same victory conditions as the Atreides or Harkonnens, which doesn’t make any sense within the story or the world. The Fremen are not interested in serving the Paddishah Emperor of House Corrino and helping his Navigators get spice. They care not for the integrity of the Imperium or the balance of power between the CHOAM and the Great Houses. That’s not their ministry, not their monkeys or their circus. So the game ends up feeling flat. Dia Lacina wrote about these issues at length in the game’s preview stage, but it doesn’t feel like that changed.

My point is that there are a lot of ways to adapt a story or a world. There will always be genre and structural limitations and the limitations of the perspective of the artist or artists involved in the creation of the piece. If you find a version of a story or a world bland or boring, that’s a legitimate criticism, and if you compare it with another version you find more valuable because of its wackiness or because it felt more artistically daring, that’s all good to. I like Raimi’s Spider-Mans more than the MCU films; I like the original Star Wars trilogy more than the prequels and the prequel trilogy more than the sequel trilogy. But, sometimes time, new technology, and a director not being hampered by the studio can make something better – I like De Palma’s Scarface much more than Howard Hawks’s, and I like David Lynch’s Dune, but my preferred Dune film adaptation is written and directed by Denis Villeneuve.

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[1] Everything prior to this point, except most of the paragraph before this one, was written in March. After this, it’s a mixed bag but mostly written in May. I ended up rereading my review after writing this and there’s a little bit of redundancy but I don’t care.

[2] That was the Apple link. Here’s the Spotify one. Listen to their stuff, it’s cool. They’ve had Vincent Bevins and Karlo Yeager Rodríguez on, among other guests.

In The Company of Kings

In the Company of Kings is a documentary film about prize fighting which attempts to connect to larger socioeconomic issues but which is too much concerned with breadth and not enough with depth, dabbling across the professional biographies of boxing legends. Frequent narration sometimes feels under-explanatory because it fixates on one man’s memory of his childhood connection to giants of the fight game. This would feel more meaningful if the audience were given more reason to feel connected to that narrator. The anecdotes of the fighters themselves connect to a general narrative about escaping the deprivation of poverty, but most of their stories are compressed as notes within the story of a couple of greats – the promoter Don King and the boxer Muhammad Ali – making the subjects feel like footnotes to an off-camera story that has a lot of holes in it. This leads to the film feeling unfocused despite that it features legendary athletes. It feels like it stops short of asking certain questions and telling certain stories, but the narrative of legends certainly doesn’t make the sport seem easy.

The film is narrated and produced by Robert Douglas, a Liverpudian Black British filmmaker who felt a connection to African American prizefighters, seeing their greatness as a sign of childhood hope while suffering from discrimination in school and racial violence in white neighborhoods adjacent to his own. He tells the story of coming to the U.S., simultaneously shocked by and finding familiarity in the toughness of North Philadelphia. The documentary uses a lot of urban blight stock footage but intermixes it with signs of hope in the form of children smiling and playing, as well as staged filming of young boxers training.

We meet Tyhler Williams, an up-and-coming fighter in Philadelphia using social media to grow his brand, and Rock Ministry, Buddy Osborne’s faith-based fighting ministry (boxing, grappling, homework club) of which Williams is part. It is exemplary, in fact, of a recurring theme throughout the film (intentional or otherwise) of older white men helping out young black guys in poverty, in contrast with the interlocking systems of white supremacy and capitalism oppressing these young black men in their everyday life. We see this again when we meet former heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins and he tells the story of going from an ex-con roofer to training with the man he did roofs for. One of the most telling sequences in this whole section is that we see the police try to frame up Tyhler Williams while he’s walking home from the gym. “The helicopter saw you pulling on the door,” lies a police officer among many searching for some unknown suspect. “The helicopter didn’t see *me* pulling on the door,” he responds, continuing to walk and livestream. It is one of many moments throughout the documentary that feels like it needs more space to breathe on its own; are we so inured to casual police corruption that it’s not even worth commenting on?

Anyway, we next focus on Bernard Hopkins, who tells the story of coming out of the gutter and the jail cell, going from strong-arm robbery to heavyweight champion. Interestingly, a major focus is his return to his childhood projects. People are happy to see him and he’s happy to see them, and it isn’t long before he discusses the need for the community to manage the aesthetics of the space – mow the lawn and so forth. It’s a tone I always find interesting because I believe simultaneously that it’s good to have pride in your home and that the strangling of communities is not the fault of the communities. It is the fault of people in power. Maybe it stands to reason that you can be taken more seriously in your appeals for assistance if it looks like you are trying to help yourself, but I get jumpy about “bootstraps” mentalities. Nonetheless, the film tells us some of Bernard Hopkins’s story and he’s remarkably candid.

We meet Don King’s stepson Carl, a fight promoter who is incredibly nostalgic about the decade between 1987 and 1997, when they basically ran Las Vegas, in his telling. There is just so much that goes unsaid – what are the implications for running a city like that, who are you connected to, what do you mean? Something I always find funny about the self-regard of anyone that finds financial success and has greater social access to rarefied spaces because of it is the way there are overlapping jurisdictions, so to speak. There’s a crew that runs a corner, and an organization they get their supply from; there’s a police precinct captain, a state assemblyperson, and a U.S. congressperson all in the same district. From whence is authority drawn and how is it deployed? Who gave Don and Carl run of the town? How does Carl King remember the Tupac shooting?

Perhaps that’s all immaterial. Carl’s biographizing of his father Don, a Cleveland numbers runner who took business and philosophy classes while incarcerated, is informative. What it’s lacking is a further exploration of how Don operated as a promoter. We are made to understand how he worked as a negotiator: demand something outrageous and then eventually come to the “middle” for what ends up being a sweetheart deal all in his favor. We don’t learn much about his relationships with fighters, just that he promoted some of the greats.

We visit Muhammad Ali’s childhood home of Louisville, Kentucky, and learn a bit about his rise to greatness and a bit about his association with the Nation of Islam, fighting in the ring for the respect of the Black Man. The most insightful part of this section might be introducing his white and black childhood friends who helped him get into boxing. It might have been interesting, in fact, instead of just mentioning that Ali had a white grandparent and was named Cassius Clay after a white slaveowner-turned-abolitionist, to articulate how that might have informed his conversion to a Black Nationalist political religion. But anyway, we learn about his training camp in Deerlake, PA, cultivating fighters in the woods away from the temptations of the street, and his fraught relationship with former sparring partner-turned-boxing rival Larry Holmes.

The last subject the documentary comments on is how quickly fighters lose their money. Most stay too long because of poor financial management practices, in addition to lacking a pension or social security. This reminds me of a thought I had years and years ago, seeing how frequently professional athletes in the unionized major leagues like the NBA and NFL also end up penniless. Sports are seen as a gateway out of poverty, an example of the American Dream for oppressed classes, with stars as figures to point to about how you actually *do* have options, even if the state refuses to fund your schools or local social services. Then, billionaires pay these men millions (more frequently tens and hundreds of thousands, but the star money is big money) which, by way of their investments and ownership stakes in other companies and industries, comes back to them anyway. Sports are wonderful – human athletic competition is a beautiful thing – and its professionalization has undoubtedly created opportunities for thousands. At the same time, it is a useful release valve for the ruling class because myriad athletes born in poverty do not have a developed politic or any extensive knowledge of financial planning.[1] Earlier in the documentary, scholar Rudy Mondragón discusses how boxing was always something the underclass did, referencing Irish and Italian immigrants and their descendants before it became our turn. I mention it here because it seems like black people have been stuck as the underclass for around a century, [2] as the establishment success of some high achievers does not turn into alleviating structural social ills for the masses.[3]

Strangely, in this section we see some evidence of the mental degradation that comes with a lifetime of head injuries, but the film strangely avoids discussing the topic of a fighter’s body breaking down as such, except for within the context of interviewing Larry Holmes about fighting Ali. There’s certainly no discussion of CTE or other consequences of concussions. It just feels odd – a documentary about the hard work it takes to be a fighter skirts around the long-term sacrifices; maybe, like police casually trying to throw an innocent person in jail, this is something that no longer registers. Maybe Douglas and director Steve Read wanted to avoid that particular sad fact of boxing.

It is unclear from the documentary who Robert Douglas is and why we should care. We understand that Douglas is a fan of boxing and that he emotionally connected to the champions, but the film has a disjointed nature to it because it feels like a scattershot survey of the sport that evades any technical aspects for personal stories,[4] and it doesn’t feel like Douglas gets to connect verbally one-on-one with the fighters except at the end. In the Company of Kings strings together several different theses and two major biographies alongside several minor biographies. All manner of heavyweight champions are discussed and interviewed, although, strangely, Iron Mike Tyson is only briefly mentioned and never interviewed. This is not a film from which you will come away with a deep understanding of the sport of boxing, though you will have confirmed and reaffirmed that poor black kids draw inspiration from sports heroes, and that greatness in sports is fleeting but the memory of your inspiration may last.

Final Score – 2.5/5

As of April 30, 2024, In the Company of Kings is available on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play/YouTube Movies and Fandango at Home.

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[1] This is to say nothing of the recurring prevalence of athletes who aesthetically represent the underclass but come from the suburbs, which is a separate issue.

[2] That Jews in the 1930s or Hispanic/Latine Americans contemporaneous with African Americans do not figure into the story is a separate issue altogether and two separate issues among themselves.

[3] The Obamas and Kamalas of the world have not, in fact, led to a golden age of black uplift.

[4] How does a fighter amass an overwhelmingly positive record; why are there so many separate championships and commissions?, and so on.

Hanky Panky – Passion, but not Polish

Hanky Panky is a horror comedy set in a cabin in the woods, with mostly early-2000s TV movie production values, committed performances, absurd writing, and a final product that flits between “good” and “so bad it’s good” without ever settling into being boringly atrocious. This correlates with lighting and staging choices that make it feeling uneven and like it could have used another coat, but there is something admirable in the passion communicated by its amateurish qualities. I certainly laughed a lot, which is the main thing you want out of a comedy.

The stage is set when a couple’s romantic winter getaway turns into a friends-and-family affair. Sam (Jacob Demonte-Finn, with a talking handkerchief named Woody voiced by Toby Bryan) is already staying at the cabin when Diane (the cheerful and welcoming hippie played by Ashley Holliday Tavares) appears, soon thereafter finding it was supposed to be a couple’s getaway for Carla (Christina Laskay) and Cliff (Anthony Rutowicz), the former of whom is much more bothered than the latter. Her plan to ignore him while drinking is a bit upset, where his plans to get drunk and fish can go right along. Their marriage is in an acerbic place, and their friend Rebecca (co-director and production designer Linsdsay Haun) sought to bring them together with some friends, including Cliff’s brother Dr. Crane (writer and co-director Nick Roth) and his wife Lilith (Azure Parsons) who I wasn’t sure actually existed until her shocking and funny reveal. Chipper-and-odd neighbor Kelly (Clare Grant) shows up with a bunch of desserts and stays a spell. Toby Bryan, who led special effects on the movie, plays Rebecca’s brother Norm, with whom she has a weird relationship tied to a religion that’s initially only alluded to. We also see him fully frontally naked; it’s such an odd performance and I mean that in the best way. Awkward dinner conversation has Sam win over both Diane and Dr. Crane with his expertise in fabrics and clothier trades, while Carla broods.

Before long, there’s chaos, death, and Cliff and Diane on a psychic retreat where they meet an evil hat played by Seth Green. I don’t want to give it all away because, when I sat to down to write I was feeling uneven but now I just feel like this is a film you should experience as quickly as you can. It’s so bizarre, but clearly have a level of craft to it. It’s not especially sophisticated, but it’s nice when a group of people film a short and then come back together a decade later to make the feature-length version.

If I had to stretch, I’d say that Hanky Panky is a movie about the expectations we put on others and the harsh ways we can shape our perspectives, using judgment to create hierarchies of in- and out-groups, as well as how things like tangential shared passion or the pure guiding light of romantic attraction can build a bridge over the gaping metaphorical chasm of distance that can be ethnicity, religious background, or the extreme social awkwardness of a dinner party that seems accidental but was actually assembled by incestual alien-worshipping cultists. It’s a weird movie is what I’m saying in my mixed metaphors here. The main morals, in the few moments where the film is interested in those things, might be not to judge people and to be open to things, to care about people and let them care about you, and also to trust your gut. I don’t know, I really wouldn’t say this is a film concerned with a particular message besides “it’s fun to make movies with your friends” and “it’s good to get a little weird with it.”

Hanky Panky’s got a real Adult Swim, high-at-two-AM vibe, which is different from the initial Coen Brothers-adjacent vibe its opening scene gave me, with a man running through the snow and being murdered. Granted, I notice as you will that the actors’ names all have something like “demon” or “ghoul” interpolated into their name to let you know what kind of film you’re watching. The movie takes some odd turns, but it feels more like a throwback than something avant-garde. It’s a charming picture whose most structurally sinful scene might be a fight between inanimate objects on visible wires. That bugs me, mostly because I can’t tell if it was a matter of leaning into the rough edges or simply not caring to sand them down. Still, there are far too many untextured movies at our fingertips at all times; too few that look like what you and your friends would do with enough talent and effort.

Final Score – 3/5

Hanky Panky is available to purchase on Amazon Prime as of April 19.

Monkey Man, or, Dev Patel’s Baadasssss song

“Oh, Dev’s got the juice,” is what I kept saying to myself through the first half of the movie, what I communicated to my friends after watching the film about the action directing chops of director, star, and co-writer Dev Patel. Monkey Man is a movie you feel as you’re watching. You brim with hope for the hero and anticipation for the downfall of his enemies. This, to me, is what art is for. Does it make you feel? Does it make you think? Either is good, both are better. Does it entice you to laugh like a psychopath at the absurd, brutal, or ornate set-up and pay off-of a vicious, righteous kill? The best action movies do, Monkey Man does.

This multilingual revenge film is Dev Patel’s directorial debut, hard-hitting action set against the backdrop of criticizing Hindu Nationalism as a violent exclusionary concept and a mode of using religious identity to cover economic and environmental exploitation. Our protagonist, “Kid,” or “Monkey Man,” adopts the name “Bobby” from the bleach cleaner he uses in his kitchen job, on a revenge mission to kill police chief Rana Singh (Sikander Kher), a fascist stooge that assisted a religious leader, Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), and his chosen politician clear people from land. The film begins with a young Bobby (Jatin Malik) in his forest home listening to his mother tell the story of Hanuman, a Hindu ape deity and hero, a story – and the circumstances of his hearing it – which he recalls throughout the film.

We next see him as an amateur bareknuckle brawler who performs in a monkey mask, usually not better than second-best. The fight promotion is governed by a white South African named Tiger (Sharlto Copley) who maintains a huge gambling racket and in a manner seems to exemplify transnational colonial legacies. He addresses the crowd and says that whatever god they pray to they all (he included) worship money. Kid sleeps on a crowded floor with dozens of other men in a house in the slums, using his connections to get information about a woman that manages an establishment Rana frequents (Ashwini Kalsekar as Queenie), arranges to have her purse stolen and then transported across town, kilometers away from her. The camera work and editing in this sequence is especially dynamic, following motorcycles and scooters through crowded streets, children running over and under objects and through buildings, and so on. Much like the camera’s close eye on the bareknuckle kickboxing-and-grappling, the cheering crowds, and the juxtaposition between the slums and the urban centers of concentrated wealth they butt up against, this sequence paints a picture of deprivation, desperation, and ingenuity. Kid returns Queenie’s purse to her at her establishment in exchange for work in the classy brothel’s kitchen.

Being a good worker, Kid moves from the kitchen to doing bottle service, becoming friendly with Alphonso (Pitobash), meeting sex worker Neela (Adithi Kalkunte, who maybe has too few lines), and becoming accustomed to madame Queenie’s calculated capitalistic cruelty. Patel, cinematographer Sharone Meir, and the editing team use montage to show the character’s immersion into the world he is infiltrating, as well as training a dog he meets in the back alley to carry his black market-purchased revolver through a hole in the fence so Kid can avoid metal detectors. He spikes Rana’s coke in the top floor night club and confronts him in the bathroom. You think, wow, the showdown comes so early, and then things spiral further. A savage bathroom fight worthy of a Mission: Impossible film followed by a police chase on rooftops, through streets, and Kid incidentally fighting a machete-wielding pimp in a brothel, amid several more brutal run-ins with police along the same sequence. He’s shot off the rooftop, falls into the grossest water, and is nursed back to health at a hijra temple, where a community of third gender people is led by Alpha (Vipin Sharma).

In this first half of the film, at bars we see on TV the guru Baba Shakti speak in interviews of his humility and how he isn’t interested in politics, just helping people. Meanwhile, we hear offhandedly that there are concerns about the labor conditions of the factories where his branded health drinks are made, and we see directly that he ordered Rana to destroy Kid’s village. We also see news footage violence in the street done by members of the right-wing Hindu nationalist movement, attacking Muslims (and possibly Christians) and transgender people. These ideas are never developed in the way they might be in a political thriller or political-legal drama. The film is not, for instance, heavily or specifically interested in the recruitment and development strategies of the paramilitaries. (Though, I will say, I am generally in favor of focusing most of your ire on institutions like the police and holy men using religion as cover for their self-enrichment if you want a shorthand for expressing these issues.)

Nonetheless, what briefly seem like asides play minor roles in informing characters (Alphonso jokes that the kitchen manager doesn’t like him because of the “Muslim-Christian” thing, as opposed to him trying to take guys off the line to buy or sell drugs) or end up as set ups for major payoffs – hearing about and seeing transgender people being attacked by fascist mobs on the television leads to meeting the hijra who nurse Kid back to health; this in turn leads to Kid/Bobby/Monkey Man training with them, which makes him a more effective fighter; he uses their money to bet on himself through a proxy and returns their money many times over with a note reminding them of their own warrior heritage, so when he’s outnumbered in the final stages of his showdown with corrupt police and criminal goons, the hijra arrive as his allies. It’s smoothly and elegantly, but never boringly, done. At the hijra temple, renowned Indian musician Zakir Hussain plays the community table maestro who tells stories with his music, and helps Kid cultivate his striking combinations. It’s so cool. We get insights into individuals and social structures, and it is moreover artistically engaging. It is a combination of classic martial arts/action movie components alongside traumatic flashbacks, psychedelic visions that got me back on board when I worried we were losing momentum, and heartfelt conversations about humanity and spirituality. All thisall looks and sounds gorgeous.

The blood-splattering brutality is intense when it’s on, but also stops short of feeling extraneous. There’s nothing wrong with exploitation cinema or gratuitous gore from time to time (or all the time if that’s your bag), but here it mostly feels like sensationalized realism. I saw it opening weekend, but this review is late enough now that I can tell you it prominently features its protagonist training with transgender women to beat up corrupt cops. I’d have thought very highly of the film regardless, but that’s the sort of thing you post online as a “what more do you need?” recommendation. What you need is an exceptional execution of such a tantalizing promise, and Monkey Man delivers. Monkey Man is among the most entertaining films I’ve seen this year, a martial arts film which maintains a sometimes-grim seriousness while also effectively deploying humor.

Monkey Man is similar to Extraction in eyeing political corruption in South Asia, but feels more insightful and less exoticizing. The different circumstances of the protagonist (an Indian man moving through stratified space rather than an Australian mercenary dropping in for a rescue mission that goes wrong) changes the perspective of the camera and the audience. The wealth concentration and disparity it showcases reminds me of where I live and what I’ve seen in other American cities, the stark reality of segregated wealth, the blatant confrontation with the uneven distribution of the benefits and costs of capitalism. It made me think of the ways the present world political-economic system distributes risk and gain but also how the increased concentration we associate with the developing world is where we’re headed if political will doesn’t arise in this country to shift the direction of our politics. Maybe it is inevitable…

Monkey Man also made me think, as I often do, about how religion and seeking a connection with nature, with your fellow humans, and with a concept of the divine, can manifest in negative and positive ways in the world. Prevalent though it is, the anti-Muslim discrimination of the Amero-European West is not the only stripe of that sort of religious chauvinism. As long as organized religion has existed, it has had political ramifications and some forms of majoritarian tendencies. As cruel as that is, there is something beautiful about the fact that there has likely as long been resistance, violent and otherwise, as the excluded people whom the majority (or the ruling minority within it) try to paint out of the picture instead demand recognition and respect.

There might be many lessons to learn from how Monkey Man deals with politics – in religion, in physical space and wealth, in institutional corruption and intersections between vice, police, military, religion, and legislation. There might be a version of the film that deals with these problems in a more meticulous way. But this version is more than acceptable. The prime minister (whose name is “Joshi” but who does not appear in the IMDb or Wikipedia cast lists) is spared at the final fight, perhaps a nod to avoid censorship in India (the flags in rally scenes had their colors changed from the orange affiliated with the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh paramilitary to a crimson closer to what’s used by the communist parties in India). Monkey Man wants the guru after he’s dealt with the police chief, maybe an artistic veneer to commentate on a problem without being accused of encouraging violence against a head of state. I don’t know. I just know this movie is a tremendously fun time, a real badass flick that also made me think.

Final Score: 4/5

Hell is A World Without You, and the political echoes of religious trauma

Hell is a World Without You is a funny and touching book that, in its early chapters, has me frequently shocked by how closely my own experiences mapped onto those of the protagonist, a fictional person who would have been about nine years older than me. Isaac Siena, Jr. is not entirely a fictionalized version of author Jason Kirk, but I could not help but read it largely as autofiction because of what Jason has revealed about his upbringing in the approximately thirteen years I’ve been listening to his podcasts and the interview I read leading up to the book. But we’ll set that aside for the moment; let me give some broad strokes about what the book is about. Some spoilers ahead, as well as a thick section where I talk about my experiences in churches.

Hell is a World Without You is a coming-of-age novel about living in the intersection of capitalism, jingoism, and Christianity that is the American Evangelical movement. It is about how that space transformed at the turn of the millennium and how it had been shaped in the latter half of the 20^th century around the American conservative movement. It is a four-year snapshot which historically contextualizes a political-religious movement whose ideology rests on an ahistorical conception of itself. It’s a book that is simultaneously about paintball and budding sexuality in one scene, Diablo II and theological uncertainty in another. It’s about how self-loathing builds up in children trying to navigate the rules, a handful of which may have some real moral basis, but which are drowned out in their utility by the many of which are contortions of morality to control women’s bodies and use young people’s Bible study as spaces of social reproduction while setting them up for a twisted relationship with physical reproduction.

This book made me think so much about middle school and high school, which feels like misplaced nostalgia and wistfulness at the best of times (and relentless criticism of a child at the worst), and in the first hundred pages here was a combination of kind and cringing familiarity. As someone relatively young that has been trapped in unending self-inquiry about “what is wrong with me?” probably since elementary school, the poignancy of its imagery was unceasing. I felt a sadness and a kinship with Isaac Jr. because of how his failure to live up to impossible moral aspirations haunts him into suicidal thoughts, something you might not escape just because you escape that kind of church. You might find yourself holding onto that sort of harsh self-evaluation even when you lose religion as your moral north star. The feeling of not being enough, not having any certainty and just wanting so badly to believe in the things you are meant to believe is so potent here, and Kirk effortlessly… well, probably it took a lot of effort, so let’s say *expertly* blends teenage moral inquiry, lust, and self-doubt with tremendous authentic-feeling comedic chops. “In this life or the next, I will see her whole sports bra” is a funny line without context, but it’s a funnier one within it.

The book is in part a theological treatise or polemic, not so much demanding you agree with it but most purely in the sense of exploring Siena’s own journey reconciling the things he feels are most true and most nonsensical about the version of Christianity passed down to him, leading to a belief in something simultaneously truer and more nebulous. Isaac’s life is guided by a deep fear of hell, impacted greatly by his father’s death and his uncertainty about where he ended up. Isaac worries a lot about what other people think of him, noting the cruel judgmental murmurings of other churchgoers.

Isaac goes on to reconcile the conflicts within him as, around him, a father figure that once told him not to worry about the rapture grows his humble church by combining hellfire, brimstone, and patriotism, using the absolute thinnest of metaphors to praise a warmongering president. Isaac’s close friends include the pastor’s niece Sophie, who does ASL interpretation of the sermons, Josiah, the pastor’s son who goes from arrogant to insecure about his place within the political dynasty, and a coterie of girls with the middle name Grace, boys called Caleb. Outside of church his best friends are a young lesbian named Bobbi with whom he plays Pokémon and debates the nature of reality and a Sikh football player named Amir who becomes targeted by racist and ignorant students after 9/11. Isaac explores the bible, multiple churches, theology, and morality as the contradictions sharpen between what he’s been told in church and what he experiences in real life. He starts a Video Game Church bible study with his young friends, has a fling with a girl of a different denomination, experiences the lasting and temporary ways young people love one another. He clashes internally and externally with the idea that men and women are made impure by sex outside of wedlock, and that it is a sin for men to look lustfully at women and that it is women’s fault if men fail in this way. He assembles a men’s accountability group so the pubescent boys can take account of how often they’re battering themselves. He is puzzled by when he is told the Bible is being metaphorical (basically anything to do with giving up riches) versus being literal (anything punitive).

The writing point-of-view is, again, expert artistic crafting. You feel the protagonist grow through the first-person perspective of being almost 14 to almost a legal adult, complete with the haunting and threatening voice of a mean moral advisory voice – a pseudo-schizophrenia or a brimstone preacher sycophant, an angry and unforgiving angel on his shoulder. It is a vivid past tense description that immerses you in that growth, through the awkwardness of thought and spoken idea from being just barely out of middle school to being on the tip toe toward college, and the articulation of the thoughts evolves thusly. It has a nearly diary-like quality while occasionally importing formats like AIM messages or dropping in song titles to soundtrack a summer. It’s a book about relationships – Isaac’s with his self and his spirituality and with his family and friends, who are the objects of collegial, fraternal, and romantic affection that make him care about church and make him question it.

My experiences with religion are not the exact same as Isaac Siena, Jr.’s, but I do want to talk about the overlap and why this book so strongly resonates with me. I was baptized Lutheran (in elementary school at a mostly white church) but didn’t finish my catechism (in middle school at that same church) for reasons that are unclear to me (I still have mostly fond memories of both the pastor – who let us stay in his house one summer when we were moving from a house on his street to one around the corner – and the youth pastor there, who moved back to Minnesota after a little while). Then, when we moved states (in high school), we went to a Baptist-derived nondenominational church and, along these later years I stopped believing in God. We visited megachurches in Henderson, Nevada, and Randall Cunningham’s church in Las Vegas. My sophomore year of high school, I started going to Catholic mass on Saturdays with my granddad across the Las Vegas Valley (at a rival high school near my house, at a large purpose-built church near the strip, and so forth) until mom gave me the ultimatum that I could go to both church with her and mass with Pop or just church with her.

I remember figuring out that I thought homophobia was stupid in middle school, and I also remember that I internalized homophobia in part because of the church and that kept me from coming out as bisexual to myself and later my friends and still later my family for several years. Reading the book, I couldn’t help but think about how quickly I fell out of the ranks of the most devout and how my relationships with my church friends were not tight enough to bind me to church or even make me feel like I was missing anything for most of the decade-plus since I’ve been a regular attendee. I remember rejecting a seventh-grade science lesson about entropy and the swallowing of the Earth by the Sun in Fontana, CA, then later being bemused that the first day of my biology class in junior college in Houston, TX began with us watching a documentary about the ability for Christians of various denominations to work in the sciences and accept evolution as part of God’s plan. How the turn tables.

Reading the first couple dozen pages of Hell is a World Without You, I mentioned to my girlfriend the time in middle school where my mother, brother, and a couple of my teachers prayed around the flagpole early in the morning. The next day I was reading the book and Jason Kirk and Isaac Siena are talking about that same practice. Isaac mentions “Open the Eyes of My Heart, Lord” and I think about singing along to that in the predominately white Lutheran church.[1] Which, I guess, we can pull back here from my smattered recollections to the book and its cultural references which have this strange resonance because I was born so much later than the protagonist but I existed in the same cultural milieu eight years later, where some of the songs were becoming oldies but some of the pop punk and rap and Christian music was prevalent in my life. We were allowed to read Harry Potter when I was in elementary school and middle school and Mom thought it was silly that was considered such a big deal by some Christians; conversely, we weren’t allowed to see The Golden Compass when it came out when I was in ninth grade because some people at the church said it was bad.

I remember, in elementary or middle school, being cornered by another church youth with a church elder for not supporting Bush’s wars, which felt awkward then and feels resentful now, but at least the pastors never advocated for it from the pulpit. I remember being told that an older church youth knew he was gay but had chosen not to live that “sinful lifestyle,” as if it were some challenge from God to overcome. I remember being in the youth service in the predominately black church in high school and one of the youth ministers saying he wasn’t sure he could support Obama because of his stance on abortion and responding out loud, “There are wars going on.” I remember that same minister answering my concern that the Bible didn’t make sense with things I was learning in school by saying “Sometimes things don’t make sense, but we still have to believe anyway,” which I felt was inadequate to the moment. The other youth minister told me he was disappointed and expected me to get it together and be a leader among our cohort. Moments earlier, my younger brother had chided me for starting problems since we had been called to confirm or deny our faith during the service. I had told him and my stepdad I didn’t believe in any of this anymore a few days before. It was a funnier and less stressful coming out than the sexuality thing later.[2] I can’t remember if my mom more ended up feeling angry or embarrassed about my newly explicit atheism – I know there were fights about it later, the latest and most surprising when I was about 21. Here’s a funnier memory, from earlier in the same high school period when I still believed in God: a video was being shown in the main sanctuary celebrating the purity pledges (promising to stay a virgin until marriage) that the older youth had recently taken. I was so confounded but found it funny, thinking to myself with a mixture of humor and panic, “They gon’ make me lie to Jesus. It’s not gonna work, he knows my heart.” I have an imprecise memory of a conversation that matches with a very vivid feeling – thinking that, with all the many religions, maybe they draw from the same source; I’m hardly the first person to come up with this concept, but I was disheartened it was treated as heresy.

That was all between when I was 13 and 15. From the ages of probably about 8 to 12, anytime I was alone in the house and I didn’t know where everyone else was, I would worry that I had been “left behind” during the Rapture (when God takes all his chosen people away before the antichrist comes to make everything terrible for a while before Jesus returns and establishes a thousand-year kingdom), something the protagonist of Hell is a World Without You experiences once in the book. My mom had read the Left Behind books and I had gotten me the first four or five books in the Left Behind for Kids series. We watched the first several movies, as they lowered in production value and moved from cinema releases to straight-to-DVD; of course, the idea has gotten some gradual mainstream non-Christian religious purchase through shows like The 100 or The Leftovers, which draw on the concept if not taking it wholesale.

I learned in graduate school from a friend raised Protestant that converted to Catholicism as an adult that the Rapture was a fringe Protestant belief and from a born-and-raised Catholic that (most) Catholics didn’t believe in it. It may or may not surprise you to know that the prevalence of the Rapture in the American Evangelical movement is part of American political support for Israel aside from other material considerations – the largest pro-Israel lobby by membership at over ten million members is Christians United for Israel. CUFI’s co-founder, John Hagee, all-but-explicitly endorsed Trump in September 2020 and his lobbying group believes that Israel needs to be propped up to bring about a cataclysmic war to prompt the Second Coming of Christ, and for Jews to be converted or sent to hell on Christ’s return.[3]

It stands to reason that these beliefs being so influential in American Christian politics – the sending of money to Israel, the many of these people who get elected to Congress –feels like it should come up more in contemporary conversations about the conflict of occupation and the related genocide. It’s probably worth mentioning, in any case, the prevalence of Christian Dominionism as a motivating ideology in the contemporary Republican movement and recalling George W. Bush’s bold expressions of serving God’s mission with his wars.[4]

I mention all these things, my experiences and some of the wider political context, to explain why this book is important to me and why it is important beyond that. My life has been shaped in large part by my relationship to Christianity – one where, even if I am now very far from among the faithful spiritually, I remain in physical and familiar proximity. And for all the damage that was done to me mentally and emotionally, I am not among the many thousands forced into gay conversion therapy. My clothing might have occasionally come under criticism, but I didn’t deal with sexist ideas of modesty. I had it a lot easier than some. No church elders ever ran into our sanctuary as masked-up gunmen as a test of faith like happened in Hell is a World Without You, turning a teenager into a zealot.

I also must admit I was not totally bereft good experiences. One of the youth leaders at SonFest (our summer vacation bible school) lent me his Initial D DVDs. We used to go to Graziano’s pizza and play Metal Slug in the arcade. I don’t remember the worst parts of the lock-in, but I remember generally enjoying it as well as the Halloween festival. The first time I played Dune 2000 and Command & Conquer: Red Alert were at the same church friend’s birthday party. I learned who Alfred Molina was beyond being Doctor Octopus when I watched Luther in youth group. And I remember the park barbecues at the black church being a mostly very good time. Having to read the whole Bible in middle school was not an awful experience, even if Revelations did scare me. I always liked Exodus and The Ten Commandments. I’ve forgotten it now, but I had Psalm 23 memorized for years after I let go of the church. And my lasting interest in trying to decipher the real meaning of things I think are metaphorical or exaggerated was a useful entry point for Jason Kirk’s podcast Vacation Bible School, where he and his wife Emily Kirk practice a heresy that might have let me stay in the church if it were more prevalent – they are open-minded and inquisitive, analyzing meaning in the Bible, and bringing on scholars and friends of various faiths at co-interrogators and interlocutors. My penchant for such things probably contributed to whatever value I have as a critic and whatever merit I had in my training as a historian. It will be obvious from reading any things that I write, and certainly this, that I have difficulty with vulnerability and yet crave connection. I also struggle with conciseness.

Hell is a World Without You feels like a miracle to me, causing me to reflect on the deep-running mental and emotional scars of my Christian upbringing, and how they are woven through how I still see the world. I don’t believe in God but sometimes still find myself thinking I’ll have to answer for all my shortcomings and mistakes. I don’t know that I could have avoided the punitive introspection in pursuit of perfection if I hadn’t been subject to Christianity in the ways I was. I do know that there’s a balm for the lack of personal resolution in knowing that so many of us in this broad and interconnected network do survive and take what is good from these experiences and pay it forward into the lives of people around us. My most prevalent concern might be that the ending is too happy, but it is nothing if not earned – the climax about blew me away. And, while I may be entering one of those periods where I crave sad or angry endings, I’ve also found that I don’t want a lazily cynical one. There’s nothing wrong with cynics, but I don’t think I want to read or watch or hear anything creatively lazy ever again.

Anyone curious about American Christianity, including but not limited to American Protestantism, including but not limited to the American Evangelical Movement, should read this. Anyone curious about the good and bad of youth group and vacation bible school should read this book. It’s compassionate and entertaining. It feels important as a cultural historical artifact that can resonate beyond the people who directly relate to it, and which has value in examining and refracting a significant cultural force in the world. But it also doesn’t feel like it’s up its own ass, and it’s the fastest I’ve finished a book in a long time.

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[1] Abbott Elementary has an episode where Mary Mary’s “Shackles” plays prominently and I remember being at a party in grad school and showing my (atheist and Catholic and Mormon) friends that song, the one song of all the gospel my mom played in her minivan on the way to swim lessons that I still recognize as being an excellent track.

[2] Imagine being 24 and worrying if you were going to have to stay with one of your friends instead of your mom because of your sexuality

[3] This millenarian ideal was crucial to the settlement of Palestine by Jews in accordance with Protestant political theology in the 19^th century. This is one of the key arguments of the third chapter of Ilan Pappe’s Ten Myths About Israel.

[4] There’s also the whole red cows thing, which is almost too stupid to discuss. It’s one of those occasions where the South Park version (with Van Halen performing at the Vatican) is far superior to the real things people believe, notwithstanding Parker and Stone’s requisite casual racism.

Alex Garland’s pretty and pathetic Civil War

Civil War is a movie I was not sure was capable of disappointing me because I accepted the premise expressed by the marketing demonstrated a low level of political sophistication in its inquiry. I found the movie visually striking at times but, in the end, it is simply afraid or incapable of making a statement more profound than “war makes monsters of us all.” All sides are bad, existing in a vacuum and causing destruction amid existing disorder; the existing power structure and any responses to its mercilessness are wrong. This is one in a long line of movies that think being cynical is the same thing as being wise, but lacks the rhetorical flourishes to take its faux-wisdom to the heights of spectacular entertainment that might preclude an unsympathetic reading. There are lots of movies with bad politics that are still fun to watch. This is a movie that wants you to feel good about being a patronizing centrist – it is the politics of amoral moralism; thinking you’re more righteous than rabble you won’t lower yourself to speak to.

The terrific cinematography and still photography creates a certain bleak beauty which has some charm to it. For this, Rob Hardy is to be lauded. Eventually, though, it feels like one of the lower-tier of Euphoria episodes – all style, no substance. Alongside that, the sound effects work help immerse the audience in Garland’s idea of the experience of being a conflict photographer. Nevertheless, the musical choices which work at some points to create dissonance and in others to reify theme, combine to create a wall of sound between the viewer and the characters, undercutting that intended immersion. It works alongside the pedestrian-at-best dialogue and thin characterization to consistently undermine solid performances, sapping them of their ability to evoke emotion.

But let’s take it back to the beginning, and what it is you are being immersed in and where your emotions are prodded but not aroused. Civil War begins with the audience meeting the president (Nick Offerman) as he prepares himself to give a speech. Then we see professional conflict journalists, photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and writer Joel (Wagner Moura), showing up to a protest in what is revealed to be NYC. Amateur photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) is shooting pictures. A police officer hits her with a baton while pushing angry, presumably thirsty, people away from a water truck. Anyway, Lee gives Jessie her reflective vest, then hides her behind a police car while a young woman holding an American flag detonates a suicide bomb while running toward the water truck. We never learn her aims or her opponents, she just represents senseless violence in the wake of collapse.

Jessie seeks Lee out at the hotel all the journalists are staying, then she and veteran reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) hitch a ride with Lee and Joel, who are headed to D.C. to profile the embattled president. Along the way they find militiamen, soldiers, tragedy, and trauma. The audience gets to see what the U.S. might look like if it splintered into factions killing each other over… well, the movie doesn’t say what exactly, but presumably the distribution and administration of resources, since that’s what politics and war tend to be about. There is something engaging there, especially in the scene-setting shots of the early running and the display of the final showdown which comes about through a twist of escalation.

Civil War rests on an obvious setup – the United States is at war with itself for the second time, this time with twice as many factions. The factions, which you may recognize from the map used in marketing, include the Western Forces of California and Texas, the Florida Alliance stretching from Oklahoma to Tennessee in its northern section and from Louisiana to Florida in its southern, the New People’s Army stretching from the Pacific Northwest to Minnesota, and a chunk of loyalist states covering most of the rest of the country. People responded to this map with incredulity, but we’re all capable of suspending disbelief for a film.

Problematically, and to emphasize that this is a story about how scary and confusing war is, the impetus for the war and the conditions that led to multiple concurrent successions are not explored. While people who have lived and have never lived in California or Texas can be quick to point out their differences, it’s possible that something might unite them against the federal government; Georgia might balk to being part of “Florida,” but DeSantis and Kemp have plenty in common; and so on. The issue is that director Alex Garland doesn’t care to say what the table stakes are – is this a taxation issue, a border issue? It doesn’t matter for the story he’s telling.

Maoists taking over the Pacific Northwest, Mountain West, and Upper Midwest is arguably less believable considering the prevalence of rightwing militias in those spaces, but it’s conceptually interesting. This concept is not explored, though, it’s just a fun fact to help you form insinuations or stress the intensity of the situation. All we know is that they’re referred to as “Portland Maoists,” not what that moniker entails. “New People’s Army” isn’t even in the movie, it’s just in the advertising.

What is easily waved away as a plot or lore problem for the disinterested or open-minded viewer becomes a problem for basic storytelling and character motivation. Journalists are never neutral observers, as often as people within and without journalism confuse objectivity and neutrality. But these journalists don’t have a perspective except that they think the president is bad, as expressed through sarcastic interview prep done during their car ride that informs the audience as to what he’s been up to. Resource issues are alluded to, but it is unclear if they are a cause or effect – we know the Canadian dollar is worth more than the American dollar, that militia men in Western Pennsylvania are stringing up looters, that Americans are dropping bombs against other Americans in a presumably non-racially-motivated fashion, and that some men with .[1] Garland invites the audience to read what you want into why this is happening, what matters is *that* it is happening, as expressed by some soldiers engaged in a sniper duel later in the movie (“No one’s giving us orders. Someone’s trying to kill us. We’re trying to kill them.”). I find this unsatisfying and lazy, if not cowardly. The only allusion to material politics is that Jesse Plemons’s militia character has a hierarchy of what constitutes a real American, and therefore human deserving of life. But we don’t know any affiliation of theirs, so it doesn’t tell us anything about the world besides that the racists who currently have guns will still have guns in this hypothetical future. Wow, what a shock!

Civil War works to depict journalists simultaneously as callous and disinterested as well as brave truthtellers. They’re all cynicism and hardness wrapped up with idealism and ambition. If Garland has a bone to pick with journalists, this is again something one can permit for the purpose of a film, putting aside one’s own feelings. Artists should have perspectives and it is valuable if they are willing to take controversial stances because it allows people to test their own values against those stances, whatever the level of depth or consideration with which they are presented. I am also permitted to balk at American journalists being blasé about a civil war while simultaneously perplexed and disappointed that other people are trying to exist outside of it. This is a film that tut-tuts at actors and bystanders alike; it is an incoherent blanket condemnation of conflict.

Artists love to hide behind not wanting to be didactic, because it is a freedom to claim an absence of intention with their creation. But all movies have messages, even and especially those avoiding hard stances. Civil War isn’t a movie that’s trying to be about nothing, it’s a movie that’s trying to separate causes from effects while stressing how terrible the effects are. I did not reasonably expect that the president would be transparently coded as one or another American politician – it’s easy for liberals to project Trump onto him and for conservatives to project Biden. Such is the nature of the general consensus around things like the FBI and term limits that, absent the context of impetus, working to disband one and repeal the other doesn’t inform anything.

The stark and beautiful imagery, in the end, feels like it is in service to nothing. Moments of profound loss end up reminding me of the atrocious “He Gets Us” commercials because of the sound separating us from the characters. I feel especially bad for Kirsten Dunst and Stephen McKinley Henderson, who try to convey much while given little.

The only real character arc is unevenly executed – Jessie gets used to the circumstances of the job she is called to do and acts in a way where her contradictory values meet at an obvious climax. A story does not require a stereotypical hero’s journey, but it requires committed execution. The film has an unceremonious and almost abrupt end that creates a final note of dark comedy and ironic triumph. I don’t need ceremony, but I do need you to say something if you want me to think you are profound. Civil War is such a condescending, patronizing, marble mouthed movie that drools the marbles out to ask in the end “Well, what did you learn?” and expect a sort of “Really makes you think” response. If this is Garland’s last film, instead I say, “Good riddance.”

Score: 1.5/5 or 3/10

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[1] It’s happened before, but when I think of America bombing Americans I mostly think of MOVE in Philadelphia and the Tulsa Massacre.

Thea Sharrock’s Wicked Little Letters

Wicked Little Letters is a solid, frequently humorous, occasionally touching affair focused on the nebulously strict, religious-inspired patriarchal order of the interwar period in a seaside town in England. The film stars Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman as Rose Gooding and Edith Swan, a pair of women of opposite manners and juxtaposed social standing navigating the legal fallout of a short-lived friendship. Well-mannered devout Christian spinster Edith is among a rash of Littlehampton townsfolk getting abusive and offensive letters of unknown origin. Rose, an Irish immigrant who came to England after her husband died in the first World War, becomes the scapegoat for the criminal scandal because of her inauspicious reputation.

What did Rose do to earn this reputation? She’s from Ireland and is of less than exquisite manners. She’s unmarried and cohabitating with Bill (Malachi Kirby), with whom she raises her daughter Nancy (Alisha Weir). She is kind and friendly, but she isn’t nice and she doesn’t take people’s shit, which is just not the order of the day or the expectations of the environment. Rose goes to bars and sings and dances, and her short-lived friendship with Edith imploded after she refused to put up with chauvinistic condescension and insult by Edith’s father Edward (Timothy Spall) and his friends. So, Rose is arrested for the film’s titular letters based on lazy suspicion while Edith becomes a bit of a local celebrity because of her upstanding reputation. Woman Police Officer Gladys Moss (played by Anjana Vasan) is uncertain she’s done it but gets little help or attention from Constable Papperwick (Hugh Skinner) and Chief Constable Spedding (Paul Chahidi). Edith and Rose’s mutual friends Ann (Joanna Scanlan) and Mabel (Eileen Atkins) bail Rose out, then Gladys’s investigation leads her to work with the members of Edith’s Christian Women’s whist game to find the real culprit.

At the same time, we are reminded frequently of Edith’s strange place in life – her father sent away a man she might have married, and he maintains an archaic-feeling sense of propriety within his home, his honor tied to the prim and upright behavior of the only of his children not to have moved away. Edith and her mother, Victoria (Gemma Jones), are completely subject to his whims. There is an unspoken threat of violence, the domineering air of a sniveling and unhappy man thick enough to coat the walls of his home. In one moment of anger, he quakes about being the head of house and the captain of the ship, as if his life outside his home is a constant reminder of his internal inadequateness. How odd that his insecurity creates problems for the rest of the seaside hamlet. His cloistering seems especially intense for Edith, whose suppressed emotion bubbles out, it is revealed, into the cruel and silly-sounding letters she has sent all over town. Edith’s mother receives a letter so shocking she dies of a heart attack. Signing the witness form, Edith accidentally reveals to Moss that her handwriting is the same as that within the letters.

Moss gets kicked off the case that has become a national sensation because her boss wants a clean and quiet resolution that doesn’t involve much thinking. She and Ann investigate Edith, giving Rose’s defense attorney evidence to fluster Edith at the trial. In this series of courtroom scenes, the character of the respective women is almost more important than any evidence. Edith is purported to be unable to even read aloud the wicked little letters because she is so devoutly Christian and morally upstanding. Meanwhile, the prosecuting attorney discovered that Rose was never married and that Nancy was born out of wedlock, creating a wedge in Rose’s home life. Her daughter is upset because she feels her own reputation may have been harmed and her mother is of low standing; Bill is upset because she didn’t trust them. In the end, Moss, Ann, Mabel, and Lolly Adefope’s Kate – who comes around during the trial – spring a trap for Edith, securing Rose’s freedom.

One thing I like about the movie is that it does not call itself “based on a true story” exactly, rather beginning with a note that “This is more true than you’d think,” therefore lowering the expectations of strict adaptation of history. The changes from what really happened are therefore less offensive, though I remain mixed in my feelings about colorblind casting of historical characters. In a play it makes sense to me, but it creates a layer of unreality, especially when part of the story focuses on real bigotries and oppression (in this film, mainly sexism with some allusions to class) while waving away others that were as prevalent at the time. For instance, the presiding judge in Rose’s case is a black man in the film, as is her boyfriend; in real life, the first black British judge wasn’t appointed until 1962. The real life Gladys Moss was the first female police officer in Sussex in 1919, but the UK didn’t get their first Asian female officer, Karpal Kaur Sandhu, until 1971. Though I don’t know for sure, I can’t help but wonder if there is some measure of exculpating the audience as well as the society depicted in the film by bending reality around contemporary progressive mores. However, I do not think it is as cynical as when big budget pictures use tertiary inclusivity as part of their marketing.

This feels a more personal film, and arguably a more important one considering it’s dealing with historical facts and figures. But, maybe less self-important? The score and the sound cues allow for a mixture of dramatic and silly moments. The performances lend humanity to the characters even though much of their lives and interiority is not revealed to us. The resolution is triumphant but humble enough I didn’t roll my eyes.

Wicked Little Letters movie is a great reminder of how much the world has changed. Libel laws are a lot stricter in the UK than they are in the U.S., but on the internet anyway you can call people all manner of things without facing criminal charges. It is the case, though, that, depending on an individual forum board, Discord server, or social media site’s moderation policies, you might get pushed off the site; and if what you say is the right kind egregious and caught by the wrong people, your job might be on the line. The biggest system shock and compelling plot component exists in the reminders of how, as corrupt and inefficient as police are today, as broken as our judicial systems are, and as rampant and accepted as casual male chauvinism and misogyny remain, it used to be – systematically, if not ubiquitously – worse. At any rate, that is some of what the film is arguing. Wicked Little Letters fits neatly between See How They Run and The Banshees of Inisherin in tone, substance, the broad structure that determines genre, maybe even quality. I’m not sure whether it deserves to be lauded, but it deserves to be seen.

Final Score – 3/5

On Review Scores, and objective scales of subjective experience

I generally don’t like review scores because I feel like they contribute to a perpetual culture of consensus building and shunning people with differences of opinion, because they flatten all the things you think about a movie or a game or a book into a number and because people sometimes use them as excuses to start dumb fights instead of interesting arguments, which is subjective but so is the rest of this. I actually don’t mind seeing them from other people but I don’t love doing them myself because I feel like it’s a square peg in a round hole. It’s attributing an objective mathematic rating to the subjective experience of a film. But I guess one of the few things in this realm that annoys me more than worrying about my own ratings of films is when people (especially those I respect) worry about those of others. I mean, a couple weeks ago people were circulating screenshots of people’s Letterboxd ratings spreads. I don’t think there’s any certain substantial insight you can extract from a survey of people’s Letterboxd ratings. If you wanted to hack it, just look at the lowest reviewed films of the people that cluster higher or the highest reviewed films of the people that cluster lower. Better yet, just look up how an individual feels about films you feel particularly strongly about positively or negatively to get a sense of how their taste aligns or conflicts with yours, like you might the body of work of a professional critic. It’s not rocket science. And we shouldn’t be enforcing a consensus on move opinions, much less scores or how scores are clustered. That’s silly. Letterboxd scores are not the most serious scores, no matter how often I agonize over them, because it’s a social media site. But more important than that, to me, is the text of a review. I can abide just about any non-bigoted opinion on art and media if the argument is compelling. I’ve said that before, I think. I like tweets all the time I don’t agree with if I’m interested in seeing where the argument is going. I like reviews where the audience member-critic I’m reading liked it more than me or less than me if the way they are analyzing it is interesting to engage with – if they see the things I saw differently or if they see different things altogether.

I guess the other reason I don’t like doing review scores is that they’re static things and my opinions can be fluid (I’ve changed ratings a bunch, as I get to later and as my Letterboxd activity will show). I tend to think what I say about a film will remain true even if I weigh its components differently over time or develop new insights about it. I mean, I change Letterboxd reviews from time to time, certainly on rewatches; there’s no changing the score on a published piece.

But, alas, a critical essay about a film is technically a different thing than a review to guide consumptive practices, a film ticket buyer’s guide piece. I think that a piece intended to be a see-or-do-not-see recommendation can turn into a nuanced investigation of form and substance, and also that a piece interested in particularly aspects as reflecting sociocultural, political-economic, artistic, or other trends can also highly recommend a film to you or let you know you ought to avoid it. Still, I accept that these are broadly different modes of writing.

So, even though most of my reviews on this blog are somewhere in between these spaces, or closer to the former, maybe putting a number on things would be more helpful.

Maybe I can even create a scale, as I considered doing some years ago, and leave it here for you to reflect on or cite, when I inevitably abandon it or change scales unannounced (something I am reserving the right to do, just like most EULAs reserve the right to change things at any time with whatever notice they deem acceptable):

…

Here’s the scale, with examples from my Letterboxd and links to reviews either on PCVulpes on WordPress or Substack, Paste Magazine, Vague Visages, or Blood Knife:

0.5/5 or 1/10 or 10/100 – apparently I haven’t rated anything this low, but I’m going to sift through my old ratings and see if I can’t fit something down here

1/5 or 2/10 – really bad, don’t watch (Black Adam)

1.5/5 or 3/10 – bad, with the occasional good part (A Good Person, which very nearly moves into so bad it’s good)

2/5 – not good, but maybe not totally irredeemable, occasional good parts (Beekeeper, Aquaman, Knock at the Cabin)

2.5/5 or 5/10 – bad, with some redeeming qualities/or average, since it’s smack in the middle; this could be a poorly executed movie with big aspirations (Mean Girls, Foe, Last Voyage of the Demeter, The Flash, Batman v Superman), a well-executed or relatively-well executed movie that I find fundamentally flawed in different ways (Air, Mad Props), or something with artistic merit that I found disagreeable (Beau Is Afraid)

3/5 or 6/10 – pretty good but not exceptional (Thanksgiving, Problemista, Raging Grace, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves)

3.5/5 or 7/10 – very good with flaws or specific shortcomings or limitations (Rebel Moon, Priscilla, Barbie, Joy Ride, John Wick Chapter 4)

4/5 or 8/10 – very good (Drive-Away Dolls, Poor Things, Ferrari, Kubi, The Northman)

4.5/5 or 9/10 – very, very good (Godzilla Minus One, Asteroid City, Banshees of Inisherin)

5/5 or 10/10 or 100/100 – perfect viewing experience or so engrossing and entertaining that my critiques are bowled over by my fascination and engagement… the type of movie that makes me think “Oh you can do this?” (Deep Sea, Avatar: The Way of Water, The Five Devils, Mad Max: Fury Road, Margin Call)

And I guess all further decimals in a ten-point scale, which equal to one point in a 100-point scale, are me modifying in one direction or another.

And, like, my ratings change. I keep going back and forth on how I feel about American Fiction, which I didn’t like that much coming out of the Philadelphia Film Festival, but found funny toward the end and enjoyed much more at the press screening I went to afterward, and which I gave a 3.5 on Letterboxd but a 7.9 at Paste. The Iron Claw has a 7.6 and a 3.5 I just saw I had The Suicide Squad and Black Widow as 3 stars and switched them to 2.5. I initially felt Ferrari was 3.5 but realized I loved it so much it had to be a 4.

Maybe I’ll stop using decimals on ten-point scales; I’m less likely to stop using them on the 5-point scale. Or maybe I’ll go the other way and get more and more particular on the 10-/100-point scale and less specific on the five-point scale. See all of this makes me feel neurotic BUT I also have felt compelled this year to try to be more critical on Letterboxd and therefore in my writing, so maybe I’ll start incorporating numeric ratings into my reviews on here even knowing it’s inherently flawed and limited and that my opinion changes from time to time.

Oh, one thing I didn’t complain about earlier – I think ratings tend to only use the upper half of the scale, which I think diminishes the utility of the scale. In games, I know this has in part to do with gamer trolls and the toxicity of discourse and at least one high profile example of the tying of dev team bonuses to ratings. In movies, maybe it has more to do with some combination of access journalism and being empathetic for the fact that a lot of work goes into making these things. But a lot of work goes into a lot of things that are shitty, and it’s not incumbent on us to pretend to like things we don’t, or to try to set an agenda inflating the ego of people that make bad art, as subjective as the criteria for badness is. Oi, that’s enough rambling.

I’ve got two Dune essays coming, maybe a surprise review, who knows what else. Tune in soon!

Dune Part Two – Giddy About Implications

Dune Part Two – When a tragic space epic makes you giddy with excitement about what’s said and what’s hinted

No one who cares to think about it will ever run out of things to say about Dune Part Two. It is a sticky topic because it is in a tradition of adaptations spinning out of a science fiction novel made in the middle-1960s by a man concerned with the problem of authority, of strongmen and charismatic leadership; an environmentalist who was distrustful of government, who drew on the real world occurrence of Amero-European exploitation of the Middle East as inspiration for a neo-feudal far-future story of an aristocrat who seizes power after surviving a purge and assassination attempt by taking hold of a desert warrior people through a prophecy seeded over centuries by his mother’s order of space eugenicists. Frank Herbert’s Dune is a seminal text for modern space opera and space fantasy. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part Two adapts the second part of that book, including its clean and quickly-executed finale. It is a film about destiny, devastation, inevitability, and tragedy. It is set in the 110^th century of a different scale of time, in a world where people have trained their minds to replace computers and their bodies to reject poisons. It is a fantasy war epic set among the stars which resonates and reverberates in our present moment as conflict escalates in the Middle East as the result of a violent and domineering settler-colonial project in Israel roils into the genocide of the Palestinian people, a comparison which feels inevitable when seeing bloodied children leaving their bombed homes on the screen.

Dune Part Two stars Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides, later Muad’Dib Usul, heir to a murdered duke, adopter of indigenous traditions, and claimant to a prophecy. Across and alongside him is Zendaya as Chani Kynes, his lover and teacher, who does not believe in the prophecy, but grows to trust in, and be hurt by, Paul. Javier Bardem is Stilgar, leader of many Fremen, a deadly warrior and strategist, and Paul’s loyal steward. Rebecca Fergusson is the Lady Jessica, the grieving lover of Paul’s father, a pregnant member of the Bene Gesserit. In the first film she is an able thinker and warrior beset by tragedy in the knowing that she has laid a trap for herself, brought ruin to her chosen family because she put her love and loyalty to it above her loyalty to the conniving order she came out of. Here she finds new psychic and political power among the Fremen, the desert nomads fighting against the oppressive Harkonnens, the Atreides’s primary Great House Rival. The Harkonnens are the Baron Vladimir (Stellan Skarsgard), a brutal, gluttonous man with two nephews as prospective heirs – “The Beast” Rabban (Dave Bautista), a vicious, angry, paranoid monster of a man – a great warrior turned into a coward for fear of what he might lose, and na-Baron Feyd Rautha (Austin Butler), a sociopath who brims with lust for blood and for flesh.

The film starts as Paul and Jessica accompany Stilgar, Chani, and other Fremen on their way to their home, the Sietch Tabr. They fight Harkonnen soldiers, equipped in dark space suits, floating through the air in a way that almost feels like old-fashioned wirework, exemplifying the science fiction aesthetic here that feels so unlike the versions of jetpacks, wings, and other forms of flight that have become ubiquitous and redundant throughout mainstream mass market speculative fiction film. There is a smoothness and a crunchiness to them, and to the Imperium. There is a distance and a strangeness everywhere and always, but we are drawn into the characters by the weight of their troubles and their charisma. The Atreides who become Fremen are victorious here; gradually Paul learns to fight like them and be like them. He seizes a prophecy given to him through psychic powers his mom taught him and through the powerful hallucinogen that comes from the planet Arrakis/Dune, the “spice” mélange that makes space travel possible and gives the planet its importance and is everywhere in the Fremen’s food. Paul becomes a great warrior and reunites with his old battle master, the Atreides warrior-poet commander Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), bringing together the atomic weapon power of the Atreides and the desert power of the Fremen to bring the Imperium which had conspired against his father and his House to heel.

This is a movie of images – great dunes in Jordan and Abu Dhabi for Arrakis, battlefields in Budapest, sets and CGI constructions of ornate oppression in the intricacies of the Harkonnen home world Giedi Prime (which also features striking black-and-white sequences of ceremonial arena battle, wet fireworks, and a huge military procession) and the massive scale of mining and transportation technology, and of course Shai-Hulud, The Great Maker, the iconic sandworms of Dune. Here those great monsters show their tremendous utility to the Fremen – the process known as “making peace with Shai-Hulud;” tricking the beasts which grow up to 400 meters (1300 feet) long into giving you a ride on its way across the sand which it refines into spice through its natural processes and travels.

The scale of this desert world, of the natural austerity, of the ingenuity of the people that live in it, married with the idea of high-tech and low-tech that is not inscrutable but feels irreplicable, these are all components of the aesthetic magic of the film. No less than five months pass in the film as the small Atreides remnant and their plentiful Fremen allies build up their violent resistance to the exploitative occupiers. In this time, we see Paul have visions of possible futures, and we see things come to pass which are similar but different than his visions in the first film – we see the limits to his prescience, the limits of prophecy even as he gives himself over to it, finding the points of choice and chance among what seems inevitable.

This is a movie rife with implications through its worldbuilding; as a matter of adaptation, there is so much you learn in the book that is only nodded or hinted at here. And there are changes made, too; Liet-Kynes is never mentioned by either name in this film even though we know from the first that she has begun the ecological program of reclaiming the desert as green. The Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) is a character rather than just a narrator; Chani’s resistance to the prophecy (alongside her friend, Shishkhali, played by Souheila Yacoub) is a new wrinkle.[1] There’s no spice orgy. We get a talking fetus instead of a nigh-omniscient toddler. I take no issue with any of that; one thing I did miss from the book was Paul becoming responsible for the widow of the man he slew in the first film, but again, choices amid storytelling constraints.

My general rule with remakes is that for it to be worth doing, a film has to be improvable. There is little sense in just making a movie to make it. Adaptations are slightly different because you have a different creative team with different interpretations of source material (obviously that’s also the case for remakes, but it’s a slight distinction of process). How many versions of A Star Is Born or The Great Gatsby do we need? I can’t call it, but I do think it’s funny that every generation or so, a new audience is introduced to Frank Herbert’s Dune, with all its fascinating in-universe and real-world implications, its line or symbiotic relationship between exoticizing Islam and the Arab world and critiquing that exoticization. It is impossible to make art without problems, and this story will always have some layer of being “problematic”; that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be told, that just means that when it is told we should think deeply about its meaning, however and by whomever it is made. I suppose I struggle to condemn it because, as a refraction of an artifact, it has value for what it shows about the time it came from as well as what it represents in the current moment. And it’s cool and fun in the ways that make incisive critiques about the premise the second or third thing that comes to mind instead of the first. Dune is a story concerned first-and-foremost with confronting heroic narratives and deconstructing them, and it does this through a heroic narrative with an ending you are told is nigh-inevitable and of at best questionable morality by the very framing process of the story. That translates to this film as destiny and doubt. The story confronts white savior narratives by circling and underlining that the protagonist feels an inevitable pull toward wreaking terror and havoc, and in Dune Part Two this translates in part to his mother just fully appropriating cultural aesthetics to claim a place of religious and political power that she herself is half-pulled into.

It feels astounding and miraculous even as cinephiles, film critics, and science fiction fans debate on the internet whether and what constitutes strangeness in the book; what is unfilmable or unadaptable or what have you. Simultaneously to considering what is impenetrable, people debate inclusivity, representation, and appropriation. Someone said it was an Arab world with no Arabs; this was perhaps a more compelling critique in the first film, which had far less Arabic names in the cast, but it stands to reason nonetheless that you can watch it and have a visceral reaction of concern or even embarrassment as we can all watch the film and know the Fremen aren’t in the wrong, even if Paul is. My enjoying Dune and not wanting flat critiques of its use of imagery with clear cultural connotations does not mean those connotations are not worthy of assessment or critique. It feels unfortunate ( though inevitable for at least the last two decades) that a studio would insist on the characters talking of “holy war” and “crusade” instead of “jihad,” but it’s hard for me to tell if the movie be a better piece of art or the world a better place if that was the language Paul used. It’s less forgivable that they designed a language that sounds a bit like Arabic instead of just using Arabic, but I’m more acknowledging a complaint than making one. I’m getting aside from myself, but I essentially don’t think it’s as easy as “this was done one clear whitewashed way and should have been done a different, more inclusive way.” For one, it isn’t a straight cultural whitewash, and for another I don’t know if the themes work as well if you make it less allegorical and interpretive and more literal. That’s a nonexistent counterfactual.

My biggest complaint really is that I wish there was more dialogue to help establish the development of and emotional engagement within the Paul-Chani romance, and perhaps to further flesh out the court intrigue beyond inevitabilities. I find what is here useful and I do like living in its implications and subtleties. I don’t think what Villeneuve did was wrong or a failure of adaptation, and I believe in film as an audiovisual medium where pictures take precedence. I even think the film very smartly leans into the meaning of silences, but I think Dune Part Two could have been even more cerebrally and emotionally engaging (especially as far as selling the romance between Paul and Chani) with more dialogue. At the same time, that could have made it feel crowded. Within the constraints of what is left here, we are very close to perfection, yet not quite there. A conundrum of art. It also feels very much like the second act of a trilogy, but that doesn’t strike me as a problem, just a fact of life.

I end up crossing 2000 words while this was intended to be the short version of the piece. It’s far longer than the essay that I cut away from to start writing this. Is it clear what I think? Can you tell what I feel? Dune Part Two rocks, especially if you watch it in IMAX two hours after finishing its predecessor at home. It’s a great time. It’s visually compelling, by which I mean gorgeous – it would clearly be an unforgiving life to live on Arrakis, and yet I feel called to it. It isn’t especially wordy but all its dialogue is meaningful. It isn’t a slow movie (it endlessly impresses me how Villeneuve and company can push past 160 minutes and make it fly by) but it’s given me so much to contemplate. Dune Part Two feels like a space age fairy tale, a space fantasy with few easy good guys but still dotted and underlined with clear moral warnings about the temptations and trappings of power. If anything, the baseline political-moralistic critique should interrogate the seeming wrongness of what the Fremen will go on to do in league with the Atreides. As in, why is their vengeance on the Imperium wrong? But this gets precluded by and large because the story of Dune (in film and in book) is so clear about this being Paul’s will and destiny rather than the Fremen’s (and the film goes further to explore the Fremen as a people of split consciousness around being undermined and manipulated) that this critique might die out of the gate. Dune Part Two is a drama, an epic of sight and sound, a film I want to return to again and again – a universe of terror and tragedy that I nonetheless feel enticed to and want to envelope me. Long live the fighters, indeed.

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[1] It was important to me, especially after watching this a second time before reviewing it, to avoid just parroting what was on the internet in the interest of giving my own impression. But it can’t be helped that, while I’ve avoided reading major reviews so far, I did have internet interlocutors. https://x.com/muaddibstyle/status/1766646007385784593?s=20