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

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

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

Problemista – As in, Problem Solver

Problemista is an A24 movie. Occasionally, people will act as if it’s absurd to notice that the production company has a vision because people can be limited in how they interpret that vision (they have produced or distributed nearly as many comedies as horror), but there are still some signs in what they look for – the slightly off-kilter but overall approachable, the heady but not impenetrable, the artistic but not necessarily abstract. Problemista is a very funny comedy in this vein. The film, written, directed by, and starring Julio Torres (writer on SNL, creator of Los Espookys) and narrated by Isabella Rossellini is a story of dreams – a story of desire, perseverance, and of course the hurdles of dealing with the arcane institutions which make up the U.S. state and economic apparatus. Problemista means “troublemaker” and what our protagonist (Julio Torres as Alejandro aka “Ale”) navigates through the film are problems he must solve through cool-headed optimism, trouble he finds himself in because he wants more for his life than the world will easily give him.

Ale is a young man raised in El Salvador by his mother Dolores (Catalina Saavedra Pérez), a sculptor and metalwork artist who tried to give him everything, leading him to pursue the ambitious dream of making offbeat and social commentariat children’s toys in New York City. Ale works at a cryogenics company attending the capsule of the artist Bobby (RZA) and ends up working as a personal assistant for Bobby’s eccentric, erratic, explosive life partner, art critic Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton). They grow together over time as Ale pursues permanent residency and a talent incubator program at Hasbo, navigating the maze of the American immigration system, met by passive-aggressive and apathetic artsy roommates, the online gig economy of Craigslist (where Abbott Elementary’s Larry Owens shines as a human embodiment), Elizabeth’s ambitions, mood swings, and old grudges (bringing in Greta Lee as Dalia, an artist whose career she upset with a bad review), and more.

When Problemista first started, I though it felt like mixing Barbie’s tendency of satirizing companies while advertising for them, especially Hasbro[1] with Poor Things and Beau Is Afraid’s respective interest in absurd satire of reality. There’s the Poor Things experience of learning about a world that’s new to you and the Beau Is Afraid experience of constant befuddlement, though Ale is a much better improviser than Beau. Over the course of the film, it establishes itself as more separate in tone, but thematic overlap remains. While completely tonally disparate, it also reminds of Imperial Dreams in focusing on the tremendous barriers people face moving through the world from a structurally marginalized position (in that movie, being a former convict trying to reintegrate into society; in this movie, being an immigrant). Like those movies, especially Beau Is Afraid – which is somehow, or in some ways, the most grounded of the three in comparison – there is flirtation between physical placement in the literal and metaphorical world, most especially the depiction of Ale as a knight facing Elizabeth as a dragon in a low-tech community theater-style costume in a cave.

I thought Problemista had interesting things to say but remained constricted by the socially ubiquitous fear of moral didacticism. It wants to be about the difficulties of immigration but is also focused on the virtues of patience and a can-do attitude, i.e., perpetuating American dream mythmaking by having Ale get a relatively low level job at Hasbro as a triumph against all his hurdles and after holding onto his dream by sidestepping the opportunity to be a paralegal (and of course he becomes later very successful so he can cryogenically freeze himself). Tilda Swinton’s performance was great, her character a terror, her lessons to Ale a mixed bag for him to pick through. The dream sequence imagery was impressive in its moderate technique; Ale bounding around as he walked like a puppet on strings contributed to the fable-like nature of the story and literalized the pep in his step. Some of the most fun imagery expresses the impossible trap, a vertical-lateral maze, of his pursuit of stability to make money to get legal permission to stay in the country.

Problemista is good but not great. It has some utility, some fire, some artistic novelty and colorful imagery expressing the difficulties of making one’s way in the world. If Problemista had foregone product placement, perhaps it could make more cutting criticisms (one of my favorite scenes features an exploration of the illogical nature of late fees and the unethical and illogical nature of companies putting holds on deposits and then taking late fees, but the credits sort of tongue-in-cheekily note that the policy of the bank in question changed somewhat between the filming and release of the picture). If it had come out in 2022 it would have stood out more, but as it is, the shadow of Barbie (which I like, with some reservations) and of Beau Is Afraid (which I did not enjoy, but sort of respect) hang over the film. Yet there is nothing to be done about that. As an individual experience, I like it more than either of those films – I didn’t roll my eyes even once during Problemista. It feels more adult than the former, and far more interesting and less navel-gazey than the latter. I do find it more incisive, but it is missing something in the sense of philosophical vitality or ideological dynamism in the way that its ending comes together. So, if you liked either of those movies, watch this one. If you didn’t watch either of those movies, this is still worth watching. Don’t expect it to change your life, but it may enrich it. [2]

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[1] As opposed to Mattel

[2] I think I’m giving this a 3 on Letterboxd. I’m trying to be harsher on there, as if it matters. I’m toying with the idea of doing ratings on here, but then I have to work up a scale and explain it.

Mad Props – On the Valorization of Commodified Nostalgia

Directed by Juan Paublo Reinoso and starring Oklahoma-based banker-collector Tom Biolcini as lead interviewer, Mad Props examines the hobby of movie prop collecting, the crafts of movie prop creation, and the medium of film to answer the question “are props art?” The answer seems obvious to me and is unanimous among the interviewees, but the film is nonetheless an interesting and reverent work. That reverence is an artistic weaknesses as the film lacks any measure of critique or special introspection and has a slight and occasional air of defensiveness – as if the intent to persuade turns to desperation. Nonetheless, Mad Props is a film which celebrates film by shining a light on the people that make movies beyond the actors and directors, and I’m inclined to celebrate that.

I’m less inclined to celebrate the nostalgia with which our society is currently resplendent and am feeling out the tension of mass culture as a door into all culture. People alive in the 1980s who can’t let go of Ghostbusters aren’t necessarily laudable for that (especially as it leads to terrible sequel after terrible sequel), but I tend to approve of teaching youngsters in Gen Z and Gen Alpha about the pop culture classics of yesteryear. Regardless, it’s interesting to see how film buffs acquire these collections, even if the investigation lacks some rigor.

The documentary begins by introducing us to Tom Biolcini, a banker who’s loved movies his whole life, crafting his own props and homemade horror flicks as a child. While his dream of working in Hollywood as a prop artist fell to the wayside, his love for the artistry of the tableaux never died. As an adult, he has a huge prop collection paid for by his evidently successful career as a financier and shares his collection hobby with his son Rocco. After showing us the Biolcini family home and collection (and soliciting fun anecdotes from Tom’s mom, wife, and daughter), Tom and Juan take us around the U.S. and to England and France to see individual collections, museums, a tattoo parlor that is also a prop museum, the Outsiders House in Tulsa, and a prop design facility in California. In all these spaces, we hear stories of what first inspired the collectors and how they think of props and movies, usually wrapped in nostalgia for childhood fixated around the blockbuster boom era centered on the 1980s.

On the one hand, I often find myself thinking these collectors have too much money. Like many experiences I have with entertainment or otherwise witnessing luxury and largesse amid signs of societal collapse, I can’t help but think that it feels like viewing the last people dancing on the Titanic. There are great sums of money at play – hundreds, thousands, even tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent at auction on what one curator says were formerly considered mere byproducts of the filmmaking process. There are certainly more altruistic uses this money could be put to than permanent revival of childhood.

At the same time, there are perhaps more sinister uses – in a society of consumption and disposal, collecting art you find meaningful rather than consigning it to a landfill is not the greatest sin. Part of Mad Props’s early reflections focus on a loose community across the U.S. and Europe that collect art to be displayed. They start museums, they share their collections and cross-reference each other’s authenticity, and – while they fit the definition of “nerd” that encompasses most audiences now that 1980s nerd culture dominates American pop culture through a media whirlpool – most of them have significant others and social lives. A museum curating duo in France always looks for Dark Crystal merchandise at auction because the wife of one is a huge fan of the film. Biolcini shares his hobby of prop collecting with his son and of movie watching with his whole family. Several of the collectors (including House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan J. Condal) make jokes about their wives’ begrudging acceptance of their collections.

As such, there exists a tension throughout the film for the socially critical as we see a bunch of people spending money to acquire the on-screen tools of filmmaking – costumes, prosthetics, animatronics, set dressing – in a manner that depends deeply on nostalgia for middle brow mass culture art. It is a worship of uncritical populism that I feel a need to push back against even as a big fan of moves like Star Wars and Back to the Future Part II, if only because I feel the closing monologue over-fixates on minimizing high art – abstract paintings and the like. To be clear, the reason I think that minimization is misplaced is because I think an appeal to ticket sales and brand recognition undermines the investment of value into the art on its own merits. E.g., the animatronic skinned rattlesnake from Prey is still impressive even though the film wasn’t given a theatrical release for selfish corporate reasons. Conversely, seeing the B camera from The Ten Commandments was as meaningful to me as any of the costumes because it is a culturally important movie and a sort of historical epic seldom made anymore with a longevity that precedes the era of blockbuster mass marketing of toys and lunchboxes that this prop fixation arises out of.

The tools which produce pop art have value imbued in them by the artist at least as much as the audience, and it is in transitioning from discussing the fixations of nostalgic collectors to the memories of the craftsmen and actors that the film is at its most moving. This really comes across in prop master Alec Gillis and famed actors Robert Englund and Lance Henrickson sharing stories from their movies. Gillis’s collection is especially noteworthy – he and Henrickson tell stories about working on Aliens with James Cameron, but he also has animatronics from The Santa Clause 2, Prey, Mortal Kombat, and other films, and puts a tremendous value on the creation of connection with people in the audience through the craftwork of developing the pieces.

One thing I wish the film got more into was the extent to which the market around prop collection facilitates a secondary or tertiary speculative market. Everyone interviewed in the film – including very notably Stephen Lane of the Prop Store in London which facilitates so many auction transactions to private collectors and museums – seem in it for the love of the art. Granted, Lane is one of the pioneers of the market, so – while he talks about the cultural and historical importance of the artifacts – he clearly has entrepreneurial spirit and profit motive in turning moviemaking trash into treasures. Nonetheless, the extent to which these commodities are sold purely to accrue value is obscured. It’s hard to imagine there’s none of that going on (it’s a longtime large component of collecting traditional art and low art), but I suppose it’s not impossible.

I was impressed by the level of access Juan and Tom were able to achieve – there are prominent actors and skilled craftworkers I haven’t mentioned – as well as the breadth of movie clips cleared that strike me as an expensive undertaking all their own. For whatever my misgivings of the arrested development of American culture in recursive tailspin, it’s not as if I’m immune to it. I like movies, including many of the ones discussed and whose props are collected here. I like when people like movies and when they collect the things that resonated with them and share them with the world. The difference between a collector and a hoarder is in display – at least one of these collectors builds art to display the props atop and within, the exponential exemplification of reverence. And for what little we learn about the collectors and their lives, Reinoso and Biolcini depict them in such a fashion that, separate as we are in geography and money (I won’t be bidding six digits for an Indiana Jones prop at any point in the future), they feel like my spiritual cousins if not siblings.

In that way, Mad Props is an effective showcase. I feel like I should hate these people and their enthusiasm, but I cannot because I share some of it. Even if all the collectors were antisocial neurotic sociopaths, we would still have Englund, Henrickson, Gillis, and his team. But the collectors are nice on screen however they are off it, they mostly even let Biolcini touch stuff (and it’s not like you can hold it against them when they don’t), and he is a confident presenter even if he could have asked more incisive questions. There is some reuse of auction clips, probably too much time with the Biolcini family, and one interview toward the end which really flirted with being pandering or exploitative in valorizing the hobby as an equalizing playing field. There is a version of Mad Props that is more polished or more incisive, and that version would be better, but the version that exists here is mostly charming in its enthusiasm and may prompt further research. This movie fulfills the remit and maintains the vibe of the era of film which it celebrates; when more slips through, it’s a pleasure. And regardless of its critical shortcomings, it at least doesn’t feel as market tested and flavorless as the successors to the era its fixations were born out of.

Ferrari (2023)

Sometimes you walk away from a movie and it grows on you and you realize you don’t just like it, you love it. One of the reasons that I hate numeric ratings is that I find my feelings can change about a movie even if my thoughts about it don’t; I mean, those thoughts can shift too, but that seems more forgivable, somehow.

To quote a Twitter acquaintance, no sport works as well on film as auto racing. Like many of director Michael Mann’s films, Ferrari is about work – how people (usually men) go about their day to feed themselves and their families, and the contradictions of ethics and morality that comprise their daily comings and goings. In the case of Ferrari, the story – adapted by screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin from the biography Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine by Brock Yates – follows Adam Driver as the race car driver-turned-entrepreneur as he pursues the Mille Migla (“thousand mile”) open road endurance race to buoy the strained finances of his namesake car company; win the race, attract partnership investment to avoid bankruptcy. The competition for resources and attention between the manufacturing and racing divisions of Ferrari are one part of Enzo’s conflict with his wife and business partner Laura (Penélope Cruz), who resents him for the death of their son Dino as well as Enzo’s “whoring.” Meanwhile, at an estate he has maintained in secret, Enzo has a second family with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) and their son Piero (Giuseppe Festinese), a young boy uncertain about his identity as he approaches his first communion. Ferrari is in large part a film about grief, responsibility, and old-world patriarchal moral duty.

The film opens with a grayscale portrayal of Driver as young Enzo in a racing car. Then, we see him awaken in bed beside Lina, check his watch, check on Piero, and head to his primary home. Laura says she will abide his whoring but that he is required to be home when she awakes, shooting the wall beside his head in their bedroom – Mann has established their relationship, the understanding between them, the festering grief and malignant passions. Next, they take separate cars to visit the mausoleum where Dino (Benedetto Benedettini; later Gabriel Noto at seven years old and Edoardo Beraldi at three years old in flashbacks) is interred. When the camera looks at Enzo while he speaks to his late son, the background shows that Enzo’s brother Dino, who died during World War I, shares the space. It is brilliant work by Mann and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt to establish the trauma the family has experienced and the guilt that animates Enzo’s ambitious drive. The second World War is also invoked as a shared backdrop of the film – Enzo’s factory was destroyed then, and it’s when Piero was conceived.

Milan native Daniela Piperno portrays Enzo’s mother Adalgisa, who has a confrontational relationship with Laura – she is a sort of archetypical shuffling-and-muttering mother-in-law who does not believe Laura should question Enzo, and believes Enzo has a right to an heir, rubbing the death of one Dino into her face while continuing to bear the wounds of his namesake predecessor. Adalgisa and Laura arrive to the gravesite as Enzo is leaving, and many of the film’s emotional conflicts have been established.

Shortly thereafter we see all these characters at mass – Enzo and his team of strategists and engineers have brought stopwatches as they listen through a homily which uses engines as a metaphor (further establishing the connection between the municipality of Maranello, province of Modena, and the profits of Ferrari and rival Maserati) for the sounds of Ferrari’s and Maserati’s test drivers starting and finishing. We see a man die testing a Ferrari not long after, as Alfonso de Portago (Brazilian actor Gabriel Leone as the aristocrat motor sportsman) pursues a racing gig with Ferrari and becomes his replacement. The violence of the afternoon (this death is not the last we see on screen) is in slow motion – the drama coming from knowing that everyone present is witnessing a tragedy about which they can do nothing. The emotion is palpable as the driver’s girlfriend or wife watches on. Enzo wants to provide the woman a sort of widow’s pension. Laura takes exception to this, establishing her nature as a serious businesswoman, with all the coldness that implies; antipathy to the losses others suffer as part of their alignment and association with Ferrari, even as she manages her own abiding grief.

Some of the tensions at play here are highlighted in the film’s most emotional scene – a night at the opera where Linda sits in the balcony and can see down to Ferrari’s seats, where Laura has decided not to accompany Enzo. As the music soars the various characters are transported away to moments in their past. Laura and Adalgisa, both hearing the music from the estate, remember their sons. We see Enzo and Laura young and happily in love, with their boy playing in their bedroom. Adalgisa watches *her* Dino walk to board a train to join the fight in The Great War, walking through the fog never for her to see him living again. It is an intense series of images, showing love and laughter to establish how much has been lost. Enzo, while still strong and brilliant, is gray now. Laura, still beautiful, has circles around her eyes and moves through each day haunted and full of fury.

Another emotional highlight to establish emotional stakes and foreshadow coming tragedy takes place between Enzo and his racing team. After a later race where Enzo is uninspired by his team’s performance, he explains to his drivers (the aforementioned de Portago alongside Jack O’Connell as the English Peter Collins, Patrick Dempsey as the aging Italian Piero Taruffi, and Wyatt Carnell as the German Wolfgang von Trips) that he wants more from them – he wants them willing to risk their lives, to take the hard chances. “Two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment in time,” he begins, before warning them they must accept the danger of this violent sport, their “deadly passion,” their “terrible joy.” They need to be willing to put their life on the line for victory. “You get into one of my cars, you get in to win.” The drivers must decide, Enzo says, if they are hungry competitors like the men at Maserati (Derek Hill as Jean Behra among them) or just gentlemen sportsmen. At the Mille Miglia, Enzo warns de Portago that his job is to just finish the race alive – it’s his first run, unlike the other men. There is a scene the night before the race where the drivers solemnly write and seal letters for their loved ones, in case they do not return. In the typical fashion of the young and hearty, de Portago heeds the one of these warnings that is a challenge rather than that which is intended to preserve him.

Class, culture, and labor figure interestingly into Ferrari. Enzo sells a car to the king of Jordan, he has a second house for his mistress, the municipality and the region depends in part on his decision making. By one metric, he carries them all with him, by another they are the tools of his success, laborers and peasants at the whims of an industrialist baron. He watches a race with his lead mechanic while everyone else has the day off. The idea of Enzo having or deserving an “heir” and the question of his obligations and responsibilities to his wife are wrapped up in culture and psychology but also in material reality – the rules are different, generally, for rich and poor, as are the concerns. Death happens around Enzo, some of which (like his older brother and eldest son) he cannot control, but others for which he is more, if not directly, responsible. He tells others he learned long ago to harden himself or find another line of work; the fickleness of death and destiny haunt him. Today, motor sports are much less dangerous because of advancements in technology and development of new rules; but this is a relative term – an F1 driver died in 2017.

Ferrari, like all car films, exists in part to explore the hubris of human experimentation with physics and mechanics. There’s hell to pay and it only takes one currency. The hubris, the pursuit, even manifests in a philosophical tension – Ferrari claims that he sells cars to race whereas Maserati races to sell cars; it is a symbiotic thing, not an either-or proposition, but there is a ratio here, a shifting scale of priority and value, and an inherent question of the purpose of capital and the process of capitalism. Is the acquisition of wealth and status a tool to pursue other things, or are other pursuits always means to the end of wealth? Where does contentment come from? What do the rich want? Men like Ferrari get to ask questions of society, of social structure, and of reality that the rest of us do not. Some of their comeuppance is in questions of reputation, which determine things like the stock value of a publicly traded company, the sale value of a sports car, or the stock and trade of the paparazzi that investigate, or are bribed and threatened by, a luxury car magnate because of personal and professional scandal.

Ferrari is a good biopic because it makes decisions that can be met as divisive. It stops short of hagiography – this is not a feelgood story about a noble man, though it is about a man’s greatness, how he pursues and deploys it. It is a portrait of a man at a crossroads; a former racer, an established businessman, trying to save his company. It is for the viewer to decide whether that was a prize worth the price paid for it. That company still exists – Scuderia Ferrari, the racing division, just made one of the highest profile transfers in motorsports history with seven-time Formula One championship winner Lewis Hamilton coming over from Mercedes[1] – but many challenges were ahead in the 1960s. The race Ferrari won in 1957 (his drivers finished in the first, second, and third place) no longer does; that was the last Mille Miglia that ever ran in that configuration because of the tragedy they were at the heart of simultaneous to their success. Epilogue-style text lets us know that Piero eventually took the name Ferrari and became Enzo’s heir; it does not mention that Ferrari had further financial troubles in the late 1960s, or that Enzo provoked several of his top engineers to leave and form their own company in the mid-1960s. This isn’t a failing of the movie, but it does end rather abruptly, perhaps stopping short altogether. Nonetheless, Ferrari strikes me as beautiful and emotional. Because of its subject matter, there is ample action, but there is a lot of drama, hot blood coursing through it, a heart beating as strongly and rapidly as an engine.

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[1] Hamilton will start at Ferrari in 2025. He will race for Mercedes in 2024