TV RECAP: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Season 3 - Episode 5: "4,722 Hours"

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At this point, there are probably three types of AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D fans (with significant crossover, of course):

1. Marvel Cinematic Universe completists watching to make absolutely sure that they don't miss any subplots, threads, etc being either launched or tied-up here.

2. Fans of all things Marvel and/or comics in general watching to make sure they don't miss appearances by any characters or iconography that hasn't shown up elsewhere yet.

3. People who've genuinely become invested in the characters/world of this specific show, care about the characters and want to know what happens to them.

"4,722 HOURS" is a rare episode that feels designed with Audience #3 exclusively in mind: It's a single story strictly involving the series' own storylines, no cutaways to any other subplots and no (definitive, at least for now) ties to either the Cinematic or Comics Universe. It also happened to be pretty damn well-executed and a fine acting showcase for Elizabeth Henstridge, which I imagine helped soothe the lack of case-specific goodies for viewers of other stripes.

SPOILERS follow:

For those just jumping onboard: Midway through Season 2's back-half, it was discovered that S.H.I.E.L.D has been in (high-level secret) possession of a mysterious stone monolith that morphs into a "living" liquid form and back again seemingly at random and has existed on Earth since ancient times. In the final moments of the season finale, said monolith managed to leak out of it's containment-cell long enough to liquefy and (apparently) swallow Agent Jemma Simmons whole. Earlier this season, it was discovered that the monolith actually functions as a time-space portal and that Simmons was still alive... but had been zapped off to a mysterious alien planet that looks absolutely nothing like the California desert processed through a blue day-for-night filter.

Through the obsessive dedication to her rescue of her BFF-who'd-really-really-really-like-to-be-more Agent Fitz, Simmons was rescued and yanked back to Earth early on but has demonstrated signs of detachment and strange behavior ever since - particularly in a resistance to picking up her awkward mutual courtship with Fitz where it left off (he had just finished managing to ask her out to a for-real romantic dinner when the monolith "ate" her.) This culminated in a stinger from two episodes ago, wherein she confided in fellow Agent Bobbi "Mockingbird" Morse that the real issue she was having was that she was desperate to get back to wherever it was she'd been marooned. "4,722 HOURS" presents Simmons' story of her ordeal as she relates it to Fitz (who's help she requires to "go back"), in order to explain not only where she was and why she'd want to return... but why she was so reluctant to tell him in the first place.

The fact that there weren't many other reasons for her to keep a secret from her best (only?) lifelong friend that made any sense, it would appear that most fans already figured that last part (she met and fell into a romantic relationship with someone else while offworld) out well beforehand. But even with the guessing games neutralized, the meat of the story (NASA sent an astronaut team through the portal 14 years ago, Simmons is rescued and ultimately falls in love with the last survivor of the doomed expedition, Will Daniels) was compelling and interesting; even as the "showcase" stuff re: Simmons showing off her DIY survivalist chops before meeting Will was frontloaded into the beginning.

Budgetary issues for non-recurring FX, sets, etc is AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D's consistent bugbear, and while there's a certain amount of charm in the oldschool B-movie solutions this episode pulls out to try and work around it (I almost wish they'd gone all the way and just openly shot in Bronson Canyon - or did they?) it's hard not to wish that the alien world looked a little more "alien" or that there was more creature-feature action than Henstridge (however enthusiastically) pretending to wrestle a floppy rubber tentacle we're meant to imagine is attached to some much larger water-monster. Still, if they were saving the money for their big "mystery heavy" (the planet is "haunted" by a shadowy shape-shifter who comes and goes with the aid of a powerful sandstorm) it was probably worth it, as those sequences were impressively "different" for the series.

On the other hand, much as I enjoyed this one, I'm worried about where it's going. Fitz's luckless longing for his platonic lifemate has been at the core of his carefully-managed "adorkable" persona from the beginning of the show, it's been fun to watch AGENTS prod at it for drama to make him even more likable/identifiable (he has now endured drowning, shootouts with terrorists and diving into a black hole for this woman, but - awww! - still stammers like a schoolboy when actually trying to ask her out) and it's very in-character for him to immediately decide to help her rescue Will is perfectly in-character... but I hope they don't take this too far in the obvious direction.

Yeah, it's hard not to feel the character (he risked his life multiple times over to save her and it turns out she met someone else? Ouch!), but "Woe is me! Even the female nerds I actually have things in common with prefer jocks!" (it's made expressly clear that Will isn't a scientist, he was the other astronauts' macho survivalist backup) is a really tiresome male nerd angst trope, and I'd really hate to see Fitz become an icon to the internet MRA "male geeks are denied the sex we're entitled to!" set because the show decides to give him one righteous feeling-sorry-for-himself monologue too many over this. (By the same token, I'm genuinely depressed imagining how much slut-shaming hatemail and forum-posting is being directed at Henstridge right now.)


BULLET POINTS:

• Yes, when Will said that the planet "has moods," my first thought was Ego: The Living Planet, too.
• I'll say it but I bet I'm not the only one thinking it: How cool would it have been if "Will Daniels" had been John Jameson III instead? It's unlikely, but I wonder if that was ever floated as a possibility - he's never been among the most important tertiary Marvel characters (so he's probably not a big part of anyone's movie plans) and it'd be quite a "we're still worth paying attention to!" coup for AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D to have debuted the first official piece of the MCU-official SPIDER-MAN world.
• If AGENTS does one thing consistently, it's nesting reveals and twists inside one another in multiple layers. As such, it's probably safe to say that there's more to Will than we already know. The fact that we only "know" that his crewmates went space-mad and had to be killed in self-defense from his story (Simmons finds the bodies of transportees from other eras, but not them) his very science-ish understanding of the planet's glowing-hot substrata, etc. I hope he's not an out-and-out villain, as that would play way too much toward the "Lament of The Nice Guy" stuff I'm hoping they avoid re: Fitz.
• That said, if Will IS a villain, a possibility would be that he's actually just a further manifestation of whatever the Big Evil on the planet is (see below) and all his actions have been to trick Simmons into pulling him/it onto Earth. (Alternate theory: He's a Skrull.)
• On the other hand, y'know what we've been hearing a lot lately? "Death," used in atypical contexts. The Hebrew symbol for the word was on the scroll Fitz found that helped unlock what the monolith was, and Will refers to the Big Evil in the sandstorm as a personification of Death. As readers of these recaps are likely already aware, Death Personified is a major Cosmic Marvel figure whose romantic attention is the motivating goal of INFINITY WAR's big central villain. So, there's that.
• On the other hand, if Death is going to be an MCU character (I still think it's more likely they'll conflate Death and Hela into one character, debuting in either DOCTOR STRANGE, THOR: RAGNAROK or both) I can't really imagine AGENTS getting to be the place where she first appears. More likely, though, I think the whole monolith/portal/weird-planet subplot will tie back into the Inhumans/Kree business that's still technically the "A-plot" of Season 3.

NEXT WEEK:

"AMONG US HIDE..." is mainly promising more of the "Let's Get Ward!" storyline (yawn) but with Bobbi finally getting back into the field (yay!) for what may or may not still be a build towards the spin-off. The teaser is being explicit calling Andrew dead, but I don't care - I'm still thinking he's Lash. The title, incidentally, is a reference to Fantastic Four Issue #45, which featured the debut of the original Inhumans Royal Family; so presumably there'll be more from that storyline as well. 

ALSO: We're still awaiting the appearance of Powers Boothe, who's scheduled to reprise his role as the (now former) Security Council head from AVENGERS and WINTER SOLDIER. Word is AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D will reveal his character name if Gideon Malick, which some fans are predicting is a clue that he'll be the MCU version of Albert Malik, aka Red Skull II.

Really That Good UPDATE

Hey gang.

So, update on the status of the next REALLY THAT GOOD episode. Short version: It's coming, and soon. Obviously, I did not want to let the series go this long with VACATION as the most recent installment, but sometimes life gets in the way.

I could probably blame my recent health concerns, but the fact is it's less about that and more about that being the impetus to reconnect with parts of my life that I'd allowed to become detached. A social life, even one as haphazardly-managed as mine, is important to cultivate; and a side-effect of this is less time alloted between paid work to give over to passion projects - particularly passion projects that don't (for the most part) generate funding in and of themselves outside of viewers being hopefully wooed to chip in at The MovieBob Patreon.

That having been said, a greater impediment still was that I happened upon a situation where a film turned out to be impossible to place in proper retrospect without talking about its direct sequel, which in turn was impossible to itself quantify without talking about its predecessor. As such, the next REALLY THAT GOOD has become (by necessity) a two-film piece; which presents a new set of challenges and a rethinking of style and approach - which I believe I have cracked, hence this update.

I usually try to do these things as surprises, but since you've been kept waiting long enough I figured a small tease, at least, is in order. So...



The next REALLY THAT GOOD, ideally hitting in early November, will be Sam Raimi's SPIDER-MAN & SPIDER-MAN 2.

I've been picking away at this/these one/two for awhile in the background now, and I'm excited for how it's coming together. I can't wait to share it with you all, and I hope you'll find the wait worth it.

P.S. Just for a further tease, I also hope to have a second episode ready for late-November and at least one for December as well. One is a Christmas movie (that I am mentally-preparing to record sound for while remaining verbally-composed), the other is about a boat. Stay tuned :)

JESSICA JONES is Sooper-Serious Business, Yo

I liked DAREDEVIL a lot, but I never really got onboard that it represented some kind of next-level evolution for the Marvel Universe brand.

Too much of the story felt stretched-thin between the "main" beats (why is the law practice so incidental to the series so far?) and I'm less inclined to see it's much-ballyhooed aesthetic and tone as the welcome "dark side" of the MCU and more like the eyeroll-inducing "stuck in the early-2000s" side. A good series, but mainly one that does the best possible version of stuff I'd thought the superhero genre had managed to otherwise outgrow: Unrelentingly grim, afraid of its own four-color shadow (Matt Murdock, in both his getups, is the worst-dressed superhero in Marvel not named Quicksilver), celelbrity-villain dependent (yes, D'Onofrio was magnificent all the same) etc.

But for what it was, it worked. But I'm wondering whether or not having this as the default-setting of the Netflix/DEFENDERS Marvel material is going to prove limiting. Case in point, the otherwise very good looking first full trailer for JESSICA JONES:

I'm feeling this (Krysten Ritter as a bitter hard-living superhuman detective? Good pitch) but not without reservation. For starters, it occurs to me that no one seems to have asked how Jessica's comic backstory (put-upon average girl gets super-powers by accident, tries to be a superheroine, suffers a horrible fate that jades her on the costumed life, becomes superhuman-problems-focused private eye instead) is going to "work" in an MCU where widespread superheroism is only a few years old. Will she have even ever been "Jewel" in this version (the next-to-last scheduled episode is title "Jewel & The Power Man," which reads like an intent to take the piss out of the idea of Jones and Luke Cage acting anything like their "super" selves) And, if not, doesn't that negate a lot of the "point" of the edginess i.e. "Here's what happens when the fantasy fails?"

I'm also wondering if making David Tennant's Zebediah "Purple Man" Killgrave apparently a central focus is a great idea. Yes, he's important in this mythos, but I hope they haven't looked at how much everyone loved Kingpin in DAREDEVIL and decided that building the narrative mainly around the villain is the way to go for all of these series. Also, yes, it bugs me that he's not purple - or maybe he is, and just mind-controlling everyone to not notice it? That'd be fun. And it'd be a nice surprise if Rachel Taylor's Patsy Walker turned out to already be Hellcat, but I'm not counting on it (ditto Marvel using this series as a surprise-introduction for Carol Danvers, who was part of this project back when it was pitching as a network show but doesn't seem to be now.)

In any case, the series hits in about a month so we won't have to wait long to find out.

TV RECAP: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Season 3 - Episode 4: "The Devils You Know"

Now we're getting back on track.

After nothing much special happening last week, AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D rebounds this week with an episode where not much happens for the most part... and then everything happens in the last 10 minutes or so. Not exactly appointment-viewing stuff, granted, but this time last year we were still dealing with the "Coulson keeps drawing maps" business, so yeah.

SPOILERS follow:

For the most part, we're continuing the threads laid down last time: S.H.I.E.L.D and ATCU are now (reluctantly) working together on the Inhumans "problem" in order to track the movements of the Inhuman-hunting monster Lash, with the added wrinkle of Daisy being extra-annoyed because she's getting the sense that Coulson's decisions are being swayed because he's kinda "into" ATCU boss Rosalind Price. Also annoyed: May's ex-husband Andrew Garner (Blair Underwood), the psychiarist who's been counseling Inhuman "Secret Warriors" prospects for S.H.I.E.L.D and isn't happy to learn that self-duplicator Alisha (last seen in Season 2) is already on active assignments. Meanwhile: Fitz is still trying to reconnect with Simmons, not yet aware that her real problem is that she actually wants to "go back" to the alien otherworld she was marooned on between seasons. Elsewhere: Agent May finally has enough of Hunter's recklessness in his let's-go-kill-Ward mission (me too - it's boring) and rats the whole thing out to Coulson, only to be surprised to find Andrew working at S.H.I.E.L.D.

The May/Andrew stuff is, surprisingly, the most compelling this time. The writing typically plays May as so close to the vest it's easy to miss when the show is actually setting up unseen parts of her story to be "mysterious" instead of just "taciturn badass." The idea is that she and Andrew did some near-reconnecting at the start of her leave, but then he took off without explanation and now she's even more bitter/jaded than ever - the duality now being that both parties have disappeared on the other to (apparently, in Andrew's case) go do secret work for S.H.I.E.L.D.

Oh, and it's also more compelling since Andrew promises to explain where he went and why "later" to May... only to be DEAD (apparently) by the end of the episode because Ward threatened to have him whacked after discovering Hunter's undercover gambit and Hunter called his bluff. So yeah, down goes Andrew, blown up in a convenience store explosion by Werner Von Strucker. Because this is a series that really needed to keep killing off it's Black supporting characters.

Anyway! The supposed Lash "origin" teased at the end of last week was more misdirection: Instead, we meet a soon-to-be-dead Inhuman whose "power" is breaking out in a rash around other Inhumans whose been helping Lash (who is also an Inhuman, just like in the comics) find his victims - his rationale being that being Inhuman is so unpleasant that these are mercy-killings. He turns out to be wrong, of course: Lash turns up to kill him by attacking the ATCU truck transporting him (and Daisy and Mack, reluctantly being allowed to inspect their "partner's" facilities) and describes his actions (existance?) as "necessary" rather than merciful.

For reasons unknown, Lash doesn't bother to kill Daisy - so she's alive/awake to see his retreating shadow seemingly morph back into that of a "normal" human (Lash looks like a hedgehog-man, if you haven't been watching.) "So he could be ayone!," she helpfully explains to Mack/The Audience... just before Rosalind awkwardly steps into the room (meaning that Lash is definitely NOT her, unless AGENTS' misdirection-lever is busted.)

And then there's Fitz/Simmons. After doing the world's worst job of hiding her private research into rebuilding the portal, Simmons reveals that she needs Fitz's help to go back to Planet Day-For-Night Desert because "something happened" there - something we'll presumably find out next week.

Good episode? Yeah, but more in the "keeps the stories moving" sense than "THIS is why you should be watching!" sense. I'm a lot more impatient for the next one than I was for this, though, so that's definitely something.


BULLET POINTS:

• Lemme get this out of the way straight-off: Andrew is NOT actually dead because Andrew is Lash. It explains everything: Why he vanished suddenly on May, why he's so big on helping S.H.I.E.L.D catalog Inhumans but not on actually clearing them for combat, how Lash is always one step ahead of everyone, where he's getting his data from and (from this episode) why Werner looked panicked instead of psyched after the hit. The only remaining question for me is whether he's always been Inhuman (meaning he would've been one when May killed the kid psychic in her "Cavalry" origin) or whether he's among the recently-turned.
• In the preview for next week, Simmons calls the mystery planet "Hell." Could be hyperbole, but recall that so far AGENTS' main point of connection to Cosmic Marvel has been through THOR-adjacent characters, and THOR: RAGNAROK supposedly involves Viking Hel.
• One imagines that Hunter probably isn't going to "come back" from willingly getting a fellow Agent's loved-one "killed" to settle a grudge. Is that spin-off back on or still off? I can't keep track anymore.

NEXT WEEK:
"4,722 Hours" appears to feature Simmons going all survivalist on Planet Whatever, with still no real indication as to why she'd want/need to go back there. Were there other people/things with her? Guess we'll find out in a week:

"JOY" Still Doesn't Want You To Know What "JOY" Is About

I dunno. At this point I feel like JOY (installment number three of a film-series where we're not supposed to notice that the director of SPANKING THE MONKEY keeps inexplicably casting Jennifer Lawrence as middle-aged mother/nurturer figures) should stop playing cute and just own the fact that it's about the invention and maketing of The Miracle Mop.



I "get" that the idea is probably to avoid seeming like a "gimmick" premise, but from where I sit "Hey, this sort-of kitschy infomercial thing you maybe snickered at back in the 90s actually has a pretty compelling story behind it" is a more interesting pitch than "Jennifer Lawrence sternly walks through out-of-context working-class Americana for a few hours!"

THE FIGHTER was a solid, occasionally excellent movie; but the fact is David O. Russell has been on a career plunge since the magnificent THREE KINGS and thus far this one barely looks better than AMERICAN HUSTLE - and AMERICAN HUSTLE was fucking terrible.

Venture Capital

Yes, the STAR WARS trailer is lovely. But this is the preview I've been waiting for. Has it really taken 13 years to get to 6 Seasons of THE VENTURE BROS? It has. That would be irritating for any other series, but here it's more like an indicator of how much care goes into everything:



Now, the fun part: Re-watching everything to remember where exactly things left off.

SCHLOCKTOBER: "Ninja Gaiden: The Anime"

TV RECAP: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Season 3 - Episode 3: "A Wanted (Inhu)man"

AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D's greatest strength is its ability to pivot on a dime into an entirely different tone or story-thrust than it had been in before, but that's also its most prominent stumbling block: When the show can be anything, what exactly are people holding on to week-to-week? The previous seasons (in hindsight) aimed to mitigate this by dividing their first and second halves by broad over-arching storylines: Season 1 was "Why is Coulson alive?" followed by "Oh shit, HYDRA's back!" Season 2 went with "What is Skye, really?" and segued to "Meet The Inhumans."

But Season 3, thus far, doesn't seem to have established a first arc or even a definite sense of purpose: Despite the season-specific "SECRET WARRIORS" branding, we mostly seem to be back in the scattershot, episodic structure of Season 1 but now the characters are all dragging two seasons worth of baggage and loose-end storylines. Maybe that's deliberate, maybe we won't know what this season is "really" about until CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR flips all the tables come May, but as of right now I'm missing the clear sense of purpose Season 2 already had by this point.

SPOILERS FOLLOW:

We're back to a three-way split storywise this week, in any case: Coulson and Daisy (formerly Skye) are still trying to protect newly-made (or "outed") Inhumans from both The ATCU and the monster Lash, Hunter and May are working to infiltrate Ward's new HYDRA start-up gang and Simmons, having been rescued from an alien world by Fitz, isn't re-adjusting to Earth all that well.

After taking a break last week to put the focus on reuniting Fitz/Simmons, "A Wanted (Inhu)man" turns back around to Coulson and Daisy racing against the government backed paramilitary outfit ATCU (Alien Threat Containment Unit) to get a handle on the rapidly-growing population of newly-turned Inhumans (read: Mutants, but because of Alien genetic-tampering from prehistory); the difference being that S.H.I.E.L.D wants to protect them and draft the willing into Coulson's "Secret Warriors" team, while ATCU boss Rosalind Price wants... well, it's not clear.

The key "wanted" aquisition this week is Daisy's (still boring) lightning-throwing pal Lincoln, who isn't interested in getting caught by either team but has to make a choice when ATCU leaks his name to the press and he finds himself in a tragic spot involving an old friend. Like everything else involving "Sparkplug" up to this point, it's not particularly compelling but it does the job of misdirecting a twist: Coulson is willing to give up Lincoln when it turns out ATCU's second-choice target is Daisy, but when he bolts (sorry) anyway The Director offers up a compromise: S.H.I.E.L.D (which, remember, is still technically unknown to still exist by nearly-everyone) will "temporarily" team up with ATCU.

Well... alright, then. It's a nice gray-shades turn for Coulson, taking him back to the morally-dubious problem-solver space he occupied prior to THE AVENGERS, but apart from that I'm not seeing how this is especially different from the deal struck with Talbot last season. The expectation, obviously, is that when CIVIL WAR's "let's regulate superheroes" thing kicks in ATCU will be said to be an arm of that, putting Coulson and his Secret Warriors in an awkward place, but even if that's the case it feels like a half-cooked plot turn for now.

The big secondary story continued to be Hunter and May (no James Hong this week, sadly) looking to climb into Ward's Nu-HYDRA team, which involved Hunter having to go through a FIGHT CLUB-style initiation to even get a meeting. The whole thing felt ugly and tonally off (this is another storyline where the super-spies on both sides just kinda agree not to use any of the scifi gadgetry shortcuts they have other times just because), with Hunter spilling (and losing) a ridiculous amount of blood while May wipes out a trio of would-be sexual-assailants - yeesh. A little grit is fine, but this reeked of AGENTS as the MCU's middle child trying to prove that it could be just as "cool" as its angry/ultra-violent baby sibiling DAREDEVIL.

The best stuff involved the Fitz/Simmons story, as Fitz's awkward but endearing attempts to help lead Simmons back to normality felt like it was teasing more interesting developments (in terms of the characters) than the showier A and B stories. The "button" of Bobbi and Fitz having developed a close personal friendship between seasons (he's helped her with physical rehab, she's turned out to have serious skills filling in for Simmons in the lab - alongside him) is getting hit especially hard in-tandem with Simmons being "different" now; which could make for some really uncomfortable drama i.e. one party or the other feeling like they might've waited too long to say... something. To me, that's more (potentially) interesting than the stinger of Simmons' "I have to go BACK!" (which has to be a deliberate LOST-reference, right?)


BULLET POINTS:

• What's up with Simmons? Could still be (literally) anything, but the idea that she might actually need to go back through the portal somehow (to help someone? to help herself?) is a good wrinkle. This being fan-theory bait, let me throw mine in: This isn't the "real" Simmons.
• Speaking of fan theories, another one being floated is that the monolith/portal is some kind of judging-mechanism that only gobbles up people "guilty" of something - recall that Simmons (unknown to everyone else) straight-up murdered a baddie last season. Notably, it also went all gooey for Professor Randolph last episode.
• ATCU's endgame? Honestly, I'd be surprised if a lot of the details of that still aren't even clear to the people making the show: The degree of foreknowledge the Marvel TV team has of the Marvel Film team's specific plans is unclear, and now that they're serving two different masters (Kevin Feige now runs Marvel Studios as a separate-but-related Disney division, but TV and Netflix are still under the thumb of Marvel Inc. majority-stockholder Ike Perlmutter - a man the near-entirety of the film division famously despises) that's not likely getting any better. My guess is that the ATCU's "real mission" won't be clearly delineated until it can be revealed as a "prototype" of the pro-registration side of CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR. That having been said...
• ...CIVIL WAR, the comic storyline, led more-or-less directly into another Marvel's event series (after WORLD WAR HULK, which sequelized the pre-CW PLANET HULK maxiseries) SECRET INVASION. In that story, it's revealed that The Skrulls (alien shape-shifters) had been quietly infiltrating all levels of human society for decades to gradually prime us for takeover, and that they saw the post-CIVIL WAR fracturing of heroes as a perfect "coming out" opportunity. Of note, Skrulls are the ancient arch-enemies of The Kree - who created The Inhumans specifically as anti-Skrull bioweapons. Thus far our main known detail about Rosalind Price is that she's good with disguises and otherwise lacks a tangible past. Oh, and the Skrulls? They have a Queen.
• I don't think we've seen the last of Professor Randolph, and I don't think he's coming back as a good guy.

NEXT WEEK: Lash (apparently) gets an origin story in "The Devils You Know."

Should've Led With This

As I said in this BMD piece, I was "onboard" with ABC's new MUPPETS show from the start, but even still I think it was probably a mistake for them to have not led with last night's 4th episode, which (thanks to stuff like this) felt a lot more like "classic Muppets" in execution - something the series has been criticized for.

That can't miss karaoke night deserves another look and another listen! #TheMuppetshttps://t.co/gRxTTXWOVE

— The Muppets on ABC (@TheMuppetsABC) October 14, 2015

Schlocktober Returns

Realized I managed to NOT post last week's IN BOB WE TRUST, which featured the revival of SCHLOCKTOBER. My bad. Here it is below, along with the new one from this week:

LAST WEEK:

THIS WEEK:

"HAIL CAESAR!"

The Coen Bros back in 1940s Hollywood mode?

George Clooney as a hack leading-man blithering through a costume epic?

Scarlett Johansson as an Esther Williams analog?

To paraphrase Mr. Oswalt: What god did I please???

TV RECAP: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Season 3 - Episode 2: "The Purpose in The Machine"

First things first: "Purpose in The Machine" introduces Agent May's father. As he turns out to be (played by) the legendary James Hong - one of our all-time greatest character actors - it is now automatically the most important episode of AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D that has ever aired or likely will ever air.

Anyway...

By now I've come to terms with the fact that a lot of the reasons I've come to genuinely enjoy AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D are probably the same things that both the series' creators and other audiences find the most frustrating - in particular its tendency to change-up tone, direction, story-arcs, character roles and general narrative flow on a whim. Yes, I'm aware it's more a function of Marvel TV and Marvel Film not really being on the same page a lot of the time, but what works works. Case in point: "Purpose" opting to (seemingly) resolve what easily could've been a season-long plot thread (Agent Simmons, believed dead by everyone but Fitz, is stranded on an alien planet) in the season's second episode. Did not expect that.


The "let's get Jemma!" storyline takes up the bulk of the episode and (happily) serves as opportunity to reintroduce Peter MacNicol's Professor Randolph, the standout one-off character from the early-half of Season 1. A blue-collar Asgardian commoner who's been anonymously chilling on Earth for a few thousand years (random stone-worker in his own world but a super-strong near-immortal here,) Randolph was for a long time AGENTS best example of its then-unrealized potential to do interesting things with the Marvel arcana; and it's both fun to see him back (MacNicol has been relieved of his supporting role on CSI: CYBER, so here's hoping he picks up a regular spot here) and intriguing to see hints of deeper intrigue to him: He clearly knows more than he's telling about The Monolith, is strangely insistent that "any" portals be destroyed and has an... "odd" reaction to learning that The Inhumans still exist or that Daisy (formerly Skye) is one of them.

That last part is especially interesting from a future-storyline perspective: We've already seen both Kree and Asgardian visitors react with fear to the presence of Inhumans and/or Inhuman-adjacent technology on Earth, which could make things very complicated with the series already plunging into the expected Inhumans-as-X-Men-replacements stuff re: government/military crackdowns. Historically, the middle is not the safe place to be in Marvel narratives. In any case, by the time things wrapped up The Monolith was atomized and Fitz/Simmons were reunited, though with her suffering some clearly heavy PTSD from... whatever she went through on the other side; with the only new information gleaned being that The Monolith was at one point in the possession of a pseudo-Masonic group of 19th Century Brits - wonder if that's going anywhere?

Elsewhere, the secondary-business re-introduced Agent Ward, continuing in his quest to rebuild a leaner, meaner new HYRDRA in his own image. I'm still not really feeling this storyline (unless we're going to get something more like the COBRA-esque HYDRA of the comics, HYDRA has been done at this point) but I enjoyed the misdirection of this step, as we're led to think Ward is kidnapping a rich young brat to torture for his money but instead learn the "kid" is Baron Von Strucker's heir and Ward was looking to test his resolve and recruit him. I'm still not "invested" enough to care about the eventual setup that comes from this (Strucker Junior enrolls in the College psych course of May's ex, who's also S.H.I.E.L.D's on-call therapist) but it's something.

I also found myself feeling a little impatient with how slow the build to Daisy/Coulson's "Secret Warriors" team is turning out, though it's at least more interesting than Nu-HYDRA or (at least so far) Hunter and May teaming up to go kill Ward (though that one did lead to some highly-agreeable quiet-drama scenes with Ming-Na Wen and the aforementioned Mr. Hong.) I'm more and more getting the sense that the anti-aliens/Inhumans/etc sentiment stuff is part of the build to either the mid-season break (for another AGENT CARTER miniseries - hooray!) or for the innevitable CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR tie-in, but I hope it doesn't continue to sit there inert until then, with Dr. Buzzkill showing up every few episodes to say "Nope, not yet."

Bullet Points:

• Where was Simmons? Still no idea, but given her reaction after leaving (waking up clutching a shiv in defense) it's pretty clear she wasn't alone there. Also, we know other people have been there before -  wonder what's become of them?
• Randolph refers to the activities of the 1830s Monolith-dabblers as "half-baked Satanism." Something to note: The Inhumans are showing up instead of Mutants here for purposes of MCU-worldbuilding because Mutants can't be used outside of Fox movies, but the same rules don't actually (entirely) apply to television; which (unless I've got it twisted) means that, if Marvel wants these guys to be an incarnation of The Hellfire Club, they could be.
• Also: Randolph describes attending a very EYES WIDE SHUT-ish party at the castle where the Monolith-machine was hidden, guided by "a man dressed as an owl." Wouldn't it be funny if he was any relation to a certain Daredevil nemesis?
• Coulson threatening to turn Randolph over to the alien-hunters was a nice nudge toward getting him back to the morally-ambiguous space he occupied before we found out his motivation was being a Captain America fanboy. The Secret Warriors are going to be the off-brand X-Men, fine, but that doesn't mean Coulson needs to be Professor X.
• Unanswered question from Season 2: Where is General Talbot in all of this? (I'm crossing my fingers he turns up alongside the returning "Thunderbolt" Ross in CIVIL WAR.
• It just occured to me that Randolph could easily turn up on AGENT CARTER. That would be pretty great to see.
• We still never found out what made the Monolith liquefy apart from when Daisy and/or The Machine were making it happen, but it seems like it only ever did so in the presence of Inhumans, Randolph (and Asgardian) ...and Simmons. I still don't think she's Inhuman, but maybe an alien of some kind?

NEXT WEEK:
"A Wanted (Inhu)Man" promises to pull Lincoln back into the storyline. I have no particularly strong feelings for this character, but apparently a lot of fans hate him. I bring this up because I now learn that his derisive nickname is "Pikachu" in some circles, so now even though I know they're eventually going to call him Spark Plug I really want that to come up somewhere.

Video Review: THE MARTIAN

Review: THE MARTIAN

Note: Video review is in-production alongside several other projects, but I know people have gotten tired of waiting so for now here is a text version - as ever, content like this is possible in part through The MovieBob Patreon.


THE MARTIAN (2015)

HOLY FUCKING SHIT does it feel good to love a Ridley Scott movie again!

Alright, alright, look. I know people have been asking me about dialing back the profanity on these things, but, I’m sorry – it’s been a long time since one of our undisputed greatest filmmakers actually MADE a great film, and I’m excited about it! This hasn’t happened since the Director’s Cut of KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, and that was in 2005… and since he’s already announced that he’s going to follow this one up with another FUCKING “Prometheus” movie, it probably isn’t gonna happen again for awhile. So how about you get off my ass and enjoy a rare unabashedly positive review, huh?



THE MARTIAN is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year – and since it’s now October, pronouncements like that start to actually mean something. After a solid decade producing movies that looked great but often broke down on the narrative level, Sir Ridley has once again landed on solid base-material and turned in the kind of filmmaking that’s so good you want to call it a miracle… except that’d actually be doing it a disservice: There’s nothing mystical or ephemeral about why THE MARTIAN is great, the answers are all right up there onscreen. The cast is great, the acting is great, the script is tight as hell, the direction is nigh-flawless, the FX work is gorgeous – hell, even the song choices are good.

Everyone is on the same damn page and everyone is doing their damn job. THAT’S why it’s good… which is amusing, considering that that’s also a fairly concise breakdown of the film’s plot, theme and overarching ideals – but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The basic premise here is that in the near future NASA has finally managed to launch a manned mission to Mars. But there’s a storm on the planet’s surface bad enough that the crew has to abort the mission and take off early, and amid the chaos one of them – specifically Matt Damon as team botanist Mark Watney – gets swept up in the storm and thrown to certain death. BUT! By sheer random chance, Watney is NOT actually dead: He’s just stranded, alone, on the Red Planet.

Fortunately for him, Watney happens to not only be a brilliant and capable enough scientist to literally life-hack his way into creating a sustainable longer-term existence on Mars; he’s also one of those Movie Scientists whose ALSO kind of a “bro” and loves to quip sardonically about everything he’s doing for the audience. We’ve had a TON of these “It’s okay for me to be this smug all the time because my confidence comes from my admirable intelligence” heroes lately, and to be honest Watney would probably be insufferable if we had to spend the whole fucking movie with him – but we don’t.

And that's where THE MARTIAN goes from being merely a solid film to a genuinely excellent one, transcending it's starting point as a rock-solid genre exercise to become something like a masterwork.

See, while it'd be all well and good to just stick around on the red planet following Watney – especially since this is absolutely the finest “Movie Star” turn of Damon’s entire career to this point - the film instead cuts back down to Earth where NASA soon discovers what's happening and mobilizes what soon becomes a global effort to bring him home; an effort through which THE MARTIAN slyly reveals it's true colors: this isn't some hackneyed cautionary tale about the dangers of exploring the unknown - it's a high-stakes procedural about the AWESOME power of knowledge, which has placed Mark Watney in one of the most impossible situations imaginable MAINLY so that it can thrill us with detailed depictions of smart, dedicated people figuring out how to get him out of it.

This is, in effect, a love-letter to science, space-exploration and NASA in particular – both in terms of it’s history and also it’s ideals: There’s no “villain” in THE MARTIAN other than shitty luck and Mars itself – none of the human characters turns out to be an asshole or cartoonishly unreasonable in order to generate false drama, there’s no bullshit love-triangles or personal pettiness employed to make us like or dislike certain characters, none of the sappy tacked-on “personal growth” narrative that kept pulling me out of GRAVITY and (thank GAWD!) none of the pseudo-spiritual bullshit that ruined INTERSTELLAR.

Hell, the movie doesn’t even try to impose a “character arc” on Mark – and he’s the MAIN character! He doesn’t “change” or “grow” or “learn” anything through his ordeal, he and everyone else just face down the problems they’re presented with and solve them one after the other. That’s easier said than done – the whole reason cheap drama and forced-arcs exist in drama is because procedural storytelling isn’t always the most riveting thing in the world – that’s why you fill your cast up with people like Jessica Chastain, Michael Pena, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kate Mara, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Sean Bean, Donald Glover… AND why you hire a director like Ridley Scott. And that’s why, if everyone shows up and does their job, you’ll get a great film out of it.

Now folks… I’ll admit I’m the easiest lay in the world for stuff like this. I’m “that guy” who never stopped being in love with outer space. I’m “that guy” who thinks we oughta be dumping as much funding as we POSSIBLY can into NASA come hell or high water because I do NOT want to die without at least seeing humanity be on it’s way to something like Starfleet in my lifetime – and I’m that guy who if you hear this and come at me with some short-sighted “but people are still… and we need money for… but it’s not as important as…” my response is always going to be SPACESHIP. FUCK YOU. That’s why it’s been hard for me to write this review, because I wanted to be sure I loved this movie MAINLY as a movie, and not just because it’s a fellow “let’s get our asses back to space!” booster – but yeah, this one is REALLY that fucking good!

I cannot think of a single thing I dislike about this movie. I love Scott’s direction, I love the cast, I love watching Matt Damon remind us how GOOD he can be when he’s not making an idiot of himself of that fucking reality show, I love how tight Drew Goddard’s screenplay is, I love how well-executed the denser scientific stuff is handled so that it’s still 100% compelling even though I understood MAYBE 20% of what they were actually talking about, I love seeing Sir Ridley bust out a couple of those music-montage sequences he ALWAYS kills at but doesn’t do enough of, I love the way it celebrates and lionizes the idea of science and mathematics skills as essential tools of survival WITHOUT any shitty STEMLord “Nyah! We run the world now!” pandering “Revenge of The Nerds” bullshit, I love the way it celebrates a GLOBAL future of cooperation via a key subplot involving the CHINESE Space Agency without feeling like it’s unnecessarily getting into OR avoiding politics.

There just isn’t a SINGLE place where THE MARTIAN goes wrong – it is, quite simply, an absolutely perfect realization of exactly what it wants to be. And I haven’t enjoyed a single movie more this year. Don’t miss it.

This review and others like it are possible in part through The MovieBob Patreon. Do you operate an outlet and would like MovieBob content to appear there? Contact Bob at BobChipman82@gmail.com

Lost Age

Colin Hanks, following in his dad's footsteps as a friendly chronicler of history/pop-Americana:

This is gonna kick my ass, I can already tell.

I was a video-store guy, so my physical media retail experience lacks the direct rock n' roll connection of my record-store brethren (musicians, even burnouts, make everything "cooler" by presence, even if they're just working the checkout between dive gigs) but I'm desperately nostalgic for that "scene" all the same. Yes, streaming is a lovely modern convenience. Yes, lack of physical overhead levels the field for films/distributors of diverse backgrounds. 

But the end of the video/music/game/etc store as community hub for enthusiasts and dilettantes alike is a genuine cultural loss, there's no question about that. People ask all the time how so much of film/TV/etc fandom has become toxic and narrow lately, and I can't think of single bigger culprit than removing the idea of physical, real-world interaction with the media itself, with other consumers, with salespeople and so forth. We've very much lost the concept of growing by sharing spaces/interest, and this looks very much like a eulogy for that.

RECAP: Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Season 3 - Episode 1: "Laws of Nature"

NOTE: This piece and others like it are possible in part thanks to contributions to The MovieBob Patreon.


And we're back.

One thing is for certain: Whenever AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D (and yes, I'm going to be the one pedant who insists on still typing out the periods on that) eventually wraps up, it's going to be fascinating to unpack. Popular culture in general will likely be chewing over the particulars of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for decades in terms of its substantial place in the evolution of mass-entertainment - specifically, the rise of continuity-drive cross-media storytelling - but AGENTS feels like it's always going to remain its own strange animal: Tasked with expanding and setting-up the concurrent movies but denied access to the most notable "toys" while also telling its own story, it's effectively been three different shows across three seasons with characters and relationships turning on that same absurd axis.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Case in point: It now completely impossible to talk about Season 3 without "giving away" the laundry-list of reveals and twists that made up the first two seasons longest and most well-played gambit: Chloe Bennett's mysterious orphan super-hacker turned quick-study neophyte Agent Skye has actually (unknowingly) been the Marvel Comics superheroine Daisy "Quake" Johnson this whole time, and "her people," The Inhumans, have been lurking in the Cinematic Universe's shadows for even longer. Which means that AGENTS' mission statement now includes laying the groundwork for a Marvel movie that isn't due to come out for another four years.

Short version: The Inhumans are basically Mutants (though they came first) but with a more complicated lineage as seemingly "normal" humans who ancestors were experimented on by The Kree ("The Blue Ones" from GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY) in pre-history who manifest super-powers and/or monstrous new forms when exposed to the alien element Terrigen. Most of them walk the Earth not knowing their own true identity, with a few isolated communities of "full" Inhumans living in secret, but at the climax of AGENTS Season 2 a quantity of Terrigen was released into the ocean and has now dispersed into the ecosystem to such a degree that "new" Inhumans are popping up everywhere. (This, you may have guessed, is an expansion of the original comics' conception of The Inhumans, undertaken with an eye on letting the MCU tell X-MEN stories without needing the "real" X-MEN.)

As Season 3 opens, S.H.I.E.L.D (still not "officially existing") has rededicated itself to managing the outbreak, both by trying to help the new Inhumans and contain those that turn out to be dangerous; with one eye on drafting those willing to be part of Director Coulson's "Secret Warriors" program. Oh, and Skye isn't "Skye" anymore: She's going by Daisy, and arrives in the first scene of "Laws of Nature" having fully-emerged as S.H.I.E.L.D's resident in-house superhero. Her focus for this episode is bringing-in (and expositing-to, of course) newly-changed Inhuman Joey Gutierrez, who has metal-melting powers and a touch of irony to his origin: He's gay, and not particularly enthused about effectively having to "come out" all over again.

Elsewhere, the rest of the team are dealing with their own personal fallouts from Season 2: Hunter and Bobbi/Mockingbird are back on non-speaking terms, with her doing time in the lab waiting for a leg to heal and him brooding over revenge plans against the turncoat Agent Ward. Coulson is the only person who can't get used to Skye's new name, is worried that Agent May isn't coming back from "vacation" and can't find a mechanical arm (it got cut off) that feels right. Agent Mack is feeling glibly-innadequate now that Daisy is "the muscle" and Agent Fitz is scouring the globe in an obsessive quest to rescue Agent Simmons, whom they know was "eaten" by The Monolith but not why, how or if it can be reversed (as it turns out, she's been zapped away to an unnamed alien planet.)

Otherwise, the plot of "Laws" was mainly concerned with some clever misdirection involving the reveal of what looks like our new "bad guy team" for Season 3, ACTU (Advanced Threat Contaiment Unit) a government-backed paramilitary unit tasked with neutralizing all the people-with-powers stuff that keeps happening over in the movies. I'm hoping there's actually further misdirection going on here, since another "Bad S.H.I.E.L.D" feels kind of lazy (HYDRA is down to just Ward and some biker bros as of Season 2), but the introductory gag is pretty cool: Coulson and ACTU's mysterious leader Rosalind Price had both assumed that eachother's teams were responsible for the murders of various Inhumans, but as it turns out there's a third party: Lash, an evil Inhuman who (in the comics, at least) feels that Terrigenesis transformations are being handed out too willy-nilly and goes about hunting/killing those he deems unworthy of the Inhuman mantle.

Bullet Points:

• The big setpiece, a powers-vs-powers brawl in a hospital between Daisy, lightning-tossing Inhuman Lincoln and Lash is suitably impressive stuff; but if AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D is committing to going the full-on superhero route (via the Secret Warriors business) it's going to need to raise it's game to compete with ARROW, THE FLASH and (potentially) SUPERGIRL.
• Since Gutierrez can melt metal, it feels like a safe bet that they'll ask him to try and do... "something" to The Monolith, yes?
• It's tempting to start wondering whether ACTU will be a precursor of the "let's regulate superheroes" stuff coming in CIVIL WAR, but I wouldn't bet on it - yet. Ike Perlmutter, the much-maligned Marvel bigwig recently ousted (forcibly) from having say over the movies, still technically controls the TV division and the two halves already didn't get along great (logistically or otherwise.)
• Speaking of which: I'll stop harping on this eventually, but I'm still annoyed that the TV Agents weren't on the rescue-helicarrier in AGE OF ULTRON. Obviously Coulson couldn't have been there, but if Fitz/Simmons or one of the Koenigs were just matter-of-factly onhand it would've been appropriate and a really cool moment.
• Speaking of The Koenigs, how long do we have o wait for Patton Oswalt to show up again?
• Nice Continuity seeing President Ellis from IRON MAN 3 onscreen again.
• Apparently the Hunter/Mockingbird spin-off series that was confirmed but then canceled while the Season was in production is back on the "yes" list, so I wonder how that's going to work. Is the idea that they'll go off and continue the conventional S.H.I.E.L.D vs HYDRA stuff with Ward while the "main" series focuses on being not-X-MEN?
• Who is Rosalind Price? Is she's another "secretly someone from the comics" reveal, thus far it's too well hidden to even guess.
• Where is Simmons? No idea, but the best guess is probably the Kree Homeworld or somewhere else Kree-related. Yes, it'd be fun if she ran into someone from GUARDIANS out there. No, that probably will not happen.
• Why did The Monolith (supposedly deadly to Inhumans) take Simmons but nobody else? Obvious answer would be "she's an Inhuman," but I wonder if it'll be that simple...

So far, I'm digging it. It's not as much of a "Holy SHIT this got better suddenly!" blowout as Season 2's premiere was, but I'm liking where things are going thus far. One imagines that there's some CIVIL WAR buildup to come that's going to get everyone's hopes up (the Inhuman-outbreak thing would fit well into that story, but so far they're not even mentioned in the plot-descriptions for that movie) but for now I'm looking forward to seeing how things play out. Will we get some indication of the more "familiar" Inhumans (Black Blot, Medusa, etc)? Will some Cosmic Marvel stuff crop up in Simmons' story? I'm looking forward to it.

NEXT WEEK: "Purpose in The Machine" isn't teasing much plot, but I'm intrigued to see the team standing in what looks like an old-fashioned Universal Monsters mad-science lab and I'm really happy to see the return of Peter MacNicol's expat-Asgardian, who was a highlight of Season 1. I hope they wind up asking him to be a regular (MacNicol's CSI: CYBER character is being replaced by a series-hopping Ted Danson, so he's got the space open...)


This piece is made possible in part by contributions to The MovieBob Patreon. Want to see more? Please considering becoming a patron. Do you operate a site or outlet and are interested in publishing work like this? Please contact Bob at BobChipman82@gmail.com

The Dark Knight Fades (Retrospective)

NOTE: The writing and publication of this piece were made possible in part by The MovieBob Patreon.


THE DARK KNIGHT FADES: On the Striking Non-Impact of Christopher Nolan’s Bat-Masterpiece.

By Bob Chipman

What happens when the movie that’s supposed to change everything… doesn’t?

Every filmmaker probably hopes, however secretly, that their movie will change the world; even if the change is limited to one new recognizable box occupying shelf-space on the DVD racks (or iTunes queue, for you fancy Millennial tablet-swipers.) Bigger, more substantial cultural-landmark stature is a rarer achievement; and when it happens it’s seldom predictable. “No one ever sees The Big Ones coming!,” Old Hollywood logic will tell you, gesturing to the yellowing first-run posters for JAWS and LOVE STORY always posted hypothetically nearby.

Except when they do.

Every once in a while the mix of cultural readiness, marketing hype, genuine anticipation and collective societal desire all line up; and you get that rare scenario wherein a movie that wants to change the world debuts to a world that’s already cheering, begging and pleading “I’m ready! Change me!” like pubescent Beatlemaniacs at the Sullivan show. Sometimes it starts out as a minor surprise (think the first LORD OF THE RINGS feature), sometimes we really should have seen it coming (think STAR WARS, a “surprise” to an industry that hadn’t yet realized the Famous Monsters/comic-shop set were champing at the bit to be their new best customers) and oftentimes the movie itself isn’t exactly a classic (think AVATAR… for the first time since 2009) but it happens.

Such was the world that assembled to receive Christopher Nolan’s second Batman-epic, THE DARK KNIGHT, in the hazy summer of 2008. Granted, it was to be expected that the second (in that particular cycle) cinematic outing for what was then still the movie world’s most popular cinematic-superhero would land with a certain amount of welcome: Nolan’s BATMAN BEGINS may have only been a sleeper hit four years earlier, but it’s reputation had borne out well on cable and at Blockbuster Video (ask your parents) and – perhaps more importantly – it had inspired absolutely ravenous devotion from the grown-up comic book devotees whose obsessions were the primary fuel of the newly-dominant Internet Film Press.

To the so-called “fanboy” contingent, the Christopher Nolan of 2008 was the new God Auteur of big-budget moviemaking. Through BEGINS he’d claimed their undying loyalty by cleansing the BATMAN-franchise of Joel Schumacher’s mortal sins (primary colors, a sense of humor, an unwillingness to pretend he wasn’t working with cartoon-archetypes created for 7 year-olds and, of course, homoeroticism – in case you’ve forgotten your Bat-Catechism) and returning the 70+ year-old icon to the dark n’ gritty “roots” everyone seems to forget he only acquired as recently as the mid-1980s.

To web-critics and indeed also the older-guard film press, he’d inspired gooey love-struck awe via his potent technical acumen, affection for analyst-flattering labyrinthine story-structure and Film School Approved roster of (obvious) stylistic influences – notably Michael Mann, Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Mann, Stanley Kubrick, Michael Mann and also Michael Mann. Fewer things will inspire fealty among the traditional (or traditionally-inclined) film press than a structure-fixated craftsman who can boil any far-flung scenario down to a cast of well-regarded, overwhelmingly-male character-actors “Just doin’ a job!” in sharp suits and oh-so-serious faces.

“Nolanizing” had even become a movie-culture buzzword, referring mainly to the slew of productions begun in this period that clearly aimed to impose BATMAN BEGINS’ formula for adaptation (strip out anything resembling the fantastic or whimsical, ramp up the business-school machismo, flatline the sexuality, keep things as “grownup” as possible and don’t you dare crack a smile!) onto other intellectual properties. The proof of its efficacy seemed to be in the pudding: 2006’s CASINO ROYALE, which applied BEGINS’ outline to none other than James Bond, was heralded as a franchise-reviving hit – albeit one that proved unable to defeat an animated feature about a tap-dancing penguin for the top of the box-office. Still, the meme had been cast in iron: Nolan as the savior of the blockbuster, his style and methodology as the new key to success and acclaim.

And if Christopher Nolan was a Hollywood Messiah, THE DARK KNIGHT arrived pre-ordained as his Sermon on The Mount: Its trailers, promising enormous action and grim theatricality, had been ubiquitous for at least a year; with mainstream audiences primed for a payoff promised since BEGINS (a new incarnation of the iconic villain The Joker via rising-superstar Heath Ledger) while hardcore fans poured over screencaps and dialogue snippets for early clues: Would Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) become Two-Face? Was Harley Quinn (Joker’s girlfriend) a character? Did the title indicate any thematic ties to The Dark Knight Returns, a landmark comic series by Frank Miller whose shadow had loomed over (and indeed consumed) the Batman character since the mid-80s?

And then Heath Ledger died.

Fandom hosannas and the promise of being at the spearhead of the pop-culture zeitgeist are nice; but for turning a movie into a myth before anyone even gets to see it, nothing beats a Promising Young Artist™ with His Whole Life Ahead Of Him© dying unexpectedly before his preordained starmaking performance. To be clear: Ledger was an unmistakably natural-born movie star, and his Joker indeed demonstrates the flowering of a truly ferocious screen talent – his loss, as with all artists taken before their time, is incalculable. But none of that dispels the fact (quite the opposite, really) that his passing was the Fates’ final flourish in the alchemy that transformed THE DARK KNIGHT into the “event” it ultimately became: This was no longer merely a monument to fanboy wish-dreams and DC Comics licensing deals… this was to be an Egyptian Pyramid – a mountain-sized headstone at the grave of a mourned soul taken too soon.

Which, of course, meant the film (or at least that one performance) was now an Oscar Contender.

I can say from personal experience that, before fandom had realized that it was more fun to own The Culture than The Culture’s trophies, the legitimizing of “our” genres (science-fiction, fantasy, comic-book adaptations) through Academy Awards recognition was a prize never far from the minds of Film Geeks. The three consecutive years the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy spent gobbling up nominations (and technical awards) before culminating in a colossal near-sweep was reported on by the AICNs and CHUDs like an insurgent military campaign – a thumb in the eye to every book snob who ever sneered that this or that 29+ volume worldbuilding exercise about Elven Swordmaidens wasn’t “real literature” - And now it was starting to feel like the next Big Victory, a story about masked vigilantes in capes thwarting gimmick-nicknamed gangsters sitting between the period-pieces and political dramas at the Best Picture table, was within striking distance.

At that point, the movie didn’t even really need to come out – though it did, in July of 2008 to near-universal acclaim from fans and critics alike. Thunderous, shrieking acclaim of the sort that greets a film so hotly anticipated and featuring parts that work so well (Ledger’s now-iconic Joker, Nolan’s fully-realized “Batman, but as a thing that could happen” vision) that you want to actively undermine your own creeping misgivings about the parts that don’t (Christian Bale’s cringe-inducing “scary” Batman voice, a weirdly-structured extra third act, what feels even more so today like an implicit thumbs-up to Cheney Doctrine domestic security policy) lest you begin to think yourself a Bat-heretic.

Even the kinds of iconography-bending or material-flouting that would normally drive the fanboy set into a seething frenzy (The Joker wears makeup instead of bleached skin!? Two-Face dies rather than live on to bedevil Batman in future adventures!?) was, if only for a moment, forgiven: This was a great film. More importantly, this was the one comic-book movie to rule them all. The future of the genre. It’s box-office would blow open the doors for even more adaptations of DC’s ignored-by-Hollywood characters (maybe we’d finally get a great new Superman movie!) with “Nolanizing” as the magic cure-all for anything perceived un-filmable. It would make the critics shut up and take notice. And best of all, it’s stature as a Serious Issues™ crime-thriller that incidentally happened to involve Batman made those vague hopes of Oscar glory seem more real and vibrant than ever.

In fact, the idea that THE DARK KNIGHT “deserved” a place as a 2008 Best Picture contender became such a foregone conclusion that when it ultimately wasn’t among The Chosen (though Ledger’s family would still collect an all-but guaranteed posthumous Supporting Actor statue) it was immediately decided that its absence would be transformative instead! So widespread was the outcry among the press (I myself made a rambling monologue about the outrage of The Snub my video-resume to a potential employer – and got the job), the punditry and the public that it was widely viewed as the deciding factor in The Academy’s subsequent decision to increase the number of Best Picture nominees, a move obviously designed to allow bigger, more popular (with audiences) films to have a shot in the future. THE DARK KNIGHT was now poised not only to re-chart the course of its entire genre, but of the entire industry, all the way up to its yearly awards bonanzas.

And then… it didn’t.

It’s hard to put a finger on when it became fully apparent that THE DARK KNIGHT was a paper tiger as far as movement firebrands go. Maybe it wasn’t truly visible until its own sequel, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, landed as a dreary, convoluted slog a few years later. But it feels apparent now, and increasingly so as each new superhero-blockbuster goes by, that the notion of Nolan’s prestige-format Bat-opus as thetransformative moment of the genre was both premature and over-sold. Its expected influence over subsequent comic-adaptations has waned, almost no one involved has moved that much further in their careers and even its own studio appears to be in no small hurry to change directions.

In fact, I’d say that it’s worth positing that, outside of its own individual lasting popularity, THE DARK KNIGHT has had almost NO substantial, lasting impact. Not on film, not on the popular-culture, not on comics and not even on Batman. And that feels close to astonishing considering how sure the entire cinematic world was that it had experienced a GODFATHER-level sea change.

It hasn’t been much of a long-term boon to Christopher Nolan, whose post-TDK auteur-invulnerability lasted for exactly one film (INCEPTION), unable to protect him from a gently-disappointed critical drubbing for RISES and widespread audience-indifference to his ambitious mess of a sci-fi epic, INTERSTELLAR. More problematically, the focus on the minutiae of his aesthetic sensibilities has turned “Nolanizing” into something of a cinephile punchline, with many of the same fandom-obsessives who once poured over his recurring themes and tics like Rosetta Stones of moviemaking now pointedly asking if this filmmaker is trapped in his own box; culminating in a lukewarm reception for the Nolan-overseen would-be successor to the KNIGHT trilogy, MAN OF STEEL that found more than a few pinning the film’s myriad shortcomings on the influence of his grim, joyless sensibilities.

Whether that appraisal is true or not is beside the point: In terms of the pop-hivemind, Nolan’s memetic identity has flipped from “The thinking-man’s action director” to “The guy who sucks the fun out of everything;” a caricature that (fairly or not) fits far too nicely with everything from narrative criticism (Why does nobody in INCEPTION dream about sex? Or fanciful settings? Or anything other than macho heist-movie scenarios?) to aesthetic disagreements (Who decided to wash the color-contrast out of, of all things, a Superman movie?) And sure, while he’s in no danger of not being able to get a project off the ground any time soon, it’s an extraordinary turn to see a filmmaker previously touted as the blockbuster’s new gold-standard become an Internet Comedy punchline for “This movie is dreary and no fun.”

Likewise, leading-man Christian Bale has found himself unable to secure another Batman-scale role. Though he finally picked up his Oscar for an impressive supporting turn in THE FIGHTER, a high-profile attempt to become the new face of the TERMINATOR franchise (an aim which reportedly led to a complete reworking of the storyline for the fourth installment, SALVATION) fizzled at the box-office, as did a turn as Moses in Ridley Scott’s poorly-received EXODUS. And while some critics (not me, by any stretch) embraced his showy turn in David O. Russell’s Oscar-baity Scorsese-a-like AMERICAN HUSTLE, audiences were less enthusiastic. And while Batman is already making his way back to theaters for DAWN OF JUSTICE, it’s a new version played by Ben Affleck in what’s already being touted as a marked departure from Bale’s interpretation.

Its hoped-for effect on the Academy Awards’ perception of genre film, too, never materialized. Though the following year’s Best Picture nominees did notably include Neil Blomkamp’s surprise alien-apartheid crowd-pleaser DISTRICT NINE, it didn’t help any fellow “outsider genre” offerings crack the victory ceiling: Despite dominating the cinematic landscape of the last decade and change, comic-book superheroes are an almost entirely-absent presence come Oscar time. Instead, a certain number of nominees each year became the butt of jokes as the recognizably-extraneous contenders among the Awards-blogger set, and The Academy began walking back the parameters of the arrangement as of last year; effectively making Oscar one more industry institution THE DARK KNIGHT ultimately failed to upend.

But, of course, nothing speaks to how profoundlywrong film culture’s educated guesses at the lasting influence of THE DARK KNIGHT really were than the subsequent fate of the comic-book superhero genre. This, above all else, is what Nolan’s work was supposed to form the new foundation of; a genre purged of both the “toyetic” technicolor nonsense of the earlier BATMAN features and the haphazard studio-handling that seemed to produce two X-MEN 3s or FANTASTIC FOURs for every one SPIDER-MAN. TDK was supposed to represent the future course of the entire genre: Characters stripped of their more film-unfriendly fanciful quirks, stories framed as “deconstructions” of the medium, aesthetic-sensibilities belonging more to the mainstream action genre and an almost defiant seriousness of purpose.

But the promised imitators never really materialized - except, once again, for the James Bond franchise, which paused its ongoing meta-story about a evil secret brotherhood to let Bond battle a Joker-like disfigured “funny” villain with a similarly Joker-like ironic-anarchy scheme in SKYFALL. Meanwhile, the lone film to be openly positioned as a DARK KNIGHT spiritual-progeny (read: another “deconstructed” superhero refigured for a dark, gritty modernization), MAN OF STEEL, found its dreary tone savaged by critics and fans alike.

The greatest irony, of course, is that the impact THE DARK KNIGHT was supposed to make wound up being made by another 2008 superhero feature. Marvel’s IRON MAN debuted to big money and solid reviews months before the Batman film bowed, but apart from devout fans crowing about a post-credits teaser floating the idea of other heroes lingering on Tony Stark’s margins and something called “The Avengers,” it (like the rest of the genre) was seen as being permanently consigned to Nolan’s bat-shadow. And in this case, the contrast couldn’t have been clearer: IRON MAN was a mid-budget (by today’s standards, anyway) romp whose plot-machinations were secondary to a quip-filled leading man turn by Robert Downey Jr. and an aesthetic determination toward faithfully translating the more colorful and fantastical side of the comics medium to screen. Fun, sure, but only just that – a trifle, compared to TDK’s quest to elevate “mere” comics into something Important™ and Meaningful© (as determined by the cadres of largely aging, humorless white men who hand out movie awards.)

And yet, that “trifle” has proved to have an impact and an influence that KNIGHT could (and did) only dream of: The Marvel Cinematic Universe that spun out of it has changed the blockbuster landscape like nothing since the debut of STAR WARS, establishing a new template for success that not only every other superhero series but every other big-budget moviemaking apparatus period is now chasing. Back in ’08 it was assumed that every cinematic hero (super or not) would find themselves “Nolanized” for success, but instead everyone from Robin Hood to King Arthur to the Universal Monsters are being set up for their chance to be franchised, crossed-over and eventually (hopefully) AVENGE’D.

So a movie that was supposed to change everything ultimately changed very little. Not in its genre, not for its medium, not even for its lead character; who’s already found himself recast as part of a planned decade-length interlocking multi-film narrative that will dwarf its predecessor by design. What everyone assumed would be a centerpiece is now more of an outlier - so what now becomes of it?

A better question might be why anything needs to become of it. Outliers are, after all, just as much landmarks as centerpieces. What fandom’s obsession with what THE DARK KNIGHT was meant to do on behalf of its tertiary elements long-term managed to obscure was that it remains a fairly excellent piece of work as is – even (perhaps more so) when removed from the broader superhero movie phenomenon, the Batman legacy and even its own prequel and sequel. Maybe it will take a while for the moviegoing world to take note of that again, as TDK continues its rotation in Saturday afternoon cable programming while the Marvel and DC Cinematic Universes slug it out at the multiplex for the next who-knows-how-long – pushed too early to the background because of everyone else’s expectations… punished by pop-culture for being “only” a good movie.


NOTE: The following piece was written for outside publication but didn't quite find a home. Posting here now, in the interest of not over-dating it any further. Are you a publisher/site-owner who'd like to see work like this on your outlet? Contact the author at BobChipman82@gmail.com Want to see more material like this published here? There's a MovieBob Patreon for that. Thank you.

Review: STONEWALL (2015)

And here's one of those not-great misfires of a movie that will probably wind up with a (slightly) better reputation than it deserves (later) largely because the initial response will be seen (by some) as much more negative (perhaps even "unfairly" so) than was warranted. So much of modern film-discourse is built around pre-reactions, space-filling hypothetical "analysis" (read: guessing) and hot-takes that this becomes a recurring issue - the transformation of "bad" movies into "better than expected" by hyped-up early condemnation.

Fair or not, the knives seemed to have been out for Roland Emmerich's STONEWALL pretty-much since it was announced; first based on the idea that a blockbuster/action-specialist shouldn't be tackling a historical drama about gay activism (that the ID4 and DAY AFTER TOMORROW director is himself a gay activist was evidently not as widely known as I'd thought), later based on the version of the story he had chosen to tell: Namely an "eyewitness to history" historical-fiction approach wherein the events of the infamous riots popularly-cited as the "birth" of the modern gay-rights movement are presented to the audience from the perspective of a fictional character rather than any of the real figures who participated in the real thing; the final straw being that said audience-avatar was to be a strapping, classically-handsome Midwestern teen-heartthrob type (Jeremy Irvine) whose journey to accepting his own gay self-identity occurs in-tandem with the events leading up to the riots.

SPOILERS after the jump:



Whereas the Stonewall Riots in "popular history" were, for years mainly framed as a moment of unity; in recent decades they've gained renewed life as a point of symbolic schism within LGBTQ activism. Today, Stonewall is discussed less often in terms of it's meaning to the early gay pride movement than it is in regards to how the fact that the first wave of rioting/protesting was spearheaded by trans women and people of color whose contributions were subsequently minimized by the co-opting of the events as a rallying-point for "mainstream" (read: white, male) gay culture.

In this respect, then, the indictment of Emmerich's approach is less that he's opted to "print the legend" and more that he's not printing the right legend. And while one can't possibly not be sympathetic to the aggrieved parties here (the various erasures in question here are a serious problem in the reality of the matter and a major component of why the movie doesn't work), I also can't help but wonder if any version of STONEWALL that, regardless of quality, wasn't explicitly all/only about condemning said erasure (which would be a wholly legit film to make in it's own right, just so we're clear) would've been welcomed at this point - regardless of who directed and how they chose to tell the story.

Not that it matters beyond theory at this point, since the film indeed is an unfortunate misfire and its tone-deafness to its own use of historic-symbolism is a big reason why; but I still can't shake the sense that more than a few critical minds were made up before a frame of film had been projected. Still, since whatever was being attempted hasn't worked, the point is largely moot.

Again, I take no issue with anyone so personally affronted by the manner in which the story is being told that they refuse to even bother engaging it on any other level (not that I, the exact opposite of "marginalized" in every conceivable way, would have a "right" to in the first place.) But, frankly, the ways in which STONEWALL goes wrong (and also right, here and there) run deeper than which details have been fudged and which figures have been ommitted. It's ultimately a failure, but a sincerely-mounted and fascinating one.

The key problem, on a technical level, is that the film can't find any sense of cohesion. Emmerich and writer Jon Robin Baitz are going for big, sprawling, multi-character, high-emotion historical melodrama here (think TITANIC), and if there's one thing that consistently torpedoes works in that genre it's an inability to make all the moving parts work together. There are a lot of threads criss-crossing the narrative here: The personal journey of Irvine's Danny Winters, the exploits of a group of young homeless hustlers led by Johnny Beauchamp's Ray/Ramona (a scene-stealing performance that come close to rescuing the movie), political/gangland conspiracies surrounding the mob-owned Stonewall bar itself, Ron Perlman as a brutal kidnapping-prone pimp, power-struggles within the corrupt police precinct charged with managing "business" on Christopher Street, Johnathan Rhys Meyers's would-be Mattachine Society order-keeper, Ray's unrequitted pining for Danny, the fleeting presence of Marsha P. Johnson, Danny's secondary struggle to secure attendance at Columbia, the death of Judy Garland, etc... and very little of it ever comes together; with each plot-transition feeling more like slices of six or seven different movies (some more compelling than others) being shuffled around in an attempt to make "more" translate into "epic."

But, if we're being charitable, it can be said that the final film is a case of two disparate main storylines - Danny's journey and the drama surrounding Stonewall itself - that fail to come together. They never form a genuinely-meaningful parallel, always leaving one feeling like a distraction from the other, and thus The Moment where they're supposed to converge and drive the emotional climax doesn't gel. You can see, mechanically, how everything is supposed to build to a crescendo wherein Danny embraces himself not only as gay but as a gay-revolutionary; but when it arrives it feels false. And while a big part of why is because it's impossible to ignore that actual heroes are being nudged aside for a made-up one... the fact is it still wouldn't work dramatically even if that somehow wasn't an issue.

Here's the thing: While too symbolically-problematic to likely ever be "acceptable" for this specific story, the "Danny-as-POV" aspect makes a certain amount of technical sense. It's clear from the opening frames that Emmerich is aiming for message-movie territory here: unconcerned with accuracy to the point of self-parody, the goal here isn't even so much to commemorate Stonewall itself but rather to send audiences home in an afterglow of righteous, fist-pumping "get off your ass and do something!" fervor; and framing the story around a near-blank protagonist's transformation from self-preserving survivor to community-minded activist is a surefire way to do that.

In fact, in that regard even the "whitewashing" makes a certain amount of mechanical sense - the level of naivete about the way of the world required for Danny's role as the reciever of lessons effectively demands that he be a clueless rural white kid in this scenario: If he were any further marginalized, it would be unbelievable for him to arrive on Christopher Street so lacking in worldliness so as to spur the other characters to explain their world and ways to him/us. That doesn't make it "okay," but you can see the reasons for it to have occured beyond simplistic presumptions of malice.

Yes, as many had worried, the film posits Danny as throwing the "first brick" in the riot, but he doesn't pick it up himself: It's thrust into his hand by another character as a "put up or shut up" moment wherein Danny, here more than anywhere else positioned as walking Golden Boy metaphor for the entirety of "apolitical" America and American gays of the era specifically, is forced to choose between Mattachine slow-build politicking and radical upheaval as the right path for himself and His People - and yes, because I wasn't exaggerating about the melodrama here being TITANIC-level hyper-earnest cheese, this actually plays out with Rhys Meyers and Beauchamp shouting "DO IT!" and "DON'T!" at him from opposite sides of the street like those movies where two kids fight over ownership of a puppy.

(For what it's worth, I cringed on-reflex when Danny threw the brick - an action that many accounts and popular-narrative typically attribute to Johnson - but in narrative/character context the moment makes sense. But having him then turn around, immediately-transformed, and become the first character in the film to raise a fist and shout "GAY POWER!" is a tone deaf, deflating decision. It would've been more appropriate and powerful if he'd thrown, stayed in-character with some "Oh crap, what'd I just do?" yokel-beffudlement and then find strength as Ray and the others rallied around him and started the chant.)

This sort of stuff is, believe it or not, the best and worst parts of the project. Turning complex events/ideas into stark clashes between goodies and baddies to drive The Point home is Emmerich's narrative stock in trade - lest we forget his recent (under-appreciated) WHITE HOUSE DOWN, wherein a grab-bag of progressive policy-messages are wedded to a scenario wherein a fictional version of President Obama battles a terrorist strike-team comprising the entire scope of American right-wing ideology from pro-war Senators to white-supremascists to Snowden-esque techno-libertarians. Unfortunately, the unfocused screenplay makes all these mechanics for naught - a lot of the "worldbuilding" winds up as dead-ends, and even then there are too many scenes setting up other threads where our "hero" isn't even involved.

Meanwhile, trying to give Danny an inner-life and backstory beyond metaphor/stand-in turns out to be a resource hog on the more interesting parts of the movie. It's clear that Emmerich and Baitz have keyed in on the character at a very personal, visceral level (like most well-intentioned misfires, STONEWALL seems a case of decisive-clarity being impeded by filmmakers operating in full-blown, heart-on-sleeve, bleeding onto the text earnestness), but trying to make him a three-dimensional character weakens his ability to function as a symbolic vessel in the "other half" of the movie.

It doesn't help that "Danny's story" is where the film decides to drop any last remaining pretense to subtlety in establishing its moral axis: The poor kid isn't simply bounced from his home after being outed at school (complete with finding an already-packed suitcase waiting on his bed); he's "caught" in a tryst with the hero quarterback of the football team that just happens to be coached by Danny's own father (really!) who, when confronting his son, accuses Danny of seducing "his quarterback" as a way to hurt him. Yeesh!

What's frustrating is, even as the parts never really click into place there are individual moments where you can see the better movie STONEWALL wants to be. The lack of fusion between Danny the Character and Danny the Metaphor fails him, but Irvine is a strong presence in both versions. Beauchamp is legitimately great, carrying huge sections of the film on his shoulders and infusing the world-building business with real energy and elevating every other performer he shares a scene with to the point where you have to wonder why Ray isn't the main character - especially since he also starts out even more politically-averse than Danny. Relative newcomer Vladimir Alexis impresses as Queen Cong, another of Ray's posse. The production design and cinematography are pretty terrific, centering the aesthetic appropriately between gauzy Norman Rockwell mythic-history and sanguine oversaturation.

The riot itself, particularly when it sticks to history ("Why don't you guys do something!?" occurs as it does in most accounts, and makes for a big moment), is unquestionably compelling - even though we only get to see the first night. And yes, even though it's also one of the goofiest things to happen in the entire movie, Ray and Danny's crew facing down an advancing phalanx of armed riot-control cops by forming a chorus-girl kickline (I honestly have no idea if this is drawn from anything real) and belting out a playfully-filthy power-anthem is pretty-much exactly what I wanted out of the Roland Emmerich version of this story, for better or for worse.

From where I sit, this is all much more "silly" than maliciously-offensive (though somehow also not silly enough, given that Emmerich's other historical-fiction entries are legitimate gonzo camp classics)

In the end, while not forgiving the film it's many shortcomings, it largely left me feeling bad for Emmerich, who clearly wanted to make this work and had described STONEWALL in the past as a 20-year dream project. I've referenced TITANIC a few times in describing the film's tone, but in terms of net-results it has more in common with Scorsese's GANGS OF NEW YORK or Levinson's TOYS - other films that sat as long-desired "passion projects" from great filmmakers but emerged as overbaked, unfocused, overwrought and (perhaps) too long-overthought mistakes. Sometimes, you can sit the egg so long that what hatches just doesn't smell right.

I absolutely believe Emmerich has wanted to make this movie for almost two decades... I also believe it's clear he didn't update his thinking or approach to it in all that time. 20 years ago, STONEWALL would've been a revolutionary culture-bomb ("G-g-gay stuff!? Gay p-p-power!? As a mainstream-aspiring crowd-pleaser!?") that would today be analyzed as "of it's time, but problematic." Arriving today, it's too little, too late, too focused on the wrong stories.

Too bad.