Movies from This Year I Finally Saw: Dune Part 2

Spoilers Ahoy

The desert is beautiful in exactly the way that means it’s something that can kill you. It’s vast, and terrifying, and gorgeous. The only thing that compares is the sea; but the sea is totally alien, and to survive there, we need to bring tiny islands of our world with us to survive. The desert allows no such vessels, it demands that we join it, live as it does.

My Dad grew up on the edge of the low desert, I spent a lot of time as a kid there. I mention all this so that I can tell this story: when we watched the 2001 Sci-Fi channel version of Dune, the first time the Fremen arrived on screen my Dad burst into laugher; “Look how fat they are!” he roared, “they’ve never been in the desert a day in their lives!”

He did not say that when we watched the new movies.

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And so yes, I finally saw the second half of Dune. I liked it. I liked it a lot. I think this has to go down as the new definitive example of how to turn a great book into a great movie (the examples for how to turn “decent-but-not-great” and “bad” books into great movies remain Jurassic Park and Jaws, respectively.)

It’s vast, it’s grand, it looks great, the acting is phenomenal, it’s fun, it’s exciting. It’s the sort of movie where you can list ten things about it at random and someone is likely to say “oh yeah, that was my favorite part.”

Denis Villeneuve has two huge advantages, and wastes neither. First, this is the third attempt at filming Dune, and as such he has a whole array of examples of things that do and don’t work. Second, he even has an advantage over Frank Herbert, in that unlike the author of the book, Villeneuve knows what’s going to happen in the next one, and can steer into it.

It’s immediately obvious that splitting the book into two movies was an even better idea than it first looked. While stretching a book-to-movie adaptation into two movies has become something of a cliche, Dune is different, if for no other reason than when they announced that they were going to make two films, literally everyone who’d ever read the book correctly guessed where the break was going to be.

But in addition to giving the story enough room to stretch out and get comfortable, the break between movies itself also turns out to have been a boost, because everyone seems more relaxed. The actors, who were all phenomenal in the first part, are better here, the effects are better, the direction is more interesting. Everyone involved clearly spent the two years thinking about “what they’d do next time” and it shows.

It looks great. The desert is appropriately vast and terrible and beautiful. The worms are incredible, landing both as semi-supernatural forces of nature but also clearly real creatures. All the stuff looks great, every single item or costume or set looks like it was designed by someone in the that world for a reason. The movie takes the Star Wars/Alien lived-in-future aesthetic and runs with it; the Fremen gear looks battered and used, the Harkonnen stuff is a little too clean, the Imperial stuff is clean as a statement of power, the smooth mirrored globe of a ship hanging over the battered desert outpost.

The book casually mentions that Fremen stillsuits are the best but then doesn’t talk more about that; the movie revels in showing the different worse protective gear everyone else wears. The Fremen stillsuits looks functional, comfortable, the kind of thing you could easily wear all day. The various Harkonnen and Imperial and smuggler suits all look bulky and uncomfortable and impractical, more like space suits than clothes; the opening scene lingers on the cooling fans in the back of Harkonnen stillsuit’s helmets, a group of soldiers in over their heads trying to bring a bubble of their world with them, and failing. In the end, those fans are all food for Shai-halud.

Every adaptation like this has an editorial quality; even with the expanded runtime we’re playing with here, the filmmakers have to choose what stays and what to cut. Generally, we tend to focus on what got left out, and there’s plenty that’s not here (looking at you, The Spacing Guild.) But oftentimes, the more interesting subject is what they choose to leave in, what to focus on. One detail Villeneuve zooms in on here is that everyone in this movie is absolutely obsessed with something.

Silgar is obsessed that his religion might be coming true. Gurney is obsessed with revenge at any cost. The Baron is obsessed with retaking Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit are obsessed with regaining control of their schemes. Elvis is obsessed with proving his worth to his uncle.

Rebecca Ferguson plays Jessica as absolutely consumed with the twin desires for safety and for her son to reach his full potential, whatever the cost. She has a permanently crazed look in her eyes, and the movie keeps it ambiguous how much of that is really her, and how much is PTSD mixed with side-effects of that poison.

At first, Paul is a kid with no agency, and no particular obsessions. He’s upset, certainly, but he someone who’s adrift on other people’s manipulations, either overt or hidden. You get the sense that once they join up with the Fremen, he’d be happy to just do that forever. But one the spice starts to kick in, Timothée Chalamet plays him as a man desperately trying to avoid a future he can barely glimpse. When reality finally conspires to make that future inevitable, he decides the only way forward is to sieze agency from everything and everyone around him, and from that point plays the part as a man possessed, half-crazed and desparate to wrestle him and the people he cares about through the only path he can see that doesn’t lead to total disaster.

My favorite character was Zendaya’s Chani. Chani was, to put it mildly, a little undercooked in the book, and one of the movie’s most interesting and savvy changes is to make her the only character that isn’t obsessed with the future, but as the only character who can clearly see “now”, a sort of reverse-Cassandra. While everyone else is consumed with plots and goals and Big Obsessions, she’s the only one that can see what the cost is going to be, what it already is. The heart of the movie is Zendaya finding new ways to express “this isn’t going to work out” or “oh shit” or “you have got to be fuckin’ kidding me” with just her face, as things get steadily out of control around her. It’s an incredible performance.

Chani also sits at the center of the movie’s biggest change: the ending.

In the book, Chani and Jessica aren’t exactly friends, but they’re not opposed to each other. The story ends with Paul ascending to the Imperial throne, with the implicit assent of the Spacing Guild and a collective shrug from the other great houses, and the story’s point-of-view slides off him and onto the two woman, as they commiserate over the fact that the men in their lives are formally married to other people, but “history will call us wives.”

Then, Dune Messiah opens a decade later after a giant war where the Fremen invaded the universe, and killed some billions of people. It’s not a retcon in the modern sense of the word exactly, but the shift from the seeming peaceful transition of power and “jihad averted” ending of the first book to the post-war wreckage of the opening of the second is a little jarring. Of course, Dune Messiah isn’t a novel so much as it’s 200 pages of Frank Herbert making exasperated noises and saying “look, what I meant was…”

Villeneuve knows how the second book starts, and more important, knows he’s going to make that the third movie, so he can steer into it in a way Herbert didn’t. So here, rather than vague allies, Jessica and Chani stand as opposing views on Paul’s future. The end of the film skips the headfake of a peaceful transition, and starts the galactic jihad against the houses opposed to Paul’s rule, and then the movie does the same POV shift to Chani that the book does, except now it’s her walking off in horror, the only person convinced that this will all end in flames and ruin. (Spoiler: she’s right.)

It’s a fascinating structure, to adapt one long book and its shorter sequel into a trilogy, with the not-quite-as-triumphant-as-it-looks ending of the first book now operating as (if you’ll forgive the comparison) an Empire Strikes Back–style cliffhanger.

It’s also a change that both excuses and explains the absense of the Spacing Guild from the movie, it’s much easier to light off a galactic war in one scene if there isn’t a monopoly on space travel that has a vested interest in things staying calm.

Dune is a big, weird, overstuffed book. The prose is the kind that’s politely described as “functional” before you change the subject, it doesn’t really have a beginning, and the end kind of lurches to a halt mid-scene. (And it must be said that it is significantly better written than any of Herbert’s other works. Dune started life as fixup of serialized short stories; the novel’s text implies the influence of either a strong editor or someone who gave a lot of productive feedback. Whatever the source, that influence wouldn’t show up for any of the sequels.) It’s a dense, talky book, with scene after scene of people expositing at each other, including both their conversation and respective internal monologies.

Despite it’s flaws, It’s a great book, and a classic for a reason, mostly because whatever else you can say about it, Dune is a book absolutely fizzing with ideas.

This is a book with a culture where computers are outlawed because of a long-ago war against “Thinking Machines”, and a guild of humans trained from birth to replace computers. There are plenty of authors who would have milked that as a book on its own, here it gets treated as an aside, the name “Butlerian Jihad” only appearing in the appendix.

Taking that a step further, the guild of analytical thinking people are all men, and their counterpart guild—the Bene Gesserit—are the scheming concubine all-woman guild. And yeah, there’s some gender stereotypes there, but that’s also the point, it’s not hidden. They’re both “what if we took these stereotypes and just went all the way.”

The book is constantly throwing out new concepts and ideas, tripping over them as it runs to the next. Even the stock mid-century science fiction ideas get a twist, and we end up with things like what if Asimov’s Galactic Empire was a little less “Roman” and a little more “Holy Roman”. And that’s before we get to the amount of word-building heavy-lifting done by phrases like “zensunni wanderers.”

And on top of all that, Herbert was clearly a Weird Guy (complementary.) The whole book is positively bubbling over with The Writer's Barely-Disguised Fetish, and while that would swamp the later books, here the weird stuff about politics or sex or religion mostly just makes the book more interesting—with a big exception around the weird (derogatory) homophobia.

And this is where I start a paragraph with “however”—However most of those ideas don’t really pay off in a narratively compelling way. They’re mostly texture, which is fine in a sprawling talky novel like Dune, but harder to spare room for in a movie, or even in two long ones.

An an example: Personal shields are another fun piece of texture to the setting, as well as artfully lampshading why this futuristic space opera has mostly melee combat, but they don’t really influence the outcome in a meaningful way. You can’t use them on Arrakis because they arger the worms, which sort of explains part of the combat edge the Fremen have, but then in the book it just sorta doesn’t come up again. The book never gives the Fremen a fighting style or weapons that take advantage of the fact their opponents don’t have shields but are used to having them. Instead, the Fremen are just the best fighters in the universe, shields or no shields, and use the same sorts of knives as everyone else.

The movies try to split the difference; shields are there, and we get the exposition scene at the start to explain how they work, but the actual fights don’t put a lot of effort in showing “the slow blade penetrates”, just sometimes you can force a blade through a shield and sometimes you can’t.

Visually, this does get gestured in a few ways: those suspensor torpedoes that slow down and “tunnel” through the shields are a very cool deployment of the idea, and the second movie opens with a scene where a group of Harkonnens are picked apart by snipers but never think to take cover, because they usually don’t have to.

And this is how the movie—I think correctly—chooses to handle most of those kinds of world-building details. They’re there, but with the volume dialed way down. The various guilds and schools are treated the same way; Dr Yueh turning traitor is unthinkable because he’s a trusted loyal member of the house, the Suk School conditioning is never mentioned, because it’s a detail that really doesn’t matter.

As someone who loves the book, It’s hard not to do a little monday-morning quarterbacking on where the focus landed. I’d have traded the stuff at the Ecological Testing Station for the dinner with the various traders and local bigwings, Count Fenring is much missed, I’d have preferred the Spacing Guild was there. But it works. This isn’t a Tom Bombadil/Souring of the Shire “wait, what did you think the book was about?” moment, they’re all sane & reasonable choices.

It turns out letting someone adapt the book who doesn’t like dialoge is the right choice, because the solution turned out to be to cut basically all of it, and let the story play out without the constant talking.

And this leads into the other interesting stylistic changes, which is that while Dune the book is deliriously weird, Dune the movies are not. Instead, they treat everything with total sincerity, and anything they can’t figure out how to ground they leave out.

I think this is a pretty savvy call for making a Dune in the Twenties. Most of the stuff that made Dune weird in the 60s has been normalized over the last few decades of post-Star Wars blockbusters, such that we live in a world where Ditko’s psychedelic Dr. Strange has starred in six different big budget movies, and one of the highest grossing movies of last year co-starred a talking tree and a cyborg raccoon. There’s no out-weirding that, the correct answer is, ironically, to take a cue from George Lucas and shoot it like it’s a documentary about a place that doesn’t exist.

So most of the movie, the fights, the worms, gets shot with total seriousness, and then Paul’s powers get visually reduced to the point where the movie is ambiguous about if he can really see the future or not. Even something as out-there-bananas as Alia is stripped down to the minimum, with the story’s timeline being compressed from multiple years to a couple of months so that we don’t have to figure out how to make a toddler with the mind of an adult work on the screen.

Which brings me to the last topic I want to cover here, which is that David Lynch’s Dune hangs over this movie like a shadow. It’s clear that everyone making this movie has seen that one. This is almost always to this movie’s benefit, both in terms of what’s there and what isn’t.

To wit: if anyone could have made something as very-specifically weird as “toddler with the mind of an adult” work, it was Lynch, and he didn’t, so the new movie stays clear. The look of both the Atreides and the Harkonnens owes more to the Lynch film than it does to the book, and there are any number of other aspects that feel like a direct response to that movie—either copy it, or get as far away as possible.

I picture Villeneuve with an effects pedal labeled “Lynch”, and he’d occasionally press on it.

I really, really liked these two movies. They’re far better than the Lynch film both as an adaptation of the book and as movies in their own right. But I really hope that pedal gets a little more of a workout in Dune Messiah.

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You know, I really, really, really wanted to hear Christopher Walken say “Bring in that floating fat man—the baron!” I can hear it!

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This means that the music video for Weapon of Choice is a prequel, right?

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A final thought. Lynch’s Dune opens with Princess Irulan looking the camera dead in the eye and explaining the premise of the film, a sort of sci-fi Chorus asking for a muse of fire, but clunkier. Denis Villeneuve’s first part—correctly—does away with all that and just starts the movie.

Before this second movie came out, I joked that the real power move would be to open the this film with Irulan narrating (“The beginning was a dangerous time”,) to act as the ‘previously on Dune’ recap.

Reader, you cannot possibly imagine my surprise and delight when that actually happened.

Movie Review Flashback: Zack Snyder’s Justice League

Programming Note: Back in March/April of 2021, I wrote a review of the then just-released Snydercut of Justice League for [REDACTED, but a different REDACTED than last time]. I’m actually not a thousand percent sure this actually got published back then, but I’m putting it up here now for roughly its 3rd anniversary. I did a little cleanup, but mostly I left it as it was, three years ago. On an amusing personal note, writing this was one of the things that caused me to think “you know, I should really re-light the blog.”

So, #snydercut. The tl;dr is that by any reasonable metric it's a lightyears better movie than the theatrical Whedon version, and that it's absolutely a Justice League movie by the guy that made 300.

Is it any good, though?

There's something to be said for just raw, un-compromised artistic vision, and this is clearly the movie ZS set out to make, and dang did he ever make the heck out of it.

It's extremely Zack Snyder. The guy has a style, and this might be its apotheosis. If nothing else, he knows how to make stuff look cool, and every character has at least one moment where they're doing the coolest thing imaginable. If I'd had seen this at 15 I'd have lost my damn mind. And that's kind of the point—this is a 15-year old's idea of what cool and grownup is.

The whole thing operates at this level of just Operatic Pomposity. Extremely silly stuff is happening constantly, and the movie just plays it completely straight-faced, as if this was the most amazing stuff you have ever seen. I mean, SIXTEEN minutes into the movie, the literal greek god Zeus shoots a Jack Kirby character with lightning, and the movie shoots it like it’s the end of Macbeth.

And you can kind of see why. The "other guys" have established a brand for self-aware, slightly self-deprecating superhero movies, and you want to carve out a space where you don't look like an Avengers knock off. Problem is, the only space where this material can work other than "Robert Downey Jr smirking" is "as goddamn serious as possible", so they went with that, and it's hard to blame them. Well, and there's also a genuine audience of people who think Frank Miller is a genius non-ironically, and I'm glad those people got a movie for them.

Having the movie at full prescription strength is intersting, because all the bad ideas are still bad, but they're fully baked, and you can see where they were going with it.

It's almost boiling over with ideas it can't figure out how to land.

ZS knows instinctually that character conflict is interesting, but can’t figure out how that works. Instead, everyone settles into this kind of grumpy-surly mode, but never actually disagree about anything.

It keep gesturing at other, better movies. There's an absolutely lyrical scene where Barry Allen saves Iris West from a car crash in the middle of a job interview that both nails Barry's character as well as finally figuring out how to show The Flash's powers in live action. Wonder Woman stars in a 10 minute Indiana Jones movie with torches and secret doors and everything. There's a really neat sketch for a movie about Lois Lane and Martha Kent dealing with their shared grief over Clark's death, and exploring what it's like for the people who knew the real person when a famous person dies, and THEN, as soon as Lois decices to move on, Clark comes back to life.

Heck, I'd take any of those blown out to 90 minutes, no question. Still, abbreviated as these sketches are, they’re good!

But, theres at least two colossal conceptual screwups in the movie that even this version can't do anything about.

The first is trying to invert the Avengers model, and introduce everyone in this movie and then spin them off. It ends up as an amazing counter-example of how well put together the first Avengers really was. Consider: basically every speaking character—Heroes AND Villains—as well as the core McGuffin, had already been introduced, so all that movie had to do was remind the audience who everyone was and then say "oh no! this guy from that movie has teamed up with aliens to get that thing from that other movie!" And BAM, you get to start 2/3 into the story and just RUN. Justice League has to spend the first 120 minutes just explaining things so that the rest of the movie can even happen.

The second big screwup is trying to go for the Kirby Fourth World / New Gods / Darkside stuff in one gulp. There’s so much there, and this movie has to push most of it to the margins. The result is a movie where the actual bad guy only shows up right at the end and has no lines, while the rest of the time they fight his least-interesting henchman.

As kind of a bonus mistake, the movie picks up where BvS left off, which means a dead Superman, which means most of the middle of the movie is a speedrun of “The Search for Spock” but for Superman. And it’s massively irritating, because the emphasis is all in the wrong places. Literally no one on earth thought Superman was going to stay dead, and even less people thought that he was going to sit out a Justice League movie. So the Return of Superman stuff in the middle is never interesting, it just feels like padding in a movie that already has too much going on. One more sublot jammed in that could have easily been stretched out into it’s own story, or should have been left behind in the conceptual phase.

There were some things I really liked, though. As I alluded to earlier the way they represent the Flash by having him stay the same speed but having the rest of the world go into slow motion is absolute genius, a perfect fit for Snyder's slow motion fetish, and forehead-slappingly obvious once you've seen it. And even though Days of Future Past had done something similar with Quicksilver three years earlier, this movie keeps finding new ways to use the idea, and even the lighting, instead of being ridiculous, serves as a snazzy indicator that Flash speed has kicked in before you have time to process that the background has slowed down. The shot where he steps back and catches the batarang is brilliant, and was rightly the center of the trailer.

I basically loved everything they did with Wonder Woman? Great use of a great character.

I also like that they way they solve the “Superman is too overpowered" problem is to lean all the way into it, and just show him as being on a completely different level from everyone else. That shot when he's fighting the League, and Flash is running by the frozen slow motion melee, and then Superman's eye suddenly moves to follow Flash? That's one of the best things anyone's ever done with Superman in live action. And it almost makes the “Search for Superman” stuff work, because he operates less like a character and more like a bonus mcguffin—he’s the Death Star plans, and once the League has him back on his feet they’re in good shape.

But, here in 2021, the biggest ding on JL is that absolutely everything that this movie tries to do in terms of tone or content, Infinity War / Endgame does better. The way this movie tries to be all edgelord dark looks downright amateur hour in a world where the "goofy" superhero francise made a movie where the bad guy wins and half the main characters die, and then rolls silent credits in front of a stunned audience.

[TEMPORAL INTRUSION: Hi, Gabe from ’24 here.  The original version of this had a horizontal line marking a transition here, but I’m going to replace that with something a little more thematically appropriate and #helmancut my own review from 3 years in the future.

Obviously, this was all written before we knew they were going to finally put that cycle of DC movies out of their misery and hand the keys to the guy Disney accidentally fired over some tweets, or that Marvel was going to spend the next several years exclusively stepping on rakes they had carefully placed in front of themselves.  I’m on the record as saying I think “superhero fatigue” is really “bad-movie-with-assigned-homework fatigue”, but either way, it’s a real thing.  I agree with everything I wrote here, but after years of relentlessly bad superhero and superhero-adjacent movies, I wouldn’t have written all this in such an upbeat tone.  And also, I sorta failed to point this out before, but those last two Avengers movies weren’t that great either.  “Grimdark bummer-times serious” just isn’t a key superheros play well in.

What’s remarkable to me now is that in the spring of ’21, waiting out what we thought was the tail end pandemic and just before our fall plans were wrecked by the Delta variant, I still remembered enough about the theatrical JL that I could do a comparison without a rewatch; now, I’m not sure I could tell you anything that happened in any of those movies.  Honestly, the only part of either version of JL that I still really remember is that mini–Indiana Jones movie starring Gal Godot at the beginning.  With the entire exercise now in the rear-view mirror:  They should have done a lot more of that.

We now return to the spring of 2021.]

I may be slightly more interested in the practice of turning a "long bad movie" into a "shorter, less bad" movie than the average person, but I think it's fascinating to see this, the original, and compare it to what they shipped in 2017. It's clear what Whedon's marching orders were: "cut it down to two hours, and add jokes". And that first one is a hell of a thing. You can squint and see there's a decent 3 hour version of this with a really solid deleted scenes section on the DVD, but cutting out half the movie is going to require some serious restructuring. For starters, you gotta pick a main character. There's two obvious choices:

Cyborg is clearly meant to be the emotional center of the movie. He's the only character with an actual "arc" who ends the movie in a different place that he starts. There's a kind of neat story in there about moving through the stages of grief, learning how to deal with the cards life deals you, and then finding a new family and purpose. The problem is—and this is a darkly hilarious punchline after all the allegations and drama—it turns out Ray Fisher really can't act. He's utterly out of his depth the entire time, and is utterly unable to deliver what the movie needs him to. He seems like a neat guy who everyone likes, and he was clearly treated abominably, and Whedon is a garbage person, but cutting his part to the bone was clearly the right call. That guy has no business being anywhere near a big movie, much less anchoring one.

Fortunately, however, the actual main character of the movie is clearly Wonder Woman. All the critical decisions in the movie are hers, she's the one that figures things out and gets the big exposition, she's the only one that gets a side adventure at the beginning—she's even the only one that gets her own theme music. This is a fairly clear "Wonder Woman and the Justice League" cut where it sticks with her as a the spine as she figures things out and recruits a team; not unlike the way Steve Rogers stays as the spine of the first Avengers movie.

So Whedon, of course, cuts out all her scenes and shoots a bunch of new stuff to make Batman the main guy. And you can almost see the panic-logic here. Suicide Squad bombed, BvS got a much more tepid reaction than they were expecting, Wonder Woman wasn't out yet. Recentering the movie on the one DC character thats proven able to hold down a franchise is an easy call to make, and "this movie needs more Batman" is a seemingly safe choice. But damn, what a screw up. And then it gets all extra icky once you roll in all the stuff we now know about "Joss Whedon, Fake Feminist".

Were there better ways to spend that 70 million bucks? Probably. It it a great movie? Not really. This isn't a Blade Runner-style "good movie becomes great" recut, this a Heavens Gate-style "oh, it turns out they really weren’t incompetent".

I'm glad they did this though. Its easy to see why the cast was so disgruntled, and I'm glad we got to see the movie they signed up to make. As the various studios figure out what to do with their personal streaming services, I hope "original cuts" of movies becomes a thing. If nothing else, I hope this encourages Disney to drop the first version of Rogue One on Disney+, or even, dare I say it, the real Star Wars.

But you know what? We've all had our work fucked up by other people. I'm glad someone got to haul their real work back out the trash and say "no, I made THIS."

Fallout (2024)

I found myself with more free time than I was expecting last weekend, and as I was also lacking in appropriate supervision, I “accidentally” watched all eight episodes of the new Fallout tv show.

I liked it! I liked a lot. It was fun, exciting, funny, great cast, looked amazing. But I’ve been wrestling with this post a little, because this is one of those weird bits of art where I genuinely liked it, I enjoyed watching it, and yet find myself with mostly only critical things to say.

Let’s get my biggest surprise out of the way first: Ron Perlman wasn’t in it. It’s a weird omission, considering how closely his voice is associated with the source material. Without getting too heavy into the spoilers, there was a scene near the end where a character looks over at a shadowy figure, and I thought to myself, “this is perfect, Ron is going to lean into the light, look the camera right in the eye and say the line.” And instead the shadowy figure stayed there and that other character looked the camera in the eye and said the line. Maybe it was a scheduling thing, and he was too busy teaching people how many ways there are to lose a house?

But okay, what did I like?

I liked the three main characters very much. Lucy, the most main of the main three manages to hit the very tricky spot of being “naïve”, but not “stupid” or “incompetent.” She’s just got a different set of experiences and skills than everyone else, but she learns fast and she figures out how to apply those skills to the new situations she finds herself in. She also manages the equally tricky maneuver of being a genuinely good person who stays a genuinely good person as the world around her gets weirder and more complex. She pretty much consistently finds the right reasons to do the right things, no matter how morally gray the world around her gets. She also looks remarkably like the starting model for the player character in the first game.

Maximus, on the other hand, manages to covey a sense of always being morally ambiguous and compromised no matter what he’s doing. It’s also a tricky performance, a character whose always likable despite the audience never really knowing why he’s doing what he’s doing. He’s always thinking, but you never know about what.

Rounding out the triptych of leads is The Ghoul, who is clearly designed to be everyone’s favorite character—the sort of hyper-competent amoral badass gunslinger thats always fun to watch. In addition, he’s played by Walton Goggins, who dials the goggins-o-meter all the way up to 11 and seems to be having an absolute blast. Goggins effectively plays two roles—the Ghoul in the post-apocalyptic present of the show, and Cooper Howard, the fading western actor-turned Vault-Tec spokesman in world before the bombs drop.

But the rest of the cast is outstanding as well. Everyone is great, they get the tone they’re supposed to be going for. And then, special mention for Kyle McLachlan—that’s right, hero to children Dale Cooper himself—who shows up for a tiny part right at the start and again at the end, and just absolutely owns the room. I’m not sure any actor has ever “understood the assignment” more than Kyle does in this.

My favorite parts of the show were those flashbacks to the world before the war—a world where there are robots and futuristic cars, but it’s been the 50s for a century. The production design here is outstanding; at first glance it’s the 50s, trilbies, poodle skirts, but with just enough high-tech stuff around the edges to produce a subtle dissonance. And then the show opens with every nightmare we had as kids growing up in the cold war.

Mostly, the show is those three out in the wasteland, paths intersecting, running into weird stuff. Their relative goals are less important—and frankly, underbaked—compared to them bouncing off each other and the various dangers of their world. The maguffin itself feels almost perfunctory, we have to have one for genre reasons, so this’ll do. The star attraction is the wasteland itself, a Mad Max meets spaghetti western desert full of monsters, mutants, skeletons. Whenever the show was about those three out having crazy sidequest adventures, following “the golden rule”, it sang.

But let’s step back and talk about Fallout as a whole for a sec. To recap: Fallout is a series of CRPG video games. The first kicked off the late 90s renaissance of “western-style” CRPGs. Fallout acts as kind of the “parent dojo” for a lot of the CRPG world; the leads for the first game would go on to form Troika Games, the team that made Fallout 2 would form the nucleus of Black Isle studios inside Interplay, which also worked with and helped launch Bioware with Baldur’s Gate. A Fallout 3 was in the early stages, but cancelled as Interplay finished going out of business.

After Interplay imploded, Bethesda picked up the rights to the series in the fire sale, and ten years later published Fallout 3. Meanwhile, many of the crew from Black Isle had reformed as Obsidian Entertainment, which would then work with Bethesda to make Fallout: New Vegas with a team composed of many of the people who worked on the original cancelled Fallout 3, and using some of the same designs. Finally, this was all capped off with Fallout 4 once again by Bethesda.

The point to all that is that the series is five games, each made by different people, at different companies, starring different characters, all with different tones and takes on the material, across nearly 20 years. I think it’s best thought of as an anthology series riffing on the same concepts rather than any sort of single vision or viewpoint. There’s a few core pieces—that mad max–meets–westerns wasteland, vaults full of elites waiting out the end of the world, mutant monsters, and a tone described as “satirical” by people who think that’s just a fancy synonym for “dark humor”—but otherwise, each game does its own thing.

How do you adapt all that in to 8 episodes on Amazon Prime? This adaptation makes a really interesting choice, in that rather than directly adapting any of the plots of the previous games, or mix-and-matching elements from them, it tells a new story with new characters in the same world. It’s effectively “Fallout 5”. This turns out to be a great idea, and it’s one I can’t believe more video game adaptations haven’t done.

It also, in a pleasant surprise in this age of prequels, is set after the other games, so those stories are vaguely treated as having “happened” and then here are some things that happened next.

As such, the show gives itself the flexibility to pick and choose various bits from the games to use or not, as well as threading new new inventions. It manages to hit a sort of “median-value” Fallout vibe, equidistant from all the games, which is a harder accomplishment than it makes it look.

Tone-wise the show settles on something best summed up as “Diet Westworld”. Because, of course, this is made by the same team that made the “stayed on too long” Westworld for HBO and the “killed too soon” The Peripheral for Amazon.

It has a lot in common with Westworld: multiple characters stories interweaving, a story that plays out in two time periods, The Ghoul is who Ed Harris’ Man in Black wanted to be when he grew up, a sort of jovial nihilism. It’s not simplified so much as streamlined, the time periods are obvious, the list of characters is shorter.

It definitely inherits Westworld’s desire to have everything be the result of one mystery of another, it’s a show that constantly wants to be opening locked boxes to find another locked box inside.

And this is too bad, because for me, Fallout is one of those settings that works much better when it’s operating a vibes-over-lore mode. You’re out in the wasteland, and it’s full of weird stuff that no one can explain, because anyone who could died before we were born, and we’ve got better things to do than speculate. Why are these vaults here? Grandma’s notes don’t say. Rad scorpions, huh? Yeah, they seem bad. Super-mutants? Yeah, don’t get near them.

Unfortunately, the games, and now the show, have trended more towards the “explain everything and fill in every detail” school of design, which… sure. It’s fine. I bring this up because the show leans hard into my single least favorite corner of the setting, namely that Vault-Tec, the company that built the vaults, was Up To Something, and Dark Secrets Abound. And this has always made me make a kind of exasperated sound and throw my hands up in the air because, really? “A third of a percent of the population decided to wait out the end of the world in luxury apartments while everyone else did the work to survive and the rebuild, so their grandchildren could emerge and take over” wasn’t enough satirical payload for you? You had to also make them Lex Luthor? And this is probably because this happened during Peak X-Files, and wheels-within-wheels conspiracies were cool and trendy in the late 90s, but now that just makes me tired.

The show even kisses up against the Thumb Thing. Let me explain. The mascot of both the franchise and Vault-Tec is the Vault Boy, a 50s-esque smiling cartoon character usually shown throwing a thumbs-up. No matter how bad things get, there’s the Vault-Boy, happy as can be.

There’s this urban rumor meets fan theory that the reason the Vault-Boy has his thumb up is that this is a way to gauge how close you are to an atomic bomb going off; if the mushroom cloud is smaller than your thumb, you have time to get to shelter. And, this is the most Lore Brain thing I’ve ever heard. Of course that’s not why he has his thumb up, he’s doing that because it’s funny to have a relentlessly optimistic cartoon character in the face of the terrible horrors of the aftermath of a nuclear war. But the people poisoned with Lore Brain need everything to Mean Something, so this rumor persists, until the show dances right up to the edge of endorsing it. And this drives me crazy, because not everything needs to have some complicated explanation you can read about in the wiki, stuff can just be thematic, you know?

The show also picked up Westworld’s (and The Peripheral’s) grim sense of humor. I preferred the Fallout games when they were on the funnier end of the spectrum, and I could have gone with a funnier show. It’s not not funny, but it’s also a show that cast Matt Berry in a fully serious part, which feels wasteful.

And a final thing Fallout inherited from Westworld is the “adult-ness” of the content. I promise I’m not one of those weirdoes that thinks movies shouldn’t have sex scenes, but my hottest take is that most movies would be better one rating lower than they are. And normally, this wouldn’t bug me, except I have a 12-year old at home who loves Fallout, and I can’t in good conscience show him the show.

Because I lied up at the top, I didn’t just happen to watch it over a weekend, I previewed the first part to see if I could watch it with the kids, realized that the answer was “…probably not?” and then jammed the rest of the show to see if I was right.

And what really grinds my gears about that is the content is only barely over the line into that TV-MA / R level, it wouldn’t have taken that much to knock it down to a stiff PG-13. And, like, if you’re going to go “adult”, go all the way, you know? I kept grumbling “pick a lane!” under my breath while watching it; it kept feeling like one of those 80s movies that threw one dramatic stabbing or topless scene in just to get their PG movie up into R so the teenagers wouldn’t think they’d gone soft. If you’re not going to let my kid watch it, go full Robocop, you know? Or, more to the point, full Westworld.

Because, unlike Westworld, none of that stuff mattered! Whereas Westworld was fundamentally The Writer's Barely-Disguised Fetish (In Color!), here it’s all basically frosting. You could have cut around it, or panned away, and really not lost anything. On the other hand, if I’m honest, it wasn’t the mild sexy stuff or the CG gore that tipped it over the line to “nope, wait til he’s older”, it’s that there’s a sequence halfway through the first episode that’s every nightmare he’s ever had about a school shooting. And in fairness, that part is key to the plot the way the sexytimes and cartoon gore is not, so this is where I throw my hands up and say Libya is a land of contrasts, and that I get it, I really do, but I would have really preferred watching this show with my kid than not.

And my final gripe I’m going to air out here is that the show ended up with a worse case of Surf Dracula syndrome than it originally looked like it was going to have. She gets out of the vault in the first episode, but then the last episode ends on a note that’s clearly supposed to tease the next season, but instead feels more like they’ve finally arrived at the premise of the show. There’s a much better version of this show that got to that set of plot beats at the end of the first hour and built up from there.

Or to put that a different way, it feels like the show ended at the end of the first act of the main quest-line, after mostly draining side quests.

TV is in a weird place right now, and Fallout reflects the current anxiety over the form. It’s certainly not a old-style traditional episodic show, but nor is it the “badly-paced 8-hour movie” so many streaming shows tend to be, nor does it manage “heavily serialized but every episode does it’s own thing” as well as Westworld did. Instead it lands somewhere in the middle of all of that, and ends up feeling like a show that’s both very busy but also killing time until the next season.

And I don’t think dropping the whole show at once did them any favors. Whereas Westworld dominated the conversation for weeks at a time, this show is almost impossible to talk about, because everyone has seen a different number of episodes, so instead of talking about anything interesting, the web swirls around Vault-Boy’s thumb and dates on chalkboards. There’s a lot to talk about, and I notice every website that might want to talk about them already have the quality of walking back into the room saying “…and another thing!” long after the conversation was over.

I’m getting dangerously close to saying “I wish they had made a different show,” but I wish they’d leaned a little harder into the 50s aesthetics and had each episode be standalone new wacky adventures every week with the premise explained by the words to the theme song.

And this is all the nature of the medium here in 2024, but I really wish that last “okey-dokey” felt earned, that it felt like a punch-the-air climax to what had come before, instead of feeling like Dracula was finally getting his surfboard out.

Some Personal News!

Interrupting Icecano’s regularly scheduled programming, I have some personal news!

I have a (very) small piece of writing published in Kobold Press' Guide to the Labyrinth:

As part of their Tales of the Valiant Kickstarter to pathfinderize 5E, one of the auxiliary books is a Manual-of-the-planes-a-like guide to other worlds/planes/dimensions. They had a sort of contest/open slushpile to submit world designs for that book, and my “Thaecosia Archipelago” was one of the ones that made it in!

As we all know, “settings legally distinct from Planescape written by former members of the Planescape team” is one of my most significant weakness, so this was really fun. Talk about checking off a bucket list item!

Hardware is Hard

Friday’s post was, of course, a massive subtweet of Human’s "Ai" pin, which finally made it out the door to what can only be described as “disastrous” reviews.

We’ve been not entirely kind to Humane here at Icecano, so I was going to sort of discretely ignore the whole situation, the way you would someone who fell down a flight of stairs at a party but was already getting the help they needed. But now we’re going on a week and change of absolutely excruciating discourse about whether it’s okay to give bad products bad reviews. It’s the old “everything gets a 7” school of video game reviews, fully metastasized.

And, mostly, it’s all bad-faith garbage. There’s aways a class of grifter who thinks the only real crime is revealing the grift.

Just tobe crystal clear: the only responsibility a critic or reviewer of any kind has it to the audience, never to the creators, and even less to the creator’s shareholders.

But also, we’re at the phase in the cycle where a certain kind of tech bro climbs out of the woodwork and starts saying things like “hardware is hard.” And it is! I’ve worked on multiple hardware projects, and they were all hard, incredibly hard. I once watched someone ask the VP of Hardware Engineering “do the laws of physics even allow that?” and the answer was a half-grin followed by “we’re not sure!”

I hate to break it to you, hard work isn’t an incantation to deflect criticism. Working hard on something stupid and useless isn’t the brag you think it is.

Because, you know what’s harder? Not having a hudred million dollars plus of someone elese’s money to play with interest-free for years on end. They were right about one thing though: we did deserve better.

Hundreds of Beavers

Your weekend movie recommendation: Hundreds of Beavers. An indie movie that did the festival circuit over the last year or so, just came out on iTunes this week. It’s a comedy about an applejack salesman becoming north America’s greatest fur trapper. I had a chance to see this one early. All I’ll say is that it’s kid-friendly, and it’s funny.

I’m gonna need to you to trust me on this. Part of the joy of this movie is the discovery. Don’t read anything about it, don’t watch the trailer. Just watch it.

Sometimes You Just Have to Ship

I’ve been in this software racket, depending on where you start counting, about 25 years now. I’ve been fortunate to work on a lot of different things in my career—embedded systems, custom hardware, shrinkwrap, web systems, software as a service, desktop, mobile, government contracts, government-adjacent contracts, startups, little companies, big companies, education, telecom, insurance, internal tools, external services, commercial, open-source, Microsoft-based, Apple-based, hosted onvarious unicies, big iron, you name it. I think the only major “genres” of software I don’t have road miles on are console game dev and anything requiring a security clearance. If you can name a major technology used to ship software in the 21st century, I’ve probably touched it.

I don’t bring this up to humblebrag—although it is a kick to occasionally step back and take in the view—I bring it up because I’ve shipped a lot of “version one” products, and a lot of different kinds of “version ones”. Every project is different, every company and team are different, but here’s one thing I do know: No one is ever happy with their first version of anything. But how you decide what to be unhappy about is everything.

Because, sometimes you just have to ship.

Let’s back up and talk about Venture Capital for a second.

Something a lot of people intellectually know, but don’t fully understand, is that the sentences “I raised some VC” and “I sold the company” are the same sentence. It’s really, really easy to trick yourself into believing that’s not true. Sure, you have a great relationship with your investors now, but if they need to, they will absolutely prove to you that they’re calling the shots.

The other important thing to understand about VC is that it’s gambling for a very specific kind of rich person. And, mostly, that’s a fact that doesn’t matter, except—what’s the worst outcome when you’re out gambling? Losing everything? No. Then you get to go home, yell “I lost my shirt!” everyone cheers, they buy you drinks.

No, the worse outcome is breaking even.

No one wants to break even when they go gambling, because what was the point of that? Just about everyone, if they’re in danger of ending the night with the same number of dollars they started with, will work hard to prevent that—bet it all on black, go all-in on a wacky hand, something. Losing everything is so much better than passing on a chance to hit it big.

VC is no different. If you take $5 million from investors, the absolutely last thing they want is that $5 million back. They either want nothing, or $50 million. Because they want the one that hits big, and a company that breaks even just looks like one that didn’t try hard enough. They’ve got that same $5 mil in ten places, they only need one to hit to make up for the other nine bottoming out.

And we’ve not been totally positive about VC here at Icecano, so I want to pause for a moment and say this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you went to go get that same $5 million as a loan from a bank, they’d want you to pay that back, with interest, on a schedule, and they’d want you to prove that you could do it. And a lot of the time, you can’t! And that’s okay. There’s a whole lot of successful outfits that needed that additional flexibility to get off the ground. Nothing wrong with using some rich people’s money to pay some salaries, build something new.

This only starts being a problem if you forget this. And it’s easy to forget. In my experience, depending on your founder’s charisma, you have somewhere between five and eight years. The investors will spend years ignoring you, but eventually they’ll show up, and want to know if this is a bust or a hit. And there’s only one real way to find out.

Because, sometimes you just have to ship.

This sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but to build something, you have to imagine it first. People get very precious around words like “vision” or “design intent”, but at the end of the day, there was something you were trying to do. Some problem to solve. This is why we’re all here. We’re gonna do this.

But this is never what goes out the door.

There’s always cut features, things that don’t work quite right, bugs wearing tuxedoes, things “coming soon”, abandoned dead-ends. From the inside, from the perspective of the people who built the thing, it always looks like a shadow of what you wanted to build. “We’ll get it next time,” you tell each other, “Microsoft never gets it right until version 3.”

The dangerous thing is, it’s really, really easy to only see the thing you built through the lens of what you wanted to build.

The less toxic way this manifests is to get really depressed. “This sucks,” you say, “if only we’d had more time.”

The really toxic way, though, is to forget that your customers don’t have the context you have. They didn’t see the pitch deck. They weren’t there for that whiteboard session where the lightbulbs all went on. They didn’t see the prototype that wasn’t ready to go just yet. They don’t know what you’re planning next. Critically—they didn’t buy in to the vision, they’re trying to decide if they’re going to buy the thing you actually shipped. And you assume that even though this version isn’t there yet, wherever “there” is, that they’ll buy it anyway because they know what’s coming. Spoiler: they don’t, and they won’t.

The trick is to know all this ahead of time. Know that you won’t ship everything, know that you have to pick a slice you actually do, given the time, or money, or other constraints.

The trick is to know the difference between things you know and things you hope. And you gotta flush those out as fast as you can, before the VCs start knocking. And the only people who can tell you are your customers, the actual customers, the ones who are deciding if they’re gonna hand over a credit card. All the interviews, and research, and prototypes, and pitch sessions, and investor demos let you hope. Real people with real money is how you know. As fast as you can, as often as you can.

The longer you wait, the more you refine, or “pivot”, or do another round of ethnography, is just finding new ways to hope, is just wasting resources you could have used once you actually learned something.

Times up. Pencils down. Show your work.

Because, sometimes you just have to ship.

Reviews are a gift.

People spending money, or not, is a signal, but it’s a noisy one. Amazon doesn’t have a box where they can tell you “why.” Reviews are people who are actually paid to think about what you did, but without the bias of having worked on it, or the bias of spending their own money. They’re not perfect, but they’re incredibly valuable.

They’re not always fun. I’ve had work I’ve done written up on the real big-boy tech review sites, and it’s slightly dissociating to read something written by someone you’ve never met about something you worked on complaining about a problem you couldn’t fix.

Here’s the thing, though: they should never be a surprise. The amount that the reviews are a surprise are how you know how well you did keeping the bias, the vision, the hope, under control. The next time I ship a version one, I’m going to have the team write fake techblog reviews six months ahead of time, and then see how we feel about them, use that to fuel the last batch of duct tape.

What you don’t do is argue with them. You don’t talk about how disappointing it was, or how hard it was, or how the reviewers were wrong, how it wasn’t for them, that it’s immoral to write a bad review because think of the poor shareholders.

Instead, you do the actual hard work. Which you should have done already. Where you choose what to work on, what to cut. Where you put the effort into imaging how your customers are really going to react. What parts of the vision you have to leave behind to build the product you found, not the one you hoped for.

The best time to do that was a year ago. The second best time is now. So you get back to work, you stop tweeting, you read the reviews again, you look at how much money is left. You put a new plan together.

Because, sometimes you just have to ship.

Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously, previously, previously.

Wait a minute, they fucking fridged Rebecca Ferguson’s character? Absolutely not.

“And Then My Reward Was More Crunch”

For reasons that are probably contextually obvious, I spent the weekend diving into Tim Cain’s YouTube Channel. Tim Cain is still probably best known as “the guy who did the first Fallout,” but he spent decades working on phenominal games. He’s semi-retired these days, and rather than write memoirs, he’s got a “stories from the old days” YouTube channel, and it’s fantastic.

Fallout is one of those bits of art that seems to accrete urban legends. One of the joys of his channel has been having one of the people who was really there say “let me tell you what really happened.”

One of the more infamous beats around Fallout was that Cain and the other leads of the first Fallout left partway through development of Fallout 2 and founded Troika Games. What happened there? Fallout was a hit, and it’s from the outside it’s always been baffling that Interplay just let the people who made it… walk out the door?

I’m late to this particular party, but a couple months ago Cain went on the record with what happened:

Fallout Was A B-Tier Project

Why I Left Fallout 2

and a key postscript:

Listening To My Stories With Nuance

…And oh man, did that hit me where I live, because something very similar happened to me once.

Several lifetimes ago. I was the lead on one of those strange projects that happen in corporate America where it absolutely had to happen, but it wasn’t considered important enough to actually put people or resources on it. We had to completely retool a legacy system by a hard deadline or lose a pretty substantial revenue stream, but it wasn’t one of the big sexy projects, so my tiny team basically got told to figure it out and left alone for the better part of two years.

Theoretically the lack of “adult supervision” gaves us a bunch of flexibility, but in practice it was a hige impediment every time we needed help or resources or infrastructure. It came down to the wire, but we pulled it off, mostly by sheer willpower. It was one of those miracles you can sometimes manage to pull off; we hit the date, stayed in budget, produced a higher-quality system with more features that was easier to maintain and build on. Not only that, but transition from the old system to the new went off with barely a ripple, and we replaced a system that was constantly falling over with one that last I heard was still running on years of 100% uptime. The end was nearly a year-long sprint, barely getting it over the finish line. We were all exhausted, I was about ready to die.

And the reward was: nothing. No recognition, no bonus, no time off, the promotion that kept getting talked about evaporated. Even the corp-standard “keep inflation at bay” raise was not only lower than I expected but lower than I was told it was going to be; when I asked about that, the answer was “oh, someone wrote the wrong number down the first time, don’t worry about it.”

I’m, uh, gonna worry about it a little bit, if that’s all the same to you, actually.

Morale was low, is what I’m saying.

But the real “lemon juice in the papercut” moment was the next project. We needed to do something similar to the next legacy system over, and now armed with the results of the past two years, I went in to talk about how that was going to go. I didn’t want to do that next one at all, and said so. I also thought maybe I had earned the right to move up to one of the projects that people did care about? But no, we really want you do run this one too. Okay, fine. It’s nice to be wanted, I guess?

It was, roughly, four times as much work as the previous, and it needed to get done in about the same amount of of time. Keeping in mind we barely made it the first time, I said, okay, here’s what we need to do to pull this off, here’s the support I need, the people, here’s my plan to land this thing. There’s aways more than one way to get something done, I either needed some more time, or more people, I had some underperformers on the team I needed rotated out. And got told, no, you can’t have any version of that. We have a hard deadline, you can’t have any more people, you have to keep the dead weight. Just find a way to get four times as much work done with what you have in less time. Maybe just keep working crazy hours? All with a tone that I can’t possibly know what I’m talking about.

And this is the part of Tim Cain’s story I really vibrated with. I had pulled off a miracle, and the only reward was more crunch. I remember sitting in my boss’s boss’s office, thinking to myself “why would I do this? Why would they even think I would say yes to this?”

Then, they had the unmitigated gall to be surprised when I took another job offer.

I wasn’t the only person that left. The punchline, and you can probably see this coming, is that it didn’t ship for years after that hard deadline and they had to throw way more people on it after all.

But, okay, other than general commiserating with an internet stranger about past jobs, why bring all this up? What’s the point?

Because this is exactly what I was talking about on Friday in Getting Less out of People. Because we didn’t get a whole lot of back story with Barry. What’s going on with that guy?

The focus was on getting Maria to be like Barry, but does does Barry want to be like Barry? Does he feel like he’s being taken advantage of? Is he expecting a reward and then a return to normal while you’re focusing on getting Maria to spend less time on her novel and more time on unpaid overtime? What’s he gonna do when he realizes that what he thinks is “crunch” is what you think is “higher performing”?

There’s a tendency to think of productivity like a ratchet; more story points, more velocity, more whatever. Number go up! But people will always find an equilibrium. The key to real success to to figure out how to provide that equilibrium to your people, because if you don’t, someone else will.

Getting Less out of People

Like a lot of us, I find myself subscribed to a whole lot of substack-style newsletter/blogs¹ written by people I used to follow on twitter. One of these is The Beautiful Mess by John Cutler, which is about (mostly software) product management. I was doing a lot of this kind of work a couple of lifetimes back, but this one of the resources that has stayed in my feeds, because even when I disagree it’s at least usually thoughtful and interesting. For example, these two links I’ve had sitting in open tabs for a month (They’re a short read, but I’ll meet you on the other side of these links with a summary):

TBM 271: The Biggest Untapped Opportunity - by John Cutler

TBM 272: The Biggest Opportunity (Part 2) - by John Cutler

He makes a really interesting point that I completely disagree with. His thesis is that the biggest untapped opportunity for companies are people who are only doing good work, but give off the indications that they could be doing great work. “Skilled Pragmatists” he calls them—people who do good work, but aren’t motivated to go “above and beyond”, and are probably bored but are getting fulfillment outside of work. Not risk takers, not big on conflict, probably don’t say a lot in meetings. And most importantly, people who have decided to not step it all the way up, the’ve got agency, and deployed it.

In a truly world-class, olympic level of accidentally revealing gender bias, he posits two hypothetical workers, “Maria” who is the prototypical “Skilled Pragmatist” and by comparison, “Barry”, who takes a lot of big risks but gets a lot of big things done.

He then kicks around some reasons why Maria might do what she does, and proposes some frameworks for figuring out how to, bluntly, get more out of those people, how to “achieve more together”.

Not to use too much tech industry jargon here, but my response to this is:

HAHAHAHA, Fuck You, man.

Because let’s back way the hell up. The hypothetical situation here is that things are going well. Things are getting done on time, the project isn’t in trouble, the company isn’t in trouble, there aren’t performance problems of any kind. There’s no promotion in the wings, no career goals that aren’t being achieved. Just a well-preforming, non-problematic employee who gets her job done and goes home on time. And for some reason, this is a problem?

Because, I’ll tell you what, I’ll take a team of Marias over a team of Barrys any day.

Barry is going to burn out. Or he’s going to get mad he isn’t already in charge of the place and quit. Or get into one too many fights with a VP with a lot of political juice. Or just, you know, meet someone outside of work. Have a kid. Adopt a pet. That’s a fragile situation.

Maria is dependable, reliable. She’s getting the job done! She’s not going to burn out, or get pissed and leave because the corporate strategy changed and suddenly the thing she’s getting her entire sense of self-worth from has been cancelled. She’s not working late? She’s taking her kids to sports, or spending time with her wife, or writing a novel. She’s balanced.

The issue is not how do we get Maria to act more like Barry, it’s the other way around—how do we get Barry to find some balance and act more like Maria?

I’ve been in the software development racket for a long time now, and I’ve had a lot of conversations with people I was either directly managing, implicitly managing, or mentoring, and I can tell you I’ve had a lot more conversations that boiled down to “you’re working too hard” than I’ve had “you need to step it up.”

Maybe the single most toxic trait of tech industry culture is to treat anything less than “over-performing” as “under-performing”. There are underperformers out there, and I’ve met a few. But I’ve met a whole lot more overperformers who are all headed for a cliff at full speed. In my experience, the real gems are the solid performers with a good sense of balance. They’ve got hobbies, families, whatever.

Overperformers are the sort of people who volunteer to monitor the application logs over the weekend to make sure nothing goes wrong. Balanced performers are the ones that build a system where you don’t have to. They’re doing something with the kids this weekend, so they engineer up something that doesn’t need that much care and feeding.

I suspect a lot of this is based on the financialization of everything—line go up is good! More story points, more features, ship more, more quickly. It’s the root mindset that settled on every two weeks being named a “sprint” instead of an “increment.” Must go faster! Faster, programmer! Kill, Kill!

And as always, that works for a while. It doesn’t last, though. Sure, we could ship that in June instead of September. But you’re also going to have to hire a whole new team afterwards, because everyone is going to have quit after what we had to do to get it out in June. No one ever thinks about the opportunity costs of burning out the team and needing a new one when they’re trying to shave a few weeks off the schedule.

Is it actually going to matter if we ship in August?

Because, most of the time, most places, it’s not a sprint, and never will be. It’s a marathon, a long drive, a garden. Imagine what we could be building if everyone was still here five, ten, fifteen years from now! If we didn’t burn everyone out trying to “achieve more”.

Because, here’s the secret. Those overperformers? They’re going to get tired. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But eventually. And sooner than you think. And they’re going to realize that no one at the end of their life looks back and thinks, “thank goodness we landed those extra story points!” Those underperformers? They actually wont get better. Not for you. It’s rude, but true.

The only people who you’re still going to have are the balanced people, the “skilled pragmatists”, the Marias. They’ve figured out how to operate for the long haul. Let’s figure out how to get more people to act like them. And they want to work in a place that values going home on time.

Let’s figure out how to get less out of people.

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1. I feel like we need a better name for these, since substack went and turned itself into the “nazi bar”. It’s funny to me that as the social medias started imploding, “email newsletters” were the new hotness everyone seemed to land on. But they’re just blogs? Blogs that email themselves to you when they publish? I mean, substack and its ilk also have RSS feeds, I read all the ones I’m subscribed to in NetNewsWire, not my email client.

   Of course, the big innovation was “blog with out-of-the-box support for subscriptions and a configurable paywall” which is nothing to sneeze at, but I don’t get why email was the thing everyone swarmed around?

   Did google reader really crater so hard that we’ve settled on reading our favorite websites as emails? What?

Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Oppenheimer

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously, previously.

At the end of the day, it’s a movie about the atomic bomb that doesn’t have a single Japanese person in it, and that thinks the most compelling thing about the bombing is that a well-dressed, comfortable white guy was slightly uncomfortable.

This is the point where I should probably neatly set my bias out on the table. There’s a genre of “Man Cinema” that has always left me cold. “Man”, both in the sense that they’re about Men, but also that they’re beloved by a certain kind of male film-buff audience. Those movies where a Man is forced by Circumstances to do Things He Is Not Proud Of, and the central conflict is his terrible Man Pain, as he glowers into the middle distance, an Island that No One Can Understand. What few women there are tend to either be tools to use, prizes to be won, or The Secret Behind Every Man’s Success, but never really a character in their own right. Basically, the default mode of the 70s New Hollywood; essentially every movie Coppola, Scorcese, or DePalma ever made.¹ Or the kinds of movies that one scene in Barbie was making fun of.

Chris Nolan’s movies have always slid right into that tradition. And look, I’m not going to say these movies are bad, or invalid, they’re just not my jam. If Oppenheimer hadn’t been the other half of Barbenheimer, there was basically no chance I would have watched it.

One of the delightful things about Barbenheimer as an event was that it was clear, like Elvis vs The Beatles, it was possible to like both, but everyone was going to have a preference. Long before they came out, I knew I was going to be Team Barbie.

And so? In short, my feelings about the movie are as ambivalent as the movie’s feelings about it’s subject. It is, of course, well made, and I find myself with more to say about it than I was expecting. I also suspect that every criticism I have of the film is also something somebody who really likes these kinds of movies would say, just with different emphasis.²

And with the preliminaries out of the way…

This is a movie about Great Men, who recognize and respect each other, and the Small Men who surround and resent them, biting at their ankles. Greatness, in this movie, is an fundamental condition, recognized by other Great Men, sometimes even long before anything Great has taken place.³

The cast is uniformly excellent. The standout performance is Robert Downey Jr., who is so good in this they finally gave him his Oscar for Chaplin. He continually finds new ways to look Small, playing Lewis Strauss as a bundle of grievance and bruised feelings, starting every interaction with an air of desperation, and ending it with the look of a man who has formed a new permanent grudge.

Cillian Murphy, on the other hand, plays Oppenheimer as a man almost supernaturally serene, exuding confidence with a side-order of mostly-justified arrogance, but with an increasingly haunted look in his eyes.

Both Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh make the most of their reduced screen times to show why Oppenheimer couldn’t resist either (although the opposite is less obvious.) It does put Emily Blunt in the unusual-for-her position of playing the second choice, which she seems to relish, and she conveys Kitty Oppenheimer’s blossoming alcoholism as a sort of general aura of decay rather than any specific action.

My favorite character was Matt Damon’s Leslie Groves, who was the only person who seemed to be playing a character, rather than a sketch of one. Not only that, he plays Groves as someone both unimpressed but also unintimidated by Greatness; or rather, someone from a completely different Great-to-Small axis as everyone else.

But, there’s not a single weak link in the movie, even the actors that show up for just a scene or two. Most everyone else is are reduced to shadows, because the pacing is, to use a technical term, a little weird. The movie hurtles along at a breakneck page, skipping along the top of the waves from scene to scene, at times seeming more like sketches of scenes that actual drama—the characters arrive, strike a pose, deliver a series of one-line monologues, and then the movie moves on.

This is exacerbated by the movie’s nested-flashback structure, which I liked quite a bit. Three stories plays out across the movie—the period around and including the Los Alamos project, Oppenheimer’s security hearing after the war, and Strauss’ (failed) senate confirmation hearing. The movie slides from one time to another, additionally using color (or the lack of it) to indicate which parts are from Oppenheimer’s point of view, and which are not.

The result is a movie that seems to abbreviate everything and never manges to give anything room to breathe, despite being three hours long. My standard belief stands that no movie should be over 2 hours; I’m quite confident that there are better versions of this movie at both 110 minutes and at 4 hourlong episodes.

As such you don’t need to know anything about these people or events to watch the movie, but it certainly helps to know who the guy with the bongos is, because the movie won’t tell you.

Actually, let’s hang on Feynman for a second. One of the funnier aspects of the movie is that basically every character is a real person who was famous in their own right, and they pop in for a scene or two and then vanish. Occasionally, one can’t help but feel like the movie has focused on the least interesting person that was present for the Manhattan Project?

Feynman gets, basically, two scenes. He’s one of the few scientists who we see Oppenheimer personally recruit, and the scene is shot from below, causing Oppenheimer, Groves, and Feynman to loom like statues, as dramatic music plays. We don’t find out this character’s name, or what he does, but the cinematography of the scene makes it clear he’s one of the Great Men. From that point on he’s in the background of nearly all the Los Alamos scenes, although I can’t remember him having an actual line of dialogue other than occasionally playing those bongos.

Then, he pops back in again for the Trinity test for the really-happened-but-heavily-mythologized moment where he realizes he doesn’t need the special filter, he can just watch the explosion through his car windshield. And then he vanishes for the rest of the movie, because unlike, say, Fermi or Teller, he has nothing to do with the later political machinations. But still, you’re left pointing at the TV like DiCaprio in the meme, thinking “that’s Feynman! Show him picking some locks!” And the same with Fermi, and the Chicago Pile being reduced to mere minutes of screen time, or hoping he’d ask “Where is everybody?”

(And, Feynman is played by Jack Quaid, most known in these parts as the voice of Boimler on Star Trek: Lower Decks, and so presumably the reason he’s not in the later parts of the movie is that Mainer finally rescued him.)

But that’s not the point of the movie, and fair enough. Because the central concern of the film isn’t really the atomic bomb, it’s the vicious grievances of the small and petty, and to illustrate there’s no service great enough that can overcome failing to be The Right Kind of American.

There’s a quote from Werner Von Braun (not appearing in this film) about Oppenheimer that “in England, he’d have been knighted,” but instead he was hounded from any formal government post due to the constellation of long-standing grudges from Strauss and others being allowed to fester in the paranoid excesses of the 1950s. Although, speaking of England choosing who to knight, knowing what happened to Turing at about the same time makes it look like Oppenheimer got off light.

The scenes in the security hearing are excruciating. While the formal subject—the renewal of his security clearance—is technical and seemingly inconsequential, the subtext is that this is determining who gets rewarded for their work, who gets the credit, and most importantly, who gets to decide how to use what they all built. Everyone, and there are many, who ever felt slighted by Oppenheimer’s greatness gets to show up and slide a knife in, a cavalcade of trivialities and paranoia. Even Groves, nearly omnipotent a decade before, proves powerless before the unchained animus of the thin-skinned.

After Oppenheimer’s loss, the movie does its most fascinating and distinctive move, and instead of following the title character into exile, it watches the consequences play out years later for his nemesis. While the focus is on Oppenheimer, the man himself makes no appearance in this phase of the film, as Strauss runs headlong into the bill coming due for a lifetime of treating everyone the way he treated Oppenheimer.

I spent the whole first part of the movie with the nagging feeling that this was all very familiar. That kind of vague, near–deja vu feeling. What is this reminding me of? A Great Man, a Genius, taken down by the petty grievances of Small Men, told mostly in flashback?

About an hour in, it hit me: this is all just Amadeus.

Which illustrates what I think is the core flaw in the movie. It knows Oppenheimer is a genius, but a genius in something neither the audience nor the filmmakers know very much about. There’s no good way for him to Be A Genius on screen in a way the audience will recognize, instead we have lots and lots of scenes where other people talk about what a genius he is, and then Oppenheimer stands dramatically filmed from below, looking off into the middle distance, while dramatic music plays, not entirely unlike the Disney Pocahontas.

Recall, if you will, the opening scene of Amadeus. Salieri, Mozart’s colleague, Nemesis, and possible murderer, is in a sanatorium nearing the end of his life. A young priest, who acts as the audience’s surrogate, arrives to take his confession, and by extension, have the movie narrated to him. The priest has no idea who Salieri is, or was, or that he was once one of the most famous composers of Europe, just that he’s an old man with a piano.

Oppenheimer never mangages the simple directness of Salieri playing his own compositions, which neither the audience or the priest recognize, and then painfully playing the opening notes of Serenade №13: A Little Night Music and have the audience and their surrogate instantly recognize it. Just playing Mozart’s actual music covers the majority of what Amadeus is trying to do, and Oppenheimer has nothing like that to fall back on.

Similarly, RDJ is genuinely extraordinary in this, constantly finding new ways to be small, and petty, and fragile, but the script never gives him a scene with the clarity and focus of Salieri leaning back into his chair and hissing with a mixture of exhaustion and defeat, “That was Mozart.”

It is funny that for both Amadeus and Oppenheimer, it’s the actor playing the nemesis who won the Oscar.

The other biggest problem with this movie is it’s lack of an actual point of view. It’s not apolitical so much as anti-political, there’s a big hole in the middle where an opinion should go.

This is par for the course of Nolan movies—this is the man who made the definite “Fascism is good, actually” movie with The Dark Knight, but with the sense that he made it by accident, just by taking Batman more seriously than anyone else, and then failing to notice or care where he landed. There’s an almost pathological refusal to comment on what’s happening, to have an opinion. Part of this is the fact that the majority of this movie is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view, and his point of view is, to put it mildly, ambiguous.

The movie knows there’s something interesting about the fact that Oppenheimer and many of the other scientists are Jewish, building the bomb to stop the Nazis. It knows there’s something interesting about the fact he can speak multiple languages but not Yiddish. It knows theres something about the way many of these Great Men were leftist/socialist/communists types in their youth, then put that away to work on the bomb, and then have that come back to haunt them later. But the movie can’t quite figure out what to do with that, so it toys with it and then puts it back on the shelf.

It almost makes contact with the world view that only a WASP can be a real loyal American and that Oppenheimer is questionable from two directions—being both Jewish and a possible communist—but never makes the connection. It gestures at the fact that the jews were being put into camps, but then never addresses that the bomb was only used on the people the americans were putting into camps.

It utterly fails to put the security clearance hearing in any sort of context of the McCarthyism panic of the time, and the fact that a small people were using an atmosphere of paranoia to act on an old grudge and air out their personal animosity. It’s there, buried deep in the mix, but you have to have done the homework first to see it.

Some of this is down to the film’s structure and pace. For example, the fact that Strauss resented Oppenheimer’s seeming rejection of their shared Jewish heritage is actually in the movie, albeit expressed in two single lines of dialogue, 90 minutes apart. The root of their animus is left vague. In reality, wikipedia will give you screen after screen dissecting their mutual dislike; the movie more-or-less summarizes it with the look on RDJ’s face when he realizes that Oppenheimer already knows Albert Einstein.

Mostly though, the movie refuses to comment, Were Oppenheimer and the others going to communist meetings because they were believers, or because that’s where all the hot babes were? It’s ambiguous.

The whole movie is weird and ambiguous and ambivalent, because the real guy was weird and ambiguous and ambivalent. What did Oppenheimer really think about, you know, all that atomic bomb stuff? It’s not clear! And this is where the movie fundamentally makes a decision that I understand, but disagree with. Nolan and company make the call to just lean in to the ambiguity all the way, so not only do we never get a handle on Oppenheimer, we never really get a handle on what anyone else thinks, either.

So we get a scene where Oppenheimer and the other Manhattan project scientists are looking at pictures of the wreckage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the camera zooms on in on Cillian Murphy’s face filled with an ambiguous expression. No only does the movie not show the final result of their work, we don’t really see anyone else reacting to it either. And, that’s it, huh? That’s our take on the atomic bombing, the Scarecrow looking a little perturbed?

In fairness, the last scene lands on “this was probably bad, actually,” and Gary Oldman shows up (like he did in The Dark Knight) to deliver the closest thing to a point of view that the movie has, which is that Oppenheimer needs to get over himself, a whole lor of people had to work together to unleash what they did.

One gets the feeling that the movie ends on Strauss’ failure mostly because that’s the only storyline that has actual closure, everything else just kinda floats away.

And look, I don’t need every piece of art I consume to share my politics, I don’t need every movie to end with Doctor Who materializing and reciting the Communist Manifesto. I mean, that would be bad ass, but I get it. What bugs me is not when people have opinions I disagree with, it’s when they fail to have one at all. Because this is a movie deeply uninterested in having a broader opinion. There’s a point where a desire for ambiguity stops being an artistic statement in it’s own right, and starts looking like cowardice.

At the end of the day, this is a movie that thinks the atomic bomb was probably bad, but on the other hand, the guy who didn’t like Oppenheimer didn’t get his cabinet post so maybe that’s okay? It feels like nothing so much as a three hour version of that dril tweet about drunk driving.

If you want to spend three hours watching the way Greatness is torn down by Small Men, and about the way horrors of war beget further horrors made by haunted men, I’d advise against this movie and instead a double feature of Amadeus and Godzilla. If nothing else, in both cases the music is better.

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1. One of the the things I love about Star Wars so much, especially in the context of the late 70s, is that Luke spends the first act being this kind of character, and then moves past it. One of the reasons Anakin never really works is that he is that kind of character—he’s clearly supposed to function like Michael Corleone, but they failed to hire Al Pacino to play him.

2. The all-time champion of this kind of review, of course, is Mad Max: Fury Road where the most positive and the most negative reviews were both “It’s just one big car chase!”

3. There’s a couple of scenes where you half-expect then to start comparing midichlorian counts.

April 8, 2021: A Sketch From The Midst Of A Pandemic

This was originally written for [REDACTED] on April 8, 2021. I’m republishing it here on its 3rd anniversary .

I got my shot at the Sacramento County "distribution center" at Cal Expo. Cal Expo, for those who don't know or don't remember, is the permanent home of the California State Fair. It's plunked down unceremoniously on the north side of the American river, in the middle of a weird swath of the city that's been permanently in the middle of one failing urban renewal project or another for my entire life. These usually involve "rebranding" the area—according to a sign I drove past which is both brand new and already battered, I'm told we're now calling this area "uptown sacramento". It'll have a new name this time next year.

Cal Expo itself is a strange beast—a 900 acre facility built to host an annual 17 day event. The initial fever-dream was that it would become "DisneyLand North", mostly now it plays host to any event that need a whole lot of space for a single weekend—RV fairs, garden shows, school district-wide science fairs.

The line to get in to the vaccination site is identified with a large hand-lettered sign reading "VAX", surrounded by National Guard troops. Everyone stays in their car, and the line of cars snakes between dingy orange cones across acres of cracked parking lot. Enormous yellow weeds pour out of every crack, and I realize, in one of the strangest moments of dissonance of the last year, that this is the section of parking lot that in the before-times hosted the christmas tree lot. Now it's full of idling cars and masked troops in camo.

As befitting it's late 60s origins, Cal Expo mostly composed of bare dirt and giant brutalist retangular concrete buildings. They're all meant to be multi-use, so they've got high ceilings, no permanent internal fittings, and multiple truck-sized roll-up doors. They give the impression of an abandoned warehouse.

The line of cars contines into one of these bunkers. Incredibly friendly workers; a mixed of national guard, CA Department of Health and Human services, and a bunch of older RNs and MDs with strong "retired and now a docent" energy.

The whole thing runs like clockwork - directed into a line of cars, get to the front, get the shot, they drop a timer set to 15 minutes on the dashboard, and then directed out to the "Recovery Area", which is the next parking lot over full of other lines of cars.

The air is incredibly jovial. The woman who gives me my shot compliments my Hawaiian shift, and hopes we'll all be "somewhere like that" soon. A grandmotherly RN comes by and give me advice about where to keep my vax card. A younger guardsman in a medic uniform explains the symptoms to watch for, and then we shoot the breeze about Star Wars for a minute before he moves on. An older Guard Colonel walks by, sees the "JANSSEN" on the card on my dashboard and says "Ahhh! The one and done, NICE!" with a fist pump as he walks on.

Another HHS RN comes by and tells me my timer is up, along with every other car in the row. Another national guardswoman waves at me as I drive off. Everyone is wearing a mask, but you can tell everyone is smiling.

Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Wes Anderson 2023 Double Feature

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously.

I don’t think “realism” is a super-interesting aesthetic goal. It’s a legitimate goal, certainly, but far from the only option and rarely the most compelling. But Movies, especially since the 70s, have had an attitude that that “realistic” means “for grownups”, and anything fantastical or stylized means “for kids”, with certain carve-outs for “surrealism” that mostly only apply to David Lynch.

Which is one of the reasons I love Wes Anderson’s movies so much, as he’s one of the people who seem to be actively thinking about “what can we do other than make it look real, though?” There’s a running joke that every Wes Anderson movie is “the most Wes Andersony movie yet!” but that’s not quite right. He’s got a set of techniques, tools, and he keeps refining them, finding new ways to hone the point.

Anderson always gets kind of a strong reaction in certain corners of the web, which is funny for a lot of reasons, but most of all because the kind of people who don’t like his movies tend to also be the kind of people who are mad everything looks like a Marvel movie now, and it has a real quality of “we want something different! No, not like that!”¹ That said, people mustering the energy to actually hate something is a pretty strong signal that you made Art instead of Content.²

It was a stacked year, with two releases, which I watched in completely the wrong order.

Asteroid City

It is an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication. But together they present an authentic account of the inner workings of a modern theatrical production.

Anderson has always leaned heavily into artifice as a storytelling technique, and here he pushes that about as far as possible. Even within the terms of it’s own fiction, it’s all fake: a fake performance of an unreal play, made for a TV broadcast which isn’t real either, and then proceeds into what is absolutely not a play. It’s a strong move to open with “none of this really happened”. That’s implicit in all fiction, but rarely is it foregrounded like this. The movie gets a couple of things out of this.

It results in maybe his all time best opening; black and white, a non-widescreen aspect ratio, and Bryan Cranston doing a Rod Serling impression as the host of the TV show from the 50s. He describes the play we’re about to see, and then introduces the writer (Ed Norton) who steps out onto the stage and introduces the plot outline, the characters, and then walks through the layout of the scenery, and the camera angle cuts around showing the “actors” in their street clothes, and then each piece of fake scenery. The camera pulls back, the lights turn off, and them—bam—we’re a color widescreen, following a train into Asteroid City, where the camera carefully shows us each of the pieces of the set around town, now both more and less real.

It’s Shakespearian, but not the way people usually mean it—instead it’s the opening of Henry V rendered in the language of TV.

And the movie proceeds in the multiple layers, moving back and forth between the Host and his TV show, the actors and writers of the “play” working on it, and then the “play” itself. This also means many of the actors are effectively playing more than one part, the “actor” and the “character”.

But we also get the layers bleeding into each other; the host accidentally entering the scene at the wrong time, actors leaving the play to talk to the director or to each other. Rushmore and Barbie meet up behind the stage and perform the scene that was “cut for time” roughly where it was supposed to go. Characters talk about ideas for how to stage scenes that are coming up. The structure of a play is maintained, with title cards popping in to remind us which act or scene this is.

The cast, as always, is stacked and excellent. Just about the entire Anderson rep company is in this, with actors who would normally get top billing showing up here to stand in the back of scenes with no lines, and then deliver one word or two. There is a Bill Murray–shaped hole that Steve Carell does about a good a job of fulling as anyone could. (Originally, I assumed the Bill Murray role was the one taken by Tom Hanks, but knowing that it was actually the hotel manager makes that character make a lot more sense.)

There’s a lot of thematic material churning around about loss and acceptance and moving on and human connections and art, but it’s also a movie where the characters openly talk about the fact that the don’t understand what it all means. Anderson likes to leave some blanks for the audience to fill in, and this might be his best deployment of that technique. I know what it all meant to me, but it feels like cheating to say.

Doesn't matter. Just keep telling the story.

But, now that we have all that out of the way, let’s focus on what’s really important: this is an incredibly funny movie, full of incredibly good actors, doing incredibly silly things with incredibly straight faces.³

It’s less of a movie and more a series of skits performed completely deadpan. All of Anderson’s movies are like this, but in some ways this as close as he’s ever gotten to the full Airplane!.

From the opening where Matt Dillon describes the two possible problems with the car and then discovers a third, followed by the three girls disagreeing with the waitress that they are princesses, the movie is continuously funny, and I pretty much laughed out loud the entire time.

Which, of course, is the secret to all the thematic and structural stuff I spent all those words on up front—it’s not that they don’t matter, but they’re there to set up a bunch of really funny jokes, and to do some slight of hand to keep you from noticing that the joke is coming, until, like the UFO, it’s right on top of you.

I loved it, by the way.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More

People love faces.

I could make an argument here invoking evolutionary biology, or some deeper philosophical point, but this isn’t that kind of review so I’m going to skip all that and say that most storytelling boils down to being fascinated by other people’s faces.

And so we come to The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which centers on “what if we had some really good actors look the camera dead in the eye and tell the audience a story?”

In a lot of ways, this quartet of stories feels like the endpoint of the increasing artifice Anderson has been working in since at least French Dispatch. My take is that this is less about artificiality for its own sake than it is borrowing visual storytelling techniques from other mediums and deploying them in a movie, where they look more fake compared to the default “realist” style.

A very early example of this is the scene in Life Aquatic where camera pulls back to reveal a cutaway side view of the Belafonte as Steve Zissou narrates a tour of his boat. The boat isn’t literally a cut-away, but the scene plays as “here’s how we would do this if it was a comic.”

Here, it’s using using techniques and tricks from the theatre, but remixed in a way you could never do live on stage. So, we have stagehands handing props to actors on screen, actors sitting on prop boxes to simulate levitating, pieces of scenery sliding in and out of frame as scenes reorient. Except the scenery moves in ways it never could on stage and the stage hands come from places they couldn’t have come; this is the visual language of a play deployed in a way that could only work in a movie.

The first segment starts with Ralph Fiennes in character as Roald Dahl himself, looking very much like the real thing, settling into a fairly accurate recreation of Dahl’s real-life writing hut. he settles into his chair, fusses about with his pencils, the heater pops and hisses. Bright colors non-withstanding, it’s realistic—we’re in the real world, watching Roald Dahl getting ready to write a story. There’s a naturalism to it, a sense of authenticity; this is probably what it really looked like when a roughly 60-year old man sat down to write. He settles into place, pulls the the writing surface into his lap, puts pencil to paper, and then…

…the whole tone changes. Fiennes continues to talk, narrating the story, but his aspect shifts; he’s the narrator now, not an old man writing; he pushes the paper away, stands up, walks out of the hut with a completely changed demeanor as the scenery changes behind him. We’re not in the real world anymore, we’re explicitly in the Land of Story now. It’s one of the most marvelous transitions I’ve ever seen, and it’s all in essentially one shot.

The story plays out as a series of nested stories, Roald Dahl’s outermost narration, Henry Sugar’s discovery of the book, the book’s contents as narrated by the doctor, the story told by the old man of how he learned to see without his eyes, and then back out again until we unwind back to Roald Dahl in front of his shed again. The narration passes hands, and the actors narrating play a kind of double role, both as a character on screen and then turning towards the camera to deliver an aside to the camera.⁴

I found it compelling almost to the point of hypnosis.

As with Asteroid City, the artifice is the point. Did this really happen? Of course it didn’t, it’s a short movie on Netflix based on a Roald Dahl story made by the guy who did Royal Tenenbaums. Does it matter? The end hits the same either way.

Anderson has never come close to matching the emotional punch at the end of Royal Tenenbaums of “I’ve had a rough year, dad.” He’s spent a lot of time trying to recapture that hit, never successfully. While he’s moved on from trying, he does like to end his movies with a punchline. “And that’s what I have done” is one of his best.

This is exactly the sort of experiments that 1) short movies, and 2) streaming should be used for. It’s outstanding that this was what finally won Anderson his first “big boy” Oscar.

Some stray observations on the other three stories:

“The Rat Catcher” was always one of Dahl’s slice-of-weird-life stories, where things keep getting more uncomfortable without ever being overtly dangerous. Here, it turns into an acting clinic between Ralph Fiennes finding new ways to be menacing, and Moss from The IT Crowd finding new ways to look horrified.

“The Swan” always bothered me as a kid, Dahl always had mean streak, and this was one of his meaner stories, the sort of story where only bad things happen. It also had a strangely ambiguous ending, especially for Dahl—what really happened there? Did the boy escape? Is he dead? Is the thing that happens at the end metaphorical for dying? And it’s ambiguous in the sort of way you can get away with in prose, since the reader can only “see” what the author describes. I was very pleased that they found a way to keep the ambiguity intact despite the audience now being able to see everything that happened.

Also, it’s hilarious that Rupert Friend was absolutely mesmerizing in this at the same time he was phoning in being the Grand Inquisitor in Obi-Wan Kenobi. What a weird year he had!

“Poison”, meanwhile, after almost being word-for-word with the source material, does change the end, to refuse to let the racism off the hook. Partly this is through some sharp editing, but mostly through the looks on Ben Kingsley’s face.

It’s worth noting, for the record, that while this set of stories has a remarkable variety of narrators, none of them are women, which while accurate to the source material, rankles somewhat here in the twenties.

I Guess I Should Put A Conclusion

Like I mentioned way back at the start, I watched these out of order, Henry Sugar first, then Asteroid City, so on first swing the movie felt like a step back from the shorts. On a rewatch in the right order, it was more obvious how they built on each other. But I enjoyed them both either way.

Where do you go from here, though? Henry Sugar really does feel like an endpoint for the approach Anderson has been developing since at least The French Dispatch, there’s a straight line from that movie, though Asteroid City to Henry Sugar. Or maybe not an endpoint but more that the technique has arrived at it’s final form.

I’m really looking forward to whatever comes next.⁵

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1. This is because these people don’t want “different”, they want everything to look like a Scorcese movie.

2. Which pretty much sums up the whole of the current economy and the human condition in one sentence. I will not be taking questions at this time.

3. It’s incredible.

4. It’s a kind of extended riff on soliloquies, but that both makes it sound overly pretentious and undersells it at the same time, so I won’t make that comparison.

5. I was expecting another stop-motion palette cleanser, but instead it sounds like it’s going to be a spy movie?

Doctor Who Grab Bag

The PR machine is gearing up, and as such they announced all the episode titles and writers for the upcoming season over the weekend, along with a new trailer: Doctor Who's New Trailer is a Time-Traveling Delight

I’m hoping someone eventually writes a gossipy behind-the-scenes book about how this iteration of the show came about. The stories around the campfire sure makes it sound like the show really was effectively canceled after Chibnall & Whittaker left in ’22, and then something happened and now Davies is running a new show with the same name as part of a co-production with his old friends at Bad Wolf and spending Disney’s money to do it. It also sure seems like there wasn’t that much time between that deal happening and the new-new show going into production.

Backing some of those rumors up is the fact that of the eight episodes this year, RTD is writing six of them. The two he’s not writing are the long-rumored and half-heartedly denied return of Steven Moffat for what’s likely to the best show of the season, and the previously announced pair of Loki’s Kate Herron with Briony Redman.

Doctor Who never had a writer’s room in the American TV style, nor did it usually do the BBC-style single author, instead it tends to use a rotating bench of freelance writers, which helped give the show it’s “anthology but with the same regular cast” vibe. Having nearly every episode be written by the showrunner raised eyebrows in some corners of the ‘net. But I suspect there isn’t anything more to it than the fact that they had to stand up a new production essentially from scratch, and fast, and there wasn’t time to find and spin up a batch of writers, especially if there was a chance they would need any handholding. So, RTD leans into the throttle and does most of them himself, and then pulls in the one other guy whom he knows can deliver a script without any assistance, and then the woman who directed what was effectively the best season of Doctor Who in years.

Meanwhile….

If two weeks ago was “Caves of Androzani” at 40, that means the next story, “The Twin Dilemma” also turned 40 over the weekend. “Twin Dilemma” is mind-wrenchingly bad, and not in a fun way, just 4 25-minute slices of pure anti-quality, the mathematical opposite of entertainment.

One of the funniest things about classic Doctor Who is that one of the all-time best episodes aired back-to-back with the absolute worst. This is a power move very few shows attempt? Star Trek, for example, had the basic decency to put “City on the Edge of Forever” and “Spock’s Brain” on opposite ends of the run, you know?

Back before the show came back, we spent a lot of time trying to convince ourselves that the show’s early-80s implosion wasn’t as bad as it really was, that there were some gems in there, that you could appreciate it on its own merits, but also maybe there were some Lessons that could be learned.

Which brings me to last week’s other pair of Doctor Who-related anniversaries, as last week also marked 19 years since the new show came back, and 20 since they announced that it woud.

Because after the show came back, and was just casually wildly successful, we could all relax. The good parts of the old show were still good, but we didn’t have to convince anyone else—or ourselves—that the bad parts were otherwise. Because the only lesson from that part of the old show was actually “don’t hire people bad at TV to run your TV show.”

With all these popping in March, it feels like there’s a spring metaphor in here somewhere, but that would be crass.

And finally…

From basically the first moment it was announced that Davies was coming back to run the show, everyone assumed his first call was going to be to Moffat, in a sort of “If I have to come back, so do you” way. Moffat’s response to this was to give a series of very carefully phrased denials, where he never actually said he wasn’t coming back, and the fact that he was coming back after all became one of those worst-kept secrets around. The word on the street was that he was writing episode 3 of the season, and then it leaked via a producer’s CV that he was probably also writing this year’s christmas episode.

And so they finally admitted that he was coming back a week or two ago, with this vaguely embarrassed air of “why did we cover this up, again?” Because he is, in fact, writing episode, titled “Boom”, and still strongly rumored to be writing the christmas show, rumored to be called “Joy to the World.”

Armed with that knowledge, I’d like to call your attention to this interview from the end of January, from well before anyone admitted he was coming back (seriously, it’s only a minute or two, go watch and I’ll meet you under the link):

Doctor Who's Steven Moffat on possible return: "It's fine without me!" | Radio Times

My favorite part is the little pause where he builds the sentence in his head and works both his episode titles into his non-denial denial that he’s coming back. This is the guy who wrote an entire season that locked into place around the Tardis being all four parts of “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” and also built a joke in “Blink” around trolling a specific web forum; glad to see the old magic is still there.

This is gonna be really fun.

Lightsaber Hot-Take Follow-Up

Following up on last Monday’s Hot Takes on Lightsabers: Last week’s episode of The Bad Batch? That’s how you pivot a story around a lightsaber powering up. A perfect example of “oh snap, it just Got Real.”

(Also, are you watching Bad Batch? You should be watching Bad Batch)

Getting Old

A very common trope in 80s movies was the tired, obstructionist, authority figure. You know, the EPA guy, the high school principal, the bad boss, whatever. The guy in a suit trying to stop the premise of the movie from happening.

These characters had two roles, narratively speaking. First, they acted as secondary antagonists, a miniboss for the middle part of the movie, if you will. But they also gave voice to the obvious objections to the high-concept premise, but did it in such an asshole way that the audience wouldn’t take them seriously. There probably are regulatory concerns about storing ghosts in a basement in Manhattan? Or problems with high school kids skipping that much school? But having the person bringing it up be such a jerk defuses it, and solidly positions the audience against the man with no dick, or whoever.

I suspect the reason these don’t crop up as often anymore is that movies feel that audiences are more confortable with those sorts of high-concept premises, and don’t feel the need to smooth that over as much. As an example, every John Hughes high school movie has the principal as one of the antagonists, but Clueless doesn’t even have the principal on screen, even though Cher spends less time in class than Ferris ever did.

I bring this up because one of the weirder changes I’ve noticed in myself—and by extension, my politics—as I’ve gotten older is an increased sympathy with these figures.

This observation is brought to you mostly by having rewatched Die Hard at the end of the year (remember kids, Santa won’t come until Hans Gruber falls off of Nakatomi Plaza) and I keep thinking about how Deputy Chief of Police Dwayne T. Robinson is a massive jerk, but isn’t actually wrong.

Die Hard is a great movie that has aged in some really interesting ways, which probably deserve a longer post at some point, but recall there are two sets of authority figure minor antagonists—the LA police, who are basically hapless, and the FBI, who are actively malevolent. The LAPD are there to make things harder at the start of the movie, as Hans Gruber says, he’s waiting for the FBI.

Deputy Chief Dwayne’s major objection is that, as he puts it, all the LAPD have is McClane’s word for what’s going on. What he doesn’t know is that he’s in an 80s action movie where reality is bending around Bruce Willis to make sure the first sentence of his obituary won’t contain the word Moonlighting; under “normal” circumstances, none of this would work out. The movie knows this, too, and makes sure we know it’s in on the joke by making his first objection, which the dad from Family Matters angrily denies, “how do you know he isn’t the guy who shot up your car?”—which of course, McClane was. When the FBI show up and turn out to be actual bad guys, the movie makes sure we know that Dwayne is as horrified as we are; he’s a jerk, and a dipshit, but he’s not evil, and he’s not wrong. Most days, he’d have probably even been right.

But that’s not the one I keep thinking about. The one I keep thinking about is the “Duality of Man” scene in the better, funnier second half¹ of Full Metal Jacket. You know, this one: Full Metal Jacket Born to Kill/Peace Button Duality of Man. It’s one of the most quoted scenes in the movie for a reason, it’s basically the whole movie’s philosophy in a nutshell.

The usual “young man discovering the movie” interpretation here is that the Colonel is confused, and that Joker outsmarts him here, and that the Colonel responds to his own confusion with angry bluster and weird jingoism. A scan of the youtube comments, which is always a mistake but bear with me, shows most of the people commenting have that view.

But go watch that scene again. General Rieekan, presumably fresh in from Hoth, knows exactly what the score is before he says anything. He’s not asking Joker about the peace sign because he’s confused, he’s asking because he wants to make Joker say it out loud.

“Then how about getting with the program? Why don't you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?"

There’s a whole media thesis in all this about the American Individualist Hero as the Lone Sane Man standing up to authority figures who represent The Establishment and the Insanity of the Status Quo, which I’ll spare you because I want to write that even less than you want to read it.

But look. If there’s one thing I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older, is that we’re only going to be successful if we all work together. There are very, very few situations where one person can actually ascend and leave everyone else behind. The colonel knows this—he might be waiting for this peace thing to blow over, he might be an asshole and probably a low-grade war criminal, but he knows all the marines are in the same danger, and all the statements in the world about the duality of man aren’t going to stop a bullet. (This is also kinda the point of the last scene in the movie.)

If I was living near that firehouse, I’d want to know that the EPA had signed off on anything called “a containment facility.” School is worth it, no matter how good your synthesizer coughs are. The guy on the radio who likes Roy Rogers really might have been the one that shot up your car.

And sometimes, in real life, the lame authority figure isn’t being obstructionist for obstructions sake, they sometimes know something you don’t. Or they’re remembering that there are other people here that you didn’t.

It’s worth acknowledging at this point that the “punk rocker to aging conservative suburbanite” is a cliché for a reason, and you have to stop and check yourself from time to time to make sure you didn’t accidentally dose yourself with the wrong red pill or whatever. But I think as long as you can keep your empathy up, you can shake that off, no matter how much you realize the boss might have a point.

Because real life is complicated, and messy, and full of choices with no good answers. And you have to power through, knowing there’s no good options, reducing harm as much as you can, linking arms, working together, pull as many people up the ladder behind you as you can. As fun as it is to be “that guy”, this isn’t Die Hard, for just about any possible definition of “this”.

There’s at least a dozen things I’m subtweeting here, but I cannot tell you how often I’ll see something—in the news, at work, just generally “around”—and mutter under my breath “why don’t you jump on the team?”

Kid, we all want to go home, and none of us want to be here. Let’s figure out how to all go home together.

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1. Don’t @-me, it’s true.

Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Animation Double-Header

Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them, and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)

In brief: loved it.

The Turtles are a weird franchise for many reasons, not the least of which because they started as a satire of early-80s comics generally, and Frank Miller’s Daredevil specifically and then managed to wildly outlive all the things they were satirizing. (If you will, they’re the Weird Al of comics.). They’re an intentionally absurd concept, the characters look weird on purpose, the whole thing is deeply silly. But, they’re still here mostly because they’re just so much damn fun. As such, they’ve landed somewhere between a fairy tale and a jazz standard; constantly being reinvented, every couple of years someone new does their take; not a reboot so much as a new cover version.

TMNT adaptations live or die based on how well they remember that the turtles aren’t a team, they’re a family. There’s a tendency to write them as, basically, store-brand X-Men, with Leonardo as Cyclops, and Splinter as somewhere between Professor X and that floating head from Power Rangers. But Splinter isn’t their boss, or commanding officer, or their teacher, he’s their dad, and Leo isn’t their field commander, he’s the older brother the others let pretend is in charge. On that front, Mutant Mayhem does about as well as anyone ever has done.

Possibly the most genius move was to cast actual teenagers as the Turtles and then record them as a group; the characters and their relationship’s shine in a way they almost never have. There’s a scene towards the start of the movie—which rightly ended up as one of the first trailers—where Leo is trying to get the others pumped up for their new mission, which turns out to be shopping, whereupon the others proceed to bust on him mercilessly, which manages to simultaneously nail all four words of the title better than maybe anyone has before.

It’s an incredibly thoughtful take on the material. There’s a lot of “stuff” out there to use or not, and clearly a lot of care was put into what elements to keep, which to highlight, and which to leave behind. Its also a movie that knows its main job is to be an on-ramp, so it avoids any sort of extended exposition or complex back stories in favor of a fun adventure movie with fun characters.

The best word I can come up with for this movie’s relationship with the existing material is relaxed. It knows that the core audience it’s targeting doesn’t know anything, and that the older fans who do already have their own “definitive version”, all of which the movie seems to take as permission to try new spins on old ideas.

This leads to some fun choices—the villain is new, and their backstory is assembled out of some fun bits and pieces from previous versions. The tease of Shredder at the end manages to hit the same “oh snap, that’s going to be wild!” energy regardless of if you’re a new or old viewer.

There are some deep cuts here—this is a movie with both Utroms and Mondo Gecko—but the movie assumes you don’t know who these things are and even if you do, you havn’t seen them in this configuration, so the recognition is pure value-add, rather than a reward for finishing the homework.

Even the seemingly-strange call to cast Jackie Chan as Splinter pays off, giving Splinter a fight right out of an early Police Story, staggering around, desperately pulling props out of left field to fight off an endless supply of bad guys—there’s a bit with a desk chair that if you told me was from Rumble in the Bronx I would believe you with no further fact-checking.

But critically, the movie knows the only thing from the past it has to get right are the five main characters and their relationships, and there, it excels. I wasn’t expecting much, and it turned out to be the best take on the Ninja Turtles anyone has ever done.

The animation style here is fantastic, and clearly exists because Spider-Verse cleared the way, landing somewhere around a “hand-drawn claymation” aesthetic, while still being 3d CG. It looks great, from the subtle moves of the Turtle’s eyes or hands while they talk, to things like the Turtle van crashing through a crowd of absurd monsters.

We’re starting to see the projects that were greenlit because the original Spider-Verse was a hit, and it’s clear that movie is giving everyone else justification to explore more and different styles of animation.

It’s fun, the action is exciting, the characters are appealing, the conflicts justified, emotions earned, with a satisfying ending that leaves you wanting more. Yes please.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

Speaking of movies that were greenlit because Spider-Verse was a hit…

Let’s start with the negatives: this movie is way too long, and then ends with a cliffhanger. There’s no movie over two hours that wouldn’t be a better movie under two hours—or cut into two movies. If you really need that kind of time, you should probably be making TV? I’m utterly confident that when the sequel to this is finally released, it’ll be obvious how to rework the pair of them into three better 90 minute movies.

Otherwise, this is one of those sequels that actually understands what was good about the first movie, and then does more of that.

Most American comic-book superheroes tend to have a similar set of powers: strong, good at punching, maybe they can fly, some kind of signature weapon. Distinctive outfit, but not too hard to draw. Look at the Avengers; they’re all really good at punching, a couple of them can also shoot, and two can fly.

Part of what makes Spider-Man so fun is how weird the character is compared to that baseline. He’s not just strong, he’s crazy strong. He can’t fly, but he can swing? On Webs? And he can shoot those webs as either a weapon, or a tool, or a way to disable bad guys? Plus, sticks to walls, oh, and ESP. And on top of all that, he’s got one of the most elaborate costume designs out there. And then on top of that, he’s funny. Like the Turtles, it’s a character that started as a spoof—what if the teen sidekick was on his own, but didn’t have a job, and had to make his own costume from scratch and do laundry—that fully surpassed everything it making fun of.

As a result of this, Marvel has kept tossing out new spins on the character; as a woman, from the future, as a different kid, different revisions on the powers, maybe this one can do electricity. Even the “original” Peter Parker Spider-Man has two distinct iterations, one vaguely fifteen, one just shy of 30, occasionally married. Of the crowd of various alternate Spider-People, Miles Morales rose to the top as both a great character in his own right, as well as establishing himself as the definitive take on “Spider-Man as a teenager.”

The first Spider-Verse got a lot of mileage out of putting the older version of Peter and Miles together, with Pete acting as the mentor/experience superhero that Pete never had as a solo teen act, while—correctly—keeping the focus on Miles, and threw in some other Spiders while they were at it. The new movie wisely keeps Peter almost entirely on the sidelines, and fills the movie with other versions, delighting in being able to contrast the various Spiders.

The result is a movie that revels in how fun “Spider-Man” is a concept. Webs, sticking to walls, vaguely-defined ESP. Long scenes of Spider-People swinging through the air, shooting webs, solving problems the way no other action hero, super or otherwise, would.

It’s hard to begrudge the flabby length of a movie that’s enjoying itself so much. “How many times have you watched the Batmobile drive out of the Batcave?” you can almost hear the movie ask, “let’s spend a few more minutes with these ridiculous characters webbing up a falling building!”

This extends through the non-action parts of the movie just as well; these are characters that aren’t immune to gravity, but are highly resistant to it. My favorite scene in the movie was Miles and Gwen on what might be a date at the top of a building, casually walking off the edge of a ledge, and then sitting and watching the sunset from the underside of that same ledge, Gwen’s ponytail hanging down the only sign they’re sitting somewhere no one else could.

Which brings me to the other standout part of the movie, Spider-Gwen. “Gwen Stacy, but she got bit by the radioactive spider instead of Pete”, was one of those low-hanging fruit ideas that’s been waiting around for half a century for someone to finally pick. Originally tossed off as a one-off in the comics, the character hit hard enough she’s stuck around become the other best take on a Spider-Person in the last few decades. Even the costume is fantastic take on how a different kind of teenager would make a costume—spider symbol, but with ballet slippers and a hoodie. Expanding her role from the last movie, here she settles in as the other lead, anchoring most of the emotional journeys of the film.

My personal favorite alternate Spider-Man was Spider-Man 2099, from Marvel’s short lived 2099 experiment in the early 90s, which dared to ask, “what if our characters were just a little more cyberpunk, and a lot angrier?” None of them really worked, either creatively or commercially.¹ So, imagine my surprise when Miguel O’Hara, Spider-Man 2099 himself, showed up in this! I was a little salty when I found out he was going to be the bad guy, except he isn’t really—he’s the antagonist, but he isn’t the villain.

Good guys fighting each other is about the most tired trope super-hero comics has, and this movie might be the first time anyone has actually put the time in to work. I takes the time to set up a genuine difference of world view between Miles and Miguel, where by the end, you genuinely buy that neither is willing to let the other continue. Most of the time when the good guys fight each other it’s because they didn’t have one very simple conversation, here, that conversation happens, and things get well past that point before webs start slinging.

The nature of that conflict is delightfully meta. Miguel wants to “defend the timeline”, and if that means terrible things needs to happen to Miles, so be it. Miles, correctly, isn’t really interested in having loved ones die for an abstract point about “history going the right way”. This is explicitly framed in terms of “protecting canon” vs “new ideas”, with Miguel standing in for the old fans who won’t suffer changes to their beloved franchise, and Miles as the voice of the people saying, “yeah, but what if we didn’t just make bad copies of stories from the 70s?” Literalizing these kind of fan arguments feels like exactly the way to do franchise fiction here in the mid-20s.

And, I haven’t even brought up the animation yet, which is, of course, outstanding. Each alternate universe gets its own distinct animation style, which each character keeps when the move to a different universe, leading to multiple styles overlapping each other, which is visually astounding and somehow manages to never be overwhelming. It’s the sort of thing where you look at it constantly thinking “how did they do this?”, and then you find out that the answer was “labor abuse”, which does drain the enthusiasm somewhat.

It looks incredible, but for the sake of all the animators I hope the next one takes a long time to come out.

Fun, exciting, appealing characters, goofy powers, cool visuals. What more could you want from a two-and-a-half hour Spider-Man cartoon?

What did we learn from all this?

This is usually the point where were start talking about high-vs-low art, and questions like “what more could you want?” get answers like “real people with real emotions, we’ve had enough cartoons, thankyou”. This was the central conflict behind the Barbenheimer phenomenon over the summer, and why Coppola looked like he was going to have a stroke when he had to congratulate Barbie on “saving cinema”.

But I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. Theres a class of movies that don’t get made enough: the adventure film targeted at 9-year olds, but talks up to them instead of down, that they can watch with their parents and older siblings, and everyone enjoys them. This has never been that common a genre, because it’s way easier to either skew younger, or juice it up and go for the “older teenagers sneaking into R-rated movies” demographic. The PG-13-ification of action movies has only made this worse, I mean, they actually made a movie called Batman vs Superman a couple years ago that I couldn’t take my 9-year old to, and he’d have hated if I did.

I’m not looking for something drained of all content, but I am looking to avoid any more nightmares about “the time captain america kicked that guy into the fan”, or “when han solo got stabbed”, or, you know, extended scenes of animals being tortured to death. (Watching movies with tweens, you really notice how much torture these kinds of movies have in them these days.) You know, movies like old Star Wars, not new Star Wars. It’s always worth celebrating when there’s a fun movie everyone can sign up for.

Something else that’s been talked about a lot with regards to 2023’s strange box office has been “super-hero fatigue”, and while that’s not not a thing, it’s also not the whole story. Both of these movies were new swings at old superhero franchises with decades of “lore” and factionalized fan-bases, and they both got a very positive critical reception, they made a bunch of money, and managed to avoid being a flashpoint for toxic assholes. And let’s just really underline this, despite being animation, both movies had explicitly diverse casts and characters. It’s possible. More like these, please.

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1. Ironically the only time the “2099” concept worked, in the sense of “new takes on old characters, but in the blade runner-o-mancer future” was a couple of years later when DC Animation launched Batman Beyond. I’m utterly convinced that show started as “what would it have taken to make Spider-Man 2099 good,” and then worked backwards to make it Batman. Look, Terry is absolutely Spider-Man, he’s just stuck with a Bat-Suit.

Doctor Who Season 1/14/40

As long as I’m linking to trailers and embedding video, there’s a trailer out for the new season of Doctor Who:

Wait, did they do the Akira slide… with the Tardis?

Electronics Does What, Now?

A couple months back, jwz dug up this great interview of Bill Gates conducted by Terry Pratchett in 1996 which includes this absolute gem: jwz: "Electronics gives us a way of classifying things"

TP: OK. Let's say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War and the Holocaust didn't happen. And it goes out there on the Internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on. There's a kind of parity of esteem of information on the Net. It's all there: there's no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.

BG: Not for long. Electronics gives us a way of classifying things. You will have authorities on the Net and because an article is contained in their index it will mean something. For all practical purposes, there'll be an infinite amount of text out there and you'll only receive a piece of text through levels of direction, like a friend who says, "Hey, go read this", or a brand name which is associated with a group of referees, or a particular expert, or consumer reports, or the equivalent of a newspaper... they'll point out the things that are of particular interest. The whole way that you can check somebody's reputation will be so much more sophisticated on the Net than it is in print today.

“Electronics gives us a way of classifying things,” you say?

One of the most maddening aspects of this timeline we live in was that all our troubles were not only “forseeable”, but actually actively “forseen”.

But we already knew that; that’s not why this has been, as they say, living rent-free in my head. I keep thinking about this because it’s so funny.

First, you just have the basic absurdity of Bill Gates and Terry Pratchett in the same room, that’s just funny. What was that even like?

Then, you have the slightly sharper absurdity of PTerry saying “so, let me exactly describe 2024 for you” and then BillG waves his hands and is all “someone will handle it, don’t worry.” There’s just something so darkly funny to BillG patronizing Terry Pratchet of all people, whose entire career was built around imagining ways people could misuse systems for their own benefit. Just a perfect example of the people who understood people doing a better job predicting the future than the people who understood computers. It’s extra funny that it wasn’t thaaat long after this he wrote his book satirizing the news?

Then, PTerry fails to ask the really obvious follow-up question, namely “okay great, whose gonna build all that?”

Because, let’s pause and engage with the proposal on it’s own merits for a second. Thats a huge system Bill is proposing that “someone” is gonna build. Whose gonna build all that, Bill? Staff it? You? What’s the business model? Is it going to be grassroots? That’s probably not what he means, since this is the mid-90s and MSFT still thinks that open source is a cancer. Instead: magical thinking.

Like the plagiarism thing with AI, there’s just no engagement with the fact that publishing and journalism have been around for literally centuries and have already worked out most of the solutions to these problems. Instead, we had guys in business casual telling us not to worry about bad things happening, because someone in charge will solve the problem, all while actively setting fire to the systems that were already doing it.

And it’s clear there’s been no thought to “what if someone uses it in bad faith”. You can tell that even in ’96, Terry is getting more email chain letters than Bill was.

But also, it’s 1996, baby, the ship has sailed. The fuse is lit, and all the things that are making our lives hard now are locked in.

But mostly, what I think is so funny about this is that Terry is talking to the wrong guy. Bill Gates is still “Mister Computer” to the general population, but “the internet” happened in spite of his company, not due to any work they actually did. Instead, very shortly after this interview, Bill’s company is going to get shanked by the DOJ for trying to throttle the web in its crib.

None of this “internet stuff” is going to center around what Bill thinks is going to happen, so even if he was able to see the problem, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. The internet was going well before MICROS~1 noticed, and routed around it and kept going. There were some Stanford grad students Terry needed to get to instead.

But I’m sure Microsoft’s Electronic System for classifying reputation will ship any day now.

I don’t have a big conclusion here other than “Terry Pratchett was always right,” and we knew that already.

Hot Takes on Lightsabers

This Monday dose of Hot Takes (tm) is brought to you by my having watched the trailers for both the next Rebel Moon¹ and the new Star Wars show The Acolyte² over the weekend.

I have some hot takes on Lightsabers.

Hot Take №1: Every Movie Should Have Lightsabers

I think the science-fiction movie community should do what fantasy novelists did with Tolkien’s elves, and just body Star Wars and run off with them. Put them in everything. The one thing from the Rebel Moons I fully endorse is the attitude of “it’s been long enough, we’re taking these.”

Hot Take №2: Movies With Lightsabers Should Use Them Less

A stylistic thing that the original trilogy did was that whenever a lightsaber powered up, it was a big deal. Partly, this was because they were expensive and hard to do, but the result was that they only³ came out at major story pivot points; when you heard that sound stuff was about to go down. Pulling a lightsaber out shouldn’t ever be casual, you know? It’s a sign the movie just shifted into a new gear.

This is where I segue and say I really like that Andor doesn’t have Jedi or the like, but I’d really like to see what that team could do with one (1) lightsaber fight.

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1. Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver; Yeah, it looks like more Rebel Moon!

2. The Acolyte; On the one hand, the track record for modern non-Andor Star Wars isn’t great? On the other hand, it’s being run by the same person who did Russian Doll?

3. Okay, the one genuine exception to this is the part in Return of the Jedi where Luke fights off the last speeder bike. But…

   1. This is Return of the Jedi, and that whole movie is a little thematically and structurally sloppier than its predecessors
   2. Plus, the whole middle chunk of that movie, from the sail barge exploding to Wicket telling 3PO about the bunker’s back door, is a total mess
   3. It’s pretty cool though, so we’ll let it slide