Just finished watching “Fire of Love”, the NatGeo documentary about the lives of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft on Disney+.
The Kraffts were kinda heroes of mine as a kid, alongside Cousteau and Haroun Tazieff, and this film triggered a fair bit of nostalgia! Here we follow their journey around the globe, their love of the mineral, of volcanoes, of each other, amidst some of the most breathtaking footage you can imagine of what Mother Earth is capable of… and each step bringing them closer to that fateful day in 1991.
I remember when the radio announced the news, and I always feel emotional watching that ominous pyroclastic flow… It is interesting that from a certain point of view the lessons of St. Helens were not heeded at Unzen, despite the fact that both the Kraffts and fellow US volcanologist Harry Glicken had to learn it first hand. Yet, in both cases they set up their observation station in a place they thought was at a safe distance, only for the blast of the eruption to end up much more powerful, and going in a different direction, than anticipated. This is not to blame them for being there, mind, but it goes to show how treacherous and deadly these explosive volcanoes can be…
A poignant and fantastic film, and very recommended!
This isn’t really a mini-review, but I saw The Babadook (2014) again for the first time in years. I don’t quite remember my take back then, but I really liked it now, probably one of the best representation of grief on screen that I’ve seen, blending the imaginary with the real to show how utterly destructive and annihilating unchecked emotions can be… and a poignant final message that sets it apart from others in the genre.
Beautifully done.
Coincidentally, as I post this, I realize I saw it on the 23rd, meaning it was seven months to the day since Dad left us. Seems oddly fitting…
Here’s something for a change: Yesterday’s movie yield was a double feature 😎
(mild spoilers ahead)
Let’s start with Tenet: I finally saw it after noticing that it had landed on HBOMax. I went into it without knowing anything more than it being about a cop and some kind of time travel… I liked it a lot, and that feeling was from the get go, not from analyzing it afterwards, and it makes it probably my favorite Nolan flick after Inception. I liked the twist on time travel and the way it goes about narration, reminded me of Memento in several ways. (Incidentally, it also completely ruins one of my WIPs called Tempus Fugit that had very similar time travel elements with a cop investigating crimes then traveling in time and realizing it was him doing it, leading to interesting confrontations, thank you so much Nolan for showing me I’m not that original…) It’s well thought and runs on other proven time travel tropes that tie everything together neatly, and of course being a Nolan movie the cinematography and SFX are exceptional.
Later that day, I had scheduled a showing of Everything Everywhere All At Once: I also went in blind, only knowing it was a comedy with multiverse stuff and it had Michelle Yeoh in it. This thing is absolutely bonkers, I loved it. It’s fresh, full of inventiveness and so well written, it’s hilarious and it’s emotional, and it’s also so profoundly human at its core, putting its characters first and letting them deal with the increasing absurdities of the premise. It’s a breath of fresh air and what cinema always aspired to be: a mirror, a dream, a glimpse of magic, a window through which we watch reflections of ourselves do what we can’t… Pure joy.
It’s funny that I ended up seeing both of those on the same day because they’re so diametrically opposed, and somewhat complementary, visions of sci-fi. Both deal with EOTWAWKI but one is frantically world-spanning, serious and heavy with big speeches and moral conflicts and secret organizations, while the other remains centered around a single family that doesn’t quite know how it got into this mess but just rolls with it. One deals with humanity as a whole, more a concept that needs to be saved than actual people (Kat and her son excepted, I suppose, giving the Protagonist a moral anchor of sorts), while the other deals with the human, bending genres to play with more intimate themes so universal that anyone can relate: the greener grass just beyond one’s grasp, the roads not taken, regrets, and love. And, for some reason, hot dogs and googly eyes.
Of course, I had to see it because, hello, it’s got planes in it so that was a given, but I will admit I was intrigued by the number of positive reviews before I went. And I can say, this is absolutely the most unlikely case of a sequel being better than the original that I could ever have expected. The story’s tighter, the action scenes are spectacular, the characters are well developed and distinctive enough from each other… I would also say that it’s definitely one of these movies where it’s really worth watching it in theaters if you can, because the editing and photography are top notch.
The main draw of course is that the planes are real, and it’s really the actors in them (with the exception of the F-14 obviously). The enemy is unnamed, and probably the same “rogue nation” as in the first one, a mix of Soviet Russia (they have Mi-35 helos and the latest Sukhoi Su-57 fighters) and Iran (they also somehow have obsolete F-14s… and an “unsanctioned” nuclear program). The flight scenes are visceral, and you can see the Gs pile up on the actors’ faces in a way no CGI could reproduce. They used real F/A-18s and the actors had to learn to manage their own camera setup for flight scenes! The main action set piece is pretty much the Death Star run on Earth and it’s TENSE. It really works, to the extent you completely forget they’re pretty much starting a war as the “rogue country” hasn’t attacked the US at any point. But then again, they did that in the first one too…
Story-wise, you really have to give it up to Cruise for managing to play the same character convincingly some 35 years after the first film… But the emotional weight and really for me what made the story work, is Val Kilmer’s cameo, reprising his role as Tom “Iceman” Kazansky. The character’s only there for two scenes and it’s really heartbreaking to see his ordeal knowing his illness isn’t an act (his few spoken lines are actually computer generated). I was glad to read after that unlike his character, Kilmer seems to have recovered for now. His scenes are the pivotal moment of the movie, the moment Mav finally learns to let go. The central conflict, once you understand where everyone’s coming from, is grounded and mostly believable, if you get past how old everyone is.
They lay it thick with the nostalgia bit, with an opening that’s a complete remake of the original with updated planes, and a whole lot of subtle (and not-so-subtle) nods to the first movie. Spotting those is a lot of fun.
On the disappointing side, it’s a shame that Jennifer Connelly is so underutilized as Penny, Mav’s love interest. It feels like there was a whole lot of backstory or moments that stayed on the cutting room floor. She’s such a fine actress and she and Cruise have the right sort of chemistry together for it to work, but she’s just in the background.
As Cruise said, TGM is a love letter to aviation. It’s also a recruitment piece for naval aviation, we can’t ignore that, but it’s interesting because it doesn’t shy away from showing that, while being a fighter pilot is neat, it’s also fraught with danger, and not just from enemy fire: equipment failure, bird strikes, blackouts, these folks take off knowing there’s a chance they won’t come back. But it’s all worth it, because cloud dancing is the only thing that counts.
As an aviation nerd, will definitely see it again. 4.5/5
These past few weeks haven’t been smooth sailing, but I’m kind of back. I’m extremely behind on my writing, NaNo April was a bust, I just didn’t have any heart for it. I’m planning to slowly get back into it, but I just haven’t yet. After my dad’s passing, I flip-flopped about focusing on my French hist-fic saga project… But I don’t know.
Everything is pretty much on hold on all fronts, except for one thing that I can’t quite get into yet. I’ll probably have an announcement about it later this year, if things go as planned. The release dates for the WIPs are likely going to be pushed back.
In the meantime, I spent the weekend on Severance (on Apple TV+), a dystopian show where a new implant technology allows us to hermetically separate our work life and our personal life. It’s as captivating and horrifying as it sounds, and absolutely riveting.
The show manages to capture the tedium of office environments and make it both gorgeous and ominous, making you wonder what hides behind every turn of the labyrinthine corridors of the “severed” floor, and behind the smiles of its cultish managers… The photography and art style are ultra polished and framed to perfection (the Bell Works building and its atomic age vibes make for a perfect location for a show full of retro-futuristic mid-century-ish elements) and the cast brings everything together incredibly well. The finale also resolves enough of the mysteries to be satisfied, but leaves enough pending that you just can’t wait for Season 2 to drop.
One of the best written shows of the year. Greatly recommended.
I put the first episode of Reacher yesterday not expecting much and I ended up bingeing the whole season in one seating. Prefacing this by saying that I’m among the rare few who, despite reading the series, were not put out by Tom Cruise’s performance in the movie adaptations (or even the choice of having him in the first place), the 2022 show is pretty solid and I will agree that it is more faithful to how the book depicted the character. Alan Ritchson’s Reacher is not just greatly layered, he’s also great at showing these layers gradually, playing on the other characters’ expectations (and in some way also those of the ones among the audience who don’t know the books). Reacher is an enigma when you first meet him, but the core elements of his character are never in doubt, and the first episodes establishes that perfectly by having him say absolutely nothing in the first ten minutes or so, yet show both where his moral compass points to and how skilled he is at what he does. And while he is a nigh-unstoppable powerhouse with Holmesian-level deductive skills, he’s also sufficiently reliant on others during the course of the series that he doesn’t quite become the Gary Sue one could mistake him to be at first glance.
The supporting cast also does a bang up job, Willa Fitzgerald as the tough-as-nails Roscoe and Malcolm Goodwin as the uptight by-the-book Finlay, alongside veteran actors like Currie Graham and Bruce McGill for the antagonists. The setting brilliantly reeks of “small town with a dark secret” from the very beginning (a staple of the book series) and the whole fun is to entangle what that secret is, and the twists make it very worthwhile at the same time as they make it very, very personal for Reacher, something the baddies painfully discover is definitely something you never want to face.
All in all, this adaptation is a very pleasant surprise, moreso than Jack Ryan, also on Prime and for which I had similarly subverted expectations. The 8-episode format allows writers and actors the time and space to really explore and develop the characters in a way that feels natural and organic, establish the backstories, introduce foes, allies and folks in between without rushing through the motions, play with the uncertainty of knowing who’s with or against our protagonist…
With a whole book series to choose from, if they can keep up that level of care for the source material, I’ll be looking forward to future seasons.
I just came back from watching The Matrix: Resurrections a second time, and while the first impression was somewhat positive but confused, this second viewing made me appreciate the film a lot more. Resurrections is beautifully earnest about what it sets to do, and what that is is simply, like the first one, Lana Wachowski’s expression of her life experience through her art.
(Also, right off the bat, I just loved how familiar faces kept appearing one after the other. There are so many Sense8 actors in there it was like watching a cast reunion, and as a fan I was just super happy to see that. I’m also 99% convinced that the key shop is not just a reference to the Keymaker, it looked exactly like Wolfgang and Felix’s shop!)
After two sequels that were kind of okay but mainly kind of a letdown, Resurrections is a sublimation of the original trilogy. It takes their themes and distillates them through the lens of the last 20 years. It is unapologetically Lana’s Matrix: a sequel that neither sisters wanted to make originally, but when it became inevitable, one that she had to make herself to keep control of her story, of her narrative. Because these movies are (or at least, started from) fundamentally autobiographical allegories, it would have been unthinkable to relinquish this control to a studio. That’s where the whole hyper-meta first act comes from, with its continuous self-reference that is always just shy of breaking the fourth wall.
(Caution: what follows contains spoilers)
It’s no wonder that reflections and mirrors come back as crucial tools and visual cues to navigate between the Matrix and the “real world”. Self-image and representation were always at the heart of the first Matrix movie, and this theme comes full circle here again with the added emotional maturity of a person who’s lived through transition and can look back at what was. Both Neo and Trinity know what they look like, but what the world sees is a completely different person. And eventually, it is no longer “Thomas Anderson” coming out, as the metro barrels down towards him, shouting “My name is Neo” in a defiant, yet almost intimate act of self-acceptance. It is “Tiffany” who instead asserts her true identity publicly and becomes empowered: “My name is Trinity,” she says, and indeed she always was, and nothing her family or society could say or do would change that. It’s not an accident that 20 years later, Trinity, not Neo, has become the One.
The Matrix universe can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and that’s okay. For me, I don’t think you can really dissociate the art from the artist when the art is rooted is such personal life experiences. Resurrections upends the blue pill/red pill binary, because as Bugs say, such a binary solution was always an illusion. Forget about spoons, there is no choice: deep inside, in your heart, you know what you should do to stay true to yourself, and doing anything else would be a betrayal.
All in all, I find Resurrections to be a perfect bookend to the story the Wachowskis started in 1999. It’s not without flaws, the meta stuff in the first third was almost a tad too much, the fight scenes are not as clean or memorable as before (although the Analyst subverting bullet time was pretty neat), and I found the Merovingian cameo to be gratuitous. But the film works despite these flaws, because deep down there is so much love for the characters, and so much earnestness in the tale of their literal resurrection, that it’s impossible for me not to like it.
It’s a leap of faith, and when you find in yourself the courage to take the step… at that moment, that’s when you are, finally, free.
I started fairly ambivalent about this movie. I still don’t know quite what to think of it, usually to me that means the movie’s bad, typically, but it’s not the case here. There are some genuinely good things in this Bond, bold narrative choices, bold characterization too. This is going to remain spoiler-free so I won’t go into details, but here goes…
Like the previous Casio Royale/Quantum of Solace diptych, NTTD serves as a direct sequel to Spectre, which in my mind is the worst of the Craig outings, and one of the worst Bond movies overall. There were production issues and delays, Danny Boyle was initially slated to direct but later dropped out and it doesn’t help that there was much hype about Fleabag‘s Phoebe Waller-Bridge being brought in for script duties after the director swap, and I really didn’t click with Fleabag… So let’s just say that I came in with low expectations.
Turns out that, in many respects, NTTD is a very respectable Bond movie, and an ambitious one at that. Comparisons abound with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and with reason, as it explicitly hangs over the movie with all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle references. Bold choices, I said above, and high stakes, believable stakes that lead to realistic and shocking consequences all the way to the final scenes… This is a movie where Bond hurts, where you actually do fear for his and his companions’ lives, where the villain is pragmatic and cold and won’t hesitate to shoot you, plot armor be damned.
As a Bond movie, as the final Craig Bond movie, it works. It’s not just a sequel to Spectre, it closes an arc that was started all the way back with Casino Royale. In The World is Not Enough, Q famously told Bond, “Never let them see you bleed.” Daniel Craig’s tenure as Bond has him bleeding, literally and metaphorically, a broken man haunted by personal demons, fighting to make a broken world better.
However, the movie also suffers from several issues. It is long, and it makes you feel it, and there are several instances where some trimming could have made it tighter. If characterization as a whole improves overall, especially with everyone returning from Spectre getting much richer dialogue and scenes, the only exception to this would be with M’s badass decay from Spectre and Skyfall, as his plot-related oversights prior to the movie caused the whole mess… The movie also introduces Lashana Lynch as the new 007 (not the new James Bond) and while I have no problem with her performance, I did feel her characterization was a bit on the nose to contrast with Craig’s more “old school” approach.
Discussing specifics would lead me to spoiler territory, so I’ll just stop here. Overall, this is a spectacular Bond outing and a fitting send-off for Daniel Craig. The pacing is messy but the punches land and the movie sticks the landing in a way that both serves the story and is satisfying to me as a viewer. Like OHMSS before it, NTTD breaks the mold and goes where no Bond movie has gone before, ever. And for that, I think it deserves quite a bit of respect.
Mansfield’s style is so powerful it just makes me want to put away my keyboard and forget I even tried… It’s lyrical but direct, not a word is wasted, and images flow into your head as you read, building up this fantastic panorama of perspectives… And how it’s built, how it comes full-circle at the end, nailing a perfect landing… This is a creator in perfect control of their craft. Reading her is like listening to Haendel. I’m rambling, but it’s because I’m speechless.
I finished watching “Away” yesterday, after starting it over the weekend. It’s a Netflix original show, starring Hillary Swank, about the first manned mission to Mars.
(this review contains spoilers)
It’s not bad, but it’s not great. I really had difficulty with suspending disbelief as the high-rate sci-fi is bogged down by ridiculous melodrama. It’s ostensibly the goal of the series to show how such a trip and the isolation it entails might affect both the crews out there and the families, friends and coworkers on Earth, but it was really hard to swallow. And it was particularly egregious in the very first episode, which almost made me quit. I simply cannot believe that a crew that trained together for two years or more would behave like this, let alone 24 hours into the mission. And some of their subsequent behavior was also incredibly unprofessional.
I also don’t believe that NASA would kickoff the manned mission without making sure that the Pegasus resupply ship had landed safely.
Other than, that it was… okay. I do like that the characters had a fully fleshed out background, each with their unique perspective, and the cast is great. Also as mentioned, the production value is stellar (no pun intended). The zero-G is extremely well done and only a few details (like tears) betray the artifice. It’s just a shame that the script is lacking.
I’ll be on the lookout if there’s a Season 2, but I’m not on the edge of my seat. Like “Amelia” (also with Hillary Swank), it feels a bit like a missed opportunity.
