Margot Robbie OWNS the Character

Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn.
The Boomer Review by Cecilia Calabrese.

I saw this movie in magnificent “XD” format. It was a feast for the senses…almost to the point of overload. If you like splashes of color and action on a gigantic screen, see Birds of Prey in XD!

Margot Robbie OWNS the character, Harley Quinn! Unlike the numerous actors who created the multiple iterations of “Mistah J”, Batman, and Robin, no one can credibly recreate the cartoon/comic book personality, Harley Quinn, like Margot Robbie. I suspect she would be willing to make as many Harley Quinn movies as the DC Universe can turn out because she clearly has fun in that role. And if she is not having fun, she is a better actor than I give her credit for.

Rounding out the ensemble cast: Rosie Perez (Renee Montoya), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Helena Bertinelli), Jurnee Smollett-Bell (Dinah Lance), and Ella Jay Basco (Cassandra Cain) mesh well. The interactions among these main characters feel genuine and left me guessing just where all this was going to end up.

Ewan McGregor lost himself as the sadistic Roman Sionis. I greatly appreciate when actors not only portray a character well, they seem to actually BECOME the character so well that I have to wait until the Cast Credits to find out who played that part.

The action revolves around Harley Quinn’s life after her final (?) break-up with the Joker, following the exploits in the movie Suicide Squad (For Harley’s exploits before Suicide Squad, check out “Truly Madly Deeply: The Definitive Origin of Harley Quinn” here on Nerds who Read). For the first time, Harley is trying to find her place in the world without having a significant other in her life. Her internal conflict centers on deep seeded trust issues: in herself and others. She is protector and antagonist at the same time. The conflict with Roman Sionis sets up a scenario that brings our four Sirens of Swat (my description) together. As such, the women ultimately must decide whether it is in their own best interest, and the future of Gotham, to protect or betray a young pick-pocket that stole something of value from Sionis.

The stunts, the action, the vivid colors, the pithy dialogue, even the '80s-style cliches (as a Boomer, I offer a tip of the hat to the writers on that) all result in a classic comic book movie. Gotham City was portrayed just as seedy and disturbed as I am used to, but not quite as visually dark as we see in other representations. Gotham, being a character unto itself, has been represented in many styles. This Gotham was a bit of a departure.

Now, did I like this movie? That’s hard to say. Sitting here, right now, having just finished watching the film about two hours ago, my jury is still out! I had major issues with the continuity of the story line. Narration of the initial animated introduction made a point of stating that to tell a story, you start at the beginning [unless you're Quentin Tarantino -Ed.]. Well, this movie did do that. But then frequent sequences of the story line became frenetic, disjointed, and, at times, hard to follow. I suspect it may be helpful to have read the actual comic books before seeing the film. That, I did not do. However, there is one HUGE plot inconsistency that I found distracting to the point of getting lost in the time line. Because of it, I was confused regarding whether what I was watching was happening in “present” time, or as “flash-back” action. Part of my confusion was on account of a costume accessory. I’m a bit of a stickler for details like that, especially when they play a prominent part in the story-telling.

This movie really wasn’t my cup of Jamba Juice. It seemed as though the director, Cathy Yan, was infusing the campiness of the Batman that I grew up with (Adam West) into Gotham City of 2020. For me, the movie did get more enjoyable as the film progressed to its conclusion. I’m not quite sure what that says about the film as a whole. But, if you are a DC Universe fan, this film is meant for you. Stick around for the little end-credit nugget if you are so inclined, but if you had the large soda, it’s not worth the bladder distress.

Cecilia Calabrese is the Vice President of the Agawam City Council and will serve as President of the Massachusetts Municipal Association in 2020. She is a licensed attorney in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as well as a Registered Dental Hygienist and a rental property manager. Married to her husband, Michael Calabrese, for 34 years, they have two grown children, Charles and Michaela Calabrese.

Cece has written featured articles in The Valley Advocate (Tom Duggan, Editor), as well as various opinion pieces in The Springfield Republican and The Agawam Advertiser News. She is currently on the pre-production crew for daughter Michaela’s graduate film project. Filming starts later this month! Please give your generous support to the project at GoFundMe.com.

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Photo credit(s): Movieweb

Dual Perspective

A Boomer and a Gen-Zer take on The Rise of Skywalker.

The Boomer Review.
By Cecilia Calabrese.

My entire adult life has spanned the Star Wars Movie Universe. I turned 18, graduated high school, and started college in 1977. That summer Star Wars was released. My first paying job was as a “Candy Girl” (that was my official title) at a movie theater in Danbury, CT. Star Wars was the last movie I worked before heading off to start my studies in Marine Biology. Those were the days when “A New Hope” was merely a description of the story that began a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I only casually noticed that the 1977 film was “Episode IV” of a much longer saga. I took great delight in recognizing the sounds of Darth Vader’s breathing apparatus having been generated by SCUBA gear, being a SCUBA diver myself since the age of 16. Imagine my current disappointment in turning down the offer of an original Star Wars movie poster from my Manager, scoffing “who would want THAT?”…AHH, the foolishness of youth!

Through this prism of Star Wars nostalgia I watched The Rise of Skywalker (Episode IX) with great anticipation of what Easter Eggs were going to exist in order to maintain the attention of “my” generation. This film did not disappoint.

The opening sequence reminded me of the first scene opening A New Hope. It was visually appealing, fast-paced, and immediately grabbed my attention. Throughout the movie the brilliant use of familiar music at the right times were particularly appealing. I hope when you see this movie you pay attention to the sound cues. Not merely the music, however, but also certain dialogue and references. I am looking forward to seeing this film again to catch what I surely have missed.

If you are still on the fence about seeing this movie in theaters rather than waiting for its inevitable release on DVD/Blue-Ray, don’t wait! One of the things I enjoy about going to the movies is the chance to suspend reality for a few precious hours and be entertained. This movie does that, and, thankfully, in a much more enjoyable movie experience than Attack Of The Clones, the runt of the Star Wars litter (spoiler alert: NO Jar-Jar).

I found the expansive scenes beautifully filmed. The fight sequences were choreographed in such a way as to highlight the skills of each character, Jedi or not. Appropriate, if not slightly predictable, uses of harkening-back and foreshadowing complete the popcorn-movie experience.

This film has its weaknesses. The trio of Rey, Finn, and Poe at times felt a bit “Harry Potterish” (think The Deathly Hallows). It had a formulaic feel to me. What peril was our band of adventurers going to find themselves in next? I could have done without one particular interaction toward the end of the film, but I kind of “get it”, why that was included. It was fine and did not detract from my overall enjoyment of the film. I loved the interjections of humor to break the tension. The interactions between Finn and Poe were…well…adorable. They had great chemistry.

One fairly significant question was left unanswered, and it makes me wonder if there is already a vehicle in the works with the intent of filling that void. Time will tell.

My favorite parts of the film were when Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley were working out their “issues.” I felt that the two were well cast as Kylo Ren/Ben Solo and Rey. Driver’s physical presence on screen is riveting. Ridley is slight-of-build, yet perfectly exudes her character’s inner strength. The contrast between their characters work well on screen.

The story arc was reflexive of previous installments in the Star Wars saga and gives a satisfying conclusion to known characters in the Star Wars Universe.

If you go to the movies to be entertained while leaving wanting more, this movie does the trick.

Cecilia Calabrese is the Vice President of the Agawam City Council and will serve as President of the Massachusetts Municipal Association in 2020. She is a licensed attorney in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as well as a Registered Dental Hygienist, and a rental property manager. Married to her husband, Michael Calabrese, for 34 years, they have two grown children, Charles and Michaela Calabrese.

Cece has written featured articles in the Valley Advocate (Tom Duggan, Editor), as well as various Opinion pieces in The Springfield Republican and The Agawam Advertiser News. She is currently on the pre-production crew for daughter Michaela’s graduate film project. Please give your generous support to the project at GoFundMe.com.

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The Gen Z Review.
By Michaela Calabrese.

I’m gonna preface this review by saying I was born in 1997. The first Star Wars movies I grew up with were the prequels; and for a few blissful years I was able to enjoy them. The day came, however, when I was old enough to properly absorb the original trilogy.

Needless to say, my enjoyment of the prequels ended very soon afterward.

I won’t pretend to be the font of knowledge when it comes to the Star Wars saga. There’s plenty I don’t know about the extended lore, I can’t tell you the names of every planet in the Republic, and I certainly haven’t read all the novels or watched every episode of the animated clone wars. What I can tell you is the message I took from watching the original trilogy when I was young; the same message this new trilogy (in my eyes at least) has carried on for the next generation:

There will always be darkness in the world. It’s inevitable and terrifying and overwhelming at times.

But it’s not indestructible.

The first reviews for The Rise of Skywalker left me worried that this message would be lost behind clunky editing, bad writing, and a story that (according to some) was all over the place and a complete mess. This is not the movie I saw. The movie I saw had pacing issues and awkward lines, but it also had beautiful cinematography, a simple-to-follow narrative, characters I not only liked but really grew to love, and an ending which cemented the fact that Star Wars is still Star Wars even after forty-two years and three separate trilogies.

Let’s talk technicals, first. The beginning of the film definitely has an issue in terms of timing. The first…oh, let’s call it ten minutes or so…feel like they’re on fast-forward. There aren’t enough breaks between lines, and locations change at a rapid pace. This was what I was expecting for the whole movie. Everything felt rushed; like the director just wanted to get exposition out of the way so it wouldn’t impede the rest of the film. The opening crawl was frustratingly abbreviated, and even the first mission felt clumsy and out of place. Had this carried through the entire runtime, I would understand the negative reviews. I sat through The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey when it was released with an accelerated frame rate and I left that film with a splitting headache. No WAY was I about to subject myself to something similar!

Thankfully, there is a major turning point during which the pacing slows down. Everything which must be established by this point has been established, and from here in the film allows itself and its actors to breathe. Thus, my major fault with the movie was solved and I was free to find other elements which could ruin my experience.

And then the film reached its third act…and I hadn’t found those elements yet.

The characters (aside from 3PO) are charming and work well together. The sets, though small and a bit hard to see at times, still fit well within the narrative, and the story moves in a very promising direction. I wanted the heroes to succeed, I wanted the villains to be thwarted, I felt the same childlike excitement that I had felt watching A New Hope in my living room when I was little.

Kylo Ren, my least favorite character for the past two films, evolves far enough that I began to look forward to his scenes. He feels more three-dimensional in The Rise of Skywalker than he felt in The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi. Rey, likewise, has progressed away from the “wide-eyed outsider” trope into her own character. She was always very interesting, as well as being a great role model for little girls to look up to, but she becomes so much more by the end of this film. She finds her own strength, her own reasons to keep fighting, and she isn’t just parroting Luke Skywalker’s morality or Han Solo’s tenacity. She isn’t a protege anymore, but she isn’t cold either. She learns how to balance being stern and focused with being compassionate and kind.

The big question now: does this film work as a concluding chapter to the Star Wars saga? Well, that sort of depends on personal preference. For me, it absolutely does. The threads which were left at the ends of the original and prequel trilogies are tied up for me. There are other stories in the Star Wars universe which could be told, but this one has reached its final page. I want more, I’m always going to want more, but if this is all we get for a while then so be it. I have enough to hold me over.

Michaela Calabrese was born and raised in Agawam, MA and is now living her dream of studying filmmaking in New York City. Her graduate program has offered her the chance to direct a twelve-minute short film which will be screened for industry professionals. Please give your generous support to the project at GoFundMe.com.

Dark Fate at the Box Office...

...and it’s a shame.

Terminator: Dark Fate
Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.

Twenty-nine million dollars. That’s all Terminator: Dark Fate managed to pull in from the domestic box office during its opening last weekend. To put that in perspective, the movie is estimated to have cost $185 million to make. The poor reception is a shame, because it’s a pretty good movie. It wasn’t mind blowing or anything, it’s not going to rock your world. But it’s good solid entertainment with action, humor, and some heart.

Given that schools don’t teach the classics anymore, a quick review is in order. The original Terminator (1984) tells the story of Skynet, an Artificial Intelligence which sometime in the future—Judgment Day—achieves consciousness, launches the nukes, and then builds machines to exterminate what’s left of the human race. The humans, led by one John Connor, fight back, and after an epic war, with heavy losses, beat the machines. In a final Hail Mary pass, Skynet sends a Terminator robot (Arnold Schwarzenegger), back to the 1980s to kill Connor’s mother, Sarah (Linda Hamilton) before John is ever born. It fails. In the 1991 sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Skynet tries again, this time taking a crack at John himself. Not only do the heroes destroy the Terminator once again, they prevent Skynet from ever being created. The grim future is erased. Judgment Day never happens.

Or so they think. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), we learn “You only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable.”

We also learn that sometime between Terminator 2 and Terminator 3, Sarah Connor died of leukemia.

Which brings us to Terminator: Dark Fate. It begins two years after the events of T2. Sarah and John are hanging out on a beach in Guatemala when a model T-800 Terminator appears without warning and kills the boy. It all happens so fast that Sarah doesn’t have a chance to protect him, as she had done all his life. As they go their separate ways in the wake of the murder, both Sarah and the T-800 are suddenly aimless, alone in the world, and stripped of their missions.

Fast forward two decades. Yet another Terminator arrives from the future (Gabriel Luna). It’s an advanced model, the Rev-9, with the capability to separate its liquid metal and solid components to act independently, which is kind of cool in a fight. Its mission is to kill factory worker Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), who presumably will have something to do with defeating the machines someday. But the Rev-9 is not the only visitor from the future: Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a cybernetically enhanced super soldier, has been sent back to protect Dani.

Needless to say, as Dani and Grace alternately fight and flight from the Rev-9, they eventually cross paths with Sarah Connor and the T-800 and we find out what they’ve been up to for the past twenty years. Sarah still totally kicks ass, and you got to admire the way Linda Hamilton—who is 63—pulls it off. Dark Fate is worth seeing just for that. According to her trainer, a year of intense workouts and strict low-carb dieting went into her preparation for the role.

As for the T-800, in order to avoid spoilers, I won’t reveal much about the arc of his character. Suffice to say, it is rather touching.

The T-800 is also the main source of humor in the movie, and the basic joke is that the robot says un-robotlike things. It works, as it did in T2. Remember “Hasta la vista, baby?” One of my few criticisms of the movie is that, since the T-800 joins the others rather late in the story, there is a decidedly grim lack of humor prior to that.

Dark Fate has been heavily criticized—some are calling it a franchise killer—but frankly I thought many of the criticisms are undeserved. I am at a loss to find anything that’s so terrible about this movie to account for the flop at the box office. It certainly doesn’t suffer from the sort of cringeworthy moments that made past franchise killers like Batman and Robin so painful to watch.

What a real franchise killer looks like

Some critics complain that the murder of John Connor at the beginning erases the events of Terminator 3. I don’t see the problem. Altering the timeline will do that (Albeit what’s harder to explain is how his death prevented his mother from dying of cancer).

Nor did it bother me that the T-800 has aged considerably—Arnold is 72 years old now. Since this model is built from living skin over a machine interior, it actually makes sense.

Some of my right-of-center friends have criticized what they see as the movie’s politics and are gleeful about its flop at the box office. “Get woke, grow broke,” read one Facebook post I saw. I sincerely doubt these critics have actually seen the movie. It’s not really a political film. Yes, it has some female action heroines. It’s even been called “vagina-centric.” But this series has always had female heroines—Linda Hamilton has been badass since the beginning. Well, at least since T2 anyway. It’s not like Hollywood is rewriting anyone’s childhood for the sake of political correctness. Nor does Dark Fate have that mean-spirited girls against the boys vibe that made Captain Marvel so awful.

There is one scene in an immigrant detention center, which of course references current events, but again, it’s not really political. Pitch Meeting pretty much captured the spirit of it:

Writer Guy: I want the next big set piece to take place inside of a detention facility along the US-Mexico border, you know, get some social commentary going on. Producer Guy: Oh, okay. So what’s the commentary? Writer Guy: It, uh, you know, wouldn’t it look cool if a Terminator ran through one of those things? Producer Guy: That does sound cool.

Well, it is a cool movie. Ignore the critics and the box office and go see it.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): CinemaBlend.com, Polygon.com, giphy.com

Do I Look Like I’m Joking?

Joker.
Movie Review by Derek Power.

Where to begin? No, seriously, where to begin? I’m not kidding here. Why are you chuckling? Do you think this is funny? Am I some kind of clown? Do I amuse you?

Huh? Huh!

I’M ASKING A QUESTION HERE! WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING?!?!

…

…

...

Had you there for a second.

But to be so serious, the trailer for Joker, which opens in theaters this weekend, gives us a portrait of a man who’s not quite right to begin with, sometimes rejected and even beaten by the people around him, and eventually donning the clown face and purple suit that we’ve all come to know and love (or not) from decades of Batman movies, comics, and TV shows. All set against the background of a gritty 1970s-looking Gotham which clashes with the cheerful Jimmy Durante Smile though your Heart is Breaking soundtrack like the dissonance of a disordered mind.

Where can you begin in evaluating a film that looks at a character like the Joker?

For a character that’s octogenarian, the Joker still manages to provide new angles and approaches and has become for screen actors what Richard III still provides for stage ones (screen too). For a character from perhaps the most widely-known modern myth, he has become the closest that man has created to something on the level of Lucifer and makes all the other classic mythic antagonists—Ulysses’ Poseidon, Beowulf’s Grendel—seem like, well, clowns. But as an idea, the Joker has also come to embody not just moral evil, but also the non-rational. Thus, a better question to ask is: how can you make rational what is already irrational?

Perhaps the best approach is to start by saying what the movie is not. After all, by eliminating statements you know to be false, you get ever closer to understanding what it is.

It is not a comic book film.

Let’s start simple. Yes, this is all based on characters from DC. But apart from that and the clear influence of the 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke (more on this later), Joker owes extremely little to any established lore found in any Batman comic. Thus, it is nothing like what we now consider comic book films based on the current crop like that eleven-year effort which concluded with this year’s Avengers: Endgame. But it’s not just a matter of a clear storyline with a clear protagonist and a clear antagonist. If anything, the usual antagonist is this film’s protagonist in that everything in the film is shown through Arthur Fleck’s (Joaquin Phoenix) eyes.

It is not an origin story of the Joker

Despite its title, this is not a definitive telling of how the Joker became the Joker. For starters, it owes nothing to established comic lore. There is no nod whatsoever to “The Man behind the Red Hood” (originally Detective Comics 168, February 1951), which is the earliest story for the Joker and gave us the “dropped into a vat of chemicals” origin. Even the story that many have used as a Joker origin story—the aforementioned The Killing Joke (written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland)—is not really an origin story and hearkened back to the earlier Red Hood story. In fact, during The Killing Joke, the Joker tells Batman that his own memory of events keeps changing over time, which could be viewed as one of those escape clauses so liberality could trump continuity.

It is not some soft franchise reboot

Without getting too much into the spoilers, there are moments that suggest this is some attempt to restart a DC cinematic universe to compete with the now fairly complete Marvel one. But personally, I don’t see it happening and if it does, it won’t be through this film.

It is neither a rehash of the past, a single allegory of the present, nor a forecast to the future

By this point, you have no doubt heard the numerous comparisons of Joker to the works of Martin Scorsese and, in particular, Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1983). There is no denying it. Hell, Robert de Niro is even in it as Murray Franklin, who could very well be Rupert Pupkin finally getting his act, and his act together, and becoming a kind of Johnny Carson/Ed Sullivan type. But at the same time, Joker is not a carbon copy of those films. On the whole, it certainly owes plenty to those American films of the 1970s, plus or minus, starting as early as Midnight Cowboy (1969) and even going into the 1980s (for upcoming and seasoned viewers: note a marquee sign toward the end of Joker).

This film is also not some statement about the current state of the world. You can attribute Tolkien for me personally disliking or distrusting allegory, but the Oxford don has a very good point. Allegory is a one-way, single lane interpretation of a story and often marked by a specific time and place. Times and places fade into memory and then into dust. In the end, nothing beside remains. And so, it would be unfair to attribute allegory here.

And finally, the reason why it is not some future forecast is for me the same reason that Stanley Kubrick once gave film critic Alexander Walker about A Clockwork Orange (1971…and another point of comparison for Joker). Walker recounts, “It is not a forecast, it is a fable.” And to tie up all notions of time, any observer of the human condition—and especially over the last half-century or so—will not be surprised (after the shock dissipates) by anything shown here. The reason why Shakespeare is still relevant four centuries or so on is because human beings still do the same stupid nonsense. And like what has happened, a lack of care and forethought will mean the future can be its own “remake” of the past.

A-HA! I think I have something as to what it is. Basically, my Twitter assessment is thus:

It is a film that looks at an apathetic, even violent, world through an insane man who then becomes more insanely violent.

Good night, and good luck?

Joker (2019)
Dir: Todd Phillips
Scr: Todd Phillips, Scott Silver
Prod: Bradley Cooper, Todd Phillips, Emma Tillinger Koskoff
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen
Rated R for strong bloody violence, disturbing behaviour, language and brief sexual images

Derek Power is a musician/once aspiring filmmaker who lives in a society somewhere in eastern Massachusetts. He makes music under the name キラヨシ and can be found at kirayoshi.bandcamp.com. He can also be found being too clever for his own good on Facebook and Twitter.

Ad Pocalypse Now or DADS in SPAAAAACE

Ad Astra.
Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.

What is it with space movies and fathers? We all felt that little twinge of disappointment when we sat through that whole Contact movie, and the alien ended up appearing as Jodie Foster's father. And yet, from Contact, to Interstellar, to The Empire Strikes Back, filmmakers have some strange compulsion to take a good, original sci fi epic and tack on that most hackneyed of stories, our relationships with our dads. It was already a cliché when Sophocles scratched Oedipus Rex onto a sheet of papyrus with a reed pen, but 2,500 years later, filmmakers keep doubling down. Do they think that we can’t appreciate the vastness of the universe and the wonders of space exploration unless they “humanize” them for us? That everything has to be brought down to the level of a father missing his son's soccer game?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying never do a story about father figures. If it has some unique twist on the subject, it’s worth seeing. 2017’s Logan comes to mind, and there have been other fine treatments of the theme. Sadly, Ad Astra, which opens this weekend, isn’t one of them.

Not that it's a bad movie. The plot is basically Apocalypse Now in space: a military officer, operating far from the control of his superiors, has gone rogue, and another soldier, more junior, is sent on a journey to confront him. In this case, the rogue officer is Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a legend in the U.S. Space Command (apparently Trump’s “Space Force” really came to be). Years before, he led a mission to the outer reaches of the solar system, but contact with him had long since been lost.

When earth is hit by a surge of cosmic rays, disrupting communications, destroying electronics, and creating explosions and chaos all over the planet, his son Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), also an astronaut, is called in for a top secret briefing from a roomful of generals. They inform him the Surge originated from Neptune and they believe it is linked to McBride Senior. The brass don’t know whether he has developed some sort of weapon, or the Surge has some other cause, but they want Major McBride to try to re-establish communications with his dad. A straightforward mission, and yet the generals don’t seem to be telling McBride all they know.

In any case, McBride is launched on a journey of planet-hopping across the solar system, starting with the moon and Mars. The mood varies between the paranoid--close up shots of the interior of claustrophobic space capsules--and the awe-inspiring--spectacular panoramas of outer space (more on that later). There’s a decent amount of excitement along the way, and between action scenes McBride has long stretches of travel time to come to terms with the emotional scars left by a father whose job was more important to him than his wife and son, a father who left home, never to return. Talk about the distant father cliché. Hard to get more distant than Neptune.

There are also many mistakes in physics, and those who enjoy picking at that sort of thing will have a field day. The technical consultant, Robert Yowell, has an impressive resume of 30 years experience on space projects, but this is his first movie. Just to take one example: gravity. I could believe that there might be earth-like gravity indoors in a moon base, thanks to some sort of artificial gravity technology which is never explained. But normal gravity outdoors on Mars, where objects in the real world weigh only 37% of what they do on earth, pushes the limits of credibility.

And yet, Ad Astra has many things going for it. It has been praised for the realism of the space technology, and some of this is deserved. The rockets, spacesuits, landing modules, and launch facilities are familiar to us from the ones we’ve seen in our own lifetimes, but projected into the future just enough to make a mission to Neptune believable.

The acting is stellar. As an astronaut with a famous dad, Major McBride is a public figure with a certain persona that he’s expected to live up to: per his own opening lines, “steady, calm, ready to do my job to the best of my abilities.” And yet he’s falling apart. Brad Pitt puts in an excellent performance as a man who is supposed to be holding it together, and is faking it. Kudos also to Tommy Lee Jones for his portrayal of a once towering figure who’s now confused and on the border of senility, if not past it. And MCU fans will be delighted to see Ruth Negga, Agents of Shield's Raina, in a small but pivotal role as the administrator of the Mars base.

And then there’s the space porn. No, not that kind. Get your mind out of the gutter. I mean stunning cinematography of spacecraft blasting off and landing, planetary landscapes, starry skies. The trailer doesn't do justice to it, but it will give you a flavor at least:

One scene, in particular stood out for me: during a chase across the lunar surface, when McBride’s moon buggy crosses the terminator from day to night, the stars suddenly come out and adorn a sky that a moment before had been a solid field of black. Beautiful.

Indeed, despite its flaws, Ad Astra is well worth seeing just for the eye candy. Preferably in IMAX, where you can feel the shaking of the rockets, and see the stunning vistas of space fill your field of view.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

Not Your Father’s Aquaman

by Michael Isenberg.

Aquaman has long been the Rodney Dangerfield of the DC universe. He gets no respect. Born to the Queen of Atlantis, saddled with the very un-superhero-like name of “Arthur,” and raised by his human lighthouse keeper father, the goofy-looking Marine Marvel is the butt of numerous “You’re more useless than Aquaman” jokes on Family Guy, the gist of which is that the power to get fish to do stuff has little practical value.

Then in 2016, in the otherwise disastrous Batman v. Superman, we got a brief glimpse of a different Aquaman. Played by Jason Momoa (known to Game of Throne fans for his role as Khal Drogo), this buff, bearded version of the Dweller-in-the-Depths looked kind of rad.

We saw more of him last year in Justice League and discovered he’s hard-drinking and has a sense of humor. “Dress like a bat. You’re out of your mind, Bruce Wayne.” Kind of an aquatic Wolverine.

But it wasn’t until a scene early in the new Aquaman movie, which opens today across the nation, that I was truly convinced: this is not your father’s Aquaman.

It’s a fight scene, Aquaman against the father-and-son pirate team of Jesse and David Kane, aka Manta. The Kanes are attempting to steal a Russian submarine. They’ve killed the captain and many of the crew; the survivors are holed up in the torpedo room, neutralized. Aquaman bursts through a hatch, and after a quip (“Permission to come aboard”) proceeds to take the Kanes and their henchmen apart. The action ends with the crew safely evacuated and Daddy Kane trapped under a missile as water floods the compartment. “Wait!” Manta yells to Aquaman. “You can’t leave him here. Help me! Please!”

We’ve seen the scenario a million times, and the hero always rescues the trapped villain, who really doesn’t deserve it. But not this time. “Ask the sea for mercy,” Aquaman tells him. And then he leaves.

Totally. Bad. Ass.

The theft of the submarine is just the first step in a scheme by Aquaman’s half-brother, Orm, monarch of one of the seven Atlantean kingdoms. I wasn’t really sure which one; the politics of Atlantis are intricate and confusing. A clunky exposition scene tries to explain it all, but it doesn’t help much. I was reminded of the Star Wars prequels’ debates over the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems. I’m not even sure if there really are seven kingdoms. I think some are extinct. Anyway, Orm plans to use the submarine in a false flag attack to unite however many kingdoms there are for a war against the surface dwellers. Because pollution of the oceans or something. Fortunately for him, Aquaman just abandons the still-functioning submarine after he defeats the pirates. The Russian Navy, inexplicably, makes no attempt to salvage it, thereby allowing Orm to just take it and make the movie happen.

In any case, not all Atlanteans are arming for war. The beautiful redhead Mera, daughter of the King of…one of the kingdoms, seeks out Aquaman and accosts him with a Call to Adventure: she begs him to come to Atlantis, challenge his brother for the throne, and thereby stop the war. True to the Hero’s Journey, Aquaman initially refuses. Not my circus, not my monkeys. But events conspire against him and before long he is under the sea, threatening Orm with an “ass-whooping.”

DC movies since 2005’s Batman Begins have a reputation for being grim. It even inspired a joke in rival Marvel’s Deadpool 2, in which Deadpool says to the straitlaced Cable, “You're so dark. Are you sure you're not from the DC universe?” But Aquaman has a different feel to it. Part of it is that, starting with last year’s Wonder Woman, DC is finally putting humor into its movies. For example, in one scene, Mera impulsively jumps out of an airplane—without a parachute. Seeing the shocked look of the pilot, Aquaman says, “Redheads, you gotta love them.”

But it’s not just the one-liners. Aquaman has a very different visual feel from previous entries in the DC Extended Universe. Instead of the grimy, hyper-realistic, claustrophobic urban setting of Gotham, we’re out in the open, in the vast spaces on the ocean surface—and beneath. The colors are bright. We even spend some time in a cheerful Mediterranean seaside village. The underwater CGI seascapes really dazzle.

But sadly, despite a very likable and kick-ass Aquaman, some funny one-liners, and stunning visuals, this movie isn’t that great. It's not terrible, there's no "Martha" moment. Just not great. The problem is the script. It just fails to sparkle in so many ways. I already mentioned the ponderous exposition and the plot hole concerning the submarine. The dialog is not up to par. What’s supposed to pass as witty, romantically-charged banter between Aquaman and Mera frequently falls flat. And once it is set into motion, the plot is entirely predictable. There is only one twist to speak of, and I saw it coming a mile away. I even knew exactly what the last scene was going to be long before the end.

Still, I hope Aquaman does well at the box office. Now that Jason Momoa has given the character a much-needed makeover, I’m eager to see him back in a better movie.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

The Dark Deco Knight

Batman: the Animated Series and Batman: Mask of the Phantasm.
Review by Kerey McKenna.

For our next entry in Noir November I wanted to take a look at the movie and TV series that more than any other imprinted noir and pulp sensibilities into my young mind: Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and Batman: the Animated Series. Not only are they among the best iterations of the Batman mythos; they're also a loving tribute to classic film noir.

In 1992, Warner Brothers Animation launched Batman:The Animated Series to much fanfare by old and young fans alike, a pulpy action cartoon with classic film noir aesthetics and sensibilities. Only a year later the production team managed to take their version of Batman to the big screen with the feature length Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, resulting in what I propose is one of the best Batman motion pictures ever made.

The narrative of the film actually takes place in two time periods, the “Present” of the TV series (a version of the 1990’s that looks uncannily like the 1950’s; more on that later) in which Batman is well-established as the protector of Gotham, and ten years prior, when a college-aged Bruce Wayne is about to begin his costumed crusade against crime. Going back and forth between the two eras is actually a great way to do the “Superhero origin story” and I’m a bit disappointed no millennial superhero movie has lifted the trick. A fully formed Batman bursts into action in the very first scene, and over the course of the film we get to peer back in time to see the moments that informed the man he would become. Unlike some origin stories of popular characters, these flashbacks don’t obsess about trying to explain every little piece of Batman’s iconography and signature weapons. Instead the grand insight offered by the flashbacks is Bruce Wayne’s state of mind in becoming Batman; along the way they also provide crucial clues to a mystery playing out in the present.

The film begins with present-day Batman doing a bit of gang busting to break up a counterfeiting ring. However things go sideways when a mysterious cloaked figure uses the chaos of the fight to single out the gang’s ring leader and dispatch him with lethal force.

While trying to uncover the identity and agenda of this mysterious Phantasm, Bruce Wayne is haunted by thoughts of more sanguine times, thanks to the return of old flame Andrea Beaumont to Gotham. We learn that ten years ago, just as young Bruce was taking his first forays into vigilante justice, he crossed paths with Andrea, and his caped crusade almost ended before it began. Andrea could have undone Bruce's plans for vengeance by offering him the alternative of a loving and happy life. Unlike the other women of high society—flighty, vain, and gold digging—Andrea knew tragedy through the death of her mother and could relate to the serious and brooding orphan Bruce Wayne on that level, while still offering him a chance at normalcy.

However it seemed destiny had other plans. Andrea mysteriously called off their engagement, leaving Bruce no choice but to throw himself wholeheartedly into his one-man war on crime.

Meanwhile in the present, the Phantasm appears to be targeting specific mobsters for a very personal, but as yet unknown grievance. A grandstanding politician pins the murders on Batman and sics every cop in Gotham who isn’t Commissioner Gordon on Batman’s trail. Further complicating matters, Batman’s archnemesis, the Joker, is on the Phantasm’s hit list and the Clown Prince of Crime decides the best defense is a good offense...and lots of explosives.

The past and present begin to converge as we learn how the Joker, the politician, the targeted mobsters, and the loss of Bruce’s lady love ten years ago are all connected.

With great pacing and a character-defining voice cast (Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill, voicing Batman and Joker respectively, would reprise these roles many times over the next twenty odd years), Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is a great entry in the superhero canon. But why am I bringing it up as noir?

Dark Deco Design

In 1989, Tim Burton’s summer blockbuster Batman introduced mainstream audiences to a Gotham far more grim and dark than they remembered from Adam West's 1960’s campy romp. Yet the new gothic take on the material didn’t deter kids (and adults) from shelling out millions of dollars for enough bat-themed bric-a-brac to fill two Bat Caves.

To coincide with the release of the sequel Batman Returns, Warner Brothers turned to their animation studio to keep the momentum going and further capitalize on the character with a Saturday morning cartoon show.

Instead of a toy-centric cash grab, however, the show’s creators set about creating a high quality program that would stand on its own merits as something beyond a movie tie-in. They kept the darker aesthetics of the Tim Burton movies and then leaned hard into anachronisms in the set and prop and character designs to create a style that would be referenced in Warner Animation well into the next century, Dark Deco or Deco Noir. The sets, props, and even the characters themselves have a geometric and streamlined look that is characteristic of the art deco movement, which had experienced a revival during the 1980’s. I believe this was also done as a statement of respect and homage to the Max Fleischer Superman Cartoons of the 1940’s which until then had been the high water mark for realizing a superhero in animation.

Viewers of Phantasm could be forgiven for believing the movie is set some time earlier in the 20th century. Gotham City appears to be stuck in the golden age of art deco design—1930's Streamline Moderne, to be precise, which would dominate city skylines for decades to come. In the TV show, unless it was a very specific piece of technology like a VCR or a supercomputer necessary for the plot, the denizens of Gotham appear to have universally decided nothing designed past 1960 was aesthetically pleasing. Eagle-eyed fans did spot on-screen calendars and documents indicating the show was taking place in the 90’s. However when I poured through the film for this review, I couldn’t spot any obvious anachronisms that would be alien to the 1950’s, save for Batman's crime fighting technology and Joker’s uncannily accurate mini auto-gyro drones.

Adding to the sense that the viewer is looking at something from another time, the creators translated era-appropriate editing and visual effects, such as certain screen wipes, vignetting, and discretion shot pan-aways. Speaking of discretion shots, since this Batman was ostensibly for a family audience, the creators had to work within constraints similar to those classic noir creators laboring under the Hayes production code. While mainstream “neo-noir” creators of the 90’s reveled in the freedom of R-ratings, Batman’s writers used the tricks of the trade of the 30’s and 40’s to sneak a bit of sex and violence into their noir tale but always left the most explicit material to the audience's imagination.

These 1930-50’s film aesthetics were then realized with an often dark palette. Famously, many visuals for the series and the movie were actually created by painting the art on black paper instead of the animation industry standard white. The creators were very careful with their use of light and shadow and the result was a film and TV series that didn’t look like anything else produced by American studios at the time.

Friends from out of town

Any film student worth their salt could tell you that a drastically tilted shooting angle in film can help convey unease, tension, or even madness. It was a popular technique in the film noir canon and also the often psychedelic Adam West Batman. The technique is referred to as a Dutch Angle or Dutch Tilt as it was introduced to American filmmakers primarily from German (Deutsch) impressionist films, and even actual Germans (and other Europeans) who came to the West after the two world wars and wove their own sensibilities into film production.

The Batman animated projects that launched in the 90’s also have another international influence on their style—the influence of the Far East. To meet their TV release schedule and a theatrical production time about one-third of what it took a contemporary studio like Disney to get something to the big screen, Warner Brothers

Akira (1988)

animation had to subcontract a lot of work overseas. For the film, they collaborated with Ong Yang Animations of South Korea and Spectrum Animation of Japan. And while American animated films and cartoons of the time typically weren’t dealing with more “cinematic” shot composition and mature subject matters, a lot of Eastern animation was.

In addition to providing resources for the tedious process of hand drawn animation, these two Asian studios brought much needed experience in how to produce the effects Warner Brothers was looking for. This resulted in…

Standing the Test of Time

A lot of work went into creating an animated Batman that would be taken seriously, and I argue that Batman: The Animated Series and its companion movie Mask of the Phantasm represent a definitive take on the character and mythos. At a time when a Marvel Cinematic Universe would have been considered a fever dream, an animated DC universe of interconnected TV series and further films had already sprung forth from this iteration of Batman. Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill have been called upon again and again to reprise their roles because to fans of my generation they are the voices of Batman and Joker. In this version of Batman, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. played Alfred not simply as a loyal, unquestioning servant, but as a man struggling to make sure that Bruce’s quixotic quest doesn’t end in more tragedy. This is the tone struck by every subsequent version of the character in TV and film. As for breakout character Harley Quinn, known to more recent audiences from her central role in 2016's Suicide Squad, she was invented for this series.

In honor of what this version of Batman has meant to fans, this Veterans Day weekend Warner Brothers is airing Batman: Mask of the Phantasm in select theatres throughout the country. If you, like me, are a longtime fan, or if you somehow missed it but are intrigued by anything I’ve described for you, I would highly recommend trying to get yourself a seat for a screening this holiday weekend.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Still Roaring

by Michael Isenberg

Congratulations to Wonder Woman, winner of the 2018 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, awarded last night in San Jose.

I still think, as I wrote last week, that Logan was by far the best science fiction movie of 2017, which is why I awarded it my NOT A HUGO Award. But sadly, it did not receive a nomination for the actual Hugos. Whether that was because it wasn’t sufficiently politically correct, or for some other reason, I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader. In any case, of the movies that were nominated (I’ll say it one last time: The Last Jedi? Seriously?), Wonder Woman was by far my favorite, and I’m glad to see it took home the silver rocket.

Here’s what I wrote about Wonder Woman when it came out last year. On reflection, I was concerned that perhaps, in my initial shock that the movie didn’t suck, my review was more glowing than the picture deserved. But I reread it today and I think I struck the right balance between the things that were awesome about Wonder Woman, and the things that needed improvement:

She is Wonder Woman: Hear her Roar! Sorry about the title. My friend Kerey committed me to it in his Introduction to Wonder Woman here on Nerds who Read. He told the whole world that if the movie was good, that was what I was going to call my review. If it wasn’t, the title was going to be “Blunder Woman.” So obviously it was good. In fact, it was awesome. Which disproves two beliefs that I've held for some time: 1) that Hollywood can’t make a good movie with a female superhero, and 2) that DC Comics can’t make a good movie with any kind of superhero. Over the years, legions of female superhero movies have bombed at the box office. Conventional wisdom in Hollywood was that female superheroes just didn’t sell. Brainy pundits put their intellectual heft behind various theories as to why not; the theories ran the gamut from sexism to sexism. Apparently the audiences were sexist for not going to these movies. But IMHO, the reason the audiences stayed away was because these movies just weren't very good. Read more…

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo credit(s): Indian Express

Where No Superhero Has Gone Before

The First Annual NOT THE HUGO Awards.
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Logan.
Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.

Welcome back to the first annual NOT THE HUGO Awards. I’m your host, Michael Isenberg, Editor-in-Chief of Nerds who Read.

Congratulations to the “The Last Novelist (or A Dead Lizard in the Yard),” winner of the award for Best Short Story.

Our final category is Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, which is Hugo-speak for movies.

Logan is unlike any superhero movie I can remember, and certainly unlike any in recent years. Honest Trailers put it best, “In a cinematic universe known for its huge casts, CGI, and mixed-up timelines, an X-Men movie will rise above its peers, by saying, ‘F—k that. We’re doing our own thing.’”

Their own thing is a tale of superheroes confronting old age. The year is 2029 and Logan (Hugh Jackman) is a shell of his former self. Sure, he can still kick ass, as he shows us in the opening scene: He takes down a gang of hoodlums who attempted to strip his car (with him napping inside) and then shot him when he told them not to strip the chrome plating off the lug nuts. Three dead, one with a severed hand, another missing a leg. But afterwards, Logan feels the aches and pains of the fight a lot more acutely than he used to. The bullets don’t pop out as easily, the wounds don’t heal as fast, he’s alcoholic, he needs reading glasses, and, in what Cinema Sins calls “the most brutal ED joke ever,” he struggles to fully extend his trademark adamantium claws. “Seeing you like this just breaks my damn heart,” one of the villains tells him, not entirely facetiously.

And yet, Logan is in pretty good shape compared to Charles Xavier—Professor X (Sir Patrick Stewart). Weak and senile, constantly complaining that no one listens to him, and chronically in need of a shave for the sparse white bristles that stubble his chin, the ninety year old Charles is suffering, in the words of another of the villains, “a degenerative brain disease in the world’s most dangerous brain. What a combo.”

A fatal combo. Charles is prone to uncontrollable seizures in which he radiates waves of telepathic energy. Those who are merely immobilized by it are the lucky ones. Many are killed. The movie begins about a year after the “Westchester Incident,” in which one such seizure injured six hundred people and killed seven mutants, bringing the X-Men and Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters to an ignominious end. Not that there was much need for the school anymore. No mutants had been born for a quarter of a century.

Now Charles and Logan are on the lam. Charles is hidden away in a fallen water tower on an abandoned Mexican industrial site. Logan is driving a limo for asshole conventioneers and exhibitionist bachelorettes, trying to earn enough money to maintain the supply of black market drugs Charles needs to control his seizures. Not that Charles shows any gratitude. “I guess you prefer me pharmaceutically castrated, rambling like a lunatic,” he tells Logan. “So much easier for you.”

“I know, Pop,” Logan replies. “I’m such a giant disappointment.”

Into this sad existence, Laura (Dafne Keen) tears in like a whirlwind. An eleven year old Logan clone—his daughter, if you will—Laura was created unbeknownst to him in a laboratory run by the evil Alkali-Transigen Corporation. (Must it always be an evil corporation?) And lest you wonder how a man’s clone can be a girl, well, see the comic books—it's explained there. Laura has escaped from the lab and now needs Logan’s help to drive her to North Dakota where she is supposed to rendezvous with the other escapees and cross over to Canada and safety. Or at least that’s the plan the nurse who helped her escape “read about,” apparently in an X-Men comic book. Logan is skeptical. But, following in the tradition of reluctant heroes that runs from Hamlet to Casablanca and beyond—he piles into the limo with Laura and Charles, and they start their drive north, an army of heavily armed, generously funded, and well-connected Alkali-Transigen henchmen hot on their trail.

Laura first appeared in Marvel Comics in 2004 as X-23. “Old Man Logan” made his pen and ink debut four years later. As in the movie, comic book Old Man Logan lives in a future dystopia where most of his friends and loved ones have died. Tired of being a hero, he travels the country with a sidekick (albeit it’s the blind Hawkeye rather than the senile Charles). But that’s where the resemblance ends and we must look beyond the comics for the movie’s inspiration.

Director James Mangold reportedly acknowledged creative debts to other road movies set in the American West, specifically Little Miss Sunshine and The Gauntlet. The Western, in general, is also an obvious influence, what with the wide open desert and mountain vistas seen throughout Logan, and the Spaghetti Western, in particular, with it gritty reality, which manifests in 2029 as dust, rust, and truck stops. The Western influence is explicit in a scene where Charles and Laura watch 1953’s Shane. This being a movie, the words uttered on the TV are improbably apropos to Logan’s struggle to leave his days of hurting people behind him—even when the hurt is in the name of heroism:

A man has to be what he is, Joey. Can't break the mold. I tried it and it didn't work for me…There's no living with...with a killing. There's no going back from one. Right or wrong, it's a brand. A brand sticks. There's no going back. Now you run on home to your mother, and tell her...tell her everything's all right. And there aren't any more guns in the valley.

The old man taking one last road trip is another well-worn trope that also clearly influenced Logan. As with the protagonists of Harry and Tonto, About Schmidt, and The Straight Story, the open road teaches Logan, as he approaches his end, what it was all about. The twist here, of course, is that the old man is a superhero.

And yet, the superhero movie is one genre that didn’t influence Logan.

Today’s superhero movies are painted big on the canvas: Gargantuan budgets in the $300 million range. Massive crossover events in which dozens of characters team up, for evil, or for good. Technology so advanced that the characters themselves argue over whether it’s science or magic. Extra-formidable villains with godlike powers. Some are even actual gods like Loki. All have ambitious plans to rule—or destroy—the universe, or at least vast swaths of it. Wagnerian soundtracks. And CGI. Lots and lots of CGI. CGI stunts that defy physics. CGI planetscapes with brilliant colors and more suns than you can shake a stick at. CGI characters who barely resemble anything human. CGI ‘splosions in which the CGI White House or the CGI Palace of Westminster is vaporized in a blaze of CGI firepower. And, in the case of last year’s Justice League, even a CGI upper lip to erase the mustache that Superman actor Henry Cavill was unwilling to shave.

I’ve long contended that CGI has ruined movies by substituting spectacular special effects for boring old fundamentals like plot, character, and dialog. Logan proves me right, by showing what a movie can be if it dials down the CGI a notch or ten. Logan is more of a small canvas, with a budget of “only” $97 million. It bucks all the other superhero movie trends as well. The technology of 2029 is little advanced over 2017, the only significant development being the widespread deployment of self-driving trailer trucks. The villains are just men who want the mutants under their control. One or two have cybernetic enhancements, but that’s the extent of their powers. None can fold time or wipe out half of human life with a snap of his fingers. The background music is subdued, often little more than mournful chords that evoke rain sliding down window panes. Long stretches of the film have no background music at all, which, incidentally, makes it a lot easier to hear the dialog.

The result is so incredible that the professional trolls on YouTube were at a loss as to how to make fun of it. Pitch Meeting hasn't even tried yet. Jeremy on the “Everything Wrong with Logan” video deducted eight sins, half of them for girl-Wolverine’s awesomeness and bad-assery. Don’t know if that’s a record, but it’s got to be up there. How it Should Have Ended had to pad its runtime with a nearly five minute X-Men musical number in the style of Les Miserables, an homage to another Hugh Jackman role. “Damn, this movie’s hard to make fun of,” Honest Trailers’ Epic Voice Guy lamented. “I got to call in some help.” He tries to enlist Deadpool, but the King of Snark refuses to play along: “Are you high? I’m not going to s—t on Logan. That film is a f—king masterpiece.”

It really is. Just the fact that they managed to put a kid in an adult franchise without having her be annoying (“Now this is pod racing”) is an accomplishment. As for the father-son relationship between Logan and the Professor, it’s an emotional wallop. This scene in which Logan carries Charles to his bed and tries to give the resistant professor his pills, is simultaneously funny and heartrending:

Logan: How about you blow on them to make them safe. Charles: F--k off, Logan. Logan: So you remember who I am now. Charles: I always know who you are. It’s just sometimes I don’t recognize you. Logan: Take the pills.

Despite his gruff exterior, I can’t help noticing that Logan takes the most tender loving care of the Professor. And even though nothing Logan ever does is good enough for him, in his more lucid moments, i.e. when he’s not shouting advertising copy for the Taco Bell quesalupa, the Professor is determined not to let his role as Logan’s teacher slip away. “You know, Logan,” he tells him, during the film’s Hawkeye’s Farm in Iowa moment, “This is what life looks like. A home. People who love each other. Safe place. You should take a moment and feel it…Logan. Logan! You still have time.”

As it happened, I first saw Logan during my own father’s final months. And although dad was never as dependent as Charles, the movie hit home hard. Writing this review has gotten me choked up more times than I care to admit.

I freely acknowledge that I may be biased by those personal circumstances, but I really think that Logan was not only the best science fiction movie of 2017, it was the best 2017 movie of any genre. Mr. Jackman and Sir Patrick’s performances were Oscar-worthy, a fitting curtain call for their seventeen year run as Wolverine and Professor X. Sir Patrick was so committed to his part in Logan that he lost twenty pounds to prepare for it. "I wanted to look sick and undernourished and stressed and frail and vulnerable," he told Variety. Alas, the hidebound Academy couldn’t see past Logan’s comic book origins. The movie garnered only a single B-list nomination, Best Adapted Screenplay and it didn’t even win that. I expected the Hugo Award voters, rooted in science fiction, to be more receptive, but they too gave Logan the snub. (I'll say it again: The Last Jedi? Are you serious?!) No doubt Logan didn't have enough about global warming.

But to redress these injustices is why I started NOT THE HUGOS, and I’m delighted to present the final award, Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, to Hugh Jackman, Sir Patrick Stewart, and Logan.

Tune in tomorrow to Nerds who Read, when Contributing Reviewer Kerey McKenna will review another of the actual Hugo nominees, Rebecca Roanhorse’s short story, “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™.” And join us next week, when we’ll look at the outcome of the Hugos and review some of the winners.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

An Ending I didn't Ant-ticipate

Ant-Man and the Wasp.
Movie review by Michael Isenberg.

The trailer promised “The perfect summer movie.” Ant-Man and the Wasp delivered: it’s exciting, it’s heartwarming, and it’s very funny. Just don’t think about it too much. Summer’s not for thinking.

The curtain rises on Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) under house arrest—fallout from fighting on the “wrong” side in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War (Go Team Cap!). But the Feds aren’t satisfied with having Scott under lock and key. They want his mentor, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), along with Hank’s daughter Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), the duo who furnished Scott the Ant-Man suit that gives him the power to shrink to ant-size and benefit from that insect’s proportional strength. So Hope and Pym are on the lam and needless to say they’re not too friendly to Scott these days.

Scott passes the long hours playing the drums, learning close-up magic from Internet videos, and staging elaborate make-believe heists in which he and his daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) crawl through ventilator shafts made of cardboard boxes and slither through laser grids made of string in order to “steal” his most precious possession: a trophy she had given him for his last birthday. It’s labeled “World’s Greatest Grandma.”

The time spent with Cassie, now about eight years old, is endearing, especially since for all we’ve heard about how she’s THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN HIS LIFE, we’ve seen very little of them together.

Alas, playtime must come to end when Scott has a peculiar dream: he finds himself in the persona of Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), Pym’s wife and Hope’s mom, seeing through her eyes and sharing her memories. We heard about Janet in the original Ant-Man movie—she was Hank’s partner in superheroics, the first to wear the Wasp suit, until she shrunk too small, slipped between the molecules, and never came back. Shaken by his oh-too-real dream, Scott contacts Pym and Hope, who know instantly what happened. After Scott himself went subatomic and did come back, Pym thought that there might be a possibility that Janet is alive and could be recovered. He and Hope have been working on opening a tunnel to the subatomic realm. Somehow, their first test run has caused Scott and Janet to become quantum entangled (or ant-tangled). And so Pym and Hope bury their differences with Scott—not very deeply—and set out to work with him to bring Janet back.

The technology involved is quite advanced and absolutely everybody wants to get their hands on it. What follows is a standard MacGuffin-driven plot, with a twist—the MacGuffin is a building, Pym’s lab, reduced to rollerboard size by his shrinking technology, complete with wheels and telescoping handle.

Our first contestant is Ava (Hannah John-Kamen), who has been quantum shifted out of phase with our reality thanks to a lab accident. She is unable to grab hold of ordinary matter—hence her moniker “Ghost.” Albeit, when she wears the special suit (yes, another suit) engineered by her guardian and mentor Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne), she turns into a formidable fighter. Foster and Ghost want to get their hands on Pym’s lab to shift Ava back.

Then there’s the shady arms dealer and restauranteur Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins) who wants to sell the technology on the black market.

Finally there’s FBI agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) who just wants to capture Hope and Pym and prove that Ant-Man has been sneaking away from his house arrest. Woo is mainly comic relief, and the humor is a little corny. He is constantly on the verge of catching Ant-Man away from home, only to burst into the house with a dozen agents and discover him there doing something comical like taking a bath. It reminded me of Dr. Bellows perpetually stymied efforts to catch Major Nelson in the 60s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. I kept expecting Woo to blurt out Bellows’ catch phrase, “He’s done it to me again.”

As the lab bounces from hand to hand, there’s no shortage of action. Scott’s fighting style is humorous as he quips his way through a series of technical failures, always a little surprised when something actually works. In contrast, Hope is all sting as the Wasp. She seriously kicks ass.

Everything leads up to a big car chase through the streets of that marvelous car chase city, San Francisco. I thought I knew every chase scene trope there is, but Marvel threw me for a loop. Because the dynamics change completely when vehicles can shrink to matchbox size or be restored to their original dimensions at the touch of a button.

So, big fun. But like I said, don’t think about it too much. The science is mostly technobabble. Even the characters think so. Scott’s old partner in crime Luis (Michael Peña) asks whether the more technologically-oriented characters just put the word “quantum” in front of everything to sound scientific. Michael Peña would be excellent at Cinema Sins. By the way, he steals every scene that he’s in. (On the downside, his car horn plays La Cucaracha. C’mon, Marvel. That’s racist.)

Ant-Man and the Wasp also suffers from the absence of any real conflict. Ghost is a formidable ant-tagonist, but she really isn’t a bad person, and in any case there’s no reason why her interests are incompatible with Pym’s. As for Sonny and Woo, they never really pose a serious challenge to our heroes.

The trailer makes another promise: “The ending will ROCK. YOUR. WORLD.” They weren’t kidding. I literally gasped during the mid-credit scene—although upon reflection, I should have seen it coming. But if you want to find out what happens, you’ll have to see the movie. And if, after seeing it, you want more Ant-Man, be sure to check out the 2015 prose novel Natural Enemy, which I reviewed last week.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

Star Wars Expanded Universe: The Movie(s)

Part 2. Why Disney thought a Solo movie was a good bet, and why they were wrong.
By Kerey McKenna.

Han Solo always believed that he could do it all by himself and carry the day on pure bravado. Could he carry a movie?

No.

It looks like despite the hype and the Star Wars brand name, the Solo origin movie had a rough opening weekend.

Reviews are in, and they are mixed, including mine. The movie made money, but not Marvel movie money. In case any Disney employees are reading this and their job depends on explaining to the higher ups why they thought a Han Solo origin movie was going to do well, maybe this little history review will help remind everybody why Solo seemed like a decent bet.

Licensing Agreements: More Powerful Than You Could Possibly Imagine

It’s no exaggeration to say that when Star Wars premiered in 1977, it didn’t so much break the mold as create a new one: blockbuster as cultural phenomenon. But perhaps even more significantly, it created fortunes in merchandising beyond the dreams of avarice, or as Mel Brooks called it in Spaceballs, "Moichandizing." THE SEARCH FOR MORE MONEY.

Pre-Star Wars, knick-knacks like toys and memorabilia were considered a nice way to turn a little extra profit leading up to a movie’s premiere or the Christmas Shopping Season. However, Star Wars mania drove demand for Star Wars merchandise year round, year after year. Kenner Toys, seeking to fatten the Golden Goose of their licensing agreement for action figures and vehicles, started creating new characters and vehicles to sell. When Marvel, which had the comic book rights to the original trilogy, ran out of shooting script to adapt into pen and ink, they ordered their writers and artists to start making new content to continue the adventures of Luke, Leia, and Han. Having cannily negotiated for merchandising rights of his creation, George Lucas was willing to let his license holders start expanding the Star Wars saga with new content. With the exception of the laughable 1970’s-style variety show Star Wars Holiday Special, which was intended to be a narrative bridge between Star Wars and the upcoming Empire Strikes Back, the hard core fans, general public, and nascent collectibles speculators’ market welcomed anything with the Star Wars brand on it.

After seemingly concluding his big screen saga with 1983’s Return of the Jedi, Lucas appeared to have no interest in continuing the series on film and went about tending the Star Wars merchandising empire. With only some TV projects in the mid-80’s aimed at younger fans, (two animated series, Star Wars:Droids and Star Wars: Ewoks, and two made-for-TV live action movies centered on the Ewoks, Ewok Adventures and Battle For Endor), adult fans gravitated to novels, comics, and video games that were set in…

THE STAR WARS EXPANDED UNIVERSE

"After Star Wars was released, it became apparent that my story—however many films it took to tell—was only one of thousands that could be told about the characters who inhabit its galaxy. But these were not stories that I was destined to tell. Instead, they would spring from the imagination of other writers, inspired by the glimpse of a galaxy that Star Wars provided. Today, it is an amazing, if unexpected, legacy of Star Wars that so many gifted writers are contributing new stories to the Saga."–George Lucas, introduction to the 1996 reprinting of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye

In 1978, still riding the runaway success of Star Wars, but with the future of the saga still uncertain, George Lucas gave his blessing for what is considered to be the first official work of Star Wars fiction he did not author himself, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. Alan Dean Foster, who had ghostwritten the official New Hope novelization, created a new story based on Lucas’s ideas for a sequel assuming 1) the studio severely cut their budget and 2) Harrison Ford didn’t sign on to return as Han Solo. Instead of the planet hopping and ship-to-ship battles of Star Wars, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye is a more focused tale of Luke and Leia fighting their way through a jungle planet to keep a powerful McGuffin, er artifact, from the clutches of Darth Vader (with no startling revelations about heredity). Small potatoes when compared to the actual sequel Empire Strikes Back, but just the thing for fans that wanted more adventures of the brave farm boy and the fearless space princess.

From these humble beginnings sprang an entire literary universe of prose novels and later comics set in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Over the years Lucas and his publishing partners set up a stable of creative talent to tell more Star Wars, sometimes about the main cast, sometimes about the supporting cast, sometimes just a walk-on appearance, and ultimately about some original characters. Under Lucas and his paid continuity guardians, creative teams were given license to weave narratives around the existing three movies and the further adventures of the main cast and their offspring.

Through George Lucas’s in-house video game company, LucasArts, and its subcontractors, the canon expanded into ones and zeros with video games like Shadows of the Empire, Dark Forces, and Rogue Squadron. In turn, to promote the games, prose and graphic novelizations of the video game storylines were created.

Without the guarantee of new movies, the Star Wars saga now thrived in a seemingly self-sufficient ecosystem of prose, comics, and video games. Even when the infamous prequels dropped, the Expanded Universe not directly under Lucas’ control continued to turn out work that kept fans engaged. For example the animated series The Clone Wars: As a weekly serial, it was limited by a TV budget, but it had more screen time than the movies in which to unfold a more epic war story that arguably used Lucas’s characters better (yes, even JarJar Binks) than Episodes I, II and III.

Given the argle-bargle about subsequent Star Wars projects, whether they were helmed by Lucas or Disney, I think many fans would have been happier if no new big screen projects were created. They would say that they wished the Han Solo origin trilogy could have been brought to life. Or that they want to see the adventures of the Jedi Academy and that one kid Han and Leia had that turned to the Dark Side. And maybe the story of unknown and unsung spies working to bring down the Death Star in Dark Forces would make a good movie someday.

They would have said that, and some may even still believe that their favorite piece of authorized fiction would have made a better Disney Star Wars movie, but...

The new Star Wars movies are the Expanded Universe writ large

The new Disney overlords of the franchise may have declared their intentions to create a new Expanded Universe, but it’s a cash crop planted in the remnants of the previous harvest. Invariably a generation of creators raised on the original Star Wars Expanded Universe (now dubbed “Legends”) have already started taking characters and plots from the old works and putting them into the new. And back on the big screen, both entries in the “Star Wars Story” movies, Rogue One and Solo, are authorized fiction novels blown up into feature films. Between the two of them they pretty much encompass how an Expanded Universe property usually played out, either a group of wholly new characters providing a new point of view and elaborating back story for previously established events (Rogue One) or giving characters we met in previous movies origin stories and more adventures (Solo). The whole endeavor has the same freedoms and constraints as the novelizations did. Because Star Wars doesn’t deal in time travel (yet), there isn’t the setup that was used in the JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot films that “it’s a new timeline so characters don’t have their plot armor.” Any new projects can doodle in the margins of Star Wars canon but they can’t erase the whole texts.

Rogue One and Solo aren’t direct adaptations of any particular pieces of Expanded Universe prose but rather are distillations of the whole experiment. There were novels based around the fighting men and women of the galactic civil war and the espionage that was required to thwart the Death Star. Before Solo there was a trilogy of novels fleshing out the adventures of young Han and how he met Chewbacca and acquired the Falcon.

So if prose, comics and video games were keeping the saga alive and thriving before, and even after the prequels, than it stood to reason that audiences would adore these distillations of the expanded universe right?

“Your overconfidence is your weakness” - Luke Skywalker, Return of the Jedi

Expanded universe novels have made number one on the New York Times bestseller list (even during times when no new movie was anticipated). The post 2000 Star Wars TV shows (Clone Wars (2003), The Clone Wars (2008), and Rebels 2014) ran for a combined fourteen years. So for Disney, flush with the success of its Marvel films, doubling down on another nerdy shared universe seemed like a safe bet.

However, with Solo stumbling on the starting block, it looks like Disney may have to keep some things in mind going forward, the first being that while the Expanded Universe did maintain and expand the value of the brand, it often did it as a niche product for invested fans, not with the all-demographic mass appeal of the original movies. They may also be coming up against the event fatigue I wrote about previously in the context of comic book universes. Audiences may not be ready to have each Star Wars movie come so close to the last. It took Marvel Studios films a bit of time to build up that kind of momentum and audience goodwill.

Whether Disney will hit its stride with the Star Wars films or ease off and greenlight fewer movies, we will just have to wait and see.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.