I'm reading a draft of @dilmandila 's THE BLOSSOMING OF THE BIG TREE where an autistic grandma must coordinate the defense of her #solarpunk utopian federation from colonialist invaders, and one thing I find really interesting is the "old person PoV" as a counterpart — with both similarities and contrasts — to "fish out of water" (think Luke Skywalker, Bilbo Baggins, and many many mostly young sword-and-sorcery or isekai/rebirth protagonists) for exposition. An older character's PoV can be a very effective way to worldbuild from the perspective of a character who has lived through upheaval and change, and can be particularly effective in near-future #scienceFiction like Blossoming where the distance between our time and the time of the story can be bridged with the PoV character's lived experience, as in this passing thought from the protagonist Adita:

¶The caller . . . was two thousand miles away in what used to be southern Tanzania. Even after all these years, she oriented herself by placing people in their old countries.

See how Adita, located in present-day #Uganda, thinks like us in terms of nation-states while living in a future where many of those states are gone, helping the readers in turn orient themselves geographically with the information? And it's such a particular effect that our mode of nation-centric thought, shared with this elderly character, is a faintly embarrassing throwback in the book's timeline.

And yet the book isn't ageist about this: Adita isn't just some grognard who can't get with future but very much at home with the new technology and reality, a resourceful, adaptive figure who's poised to play a central role in the survival of her community almost in spite of herself. I find this interweave of technique, character, and story fascinating and am eager to read on.

You can pre-order Dilman Dila's THE BLOSSOMING OF THE BIG TREE here ododopress.com/novellas/the-bl… or grab an ARC of the current draft with a BookSirens account! booksirens.com/book/BUG035E/WX…

#amReading @writingbooks @bookstodon

Mars After Midnight: Run a Late-Night Intergalactic Community Support Centre 🪐🌃

Here’s the very first Playdate game we played! Mars After Midnight is from indie game legend Lucas Pope, the man responsible for the likes of the highly inventive The Return of Obra Dinn (2018).

It’s a fantastic coup for Playdate as his latest project is an exclusive for the handheld. And this is a marvel of a game—funny, weird, wonderful, and so much more.

What’s it about? An Off-Colony Community Support Centre simulator for a bunch of aliens that starts at 1am. We can dig that.

Entrant-Screen Support Sessions for Aliens in Mars After Midnight

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=xRuG9Ooe9h…]

As the player, you run a support group that begins in the early morning. You have to pick what sessions to offer local aliens, such as Cyclops Anger Management and various other things.

You need to promote each session during the day by putting up posters. Plus, you need to pick a tasty snack for the night for your attendees to enjoy.

Once you’ve set that all up, you act as the doorman. Aliens knock on the door, you have to screen them, decide whether to let them in, and clear up their dining experience (if you do let them in).

Every time they eat the bastards make a hell of a mess, so you need to sweep everything up super fast before other arrivals crop up.

Intrigued? Well, here are the first seven minutes in action.

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=qNSrqCsa0-…]

To help improve your community support, you can buy stuff such as a translation box (the Blab-o-Dex). This helps you work out what aliens are saying.

That’s vital, as you can use its translations to work out if the aliens are actually invited. Or just there to try and cadge some free cake.

All this stuff is similar in theme to Lucas Pope’s famous Papers Please (2013) where players must screen individuals before they can enter a totalitarian state.

Mars After Midnight is much more silly and offbeat than Papers, Please, which is quite the nerve-wracking experience. Instead, here you’ve got a lovable sci-fi sim that doesn’t take itself very seriously.

There’s about three hours of gameplay. Plus, you get a fantastic and crisp visual style alongside a brilliant retro styled soundtrack that works itself into your brain.

Although the looping support sessions may feel a little repetitive from time to time, there are enough fun little embellishments to the experience to make it one of the best Playdate games.

Mars After Midnight’s Use of THE CRANK!

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=MRjRt4NSfK…]

Behold above the might of THE CRANK!

Okay, so a big (and super epic, like) gimmick with the Playdate is its crank. It’s not super essential to the Mars After Midnight Experience, but its use shakes up proceedings in fun and inventive ways.

Although it’s not a gesture-based game, it does have that feel about it.

You have to clock in for your shift, for example, which requires you to jam in your slot card to a machine. There are a lot of satisfying crunchy moments like that with this title and the Playdate’s retro two button feel.

Retro Gaming Bloops and Bleeps—The Fantastic Sound Design to Mars After Midnight

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=Q7uQHc4dTz…]

There’s a rather good retro soundtrack to go with Mars After Midnight. It gets into your skull and you feel the urge to listen to.

All very Game Boy, but with modern flourishes. We’re digging it!

A Few of Lucas Pope’s Intriguing Dev Notes on Mars After Midnight

Over on this Itch.io account, Pope ran a dev log for Mars After Midnight.

He provided extensive dev log notes about creating the game. We get the impression it was a fun and engaging experience for him, the technology of the Playdate offering a much different type of experience.

“The Playdate is a lot of fun to work with — fantastic 1-bit Sharp screen, novel crank input, simple development API, and great support from Panic.

I puttered around trying to find a good concept that I felt worked well with the hardware and this is basically where I ended up. Unlike most of my dire last few games I’m gonna try to make this one a little more light-hearted. Something my kids might like.

Right now the concept is still pretty thin. Think Papers Please, -lite, with no border checkpoint, no desk, no paperwork, on Mars. Actually maybe don’t think that. I only have the elements of a game and not the full thing yet, so things are still pretty open-ended.”

One of the reasons for making the game was to entertain his kids. Particularly with the designs of the aliens and their expressive, weird faces.

Notes on the Face Generator

Pope provided a full face generator update in 2023 (you can also refer to making martian faces if you fancy a few more creative details), which has loads of details about how game development works.

Of the aliens, when you’re screen these dudes prior to the support sessions, you really get a good look at their peculiar mugs.

To make them, Pope did the following!

“The face generator is written in Python but in a C-like style that could potentially port to full C. The idea was to eventually move the code to run on-device and generate an infinite number of faces at runtime.

As the game design solidified I realized this runtime generation wasn’t going to happen. For one, it’s not really necessary: I can generate thousands of faces offline and just include them in the game — each face is just a few kb.

Second, the face generator is not quick. Part of the problem is Python’s leisurely pace but even with conversion to C and heavy optimizations it’d never be as quick as loading a small PNG on-device.”

All these intricate details highlight how difficult game development. How time-consuming. They go to all this effort for people’s entertainment and we find it quite the marvel.

Synthesising Martian Speech

In Mars After Midnight, you have to decode alien speech. This is important during pre-support session screenings. They say stuff like that dude above.

Once again, Pope provided fantastic and detailed insights into this. Check out his dev log: synthesizing martian speech.

“Before there were neural networks and machine learnings to do all our computer talking, speech was generally synthesized by modeling the vocal cords and resonant cavities of the mouth. There’s decades of research into this and probably the most well-known classic example is SAM the Software Automatic Mouth from the early 80’s.”

The example on his page will be familiar to all of us. Stephen Hawking used it with his speech-generating device after his ALS progressed.

However, now we have speech synth systems. Pope would announce vowels into the system, before adding crossfading them for an AHYEEYAH sound. However, this didn’t work! So, the plucky developer created some code to transform the voice.

“In-game, the vowel synth keeps track of which formant sets are used in a word, and the game logic can query which one is currently playing. The full voiced list of aeioumr is reduced down to aom for the mouth frame selection. Add a little shake and bob’s your uncle.”

The fantastic amount of effort he went in to here is highly commendable. Not least with the Blab-o-Dex translation device, which turns the alien’s distorted gurgling into understandable English.

Pope has also uploaded sound design processes to his YouTube channel.

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=hxu8U91ALD…]

It’s quite uncommon to see a dev go to this much detail with their creative process, but we’re doffing our old man caps to him on this one.

Great game. Maximum effort. Ingenuity overload.
#Creativity #Entertainment #Fun #gaming #IndieGames #Lifestyle #LucasPope #MarsAfterMidnight #Playdate #sciFi #ScienceFiction

Professional Moron

2024-04-14 15:00:38

Playdate Console Review: Crank Up the Fun on the Run! 🟨

Given how yellow is our favourite colour, we really couldn’t resist the indie/retro gaming allures of the Playdate handheld.

This diddy little thing is from American company Panic Inc. in Portland, Oregon. It launched in April 2022 and is available for shipping worldwide at £150 ($199).

It’s a mini-handheld thing and kind of a homage to the Game Boy whilst featuring cute, inventive, and quirky little games that put fun at the forefront.

The Playdate is PROOF Yellow Makes for the Best Fun in the World 🟨

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=HdF3CnFvxg…]

It says everything you need to know about our gaming sensibilities we wanted a Playdate over something like a PlayStation 5.

The handheld is a merger of the old with the new, featuring a black and white display screen, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a nifty little speaker (plus, a slot for earphones). You charge it up by a USB cable that fits into a PC, Apple charger, whatever else.

The console really is tiny and fits in the palm of your hand!

You can flip THE CRANK (more on that further below) out of the side and use it to manipulate in-game activities.

All the games on it are exclusives, too, and when you get your Playdate you gradually get 24 free games as part of the gaming seasons the device launches. Apparently, there are now well over 400 games on this thing!

You download games straight to the device, play them, enjoy, and yeah… that’s it! Simple but mighty effective, this yellow thing has been charming us over the last week. Much love! 🟨

Some of the Best Playdate Games Out There

The Playdate has exclusive games. This is the big appeal of the thing, the range of fun little unique concepts on the go ONLY available on this handheld.

The games are super cheap and are usually around the £5 mark ($6.50).

How you buy them is even great fun—you manipulate the crank to confirm purchases. For that draining physical effort, you get gems such as these.

Mars After Midnight

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=xRuG9Ooe9h…]

This one is by Lucas Pope. That’s the man behind some of the most iconic indie games, including brilliant puzzle romp Return of Obra Dinn (2018).

And it’s probably the biggest release on the Playdate yet—a real score for the handheld as an exclusive.

Mars After Midnight is just magnificent. It’s really credit to Pope he can take such a concept and turn it into this, packed with brilliant little details (the alien translation box is a delight) and simultaneously get you doing the dishes.

This is the type of thing we wanted from the Playdate and it delivers big time, with a strange alien landscape playing out with free snacks and mental health sessions (one of which is flatulence-based… hurray!).

Root Bear

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=TOK_aDS1RV…]

Root Bear initially appears a bit idiotic, not helped by how it took off on the ever-annoying TikTok as a fad of the short attention span moment.

However, once you give it several goes… it gets mega addictive!

You have to pour drinks up to a certain point, using the ever-present Playdate crank, and get rated on your pouring techniques.

Once you’ve mastered the basics (and stop the wild wailing the character does if you get it wrong, including a mighty Wilhelm Scream) it becomes a high scoring and speedrunning dream.

Mega Dystopia Micro Architect (MDMA)

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=rkeMNxm6h_…]

Solo indie dev gytiszal is responsible for what some people thing is the Playdate’s very best game. We’ve got round to playing it yet, but it’s a relaxing city builder game.

The idea is to plan out a city, but everything is very slow paced and chillout. From what we’ve heard so far, MDMA also boasts one of the Playdate’s best soundtracks.

OOM

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=hm9LUK7xTe…]

Yes, a rhythm game! Makes sense that someone would try this out with the Playdate’s crank thing. OOM is the one!

You have to yank the crank to the beat and manoeuvre your little dude to safety. A neat little concept.

Gun Trails

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=_GscxQLpRl…]

A fast-paced and already notoriously difficult space shooter, Gun Trails is an adaptation of a classic genre. It’s the usual stuff—shoot, boom, ratta tatt.

Gun down the enemy spaceships ahead of you and revel in the glory.

Under the Castle

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=5jRst88aBR…]

This is one of the most ambitious efforts available. Under the Castle is a mini-RPG experience, highlighting just what this little console can do.

There are roguelite elements with strategy. Alongside its great audio and crystal clear visual style, this is arguably the best RPG on the system.

Cranking Up the Playdate’s Cranky Crank

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=npUOw88NJ2…]

Okay, so the crank. What is it? Basically, it’ s an analog controller. You can see it in action above on Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure.

The thing (the crank) is tucked into the side of the Playdate. There’s a satisfying motion to bring the crank out, which also makes the console do one of its retro gaming style bleeps.

You can use the crank to navigate across the menu screens, too, but its main purpose is the in-game stuff. Not all games use is, but the likes of Root Bear put it to super effective use.

Some suggest the crank is a gimmick. It kind of is, but for us it reinforces what the Playdate is all about—fun. A bit of a laugh with a handheld that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Closing Thoughts: Bringing Yesteryear Into the Now Year With a Crank 🟨

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=Q22-SRx4Fe…]

It’s easy to swoon for the Playdate. There’s a very active community Panic is providing, with a podcast series available and regular Nintendo Direct styled updates on what’s coming up releases wise.

The yellow little thing has slotted neatly into our lifestyle.

At the moment we’ve found ourselves enjoying it in the hour or so before bed, experiencing the various unusual game concepts and revelling in its Game Boy homage qualities.

However, we’ll soon be taking it with us on commuting trips, too.

The fantastic portability of the device, plus its accessibility, have really charmed us over one, dammit.

Problems? Some gamers have an issue with the lack of a backlight on the screen. We’ve not had any real bother with that, it’s not like the Game Boy era where you had to battle like crazy to see anything.

But we have had a few post-game-purchase download issues where error messages pop up. When you turn the console off, it downloads eventually. But the errors can get a bit frustrating (we presume this issue will iron itself out at a later date).

Cripes, that aside, we love the thing.

If you’re a fan of retro gaming, or just want to shake up your gaming routine with something accessible and fun (with a big emphasis on FUN), the Playdate is for you. 🟨
#Cute #Entertainment #Fun #GameBoy #gaming #handheldConsole #IndieGames #PanicInc #Playdate #Retro #RetroGaming #Technology #Yellow

Mars After Midnight - Launch Trailer

Mars’ citizens need your help! Mars After Midnight is a silly entrant-screening, mess-tidying, session-planning work simulator for Playdate developed by Luca...

^{Panic (YouTube)}

„Stahllilie“ verlässt das Programm von Tiny Tusk

Wer auf Meta und Tiktok unterwegs ist, wo die Verlegerin die News gepostet hat, hat es bereits mitbekommen. Die gesamte Stahllilie-Reihe verlässt das Programm von Tiny Tusk zum 22.03.2026 (das ist die LBM nächstes Jahr).

Weil ich bereits darauf angesprochen wurde:

Zwischen der Verlegerin und mir besteht kein böses Blut. Wir haben uns nicht gestritten, es gab im Hintergrund kein Drama. Ich lektoriere regelmäßig für den Verlag und kann euch außerdem bald was echt Schönes ankündigen, woran das Team lange gewerkelt hat.

Der Grund ist ganz banal: Die Reihe verkauft sich nicht.

Martina hat sich echt ins Zeug gelegt. Alle Bände haben eigens angefertigte, digitale Illustrationen erhalten, es gab zu allen Bänden hochwertiges Merchandising und nachdem 2020 sehr viele Messen weggefallen sind, hat sie die Bücher alle zusätzlich via Print on Demand bei Epubli zugänglich gemacht, um sie in den deutschen Buchhandel zu bringen. Wer schon mal gesehen hat, was Versand von Österreich nach Deutschland heißt, versteht vermutlich, warum das auf diesem Weg passiert ist.

Der erste Band hat sogar ein komplettes Revamp bekommen – ein neues wunderschönes Cover von Nika S. Daveron (womit sich definitiv ein Traum von mir erfüllt hat, ich wollte immer schon ein Cover von Nika!), einen erwachseneren Titel und das Innenleben wurde auch noch mal von mir auf Anachronismen und Sprache durchgeschaut und neu gesetzt.

Diese Betreuung ist nicht selbstverständlich. Ich fühlte mich ehrlich gesagt die ganze Zeit ziemlich verwöhnt.

Wir haben alles versucht, was in meiner Macht als unbekanntes Licht und in Martinas Macht als Kleinverlegerin liegt. Aber wenn es nicht klappt, dann klappt es nicht.

Wir haben uns also einvernehmlich darauf geeinigt, dass Danas Abenteuer nur noch bis zum nächsten Frühjahr unter dem Banner der winzigen Orkzähnchen zu finden sein wird.

Wie es danach weitergeht, weiß ich noch nicht. Ich hoffe, ich vergesse nicht, es euch dann zu erzählen.

Aber falls ihr die Novellenreihe noch in genau der Variante haben wollt, in der sie vorliegt: Kauft Martina die Lager leer, ja? Dies ist der Link direkt zur Stahllilie-Reihe im Verlagsshop.

Wenn ihr euch anschauen wollt, um was es überhaupt geht, findet ihr auf meiner Homepage jeweils Informationen und Bonusmaterial.

Das ist Band 1:

feuerblut.com/meine-werke/feue…

Ich hoffe, dass ihr der kleinen Novellenreihe noch ein bisschen Liebe gebt, bevor sie aus dem Verlagsprogramm verschwindet. Und auch darüber hinaus – über Details darüber halte ich euch gerne auf dem Laufenden!
#SchreibendenLeben #ScienceFiction #Stahllilie #Vertragsende

Cel-paint with all the colors of the wind!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscars Quest ’26 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony. Among other perks, sometimes it means movies I was thiiis close to watching last year get a second chance to slot into my free time.

Arco played at last year’s Heartland Film Festival and was on my viewing shortlist, but its lone showtime wound up among the several I missed due to schedule conflicts amid that great cinematic feast. One of two French nominees for Best Animated Feature this year, it played here in Indy for a single Oscar-season week before it flew off like a rainbow-streaking rocket toward the sunset.

The Gist: First-time writer/director Ugo Bienvenu takes us to a distant future where humankind lives far above the messes left below, in houses mounted on mile-high hurricane-resistant columns rising above the clouds. Time-travel suits are a thing, and they fly, and they leave rainbow trails everywhere they zoom around, and their future doesn’t have iridophobic culture-warriors who try to shoot them down. But to keep all that future-wonder in check, users must be at least twelve years old. Our li’l rascal Arco (voiced by Juliano Krue Valdi, who’ll be playing a certain young King of Pop in the upcoming Michael) is the youngest in a loving family of five, who grabs a suit and illegally sneaks away because he just really wants to see some super awesome dinosaurs live in person for his birthday, and watching Jurassic World 316 for the third time just isn’t the same, even with 64K holodeck visuals and Hyper-Deluxe Smell-O-Rama.

But the inexperienced lad fumbles the controls and only skips back to the tad-less-distant future of 2075, where he meets a girl about his age named Iris (Romy Fay). In her era, Facetime is now 3D holograms and robots have replaced all the schoolteachers and nannies. Her parents (Marvel superheroes Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo) entrust her in the care of one — whose voice is both actors’, cleverly intertwined — while they both stay in The City during the workweek, kinda like Don Draper minus the adultery. The two lonely youngsters meet-cute in a park, where Arco’s suit is damaged so he can’t return home. While they quest to replace the broken piece, they’re stalked by a trio of weirdos resembling a neurotic British Invasion band except for their matching scalene-rimmed rainbow sunglasses (Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea, a trio of typecasting). Wacky chases and colorful flights through pretty backdrops ensue.

The familiar voices: In addition to those named above, the English dub released to American theaters includes Barbie‘s America Ferrara as Arco’s mom. Fun trivia: his dad is voiced by Roeg Sutherland, one of Kiefer’s brothers, whose day-job is at top Hollywood talent agency CAA.

I’d hoped to catch a subbed showing with the original French voices rather than the dub, but I misunderstood the theater’s app listing, which said it would be “subtitled”. What they meant was captions for the hearing impaired. They’re the only theater in town that offers this (which I appreciated for Hamnet and Living), but it isn’t what I’d expected. Those distinctive famous voices kept dispelling the illusion of the faraway idyll, especially whenever Ruffalo or Ferrell spoke.

I looked up the French cast anyway and was surprised to find any overlap with my viewing history. As it happens, Swann Arlaud, a.k.a. Anatomy of a Fall‘s defense attorney, is Iris’ father; and Louis Garrel, the German professor in Jo’s building in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, is one of the weirdos. (Farther out on the fun-trivia limb: Alma Jodorowsky, granddaughter of filmmaker and comics writer Alejandro Jodorowsky, is Iris’ mother.)

The Impressions: As time-travel sci-fi goes, Arco is extremely mild-mannered in both tone and consequence. Arco gets a single moment shouting, “No one should know the future…ever!”, but it’s a perfunctory shrug at butterfly-effect cognizance. He’s not even supposed to be here today, but his initial concerns about breaking the spacetime continuum are fleeting — no signs later that anything he does might’ve had repercussions in the end, neither devastating nor subtle. If his actions in this film somehow thwarted the rise of an alt-timeline where Iris would’ve died or turned into Distant-Future Nazi Edith Keeler if not for his unplanned intrusion, the world may never know.

Temporal mechanics and fraught tension aren’t among Bienvenu’s vested interests. Eventually we realize the weirdos aren’t quite the menaces we first thought despite all the chasing, but just as the lines of communication open, SUDDENLY THERE BE WILDFIRES. IS DISASTER FILM NOW. EVERYONE RUN RUN RUN OR DIE. Maybe in 2075 the environment is such a ubiquitous threat to life on Earth that spontaneously combustive viruses are a thing. The surprise catastrophe doesn’t get much foreshadowing setup, so the final act is mostly a Doctor Who team-sprint.

But for animation lovers, the real star here was never the plot or characters anyway. Bienvenu and his team offer a warm delicacy in their 2D animation, clearly Miyazaki-influenced but with rounder European edges for a slightly more Westernized design. (In comics terms, the house style here is on a spectrum between Mark Buckingham and Scott McCloud’s Zot!) Whether in the gentle scenes between two lonesome kids exploring the joy of human connection, or in the heavenward sequences after the magic suit’s inevitably fixed (as if that were in doubt), Arco is a slight yet nonetheless welcome 90-minute pleasantry.

I got a bit fidgety while watching, but afterward it was almost restful contemplating the little joys Arco brought Iris in her dysfunctional present — i.e., the underplayed hopes that It Gets Better. After all, she’s just learned the future has flying suits! And time travel! And way more man-made rainbows! And, because in time’s cyclical nature everything old is eventually new again, the future will also have loving in-person families! Maybe if there’s a sequel we’ll learn Arco’s era is so peachy-keen that all the human teachers also got their jobs back.

The end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Arco end credits, but the job titles are rendered in a prismatic color-changing font for value-added scintillation.

Midlife Crisis Crossover!

2025-10-21 03:06:44

The Heartland International Film Festival 2025 Season Finale

Our Sunday night view from the balcony of the Tobias Theater at Newfields. The slideshow still is from last year’s world premiere of ReEntry.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Once again I took a week’s vacation from my day job and posted for eight consecutive days about the six films I saw at three theaters in nine days, one virtual screening we’ll get to in a moment, plus a few other entries that included still another movie, albeit more of an anti-Heartland studio product that opened the same weekend. I doubt anyone out there read every single word, but I’m not even done yet!

For those just joining us, those six films were as follows, ranked:

• Happy Birthday
• Blue Moon
• It Was Just an Accident
• Nuremberg
• Christy
• The Invisible Half

…and I was overjoyed to learn Happy Birthday — the tiny, heartbreaking, Egyptian child-maid drama from the makers of Marvel’s Moon Knight — had won the festival’s Narrative Feature Grand Prize. I’m usually lousy at prognosticating their winners. It really is worth seeking out, but as of this writing it has no distribution deal and is still making the festival-circuit rounds. Among the others, The Invisible Half (which made its U.S. debut at Heartland) is in the same boat. Blue Moon and It Was Just an Accident opened in limited release this past weekend (read: NYC and L.A.), while Christy and Nuremberg will begin rolling out in November. It was fun standing on a level playing field with the Big Two for a few days.

For viewers who wanted to travel less, Heartland also offered a selection of virtual screenings for certain films. My wife Anne and I availed ourselves of one such option last Saturday night…

Frank Grunwald in Sweet Lorraine in Auschwitz.

From local filmmaker Philip Paluso, Sweet Lorraine in Auschwitz is a documentary produced by the Indianapolis Jewish Community Relations Council about Frank Grunwald (1932-2023) — an Indianapolis resident for years, jazz accordionist since childhood, and Holocaust survivor. Through a series of interviews conducted before his passing, Grunwald opens up about his happy family life in Czechoslovakia before die Anschluss in Austria segued to the Nazi seizure of his homeland (as we saw chronicled in the 2016 film Anthropoid, with Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan).

Once they were forced out of their home, Grunwald’s perilous journey over the next several years would have them enduring cruel imprisonment in the “spa town” of Theresienstadt, then transferred to the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. He remembers the last time he ever saw his mother and brother alive (accompanied by a heartbreaking reading of the last lines from his mom’s last letter to his dad), then separation from his dad, who was shipped off to Sachsenhausen while — through lifesaving kindnesses involving a criminal-turned-kapo and a watercolor painter whose works sparked their own documentaries — the preteen Grunwald would be marched onward to the Gleiwitz subcamp, then diverted to Mauthausen, its notorious quarry, and its Melk subcamp until the war’s end. Yes, I took some notes while we watched, far easier at home than in a darkened theater.

Using Grunwald’s personal story as a framework, Paluso takes the opportunity to cover the Nazis’ oppression of the Jews and other groups in general, unconscionable concentration-camp experiences on average, and the genocide of six million Jews and millions of others. Other interviews are included from Midwest historians and professors, including at least two from Ball State (where my sister-in-law teaches). As usual for such works, the extensive footage is not for the squeamish and candidly goes beyond what we saw within Nuremberg‘s PG-13 limits. I already wrote about the necessity of such works in that entry, and recommend Sweet Lorraine to one and all on principle, but here the overarching historical context — while especially illuminating for anyone who hasn’t watched a few of these — overwhelms the runtime and often reduces Grunwald’s singular story to a subplot.

Whenever he returns to the spotlight, he describes how his childhood love of jazz gave him a much-needed outlet for mental retreat from the everyday horrors that drove others mad. Given its importance, there’s a lot less jazz in the film than we’d expected, though we do hear Grunwald perform a few times. The standard “Whatever Happened To…?” documentary text epilogue also gives the impression that the film ends prematurely, casually mentioning that when the Communists overran Czechoslovakia in 1948, he and his dad had to escape that ordeal by going through Italy and seeking refuge in the States. That brief aside sounds like a film unto itself, which…are they saving it for the sequel?

(Also, five demerits for the narrator mispronouncing Goebbels’ name to rhyme with “nobles”.)

I wish I could’ve seen more than just these seven, but being the blogging creature that I am, I strove to strike a balance between the viewing experiences and the post-game write-ups here. At the Blue Moon showing Saturday night, our host solicited a round of applause for a retiree in the audience who’d seen forty-eight films in this year’s festival thus far. A show of hands revealed quite a few guys who’d “only” caught 30 or more by then. That’s pretty wild and enviable, and a great reason to buy a Heartland membership or at least a ten-pack of tickets, which pays for itself if you have the free time. But how many of them went home and immediately churned out 1300-2200 words about each and every film? For the fun of it? With zero networking cred and without getting journalism pay to do it? How many of those dudes will go fully unpaid-intern and have 66,000 words on J. Jonah Jameson’s desk by Tuesday morning, plus maybe photos of Spider-Man? See, this is the kind of obsessive hobbyism our society should be celebrating!

Anyway. This year’s festival screened films at five theaters. My six screenings were spread across three of those, with live intros by Heartland staffers — Film Programmer Julie Landrum, Programming Coordinator Sam Opsahi, Artistic Director Greg Sorvig, and Senior Creative Manager Angelo Auriemma. I ended my run with Nuremberg on closing night at the Tobias Theater at Newfields. The lead photo shows our perspective from the balcony, which was an odd angle I’d never tried for watching a movie before, but I stopped thinking about it as the film carried us away.

Closing night included opening remarks from Heartland CEO Michael Ault…

…and the aforementioned Greg Sorvig.

Every trip to Newfields, the place formerly known as the Indianapolis Museum of Art, comes with free glimpses of their current lobby art installations and hints of their big Harvest Nights outdoor art-walks held every October.

Currently dominating the atrium is Black Dandelion by Kori Newkirk.

Octopus tentacles! Because Halloween!

One in a series of uncommon pumpkins in the hallway leading to the theater.

Heartland was also a great excuse for me to at long last check out Alamo Drafthouse, which opened a location here last year, though not in time for the festival. They repurposed the same chassis that once housed the erstwhile Georgetown Cinemas, which in turn had replaced a Cub Foods, which in turn had replaced the Lafayette Drive-In, which in my childhood routinely played exactly the kind of horror flicks and schlock that Joe-Bob Briggs would’ve loved and told everyone to come check out. The circle of cinema continues.

They’re a couple miles north of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and consequently put up murals of racing-movie tributes and mash-ups.

Alamo have been a favorite venue in other major cities for year, widely known among cineastes for their liquor collection and their ushers’ willingness to call out and even expel audience members who insist on various forms of rudeness, such as using their phone during a movie. This year they stepped up as sponsor-above-the-title and did a stupendous job of raising enthusiasm for the proceedings. I don’t drink and didn’t get to cheer on a bouncer, but I applaud their well-organized food service, can recommend their chocolate shakes, and love that it’s only fifteen minutes from my house, the closest of any participating theater to date.

In addition to vintage posters for racing movies (some from other countries!), decor in their claustrophobic lobby includes one of Helio Castroneves’ old jumpsuits…

…and don’t hold me to it because I couldn’t find a placard to confirm, but this might be Rick Mears’ #2 car that he drove for Penske in the 1990 Indy 500? (Corrections welcome!)

Three of my screenings were at the Kan-Kan Cinema, which has some drawbacks but consistently presents the most eclectic assortments of any theater in town. They’ve become one of my main go-to spots for Oscar Quest every year, especially for indie nominees in the smaller categories.

The Kan-Kan at night.

Screen shot before my showing of Happy Birthday. Have I mentioned my disappointment that it was the least crowded showing I attended?

If you’re still here: thanks for that. I’m a nobody locally (or on most other measurable scales, really) and consequently saw most of my Heartland entries fly unobserved into the aether shortly after publishing. Fun ironic trivia in closing: of all the entries I cranked out during this special nine-day posting marathon, the one that drummed up the most traffic, multiple times over, was the one about the aforementioned anti-Heartland studio product.

Nevertheless: thanks for reading! Lord willing and time permitting, we’ll be back next year.

(Final count: seven Heartland entries totaling 11,200 words, including this one. Cheers!)

Get Involved

While the film industry is usually associated with unlimited budgets, the reality is that as a non-profit arts organization devoted to independent film, Heartland Film depends on donations to carry out our mission to curate, promote and celebrate tho…

^{Heartland Film}

“So, eagle, you do for apes what you did for dwarves and hobbit?”

Previously on Planet of the Apes: apes rule Earth now! Andy Serkis’ Caesar led apes to victory but died for ape sins! Virus strike whole planet, make humanity stupider! Humanity also mute now! Lucky apes not have to hear human stupidity! Unless apes reinvent internet! Movies not say humans can’t type! Maybe ape moderators ban humans from simian media!

Everything’s coming up monkey-house as we continue with the prequel/reboot (preqboot?) series that’s been among the most consistently entertaining of its kind in this era of I.P. recycle-overdrive. (R.I.P. those once-cool X-Men preqboots whose producers turned their last two flicks into shiny dumpster clutter.) So far we’ve had nary a clunker in the new bunch, more than we can say for the original Apes pentalogy. That’s including the latest release, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which box-office pundits are dubbing a failure because its opening weekend earned “only” $58 million domestic, nearly twice as much as all other May 2024 blockbuster openings. Guess it’s hard out here for a chimp.

If you were on board for the last three rounds of alt-future monkeyshines, round four takes a logical new direction, if not necessarily a radically new one. A centuries-wide time jump picks up long after Caesar’s benevolent reign has faded into legend because apes make poor history-book publishers. No monkey king has risen to pull together a truly unified ape nation per se; instead they’ve formed scattered, ostensibly happy clans. Owen Teague (It Chapter Two, Black Mirror‘s “Arkangel”) is our new MOCAP-suited hero Noa, teenage son in a forest-dwelling family of falconers. Humans still scrounge around the periphery, grunting boogeypeople scurrying about in this new world without reality TV to make them even dumber.

Alas, Kingdom isn’t 2½ hours of pretending the planet would be better off under animal rule. Tragedy strikes when a conquering ape army storms the village and ruins everything. Underneath the layers of fiercely intimidating CGI is Kevin Durand (last seen differently flexing in Abigail) as Proximus Caesar, an ostensible descendant of the Caesar himself who resembles him in no useful ways at all. Fans fondly recall Caesar’s catchphrase, “Apes…together…strong!” which wasn’t a macho boast, but rather a rallying cry for genus-wide teamwork in the face of adversity. Due to Proximus’ lack of proper schooling and his lust for tyranny, he misquotes his alleged ancestor into perversion: “Apes…strong!” The family tree of the apes’ George Washington has genetically degraded into an extra-aggro George “The Animal” Steele.

Proximus clearly disregards another former rule: “Ape shall not harm ape.” Granted, that already happened in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, but that was more of a one-time exception, as an extremely physical extension of “Ape shall debate ape” before they all pulled together to defeat Woody Harrelson in War. Caesar and Koba were closer to philosophical equals, the Jefferson and Adams of apes, perhaps an imperfect analog given how the HBO miniseries never showed Paul Giamatti and Stephen Dillane dueling in midair like rampaging trapeze artists. But Proximus’ domain is all about ape-fight-ape as his minions enslave Noa’s friends and neighbors for a large-scale pet project. Noa recovers from being left for dead and has to road-trip after them, possibly working his way up to standing before his much taller enemy and bellowing, “LET MY PEOPLE GO!”, thus referencing the wrong Charlton Heston film.

Along the way Noa collects a few allies. An orangutan named Raka (The Orville‘s Peter Macon) offers a respite from rage and is the closest the preqboots have come to an ape sage. (Whither Dr. Zaius?) The quest gets a little more complicated when they find themselves followed by a curious human (The Witcher‘s Freya Allan) who seems a bit more astute and definitely better dressed than her tatterdemalion brethren. Our Heroes ignore her discrepancies and invite the poor, sharp stray to tag along on the long ride to ape justice. What’s the worst that could happen?

The baton has been passed from previous directors Rupert Wyatt (who’s retreated to smaller films and TV ever after) and Matt Reeves (now overseer of The Batman‘s transmedia pocket dimension) onto Wes Ball, manager of the entire Maze Runner trilogy. (I’ve not seen them; though I’d always figured they’d be available someday as a Black Friday Blu-ray 3-pack. So far, nada.) Armed with a screenplay by Josh Friedman, showrunner behind the criminally short-lived Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Ball clearly had all the resources he needed in terms of imagination and funding. The visuals are more extravagant than ever — the zillions of exquisitely rendered monkey hairs, the verdant Last of Us post-apoc panoramas on the horizon and up front, the impossibly acrobatic camera work as the cast swings and leaps and bounces from perch to vertiginous perch, through trees and abandoned skyscrapers alike.

Our Dolby Cinema screening no doubt amped the A/V components considerably, but the immersion effect was total and wowing, expertly playing up the advantages of the theatrical experience. The quiet distances between fights might feel longer than in past entries, but for fans it’s all the more opportunity to cohabit the apes’ world, feel and hear it from within. It’s a more pleasurable time dilation than if this had instead been reformatted into a much longer and duller streaming series.

Inevitably all the ape-fights lead to an explosive finale at a monolithic human edifice that’s daunting and confounding and nonfunctional, until it isn’t and the danger levels elevate alarmingly. A new environment requires some adaptation, familiar technologies glimmer in the shadows, water becomes more of a risk than a resource, some light natural selection ensues, and we learn the humans may have been conspiring to star in their own secret sci-fi movie on the side when nobody was looking. Despite some clever sleight-of-hand, the focus remains firmly on the furry — their foibles, their furies, and their fates.

As peaceable heroes forced into conflict go, Noa is no Caesar, but perhaps that’s setting the monkey bar unfairly high. Who among us can hope to compare to Serkis, really? But Teague is believable as the earnest youngster who can’t go it alone and learns to encourage the small ensemble toward saving the day. It’s worth remembering Caesar wasn’t born an action hero, either. Circumstances thrust him into the role, and his conscience dictated he roll with it. Given time, perhaps Noa (and Teague) might grow in that direction, assuming the series doesn’t take any more lengthy time-jumps and leave him behind.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes works mostly fine as a standalone story, but — as is the blockbuster style — it’s blatantly not The End, and not an extended finale that turns the trilogy into a quadrilogy. Studios gonna studio, so it ends with a promise of more Apes to come. This one adds a few new tidbits to the overall mythology (e.g., why the name “Nova” is so common) and portends the potential fun trivia that a fifth Apes preqboot could lead to this series matching the classic series in length. Dare they even contemplate keeping up the good work and go 5-for-5 on Tomatometer ratings?

Any such hope relies on the filmmakers not to get comfy, fall back on lazy habits, or disregard the lessons learned as the Planet has kept on turning. Same as with us humans: Apes forget history, Apes doomed to repeat it.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Other apes include Eka Darville (Marvel’s Jessica Jones) as Proximus’ lead henchman; and Neil Sandilands (Netflix’s Sweet Tooth, The Flash‘s big-bad Thinker) as Noa’s dad. As a sort of bridge between trilogies, a brief prologue welcomes back Karin Konoval, survivor of the first three films, as Caesar’s old friend Maurice.

Humans who don’t dress like Quest for Fire extras include Academy Award Nominee William H. Macy (Fargo! Mystery Men! more more more!) as a spineless I.T. guy and Dichen Lachman (Dollhouse, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) as a figure of a certain station.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes end credits, but they do confirm Mr. Serkis, the late Caesar himself, offered his services to the newcomers as a Movement Consultant. A few minutes beyond the official cast list, ape noises are also attributed to a number of voice actors that include established pros like Dee Bradley Baker and Fred Tatasciore.

Those who stick around till the very end for the fade-to-black will hear one last orangutan holler, hinting perhaps we haven’t seen the last of old Raka…

Midlife Crisis Crossover!

2024-05-24 02:35:34

“Abigail”: Bunhead of Blood

Black Swan but with slightly less agony.

Horror hasn’t been a primary go-to genre for me as I’ve aged, but I’ll check out a given work in just about any genre if it can sink a hook into the elusive target that is my set of aesthetic peculiarities. (And by “hook” I do not mean I award imaginary brownie points for use of the empty “elevated horror” label.) In the wake of the Hollywood-wide restart after last year’s dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, some 7,000 new, quick-bake horror flicks will be coming to theaters over the next several months as studios catch up on their precious blockbuster assembly-line schedules. Amid the flood of recent blood-soaked trailers — from high-concept to lowbrow to “the plot is a spoiler!” — one pitch spoke to me from the fray: “From the directors of the last two Scream movies!”

If the preceding sentences sound familiar, it’s because they’re largely lifted from my previous write-up of Late Night with the Devil. If horror flicks have taught me anything, it’s that recycling is cool. Sometimes old parts can be reused in a new contraption without collapsing. Sometimes the contraption is pretty nifty, like folding a newspaper into a sailboat, or making an omelet with leftover taco filling, or lifting the one-line concept from an old Universal monster movie but throwing away the rest of the movie because no one remembers it anyway.

Hence, directors Matt Bellinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (d/b/a the team “Radio Silence”) present Abigail. The 1936 work that inspired it is a spoiler. Its entire trailer is a spoiler. Fortunately it doesn’t spoil the whole runtime, as more twists abound and a crack ensemble makes up the difference in their performances whenever the writing withholds too much.

Our initial setup seems a fairly basic caper (nowhere near convoluted enough to call it a “heist”) to kidnap a billionaire’s tween daughter (Alisha Weir, of Netflix’s Matilda and the recent Wicked Little Letters) after her evening ballet recital in a weirdly empty theater. A team of strangers has been hired for the job:

• Dan Stevens (differently accented from his recent Godzilla x Kong adventurer) as the cocky leader
• Kathryn Newton (looking to leave Quantumania behind) as the spoiled-rotten thrill-hacker
• Will Catlett (the reluctantly immortal gangster Lala from The CW’s Black Lightning) as the stoic sniper
• Angus Cloud (of HBO’s Euphoria, who died last July) as the stoner wheelman
• Kevin Durand (an experienced Big Bad from Locke and Key and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes) as the brainless muscle
• Last but most, Melissa Barrera (from those last two Scream chapters and infamously not the next one) as the field medic whom we realize is the actual main character when she gazes upon the estranged kiddo on her phone’s lockscreen and shows the slightest empathy toward their target.

Our Antiheroes do the job Reservoir Dogs style — i.e., no names, no backstory sharing, just fake names — except they’re each so doggedly individualized that even a beginner-level people-watcher can predict their baggage. One particular bonding scene explores how nowadays everyone thinks they’re so very different from everyone else, yet it’s easier than ever to reduce someone’s entire persona to a smug Sherlock monologue. Such moments of team interplay afford each actor — nary a dullard in the lineup — quite a few turns to build camaraderie or rivalry in deeper ways beyond the snarky dialogue by screenwriters Stephen Shields and Guy Busick (Radio Silence’s Scream chapters and Ready or Not).

The team absconds to an old mansion at the choosing of their employer (the amazing colossal Giancarlo Esposito!), who promises they’ll earn millions for their service. All they have to do is hold onto the girl and survive the night there, always the biggest catch in every too-good-to-be-true “free one-night mansion stay!” travel deal. Same as every movie caper or heist ever, the plan goes off the rails on both conditions. Their captive is no mere tiny dancer: she’s a double-proficiency vampire ballerina who might be just as old and vicious as Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire. Worse still, soon as she bares her fangs, all the exits slam shut. IT’S A TRAP.

Apart from a few perfunctory, pointless minutes of red-herring ambiguity about what’s really happening (where’d she go? did someone else abduct and kill her in a closet? is some other killer hiding in the shadows? Is one of the crew pulling a double-cross?), it’s hunter-vs.-hunted except the hunter is disguised as an entry-level Swiftian. She’s all but snarling, “I’m not locked in here with you! You’re locked in here with me!” as she stalks and arbitrarily almost-kills them one by one. If she weren’t outnumbered and her predators-turned-prey were horny teens sans street smarts, this would’ve been a half-hour short, possibly one-third of some themed horror triptych alongside other tales of a zombie violinist or a drama-club mummy or a teen chess champion whose pawns contain the souls of her victims.

As it stands, they do have some professional resources to pool. Wisely, their first priority — examined in the funniest scene — is discerning which kind of pop-culture vampire they might be facing. A traditional one with the classic long list of weaknesses? One of those modern, overpowered, Everything You Know About Vampires Is Wrong hotties who aren’t really vampires so much as they’re just blood-drinking DC supervillains? Or a compromised in-betweener, which means they’ll have to try everything, see what works, and hope any of them live long enough to see the scientific method to the end? And how many other splatter-flicks can they reference along the way without feeling like secondhand characters themselves?

From there, the audience is tasked with betting on how closely the death order will follow the callsheet order. The film tips its hand early to light up Barrera as the Final Gal, but beyond her, anything or anyone goes. Fortunately the ensemble strike up considerable chemistry amongst their differences, enough to mourn the intermittent murders. Yes, there’s the occasional fanging, a minion-turning of sort, and at least one twist neither telegraphed nor spoiled in the trailer. Each vampire looks lovingly creepy, taken a step above the norm in that the makeup team gives every vampire their own individual look, rather than churning them out of the same mold. Gone are the days of Buffy/Angel facial ridges looking like members of the same Klingon troop.

For a good span, though, it gets almost too easy to forget this is a vampire flick. Through several sparring rounds Abigail relies more on her supernatural strength than her creature-of-the-night skill set — admittedly challenging to employ in a mansion where most of the rooms remain fully lit all night long — to the point where the caper-flick switches genres to medium-powered superheroics. Give Barrera some wacky gadgets and this could’ve been a Birds of Prey sequel. I’m not quite complaining, as the action is slickly shot and allows us moments to breathe just long enough till the next surprise jolts us again. By the final act, though, it’s all about the vampirism rift between the survivors and the undead, all drowning in buckets of grime and fountains of blood, perhaps too unsubtle to qualify as Grand Guignol. Sometimes the only difference between vampire movies and superhero movies is the bloodshed, and sometimes not even that. Eventually Abigail remembers.

Among the cast’s VIPs, Barrera bracingly explores her deadbeat-mom/kidnap-abetter dichotomy to confirm why the directors kept her on speed-dial despite the one headline controversy; Stevens adds to his ongoing series of fearlessly flamboyant freaks as if desperate to wipe the name “Matthew Crawley” from any future Q&As forevermore; and the young Ms. Weir shows us a prodigy’s chops — at turns innocent, menacing, scheming, occasionally open to negotiation, and nuanced enough to evince more than one mode of vulnerable, regardless of which side’s ahead on the vamps-v.-mortals scoreboard. A film built around a child-star core can go bravely or broken depending on their talent level and whether the adults can coax the best from them; here, the risk pays off, hopefully in ways that weren’t damaging to her behind the scenes. (After Quiet on the Set, Showbiz Kids, and other works on the subject, it’s getting harder out here not to fear the worst about any NSFW Hollywood production costarring minors.)

As I expect is the case for much of the recent horror-flick streak at theaters, Abigail isn’t aiming for deeper meaning, apart from the morals of Negligent Parents Ought to Do Better, and Every Get-Rich-Quick Scheme Has a Price. It’s a well-buttered popcorn-heavy roller-coaster that arcs upward and into a veritable Red Sea of monster-movie over-the-toppiness. It might’ve qualified as fully classy if they’d added another ballet number or two.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Yes, the vampire daughter’s father shows up with a special guest in that role — an actor who’s been name-checked in four previous MCC entries and technically shares a major IMDb credit with one of the other cast members, though they never shared a scene in that work. His cameo is short, sweet, and scary, and he wears it well.

Otherwise, unless we start exploring the stunt team’s resumes, those named above are literally the entire cast — no other cameos, no other supporters, no crowd scenes, no Concerned Spouses back home, no exposition from newscasters or radio DJs, nary a stray extra wandering by. Far more of the budget went to makeup and VFX than to the thespian head count.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Abigail end credits per se, but the last waves of fine print scroll away accompanied by one last vampire ballerina giggle from the darkness, as if to say ABIGAIL WILL RETURN. If she does, any sequel would have to delete another role or two so they can afford the Marvel de-aging CG they’d need to maintain her immortality at ballet-class age.

yes-there-are-scenes-during-and-after-the-ant-man-and-the-wasp-quantumania-end-credits

^{midlifecrisiscrossover.com}

Fresh off Oscar Quest ’24, we bring you a sneak peek at Oscar Quest ’25.

Previously on Dune: director Denis Villeneuve brought his gloriously ponderous, A/V-intoxicating, starkly symmetrical majesty to Frank Herbert’s universe, the quintessential American “Chosen One on Planet Sahara” space opera, and helped me heal from the childhood trauma of sitting through David Lynch’s compromised beach-ball of confusion. Villeneuve gambled on a dissatisfying To Be Continued ending for Part One with no guarantee he’d be permitted to keep going. Dune: Part Two ties up a thread or two, but to viewers who never pored over the sacred Herbertian texts (or who, like me, tried and failed to slog through), it was perhaps a surprise to find To Be Continued shall apparently be the saga’s status quo evermore, for as long as capricious Warner Bros. execs permit.

When last we left our fugitive scion Paul Atreides, he was on Arrakis with his mother, when she was researching spells just before her husband died. Yes, the infamous Madame Web trailer has ruined the amateurish art of clunky prepositional phrase-trains and clause convolutions, but it’s my art and I’m clinging to it. In the two years since the first one, Timothée Chalamet now looks over 18 and Rebecca Ferguson has since exited the M:I franchise and rocks her own beguiling SF gig, Apple+’s Silo. After the sinister House Harkonnen overturned their takeover of Arrakis, Paul and his pregnant mother Lady Jessica embedded with the Fremen, a rebellious underground comprising thousands of extras and three whole speaking characters who cannot quite bring an entire civilization to life on their own. A round of E’s for effort are awarded to Academy Award Nominee Javier Bardem as Stilgar the unshakable true believer; Zendaya as Chani the skeptic and love interest, in that order, especially later on; and the other one (Souheila Yacoub from Gaspar Noé’s Climax) as the other one.

Mother and son acclimatize to hard-knock desert life and work toward restoring the honor and power of House Atreides that was wrested from them by the domineering House Harkonnen. Each has their own path to investigate: Jessica rises to power within the Bene Gesserit shadow-conspiracy witches’ coven that pulled the strings of their overthrow; Paul seeks to unify the disparate Fremen factions into one massive guerrilla revenge squad, starting by demolishing Spice-mining operations and working their way up to increasingly larger, louder set pieces. When time permits, he pursues romance with Chani and trains to become the Sandworm Surfer Supreme. Call his little side-arc Space Point Break.

But all throughout, precog visions — some his own, some not — have him second-guessing his every action or inaction. He’s humbled by them at first, but his flashes are as ambiguous as Madame Web’s, and never articulated to anyone else with enough detail to invite contrasting interpretations. In his modest hubris, he figures only he can interpret them, as is the case with many an aspiring ruler-turned-madman. Stilgar believes his choices will be correct by definition and everything will work out; the more pragmatic Chani feels her dread escalating as she is, incredibly, not blinded by rom-com puppy-love. She never thought she was dating a capital-M Messiah, but suspicions nag at her about just what sort of leader her boyfriend’s becoming.

Meanwhile back in the kingdom, the proudly gross Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) has had it with those meddling Fremen and the royal family he thought had been eliminated. Once he realizes he was too hasty to place all his hopes in his nephew Rabban (Dave Bautista), whose losses make him look like an ineffective Evil Drax, the Baron calls a new player from the bench: his other nephew na-Baron Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, played by Academy Award Nominee Austin Butler (best known as Colonel Tom Parker’s lackey in Elvis). A fair improvement over Sting’s version from Lynch’s Dune, his Feyd-Rautha is an indiscriminate killing machine, wicked with blades and knee-jerk homicidal at the slightest inconvenience. I question how a feral temper translates into better tyranny-management skills than Rabban, but the Baron doesn’t seem like the sort of big-bad who puts deep thought into his hiring or promotion practices among his nepo-nephews.

As if to drive home the point (with literal daggers) that Feyd-Rautha is the wrong Harkonnen to mess with, his intro is a stunning art installation unto itself — a panoramic arena tournament rendered in otherworldly white-‘n’-off-white, bedazzling in its lack of shadows and as brutal as a mandatory PG-13 rating might allow. Several deaths later, the stage is set for the inevitable clash of armies in the Arrakis sands and of course one final duel between Our Hero and this glowering, monarchy-sanctioned psychopath. Will good triumph over evil? Will House Atreides rise or fall? Will Paul ascend to his father’s position with sand getting in everywhere, the sandworms his chariot?

That’s more than enough intergalactic melodrama for a nearly three-hour installment from Villeneuve and his co-writer Jon Spaihts (Prometheus, Doctor Strange). As we all expected and demanded, everything looks magnificent and thunders at max volume, reverberating hard enough to pulverize your bones from the inside if you dare endure a Dolby Cinema showing as our family did. The colossal mining machines, the sandworms larger than any creature of our own reality, the requisite army and flying-ship battles, the returning Hans Zimmer and his juggernaut orchestra, and even the smaller, more mystical flourishes — Bene Gesserit machinations, Skyrim power-shouts, and so on — are a delight for fans of giant-sized speaker-stacked action. If that’s all you ask of it, you’re guaranteed an overdose of happy sensory overload.

In between its eventual For Your Oscar Consideration reels for Best Sound and Visual Effects, Dune: Part Two takes the time to interrogate the faith and trust invested so easily in the quasi-anointed Saint Paul. The controversy among the Fremen is positioned as a religious debate of sorts, but it’s more akin to fervent hero worship, with Paul acting as his own prophet, foreseeing his destiny as a worldly king or possibly something worse. His blockbuster narrative might veer off the well-worn George Lucas path, perhaps a selling point for distinguishing Dune from other works it doubtlessly inspired. As humility gives way to pride, the question is begged: when is a Chosen One not a Chosen One? Possibly when he chooses himself. Funny how in such cases it’s always a “he”.

On the downside, that abrupt heel-turn comes with few possible explanations, none of them especially organic. Villeneuve is so busy raising his baton high on the maestro’s podium that he tramples past the delicate pivot. What might be intended as foreshadowed subtlety feels more like afterthought. What’s meant to be shocking is instead bewildering, which is a less satisfying viewing sensation. The saving grace of those final scenes — besides, like, way-cool knife-fighting — is Zendaya as the lone holdout in the ticker-tape parade. I won’t be watching Euphoria in this lifetime, so this is my first time seeing her really go all-out. In the Spider-films her Mary Jane has been an above-average love interest-in-distress, sharp-tongued in their personal interplay yet never fully independent of Peter’s shadow. In the closing scenes of Dune: Part Two, Chani realizes the time has come for her to take on a greater responsibility. All she needs now is more power to complement her own. Zendaya brings it and then some.

All this and more may or may not be addressed in our next thrilling installment however many years from now. This time the cliffhanger presumably follows the source material, rather than executive runtime fiat. In Herbert’s era I imagine publishing was a smaller gamble that allowed authors such as him to plan ahead with less trepidation about having their universes cut short. Reservations aside (including some renewed online complaints of cultural appropriation outside my lane), here’s hoping Dune will be allowed to go on, rather than suffer the undignified fate that seems to have befallen that other WB IP, fellow desert-dweller Wile E. Coyote.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Mentioned but never seen in Part One, the Emperor of the universe deigns to arrive at last, embodied by Christopher Walken as a regal gent who sounds an awful lot like Christopher Walken, which makes some of his scenes really hard to take seriously. The ubiquitous Florence Pugh (Black Widow, Oppenheimer, et al. ad infinitum) tags along as his mostly ornamental daughter, who delivers some initial exposition, retreats to the imperial locker room, then is summoned forth at the end for some light flabbergasting of us unread non-Herbertites. Other newcomers include Léa Seydoux (from James Bond’s recent run) as a Bene Gesserit member who surely isn’t one-and-done; and one special surprise cameo tease from House Atreides’ distant future.

Familiar faces from Part One include Charlotte Rampling as Lady Jessica’s former Bene Gesserit boss; Roger Yuan (Shanghai Noon, Skyfall) as the soldier who betrayed House Atreides and remains unrewarded for it; and Babs Olusanmokun (now costarring in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds) in a cameo as his corpse. Late in the game, yet another old friend pops in and reminds us that in all things geek, if you didn’t see a body, they’re not really dead.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Dune: Part Two end credits, but they do confirm Chalamet and Zendaya each had their own personal chefs in addition to the production caterers. Name-checks in the Special Thanks section include two good sports who wound up in the film’s deleted scenes: Stephen McKinley Henderson (a super-powered House Atreides aide in Part One) and Tim Blake Nelson, who was…uh, no idea, maybe playing lost country-cousin Jethro Harkonnen.

In space, no one complains about eating the same meal rations again and again and again.

I can’t speak for fans of Ghostbusters or of Harry Potter post-Deathly Hallows, but whenever I get attached to an IP, I’m excited whenever that universe shows signs of forward motion or at least simulating it. Granted, when it comes to the Alien movies, my opinions are already warped — James Cameron’s Aliens is one of my Top 5 films ever, which I saw years before I got around to Ridley Scott’s original. I also respected Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s engagingly bonkers Alien Resurrection for pushing the series’ boundaries and actually getting somewhere — anywhere — after edgy pre-auteur David Fincher’s Alien³ ramrodded Ellen Ripley’s story into a literal dead end.

All Alien works since then have treated Resurrection as The End, and/or as a disowned mistake. Directors — not to mention writers of its various transmedia spinoffs — limit themselves to rooting around the limited preceding timeline for unoccupied dance floors where they can twirl in place and try out their freshest moves, never quite distracting from how the club has had the same dusty disco strobe and jukebox since 1997. Double-dates with Predators were one-night stands that no one could maintain eye contact with. When Scott himself barged back in indignantly all, “SEE HERE NOW!” we knew he could make spaceships shinier and creatures slimier, but Prometheus gave us a half-unwritten origin and Alien: Covenant was a cram session to finish the same assignment in as few pages as possible.

27 years later the franchise continues moving nowhere at sub-FTL velocity with Alien: Romulus, a pre-sequel brazenly set between Alien and Aliens in hopes of blending in, in more ways than one. I’ve seen no previous works by Fede Álvarez or his co-writer Rodo Sayagues (though Don’t Breathe is on my extremely long mental to-do list), so I came into this with few preconceptions except a faint awareness that gore is his medium. I saw the first trailer at C2E2 with an exclusive Álvarez intro, which was promising, but the second gave away way too much. I offered benefit of the doubt for as long as I could.

Our Heroes, most of whom are inevitably disposable, are space twentysomethings who might be the softest space miners in the galaxy, possibly space-mine back-office drones who alleviate their everyday ennui by playing space pranks on a Space Dwight. (A more daring film would’ve starred the Russian miners of HBO’s Chernobyl.) They’re contractually stuck in a sunless Weyland-Yutani worksite, where their three square meals a day are probably just Vitamin D horse pills, and dream of a better life or at least some time off. They wanna go where everybody knows their name, but the nearest getaway is light-years beyond and can’t be traveled to without Alien Franchise™ cryo-chambers. If such appliances were commonly sold at Space Best Buys galaxywide, chances are they’re priced far out of these worker-drones’ pay-grades.

A plan is concocted that of course is not run by any authorities or at least reviewed for possible flaws by a grizzled old miner with decades of wisdom to dispense. All those geezers can suck it as Our Heroes leave their mining colony with no resistance whatsoever and fly out to a spooky abandoned spaceship that’s apparently driftin’ in nothingness just down the road a-ways. The place is divided into two halves, each called Romulus and Remus, which never matters. Somewhere aboard are cryo-chambers they plan to pilfer for vacation gear, hopefully still functional and definitely not surrounded by dangers that might explain why perfectly usable, expensive equipment has been left alone to gather space dust. What’s the worst that could happen?

To be fair, the setup looks fantastic, if not entirely original — space blue-collar mining towns and transports are built on dingy, industrial-chic designs straight out of Coruscant’s darkest bowels or Main Street Blade Runner. The acrid smoke and the heavy-metal tonnage are palpable. Off-planet, though, we’re back on familiar turf in more ways than one. The spooky ship has lifeforms on board. A survivor pops up. They run and bleed, and run and run and bleed, run run run, bleed bleed bleed…wait, no, there aren’t that many characters. But you get the idea. If you don’t get it, then you also won’t be driven to distraction by the score by Benjamin Wallfisch (Blade Runner 2049, The Invisible Man). Like Álvarez, though, he’s unabashedly playing the hits, sampling cues from throughout the series. In our household I’m the worst when it comes to identifying instrumental pieces, but I’ve listened to James Horner’s Aliens soundtrack (the old half-hour version) so many times that even I could recognize the Pavlovian cues.

And those “hits” just keep spinning on the turntable. Characters spontaneously quote memorable dialogue from far better films with none of the knowing preciousness of “I have a bad feeling about this.” One classic soundbite is seemingly ruined on purpose, as if daring the audience to seal-clap at it anyway. Aliens‘ pulse rifle tutorial –- the only romantic moment in the entire film, which Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn played so subtly and wonderfully — has been adapted in toto but stripped of nuance and reduced to a video-game protagonist having earned five XP in the tutorial and redeemed it for the “Use a Gun” perk. The xenomorph chases stop and start, with the monsters sometimes posing lethal obstacles and sometimes calling time-out for off-screen smoke breaks. They’re same as they ever were, no new evolution to show off, unless you count how the final act is an offensively faithful remake of the final 20 minutes of Resurrection and features a Final Boss who’s mostly recycled, yet bizarrely remodeled to please anyone who loved Azkaban‘s wobbly PG emaciated NBA-draft-pick werewolf.

By then the rockiest of rock-bottoms has already arrived earlier on, when we greet the ship’s lone survivor, whose nature has been so controversial and featured in numerous headlines that I don’t even know why I’m treating it as a spoiler at this late date (it’s been a long couple weeks for me). Suffice it to say this blog has not supported rampant AI use and abuse in the arts over the past several years (especially not by other bloggers), to say nothing of egregious de-aging of now-older actors to resemble their former selves because The Kids These Days might recoil at the idea of recasting. If true, I blame their dead imaginations. But when it’s done to resurrect a character played by a dead actor? For more than a quick cameo? Which could’ve easily been recast or simply replaced by a new character? And when it’s the worst special effect in the entire film? Maybe the attempted deepfaking will look less laughable when Romulus comes to gas-station VHS, but on the Dolby Cinema screen I attended, even Madame Web would’ve pointed and laughed at the shoddiness and the dispelled gravitas.

Rather, the most intriguing character — by which I mean the only one — is the token android assigned to every Alien film. As Andy the android (not to be confused with Marvel’s Andy the Awesome Android), David Jonsson (HBO’s Industry, the upcoming Bonhoeffer) deserved far more space to roam. Andy is an older-model android who’s rather timid, going obsolete and not much use (more of a security blanket than a minion), but he’s an essential tool that Our Heroes need to access the dead ship’s computer using a really old programming language. He’s been his human’s best friend since childhood, and keeps telling dumb Dad-jokes because that’s how he was programmed. Then at a crucial time where everyone’s about to die, a much-needed upgrade serves as a pivot point; suddenly he’s no longer a mere tool…or so he tells himself. A better film would’ve spotlighted his inner conflicts front and center.

Alas, no Alien film ever allows androids to rise above sidekick status. Amid the occasional visual flourish here and there (including a tense set-piece involving zero-G, buckets of acid, and the defeat of physics by its mortal enemy, the unstoppable film-force called “But It Looks Cool!”), Andy’s story is eventually waylaid by further derivative material and his otherwise human companions who add up to six characters in search of a canceled CW series. Fan service and shiny surfaces don’t quite give Alien: Romulus an identity of its own, nor virtually anything else unique for future filmmakers to homage in Alien IP-dust-off sequels 20 years from now. Much as he’s tried to blend in…if Scott and Cameron are fraternally twinned Romulus and Remus, Álvarez is their other brother Rummo.

Thus we end with my version of Every Alien Movie Ranked:

…though if I wanted to be fair (I don’t, but I’m saying if I did), I’d have to rewatch AvP to double-check. It definitely had a better Final Boss Battle.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: For want of a new Ripley, our latest leading humans include previous “stars” Cailee Spaeny (Pacific Rim Uprising, Bad Times at the El Royale) and Isabela Merced (survivor of Madame Web and Transformers: The Last Knight). The token males in the crew are Spike Fearn (Aftersun) as the resident jagweed and Archie Renaux (Netflix’s Shadow and Bone) as a Ken whose job is “Tall”.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Alien: Romulus end credits, though the late, legendary designer H.R. Giger receives a rather prominent name-check. Anyone like me who devoured the Alien Quadrilogy boxed-set extras will recognize Alec Gillis, who was also seminal in previous films and is likewise mentioned. The estate of the deepfaked familiar face offers their seal of approval, and the complete contents of the music section are citations of three previous Alien films and Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which was used in Covenant.

(We get it, end-credits writer, all the other Alien films had SO MUCH AWESOME STUFF in them. You can knock off the tributes now.)

Midlife Crisis Crossover!

2024-02-24 04:33:55

“Madame Web”: O, What A Mangled Web We Grieve

Note the use of classic spider elements, such as webbing, multiple unmatched eyes, and someone falling down a waterspout.

We interrupt our annual Oscar Quest for this breaking announcement:

“If you take on the responsibility, then will come great power.”

Is your mind blown yet? Your life irrevocably changed? Your latent Spider-powers activated? Your craving for scrambled Marvel Easter eggs whetted?

I’d already stifled a few giggle fits before Madame Web served up that hokum to its baffled, baffling headliner when she has her 376th consecutive moment of doubt. They’re so proud of this, it’s declared at least twice. Someone behind the camera thought that line was clever and/or sage — possibly director S.J. Clarkson (a veteran of Marvel’s ex-Netflix shows) or one of the other three credited writers, including the buddy-duo at fault for Morbius. This intentionally inverted callback to Spider-Man’s world-famous tagline took four writers to bang out. It’s a rejected fortune cookie in a film that already gave us actual fortune cookies in an earlier scene. Their fetch-level anti-catchphrase suffers doubly in comparison to the real things, and we suffer for sitting through it.

Sony’s latest installment in the MCU-Tangential Spider-Man Cinematic Pocket Dimension really, really hopes you loved the animated Spider-Verse so deeply that they’re eagerly bringing all their arachnid-based IPs to life in hopes of cashing in before superhero movies go the way of three-hour musicals and Blair Witch knockoffs. The overworked Spider-Verse teams skipped over most of the Spider-ladies in that thick catalog, choosing instead to create their own. The Madame Web team had their choice of leftovers, pushed aside Jessica Drew the O.G. Spider-Woman, and ran with four of her successors, none of whom would exist if she hadn’t been handed Peter Parker’s baton first.

I was 8 years old and had been collecting Amazing Spider-Man for a little over a year when Madame Web debuted at the end of 1980. As drawn, she was a blind, paraplegic, grumpy Aunt May lookalike who could foretell the future and warn Spidey when it suited her. 33 years later she gets an origin story no one requested. Here she’s played by Dakota Johnson from the 50 Shades trilogy (not my thing, but she was solid in The Lost Daughter) as the comic-bookishly named Cassandra Webb, a 30-year-old EMT and antisocial cat lady whose foster-home upbringing apparently left her traumatically awkward, as her interactions with other humans have all the warmth and panache of an 80-year-old great-grandma whose temper ruins every Thanksgiving.

It’s A.D. 2003 and Cassie works and mopes in a New York City that’s totally action-packed with WHIP-PANS! CRASH-ZOOMS! EXTREME SHAKY-CAM! SALAD-SHOOTER EDITING, TAKEN-STYLE! And that’s just in Queens! She’s surrounded by very few period-piece mementos and I only counted two (1) oblique allusions to 9/11, which I understand used to be kind of a big deal ’round there. Parks & Rec‘s Adam Scott is her work-husband Ben Parker, whose girlfriend is not Marisa Tomei but whose sister-in-law Mary (Emma Roberts from Unfabulous and Scream Queens) is eight months pregnant and complaining about the fetus’ jumpiness, implying: (a) the radioactive spider has bitten him sixteen years ahead of schedule; (b) prequel math is the real reason for the 2003 setting, which explains why Clarkson’s bare-minimum nostalgia-pandering feels perfunctory; and (c) NYC had a lot of Spider-superhumans before li’l Petey grew into the scene as just another Spider-poseur rather than the Spider-trailblazer.

As is wont to happen in superhero origin movies, a near-death trauma triggers newfound abilities in Cassie. First and foremost, she can spontaneously see ten to thirty seconds into the future. Stubborn denial wastes any and all net benefits she could’ve gotten from her first several premonitions, even after she has an Uncle Ben-style tragedy on her hands. (Not her pal Ben, mind you — he’s over a dozen years away from becoming that Uncle Ben.) The visions are mostly mishmash; comparing them to the Final Destination series would be an insult to the latter. By the end of the film she’s mastered her powers like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, predicting and dodging every single obstacle, explosion, and chain-reaction spread pattern before they happen, despite a complete lack of training montage. But perhaps that’s jumping too far ahead here.

Before she can show or feel any real curiosity, a triptych of subway flashes presage the deaths of three teen girls, none of whom know each other but all of whom converge in one place because of The Web that connects everyone in their Earth’s reality through an unseen spider-dimension made entirely of plot-point coincidences. Cassie welcomes her younger costars Sydney Sweeney (Anyone But You, HBO’s Euphoria), Celeste O’Connor (Ghostbusters: Afterlife), and Isabela Merced (Dora and the Lost City of Gold, Transformers: The Last Knight) — one white, one Black, one Hispanic. The STEM geek with divorced parents, the streetwise rebel with rich absentee parents, and the hard-luck loner with a poor single faraway parent. These spunky latchkey kids will one day grow up to be Spider-Man spinoffs sharing a single Spider-Verse timeline, and they’ll all be 14-18 years older than Spider-Man himself if they live to see his debut.

That last clause might be a problem. Their convergence has been foreseen by one Ezekiel Sims (French actor Tahar Rahim from The Mauritanian and Napoleon), a former colleague of Cassie’s mom (Kerry Bishé from Halt and Catch Fire and Argo) who’s had powers for thirty years. He’s used them to become Dark Spider-Man, though he can’t proclaim Dark Spider-Man as his supervillain name because of course pre-Spidey is still a wee placenta-wader. Not only can Ezekiel secrete a lethal Spider-toxin by touch and change into costume in an eye-blink like the Flash, he also has precog powers like Cassie. For years he’s been haunted by a vision of being murdered by a trio of Spider-Women…this same trio of young ladies Cassie has now run into, none of whom has powers yet. He aims to kill them before they can kill him, thus thwarting the prophecy. Beyond that single nightmare, we never, ever see his precog powers again.

But Cassie foresees Ezekiel achieving his evil goal and intervenes. Her story becomes a 2003 Lifetime movie in which a headstrong woman must take innocent girls on the run from an abusive male whose lines have been weirdly dubbed with the sound-mix verisimilitude of a Gamera film. Young Jeane Dixon and three powerless Nickelodeon teens must outwit and evade a very powered Dark Spider-Man who’s had a 30-year head start on Spider-adventuring, who’s gifted with all of the Spider-quickness yet shows none of the Spider-reflexes. So it goes throughout the film as Our Heroines flee from the subway to the New Jersey woods to a motel overnighter to an incomprehensible grand finale inside and atop a Pepsi-Cola™ warehouse filled with fireworks (or possibly unused Navy munitions), for which there’s plenty of room because all the characters took turns chugging NYC’s entire Pepsi-product supply in previous scenes. The “best” part of that chaos is when Cassie uses corrugated sheet metal as a Captain America shield against fireworks that had previously punched holes through brick walls and blown a helicopter out of the sky. Fireworks, mind you, as we are verbally told.

Along the way Cassie, sans any offensive capabilities, struggles to find increasingly larger vehicles to run over Ezekiel with. At one point she flies an ambulance through a building’s second or maybe third story, mostly to look cool. A defibrillator is misused in a “cool” way that should’ve killed one or more cast members. They later flee to a diner that the girls reach by a half-mile walk but for Cassie becomes a harrowing five-mile drive from the same starting point. Naturally a set-piece breaks out, during which all the diner employees vanish, possibly on smoke breaks out back. When Cassie returns to the heavily damaged scene later, it’s abandoned and not even boarded up — just a single strand of crime-scene tape strung across a gaping hole-in-the-wall to keep out trespassers, bugs, and evidence-rinsing rain.

There’s an utterly hilarious scene in which she explains to her charges how the Spider-toxin can cause cardiac arrest, so she spends several minutes earnestly teaching CPR to them and to Viewers Like You, so that everyone will know how to apply this magical Spider-toxin cure, a very special message from the Marvel Heart Association. Granted, CPR does come in handy later, but Chekhov’s First Aid pays off for reasons wholly unrelated to Spider-toxin.

For an intermission, Cassie abandons the girls for a week-long trip to the Peruvian Amazon (put on her EMT MasterCard, one presumes) that encounters no complications or major delays with post-9/11 security at either airport, even though she’s a wanted person of interest making major headlines. But it’s important that she learn slightly more about the source of all these Spider-powers and accept the solemn advice that shall henceforth make her a better person: “If you take on the responsibility, then will come great power.” And with that, a grown Daria clone who couldn’t function as a lunchroom monitor learns how to be a maternal team leader literally overnight. She also sprouts a second whole superpower 100% irrelevant to the Arachnida class as we know it.

Anyone hoping Young Uncle Ben will contribute and display the sort of heroism that he’d one day inspire in his nephew can rest assured he’s a willing impromptu babysitter who asks not nearly enough questions, but may roll their eyes at the scene where this professional EMT’s brain checks out when a pregnant lady’s water breaks. (Did that really never come up on the job?)

Through a full two hours of actors half-heartedly trading stock interactions, it all just keeps going on like this, garnished with The CW/DC-tier visual effects that cost some $80 million because Sony didn’t bring a coupon. If MST3K riffing were taught in schools, Madame Web would be in the beginner curriculum. I haven’t seen a big-budget superhero flick this nitpickable since Superman IV, ranking even farther below X-Men: The Last Stand and Zack Snyder’s wood-duck shooting gallery for hecklers.

I didn’t expect Madame Web to be America’s next Wonder Woman or Black Widow or Ms. Marvel. Frankly, I set my expectations to absolute zero the very first time I read the phrase “Sony Announced Madame Web Will Be a Film”. But I also didn’t expect my least-worst takeaway to be a revised, fractionally mellower opinion of Morbius. That one was Blockbuster Tuesday-rental terrible, but compared to what went wrong here, it kindasorta did try, bless its flimsy heart.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Zosia Mamet (Girls, Mad Men) is Ezekiel’s Lady-in-the-Chair, guiding him remotely as she uses a stolen, early-adopter version of facial-recognition software to hunt for the three youngsters via all the cameras in town. Indianapolis native Mike Epps (The Hangover series, the Resident Evil series) is a generous coworker of Cassie and Ben’s. For a couple of scenes, Law & Order veteran Jill Hennessy is a pretty dumb NSA agent.

José María Yazpik (Narcos) is the leader of a Peruvian Amazon tribe who call themselves The Spiders, but in Spanish so it sounds exotic to uncultured audiences. Their Spider-power source begets Ezekiel’s and Cassie’s respective power sets and begs an awful lot of questions. It also raises an important point: at least the filmmakers didn’t bring up the Spider-Totems from the comics. If you don’t know what those are, don’t look them up. Believe it or not, this flick could’ve been even worse.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Madame Web end credits, and no sign of Venom, Morbius, or Michael Keaton’s displaced Vulture. Either no other Sony filmmakers wanted their future Spider-flicks connected to this one, or no one felt optimistic enough to act as if there’ll be more Sony Spider-films after 2024.

The end credits do reveal the VFX department curiously had more 2-D artists than 3-D artists, and that the climax’s score is more rousing than the rest of the film because they Xeroxed parts of John Debney’s final-battle music from I Know What You Did Last Summer. I presume this was a nod to some obscure South American spider with the ability to sample and reuse other spiders’ music.

OST I Know What You Did Last Summer: 35. Final Confrontation

No CopyRight Intended, All Rights To Original Owners!!Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for ...

^{Classic Soundtracks 📻 (YouTube)}

Whenever the teaser for this film came up between my rounds of Words With Friends, this was the exact image when the X would finally come up and I could exit the teaser and get back to my games.

“Robots are people too!” all the science fiction stories would plead with the ordinary citizens who dreaded a future where automatons immune both to Repetitive Strain Injury and to poverty might usurp our billions of factory jobs. Fantastical genre tales moved beyond Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws and into the pop culture firmament through the hard-luck journeys of Data, Short Circuit‘s Number Five, the Iron Giant, Chappie, the Westworld staff, the cast of Kubrick and Spielberg’s A.I., and legions of other eminently merchandisable microchipped personalities in between. If season 1 of Picard is to be believed, robots’ reputational status will remain a fragile thing even until the 24th century. All it takes is one malware-addled malefactor or one sinister organic-led false-flag operation, and robot rights can be tossed out the window as we revert to seeing them as our inventions and our property, rather than our friends, neighbors, or lovers.

Or, as we’re learning in A.D. 2023, all it takes is to redefine the parameters of the chat. Robots are out; A.I.s are in. Robots were willing to settle for our blue-collar jobs, but their non-corporeal cyber-brethren are coming for our white-collar and no-collar jobs. They aren’t even truly sentient yet, but limited-perception A.I.s on corporate leashes are being “hired” as journalists, writers and artists — utterly mediocre ones, to be sure, but just barely productive enough to please greedy employers and undiscerning audiences. Now the online citizenry are mobbing the networks with chants of “BURN THE A.I.!” as we’re ostensibly on the cusp of having literary discussions about the oeuvre of writer/director HAL 9000, auctioning off Skynet’s black-velvet paintings, or handing out Grammies and Newbery Awards to the dueling superprograms from Person of Interest.

Co-writer/director Gareth Edwards (2014’s Godzilla, most of Rogue One) doesn’t so much confront our current debates as he sidesteps them with The Creator, a quaint throwback to simpler times when robots, like immigrants, simply wanted to chase their personal ambitions freely in peace, and coexist with (and despite) the flesh-and-blood torch-and-pitchfork mobs at large. The film feigns relevance by referring to all its robots as “A.I.”, which is technically accurate yet may be confusing to anyone with a severe hangup about subgenre labels. To SF geeks, most of the cast are robots. ChatGPT and OpenArt do not in any way enter Edwards’ conversation here.

In a future where a spot of nuclear devastation leveled Los Angeles and was blamed on robots, our man John David Washington tries a new SF-blockbuster setting in the wake of Tenet by going deep undercover as he did in BlacKkKlansman. His dutiful Sergeant Joshua Taylor is embedded with the refugee robot community, who’ve fled to the future region of “New Asia”, which really feels like an American label. (If the locals have a better, less derivative name for it, they never mention it.) A vengeful America seeks the robot ringleader Nirmata through efforts on and below the table with an internationally televised hand-waving to New Asia’s sovereignty. Unfortunately Taylor makes the classic undercover-cop mistake of falling in love behind enemy lines; America, in turn, loses patience and switches to Plan B, which is wanton destruction in broad daylight. Their unstoppable killing machine of choice is called NOMAD (no relation to the much smaller, more talkative Star Trek killing machine), a colossal hovering cigar cutter equipped with a Giant Sky Beam™ that atomizes all matter it targets except whatever and whoever are needed to continue the plot later. Usually the part where an undercover crime drama turns tragic and no one wins comes at the end of a film, not in the prologue, so that part’s a moderate novelty.

Fast-forward five years: Taylor is on the outs with his superiors, but they reel him back in for one more special mission: now the robots allegedly have an Ultimate Weapon that could spell doom for all humanity if the robots are as evil as the U.S. government’s P.R. hacks totally swear they are. They reckon there’s only room for one Ultimate Weapon on this here planet, and that’s America’s elliptical travel-sized Death Star. They give Taylor added incentive to agree to this One Last Job — too much incentive, arguably. He makes the trip back to New Asia with a nominal team, but takes about five minutes to ditch his enemy-sabotaging assignment and find himself escorting a tiny child robot named Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), who has very special superpowers that could make her the savior of the robot race. It’s barely a spoiler to confirm they are not, in fact, blood-lusty warmongers.

Taylor and Alphie could enjoy a nice little Lone Wolf and Cub journey, except he’s made one of the worst possible mistakes for their health: he’s made Allison Janney mad. Her merciless field commander leads the American military charge with what could’ve been a one-note ferocity in other hands, but the always leveled-up Janney goes nearly orchestral with her colonel’s one-note Rite of Spring popcorn symphony. As the plot sends Our Heroes hopping away from her and toward the next set piece, we can admire the scenery and meet the other robots. The most humanoid ones (including Godzilla survivor and “LET THEM FIGHT” meme star Ken Watanabe as their kindly robot-herder) look distinctly cool with their cyborg parts and their CG’d hollow atlantoaxial joints that let us see cleanly through their necks. Very few of them come alive (so to speak) with any individual personalities or any sense of their assigned functions. Most robot stories compare their intended purpose to what they desire to do despite their programming. Most of The Creator‘s automatons presumably were supposed to “serve” and now they’re content simply to survive, little more. Or have these robots been building new robots simply out of procreative impulse?

Robots-begetting-robots tends to be more for conquering-army recruitment than for altruistic purposes (e.g., that time Ultron begat the Vision as more of a chief minion than a loving son), but Edwards overlooks that possibility because he’s much more vested in his world-building, which in a Dolby Cinema viewing was immersively dazzling, no complaints there. Sound, visuals, seamlessness of effects — if it snags a dark-horse slot in the next Visual Effects Oscar race, I’d lay a few bucks on it. The backdrops shift gears for value-added variety — seedy city nightfall, promise-filled ocean coasts, serene Asian forests suffering so much damage from man-vs.-mech melee. The lengthy climax, a barnstorming fetch-quest aboard NOMAD itself, revs up some gripping suspense (though at times it’s hard to get a spatial sense of NOMAD’s layout), but several earlier sequences rely more on throwing surprises at us than in building tension.

With the exception of a few interludes that goad Janney’s temper ever higher into the red zone, Edwards focuses almost too tightly on Washington and his wee charge, at the expense of the rest of the cast. Unlike with either Tenet or BlacKkKlansman, I found myself thinking “He’s not Denzel” a lot, whenever the film needed him to do the entire cast’s emotional weightlifting. His dad went through similar child-protector motions in Man on Fire, but Taylor isn’t played up as that sort of warrior. He’s a compromised family man with a law-enforcement resumé who maybe got Bs on his future-police-academy combat exams. He isn’t the Action Hero that this slick assembly of refurbished parts could’ve used to lift it above the baseline; he’s more of a wrong-place-wrong-time guy stuck in its gears and nearly ground up. In the closing moments his bond with Alphie finally feels real, but by then it’s hard to hear or feel any tears as they’re drowned out by so many proudly staged explosions.

After so much sound and fury, final fates are practically swept aside in the abrupt jump to The End, where The Creator barely nods toward the “Robot Lives Matter” sermon that was supposed to be the whole point. The robot characters outnumber Washington by a wide margin, but once we know what happens to him, you can almost hear the unison clicks of recording-equipment power-off buttons. It almost makes you wonder if their viewpoint would have been more authentically represented had an actual robot written and directed this.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Gemma Chan (Eternals, Captain Marvel) as Taylor’s wife, who nearly matters at first, until she doesn’t, except to the extent that the plot relies on her fridging. Ralph Ineson (The Witch) is the main military superior overseeing the robot genocide. Other soldiers include Marc Menchaca (Generation Kill), Robbie Tann (Black Mirror‘s “Mazey Day”), and Michael Esper (young Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind). Musician Sturgill Simpson (who composed the score for The Dead Don’t Die) is among the few people on Washington’s side. Veronica Ngô (The Old Guard, Star Wars: The Last Jedi) is the only other memorable humanoid robot.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after The Creator end credits, but the crew, locations, and other hints throughout the film (e.g., “Nirmata” is Nepalese for “creator”) acknowledge “New Asia” contains far more that just China, Japan, Vietnam and the Koreas. There are other countries in that whole region, despite how rarely Hollywood centers on them except when cataloging 1970s American atrocities…or building faint robot allegories of them.

Yes, our first film up is sci-fi. I gotta be me. But not all of them will be!

It’s that time again! Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

After a few brief dalliances with the festival in the past, last year I dove in a bit deeper and caught six movies in all. The fates of those films have varied in the months since — The Promised Land went on to make the Oscar shortlist for Best International Feature; Fancy Dance is now on Apple+ and remains a must-see for fans of Reservation Dogs or Dark Winds; the even tinier Avenue of the Giants has yet to find a distributor and was still assiduously touring as of this past spring; and so on. I appreciated the chance to see new features before they’re released to the world-at-large, and without waiting for pro critics to weigh in first.

Heartland’s 33rd edition runs October 10-20, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least eight films in all (Lord willing). Longtime MCC readers know the rule: every film I see in theaters gets its own entry. We kick things off with one of this year’s science fiction contestants, which held its official World Premiere right here at Heartland: a small-scale science fiction drama called ReEntry.

Nowadays in pop culture, everyone loves the multiverse! Infinite Earths across infinite timelines have produced seemingly infinite tales in which your favorite characters meet radically Butterfly-Effected versions of themselves, compare and contrast for laughs or cringes, and must scramble to return home before one, both, many, or all their universes are doomed. And yet, those stories typically lead to dialogues and/or fight scenes among the most extreme and/or absurd counterparts. Playing the odds realistically, though, if you went gallivanting around the home bases of every single version of You, which is more likely: bumping heads with the polar-opposite Bizarro-You, or a You with only the most ephemeral of differences? Would that even count as a different You?

In ReEntry, director/producer Brendan Choisnet and writer/producer Daniel Nayeri experiment with the latter proposition. Emily Deschanel, star of Fox’s long-running Bones, is our viewpoint character Ellie, who watches with no small amount of trepidation as her husband Lucas, played by Sam Trammell (True Blood, The Fault in Our Stars), dons a slimmed future-tech astronaut suit and enters an experimental gateway into another universe, assuming all the calculations were nailed to the farthest decimal point. Everyone holds their breath as Lucas disappears into elsewhere, only for him not to reemerge. Tragedy ensues, Ellie is devastated, and life must move on, however reluctantly so. Then one day, suddenly he’s back and the crowd goes wild. And they all lived happily ever after!

HA! If only. Time dilation is an issue up front, which requires some light negotiation among our married couple and their immediate circles. Some tears, some rekindling, and some therapy come into play. Then Ellie begins noticing little things, which gradually snowball as such minutiae tend to in any given relationship, even between partners who haven’t taken impossible space-time jaunts. Usually the scrutiny has to escalate until the affected party is revealed to be a murderer, an alien, an evil twin, a brainwashed Manchurian Candidate, or some other hoax that’s been done to death in countless other stories.

Tales similar to this one have been told, of course — going back at least to the season-4 Twilight Zone episode “The Parallel”, to say nothing of short stories Rod Serling surely read in the SF magazines of his day. Choisnet and Nayeri take a creative risk in approaching the incident from the perspective of the Concerned Wife — often a perfunctory, one-dimensional sidekick in numerous films who represents the trophy at the hero’s finish line or an optional accessory kept at home. Deschanel imbues Ellie with an independent interior life, the depth of an individual history, as a widow who grieves, struggles to cope, rejoices in a miracle, but then has to reconcile her quiet, mounting suspicions of the man who now stands before her. Is he really her husband? More importantly, is he really her husband?

Viewers might hold their breath waiting for Lucas to reveal his “true” self. Is he a knife-wielding maniac from Earth-Lifetime? Or a lizard in a skin-suit from Earth-Visitor? Is he hiding a goatee and a gold sash? Is this a cheap remake of The Astronaut’s Wife? Potential tropes abound, but our filmmakers have something subtler and less melodramatic in mind. Though they hold their cards closely at first, later moments are complemented with restrained visual effects that hint at the bigger picture. Marital stress is to be expected, but Deschanel and Trammell share the rapport of a realistically mature couple dealing not just with clashing memories, but with the possibility that — to employ a cliché that’ll never go out of style — their spouse is no longer the person they married. If one has changed and the other seemingly hasn’t, what do they do now? Are the new differences deal-breakers? Is “close enough” good enough?

Sci-fi fans may have nitpicks, especially when elements bump up against the budget limitations. Some plot points would’ve been complicated if the lab employed a single security guard. Lucas’ seeming demise is publicized by his own employers even though not a single journalist is around to watch Lucas’ exit in person and they could’ve gotten away with an easy cover-up. (But security and press would’ve required paying more extras.) The most unbelievable part comes when Ellie and Lucas, dressed nicely and leaving a fancy party, decide it’s such a nice night that they should just walk the three miles home, and my immediate first question was, “In those shoes?” Somehow the scene does not end with Lucas carrying her down that third mile.

Longtime couples might appreciate ReEntry‘s nuances more than other demographics, though it could also resonate for anyone who knows the creepiness of dating someone who reminded them of an ex — like, intensely so. It stands nicely alongside other low-key near-future tales that don’t begin with some bearded sage growling, “A WAR IS COMING!” and don’t end with billions dead galaxy-wide. The multiverse has room for realities of all shapes and sizes, and so does cinema, as is the entire point of this very festival.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: The chief scene-stealer is Noma Dumezweni (who originated the stage role of adult Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) as the temperamental scientist who invented the dimension-hopping portal that (apropos of the film’s couplehood themes) resembles a lit-up wedding trellis.

As a trillionaire who buys out her company after the accident, Maulik Pancholy previously recurred on 30 Rock as Jack Donaghy’s fawning assistant Jonathan. Though he learned some of the worst qualities from that former mentor, he’s not entirely irredeemable and represents the hope of an alt-timeline where maybe, just maybe, an extremely rich man can be persuaded to shut up and listen for once.

How about those end credits? I couldn’t tell you if there’s a scene after the ReEntry end credits because they were stopped halfway through as the house lights were raised for a special post-screening Q&A with the principal parties — Emily Deschanel herself and the aforementioned Messrs. Choisnet and Nayeri.

Seated left to right: Daniel Nayeri, Brendan Choisnet, Emily Deschanel, and our host Julie Landrum, Film Programmer for the Heartland Film Festival.

(As with our recent Trek convention, low-light conditions at long distances are anathema to us amateurs.)

Same panel sans zooming.

Also attending the World Premiere were Choisnet’s mother, sitting somewhere in the way back; and cinematographer Peter Fackler, who joined them onstage for a brief intro before the screening but hung back during the Q&A afterward. The team discussed how the film was inspired by a particular point in Choisnet’s own mental health history, which led to a “What If…?” contemplation of personality changes. They also complained about an old-fashioned CRT TV that just so happened to be in the home where several scenes were shot, which they left in for fun retro ambiance, but which reflected so much of their lighting equipment while shooting that they had to spend extra on CG-papering over its screen.

Post-screening Q&As aren’t unheard of at Heartland — it’s just rare that I happen to buy tickets for showings that include one. This year’s lineup has 17 such occasions planned throughout the 11-day event, at least two more of which are on my itinerary this week. Updates as they occur!

Midlife Crisis Crossover!

2023-10-10 02:07:21

Heartland International Film Festival 2023 Screening #2: “The Promised Land”

What if Little House on the Prairie but Charles Ingalls is a retired badass?

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Since 1992 Indianapolis has held its own celebration of cinema with the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater marathon every October of documentaries, shorts, narrative features, and animated works made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience, usually with an emphasis on uplift and positivity. Ever since the “International” modifier was added in recent years, their acquisition team steadily escalated their game as they’ve recruited higher-profile projects into their lineups. For years my wife Anne and I have talked about getting into the spirit of the festivities. This year we will do better. The festival’s 32nd edition will run October 5-15. I’ve committed to at least five different Heartland showings — one of them virtual in-home, while the others will screen at four different theaters throughout central Indiana…

During his downtime between playing villains in four out of every five Hollywood films, Mads Mikkelsen enjoys the occasional smaller production back home in Denmark. Last time we saw him at this level was for the Oscar-winning Another Round, in which he played a gregarious family man who turns frivolously alcoholic with his buddies For Science, only to have things spiral out of control. He starts in a completely opposite corner yet descends into chaos once more in his latest film, a historical farming drama called The Promised Land that one could argue is a Western with smaller hats.

(Minor housekeeping trivia: The Promised Land is no relation to Promised Land, the 2012 Gus Van Sant film that starred Matt Damon and John Krasinski, which I totally forgot existed. It’s blander than the original Danish title, Bastarden. I get why the renaming, but they could’ve kept brainstorming.)

The mid-18th-century King of Denmark (whose name and face are oddly hidden from us) proclaims his version of “Go west, young man!” and promises riches and titles to anyone who can establish an arable plot in the Jutland heath, the country’s desolate northern third, a wasteland of infertile brambles. Mikkelsen is Ludvig Kahlen, a 25-year military man who worked his way up from poverty to captaincy, only to retire back into poverty. The king’s offer may be his best hope of climbing the ladder the rest of the way to fortune and privilege if he can turn barren dirt into gold and coax his top-secret crops into taking root. Ludvig’s plan is “If you build it, they will come”, but the “they” he imagines don’t quite match the real “they” who do come. He can’t do it alone, but his career didn’t exactly nurture him into a people person. His allegiance to King Anonymous seems righteous, but he can be a taskmaster as harsh as the heath itself. (When he fires one worker for sloppiness, his pink slip is a punch in the face.)

Helpers come and go — married fugitive serfs, a mouthy kid who suffers the most abuse by dint of her skin color (the adults’ subtitles call her a “darkling”), assorted clans of “Taters” (read: Romani) and Germans (before Germany became a full-fledged country), and so on. Every team he tries to assemble is thwarted by the machinations of comic-relief rapist/lunatic nobleman de Schinkel, who proudly added his own “de” and flaunts it like a tinfoil crown. His family technically owned some of that heath until the king’s decree voided their claim since it’s lain fallow, but he refuses to let it go because it’s mine-all-mine. Resembling a lantern-jawed clone of Matt Smith’s manic Morbius foe, de Schinkel is a spoiled child ignoring his discarded toy till Dad tries to give it to Goodwill, and then suddenly it means the world to him.

Thus the veteran who seeks better living through agrochemistry may find himself at war once again. Much as it could’ve surprised the audience to break with the Mikkelsen tradition and let Ludvig persevere in this “historical farming drama” through clean living and virtuous willpower alone, he isn’t that character, nor is the director that sort of kindly hand-holder. Moviegoers may or may not remember Nikolaj Arcel for his Oscar-nominated 2012 work A Royal Affair, which earned him much acclaim; more likely they kindasorta remember his 2017 take on Stephen King’s The Dark Tower with Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. Arcel now counts among the many overseas filmmakers who struck cinematic gold in their homelands, got invited to jack in to the Hollywood money machine, only to retreat to a safe distance after the experience burned them. That said, not unlike The Dark Tower, The Promised Land‘s bleakness rarely lets up, turning downright brutal in the second half as de Schinkel escalates his campaign and refuses to be thwarted by a…by a mere poor.

In the isolated moments when fate does favor Ludvig, Mikkelsen’s stoic facade strains to the limit whenever he’s forced to show the slightest positive emotion toward other people. When it’s time to unleash Hell, those violent reflexes kick in and Mikkelsen is at his Mikkelsen-iest, but he rises to the challenge of conveying Ludvig’s tentative lessons in human connection. Among his subordinates, most intriguing is Amanda Collin (Max’s Raised by Wolves) as his unpaid housekeeper Ann Barbara, who has seen some stuff in her own journey through class-war oppression, and slashes an indelible image through the reels by the end.

Arcel allows them a muted sentimentality amid the unforgiving landscape, but almost lets the reins go too slack in the codas, as the sometimes on-the-nose metaphors reach their tipping points. (Can compassion blossom in Ludvig’s cold heart in the same way he hopes those top-secret crops will blossom in his fields? Was the real harvest the friends he made along the way?) The Promised Land doesn’t always perfect its balancing act between the extremes of spartan idyll and revenge thriller, but Mikkelsen’s serenely controlled inner fury is always worth checking out. Also, I know 100% more about 18th-century Danish history now than I did going into this. That still isn’t a lot, but it’s a welcome sprout in the desolation that is my shameful ignorance of world history.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: The only other actor I’ve consciously seen before is Gustav Lindh (last seen getting trounced by Alexander Skarsgård in The Northman), here playing a young local pastor who sides with Ludvig but keeps popping in and out of the film for lack of consistent onscreen odd jobs.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after The Promised Land end credits, but anyone who yearns for simpler films thriving in the shadow of today’s blockbusters may or may not be encouraged by how the crew members in the separate Special Effects and Visual Effects sections total less than 100, if that helps. American audiences are also notified of the title change when the BASTARDEN logo steamrolls through, stretching nearly ceiling-to-floor.

…

Other chapters in this very special miniseries:

• Jailhouse to Milhouse
• Fancy Dance
• Monster
• A Disturbance in the Force
• Avenue of the Giants

oscars-quest-2021-all-the-other-viewing-i-could-fit-in-before-the-big-event

^{midlifecrisiscrossover.com}