Monthly Archives: February 2024

Mission: Impossible – Fallout

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Another few weeks, another new Mission Impossible movie. And boy are these things getting more and more serialized!

Fallout concerns itself with all the[1], ahem, consequences of cutting the head off the Syndicate serpent in the prior film. You see, all the employees left adrift were themselves well-trained spies, so they just kept on keeping on, and now Ethan Hunt and his team have to secure a few loose nuclear weapons.

Blah blah action-cakes and chases and things, but here’s what I found most interesting about this movie after you cut past the (at this point) recycled world-in-danger plots and revenge plots and double crosses and explosions and all: Tom Cruise isn’t smirking his way through each threat anymore. I’m not sure if it’s that he’s older, or that Ethan is older[2], or that the writers want me to buy that there’s more on the line than there used to be, despite prior plots centering on a highly transmissible and extremely deadly synthetic virus and on global thermonuclear war, and Ethan not having all the answers with a snap of his fingers is the way they thought of.

Whatever it is, I liked seeing them have to work for it this time.

[1] oh hey, I just got the double entendre
[2] Yes yes, Tom = Ethan, but I really do think there’s a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the two possibilities. Tom being older is about him also having a more realistic world view and admitting that all of these things shouldn’t come so easily as they do, even in a fantasy action world. Ethan being older is about his growing awareness of his own mortality in a body that is beginning to run out of steam a little faster than it used to, as well as his growing awareness that nobody can maintain a win streak forever.

The Pale Door

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The Pale Door opens with a Poe quote containing the phrase, making it clear that it’s a metaphor for death. So I think you know what you’re getting into. Anyway, there’s this criminal gang in the Wild West, led by an older brother who doesn’t really want his younger brother to be a part of this life (although obviously he’s fine with the younger brother seeing all the benefits). But the younger brother is all, “we’re family, so I’mma help you on this train job.”

As you might expect, things go wrong along multiple axes, and they end up fleeing through the night to a lady-infested town in the middle of the woods. And here’s the thing. I am not opposed to movies about witches. Do they know magic? Do they consort with Satan? Are they good, or evil, or just misunderstood? Whatever it is, I’m here for it.

But these guys found one I’m not here for. Spoilers ahead, but you should probably read them anyway, and I’m sad for the guy who plays Rick on the new Magnum show that I cannot recommend this movie. But I cannot, and here’s why: if you are going to give your witch settlement[1] a backstory where they were originally from Salem, Massachusetts (and we all know how that turned out)? You are not allowed to make it so the people running the witch trials were right. Come on! It’s one of the blights of American history! What is wrong with you people?

[1] probably New Salem, Colorado? I can’t prove it, but it needs to be true.

The Marvels

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The Marvels marks the first MCU movie that I did not see in a theater. 15 year run, that’s not bad, but still: pretty big sad face emoji. Plus, it makes me irrationally feel responsible for how said movie kind of tanked. (It’s not like I didn’t want to see it. But it pretty much requires a grandparent in town to take over the kids, while the movie is still on its theatrical run. And because of a random illness outbreak, we missed our window.)

I mean, I shouldn’t feel responsible. There’s a pretty obvious culprit for why, and it is how comic book movie fans, painted with a broad brush stroke, are less interested in lady-helmed movies than dude-helmed movies. If you want to make the capitalist argument of “give the people what they want,” well, okay, I can understand that. But I would counter with the artistic argument of “lead from the front.” Anyway, enough about all this. This more important question is, was it good?

The MCU in general has been a mess basically since the credits rolled on Endgame[1]. It’s not quite rudderless. It has been dealing[2] with the aftermath of the Blip. It has been more and more broadly introducing the multiverse, and to a lesser extent it has been waving Kang around as an existential threat. But none of these things have been tied together tightly the way it was done in the old days, when every single movie was part of the whole, whether you knew it in prospect or only in retrospect.

So where do The Marvels fit into all of this? During (let’s say) a deleted scene at the end of Captain Marvel 30 years ago, Carol Danvers took out her aggressions on the Kree Empire’s AI emperor, so the kind of thing that happened to her would never happen to anyone else. Fast forward to the present, where for comic book logic reasons, an existential threat to the intergalactic superhighway has (at a quantum level) entangled Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel (she had a TV show) and Monica Rambeau (she was a secondary character in a different TV show). Also, the threat turns out to have a personal component, because that’s just better writing than if it did not.

So they have to learn to get along, and how to sort out their differences, and how to be successfully introduced to non-TV audiences, while going on a road trip through the galaxy trying to resolve the driving concern of the film. And they do it lady-style! …which sounds like I’m making fun, but seriously, since the dude-style version of this is just a bunch of punching each other, it’s nice to see the alternative.

In the end, a) I liked the movie, and okay I usually do; I’m forgiving of this particular genre and especially universe. But I think it was pretty good. Light and funny in the way I imagine The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants to have been, except with lots of punching and explosions[3]. And self-contained, which is a good thing when the attempts to not be self-contained have been so tragic. But b) the MCU at large is still a mess; nothing there has been improved by this movie, it was just a good in itself. And c) really it was more like 90% of a good. All the scenes with Nick Fury’s SABER space station were present for no other reason than to set up 10 minutes of highly gratuitous fan service. I’m not saying those scenes weren’t amusing in the moment, just that boy do they age poorly. (And to be clear, I saw this movie three days ago, which gives you an idea.)

[1] with the sole exception of the Spider–Man movies, and probably because Sony makes them with the approximate assumption that people are watching those three movies and nothing else in the MCU. Which is a bad assumption, but the unintended results cannot be argued. (Also, I’m being unfair to James Gunn here by not mentioning his (also closer to stand-alone) efforts.)
[2] badly. It has been dealing badly with the Blip, because Kevin Feige isn’t willing (or doesn’t know how) to go ahead and make even one movie or one TV show that is more than 10% a drama, and give his characters room to breathe and to grieve. Because that, much like ladies in charge of the movie, won’t put butts in seats. So maybe it’s not entirely Feige’s fault after all, I suppose.
[3] “But you said…” No, right, I know. It’s still a Marvel movie, come on. But they didn’t punch each other! Which is important.

Demons of Eden

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I know I was just complaining about how these Deathlands books are just extruding titles now, but maybe someone else thought the same thing lo these 27 years ago? Because Demons of Eden is basically on the nose. I could wish the editors were better about paying attention to character continuity now that there are multiple authors, or for that matter about scene continuity within a single volume.

And I could especially wish the books had not suddenly remembered their genre and started turning all male gazey. 38 books in, plus owning all of them, I’m not likely to stop now. But I miss being able to recommend them with almost no reservations[1], back when they were subverting the expectations of their audience instead of pandering to it, and back when there was a little more science in my speculative fiction.

But my original point was that at least the plotting is a bit more interesting and on track and acting like it and the title are related, which is not nothing. This time, our heroes tackle ancient Sioux and conquistador legends about lost cities of gold, which might also hold the key to undoing a century of nuclear damage to the entire planet. But if the only way to reach that end is to despoil one of the last idyllic locales in the post-holocaust world, is it worth it?

In conclusion, ley lines and Gaia and leaning more into earth-based fantasy plotting is all well and good, but I miss when the characters were jumping into government funded teleporters all the time.

[1] Way too detailed about guns in use, which is its own kind of uncomfortable in these fallen times, and some pretty explicit violence on the regular. But otherwise? A+, for a long run of books.

Pearl (2022)

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I should say first that this post contains semi-spoilers for the movie X, which I watched as the first half of a Friday night double feature last night. So if you read beyond this paragraph, I recommend you have seen that movie first.

So in X, our first viewpoint character is the recently cocaine-addicted stripper / girlfriend of the strip club owner, named Maxine. She wanders around the farm where she is shooting her first feature porn, in short overalls and nothing else, except when she’s skinny-dipping or sleeping or on camera, if you know what I mean (and I think you do). At one point, she crosses paths with Pearl, the wife of the owner of the farm. Pearl is ancient in a way that people made up to be old look moreso than people in real life ever seem. But Pearl still has… longings. She shows to Maxine pictures on the wall of herself in the full bloom of girlhood, before her husband went off to World War I, and tells Maxine that she should appreciate it while she’s got it, because someday she will end up just like Pearl. And the image on the wall photograph is the spitting image of Maxine, in a way that I thought was clever and telling; but in reality I did not know the half of it.

For you see, Pearl and Maxine were played by the same actress, one Mia Goth. And in the wake of that stunning realization, we learned that Ti West had made a prequel named Pearl, immediately after X was finished while they were still in New Zealand. And it was also available for streaming, so we immediately watched the next entry in what appears to be a trilogy, although Maxxxine isn’t out until later this year.

I spoke at length about the visible influences on the prior movie, so I should say of this movie that it has the imprint of The Wizard of Oz all over it. The palette is just drenched in oversaturated colors, Pearl in a dress on her bicycle immediately evokes Miss Gulch[1], and there’s a scene with a scarecrow that I really should let you experience for yourself.

Anyway, as the daughter of German immigrants near the end of the Great War and the height of the Spanish Flu, Pearl is having a rough time. She’s married, but her husband is off to the war. She hates the farm, but is trapped there by circumstance and her mother’s iron will. All she really wants is to show the world her dancing talent, get into the movies, and never come back home again.

If only her father weren’t crippled. If only people weren’t so distrustful of her German mother. If only she were free to do whatever she wanted.

If only she were sane…

So, down to the nitty gritty. This movie isn’t as tightly plotted and nowhere near as unsettlingly filmed as X was. The end of this movie as it relates to the beginning of the prior movie, it just makes no sense at all. I cannot imagine how you get from here to there. And yet… Mia Goth just sold Pearl to me, in a way I’m not entirely sure I would have believed was possible. Her  descent, her yearning, to be accepted, to be loved, to be free. It was what you would call, if it were the kind of movie people took seriously, a tour de force performance. I am truly impressed by this actor, is what I’m saying.

And my god, that smile. You’ll know the one I mean.

[1] Margaret Hamilton when she was in black and white in Kansas, instead of black and green in Oz

X (2022)

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Friday night double feature! Even better, unexpected double feature, but I’ll get to that.

The first movie was lent to me by Ryan a number of months ago[1], but the time was finally right, so, hooray. Here, I was about to launch into a brief plot synopsis, but the problem with those is if I start with the title, I will inevitably say “Title is the sensitive story of” and it feels less like an homage and more like a ripoff, even though its not my fault I’ve read and heard so many of Joe Bob’s reviews that the phrasing is just lodged in my brain. In any event, I’ll start over.

After a scene designed in every way to evoke The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we fade in on a strip club owner and two of his employees, hopping in a van[2] with a few other folks on their way out of Houston to the rural remote wilds of southeast Texas (or arguably New Zealand) to shoot the first direct-to-video but also high-minded and artistic pornographic feature, set on a farm owned by an aging, nay decrepit, couple named Howard and Pearl. The house[3] and barn reflect the owners’ decay, but the rented cabin a few hundred yards away is actually kind of nice, I think by virtue of not having been occupied over the past who knows how many decades.

The remainder of the film would be the shooting schedule of The Farmer’s Daughters, complete with the sexual liberation of Jenna Ortega and lessons on film editing and assorted X-rated shenanigans, except for the air of disquiet that hangs over the remote farm. I think it’s fair to say that if our merry band of videographers aren’t careful, they may find themselves on a collision course with that opening scene I mentioned, set 24 hours after they got into the van.

So aside from how on the nose (but in a good way) I found the setup and payoff to be, I was sincerely impressed by a lot of the acting and cinematography choices[4]. Some of the cuts were very disquieting, and this may be the first time I’ve experienced a successful jump scare that was set after the victim’s death.

But honestly, the single most unsettling aspect of the film was a casting choice that is frankly a spoiler for this movie’s mood, if not per se its plot. However! I think I can talk about it in the next review. Like I said: double feature.

[1] long enough that it’s since on Netflix and I did not technically need the lend, so, um, oops
[2] All van scenes also shot with Chainsaw in mind.
[3] Also, the layout of the house’s entryway? Immediate Chainsaw flashbacks.
[4] and also the soundtrack was baller