Monthly Archives: May 2025

Captain America: Brave New World

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The bad thing about the post-Endgame MCU is that the writers want to have their cake and eat it too. On the one hand, you need to have watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier[1] to understand where this new Isaiah supersoldier character came from or why he should matter. On the other hand, that means you will have seen Sam Wilson spend six episodes coming to grips with whether Steve Rogers made the right choice about if he should even have a successor, nevermind if it should have been the Falcon. It’s not that I object to people having more than one crisis of confidence. But if you’re going to do it in the long form exploration of the character first, then it isn’t worth wasting three minutes on a slimmed down conversation covering the same beats during the movie second. At the least, reverse the order so it’s not a recap, it’s an expansion! Either way, don’t pretend like you must cover this ground again in case I didn’t see the TV show you already made it mandatory for me to have watched to understand different ground you’re covering.

But honestly, that was the only thing about the movie that rang hollow. Brave New World is a solidly middle of the road MCU movie, which makes it noticeably above average for what they’ve released in the past six years. The deal is, there’s an enormous statue made out of a new thing that we’ve never heard of before[2] called adamantium, which is kind of a big deal. Might even be better than Wakandan vibranium, once people figure out all the applications. So once general, then later Secretary of Defense, and most recently President Ross[3] is trying to broker a treaty with several other nations to freely share “Celestial Island” and the adamantium, instead of fighting wars over it.

…unless of course he’s the same dick he has always been, and has a whole other agenda. That, ultimately, is the pivot on which the entire movie turns. That, and whether Sam can unravel the truth in time to save his cool elderly mentor and/or the world.

I think I liked it because it was good, but I will admit that I may have liked it because there was basically no noise about a multiverse. I’m not saying multiverse bad, but I am saying Something Else Once in a While good.

[1] One of the first couple of MCU TV shows they made, which also means it’s been a minute, unless you’re the type of person who rewatches everything for the tie-ins, in which case you’d have needed this, the first (or possibly second) Hulk movie, probably Civil War, and Eternals, at the minimum. But I’ll come back to this point.
[2] Well, we the residents of MCU Earth at least. We the viewers just maybe have.
[3] So that thing from footnote 1 where you have to be familiar with an ever-expanding, ever more intricate web of knowledge to even follow what’s going on in these movies? I’m sorry, but I can only say good things about this. I eat that shit up. It is awesome with a capital A++. If you want to say that’s a weakness of the movies, then you do not understand comics in the first place.

Jigoku (1960)

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This week’s approximately 4 year-old-podcast movie was Japanese and 1960s, I am pretty sure? The latter is the slight uncertainty. Anyway, Jigoku is… not precisely weird, so much as foreign. So the first thing that happens[1] is a bright young college kid who is marrying the professor’s daughter and in all ways has the perfect future ahead of him, is a passenger in the car of his friend who is basically a total dick at every moment from his first scene to his last, our hero[2] I was saying is in the car with his friend Dickchan when the friend does a hit and run on a Yakuza guy.

Shiro is horrified and guilty and decides to go the the police, only on the way tragedy strikes in the form of a second car wreck for no apparent reason, and now he’s lost pretty much all of his bright future. So he goes home because his mom is sick and on the way out the door, only to discover a nest of small-town vipers, plus the Yakuza dude’s mom and girlfriend want revenge, and about two-thirds of the way through the movie, it goes full Hamlet and basically everyone you’ve seen since the first reel is now in hell and being punished, Japan-style.

So I said foreign earlier, and none of the above is what I mean. What I could not wrap my head around is why Shiro felt so guilty over all the terrible things that happened, basically none of which he had any control over or culpability in, to my Western sensibilities. And then on top of that, was he being punished in hell because of his guilty conscience, or did the movie agree with him that he was in fact terrible and deserving of all the things being promised to him by the omnipresent king of hell narrator guy? (And then there’s the girl in purgatory for the sin(?) of predeceasing her parents. I mean, yes, that’s a horrifying thing for a parent to imagine, but that should not be how the afterlife works.)

These ontological disconnects aside, I think I liked it. The tragic collapse-of-everything setpiece was engrossing, and the 65 years ago practical effects depicting the eight (or possibly sixteen) Japanese hells was a pretty solid dive into a genre with which I have very little experience, until it’s 40 years later and dominated by angry long-haired ghost girls.

I almost signed up for the 7 day free trial of Criterion for this one. They’re going to snag me, someday. I can see it coming, like a slow motion steamroller shot from 3-5 different camera angles.

[1] Not exactly a spoiler, as it’s all pretty much from the first five minutes, but if you want to check out a Criterion channel early Japanese horror flick unspoiled, hit the eject button now, as I don’t plan to be shy with laying things out.
[2] named Shiro, ha

A Plague Tale: Requiem

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A couple of years ago [let’s say], I played a game set in medieval France wherein a teen sister and young brother are on the run from deadly swarms of rats and the Church, because of alchemists. The sequel, A Plague Tale: Requiem, picks up some short time later, with the reminder that. yep, younger brother Hugo’s affliction is not resolved.

Except for the plot, this is basically the same game, so don’t come looking for innovations. The sling is still pretty cool as weapons in games go, and the mechanic for creating and removing light as a means of progressing under various circumstances is a clever one that never got old. As far as the plot, though… I guess the best way to look at it is as a fantastical re-imagining of the Black Plague, and to then not be surprised, in either this or the previous game, when just absolutely loads of people die. Inevitably, some of them are people you care about.

The goal of the game is to cure Hugo, whether via alchemist or following his dreams[1] or delving into the history of previous small children who have been afflicted with the Macula, a word which may have some meaning outside of this game that I have not researched, but probably doesn’t[2]. There are, as you might expect, lots of soldiers stalking around, lots of rats, lots of nooks and crannies to find secret story beats for completionist achievements, and a few too many “trapped with multiple waves of enemies” scenarios for my personal tastes, but on the other hand, I did finish the game, so.

It wanted me to play again on highest difficulty but with all my unlocked abilities. I will not be doing that, but I can imagine past me, with access to many fewer games, giving it a go.

[1] I mean, dreams he is having when sleeping, not like dark ages self-actualization.
[2] It turns out to be a part of the retina, which seems completely unrelated to anything in the game. Beats me!

The Howling (1981)

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I’m supposed to remember what the randomizers are that lead into the movie my podcast bids me watch, but I really very don’t. Werewolves and something else. ’80s? Could be that, for sure, but it sounds wrong. Either way, I had somehow never seen The Howling, and so here we are.

I imagine, had I known it was a Joe Dante film, I might have put in more effort.

So there’s a serial killer[1] stalking the streets of Manhattan, and that isn’t the only reason by a long shot that I felt this movie had strong giallo elements, despite being a creature feature. Dee Wallace who you may remember as the mother from Poltergeist a year later[2] is a TV reporter engaged in an implausible sting operation where since he’s been calling her and breathing heavily, they have a connection and she agrees to meet him in an adult arcade[3] on Times Square (probably), where he is promptly shot by police. Well, not I suppose promptly enough, since she is emotionally scarred by the whole ordeal first.

Therefore, she (and her husband) are sent off by Patrick Macnee[4] to one of those peaceful outdoor psychiatric retreats, where she can be regressed through hypnotherapy to remember what happened and ease her burdens, except instead of that her husband is being constantly seduced by a hot brunette while she is being tormented by one or more creepy dudes and meanwhile for no obvious reason her friends back in town are researching werewolves, and before you know it, the moon is out of the bag, if you catch my drift.

The effects were pretty decent, one or two literally animated transformations aside. We really lost something, when CGI came to horror. It’s great for action and sci-fi and whatever genre superhero movies are, but for horror and probably fantasy? Practical effects are just where it’s at.

To be clear, this was not a good movie, and I’m not recommending it or anything. But at the same time: monster movies are cool, you know?

[1] played by the Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager, but I could never see him well enough / in sufficient lack of makeup to recognize, and definitely didn’t by voice
[2] or from not confusing her with Dee Snider because nobody besides me does that
[3] I went to an adult arcade in downtown San Jose in the late ’90s, and it was one of the greatest disappointments of my life to learn that they just meant you could watch movies there, when I was expecting to play porn-themed video games to a bitchin’ ’80s soundtrack.
[4] Best known (to me at least) as Count Iblis in the original Battlestar Galactica show, which meant I immediately distrusted him.

Slaxx

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On paper[1] (and to be 100% fair, influenced by my experience with Rubber), Slaxx is nearly the perfect movie for me, and I’ve been waiting for it to come up in my Shudder queue for years, while also being halfway afraid that whole time it would leave the service and I wouldn’t notice the doom approaching. So maybe that is just too much pressure?

The barebones plot is, there’s a new hire at a clothing store (like, the Gap but higher end / bigger name), and she’s extremely excited to be joining the company family. They have all natural, fair trade, non-exploitation branding, and a Steve Jobs type at the helm, and she’s exactly the kind of idealistic final girl type who wants to be all in on that. So naturally on her first day, she is exposed to that store’s staff, and they are all pretentiously adversarial, with a manager who is far too focused on his own career to worry about doing anything for his employees, and by the time the situation is firmly established, you’re already rooting for the killer jeans to arrive.

But the thing is… it just never lands. Despite, or possibly because of, the underlying cause of the bloody spree, I never felt what the movie wanted me to feel. Like, perhaps if the retail peon level people had not mostly been despicable in the first place, I could have latched onto the “real” story, but since I already wanted to see a comeuppance, the one that was offered just didn’t fit. It’s like in Friday the 13th. Pamela Voorhees hits differently if this batch of counselors actually deserves her wrath, versus if they’re just playing out roles in the play in her head that has no bearing on reality.

Despite all of that, the murder jeans were pretty cool. Which is not nothing.

I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re going to indict an entire industry, you murder the people who created it and the people who support it, instead of spending most of your time murdering the people who just work there for minimum wage. And if you’re going to make your targets a bunch of jerks that you root for dying, then don’t pivot into indicting an industry. The puzzle pieces just don’t fit.

[1] I mean this metaphorically, yes, since there’s no literal paper on which the plot and details of Slaxx are written down for me, but I also mean it literally, insofar as see the poster.

The Last of Us Part II Remastered

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It has been much longer than it should have been before I played the sequel to The Last of Us, especially when you consider how very much I love that game. I’m not sure why I didn’t get it in the first place, but not long after that it was Playstation 5 time, and I waited until I had one because why play it on the old busted graphics? ….and that turned out to take maybe longer than one would expect. But when I got one for Christmas this year, I also knew the second season of the show was coming down the pike, and I had to hurry up if I didn’t want spoilers[1].

The Last of Us Part II is (mostly) set about 5 years after the events of the previous game, which I will continue to not spoil, even though it perhaps hamstrings me a little for this review. It is, as the last one was, an intensely character driven narrative, with themes of parenthood still present, but being replaced by themes of… there’s not a word for this. When one says parenthood, one envisions the responsibilities of the parent to the child. This game is first about the responsibilities of the child to the parent.

The second thing it is about by chronology, and the first thing by weight, is vengeance. There’s a Chinese(?) proverb that advises if you embark upon a quest for revenge, dig two graves. Whoever said that I think underestimated the volume of digging needed by possibly more than one order of magnitude, but then again, many video games of this type are violent by nature. Still, there is an obligation and a cost associated with revenge, and the narrative provides an exemplary portrayal of both.

Also: it’s beautiful. This may of course be my review of the PS5 more than of the game qua game, but nevertheless. Also, the controller is the best game controller since the XBox 360.

All in all, it was a great story and a great experience, and I look forward to watching it play out on the small screen over the next few weeks via HBO as well as to any future game sequels that I think I expect to be coming sometime soon in the next year or two. Of course, at some point I’ll be obligated to talk about these in terms of plot, lest I get too abstracted. But not today! …unless forced, which seems unlikely.

[1] As it happens, I got spoilers, but nothing too intolerable. A scene in the first episode of the show was a flashback from the last 2-3 hours of the game, which, well.