Father Callahan is one of Stephen King’s most complex and fully utilized characters, not despite of, but in fact because of the way he drinks himself out of the novel.
“Corey Bryant sank into a great forgetful river, and that river was time, and its waters were red.” (10.341)
Callahan’s river is one of alcohol. He is a man that believes in capital E Evil which drives him to self-loathe, to beat himself up over the ideal he can’t live up to. He has a fascination with the darker side of men, which he claims allows him to understand Evil, but he is deaf and blind to the call of the real. Matters of politics and social justice require capital A action and lack the glamor of slaying Evil. He doesn't want to do that work.
Yet, the whole novel is about how Evil operates in the banal, how Evil puts on the appearance of evil. Larry Crockett’s no horror movie monster, nor are the wife-beaters or drunks or bullies.
Callahan’s obessession with secular evil isn’t out of empathy but out of insecurity. He searches for an excuse to make his small sins ok, and when he finally gets hit by the synthesis of cosmic Evil and banal evil that is Barlow, the True Evil that lays bare his flaws and makes the truth of his choices apparent, he becomes that which he shunned, a drunk doomed to wander.
Loved it but it wasn't perfect. Spoilers to follow. My biggest issue with Stranger Things is the monster rules needed more definition. Especially because of all the DnD metaphors at play. How did Will slip through to the other side and not die? How was he able to hide better than Barbs? I get the fort thing but what did he learn about the monster? I felt the adults and teens and kids altogether should have done it in. Like the the monster should've been a bit harder to stop than just psychic disintergration. It was multidimensional. What about physical real world harm revealing its tender weak spots in upside down world, requiring a co-operative two sided tackling of the situation? After waking Will, The Sheriff and his Mother could've heard the kids fighting the Demigorgon in the school, wanted to get out of the underside, but then Will could've told them they needed to stop it, reiterated the fireball anecdote about sometimes needing to just go on the attack to save his friends, and the three of them could stab at it dark-world side as Elle kept it at bay real-world side. Communicate via av equipment in the classroom or something. Reinforce this whole kids vs. The Adult Status Quo theme at play by having the adults learning something from witnessing these kids problem solve.
Tetra is a pretty capable pirate captain until Link’s actions drag her into this old boring conflict about wizards and kingdoms long dead. Through this she is given this old historical role of princess Zelda, which then becomes an issue because this designation relegates her to the sidelines. Thanks, Link, for bringing up the past!
Luckily by the end of the game Link’s made up for dragging her into this all by coming back, confronting Ganon, and waking her up. This can be seen as an apology action, more-so an inversion of Tetra’s earlier assistance in rescuing Link’s sister, than any kind of “if I save the princess from the evil I’ll get laid” type nice-guy narrative.
And Tetra assists with the final battle, light arrows and all, and once Ganon is turned to stone, the King of Hyrule drives home the whole conceit of the story: stop caring so much about Hyrule. It’s gone. it’s done. Go find your own thing. Those old designations will only enslave you to the past and drive you mad.
This narrative is at play all over that game. A little boy trying to save his sister gets this huge burden of fighting an ancient evil placed upon his shoulders because of it. A Pirate Queen is reduced to a dainty princess because of it. The King of Hyrule endured being a wooden boat that just floats around the seas (wtf was he doing before meeting up with Link?!) because the vengeance driving him spawned from that narrative. Go find something new and different because those old ways are a mess.
This is a game that ends with an adult apologizing to a child.
Sadly of course the franchise DID go straight back to a traditional ALTTP/OOT styled Hyrule, Ganondorf and imprisoned and incapable princess and all, with the next console release.
Not getting the reference is fine. Never making a reference is absurd. As long as the reference being made sufficiently conveys an idea without being dependent on a knowing wink from the audience, it works.
The last episode has Daredevil talking to a crooked cop scared he couldn’t get an honest lawyer. Daredevil delivers this line at some point among his advice:
“...and he knows a couple of lawyers who can't be bought, they can help you.”
The lawyers of course being Daredevil and his partner, Foggy.
I love this line because it so efficiently and effortlessly and elegantly gets across that Matt Murdock, the lawyer, is not Daredevil’s day job. Matt Murdock is not a burden on Daredevil in the way Bruce Wayne’s or Peter Parker’s alter egos burden them. Daredevil is not using Matt Murdock to hide, in fact he is bringing Matt Murdock into the Daredevil sphere of his life.
Matt Murdock, the lawyer, is not a burden - he’s one of Daredevil’s superpowers.
A rant on GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY and Marvel studios.
So the WGA included Guardians of the Galaxy among its nominees for an award in screenwriting.
Awesome.
Guardians is a rare piece of action blockbuster that not only provided a well-plotted piece of spectacle in which all scenes and pieces of dialogue kept providing new information and moving the story forward, but also it understands how to make every gag, one-liner, and quip mean something more than just an attempt at humor. Each joke or ironic situation provided not only entertainment but gave us a sense of who these characters were, how they were feeling about the immediate situation, why they were feeling the way they were feeling, or what their mind was thinking that they didn't want to state explicitly. Unlike the "He's kind of cute, sir" line in Man of Steel or Peter and Aunt May's bumbling back and forth in Amazing Spidey 2, Guardians never killed time or was going for just a cheap laugh. Everything was setup to either give us insight into the characters delivering the lines, or to be called back into action in the second half of the story. To develop such complex pathos and then refine it to the point of near invisibility, to marry it to a tightly plotted space opera that's part of an even larger series of Marvel Universe pictures, that's damn fine writing.
Speaking of the larger universe, I just loved how Thanos was a known entity in Guardians, and not a mysterious deity no one has heard of. Total inversion of expectations considering all we've seen of him in the movie-verse before now is a single teaser at the end of The Avengers. I also loved that the infinity stones were explained, but only partially. The Guardians don't need to know all the data. The audience already knows, if they're geeks, that Thanos has bigger plans, and so by not bogging us down with too much information on the stones and the guantlet and all that mess, it only creates greater anticipation for more by the fans. It is an excellent tease.
Finally - Ronan. Ronan was my biggest complaint after first viewing. Yes, he is simple. He's a tyrant. A zealot. A religious terrorist. It's not a subtle or nuanced character. Which can be fine. Here's what multiple viewings have made me realize: when you begin to run with the ideas of Thanos as god (the mad tyrant is trying his damndest to be one after all), the small amount of time Thanos is on screen becomes more of a service to Ronan's character. In his pursuit of power he abandons his zealous traditionalism, he abandons his god, he abandons whatever cultural structures were keeping him sane, and eventually just becomes crazy enough to blow up a planet. I don't know if Ronan ever really loved his people, but through this perspective the movie begins to utilize that concept of ideological rigidity and extremism to show how incompatible it is with reality. You gotta be able to be flexible, to grow, at times compromise, forgive, forget, etc. It's a simple lesson, but the movie makes it work. In the same manner the jokes and back and forth amongst The Guardians give us insight into who they are, Ronan's void of humor and lack of complex ideological self-scrutiny tells us a lot. I mean, come on now, he was defeated by friendship and dancing.
That Marvel has had very few slip ups (I still think Ant Man will be awesome, I don't really pay much attention to the TV shows and can't comment much there) is amazing. Not just in their delivery of consistently written movies that interdepend on each other and create a larger universe - I can sit here and hammer out words in CeltX and do that - but in the logistics of maintaining the same actors, budgeting, producing, delivering everything on schedule, and taking gambles like Guardians of the Galaxy and Winter Soldier (gambles that paid off), this is the Hollywood system being put to use in an extremely enjoyable, effective manner. This is why I'm such a fanboy of the whole Marvel movieverse. We could have easily been given fear based fad following productions like Sony's last two Spiderman movies, or the lackluster Superman reboot - WB's whole Justice League lineup just reeks of fear based catch up with Marvel. We could have gotten bloated monstrosities like The Hobbit movies.
I can't wait for Avengers 2. And Ant Man. And Doctor Strange is going to be crazy.
"Ye'd run out upon a little promonory and ye'd be balked about by the steep crevasses, you wouldnt dare to jump them. Sharp black glass the edges and sharp the flinty rocks below. We led the horses with every care and still they were bleedin about their hooves. Our boots was cut to pieces. Clamberin over those old caved and rimpled plates you could see well enough how things had gone in that place, rocks melted and set up all wrinkled like a pudding, the earth stove through to the molten core of her. Where for aught any man knows lies the locality of hell. For the earth is a globe in the void and truth there's no up nor down to it and there's men in this company besides myself seen little cloven hoof-prints in the stone clever as a little doe in her going but what little doe ever trod melted rock? I'd not go behind scripture but it may be that there has been sinners so notorious evil that the fires coughed em up again and I could well see in the long ago how it was little devils with their pitchforks had traversed that fiery vomit for to salvage back those souls that had by misdventure been spewed up from their damnation onto the outer shelves of the world. Aye. It's a notion, no more. But someplace in the scheme of things this world must touch the other. And somethin put them little hooflet markings in the lava flow for I seen them there myself."
My problem with traditionalists in the American Conservative sense is that they long for an era which not only was plagued with latent racism and sexism, but that said era lasted maybe fifteen, twenty, years tops and was only so prosperous due to extremely progressive policy systems of taxation and income distribution. If anything the death of the nuclear family we're witness to is a regression back to the semi-feudalist model of the Gilded Age; we are entering an era of cyberpunk dystopia that's not so far removed from the past; it falls much more in line with the traditions of violent expansionism, explicit social and institutional racism, industrial and corporate exploitation of the lower classes - we are returning to the traditions that shaped and molded civil wars and economic depressions, caused incidents such as the trail of tears, conditions that by sheer length of their presence in our history are far more adequate in characterizing what this country is - do away with the 1950s, the entirety of the 1800s is much more telling of what we value. That is our tradition.
Birdman's single-take camera style is being called flashy and superficial by some outlets but I feel it is extremely thematically relevant to everything going on in that movie. The unstoppable long-take rolling through all the halls and rooms and stages creates this heavy sense of time as something unstoppable. You can't pause and cut and rewind or fast-forward and do over, time marches on and you're better off riding that wave and learning to take all the troubles life throws at you and just sort of rolling with it. Keaton's whole character fears not being able to move forward. He dwells in the past. The best performances are generated once Norton's character introduces a little chaos into the dry, literal, over-practiced actions of the play. Birdman becomes a story about how the most beautiful works of art aren't necessarily pure practice and flawless execution, nor are they complete improvisational accidents. It's about coping with the present and directing all that practice and learned skill work to deal with unexpected crisis. Both the scene where he has to walkabout in his underwear outside and his final suicidal attempt illustrate this. I think Keaton fully intended suicide, yet either failed to know how a gun works or decided to back out at the last minute. There's so much going on I need to rewatch what I think might be the best film of the year.
Interstellar was a pretty picture, a lot of the cinematography I thought was pretty cool, even if I wished some of the shots would linger longer - the score was fantastic as well.
But it was a very boring movie. Themes and ideas were expressed explicitly in dialogue. No one's character was ever challenged. McConaughey had to overcome some external obstacles, sure, but it just progressed like a videogame - not much internal conflict fueling him. Anne Hathaway rants about love and it makes no sense. There wasn't much chemistry between the members of Endurance, yet at the end we're to believe McConaughey was fine leaving his now near death daughter, who motivated him to fight his way through a black hole and all the way back to Earth to - McConaughey feels fine leaving her just so he can go back across the wormhole and through time for Anne Hathaway, who he never really built a relationship with? Why was Matt Damon a villain all of a sudden? I understand he was a coward and just wanted to leave and go home but it was so tacked on it felt like the movie realized it had gone too long without tension or conflict and so forced a villain into the narrative. All the questions the movie asked were answered multiple times. There is nothing open to audience interpretation, nothing to revisit.
Did we really need Michael Caine telling us they were never coming back? At least as late in the movie as it occurred. He was too good natured and never came across as deceptive or possibly hiding something from the crew. The music and the editing worked towards trying to make this a plot twist that had weight but it just wasn't in the writing.
There's an exercise I like to do when I feel this way about a movie: I imagine ways it could have been improved and write it out. I don't think bitching endlessly will fix anything or help me come to a better understanding. It's only through exploring the whys and hows that I can feel like this is productive and not just blatant hate.
Interstellar could have dropped the whole Earth prologue. Open on Endurance approaching Saturn, the crew is waking up to check out the wormhole before they jump through it. As they wake they each catch up on their mail, chat with each other, establish identities. Here's the crucial part: no one likes McConaughey. He's seen as a renegade, a space cowboy who's only doing this for his family. He can have the same monologues - except now there's some tension and conflict because while we as an audience believe him to be right, the rest of the crew can be given valid reasons why he is wrong. You don't need Matt Damon fistfights for conflict. They go through the wormhole.
There are still multiple planets they can choose to visit - McConaughey wants to visit one of the planets with the least time dilation due to gravity. Matt Damon however signals the ship and tells them to come to his planet - where due to time dilation time passes at three times the rate it does on the other planet.
McConaughey foolishly hijacks the mission and goes to the planet with minimal dialation - it can be the tidal wave planet still, sure - and fucks it up for everyone. No one trusts him after that. THEN they go to Damon's planet.
Suddenly McConaughey has a sympathetic goal but we know he's wrong. But we want to cheer for him. Something seems off about that Matt Damon fellow.
Damon can be head of an operation that seems to be doing well for itself. Maybe he holds some weird collectivist cult values that are in direct conflict with McConaughey's rugged individualism. McConaughey wants to keep exploring, dive in to Gargantua so he can figure out a way to get home. Damon has some policies that strike McConaughey as regressive, repeating the mistakes they made on Earth.
The two men can argue and each member of McConaughey's crew and Damon's cult can serve as stand ins for different ideologies or social caricatures and through this conflict explore ideas about the relationship between man, society, earth, space, etc.
This is all fresh brain rambling and I'm not sure where it ends, but the seeds of solid structure are there. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night can be more than a comforting platitude. Maybe despite McConaughey's disagreement, Damon's colony does well for itself? Murphy should still be an integral part of the plot, somehow, as well as going into the black hole. I'm gonna keep this idea cooking.
Okay, this might become a series as I replay some old favorites.
Unreal is kind of a forgotten masterpiece. It has some cool music, colorful polygons that while definitely dated still hold a cartoony aesthetic (I prefer this to realism in videogames) - the game just reeks of atmosphere. Epic wanted to show off the Unreal Engine with a debut title so the game is stuffed with lots of moments of splash and grandeur.
What elevates it beyond beautiful tech demo is the subtle ways in which these moments all tie together to serve a greater theme. Unreal is not Half-Life, it doesn't have NPCs talking to you all the time and scripted moments that chokepoint the experience as often as Freeman's journey. The story is simple - you're a prisoner in a prison transport ship which crash lands on an alien planet. This is a great premise which can both explain away the weirdness and quirks of the levels, allow the planet to take on all kinds of foreign and beautiful architecture and geography, and the player doesn't need a full backstory. Nameless prisoner, fighting for survival.
The opening level is perfect - it is a gameplay tutorial and an expository story passage, yet it never explicitly states that it is doing either. You're instantly moving around, stumbling around a prison cell. There's no battle or fight, you're just confused. An alarm is going off, immediately you realize you're in a prison ship. Every other human you come across is dead. Reading monitors and journal logs give you brief snippets of what happened. Even if you don't read them, the ship is clearly damaged. By the end of the level you're confident in maneuvering and have found a ventilation shaft which leads outside...
Suddenly you're no longer in a cramped industrial interior. You aren't playing a moody claustrophobic Quake game, you aren't stuck in the underground lab corridors of Black Mesa. The sky is expansive, there's rocks and rivers and a small village off in the distance. The ambient music swells. Birds are off in the sky (and you can interact and shoot them!) You turn around and see the ship you just escaped, it's broken and smoking.
Without a single cutscene or tutorial you know you need to just keep moving forward. The entire game is just about surviving and pushing forward. You find the remains of other human survivors. You begin to discover a bit of the lore of the planet, of the alien civil war you've stumbled into the middle of. There's a lot of pretty levels, and within those levels you witness a lot of cruelty levied against the Nali, the oppressed slave race of the planet. Most of this you learn by just playing, reading scraps of books, runes, etc.
Unreal is a great balance of the old Doom/Quake arcadey model of first person shooter and the then emergent Half-Life story-world model. It's got a wide variety of silly and over the top weapons which are all useful and play into a nifty rock-paper-scissors system with the massive variety of enemies throughout the world. Once again, the premise allows these cartoony weapons and wide variety of monsters to be sensible within the game's world. It's just a great blending of mechanics, story, and theme. I prefer this to the expositional chokepoint model of videogaming, running from cutscene to cutscene while mowing down bulletsponges or what have you. I suppose that's why Unreal never got the same acclaim something like Half-Life did, because it's not explicit or clumsy with heavy handed themes and writing. Also I'm sure Unreal Tournament becoming mad popular also had something to do with it.
I probably won't respond to any comments or messages I get about this because I don't think the issue is really worth it. I know I posted about Vivian James a while back because I did appreciate the idea that something positive could come from all this but the shitstorm just keeps thundering up. I'm no longer a teenaged forum jockey who browses GameFAQs and 4chan all day while playing vidya. I really don't feel like it matters anymore.
I think it's going to just take a whole lot of people acknowledging that this whole discourse is doing nothing productive for the medium and telling the other guys out there to grow the fuck up.
