#grumpy old manchild

[snakebitcat]

Spoiler-free review of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

This is a story about grief and loss, and how your choice of how you deal with them shapes you into who you become.

The opening titles for each of the MCU movies always include images from the comics, or clips of the heroes they feature from past movies. I should have expected that this time they would be paying tribute to just how good Chadwick Boseman was as the Black Panther, but I had no idea that seeing all those glimpses of him was going to hit me as hard as it did.

When we learned about Chadwick’s death, there didn’t seem to be any good choice available to Marvel Studios. Do you abandon work on a sequel, and take away the chance for the kids who finally got to see Wakanda and it’s people in 2018, showing the world that they could be superheroes every bit as much as the kids of other ethnicities had been getting since Iron Man came out?

Do you recast the role, and risk having the writers and whoever takes over as T’Challa fail to do the character the honor that Chadwick did?

Do you retire the mantle of the Black Panther in the MCU entirely, and have another Wakandan hero arise in the hopes of forming a new legacy at the cost of the first major black superhero from either of the two major American comics publishers?

It looked like a No Win scenario.

In Star Trek 3, after having to sacrifice the Enterprise to prevent the villains of the movie from gaining information from the ship’s computers, he turns to Dr McCoy and asks “My God, Bones, what did I do?”

“What you had to do,” McCoy answers, “turn death into a fighting chance to live.”

And, like Kirk facing the No Win scenario of the Kobiyashi Maru test in his days at Starfleet Academy, that’s what Ryan Coogler and his writers did here.

I’ll leave it at that, except for this last diversion.

Sometime in the late 1980s, I was at a Waldenbooks flipping through a Marvel Superhetoes RPG sourcebook one afternoon, when some random stranger walks up, starts talking about the Champions campaign he’s running with friends at school, and we had a good time being nerds talking about nerd shit for awhile. And then he had to go somewhere, and I had to go somewhere, and if there is a multiverse there are universes where we never ran into each other again.

In this one, a few weeks later we ran into each other again at college, and one of us took the fucking hint and said that wr should exchange phone numbers (since email didn’t exist yet,) and I’m not arrogant enough to declare that meeting me changed John’s life for the better, but so much of the important events in my life since then can be traced back to stuff that I discovered thanks to John introducing me to an online service called US Videotel in 1992 that I can say that he did that for me.

John was the kind of friend that becomes family as much as any blood relative, and I was privileged to be a part of his life as he grew up, married, and had kids.

He was as huge a fan of Star Trek as I was, and I don’t think that a single Trek movie that was released after we met failed to see the two of us there on opening day, and when Deep Space 9 aired, one of the things I liked about it was that he got a commanding officer on a Trek show who looked like him.

And when Christopher Priest wrote the Black Panther comic that made the Wakanda we got in the MCU possible, I got to be the one who read it first and tell him that I’d stumbled over something I thought he was going to enjoy a lot, and he did.

And then in 2009, John’s heart gave out, and if I live until the end of the universe I will. Not. Ever. Accept that this was fair.

So 4 years ago, walking out of Black Panther, I was jubilant because it was such a good movie.

And I was FURIOUS that John never had the chance to see it.

This is a movie about mourning loss. But it is also a movie about celebrating why those you mourn still matter to you. And they knocked it out of the fucking park.

[goggular]

May the 40th Anniversary Be With You

“It’s not about what you love; it’s about how you love it. So there’s going to be a thing in your life that you love. I don’t know what it’s going to be. It might be sports or science or reading or telling stories — it doesn’t matter what it is. The way you love that thing and how you find other people who love it the way you do is what makes being a nerd awesome ... Some of us love completely different things. But we all love those things so much that we travel thousands of miles — which is probably easy for you, but we’re still using fossil fuels, so it’s difficult — to be around people who love the things that we love the way that we love them. That’s why being a nerd is awesome. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that thing that you love is a thing that you can’t love.”

-Wil Wheaton, Calgary Comic Expo, 2013

Artists are inspired by the artists that came before them, and inspire other artists in turn. When George Lucas saw Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, it inspired him to create Star Wars. When Patrick Read Johnson saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, it inspired him to use his father’s 8mm movie camera to create his own movies. And then in March or April of 1977, their stories intersected in a way that changed Patrick’s life forever. Forty years later, Johnson brings us 5-25-77, a coming-of-age story about his experiences that he wrote and directed. He began working on it, appropriately enough, in 2001, and was able to show a rough cut of it in 2007 to celebrate Star Wars’ 30th anniversary, but it took him another decade to complete the project. The final result has proven to be more than worth the wait. Patrick (Freaks and Geeks alum John Francis Daley) is a nerdy kid living in a time that was not kind to nerdy kids. In 1977, his mother Janet (Colleen Camp) calls Herb Lightman (the always perfect Austin Pendleton) to tell him about her son’s love of and gift for making movies, and Pendleton agrees that if Patrick can get to LA, he will arrange a meeting with Douglas Trumbull (Michael Pawlak), whose effects work on 2001 were what inspired Patrick to pick up his camera. While touring Trumbull’s production studio, Patrick becomes the first person to see Star Wars that hasn’t worked on it. Then he returns home, and has to decide whether he will stay in rural Illinois or leave home for Hollywood. Once scene that particularly resonated with me was the one when Patrick nerds the hell out in front of a group of his classmates, giving a summary of everything that happens in Star Wars, complete with sound effects and gestures acting out what the characters did. After he finishes, one of them asks him “What are you on?” Watching this unfold reminded me of how I used to do that (before my family got a VCR, my parents would ask me to watch shows they had to miss so I could do this for them), and of how, when I chose the wrong audience for it, I’d just get blank stares or sarcastic remarks. We’ve all had our moments when we love something so much that we want to show somebody why. And if you’ve ever read the comments on, well, anything really, you’ve seen that we’ve all had somebody who will bypass merely not sharing your appreciation and instead just take shots at you. But there will also be people who get it, and get you, and even if they don’t end up loving the thing that you love they will at least understand that it brought you joy, and be happy about the fact that you’re happy about something. There’s so much more in 5-25-77 that I could tell you about – a shot of one of Patrick’s eyes while he watches a plane taking off from the local airport which conveys his sense of wonder in the way the plane’s lights are reflected in his pupil is a perfect moment of beauty, for example – but you deserve the same chance to discover them by watching them happen that I got. 5-25-77 is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. If at all possible go with a friend, like I did, because if you enjoy it half as much as I did then you’ll want to have somebody to nerd the hell out with over it afterward. And in closing, I’d like to give thanks to some of the people who inspired me: Siskel and Ebert, who gave me my first lessons in how to give a movie the review that it deserves. Lindsay Ellis, whose video The Smurfette Principle introduced me to the world of internet critics like the ones here at Goggular And Toby Mobias, the guy who runs the site, ‘and who once asked me whether I had ever considered writing reviews. Next week I’ll share another of Love’s Lost Labors with you, as I nerd the hell out about one of the best movies of 2016 that you most likely missed. But in the meantime go see 5-25-77. Snakebitcat also used to be the remote control for his family’s TV before his parents finally bought a set that came with one. Good times.

[snakebitcat]

I decided to revisit Alan Moore’s comic Top Ten, and as it always does when I got to the issue this bit is in, it hit me hard - Moore and his artist Gene Ha were really hitting on all cylinders here.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, Top Ten is a police procedural book, set in a city where everyone there has super powers. In this issue, two teleport beams coming from off world have crossed, leaving an old married couple fused with one of the cosmic champions of the eternal war between Darkness and Light.

The fusion has mortally wounded them, and the only thing the officers on the scene can do is keep them company until they die.

The Gamer’s last speech always tears me up inside. I’ve been battling against depression most of my life, and sometimes the darkness has been so deep it almost overwhelmed me. But the light is still there. And so far, it’s still winning.

And while all is not yet well, there’s still the chance that it could be.

[snakebitcat]

Grumpy Old Manchild Reviews: Yesterday

I Believe in Yesterday

“You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs.”

- Paul McCartney, Silly Love Songs

In Yesterday Jack Malick (Hamish Patel) has given up on his hopes of winning fame and fortune as a singer-songwriter, when it hits him – and by “it” I mean “a bus”.

As he’s riding his bike home from the latest in a series of disappointing bookings, a blackout hits the entire world, with the lights going out as he’s crossing an intersection at the absolute worst and absolute best possible moment. It’s the worst because neither he nor the driver of the bus manage to see each other in time to avoid putting him in the hospital, but it’s also the best because when he wakes up he seems to be the only person on Earth who can remember the Beatles.

He assumes that this has given him an unfair advantage over every other musician on the planet, but at first it looks like he’s going to fail as badly with the Beatles’ music as he has with his own. After an appearance on a local morning show, however, he gets a call from Ed Sheeran (Ed Sheeran), who is looking for an opening act for an upcoming show in Russia, saw the show, and thought that anybody who could write a song as good as the one Jack performed there deserves a break. Jack asks his manager Ellie (Lily James) to go with him, but because managing him is her sideline and she has classes to teach at the school where she works, she has to stay behind.

Jack’s performance of what the world thinks is the debut of Back in the USSR makes him a global sensation, and Ed’s agent Debra (Kate McKinnon, at her utmost McKinnest here) swoops in to sign him before any other major agency can get their mitts on him.

Everything looks like it’s finally going to go perfectly for Jack, but the more successful he becomes the more guilty he begins to feel – and then it turns out that there are two other people out there who remember the Beatles, and they would like to have a word with him…

Yesterday is a wonderfully fluffy bit of cinematic comfort food. While the plot only stands out from other movies of young entertainers who find fame and success without the happiness that they assumed those would bring due to the speculative fiction premise of “What if the Beatles never happened?”, the performances by Patel, James, and Sheeran are wonderfully earnest, and there are scenes that are brilliantly poignant. The soundtrack is of course great. The subplot of Jack desperately trying to remember the words to Eleanor Rigby is a recurring bit of fun to watch. And the scene with Jack and the two other people who remember John, Paul, George, and Ringo is especially good.

If you love the Beatles, or romantic comedies, and especially if you love both, then you should see this at least once.

[snakebitcat]

Review: Rerun: 5-25-77

The 42nd anniversary of the day that the Star Wars saga began, rather than rite a new review, I decided to repost an old one. Enjoy!

May the 40th Anniversary Be With You

“It’s not about what you love; it’s about how you love it. So there’s going to be a thing in your life that you love. I don’t know what it’s going to be. It might be sports or science or reading or telling stories — it doesn’t matter what it is. The way you love that thing and how you find other people who love it the way you do is what makes being a nerd awesome ... Some of us love completely different things. But we all love those things so much that we travel thousands of miles — which is probably easy for you, but we’re still using fossil fuels, so it’s difficult — to be around people who love the things that we love the way that we love them. That’s why being a nerd is awesome. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that thing that you love is a thing that you can’t love.”

-Wil Wheaton, Calgary Comic Expo, 2013

Artists are inspired by the artists that came before them, and inspire other artists in turn. When George Lucas saw Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, it inspired him to create Star Wars. When Patrick Read Johnson saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, it inspired him to use his father’s 8mm movie camera to create his own movies. And then in March or April of 1977, their stories intersected in a way that changed Patrick’s life forever.

Forty years later, Johnson brings us 5-25-77, a coming-of-age story about his experiences that he wrote and directed. He began working on it, appropriately enough, in 2001, and was able to show a rough cut of it in 2007 to celebrate Star Wars’ 30th anniversary, but it took him another decade to complete the project. The final result has proven to be more than worth the wait.

Patrick (Freaks and Geeks alum John Francis Daley) is a nerdy kid living in a time that was not kind to nerdy kids. In 1977, his mother Janet (Colleen Camp) calls Herb Lightman (the always perfect Austin Pendleton) to tell him about her son’s love of and gift for making movies, and Pendleton agrees that if Patrick can get to LA, he will arrange a meeting with Douglas Trumbull (Michael Pawlak), whose effects work on 2001 were what inspired Patrick to pick up his camera.

While touring Trumbull’s production studio, Patrick becomes the first person to see Star Wars that hasn’t worked on it. Then he returns home, and has to decide whether he will stay in rural Illinois or leave home for Hollywood.

One scene that particularly resonated with me was the one when Patrick nerds the hell out in front of a group of his classmates, giving a summary of everything that happens in Star Wars complete with sound effects and gestures acting out what the characters did. After he finishes, one of them asks him “What are you on?” Watching this unfold reminded me of how I used to do that (before my family got a VCR, my parents would ask me to watch shows they had to miss so I could do this for them), and of how, when I chose the wrong audience for it, I’d just get blank stares or sarcastic remarks. We’ve all had our moments when we love something so much that we want to show somebody why. And if you’ve ever read the comments on, well, anything really, you’ve seen that we’ve all had somebody who will bypass merely not sharing your appreciation and instead just take shots at you.

But there will also be people who get it, and get you, and even if they don’t end up loving the thing that you love they will at least understand that it brought you joy, and be happy about the fact that you’re happy about something.

There’s so much more in 5-25-77 that I could tell you about – a shot of one of Patrick’s eyes while he watches a plane taking off from the local airport which conveys his sense of wonder in the way the plane’s lights are reflected in his pupil is a perfect moment of beauty, for example – but you deserve the same chance to discover them by watching them happen that I got.

5-25-77 is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. If at all possible go with a friend, like I did, because if you enjoy it half as much as I did then you’ll want to have somebody to nerd the hell out with over it  afterward.

And in closing, I’d like to give thanks to some of the people who inspired me:

Siskel and Ebert, who gave me my first lessons in how to give a movie the review that it deserves.

Lindsay Ellis, whose video The Smurfette Principle introduced me to the world of internet critics.

And the critics I used to share a site with. I loved working with you there, and wish you all the best.

Snakebitcat also used to be the remote control for his family’s TV before his parents finally bought a set that came with one. Good times.

[goggular]

Grumpy Old X-Man

“We all got it coming, kid.” -Bill Munny, Unforgiven

An aging man, weary from too many battles and too few victories, all hope dead, finds a reason to rejoin the struggle that he’d hoped to have left behind him.

Also, I saw Logan.

Hi there, faithful reader. Miss me? I know that this technically should have been a review of Election, and this technically should have been posted on November 16, 2016, but the actual election broke my ability to write anything longform worth reading. But then I saw Logan tonight, and as the credits rolled I thought “I have to review this,” in much the same way that I thought it when I saw Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made last June.

The first X-Men comic I ever read was Uncanny X-Men #135 (published the day after my 12th birthday, not that this bit of synchronicity means anything except to yours truly). The X-Men, and especially the members of the team back when I started writing, have been special to me, and despite the various missteps that some of the movies have made, Hugh Jackman has always been absolutely solid as Wolverine even when he hasn’t been given the best material to work with.

Logan gave Hugh Jackman the best material of any project I’ve seen him in so far. This is the best movie Fox has made based on Marvel’s mutant characters, and a heartfelt farewell to Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine.

Logan begins in the late 2020s, when no mutant births have taken place for years and the X-Men are no more. Logan now uses his birth name of James Howlett, and the only hope left to him after the incident that shattered the team that had become his family is that he can raise enough money to buy a boat that he can use to get himself and Charles Xavier (Sir Patrick Stewart), whose health and control of his telepathic powers are declining, to safety outside of America. It is the simplest of simple plans, and in the grand tradition of simple plans it is put in jeopardy when a woman named Gabriela (Elizabeth Rodriguez) begs him to take a young mutant with powers suspiciously like his own named Laura (Dafne Keen) north so that she can find refuge in a sanctuary called Eden

You deserve to find the rest out for yourself, so with one exception I’ll leave it at that. At one point Logan, Charles, and Laura pause in their trip toward Eden for rest, they watch Shane. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Shane is the story of a gunslinger who tries to put a life of violence behind him, only to be forced to return to old habits in order to protect innocents. He saves them, but has to leave because he has no place among peaceful folk. And he leaves the boy who’s been idolizing him through the movie with these parting words:

“Joey, there's no living with... with a killing. There's no going back from one. Right or wrong, it's a brand. A brand sticks. There's no going back. Now you run on home to your mother, and tell her... tell her everything's all right. And there aren't any more guns in the valley.”

As the quote I chose to open with should make obvious, Unforgiven would have been the Western that I would have used as a parallel to Logan, if only because of it being about two men of action well past their prime trying to guide a child in danger of becoming just like them through a dark and violent world. But the writers were wiser than that, and instead chose a movie about a man of violence trying to teach a child that there are better ways to follow than the bloody path they chose before it’s too late for the child to find the redemption life denied the man. Unforgiven portrayed a world where hope is delusion, and once the first drop of blood is spilled the only question is how deep the ocean of blood you drown in will be. Shane portrayed one where there is the hope, if not of leaving a life of violence behind, then at least of saving others from following your bloody example.

And in dark and uncertain times, we need whatever hope we can find.

-Snakebitcat is going to go watch Shane now

[snakebitcat]

24 years ago a group of teenagers got together to play a role playing game. 2 years after that, all but one of them were finally found.

Now they get to discover what happened to the friend they lost.

Holy shit, y’all, this comic is fucking amazing.

[snakebitcat]

In Loving Memory Of Leonard Nimoy (Repost)

(We lost Leonard Nimoy six years ago yesterday, so I wanted to revisit the tribute I wrote to him in my review of Star Trek: Into Darkness. I hope you enjoy it.)

As you may have noticed in my Wrath of Khan review, Star Trek was a huge part of my childhood. And my favorite character, far and away moreso than anybody else in the cast, was Spock. I was a scrawny little kid who was too smart for his own good, was never sure whether he would ever manage to fit in, and didn’t really understand this whole “emotions” thing. They couldn’t have made me identify with the character more if they had named him after me. It’s beyond cliché to say “part of my childhood is gone” when somebody who starred in something you loved as a kid dies, but that was the only way I could feel when Leonard Nimoy died. Losing him made me feel old as hell, and when they acknowledged his death in Star Trek: Beyond by having Ambassador Spock (the final connection between the origi9nal and reboot timelines) die, it punched out my fucking heart.

But I digress.

Star Trek: Beyond is the movie that Star Trek: Into Darkness should have been, but to be fair we needed Into Darkness to be able to appreciate that fact. It begins with the crew of the Enterprise three years into the five year mission to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life forms and new civilizations; and to go boldly where no one has gone before.

Kirk (Chris Pine) has grown weary of exploration, and has requested a transfer to a desk job. When Spock (Zachary Quinto) learns of the death of his older self he is no longer certain that his place is with Starfleet rather than with the other Vulcans. Before either can tell the other about this, however, an alien refugee from the planet Altamid arrives at the starbase where the Enterprise’s supplies are being replenished to ask for help. As the Enterprise is the ship best equipped to provide the requested assistance, and so Kirk and Spock embark on what each plans will be their last mission together.

And we get the scene that made a lot of people hate the trailer when the Enterprise gets the hell kicked out of it. The crew are scattered. Most are taken captive by Krall (Idris Elba), the alien warlord whose hatred for the Federation drives the plot. Scotty (Simon Pegg) encounters Jaylah (Sofia Boutella), a scavenger who has turned a crashed starship into a refuge safe from Krall’s soldiers. Spock and McCoy (Karl Urban) land together, as do Kirk and Sulu (John Cho). From here, the crew struggles to reunite, uncover Krall’s secrets, and find a way to escape Altamid to thwart his plans.

I could say more about the plot, but you deserve the chance to be see it unfold for yourself so I’ll digress a bit more here. Star Trek is at its best when the creators remember that while the audience wants impressive visuals, it’s the emotions and relationships that drive the characters’ stories that determine whether a new installment succeeds or fails.

Star Trek: Beyond is a resounding success. Spock and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) still have great chemistry but are dealing with the frictions that happen in romantic relationships. Kirk and Spock have become the sort of friends that Into Darkness tried but did not quite succeed at portraying. Scotty and Keenser (Deep Roy) are still the best of engineering bros, with Jaylah making a great third member of their duo. And McCoy and Spock have finally become the bickering best friends that we got on the Enterprise that had no bloody A, B, C, or D.

And Krall’s got a secret. A lazier writer would have given us someone like Admiral Evil Robocop from Into Darkness, but Simon Pegg understood that you have to make an effort, and he did. I can’t say why Krall hates the Federation and wants it destroyed because spoilers, but he has solid reasons and they matter on both a plot and an emotional level.

I don’t rate movies in number of stars; I rate it by how much you should be willing to pay. Go see this in the theatre, not just because it’s worth a full-price ticket but because you shouldn’t wait to see it.

Beyond closes with the actors playing members of the bridge crew delivering the speech about the Enterprise and her mission, dedicates itself to the memory of Leonard Nimoy and Anton Yelchin, and plays the classic theme song as the last of the credits roll. It honored where Star Trek has been while setting the stage for it to truly go where no other incarnation of the franchise has gone before.

And as the lights in the theatre came on and I exited, I thought about McCoy asking Kirk how he felt at the end of Wrath of Khan. And I realized that my answer was the same as Kirk’s:

I feel young.