The Star Wars content that Disney did put out has, for me, been an exercise in diminishing returns. I'm still not completely caught up on the animated shows, but for me, Star Wars has always been about the silver screen experience: the epic storytelling, the larger than life characters and plot, the cheer of the crowd, the crushing of the enemies, seeing them driven before you, and hearing the lamentations of the women. At the time I'm writing this, there've been five Star Wars feature films released under the Disney Regime so far: Episodes VII, VIII, and IX carrying on the main movie storyline, and two spinoffs set between Episodes III and IV of the main series, Solo and Rogue One. Out of those five, Episode VII: The Force Awakens was essentially a soft reboot of Episode IV: A New Hope, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi stands with the best that Star Wars has to offer, Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker keeps getting worse the more I think about it, Solo was a decently fun galactic romp, and Rogue One was the movie equivalent of a couple of kids playing with their toys for a couple of hours.
Thursday, December 31, 2020
The Mandalorian: For Every Character There is a Season
Monday, November 30, 2020
Running Low on Blood and Oil in East Texas... No Corpse is Completely Silent and No Chainsaw Can Drown Out Their Cries Completely
Saturday, October 31, 2020
The Legend Never Dies: Sean Connery and the Inevitability of Change
Some of my favourite memories of my grandfather involve sitting around basking in the warm glow of the TV screen. Whether it was at family functions or those times when I and maybe one of my siblings was visiting for the summer, there was something special about going through stacks of movies and TV shows on VHS, making a bag of microwave popcorn, and then settling in, preparing ourselves to enter an entirely new world. I remember my grandfather had a particular fondness for James Bond, and so it was my grandfather who introduced me to the franchise (at least according to the hazy depths of my own memory, which I will grant is only as reliable as the next man's and subject to the same imperfections). Maybe it was just a coincidence of time and space, with the James Bond films originally having become a part of the cultural zeitgeist when my grandfather was still young enough to identify with the James Bond fantasy of the witty and charming secret agent who oozed confidence from every pore and crackled with sexual energy and old enough to need that kind of escape from the drudgeries of everyday life.
Wednesday, September 30, 2020
The Bourne Legacy: An Origin Story In Search of a Franchise
The worst thing about The Bourne Legacy is probably that it felt like a puzzle piece that was desperately jammed into a spot where it didn't belong in the wrong puzzle. I absolutely love the original Bourne Trilogy, which is probably why it took me so long to get around to watching The Bourne Legacy (eight years after the fact) and Jason Bourne (four years after the fact); I had such high expectations, that there was virtually no way that either of the straggling sequels could live up to them. And I was mostly right. Mostly.
Honestly, I really found myself enjoying The Bourne Legacy for the most part, though it lacked the depth and weight of its predecessors, but something about the whole movie seemed off, and it took me a while to put my finger on it. It was a little distracting, of course, having a Jason Bourne movie without Jason Bourne (Matt Damon). It was a shame that things couldn't have worked out better behind the scenes, even if it was just to have a short scene at the end of the movie where Bourne shows up and meets Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner), the super assassin hero of Legacy, like at the end of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift where Vin Diesel makes a cameo and ties the adventure into the franchise proper. But that didn't break the film for me. No, what really stuck in my craw was that The Bourne Legacy seemed like it was an entirely new intellectual property which the powers that be decided to try and shoehorn into the Bourne franchise.
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Feel Free at Any Point to Tell Me Exactly What the Poets are Doing... Centuries Ahead though Years Behind... The Tragically Hip and Landing the Balloon
Friday, July 31, 2020
Talking the Talk... And You Can Quote Me On That
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
A Movie a Day Keeps the Boredom Away: A Modern-Day Odyssey
Sunday, May 31, 2020
The Dawn of the Dawn of Justice... Again! Release the Snyder Cut with a Side of Mayhem
Friday, April 10, 2020
Legacy of the Twelve Colonies Volume IV: Battlestar Galactica... There's a Starbuck Waiting in the Sky
Like trust, respect, love, and making on offer on a house, forgiveness should always be conditional.
This may seem counter-intuitive, but essentially what I'm arguing for is forgiveness in the sense of accountability rather than forgiveness in the mystic sense of the Christian (or Cylon) tradition, which is tainted by this concept of absolution. People absolutely should be given second chances, but it's important to make this distinction between accountability and absolution. Accountability is a process of accepting responsibility for one's actions, and involves an effort on the part of the individual who wronged someone to better themselves and atone for what they've done; it's also a process that involves that individual's society (either on a macro or micro level) to work with and support them, and reintegrate them back into the group. Absolution, on the other hand, is an abdication of all responsibility by all parties to have to change or strive to do better; it's a surrender, in the worst sense of the word, of any kind of moral obligation for everyone involved, sacrificing the need to process uncomfortable emotions like hate, anger, guilt, or resentment in favour of a self-indulgent and immediate gratification.
Like much of the series, Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica doesn't shy away from difficult ethical questions like this. Season 4 was, in many respects, centred around this core theme of the pragmatism of forgiveness, and that divide between accountability and absolution. Well, that, and, of course, hot robot sex.
Sunday, March 29, 2020
The Deafening Sound of Silence and The Virtues of Failure: Why Everybody Lives by a Code and Nobody is Ever Completely Right
Quite the opposite, Silence was a (for the most part) quiet meditation on faith and spirituality by Martin Scorsese, who has wrestled with his own faith throughout his life. This has been a common theme in many of his films, probably most notably The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun, which comprise the other two thirds of the unofficial Scorsese spirituality trilogy. Also notably, and kind of appropriately, the public response to Silence seemed a lot more subdued compared with Last Temptation or Kundun, both of which stirred up considerable controversy at the times of their release, with Scorsese even being banned from China for a time after the release of Kundun. I don't know if that's saying too much these days; if you sneeze in the wrong direction you're liable to attract the ire of the Chinese government (or, you know, if you're gay or a ghost, or perhaps worst of all, a gay ghost).
For some reason, despite his vast and varied catalogue of films, it seems that from recent online discussions, people seem to have superficially associated Scorsese mostly with subject matter relating to organized crime. Although several of his films do deal specifically with the Mafia or some type of organized crime, these specific settings and characters are a pastiche of what Scorsese witnessed growing up in New York, and a lens through which he explores themes and concepts that run a little deeper than whether snitches do, in fact, get stitches.