2025-01-21 06:25:34
There were a few moments in Skeleton Crew where it seemed like Jude Law was the only human actor in a Muppet movie. I don’t mean that to suggest he was somehow “above” the material, or that he was any better than the other performances, because all the performances were generally great.
Instead, I’m talking about how the best performances by humans in Muppet movies will have them so deeply and completely committed to the part that the uncanny valley gets flipped upside down. The Muppets become real, and you get occasional flashes of eerie hyper-reality from the human. With Skeleton Crew, the end result is a character who’s simultaneously in the middle of a grand adventure and unhappy with the character he’s playing in the adventure.
I don’t believe that Skeleton Crew needs another layer of nuance or interpretation on top of everything else, because it’s a solid, extremely well-made, and most importantly, imaginative piece of Star Wars storytelling. This is a reminder of the early days of Star Wars, when it seemed like every new frame in the movie would show you something you’d never seen before.
When I heard the concept “The Goonies but in Star Wars,” I imagined that it’d be fun and charming, but so slight and derivative that it’d end up being completely forgettable. And the series isn’t at all subtle about its references, but it doesn’t drown underneath them, either: they’re evocative, but the series almost always uses them as a jumping-off point to do something else.
Even the twist that forms the basic premise is clever: the kids come from the mysterious treasure planet! So the journey that would be the basis of another type of adventure story is just a story of them trying to return home. And the orderly suburban homes that were supposed to represent the absolute epitome of dull normality in movies like ET are so out of place in Star Wars that they seem eerie, alien, and somehow threatening.
On the whole, it feels like a series made by people who had a ton of ideas, more than something made to fill a slot in a production schedule. More often than not, stuff happens because somebody wanted it to happen. Not because nobody could think of a stronger idea.
Jude Law is such a natural in Star Wars that it’s kind of surprising he hasn’t already been in it. Over the last two episodes of the series, his character does a heel turn, and it seemed odd to me, like they’d mis-interpreted the tone of the series or his character or something. He kills a defenseless pirate, who deserved it, but it still seemed against the rules. And from that point on, he’s strangely inert: no longer the lovable scoundrel, but not an intensely threatening bad guy, either. He’s cruel but pointedly not deadly, so he’s more or less reduced to standing around making threats and fending off impotent attacks from seemingly every other cast member.
His character ends up being the most off-brand possible thing for a roguish space pirate: he doesn’t seem to be having fun at all. And while the action beats of the last episode didn’t really work for me, the thematic beats absolutely did. They picked up the series’s ongoing theme of good guys and bad guys and what constitutes being a hero. They showed how the idea had been seeded in every other episode, with a character showing the kids kindness and helping them along their way. A dark, dangerous galaxy with points of light shining out everywhere.
It seems to be the moment when Jod comes to terms with the fact that he’s not a hero. His story about surviving after Order 66 and seeing the only person who showed him kindness be murdered by the Empire: it certainly seems like a true story, but it also sounds like the justification he’s used for choosing the path he did. I got the sense that this adventure reminded him that at one point, he’d wanted to be the good guy, but he’d abandoned it. To me, it added a layer of resonance to an already-solid adventure story.
One of the things that The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett really drove home was how ruthless the Star Wars universe is. It’s a setting for adventure stories, not for comfortable living. (And in the rare times when it does show people living comfortably, they’re either selfish and awful, or they’re sheltered away and living in fear). I liked that the focus in Skeleton Crew was turned away from larger-than-life heroes or villains, and towards the beauty of lots of individual people helping each other in a dangerous universe.
2025-01-15 07:05:58
When Alien: Romulus first came out, the buzz around it was so good that I was sure I was going to have to do the rarest of rare things in 2024: go see a movie in a theater. But after the initial wave of good vibes, the mood on the internet seemed to sour, with more and more people complaining that the movie was too derivative of Alien and Aliens without significantly improving on the formula.
I finally watched it last night (it’s streaming on Hulu via Disney+), and I thought it was excellent. I can’t say that I loved it, though. There were lots of baffling edits and confusing scenes — I still don’t know exactly how Bjorn or Tyler died, for instance, and it often cut to an odd angle or a weird shot at exactly the wrong moment. Plus there were some clunky moments late in the movie as things started to go off the rails. By the time they hit the inevitable “get away from her, you bitch!” it felt that they’d already exceeded their quota. For whatever reason, the clunky moment I found the most jarring was that after a scene of efficient action movie exposition, Rain stares off into the distance and quietly says to herself, “Andy? Are you there?”
But I disagree with the criticism that it’s too derivative of the other movies. I don’t disagree that it’s derivative; it absolutely is. It feels like the first half is a 2024 take on Alien: it sets up a bleak horror movie inspired by 1970s “hard” science fiction, centered around a bunch of miserable working class people sacrificed to terrible monsters by a terrible corporation. The second half feels like an attempt to plus up the Aliens template, a relentlessly escalating action movie with multiple simultaneous countdowns to doom. In the middle is an exposition-heavy bridge filled with (half-baked) ideas from Prometheus. But I don’t see this as a bad thing. To put it in the most obnoxious way possible: it’s not a bug hunt, it’s a feature hunt.
That’s because Alien: Romulus feels like it’s made by people who understand exactly what makes an Alien movie work, and even more importantly, what doesn’t. This might piss off the hard-core fans of the franchise, but I think the trick is understanding that the Alien universe just ain’t all that deep.
I always assumed that it was, since the first movie is so jam-packed full of intriguing stuff. Giant aliens! A whole different species of alien! Face huggers! Chest bursters! Acid for blood! Synthetic humans! Evil corporations! It all seems like there’s more than enough to fuel movie after movie exploring the darkest corners of the universe in more detail.
But the trick, as I see it, is to have all these details that are just evocative enough to prompt exciting set pieces. The best installments are all tight action or horror movies, focused on a small cast of mostly-doomed characters dropped into an environment where literally everything is trying to kill them, and surviving just by virtue of their own cleverness and humanity. The worst try to focus on lore or character-building instead of developing a sequence of clear obstacles for the characters to overcome, and that’s how you get stuff like Charlize Theron not having enough sense to run to the left and avoid getting crushed by a rolling space station.
The best part of Alien: Romulus is the extended sequence where Rain has to fend off a swarm of Xenomorphs, armed only with a rifle she’s been told she can’t use without killing everyone on board the station. I say it’s a great example of why Romulus is the third best Alien movie. And it’s a great example of why I think installments in this universe work better when the focus is on cinematics instead of story.
I came to this epiphany when I was trying to establish my bona fides: Aliens is one of my top ten favorite movies. I’ve seen all of the movies except for Covenant, and I think the only worthwhile ones are the first two and now Romulus. I haven’t seen any of the Aliens vs Predator movie installments, but I have read several of the comics, as well as several of the “Predator-less” comics. I’m too much of a chicken to play Alien: Isolation even though I have it installed on multiple machines. And I’ve never read any of the novels.
Over the years I kept trying to get into the comics, and I kept bouncing off. It seemed like such a natural fit for comics, since this was such a compelling universe. But as it turns out, reading about miserable, doomed people from their perspective just isn’t very fun. That’s why I was so impressed by how the first half of Romulus efficiently conveyed how our characters lived in such a bleak world, with everything stacked against them, and why they’d be so desperate to escape. The history of Weyland-Yutani is interesting only insofar as it spurs characters into action.
Similarly, the Xenomorphs had kind of a diminishing return, and there’s only so much you can do with them before you’re either retreading the same ground, or desperately trying to come up with an interesting new mutant/variant/hybrid. They’re really “the perfect organism” only in terms of being perfect movie monsters. Every aspect of them is designed to provoke another what the f?!? moment.
So if Romulus had simply forced its characters into repeating the same discovery beats as the crew of the Nostromo, and every failed expedition before and afterwards, then it would have been derivative. But what’s so clever about Romulus is how aware it is that it exists in a world not just with multiple Alien installments, but countless movies and video games inspired by the franchise, either directly or indirectly. The dynamic of the first half of the movie is completely flipped from that of Alien, where the tension is driven not by the unknown but by dramatic irony. We in the audience know way more about whats going to happen than the characters do. And the movie is full of visual teases that build suspense not over what’s going to happen, but when.
We see a glimpse of a face hugger biometric read out on a screen in the foreground, that the characters can’t see. We see containers open in a room in which two of our characters are locked, and we’re just waiting for the inevitable to happen: a face hugger to leap out and attach to the obnoxious and unlikeable Bjorn. And I’m not at all crazy about using a CG deep faked Ian Holm in the movie, but I get the intent: we all know what role that character served in the first movie, so we’re just waiting for his inevitable betrayal.
By the time most of the cast has been killed off, the movie is squarely in its Aliens mode, and Rain is having to fend off an oncoming swarm of Xenomorphs, the characters have caught up with the audience. That’s when the movie starts riffing on the known lore of this universe: these things have acid for blood? How do we turn that into a gruesome kill that hasn’t been done yet (as far as I can remember)? The space marines in Aliens had aim-assisted pulse rifles? How do we play around with the physics of that, and how do we get tension from showing the dwindling ammo supply? Add in the interesting aspect of artificial gravity — with the “gravity purges” not making a ton of sense but adding yet another countdown timer for suspense — and it’s one of the coolest sequences in the entire franchise. I especially liked how the massive elevator was both savior and threat throughout the sequence, and how it cleverly prevented the explosive decompression.
And the main reason I like this sequence so much is that it shows how Alien movies can excel at character development and thematic resonance, even when they’re focused on action and horror. Rain figuring out to use the zero gravity against the Xenomorphs showed that she was uniquely clever and resourceful. And her actions did a much better job of conveying the theme of the movie than any of the dialogue could: loyalty, staying true to your humanity even when every possible thing is stacked against you, and refusing to give in to despair.
The end of horror movies tracking the “final girl” are almost always just her trying to survive. Aliens made Ripley an interesting character just by having her choose to go back for Newt. And Romulus does the same for Rain by having her send Kay back to (what she thinks is) safety, even if it means giving up her only means of escape. For all the time the Alien installments have spent navel-gazing about the engineers and why do we exist, or synthetic humans and what makes humanity worth saving, it’s the action-driven installments that drive home the message the best.
2025-01-11 09:15:05
Last Friday, January 3, 2025, I got married to my fiancé. You may all applaud.
We’ve been engaged since 2019, but neither of us were in much of a rush to plan an actual ceremony, not least because it’d be a lot of work to plan something appropriate that’d satisfy all the friends and family we have scattered around the country.
That changed with the 2024 election. California voters did vote to put marriage equality in the state constitution — something that was “de facto” accepted after Obergfell v. Hodges, but not explicitly guaranteed — but we’ve already seen how Republicans love to use LGBTQ people as fuel for their culture wars, to distract from their abject incompetence. I’m sure that the few remaining Republicans I still have any contact with would insist that there’s nothing to worry about, and that threats to reverse gay rights are just fear-mongering.
Which is, to put it mildly, complete bullshit. The most corrupt Supreme Court justices in my lifetime have been threatening to overturn marriage equality for a while already. And we’ve all seen first-hand how the Republican party went all-in on attack ads against transgender people during the election, something that curiously didn’t seem to bother all the “decent Republicans” we keep hearing about. It would be foolish for any gay couple not to protect themselves.
But I hate to cheapen any major life event with anything as stupid as American politics, so I’ll just say I’m glad we were incentivized to do it quickly. We got a license last month and scheduled a civil ceremony at the local city hall. My assumption was that we’d do a quick, bureaucratic, and unromantic ceremony first, and then have time to plan the “real” ceremony sometime in the future.
We may still have an additional ceremony and/or renew or vows at some point, but I was really touched by how special the day turned out to be. We invited several friends who live nearby, which had the unexpected but wonderful side-effect of having some of our oldest friends in attendance at our wedding. I had two of my very first friends in California present, from when I first moved to work at LucasArts. And J had friends from even farther back. I was so grateful they were willing to come out to Van Nuys on a Friday afternoon.
And the ceremony itself was surprisingly nice; clearly they wanted people to feel like their ceremony wasn’t in some impersonal space, but set up for a special memory. We got to say a few vows (which I had to come up with on the spot, which made me very emotional), and it was overall just a wonderful thing that I never would’ve expected from a local city hall.
Afterwards, we all went to a very nice restaurant, which J had found for our first anniversary dinner in California. We had a lot of food, talked about inessential things, but in a big group and in person, which is a rarity post-COVID and post-social media. I loved being able to spend the time with so many good people.
So basically: I highly recommend marrying somebody who still makes your heart go aflutter even after being together for 15 years. And I recommend doing it in a place where the emphasis is on the people, not the locale. Cynical me had been thinking about how much money we’d saved over having an expensive ceremony and reception, but now that I’m a week into being a married man, I think our wedding was perfect. It was all about love and hope and optimism, and nothing else.
2025-01-01 00:25:30
Book
The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman
Series
Book 3 in the Thursday Murder Club series
Synopsis
The gang of retiree cold-case investigators is asked by a local news caster to investigate the death 16 years ago of his good friend, a woman who worked at the station. Meanwhile, an elusive money-laundering tech wizard known only as The Viking has threatened to kill one of the club unless they help him take out a rival.
Pros
Cons
Verdict
It’s impressive that even as these books turn into more of a “catch up and gossip with friends” running series instead of solid mystery stories, they’re getting better at being more grounded and less twee. It’s still often silly to the point of being absurd, but they’re charming in exactly the way you want a cozy murder mystery to be.
Note
Only 7 books read in 2024, which is low even by my standards. I think I’m actually going to skip the Goodreads challenge this year (instead of saying I’m going to skip it and then doing it anyway), since having a target number makes it feel more like a chore than a hobby.
2024-12-25 01:54:41
This year we watched the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special, which should be one of everybody’s Christmas traditions. The thing I was most struck with this year is how timeless it seems. I tend to think of it as a time capsule of peak 1990s television, even though it was released in 1988.
I also tend to think of it as this bizarre little one-off gag, making fun of traditional Christmas specials. My 80s brain said that it was a cute joke that they have Frankie and Annette in the cast, and that the locals like Chairy and Conky are given top billing over Oprah and Cher.
But now I can recognize just how much love they put it into it, as if they fully intended for it to still be watched and beloved over 30 years later. Part of that is that the camp — even the playhouse annex being built by buff, shirtless construction workers using fruitcake — isn’t just a sly wink, sneaking gay stuff into a mainstream TV holiday special, during the Reagan era, when the anti-gay “family values” culture war was still in effect. Instead, there’s a real sense of “this is stuff that we love, and eventually, the rest of you will catch on.”
How else do you explain Grace Jones’s fantastic performance of Little Drummer Boy? It capitalized on Jones’s persona as way too outre for the mainstream, made fun of that (“Sorry, Grace, back in the box!”), and then gave it the space to be a show-stopping highlight.
Not to mention defiance of the attempts to gaslight the entire country into believing that it’s always been a Christian Nation of Straight English-Speaking White People, by having Charro perform Feliz Navidad and bringing in Miss Rene for “the Hannukah portion of the show.” (Along with Jewish dinosaurs playing with a dreidel).
The part of the show that I’ve had “a changing relationship with” over the years: kd lang’s wonderful over-the-top version of “Jingle Bell Rock.” (Still the best version of the song ever recorded, IMO).
Back when I first saw the special, I thought it was awkward and tone deaf. Surly teenage me said, “Yeah, kd, we all get that the show is campy, but it’s supposed to be cool as well. You’re a little too on-the-nose.” It was corny, or had I had the word back then, cringe.
Now, of course, I can recognize what an uptight little bastard teenage me was, bundling everything up tighter and tighter for fear of looking uncool. In my defense, it was the 1980s. (And I was still very very much in the closet). Now of course, I can recognize it as someone who was defiantly and confidently asserting her own style, just as much as Grace Jones was, but who’d just recently burst into the peak of her mainstream popularity.
In other words: she understood the assignment exactly, and she delivered a performance that she knew people would still be watching over thirty years later. Or if not, then at least she’d give it everything she could, all while having fun with it.
So I’m wishing everybody Happy Holidays and a very Merry Christmas, and my wish is that we can all live our lives with the unchecked, fearless enthusiasm and joy of kd lang in the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special.
2024-12-20 02:00:00
What We Do In The Shadows will most likely be one of my top 10 television series of all time. It was never “appointment viewing.” I’m sure there’s a lot that I’ve forgotten, and I probably couldn’t give details of entire seasons, much less individual episodes. But overall, it was relentlessly1 clever, surprising, hilarious, goofy, and as much as I hate to use FX marketing language: fearless.
One of the things that I most respect about the series is that the comedy and the tone were all over the place, but it always felt true to itself. It could be almost unforgivably corny, shockingly daring, and astonishingly clever all within the same episode, and sometimes within the same scene. One episode would feel like a traditional sitcom bottle episode, and the next would have an over-the-top bit of gruesome violence as a punchline, and the next would be a visual effects showcase that seemed far beyond the budget of a 30-minute comedy series.
As an example of how varied its comedy was: the gags that seemed to take hold with viewers the most, like “creepy paper,” Jackie Daytona, or the cursed witch’s hat, were rarely my favorite, but were usually alongside the funniest moments of any television series I’ve seen. I don’t know what the production of the series was actually like, but it sure seems like they would ignore the concept of a “show bible” or a consistent tone or style, instead choosing that anything was fair game as long as it’s funny.
Leading up to the finale, there was an episode inspired by The Warriors where the action was instigated by a character having his head burst like a tick and then ripped off at the neck; and then an unbearably awkward office party at a supremely shitty venture capital2 firm, which somehow made me even more uncomfortable. The series will have some of the corniest jokes you can see coming from a mile away, followed up by someone vomiting a torrent of blood or having their entrails spill out onto the floor. And it rarely feels too over the top; always exactly the right amount of excess.
That anything-goes mentality seems to have gone into the finale as well, where they decided to just try every possible ending they could think of. I only just found out that there are even a couple more I hadn’t known about — if you weren’t quite satisfied with the Newhart finale, you can go to the extra features to have Nadja hypnotize you two more times, with two more heavily-referential endings.
The series could have ended with the penultimate episode. It didn’t give closure to everyone’s story, but it was a very sweet and fitting ending to Nandor and Guillermo’s. Gizmo finally realized he was never going to fit into the human world, and Nandor finally started to treat him as an equal partner, and he proposed a new life where they fight injustice.
But it’s probably more fitting that the end of the series is the end of the documentary. It was full of meta-commentary on the series as a whole, in particular calling out the criticism that the series could’ve ended after season five had wrapped up the story of Guillermo wanting to become a vampire. I did appreciate that they explicitly acknowledged that the vampires were just going to keep on living their weird, stupid, after-lives, doing basically the same things over and over again for centuries. But it often felt more like it was giving closure to the writers more than the audience, giving them a chance to say goodbye to the series after six years.
And I’d never blame them for that! But I do think that my favorite aspect of the finale was the documentary crew just stopping the characters mid-interview, saying that they had enough footage. It was so callous and disrespectful that it felt perfectly in tone with this series.
The other thing that’s perfectly in tone with this series is taking it to the line of what’s tolerable, and even past that line, but then knowing exactly when to pull back. They can be so mean, or so gross, or so nihilistic, or so selfish and inconsiderate, or so violent, or so stupid, that the characters seem irredeemable and the writing feels like an overhard attempt to be edgy. But then they’ll have a surprising moment of kindness or cleverness that makes any sentimentality feel earned.
They did exactly that with the end of the series, choosing to have it both ways. They got the tear-jerker where Guillermo says goodbye forever and turns out all the lights one last time… and then they got the adventure-nonsense ending, riding a high-speed coffin elevator down to Nandor’s hidden underground lair. The key wasn’t just the effects — which, again, seem like way overkill for a 30-minute comedy series — but the fact that Nandor and Guillermo got to sit in the coffin together, as adventure pals instead of master and servant.
Now that it’s over, I do have a favorite moment from the entire series. Not the funniest, but the one that sums up exactly what I think is wonderful about the tone of What We Do In The Shadows. It’s in season five, when the vampires’ neighbor Sean is staging a pride parade as he’s running for office. Guillermo has just recently come out, and he’s given a special place in the parade: sitting by himself in a lawn chair on a flatbed truck, holding a sparkler and a piece of poster board reading “GAY GUY.”
It’s a good gag on the surface, because the characters are paying lip service to inclusivity without genuinely getting it. The result was Guillermo going through all the stress and self-doubt of coming out, only to be tokenized and put on display.
(As a side note: I liked how the show treated homosexuality as being distinct from Nandor and Lazlo’s hypersexuality; the series has mentioned the two of them having sex with each other and other men and male vampires plenty of times, but it never describes it in terms of romantic attraction, or as a part of their identity).
What makes the pride parade my favorite moment, though, is what happens as the camera lingers on Guillermo. He initially seems humiliated and miserable, but as the parade goes on, you can see a smile start to take over his face. By the end of the episode, he’s waving the sparkler and bouncing along to the music. Finally happy with himself and proud of the label. In an episode that’s been all about callously and clumsily making a show of pride just to win inclusivity points, it makes a very sweet and even subtle point about how much it means to the participants to be able to be out and open and not afraid of looking ridiculous.
That kind of satire, mockery, or nihilism followed up with a bit of sentimentality or kindness is what elevates What We Do In The Shadows from an extremely funny series to a memorable and even important one. It asserts that you can be smart without being elitist, sentimental without being maudlin, goofy without being pointless, shocking without being shallow, and have a tone that’s all over the place, just as long as you’re funny enough.