[8.5/10] I’m assuredly overrating this one because of the reveal, but to put it in Shyamalan terms, what a twist!
What’s great about the fact that our heroes are, and have been, in The Bad Place this whole time is that it recontextualizes everything we’ve seen in a reasonably believable way. Sitcoms are founded on conflict, and we, the audience at home, had every reason to believe the glitches in the system were just part and parcel of the usual sitcom necessity of having some conflict to motivate the action.
But “Michael’s Gambit” turns metatext into text, revealing that the character conflicts and frustrations that the main characters have been through is not merely an incidental result of some unexpected error, but rather a deliberate attempt from the architects (in some ways, a stand-in for the show’s writers) to make the characters torture one another.
It adds a creative spin on everything we’ve seen so far. (Though I do wonder if, on rewatch, everything holds up to scrutiny.) I particularly love the conclusion that despite the consequentialist good she did, Tahani’s efforts weren’t enough to get her into the real Good Place because her motives were corrupt, and that Chidi’s obsessive morality and indecision led to him hurting everyone close to him. That helps us to see these seemingly enlightened characters in a different light, which is what good writing does.
Some of the initial business where the gang is debating who should take the two slots to The Bad Place is a bit tedious, both because the logic used is pretty weak and it retreads some of the feeble love triangle stuff from before, but where it leads is outstanding.
I particularly love the idea that the Bad Place architects, and Michael in particular, are going out on a limb with this. The notion of finding new and creative ways to torture people, and trying to come up with a perfect vicious cycle with these four people completely redoes the show’s premise and gives it tons of interesting new places to go.
In addition, it provides a promising reset for Season 2. Eleanor’s own gambit is a clever one, and I’m excited to see how it all shakes out.
Overall, the laughs weren’t as strong as I might have liked, but this is a brilliant twist that I absolutely did not see coming, so the show gets points for a genuine surprise that makes me see the prior twelve episodes differently.
(And hey, let’s throw out some additional wild speculation while we’re at it. Maybe in this afterlife, people don’t get sent to hell to be punished necessarily, but to be given the chance to improve and earn themselves a place in Heaven. Each time, our heroes get the chance to be a little better and get a little closer to eternal reward. Granted, I totally whiffed on the twist here, so take my predictions with a grain of salt, but still, throwing it out there anyway!)
[9.4/10] A good mystery has to do a lot to be, well, good. It has to have a satisfying answer to the “whodunnit” question. But that answer can’t be too predictable or the audience won’t have the thrill of following along. But it also can’t be too out of left field or it will feel like a cheat. So any mystery writer has to balance including enough setups and clues to where the payoff feel earned, but so many that the solution feels obvious or pre-ordained.
But there should also be something more at the heart of the mystery than just the answer to who the killer is. The answer should reveal something deeper about the story, about its major players, about the why and the who behind the mystery. In short, there should be...well...a good donut hole inside the smaller donut inside the larger donut.
Knives Out does it all with flying colors. Its mystery succeeds like clockwork. Writer-director Rian Johnson (of The Last Jedi fame) sets up every little detail to perfection. He lays out his suspects and their motives, establishes the victim and the investigators, and doles out subtle hints at just the right intervals to keep the audience guessing, but informed enough to craft their own theories and follow along.
But he also imbues all that mystery machinery with a larger theme that meshes perfectly with the ecosystem and the family he’s created. On a pure story level, that comes down to rewarding the person who works hard, who acts with kindness and altruism even when it could rip their lives apart, while the people who claim to be her betters are a hypocritical bunch who were born on third base and think they’ve hit a triple. But on a social level, it’s about the same hypocrisy in how we treat immigrants, in how people of every persuasion treat someone they think they’re above, how that treatment shifts markedly when it conflicts with their self-interest, and how that immigrant’s hard work, decency, and above all selflessness makes her more worthy than all the scratching, clawing simps she’s father above than she realizes.
But rather than devolving into didactic sequences to communicate these ideas, Johnson does it all with style and with good humor. Even for a murder mystery that mostly occurs within a single house, Johnson, cinematographer Steve Yedlin, and their superb team bring so much visual flair to the picture. Even before anyone’s said a word, the autumnal feel of the piece and the august old manor establish a sense of tone and place within the world of Knives Out.
Once the movie kicks into gear, that aesthetic virtuosity remains. Johnson and Yedlin set up any number of Wes Anderson-esque tableaus, arranging all the major players in a series of expressive group shots. The scene where the Thrombeys descend on Marta conveys the overwhelming chaos of the scene by switching to steadicam and putting us into the suddenly jostled world that the poor girl’s been thrust into. And the sequence where a faux-affable Walt all but advances on Marta, with the thump of his cane and his first tightening around its handle, communicates the intimidation at play.
Despite those moments of fear, and the tension that permeates the film almost from the jump, Knives Out is a rollicking good time. For as much as the movie is a taut mystery and broader sociopolitical commentary, it’s also an eminently fun laugh riot. Johnson knows when to puncture the tension with a big laugh, and bolstered by Daniel Craig’s performance of a colorful Hercule Poirot by way of Frank Underwood, he’s able to make his characters poignant, menacing, or hilarious on a dime.
But he also knows how to deploy them nigh-perfectly in his well-crafted whodunnit. Johnson and company structure and pace their film brilliantly. The opening act lulls you into thinking you know who the obvious suspects and likely motives for the murder of the Thrombey patriarch are. But then he turns the mystery on its ear, showing the audience exactly, and in elegant detail, how he died and who killed him. The opening police interviews turn out to just be a smart way to introduce these characters and establish their place within Harlan Thrombey’s world.
From there, we follow the tension of the knowledge that Marta is the murderer, but also enlisted to help Benoit Blanc discoverer who the murderer is. The devices that Johnson uses in that effort -- Marta’s lie-related nausea, Harlan’s mystery novel-writer expertise in fooling the authorities, the extra question of who hired Blanc -- all heighten the fun and the twisty excitement as the case progresses. This is, laudably, Marta’s story, and the way her position change, from bystander to inadvertent murderer to overwhelmed patsy to triumphant hero, is aided by the different ways the mystery bends around her.
But the most striking of all if the way that both friend and foe turn against her once it’s revealed that she stands to inherit Harlan’s entire estate. Even including the intricately-crafted mystery, it’s Knives Out best twist. Johnson spends so much of the first act accounting for the different ways the various Thrombeys treat Marta, from dismissive to patronizing to seemingly embracing and understanding. But the second that her financial interest seems to run counter to theirs, every one of them, even and especially the ones who seemed to be decent and kind to her, immediately view her as an interloper denying them of what’s rightfully theirs.
That’s powerful. Johnson and his team build a mystery that unfolds spectacularly, with twists and turns to keep the viewer on the edge of their seat, small clues that add up to big reveals, and variations on the usual form that make it both thrilling and seamless. And yet, it’s biggest strength lies in what the answers to the mystery novel questions Knives Out asks say about the answers to the societal questions it asks in kind.
Johnson’s film is populated with people who believe they are self-made, who built themselves from the ground up, but who are (with one notable exception), entirely hangers on to someone who truly rose to the top of his field through hard work. It’s that kind soul who recognizes his equal and successor not in the slew of self-siding progeny jockeying for position against one another (whom he “cuts loose” to wean them of their dependency), but in the one person they all consider themselves better-than. The Thrombey’s all think themselves superior by dint of birth and by right, but it’s the young woman who, through the good character, industriousness, and decency none of them possesses, proves herself smarter and more worthy than any of them to inherit his fortune, and his legacy. And that makes for one hell of a mystery.
[8.8/10] I’m currently watching my fifth consecutive Spider-Man animated series. From the 1990s cartoon that I grew up on, to the Ultimate Spider-Man series that ended in 2017, Marvel and its licensees gave us five versions of the web-head in different forms. Some kept Spidey in New York, others sent him off into space. Some made him an untested kid in high school, others made him an accomplished young adult in college. Some narrowed Spidey’s world to a focused ecosystem of characters and conflicts and others expanded to encompass the whole of the Marvel universe.
But all of them starred Peter Parker as Spider-Man. And in the process of repeat adaptation, they can’t help but prompt the question -- what makes Spider-Man who he is? What is the connective tissue that makes all of these adaptations of a piece and recognizable as stories about the same character? Is it just the suit, or the web-slinging, or the quips, or is it something deeper than that?
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse aims to answer that question with Miles Morales, the Afro-Latino teenager from Brooklyn who took over the Spider-Man mantle in the “Ultimate” line of Marvel comics. Miles shares some of Peter’s qualities -- he’s young, he’s bright, he’s uncertain. But he also has his unique elements: his two loving parents, his being torn between two sides of his family, and the different culture he is a part of and represents. He is familiar to anyone who’s followed the Spider-Man character for years and years in his endearing efforts to figure out both his normal life and his superheroic one, and his youthful awkwardness and uncertainty at it, but he’s also distinct from the raft of Peter Parkers who’ve graced both the big and small screen in the last two decades.
And most importantly, this is his story. Into the Spider-Verse uses its combo-breaking protagonist and its parallel universe-hopping plot to ask the broader question of what makes a Spider-Man (or -Gwen or -Ham). But it is first and foremost a story about a young man being pulled in two different directions by the father he loves and the uncle he admires, about resolving the differences between the place that can help lift him up and the place he came from, about figuring out not just who Spider-Man is, but who you are, when everything’s counting on you.
Strip away the spidey-sense and supervillains. Strip away the interuniversal mashup and the flash and fury. At heart, Into the Spider-Verse is a coming of age tale for arguably the most compelling young protagonist the superhero genre has offered in a long time. And while it is yet another cape flick origin story -- something the film itself pokes fun at -- it has the smarts to make it much less about how a budding hero gets his superpowers, and much more about how a teenage boy decides who he wants to be.
That’s aided by the style of the film, which works in concert with the substance. The term “comic book movie” is thrown around willy-nilly to describe any cape movie (including by yours truly) but this is the first one to truly earn the designation. The entire film exudes the bumpy texture and tropes of the medium to firmly cement the movie as emerging, fully-formed, from the comic pages. It’s a tack that’s particularly effective when Miles gains his spider powers, and the prominence of thought bubbles and whirly onomatopoeia take over to cement the fact that something serious has shifted here. Honestly, you could halt the movie at around the half hour mark and still have a tidy and encouraging tale about Miles discovering his abilities that would work as its own thing and leave you hungry for more.
But that would deprive us of the ensuing hour of superheroic flash and fun. Into the Spider-Verse is a joy to watch, with kinetic, color-bursting action that captures the ebb and flow of Spider-Man’s balletic grace through the skies better than any adaptation to date. The stylized approach to character design and animation gives the whole movie a distinctive flavor from the first glance to the final scene. And the way the movie blends art styles to help connote the ways in which this is a crossover between Spider Men and Women from across the multiverse is funny and fantastic.
The films boasts almost as many web-heads per capita as a Spidey-themed Where’s Waldo book, but it works in the movie’s favor. Whether it’s the black and white stylings of Spider-Man Noir, the anime-influenced presence of Peni Parker, or the Looney Tunes-aping insanity of Spider-Man, one look at the horde of Spider-people on screen tells you what’s afoot.
At the same time, the film sketches out its supporting characters with complete arcs. A spider-powered Gwen stacy has tentative but inevitable romantic chemistry with Miles, but is a capable and vital part of the action, and slowly overcomes her reluctance to build friendships after what happened in her home universe. At the same time, an older Peter Parker from another world joins the fray to give us the “after” of the traditional Spider-Man to Miles’s “before.” There’s real juice in seeing a potbellied, battle-weary, and cynical Spider-Man being forced to rediscover his ideals through the eyes of someone who looks up to him (or, at least, a version of him), and needs him as a mentor. And the way the film not only reconstructs one Spider-Man in the background while it’s building up another for the first time, while baking in a story of growing comfortable with having children, is nigh-masterful.
But in the end, apart from the eye-catching art and dimension-spanning guest stars, Into the Spider-Verse is about Miles, and that’s where it’s the most engrossing. The film constantly draws a contrast between the life Mile’s policeman father wants for him, and the rougher-edged existence his black sheep Uncle has cut out for himself, with the freedom and style that Miles envies while trapped in his midtown magnet school existence. It depicts Miles as inherently uncertain, before and after he has the ability to stick to walls. He is undeniably capable of great things, something his family members and reluctant mentors all agree on. But he doesn't know what shape that’s supposed to take, how to be what he’s expected to be or who he means to be.
Then, through heart-rending but heartening trial and tragedy, he finds out. Into the Spider-Verse signposts it a little too heavily for my tastes, but with the encouragement of his uncle, the acceptance of his father, Miles finds his own path, his own style, that’s the true-to-oneself harmonization of the best that’s been passed on to him, from man and Spider-Man alike. He has his father’s inherent goodness and sense of doing what’s right, with his uncle’s talent for improvisation and determination, and his own creative spark that drives him to put his own signature on each move and choice he makes. The best part of Into the Spider-Verse comes not only from when our hero truly becomes Spider-Man; it comes from when he fully and firmly becomes confident, caring, self-actualized Miles Morales he wants to be.
With that, Into the Spider-Verse answers its animating question. In a preemptive strike against those who would claim that someone who doesn't share Peter Parker’s name, or his skin color, cannot be Spider-Man, it posits that the things that made the character so indelible through fifty years of stories go beyond moniquers or melanin. Through Miles’s journey, and his other universe counterparts, it declares that being Spider-Man requires facing down tragedy and knowing the pain of loss but having it embolden you toward justice rather than driving you to madness and cruelty like it does for the film’s villains. It means learning to trust yourself and what you’re capable of even when that tentativeness and uncertainty hangs over you like a cloud that you just have to thwip or leap your way through.
And most of all, persevering, getting up when you’re knocked down, and deciding not to quit. Time again, Miles is pushed back, beaten down, and all-around inclined to just give up. It’s the quality that inspires the most doubt, in his father, in his wall-crawling colleagues, and in himself. But when he overcomes it, when he finds himself and learns to believe in his own potential, he also refuses to stay down.
That’s the central idea of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The film was preceded by five decades’ worth of Spider-Man adaptations in scores of different mediums, and it will almost certainly be followed by five decades’ more. What unites these varying takes on the character, what makes them true and right and real despite their differences, is that indefatigable quality each of them shares, despite setting or style or sobriquet. And Miles Morales gives shape to that lesson, straining and striving to become Spider-Man, and becoming himself in the process.
[7.5/10] A charming and colorful introduction to this miniseries. This has an Adventure Time meets Miyazaki feel to it in the early going, which is a combo that really works for me. I like the setup here, with Wirt as the older brother who is, as his name portends, a worrywart and also a little dramatic, and Greg as the younger brother who is more sweetly naive and fearless to the point oblivious as they make their way through the woods. It sets up a good dynamic for their adventures, and I like the relationship between them.
That works here when the two brothers encounter a mill-working woodsman who seems a little dark and warns of a mysterious beast but is also willing to give them shelter and maybe directions. Wirt’s abject anxiety over this guy, in contrast to his little brother’s more childlike “just go with it” attitude makes for a nice contrast.
The animation here is also really nice to look at. The character designs have an old world toy look to them, which I like, and the wash of autumnal colors and dark spooky moods are inviting. The skirmishes and escape with the giant wolf creature is visually exciting and even a little gruesome in places, and the lighting in particular makes this feel distinctive.
There’s also a lot of laughs and fun little setups and payoffs. The banter between the two brothers is worth a smile even when it’s not going for an explicit gag. Greg’s various names for his frog, the running gag of him leaving a trail with the candy from his pants, and his effort to execute Wirt’s discarded plan are all good bits.
Christopher Lloyd also makes an impression as the woodsman, adding something dark and a little foreboding to all of this. His talk about the work of keeping the lantern going being his burden and Wirt being responsible for his brother’s actions as the elder sibling suggests a connection or a hard history there that we’re not privy to. There’s a strange, almost philosophical bent to him and his concern about the beast, which I found interesting.
Overall, this makes for a cool introduction to the miniseries, giving us the lay of the land and a good sense for the characters as we continue on Wirt and Greg’s adventures.
Diane, I can relate.
Princess Carolyn's assistant is my now favourite recurring side character.
In this episode, Diane gets high, BoJack crashes a wedding, Princess Carolyn goes on some blind dates and Todd is struggling with getting intimate. Despite how disconnected these might sound, they're actually all tied together by the complications of romance and work.
When we find Diane and Mr Peanutbutter in a therapy session, it turns out that the writer, Diane, struggles to express her feelings. But after getting high at a party, she finally finds the right words to tell Mr Peanutbutter, before she breaks her arm, goes to the Doctor and learns that SHE'S FRIGGIN PREGNANT! WHAT?
"Lay off the drugs. Especially now."
"Why, especially now?"
"Oh, don't worry. Your baby's fine."
"What do you mean "baby"? Why did you say "baby"?
"Do you not know? You're pregnant."
"Motherf--"
For BoJack, his words for one of the women of the hour accidentally start her to doubt herself, which leads her to cancel the wedding. The woman's father asks BoJack to talk some sense into her, but Bojack tells him, as we know, that his words tend to have the opposite effect. But when he finds the woman, crying in the toilets, he opens up.
"Yes, thank you, exactly. Settle. Because otherwise you're just gonna get older and harder and more alone. And you're gonna do everything you can to fill that hole, with friends and your career, and meaningless sex, but the hole doesn't get filled. And one day, you're gonna look around, and you're going to realise that everybody loves you, but nobody likes you. And that is the loneliest feeling in the world."
After two awful dates, Princess Carolyn finally meets someone who she actually has a good time with. But because she knows her days off are rare, she's worried it isn't going to work. It's heartbreaking because he seems like a nice guy, and I want Princess Carolyn to be happy. Maybe it'll work out?
"Tell you what, here's my card. If you're ever free, give me a call. If not, I'll just meet somebody else and invite you to the wedding."
"Oh, thanks."
"You don't have to come, but send a gift."
Todd, after 9 years (I'm guessing) meets Emily, whom he hasn't seen since he left escaped her apartment in The BoJack Horseman Show. After coming up with a business idea with Emily, she seems ready to do it with him again, like last time. But this time, Todd stalls before he refuses. You can see he likes her and that she likes him, but you can tell Todd's not ready.
"Oh, well, I'm pretty drunk."
"Yeah, but it seems like you're--"
"Maybe I should just go to bed. I'm, uh, I'm feeling kind of sick."
"Oh, yeah. Okay."
TECHNICAL SCORE: 8/10
ENJOYMENT SCORE: 7.5/10
!!!!!
This episode is beautiful.
BoJack is transported to a whole new world, and there is almost no dialogue for most of the 25 minutes. There's just visual storytelling and music.
So BoJack needs to go to a movie premiere at a film festival, but he's got other plans: he wants to reconnect with Kelsey. But instead, he gets onto a bus and is taken far away from where the film festival and Kelsey are in the big city. At the last stop, BoJack helps deliver a herd of seahorses, but one of them sticks with BoJack. For the rest of the episode, BoJack takes care of it, keeps it safe and gets it back home.
But when he finally reaches his destination, the parent isn't that thankful. He offers BoJack some money, but that's it. And the baby, whom he's bonded and had a once-in-a-lifetime experience with, doesn't even say goodbye. It's almost without reward and is crushing to sit through.
On the bright side, BoJack's finally found the right words to write to Kelsey. When he hands it to her, it turns out the ink has washed away. Only after she leaves does BoJack learn that he could talk the whole time.
So I guess what the episode is saying is what BoJack tried to tell Kelsey.
"ALL WE HAVE ARE THE CONNECTIONS THAT WE MAKE."
It's heartbreaking to see the connections BoJack has severed.
The weird thing was, while I was watching this, I found that I couldn't breathe. It was a bizarre experience. I guess that's how real this world is to me.
IT'S BOLD, DIFFERENT & IT PAYS OFF.
TECHNICAL & ENJOYMENT SCORE: 9/10
Reggie? Rickie? Ritchie has one messed up business. The cops definitely need to shut him down.
Throughout the episode, I thought the mystery was going to be something profound, or there would be a big revelation, but it turns out it was a huge waste of time. Well, almost.
Mr Peanutbutter and Diane's relationship is on thin ice. Princess Carolyn has to try to keep Mr Peanutbutter from tearing his house apart, and Diane is trying to keep in contact with Mr Peanubutter, making sure he knows she's safe. But it's then when they find Cuddlywhiskers. He talked about his time as a filmmaker and the moment he won an Oscar.
Up until this point, BoJack has been juggling solving this mystery with Diane and attending all his meet and greets to help him win an Oscar. Along the journey, Diane's been getting calls from Mr Peanutbutter and keeps refusing them. But when they find Cuddlywhisker's home, Diane finally picks up, and Mr Peanutbutter is furious.
"I'm glad you're safe, but I was worried about you."
"You have to call me. It doesn't matter what's happening. It doesn't matter if it's the middle of the night. You can't keep doing this to me."
- Mr Peanutbutter
Cuddlywhiskers then finally arrives and sits down to drink tea and talk with BoJack and Diane. He talks about how he found no happiness in winning an Oscar yet felt even more miserable. Diane tells Cuddlywhiskers that "Everyone was worried" about him, how he "can't just disappear" and how he "really hurt a lot of people."
"Sometimes you need to take responsibility for your own happiness."
"It takes a long time to realise how truly miserable you are, and even longer to see it doesn't have to be that way. Only after you give up everything can you begin to find a way to be happy."
- Cuddlywhiskers
Cuddlywhiskers' words resonate with BoJack and Diane. For BoJack, because he's trying to win an Oscar and has been told it'll be "the happiest moment in his life." And for Diane, she's started to think about her own happiness and how she's been leaving Mr Peanutbutter disconnected from her life.
IT'S REFRESHING.
TECHNICAL SCORE: 7.5/10
ENJOYMENT SCORE: 8/10
"Back in the '90s, I was in a very famous TV show."
Let me just say that the intro and outro are so captivating. Alright, now let's get into the review.
This season had a rough start. The first few episodes felt like nothing was happening. But after Episode 7, things changed. We gave characters, other than BoJack, more development and a massive encounter went down. Revelations, betrayals, it all happened here. It was this episode that finally got me invested in these characters. But then came Episode 8. From this episode forward, I couldn't predict what was going to happen next. I was consistently surprised by this show, and I can't wait to watch the next season.
When I first looked at this show, I thought it was just going to be an offensive comedy. But no, instead we got a deep and depressing cast of characters with dark humour to keep it from being unbearable. This show is so thoughtful. When I finished the final episode, I got into such a reflective mood. This season has left an impact on me.
I can't wait to see what's going to happen in the next five seasons.
IT'S GREAT.
TECHNICAL SCORE: 8/10
ENJOYMENT SCORE: 9/10
I know most people don't respond well if you say something negative about their favorite show but I can't help it. If you like it I'm glad for you (really) but please allow me my opinion.
I am one of those who doesn't think that this is THE best show ever. It's not even the best sitcom in my opinion. It had its moments but not many. Maybe it isn't fair to judge it 25 years after the fact because that is a long time in TV land and things change. But most of the stuff I dislike has nothing to do with timeframe.
First, why this is called Friends is beyond me. Those are the most dishonest, selfish, egoistic and sometimes even mean group of people I've seen on TV. They constantly try to withhold stuff and most of the comedic situations spawn from that. I don't see where it is funny to go behind your friends backs. There are those moments where there behave like friends should, but those come usually after they screwed up.
Than there is the characters. I've written in some episode's comment that Ross is the most obnoxious character I've ever seen on TV. And I've seen my share. And there is WAY too much of him and Rachel who I also disliked deeply. They pull down every episode they're in which is pretty much every episode. That constant back and forth, the bickering and their pretensious behaviour is so annoying. Joey was funny at first but that wears out fast once you get past 50 episodes. Very one-dimensional. I don't even know what to say about Chandler because he is that bland. Monica went from "I don't care" through "I kinda like her" but ultimately annoying. Phoebe I liked until she, too, got the I-need-to-marry virus. Until that she was honest in that she didn't care what others thought about her and just made her thing. Alltogether there was little character developement in any of them. I couldn't connect with them and was more interested in what guest stars might turn up next.
And what it is anyway with all the girls need to find guys to marry and get babies and the guys needing to score? It is a good thing there wasn't any social media available because with all those gay and trans jokes there would have probably been a lot of heat.
That laughing track is way over the top. It accompanied literally every sentence. It even ruined jokes by starting to early. And what is wrong with building up an emotional moment and going through with it instead of ruining it with a bad joke ?
So, why did I watch, and even complete, it ? It's simple. And I mean that in the true sense of the word. You don't have to pay close attention to the plot, f.e. you don't have to stop it if the phone rings, you can even skip an episode completely. It's like having a radio playing in the background. Sometimes reading the synopsis was as interesting as the actual episode. Let's be honest: continuity, logic and depth of story were not the trademarks of Friends. It is full of holes and errors. But it fitted my daily schedule. I could drop in a couple of episodes here and there. And I punished myself a little bit because I went out and bought the whole series at once. Had I watched the first season first I would stopped there and then.
This is the longest review I've written in a while which shows I thought about this show a lot. I like versitality, it would be boring if every show was the same. That doesn't stop me though from speaking my mind. This is a love or hate kind of show. I don't hate it as such. But there were only just one or two episodes a season I think were more than average. It became better towards the end (either that or I caved) but it was an effort to get through and I am glad I'm done with.
[9.2/10] Throw away the past. The rap on The Force Awakens was that it was too derivative, too indebted to A New Hope and the blueprint that had started the franchise. There was a sense that the new trilogy needed to break new ground, that having established the new setting, the new characters, and the new conflicts and mysteries, it was time to break from what had come before.
You could be forgiven for thinking that the film’s main characters share that sentiment. Kylo Ren states it explicitly. He pushes Rey to do the same while she labors under the weight of her unknown parentage. And Luke Skywalker himself, the Jedi Master who won the day in those lodestone films that forever emblazoned Star Wars into the annals of culture, has written off his past deeds, and with them, the Jedi as a whole, as a legacy of failure that needs to simply end.
But it cannot, and should not. Where The Force Awakens featured new heroes reliving the past, The Last Jedi features them remaking it. It is a film devoted to embracing the power of that legacy, good and bad, without being beholden to it. Episode 8 a film that is of a piece with its forebears, but also so full of its own life, character, feeling, and awe.
The fear among the fandom is that, as the second installment in the new trilogy, The Last Jedi would be a mirror image of The Empire Strikes Back. (Though, as with the complaints of borrowing from A New Hope, there are worse sources to crib from!). There’s some of that here. As with Episode V, The Last Jedi splits up its heroes, leaving one of them in training with an old Jedi master on a distant planet, and the other on the run from the bad guys, until everyone is united in the end. There’s offers to rule the galaxy and reveals of who the protagonist’s true parents are and a less-than-savory character who seem like friends and then sell our heroes out.
But Episode VIII echoes the whole of the Original Trilogy in moving, thought provoking ways, not just the middle chapter of it. The film meditates (nigh-literally) on the most iconic image of the original Star Wars film -- Luke gazing off at the horizon in search of adventure. It features our light side hero being lured into the throne room of the Big Bad in the hopes of turning the black hat with the twinge of a conscience still remaining, just as Return of the Jedi did with Luke, Palpatine, and Vader. From blue milk to adorable forest-dwelling creatures to wizened masters passing into their next lives and leaving their robes behind, The Last Jedi is not so much reinterpreting The Empire Strikes Back as it is ruminating on all of Star Wars at once.
And yet what’s so striking about the film is that it’s so much more than a recapitulation of those films. It is, a celebration of them, a reflection on them, and an exploration of them, that advances and subverts those ideas and themes as much as it reintroduces them.
It takes the trigger-happy flyboy, the Han Solo-esque roguish type who, true to that lineage, shoots first and asks questions later, and tempers him with the reveal that the calm, measured leadership was a product of careful and clever planning rather than cowardice. It takes the Big Bad, the mysterious power behind the black-clad dragon who can shoot lightning and bark evil monologues, and kills him off suddenly halfway through the film rather than making him the final obstacle to be overcome.
And it takes the biggest mystery of this new trilogy, the question of who Rey’s parents are, that so many diehards and casual fans alike have been buzzing over, and delivers the most inspired subversion. Rather than Luke’s lost daughter or the Emperor’s scion or Kylo Ren’s forgotten twin, she is the product of nobodies, who sold her for drinking money. It’s a truth that deep down she always knew, but couldn’t accept, because like the audience, she assumed that for someone to have fate on their side, to be able to live a life with meaning, they must come from somewhere, from someone.
But that idea is, despite the Skywalker-mad connections of everything that followed, antithetical to the animating beginnings of Star Wars. Before it was decided that Luke was the son of Darth Vader, he was simply the son of some other guy named Anakin Skywalker. He was a nondescript moisture farmer on a backwater planet who was the last guy you’d expect to take down The Empire’s greatest weapon.
That’s what made his journey so powerful. He wasn’t The Chosen One in A New Hope. He was just a kid with unrealized potential who, with the right guidance and the right chance, could save the day. The Last Jedi returns its chosen one to those roots, to providence shining down on the common, that the savior of the galaxy can come from nothing.
It’s a reversion that’s anchored by the character dead set on rejecting his own longstanding anointment. Mark Hamill is a revelation here. Gone is the naive farm boy who whined about picking up power converters, and gone is the seasoned master who saved the world and redeemed his enemy, and in their place is haunted cynic, convinced he’s caused as many problems as he’s ever solved. There’s a caustic quality to the character here, one that makes him gruff and dismissive of Rey, fatalistic about the Jedi, and unquestionably angry at himself.
Where there was an cornbread innocence to the Luke we met on tatooine, The Last Jedi introduces his echo, a man who looks upon his accomplishments that have ascended into legend as false fables of failure, and the current blight sweeping the galaxy as a fault of his own that he cannot elide or escape. He’s done seeing the battle between the dark and the light, and instead sees the continuum between the two, the yin-yang like symbols that dot his surroundings and the film as a whole, the balance that leads light to breed darkness and darkness to breed light.
That sense of balance is at the heart of The Last Jedi. It comes between Rey and Kylo Ren, who feel a force-forged connection between the two of them that lets each see the other beyond the monolithic figures who stand in opposition to one another. It comes in Leia, who tries to find the midpoint between striking the blows necessary to stay in the fight and not losing too many of her compatriots in the process. And it comes in DJ, the Lando-like figure who rejects the good guy/bad guy dichotomy and sees the struggle between The Resistance and The First Order as the changing of the tides he’s unwilling to be swept up in.
It’s there that The Last Jedi feels the most reflective, even political, in ways deeper than the four-color civics parable told by The Prequels. It asks who benefits from these conflicts, who profits from them, and whether who’s on the right side and who’s on the wrong side can be so clear cut when Republics beget Empires, conquerors beget resistance, and slaughterers beget saviors who train yet more slaughterers. In all of the mythic good vs. evil that’s so much in the bones of Star Wars, Episode VIII steps back and dares to consider that conflict, that never ending cycle, as part of some larger, indifferent system rather than an epic journey toward salvation.
It also restores a sense of utter awe to the franchise. Johnson and cinematographer Steve Yedlin create thrilling, jaw-dropping sequences that rarely lose a sense of continuity, instead allowing even the more firework-heavy sequence to progress organically and tell a story rather than simply providing raw but empty splendor. When Leia glides through space to return to her ship, or Rey and Kylo Ren fight hand-to-hand with the Red Guards (who actually get to do something for once!), when our heroes and villains meet in crimson-dusted splendor in the final frame, Johnson and Yeldin show a virtuosity with big spectacle filmmaking to match the thematic and emotional resonance of the rest of their film.
But that spectacle never detracts from the feeling imbued into the film. Episode VIII is not merely a political tract. It’s not a heap of pretty but hollow action. It’s not even just a deconstruction and reconstruction of the films from whence it sprung. It’s a story populated by characters who love and hurt and feel.
There is power in the moment when Rey and Kylo Ren’s hands touch across light years not just as the meeting of lightness and the dark, but as a human connection between two struggling individuals on either side of the same crisis of self. There is meaning when Rose jams Finn out of the path of his suicide mission, not just for the thrill of the moment, but for Finn’s nobility in trying to live the most potent opposite of running away, and Rose’s attachment in saving him, rather than stopping him. And when Luke kisses Leia on the top of her head, it’s not just imbued with the impact of an on-screen goodbye having to stand-in for an offscreen one; it’s imbued with the poignancy of a film that builds the place in one another’s lives each occupies long before they’re face-to-face for the final time.
Because in a way, they both have to move on. Luke has to let go of his failures, cast off his guilt, to do as a delightfully, once again impish Yoda suggests and let his pupils outgrow him. Rey has to let go of her belief that her family is waiting for her, and find the new family who’s sustained her to this point. And even as he seeks the means to rule the galaxy, Ben Solo cannot let go of the masters who’ve failed him, of the feelings that rage inside him, and of the parents who cannot help needing, no matter how much he may want to.
But moving on doesn’t have to mean throwing things away. It can mean giving something back. It can mean sacrificing yourself, ending something, so that something else can be born anew in its place. It can mean preserving the tiniest spark of rebellion, the brave men and women and quirky droids who can start a conflagration to spread across the galaxy. It can mean doing great deeds, that will be bent and twisted and have consequences you never imagined five steps down the line, but also inspire the next nobody on a nothing planet to gaze up at the sky and wonder what adventure may lie there.
The Last Jedi moves on from its predecessors without discarding them, and moves forward enough to leave plenty of room for its successors, both literal and figurative. It moves on from the George Lucas originals, and even from its immediate, J.J. Abrams-helmed predecessor. But it embraces the spirit of these things, an aims to recreate that feelings, that core, that sense of wonder, for a new generation.
In that, Star Wars itself is like The Force as Luke describes it. It does not belong to Lucas or Abrams or Johnson or even our continually growing overlords at the Disney Corporation. It belongs to all of them and none of them, and to us. Like The Force, like the Rebellion, Star Wars is as much an idea as it is a franchise, and just as Lucas himself reimagined those ideas from Kurosawa films and Flash Gordon serials, Johnson posits himself as doing the same, and instilling the hope that one day, kids will look to these bits of awe and wonder and be moved to look out past the horizon and tell their own stories just as he was.
So don’t throw away the past. Remember it. Embrace it. It informs what we do and who we are and who we will one day be. But don’t be bound by it. Be inspired by it. As cheesy as that sounds, The Last Jedi makes good on all the inspiration thirty years of Star Wars has provided. And just as Luke, Leia, Rey, Ben, and the rest of the conflicted figures who populate the film do, Johnson reaches out in the hopes of not just vindicating that legacy, but extending it to whatever, and whoever comes next, no matter who they are or where they come from.
[8.6/10] So there was a post on Reddit the other day, asking when movies stopped showing people getting into elevators. OK, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it. Movies used to show their characters walking to the door, walking down the hallway, getting into the car, stopping for gas, rolling on, arriving at their house, opening the door, and boom, that’s how you got to the next scene. Then, Godard happened, and suddenly you just cut past that stuff. The character was just in one room and then in the next and with a brief establishing shot or transition or even nothing more than the switch of backdrop, we eventually trust the audience to understand that the character did all that boring stuff in the meantime.
It’s the grammar and literacy of film audiences, and it’s just baked into our brains at this point. You don’t need to be told that Michel Poiccard didn’t apparate from one part of Marseille to another. We understand it intuitively in a way that audiences in the 1960s didn’t because we were raised on it. Maybe not to the degree that BoJack Horseman was raised on film and television, but still we know.
There are expectations on how this whole T.V. show thing works. Even in the post-Sopranos, peak T.V. era where everyone wants to do something a little differently, there’s basic rules for what television is, and how its deployed. You may not have A-plots and B-plots. You may not have three cameras or rising and falling action. But there are rules, damnit, and you’d better abide by most of them or risk alienating your audience (or taking refuge in being confusing which means your show is daring and smart).
And one of those rules, not in so many words, is don’t just have your character stand around and talk to the audience for half an hour. Save it for your one man show. Leave it on the stage. But for television, you need dynamism, you need things happening, you need multiple characters and incident and developments or people will get bored. You can’t leave your main character naked out there, especially in an animated show, when you’re not even limited to sets or locations or visual variety in the way that live action does.
But BoJack Horseman does. It gives you 21 uninterrupted minutes of its title character giving his mother’s eulogy, recounting his family history, doing a gallows humor-filled stand up routine, and processing the death of a woman he hated but still wanted approval from in one giant stream of consciousness presentation.
There’s interludes of humor in the form of those black comedy bits and the occasional musical accompaniment gag. There’s a cold open that flashes back to a glimpse of BoJack’s emotionally screwed up and emotionally screwing up father, and of BoJack’s first taste of how he thinks he’s supposed to process his mother’s absence. But for the most part, it’s just BoJack, in a room, practically talking directly to the audience, for a whole episode.
It is bananas. You could perform it as a monologue for your high school. You could print the whole thing out and turn it into one of those giant movie posters where the words make up the imagery of the film in some kind of literary pointillism. You could listen to it in the car and not miss much beyond the occasional coffin-side glance or impressionistic moment. It’s not something that had to be on television, that could only work in this medium.
And somehow, that’s what makes it feel as bold as it does, because it chooses to set aside all those tools in the T.V. toolbox that help make us feel things: the sad music, the hauntingly lit scene, the expressive reactions of other characters. It eschews using those same sweetners that help keep up the audience’s interest during a half-hour sitcom: scene changes, change-of-pace sideplots, pure comic relief. And instead it just gives you a sad, messed up horse on stage, digesting his relationship with his parents in real time for what is an eternity on television, and hopes it can keep your attention, make you feel BoJack’s pain, and thread the complex emotional and familial needles the series has been toying with for four and half season, with words alone.
Television is, as BoJack and BoJack wink at, considered more of a writer’s medium than a visual medium like film. That’s changing, but it comes from the fact that television started out as something much cheaper, much faster, and much more disposable than its cinematic brethren. There wasn’t money or time to worry about fancy images or incredible sets or stunning cinematography. You needed to film twenty something episode in about as many weeks and do it on the budget provided, which meant the spark had to come from the talents of performers like Lucille Ball and the skills of writers who could make three cameras and two rooms feel like an entire world.
That’s the advantage of the T.G.I.F. shows that Horsin’ Around is spoofing. Yeah, it’s easy to make fun at the laugh track or the outrageous situations, or the cornball humor. But those shows emerged from a long and proud tradition, of folks who may have been doing what they had to for a paycheck, but who also made some magic with the meager tools at their disposal, who taught a generation of latchkey kids and people whose lives were far removed from the ease and security of a T.V. family what good could look and feel like it.
It’s a feeling that BoJack has been chasing for his entire life, and it’s led him here, to twenty-minute half-rant/half-confession delivered to his mother’s coffin. And in those twenty minutes, he chews on his confused feelings about his parents, the way that he doesn't so much mourn his mother but mourns the end of a possibility for love from her than he didn’t really believe in in the first place, the way that he tacitly admits his father taught him not to rely on her or anyone, the way he acknowledges the screwed up solace in admitting that you’re drowning together as a family, the way he cherishes those brief respites when you can stop and see your family being as graceful and happy as anyone else’s, the way we confuse and expect big gestures in lieu of the everyday work of being good, the way we look for hidden depths and transcendent meaning in coffee mugs and I.C.U. signs and sad horse shows that may or may not be able to sustain them.
He does it all from a podium, a lecturn, a stage, that lets all that raw emotion and complicated feeling spill out and just sit there with the audience. There’s no subplot to cut to, no wacky interlude from Todd to take the edge off, no break from a man making peace with the fact that he’ll never make peace over this. It’s just there, in one big dose, for BoJack and the audience to have to swallow at the same time, in a way that T.V. almost never makes you do.
T.V. is usually gentler, easier, more escapist than that, even at its most challenging and un-user friendly. If you watch the 1960s Star Trek series you can see the wild new locales the show journeys to every week, the occasionally repetitive but differently-flavored guest stars who would arrive on a daily basis to fight our heroes or help them or just create a problem for them to be solved. And if you watched long enough, you would recognize that every other episode seems to have Captain Kirk schmoozing, smooching, and seducing his way out of (or into) whatever the problem of the week is.
It’s easy to write of Kirk as a womanizer until you realize that T.V. was different in the 1960s. However more colorful and adventure-filled Star Trek was relative to the twenty-minute speech of “Free Churro”, it was also meant to be disposable, watched once and never seen again, before Netflix binges or home video or even syndication were reasonably expectations for people to string all these disparate stories together in one cohesive whole.
You realize, then, that Kirk wasn’t meant to be a lothario in a series of continuing adventures. He was meant to be a passionate man in a bunch of disconnected stories that happened to feature the same characters. He didn’t leap from bed to bed -- he was just fated by the laws of television to find The One over and over again, because like BoJack says, and the arrival of the Starship Enterprise in last year’s Star Trek Discovery vindicates, the show just goes on.
That’s what we do when people die. We try to make sense of their life, and our relationships with them. We try to take all those individual moments that they lived, all those big events, and the moments that we shared with them, and sew them together into some sort of narrative that makes sense to us.
But lives aren’t stories. They don’t always have happy endings, or arcs, or resolution. Sometimes they just end. Sometimes you only see part of who your parents were and are and try construct the rest into something you can extract meaning from. Sometimes you only feel the ways your absent friends shaped you, or scarred you, and try to understand how and why it happened now that they’re no longer around to be asked. Sometimes you take that rush of moments and try to build it up into something you can wrap your head around, a series of episodes with lovable characters and continuity and choices that are as comprehensible as they are kind.
And sometimes, someone important in your life is gone and everything’s worse now. There are rules for television, unwritten stricture for how we communicate with one another in the medium, expectations that the audience can walk in with that may be subverted but have to be respected.
But life and death have no rules other than that each of us must experience both, however brief or painful or confusing that may be. And there are no rules for grief, the process by which we try to come to terms with a parent’s death, the marks their presence and absence have left on our lives. So BoJack Horseman breaks the rules of television, stops telling us stories, and just gives us twenty minutes of raw, writerly confession and digestion, as interconnected and familiar and yet unknowable as the real life tangles of being alive and watching someone die, without the comforts the glowing screen normally provides its hero, or its audience.
I liked it, but I felt like I missed too much in the translation of the subtitles. I will probably have to watch it in English and then revise my 7/10 rating accordingly. There were parts that did not make sense, like it jumped around, and the blue X's didn't make sense until they were explained way too late. I will revise my rating once I see it again, if applicable.
edit 2018-02-06: Watched this at the cinema, and I indeed bumped my rating up. I initially raised it to an 8/10 as I understood the events in the first quarter of the film, but as the nuances of the various friendships and how the social structure worked in 6th grade and how it shifted in 11th grade, as well as seeing more of the sisters' relationship, it's a solid 9/10. It's not as great as solid 10/10's I've heard it compared to, but it has amazing standout moments, like when she says I'm trying the best I can and he can't understand her, but we in the audience could understand her perfectly. Or pretty much anything she says, for that matter. I think what keeps this from reaching 10/10 quality is that perhaps it should have been a series. I felt like we needed more time with these characters, and more time for their relationships to develop organically on screen. What we have feels rushed. But still, for all that, it's a great movie.
