Quinn Fleming's Blog

I went to see Ant Man this weekend, and you know what? It's better than a bunch of the other Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. Here's which & why.


The Incredible Hulk. Were you really going to defend this movie? It's got uneven performances, inconsistent effects, and a meh story. While forgivable because Marvel was still figuring things out, I think we can move on.

Iron Man 2. Ant Man does way better than IM2 at the "science." Ant Man states the idea of shrinking simply without going into too much detail (reducing the distance between atoms, pheromone ant control), whereas IM2 makes the "science" a plot element and has a whole montage (in which Stark "invents a new element"). Comic book sci-fi doesn't hold up to too much scrutiny, so it's universally better to paint in broad strokes and focus on the characters.

Iron Man 3. Tony Stark goes from lovable ass to hatable ass in this movie. The problem with Tony is that he's a guy with flaws who gets away with it because he's a millionaire with basically unlimited financial and technological resources. Scott Lang (Ant Man) is a guy with flaws who overcomes them by being a hero.

Thor: the Dark World. Look, I also liked T:tDW. But Doctor Who is criminally underused as a villain you don't understand, while that hairpiece guy from the Strain has clear motivations while being brutally evil in ways that other Marvel foes really haven't been.

Avengers: Age of Ultron. I said it! This movie is better than AoU. And while I still like the second Avengers movie, it had real sprawl issues. It had as many characters and plot threads as a series of comic books - I think it would have been awesome to release it with fewer cuts over the course of about a month in four one-hour segments. Ant Man keeps the scale small (hah) while still making the conflict feel important.

Some minor SPOILERS here, but if you've seen the trailer for Terminator Genysis, none of this is a spoiler.

Worst

5. A clean future. Why is Jai Courtney a clean, hairless, ripped Ken doll instead of the dirty, scarred Kyle Reese from T1? He's nearly as ripped as young Arnie and basically looks like a terminator; the contrast between the two time travelers was a key to the first movie's sense of desperation.

4. John Connor's powerset isn't clearly defined. One of the things that makes terminators so scary is that you know from the start all the terrible things they can do and they will do all of them to kill you from minute one. John Connor holds back, and that actually makes scenes less scary early on - and later scenes feel a bit like a cheat.

3. The music. While there were some classic riffs in the soundtrack, most of the music was "generic action/adventure."

2. The helicopter chase. This was 100% CGI, ridiculous, and felt out of place from the rest of the movie. There wasn't even a cool third arm thing like in T2 (if you don't remember this from T2, go back and watch it, paying attention to the T1000 in the helicopter cockpit).

1. Jai Courtney. His acting was literally the worst. If you had put almost any other human in the role of Kyle Reese, this movie would have been 100x better.


Best

5.
4. The time travel. Yes, it's wacky, but it manages to balance both determinist and "no fate" ideas in a way that makes-sense-as-you-go without giving any real answers. Time travel not making sense is actually key to the Terminator franchise as the conflict between fixed and mutable theory is what gives them their sense of real danger.

3.
2. The humor. T2 had a lot of lighter moments, despite being about murderous robots from the future. T:G remembers this, and abandoning the grimdark approach of Terminator Salvation is a good thing.

1. Recreating scenes from T1. CGI Arnie actually reminds you a lot of the animatronic Arnie from T1 in a way that works really well.

Is it good?
It’s "superhero movie" equivalent to rock 'n' roll.

Is it technically good?
The effects are good, and importantly fun and colorful. The result is to make the universe feel real without being grim or boring.
Guardians is an ensemble movie, and nearly everyone is good (though some of the villains have very little to work with).
The music is often cited as a key feature of the film, not without reason: it’s cleverly used as a tool to ground the weirdness.
Director/co-writer (?)
What does it promise - and does it deliver?
A superhero movie that’s actually fun - and it certainly delivers.

If you liked these, you'll like this: the Avengers , Heavy Metal , Galaxy Quest , Scott Pilgrim vs the World .

The 100 is a CW show. That alone is enough to scare off a lot of potential viewers. But with excellent, more adult fare like Nikita and Arrow , I gave The 100 a chance. It's great. I'm sorry, I should have told you to watch it earlier.

First, the summary: juvenile delinquents are dropped from the last surviving space station onto a supposedly uninhabited earth. From there, it's parallel stories of Battlestar Galactica on the space station and Lost -but-with-teens on the ground.

If you're a fan of Lord of the Flies , Lost, Battlestar Galactica, or pretty much any genre show on the CW, The 100 is worth a watch. You'll have to be ready to tolerate some teen drama, but if you can you'll be rewarded.

1. There are secretly adults on this show.
Let's get this out of the way first: The 100 is not just a teen show. There are adults on it, in space, and they're some of the biggest reasons to watch, starting with...

2. Desmond from Lost!
Brutha.
3. Zoe from Person of Interest!

4. Gaeta from BSG!
Gaeta makes everything better, even when he's not singing.

5. Sierra from Dollhouse!
Although Dollhouse was uneven, it had a lot of great actors who deserve to get more jobs.

Much like Nintendo's classic Mario Kart, The 100 features baby versions of adult actors.

6. Baby Ali Larter. She's like
7. Baby Lou Diamond Phillips. Like
8. Characters have consistent flaws. Pictured above is The 100's version of Sawyer from Lost. He is good in 99% of ways except one very clear one (no spoilers here). This goes for all the characters - no one is perfect or one dimensional. Not terribly unusual, except for the fact that characters are actually consistent in the way they behave. Pet peeve: character acts the same way all the time except for this one time that the plot needs them to act differently. Not making an argument against character growth here, but rather plot-necessitated abnormality that reverts when no longer needed.

9. Women have agency. This show passes the Bechdel test like whoa. Girls are making decisions, not just for themselves, but as leaders. They do stuff, most of the time more competently than the boys. While yes, there is a classic CW love triangle, it's handily tempered by the fact that...

10. Everyone is dying on this show, all the time. Seriously. The body count is simply epic. Every time you think, "This is stupid, how are they surviving in the wilderness with teen drama," they don't survive, and then you think, "This show is effing dark."

Yes, The 100 is ridiculous in many ways. Yes, it's got your classic sci-fi silliness (there's a character named "Thelonious Jaha") and your requisite CW teen-ness (so many abs!), but it's a heck of a lot of fun. Plus, it's renewed for another season, so you have time to correct your mistake and catch up.


BONUS REASON
That creepy kid from The Killing , Continuum , and every other show filmed in Canada:

RIPD is one of the few sci-fi movies currently on HBO Go. That's pretty much the reason I watched it (also I may have a weakness for things titled with acronyms). Having seen the trailers, having read the reviews, I knew going into it that it wasn't going to be
Watching RIPD, I could see the pieces that should have fit together. I could imagine the good movie that it could have been. I should have hated it, but I didn't. In fact, the feeling I had at the end was disappointment. There was potential. Potential for a formulaic movie, sure, but at least a solid popcorn movie. What the hell happened?

Spoilers hereafter. (Also, lots of parentheses [and sub-parentheticals].)


It's no secret that marketability gets movies made. And it doesn't take much to think of how RIPD was pitched:

"It's Men in Black, but with zombies instead of aliens."

"Wow! Everyone loves Men in Black, and The Walking Dead gets all the right demographics. Think of the sequels! This is going to make us so much money."

And how the casting went:

"Who are we going to cast in the
"Someone with a background in comedy that is inexplicably in action movies.
"Brilliant! Who's going to be
"Someone with gravitas, who can be even more curmudgeonly, but also funnier... like if
And that's pretty much the performance Bridges turns in. Ryan Reynolds turns in his best Will Smith, but without any of the moments of real acting that Smith occasionally produces in this kind of movie (remember Will Smith's movie before Bad Boys?). Despite the paint-by-numbers approach, though, the casting is one of the better-executed aspects of the film;
There are three real problems with this movie.

1. They forgot parts of the script.
The basic plot of this movie is that Ryan Reynolds is a back-from-the-dead cop who has to fix the mistake he made of stealing gold before that mistake ends the world. Sure, but they forgot to put the scene where he steals the gold in the movie. Arguably, the choice to steal the gold is the most important, character-defining thing that the character does. Executed well, this would have humanized Ryan Reynolds (no, I am not going to try to remember character names) by showing his motivations and his reservations, and the audience could have forgiven the sin that literally prevents him from going to heaven. The way the movies stands, he just seems like a jerk. There's some "we're poor" dialogue, but come on! The guy owns a multi-story house in downtown Boston with a backyard. His girlfriend does not appear to have to work (which, by the way, what?) and spends 98% of her time in bed or jogging or being kidnapped. You don't need to steal, Ryan Reynolds.

(Underscoring that Ryan Reynolds is a jerk is his final "sacrifice" in the climax, which is telling his girlfriend not to die to be with him in the afterlife right away. That's right, we're supposed to congratulate Ryan Reynolds on not being so incredibly selfish that he would let his girlfriend die. High five, Ryan Reynolds, your character growth went from dirty cop who lies to his girlfriend to one-step-above-a-Nazi-in-the-Indiana-Jones-movies level of d-bag.)

The script also forgot a lot of the story beats that it should have stolen from Men in Black. Yes, the basic parts are there: first action sequence goes wrong and introduces main character to the new world, character and new partner don't get along and something goes sideways on their first mission, character and partner are drawn into a larger, world-threatening adventure, finale with explosions, credits. But RIPD does none of the groundwork to establish the connections between the different parts of the plot; imagine Men in Black if you didn't see the bad guy crash-land, or follow him as he set about his plans. Instead of tying plot threads together into one story, RIPD feels like it's checking points off a list of scenes that are supposed to happen. (One of the best, unintentionally[?] funny scenes in the movie has Jeff Bridges shouting at heaven about why heaven would make a relic that could end the world - because that, like everything else, is just thrown in there unexplained.)

Men in Black did a lot of things right (in the first one, anyway), and one of the most important of those was letting the audience and Will Smith share a sense of discovery about the new world being discovered. Whoa! That guy is an alien. Wow! This is an awesome underground lair full of professionals who save the world. Cool! This tiny gun blows things up in a disproportionate way. RIPD, for all the things it cribs, forgets the wonder. There are weird creatures, underground lairs, cool guns, etc, but everything is taken for granted to the point that it's boring. Ryan Reynolds walks through the movie saying "whatever" to everything, and so does the cinematography and editing. The effect is to make huge swaths of the story joyless.

2. Good ideas aren't explored.
Frustratingly, there are some cool ideas in RIPD. Hunting souls that should have gone to hell, "soul rot," time stopping at the moment of death, politics in heaven. A lot of things where you think "hey that's neat" are almost instantly dropped, or simply serve as window dressing for the generic plot.

The best example of a botched fun idea is that Reynolds and Bridges appear to everyone else as an old asian man and a supermodel. Ryan Reynolds' fancy gun looks like a banana. The opportunity for hilarity is there, and it's used good effect... basically once. I kept waiting for switches between camera shots. If you were shooting the movie, why not shoot every single scene with both the main actors and the doubles, and then play around in the editing room to see when the switches were funniest? It's clear from the frequency of switches that the doubles were on set enough to do this. And for Pete's sake, why didn't they hire a model who could act? How great would it have been for a model to have Bridges' Old West swagger, his cowboy-Lebowski drawl? Think of those great scenes from Face/Off, but funnier. It might have been better with the doubles 90% of the time. I would have enjoyed the heck out of an action movie reverse- All of Me . Someone make that.

3. It's unintentionally offensive.
At least I hope it's unintentional. The writers seem to think it's funny, not offensive, to have Ryan Reynolds complain about being asian. Maybe they figured it was "in character" for Bridges to call him "Grandpa Chen." However, let's make it a rule: no race jokes when your entire cast is white. While I know I said the casting was one of the more solid aspects of the film, but there's a distinctly beige flavor to it. Sure, it's Boston, but Boston has racial and ethnic diversity. I promise.

(And why is it curry that sets the "dead-Os" off? [Seriously "dead-Os"? That's all you could come up with?] Okay let's assume that's harmless and not an anti-Indian thing. What about Bridges' interrogation cards that seem racially inflammatory? Best case, it's the dead-Os that are racist, but again why are we even doing the whole race thing when all the main characters are white?)

Possibly worse than the casual racism, though, are the "dead-Os." These are the villainous dead people who didn't get sucked down to hell. When they smell curry (see parenthetical above), they "pop," revealing their true, evil nature and assuming a new form. Here they're clearly cribbing on another Men in Black bit - zapping aliens in human form to reveal that they're aliens.

The problem with the dead-Os is their character design. The CG people seem to have been shooting for somewhere between "Evil Dead" and "goofy cartoon" but they landed in "dirty, obese, and uncomfortably close to handicapped." Here are examples:




The designs needed to be weirder, more cartoony, grosser, more evil, something. They've dug into a new uncanny valley, where CG characters look like they're making fun of the handicapped and the obese. Every time there's a new dead-O on the screen, it feels more wrong and uncomfortable.

***4. Bonus! There are also some basic core logic issues.

What happens to souls after they get shot by the magic guns? Aren't they going to hell anyway?Why is Boston one of the biggest hubs for dead-Os? On the scale of the world, it should be quiet.When evil Kevin Bacon stops time, why don't they just kill all the RIPD officers?Ryan Reynolds repeatedly says he got shot in the face. We saw him get shot. He did not get shot in the face. I may have liked the movie more if that had actually happened.If only gobbledygook comes out when you try to tell people who you really are when you come back from the dead, why is Ryan Reynolds able to tell his girlfriend who he is?Why does no one have a Boston accent?If Ryan Reynolds was not a good cop, why is he recruited into the RIPD?Sure, those are the kind of issues you can generally just hand-wave away because it's not a movie and it's not that serious... but that's when it's a more enjoyable movie.
This reads like a takedown of RIPD, but it's really more of a takedown of the studio system that manufactured it. RIPD had all the pieces of a blockbuster. On paper, it should have made money hand over fist. But it was such a blatantly robotic copycat moneygrab that it didn't work as a movie.
Now can someone please make a sci-fi action movie version of All of Me starring possessed by the spirit of , possibly hunting werewolves (from space), set in the distant future?

If you don't follow me on Twitter (which you should: @quinnafleming), my book DMQZ is on sale right now over on Amazon. You can pick it up for just $0.99 (67% off) for the next eight hours or so.

DMQZ is a pulp neo-noir set in a post-pandemic New York City. Here's the synopsis:

In the wake of the global pandemic known as the "little dormouse," the line between the Safe Zone and the Quarantine Zone divides New York City. The shores and waters of the East River are the "DMQZ," the uninhabited area that separates uninfected Manhattan from the slowly dying borough of Brooklyn.
Jacob Hale is a Manhattan police officer rising in the ranks of the Safe Zone military government until a bank heist gone wrong lands him on suspension and under suspicion. On a quest to clear his good name, Hale finds himself drawn into a web of conspiracy, terrorism, and revolt - and into the orbit of a mysterious woman who may be the key to it all.

 Pick it up while it's on sale!

Sunday night (or Monday night, for poor souls like myself whose HBOgo panicked), HBO's first season of True Detective drew to a close. The reception of the episode was divided, and in many ways the finale was a crystallization of what people loved and hated about the show. Let's break it down.



Spoilers from here on in.




There are a lot of legitimate criticisms of the show.


The misogyny.
As many have correctly pointed out, this is a show about dead women that pretty much has no women in it. Poor Maggie, played well by the underutilized

The lack of character development.
While the finale corrects this in Cohle's case, Hart is literally the same character from episode one to eight. If we say that story should cause characters to grow, change, or at least make decisions, Hart is a complete failure.


The lack of clarity on what the heck is going on.
This one is on the border. On the one hand, I think it's more realistic that Hart and Cohle fail to take down all the bad guys. On the other, there are things that go unexplained that make less story sense unexplained. Number one on my list: Cohle's Alaska vacation. There's no bridge to take us through the emotional journey that causes him to return there - there's a fight with Hart, he quits his job, but what causes him to make that specific decision? What brings him back?

On the other hand, there are less compelling critiques as well.


The lack of clarity on what the heck is going on.
Hart and Cohle aren't supercops, but very flawed people. I think it makes sense that they wouldn't figure everything out. Not only that, but it's exciting to think that, rather than having a real supernatural element, there was a decision to create rich literary subtext for a television show. Many viewers are disappointed that some of the weird fiction motifs didn't "pan out" and were "just" used to give the story a more existential context. Rather than being disappointed, we should be excited that

The mystery's resolution was too simple.
As I posted about when trying to predict the show's ending, the resolution to the mystery didn't really matter as much as we thought it should. Personally, I could play episodes 1-3 on a loop for weeks and be happy.


The "happy" ending.
Most critiques I've read have interpreted Cohle's speech at the end of the finale as him coming to Jesus: the nihilist finally finds hope and faith. To me, the speech rang hollow - I got that same sinking feeling in my gut as at the end of the Bletchley Circle 's season one finale. Cohle, rather than finding faith, has been so rattled by seeing the truth of the universe (the cruelty in Carcosa & the spiraling galaxy) that he retreats to his "programming." Compare Cohle's description of his beliefs, and his criticisms of religion, at the beginning of the season to his speech at the end. Cohle, having traveled to Carcosa and met the King in Yellow, retreats to madness. He can no longer reconcile with what he is, and has to fall back on the "stories about the stars" that he knows are false. It's a very, very dark ending: the nihilist loses because the world is so evil that he can't bear the truth.


The best thing about the True Detective finale? It's over. Season 2 (should we start calling them "series"?) will have all new characters - let's hope Pizzolatto gives us some female leads to prove us wrong.

If you haven't watched  True Detective  yet, stop reading. Really. This is the kind of show you don't want to be spoiled.


Spoilers from here on in.

I love to guess the ending of a story, especially for a mystery.  Though most times I find myself recognizing the story beats in television well enough to guess the ending, True Detective still feels wide open. The depth and weirdness of True Detective's mythology has inspired a lot of internet speculation about what's really going on and how it's all going to end. "After You've Gone," the penultimate episode of True Detective, exploded a lot of those theories. You can find some great thematic & theoretical breakdowns here, here, and here.
What's out:
"Hart and Cohle have not been secretly working together on the case." That is, unless you believe that they've become truly self-aware, know they're on an HBO series, and are deliberately tricking us. That might be a little too weird.
"Hart and/or Cohle know what's going on or are behind it." It's fair to say that, based on "After You've Gone," that neither of the two leads are the Yellow King. That is, unless one of them is the Yellow King and doesn't know it. Or, hasn't become the Yellow King yet, but will in the "future" before becoming unstuck in time a la a Kurt Vonnegut novel.
"Gilbough and/or Papania know what's going on or are behind it." These two are even more clueless than Hart and Cohle in "After You've Gone." Or they represent the repetition of the cycle, ignoring the creepy Childress lawnmower man just like Hart and Cohle left another at the Light of Day.
What's still possible:
Occult conspiracy, cthulu mythos, creepy Texas Chainsaw Childress Family values, one of Hart's daughters is the killer, Maggie masterminded everything and broke up Hart and Cohle to cover her tracks, the idea that causality is a lie based on our perception of time and therefore no one has to kill the victims for them to die in that manner, pretty much anyone but the detectives could be and probably is the Yellow King, time travel, OJ Simpson, Canada, aliens, drugs, just some random crazy person did it.
But let's be realistic:
It's clear there's a child-abusing/murdering cult. But it's unrealistic that a cult trying to keep itself hidden would be displaying ritualistically murdered women for the police to find. So we're probably looking at to big bads to take down: the cult and the murderer. The murderer is most likely familiar with the cult, but not actively a part of it. Best guess is our friendly neighborhood scar-faced tractor-driver Childress, probably kicked out of the cult for being lame and killing women in an attempt to recreate the cult's rituals.
Does it really matter how it ends?
Not really. Unlike shows like Lost which seem to hinge on a future payoff, True Detective has been so awesome from episode one that the end really doesn't matter. Though I can't wait for it.

Is it good?
It’s surprisingly not terrible.

Is it technically good?
The effects are clearly expensive, but The acting, with the exception of a stellar The music and sound are excellent, outclassing the rest of the film.
The movie as a whole feels as though director Kosinski has made a giant motion comic of his non-existent graphic novel rather than adding anything unique to the format of film.

What does it promise - and does it deliver?
Tom Cruise saving the post-apocalyptic world - surprisingly, even though it borders on being dull, it mostly delivers with a twist.

If you liked these, you'll like this: Tron: Legacy, Elysium, War of the Worlds or other Movies.

Sorry for the delay in new posts here, been book-writing! Should have some movie reviews & such ready next week.