Phew, so I’ve just updated the listing of conventions, and it looks like a busy old year coming up, apparently unfazed and fearless of the all-powerful Omichron (which is a Doctor Who monster, right?). Anyway, here’s what’s coming up: https://metaphysicalfantasy.wordpress.com/events/uk-conventions-and-festivals-scifi-fantasy-and-horror/!
Well, to answer the question… you know when – with your xmas lunch – you’ve had three large roast potatoes (the first three movies) and you know you reeeally shouldn’t have a fourth? You want it cos it tastes so good, but your stomach already hurts. And so you have it anyway. Then you’ve reeeally had enough! Well, The Matrix Resurrections is just like that extra spud. The tension between desire and fear is actually a theme of this latest movie, too.
Should they have made that fourth one? And should I have consumed it so eagerly? Hard to say. Someone get me an Alka-Seltzer.
Keanu still can’t act. But that was never the point, and it was never really that big a deal, so quit whining already. And, yes, there is an abundance of plot-holes (rabbit-holes would be a more appropriate term, given the White Rabbit theme of this latest offering). And we know that Keanu’s comedic timing is always off, and that he can’t deliver well written dialogue even if Carrie-Anne Moss is managing to get the wooden stage-set emoting more than him. BUT IT’S THE MATRIX! The visuals and high(ish) concepts are what it’s all about.
This new movie does offer some new scenarios, and the machines have had the sort of upgrade even Denis Villeneuve might nod at approvingly. The first 40mins, set in our fake real-world, actually resonate quite well (with the sense of social distancing, isolation and modern working-ennui), even if we do then keep jumping between worlds too frequently for it to be anything but annoying. It’s just a bit pell-mell really, with too many characters squeezed in, and one too many fight scenes. Yet the larger themes and meditations just about see us through.
Neo starts as Thomas Anderson, the famous creator of a game called The Matrix. Sadly, he had a mental breakdown and started to think of the fiction of The Matrix as real! Fortunately, he has an analyst who helps him realise The Matrix is just a delusional fiction. Phew. The end.
It scores 6.5 out of 10 from me!
Fellow writers/scribblers, want to join some free writing-related learning events? Or find out about the latest writing competitions? Or complete a fun diagnostic quiz to discover what type of creative you are? No? Then you won’t want to sign up for the www.creativewritinghq.com newsletter, which will provide you with monthly updates!
This movie was written before the pandemic, which makes it an unsettling coincidence that its main theme concerns an evil mastermind looking to unleash a bio-weapon (virus) upon the world – a ‘smart’ virus that can be programmed to kill certain individuals, certain family lines and certain races! The showdown takes place in The Poison Garden, which is a microcosm of the wider world (God’s creation), in which it is humans who wreak such death and destruction upon both nature and themselves, becoming victims of themselves. Yes, this film is about consequences, individual, social and political. Even Bond suffers consequences for the things he does and has done.
Was the film worth the wait, because the pandemic saw its release delayed by a year or two? Yes, indeed. And it’s worth the wait of the 2hrs43mins running time, too. When you see it, you’ll see why it has to be that long, to tell both the individual’s story and the wider-world’s story. You’ll also see why they insisted it be shown at cinemas (rather than rushing it out on Netflix), because the cinematography is breath-taking.
It’s a great way for Daniel Craig to sign off as Bond. But I reckon I’ll leave it there, to avoid spoilers, init. The movie scores a debonair 9 out of 10 from me. (Why not a 10? Well, Rami Malek as the bad guy has a nonsense of an accent, and some of his cryptic pronouncements were just poor scriptwriting, actually (and clearly not the bits written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.) My partner actually wants to go see it again, so it was clearly doing something right, eh?
I was lucky enough to get a sit-down interview with Nozomi concerning the story ‘Solomon’s Prime Key’. Here’s how it went down!
1. How did you learn to become a writer? Any major advice?
I’ve been writing for about as long as I can remember, across a whole bunch of different projects. It’s only recently that I’ve found stories that are worth telling, and folks who are willing to take a chance on them (thanks again!).
In terms of advice, the fundamentals are always important, and you can find them anywhere. Write habitually, consume voraciously and so on. What’s been helpful for me, especially over the last 18 or so months, is to take that reading a step back and get to grips with the ideas behind the work that you love. I’ve done a lot of reading centred around different philosophies, histories, and modes of thinking, which has really helped me keep a firm grip on what I’m trying to say, and keeping me out of the weeds of aimless storytelling. If I ever get stuck on what I want to say next, I can revert back to that framework and figure it out.
2. What in particular inspired your story ‘Solomon’s Prime Key’ in The Book of Demons?
I think a lot of tales paint demons as inscrutable forces, inflicting their blessings on those who are brave (or foolish) enough to entreat them. I wanted to paint a different picture, and figure out what it would be like to slot demons into a world that is as close to ours as possible. How different would it be if, rather than call a service desk, you made an offering to a demon?
As it turns out, not very!
3. What have been the high and low points of your writing endeavours to date?
A lot of my lowest moments have been coupled with periods of manic creativity; escapism to deal with whatever’s going on in the real world, as it were.
As for high points, well – this interview is certainly one of them! I’ve never had the opportunity to answer questions about my writing before.
4. Has your own writing been influenced by any particular authors? How and why?
I want to show off some pretty nerdy influences here, so bear with me!
I can credit Phillip Pullman and Lemony Snicket as getting me into writing when I was a lot younger. Their stories made me want to tell stories of my own.
In terms of those voices who have most helped me hone my craft recently, I have to point my finger not at authors, but at writers in other media. Yoko Taro, for one, has a unique relationship to the craft of storytelling that encouraged me to take a view on how I was constructing my stories.
I’d also like to point my finger at Natsuko Ishikawa, as a woman who has created some of my favourite stories in the past few years. They’ve been a continual source of joy and inspiration during some, shall we say, troubled times.
Finally, I’d like to credit the work of Abigail Thorn for helping me be more honest about the kinds of stories I want to tell, why I want to tell them, and what they mean to me.
5. Why do you think fantasy and horror are so popular?
Abnegation is a powerful feeling, and it can be very tempting to point that way when it comes to fantasy’s popularity.
I think they both create spaces to explore alternatives to what our world has to offer, both for goor or for ill.
6. What’s your next writing project going to be?
I have two on the burner at the moment, a science fantasy novel and a more contemporary fantasy piece of work. I haven’t figured out the best way to get them out there, but keep your eyes peeled!
7. How can you stay in touch with me?
Twitter is the best place to say hi, ask questions, and generally keep up to date with my online stuff. You can find me @NozomiOkumura.I also have a site that will serve as a hub for the majority of my writing; you can find that here!
Here’s a wheeze: my new publication has made it into The Bradford Times… Bradford in Canada, that is, rather than the one in the UK. LOL. Anyway, here’s the link: https://www.bradfordtoday.ca/local-news/local-writers-work-included-in-new-tome-the-book-of-demons-4235210?fbclid=IwAR1b3e101Jr2194NQDiBkVIQRmpU16n3E8m0BxxB3q1vVCAW553kpiAyaps.
Just finished watching the first spooky season of Evil. It stars Mike Colter (of Marvel’s Luke Cage fame) as a priest-in-training tasked by the Catholic Church with examining possible cases of demonic possession. He is ably assisted by a sceptical psychologist played by the feisty Katja Herbers. Think in terms of Mulder and Scully from the legendary X-Files and you won’t go far wrong. Certainly, there’s plenty of chemistry between the leads in the style of Duchovny and Anderson. Things get decidedly hot under the (priestly) collar, that’s for sure, especially when a dastardly demon (played quite deliciously by Michael Emerson) decides that our two investigators either need to be morally corrupted or removed from the game-board entirely. It’s just the fate of all humanity at stake, after all. I’m happy to say the series is far from formulaic, however: some episodes really are quite disturbing. It scores a nearly divine 8.5 out of 10 from me. And if it sounds like your sort of thing, you might also want to check out my new title, The Book of Demons, which provides you with a history of demonology and considers why the number of exorcisms being conducted today is on the increase: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Book-Demons-J-Dalton/dp/1913562247/ref=sr_1_1?crid=AIITVR4LEM4R&dchild=1&keywords=book+of+demons+dalton+kristell+ink&qid=1628844655&sprefix=book+of+demons+dalton%2Caps%2C165&sr=8-1.
Review by Nadine Dalton-West, T @andiekarenina, nadinedaltonwest.com
It’s been a high-stakes few months over at Marvel Towers. Big cinema releases have been hammered by the pandemic. Long-form TV shows have, somewhat counter-intuitively, become disposable eyeball-filler for a world that has spent far too long on the couch. It’s hard to make a seismic television event when your beautiful fantasy epic is binged and forgotten somewhere between Queen’s Gambit and Prodigal Son, consigned to “watched it at some point during lockdown” oblivion. It’s hard to get people’s attention when their attention spans are broken.
When you serve up the dry biscuit of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier as an hors-oeuvre, it’s even harder.
So both TV show Loki and movie Black Widow had rather a lot on their to-do lists: re-enthuse a jaded fanbase, convince people there’s life beyond the Infinity Stones, re-assert the very purpose of the MCU. And – as we will see – it’s worth remembering that the actual purpose of these stories is just that: to tell us stories. Stories which make us care, stories which give us some of that wonder we got when we were children, and our comics came out weekly, and we craved that “but what will happen to these people?” moment like a good narcotic. For me, Black Widow succeeded on these fundamental terms; Loki failed. This is why. Spoilers abound herein – don’t read on unless you’ve seen both Loki and Black Widow!
Now Loki has some good qualities. Aesthetically, it’s a triumph: the TVA’s Soviet-spliced-with-Mad-Men styling is gorgeous; the cartoon clock called Miss Minutes is deliciously sinister; the brutalist concrete set looks like an endless nightmare where you’re trapped in The Barbican and can’t find the lifts. Tom Hiddleston does his best with the material, and his best is decent, although I’d like to put in a personal request to the producers to let the guy wash his hair: I’m not sure the god of mischief would be any the less compelling if the poor lad was allowed a bottle of Head & Shoulders once in a while. Owen Wilson is fine. There is, it’s true, an alligator.
…And I’m out. Seriously, that’s it. This entire series screams “wasted opportunity” from start to finish. Firstly, the timey-wimey stuff is so crass and poorly handled that you realise there is zero jeopardy. No one dies: everyone comes back. Every fight therefore ends with someone being vapourised but then lo, here they come again, because timey-wimey and multiverses, yeah? Ditto the time doors: wanna crank up the suspense by stranding our protagonists on a doomed planet where – as they tell us about seventeen times – NO ONE GETS OFF THE DOOMED PLANET? We literally sit there waiting, as do the protagonists, for someone to open the time doors just behind them, just in time. Infinite multiverses and timelines? Ok, so tell me why I should care. This specifically ISN’T our Loki (it’s a 2012 Loki who jumps out of the MCU main timeline), and neither are any of the other Lokis, literally none of whom is any good whatsoever. There is a whole episode which looks about to revel in the playfulness of having a hundred different possible Lokis and then pours it all down the drain for a running gag about a reptile and Richard E. Grant in a costume only fractionally more silly than everyone else’s. The Timekeepers are so obviously not real to anyone who has seen any tv show or film ever in their lives that the so-called reveal is thunderingly dull (and is one of several moments where the writers of Snowpiercer might fancy calling their lawyers.)
The One who Remains? Fundamental storytelling rule 101: why on earth should we care? We haven’t met him. We haven’t even had him foreshadowed. He’s a Crapus-ex-Machina. And he’s also an example of how appallingly this series treats its Black characters: they are evil or disposable, with paper-thin development, there to simply throw the focus back onto a tedious white couple who have less chemistry than a rock and a slightly different rock.
Now when we examine Black Widow, we can actually see a few key similarities. Both works are “dead end” narratives: they don’t advance the MCU’s storytelling. (Falcon and Winter Soldier and Wandavision, on the other hand, are entry-points into key new developments for Captain America and Doctor Strange respectively – they are connecting narratives for what comes next.) Loki and Black Widow are not: they are backtracks which tell discrete stories in little cul-de-sacs within the main narrative. Black Widow fills in a set of Natasha Romanov backstory beats, but still leads to the same graveside, just as Loki takes a possibility from one moment where Loki grabs the Tesseract and follows that sidebar, a sidebar which stands alone. In this sense, both works have a bit of “but what are they FOR?” syndrome about them.
Where Black Widow works is this: its humble purpose is in telling us a human story (and maybe Loki got it right all along in that being burdened with “glorious” purpose is a curse, not a blessing.) We care about this family. From the opening scene which is as exciting and suspenseful as any Marvel pre-credits sequence I’ve seen, we are positioned alongside two children who want simple things – their “parents”, their favourite song, to watch lightning bugs – and who are dragged apart by a harrowing series of events. When that family is thrown back together more than 20 years later, they have to figure out what they really mean to each other. This then develops one of the entire MCU’s key and recurring themes: found family. From the Avengers to the Guardians, this is how comics actually hook their nerds – we are all oddballs who eventually find people who are our tribe, and those people are not normally our biological family. This concept has universal resonance, underpins so much of MCU storytelling, evokes real emotion, is tender and poignant and is whatever Loki and Sylvie’s strange onanistic relationship is not.
Furthermore, when Black Widow throws you a big bad, Taskmaster, the character is seeded, developed, absolutely terrifying as a fighting machine, and a genuine threat to our protagonists. All of this, from the start, alongside THIS big reveal being foreshadowed and earned, and indeed genuinely necessary for Natasha’s redemption arc. And there’s more: the chase scene through Budapest is as huge and crash-bang as any action sequence Marvel has served us, the Moonraker nods are clever and really well-followed through in the climax, and the banter is funny. Red Guardian’s big speech pomposity is repeatedly punctured by those around him; Yelena points out that real superheroes probably don’t take ibuprofen; Johannsen’s “stick your butt out” landings are thoroughly mocked.
Fundamentally, though, Black Widow makes you genuinely worry about a collapsed pig called Alexei. Loki just puts antlers on an alligator and points at it, over and over, shouting “look at the alligator”, with ever diminishing returns.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/68494546/blackwidow2.0.jpg)
When I heard that this movie was coming out, I had to ponder the question ‘What’s it for?’ I mean, was it really gonna offer anything new, anything that hadn’t already been done in Marvel movies? Turns out, I should have had more faith. Where the Captain Marvel movie has similar themes to Black Widow, to be sure, Captain Marvel is quite confused in terms of genre, and the plot sees the lead become ludicrously omnipotent at the end (leaving it nowhere to go after that). By contrast, Black Widow seems much more grounded and authentic. I know, it’s an odd thing for me to say such a thing, especially when the movie’s full of impossible action sequences, and so on, but there’s more integrity and continuity to the emotional trauma and character development in Black Widow that makes the SFX of far less immediate concern. Indeed, there’s nice humour ridiculing the very choreographed, ‘posed’ and voyeuristic (‘male gaze’) style of action sequence that’s typical of Hollywood and traditional Marvel movies.
There can be little argument that Black Widow might/should be described as a feminist movie. It revolves around the central relationship between two sisters, exploring the nature of ‘sisterhood’. They’ve been stolen, emotionally neglected and physically abused by an evil patriarch (General Dreykov, played by Ray Winstone, with a very dodgy Russian accent indeed) who is hellbent on producing an army of obedient female super-soldiers so that he can rule the world. Yes, it’s a very cliched scenario (hence the movie doffing its cap bigtime to the Bond movie Moonraker). And, yes, the way I’m describing its themes risks making it sound like a very dogmatic or preachy affair. BUT fear not! The movie has a light touch (not much clunky exposition or lecturing at all), typical Marvel bantz (Joss Whedon style) even in emotionally fraught moments, and some nicely arranged fight sequences (ironically/knowingly done).
The ‘male’ tradition of superheroes is affectionately mocked – the Red Guardian character is an anachronistic scream. There’s no soppy hetero love story getting in the way. There’s only female drive and a lack of apology. And the story of the wider MCU is actually moved along. This movie pulls off a lot (with style) and represents a valuable contribution to the oeuvre. 8 out of 10 from me! Hurrah!
Well, despite the global pandemic/zombie apocalypse, the convention circuit has risen from its grave, from the ashes, whatever metaphor you’d like. I’ve now fully updated this website’s listings, all the way through to late 2022! Check it our here: UK conventions and festivals: scifi, fantasy, horror and comicbooks | Metaphysical Fantasy (wordpress.com)
Metaphysical Fantasy 