Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger is far better than DC’s Black Lightning

So, the first two episodes of Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger have just landed on Amazon Prime – which is odd, cos most other Marvel series like Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Daredevil, The Defenders and Cheesy Iron Fist have appeared on Netflix. Strange that Marvel have changed platform? Well, Netflix had already shown DC’s Black Lightning, you see, so Cloak and Dagger would have been far too similar to what the Netflix audience had already seen.

Which one is better: Black Lightning or Cloak and Dagger? The latter, by quite a margin. Where BL is very hammy, preachy and cumbersome, C&D is nuanced, ambiguous and non-expository. Both series deal with serious issues about what it is like being a person of colour in today’s America, but BL is moralising and about taking individual responsibility, where C&D is about empathising with those who are victims/creations of their circumstances through no fault of their own. Put simply, BL is old-fashioned and stereotypical goodies v baddies fare, whereas C&D is real-world and morally confusing. Where BL’s storyline jumps around illogically in order to permit a big set-piece fight scene (always popular), C&D is about two young people coming of age, fearing the adult world into which they are emerging and seeking to suppress their incipient powers that will make them even more of a target. The two series are almost photonegatives of each other in terms of story-telling approach and plot organisation. They have competing philosophies, fundamentally.

Cloak and Dagger is not only better than Black Lightning as a TV show, but also it is markedly better than its own original comic strip. I grew up reading Cloak and Dagger (from their first appearance in The Spectacular Spider-Man), and they were a simple pair of heroes representing light and dark as superpowers, fighting an array of very silly baddies. There was no actual social context within their stories. Yes, Cloak was a person of colour, but literally only in how he was coloured in – there was nothing about his ordinary travails in the real world – and there was no real attempt to deal with (or discuss) their implicit inter-racial relationship. The TV show on Amazon Prime, by comparison, is fully ‘woke’ (if you’ll forgive the term).

The young pretty blonde who is Dagger is a petty thief. The way she steals from others is quite distressing to watch – and her crimes become less and less justifiable. We do empathise with her, because we’ve seen her upbringing and abusive mother (and she is as pretty as she is well acted by Olivia Holt), but at the same time we are increasingly horrified by what she does. Then there is Cloak, who is a young black guy who is morally upstanding but still ends up getting into no end of trouble (in part because of his colour). Dagger rides her luck and uses her colour to her immoral advantage, whereas Cloak (as buff as he is well played by Aubrey Joseph) does the right thing but always has his colour as a disadvantage. It’s a fascinating juxtaposition and complementarity. Their lives are a mess – and, we ironically suspect, things will only get better when they embrace their opposite. Roll on episode 3! So far, it’s an 8.5/10 from me (not more yet cos of the incipient evil-corportation cliche).

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Deadpool misunderstood by critics? #deadpool2

Most of the reviews I read in the British press for the Deadpool 2 movie gave it three stars. And yet, on Rotten Tomatoes, the film is currently scoring 86% with audiences. There’s a bit of a mismatch there. I saw the film last night and, pondering some of the accusations levelled at the film by the critics, have to say I think the critics are just plain wrong, misinformed or critically unsophisticated enough to ‘get’ what the film is doing. Deadpool 2 is a brave film that is deceptively simple. In fact, a lazy, unthinking viewer (one who doesn’t engage brain or critical faculty) will probably consider the movie to be by-the-numbers or even straightout bad. This is a perfect example of ‘you get out what you put in’.

I saw several reviewers complain that the movie, for all its representation of minority groups, was still centred around two white guys (Deadpool and Cable) proving who was the toughest. These reviewers claimed that the female characters and minority groups were reduced to canon fodder or background filler (with very few lines of dialogue). Such complaints and claims are a fundamental misrepresentation of the movie. At the end of the day, the movie is about the Deadpool character (who, admittedly, is white and male), but throughout he challenges what a white male hero is all about in today’s society – that’s the point of his character! And Cable (who uses the c-word) is only there as the inverse – to show us what a macho asshole Deadpool would be if he was reduced to the traditional white hero – the Deadpool/Cable dynamic is actually a bipolar debate about the nature of male identity. To then say the female characters and minority groups are done a disservice (in ‘service’ to the patriarchy) is hogwash. The Domino character (a woman of colour) proves Deadpool wrong, has plenty of central moments and survives where loads of white males (X-force) get chewed up. Then, when the Deadpool/Cable narrative falls away, it is the narrative concerning the young, large-bodied, Maori Firefist that completely takes over. Yes, the female character of Negasonic Teenage Warhead remains largely surly and monosyllablic throughout, but that’s the whole point – since, if you remember the first movie, she hates adult authority, is too cool for school and absolutely doesn’t want to succumb to Deadpool so-annoying dad-jokes (and her manga-cutesy Japanese girlfriend, who gets on so well with Deadpool, only adds to the tightly-wound interplay). No, the Japanese girlfriend isn’t a tacitly racist stereotype – because she is given telling lines at the end to make it clear that her ‘geekdom’ character was just that – all an act, and one that she used to her own benefit (even if it does play upon our own lazy thinking or cultural bias). There might be a stronger argument that the weedy Asian taxi-driving male character gets shorter shrift (when Deadpool quips that he’s ‘Brown Panther’), but I would argue just as strongly that he’s an aspect of the male identity debate (an aspect which is even more complex when competing cultural expectations are involved).

Another accusation of Deadpool 2 from the critics is that this movie is far less ‘meta’ than the first. It simply doesn’t break the fourth wall as interestingly as the first. There’s only one line from Deadpool like ‘big CGI fight coming up’ to keep things self-aware. Once again, the critics are talking nonsense. The whole point of the ham-fisted X-force team that Deadpool assembles (and promptly gets killed) is that they spoof the X-Men motif. There are geek references to the John Wick movie, lines like ‘that’s some lazy writing right there’, ‘he’s young enough to keep the franchise going for another ten years’, apologies from Ryan Renolds about how poor the Green Lantern movie was, intertextual mention of Thanos (Josh Brolin plays both Cable and Thanos) and a whole host of ‘Easter eggs’ that I just know I didn’t even spot. I am definitely inclined to watch again, as I know I’ll see so much more.

So where does that leave us? The easy assessment is that Deadpool 2 is a far better movie than you may have heard or read. And then there’s a tougher question about what the hell the critics are up to with their relatively poor reviews. I’m not sure I have all the answers to that. Clearly, you can’t trust the media critics to guide you properly. Media critics still don’t properly understand geek culture or current social debates concerning identity (debates that are significantly informed by the (often angry) voices of young people), it would seem. For me, Deadpool 2 is an 8.5 out of 10. Up your bum, critics!

 

The Alienist – a new gothic classic #alienist #netflix

The Alienist is set in the New York of 1896 – a Victorian, very Jack-the-Ripper sort of place. There has been a spate of child murders. The police are unable to make any progress in tracking down the killer… and some may actually be protecting him, as the suspicion is that he is the son of a powerful family. In desperation, the police commissioner (who is the historical character of Theodore Roosevelt) tasks his psychiatrist/alienist friend (Laszlo Kreizler) with assembling a team to find the killer.

Psychiatry is still in its early stages, as are the sciences of police forensics and profiling. Kreizler has to fight misconceptions, his own preconceptions and a corrupt society. All the while, the clock is ticking… and children are dying. He is frustrated and panicked by his inability to make immediate progress and lashes out at his companions, who are fighting their own demons. Indeed, it is the telling character interactions and growing self-awareness of his team (the feminist, the indolent dandy and the Jewish anatomists) which really make this compelling viewing (along with brilliant acting by the likes of Luke Evans, Daniel Bruhl, Dakota Fanning, and others). The series refuses to indulge in excessive exposition – instead, we pick up clues about the protagonists’ past lives and associations by how they react to their various situations. Each of them has a hang-up, each of them has their own moral code, each of them has skeletons in the closet. The audience is effectively one of the team in having to read the clues and make sense of the narrative. It’s utterly immersive.

And we are immersed in some very psychologically-dark deeds that would only make sense to a dreaming or otherwise altered mind – a mindscape, if you will. It’s the definition of the gothic. The show is gory, in a surrealist way. It is full of disjuncture, false starts, misgivings, bizarre clues and circularity. But it’s thrilling, exciting and daring.

If you can imagine a mix of Mindhunter and Penny Dreadful, then you know what’s in store. If you can imagine a mix of historical fact and fiction, of romance and horror, of depravity and tenderness, of revulsion and compulsion, and if that intrigues and inspires you, then you will enjoy this show immensely.

It’s right up my murky, dangerous alley, this series. I score it 9 out of 10.

Don’t pay to watch Anon cos you’ll want a refund #Anon #netflixmovies

Anon is the new Netflix movie that has a cinema release. It’s a science fiction made by Andrew Niccol – the man behind the iconic and cult movie that is Gattaca (1997). Anon stars Clive Owen and Amanda Seyfried, both of whom have ‘acting chops’. The plot is high-concept, describing a future in which our identities are always ‘online’ and ‘tracked’, by video-feed, GPS and so on. Basically, any crime that occurs will always be fully documented, meaning that crime hardly happens anymore… until there’s a murder by someone who isn’t registered, someone who has managed to stay ‘off the grid’.

So the film has all the essential requirements to be amazing, right? Sadly, it’s absolutely awful. It’s so bad that if you’ve ever seen even a half-way decent scifi movie in your life, then you’ll want your money back if you’ve paid to see Anon at the cinema. Netflix have really dropped a clanger with this one. The Guardian gave the movie two stars in its recent review and I thought, ‘Well, the Guardian is always overly-harsh, so the film can’t be that bad.’ Turns out: the Guardian was actually being generous.

The film starts well enough – a grey filter/wash on the lens so that we are presented with a bleak and soulless future. No one has privacy. People live in a strange self-absorbed silence. The murder occurs and we are intrigued. Then we are told who the killer probably is and we kinda lose interest… because none of the characters are likeable in and of themselves, none of them has a moral dilemma and none of them seems to have a consistent rationale for what they get up to. The film utterly fails in its story-telling too: characters state things that they have no way of knowing, or give explanations that make no sense. The film breaks the rules of the world its built over and over. Come the end ‘reveal’, we are left utterly mystified – not in an ‘interesting’ way, but in a totally ‘well-that-was-random’ way. There is no reason for what the killer has been up to. The killer’s so-called explanation of what they did makes no sense. The film is full of inconsistencies, holes and unintended paradoxes.

And then we have the same old casual misogyny that we’ve seen for decades. It’s tired, tiring and tireless. Every single female character has to be buck naked in the movie, Amanda Seyfried very much included. Amanda is half Clive Owen’s age, and he really isn’t wearing well. I cringed when they had their obligatory sex scene. Add to that that Amanda is styled as a manga-female (entirely infantalised) and it feels like nothing short of pedophilia. We see naked females killed, and then we go over the film footage again for no apparent reason except to see their pert nipples and bouncing breasts one more time – it’s murder porn basically.

And the movie doesn’t stop at overt sexual exploitation either. Why stop there? Let’s go for racism too. The only person of colour in the movie is a maid (oppressed by her white, blonde employer) – the maid doesn’t get a single speaking line and only exists to show how ‘good’ the old white patriarch (Owen) is. Bless. Maybe one of the cops is a person of colour too (not sure), but he rapidly gets shot dead. And that’s that.

Anon is offensively bad. It’s also frustrating cos it wastes a perfectly decent premise. Shame on you Netflix. Stay out of our cinemas if this is the sort of fare you’re gonna offer. I give a score of 1 out of 10 (and maybe that’s too generous).

 

Infinity War not a bore #InfinityWar

In the last dozen years or so, there have been 19 Marvel (MCU) movies. More than one a year on average. The pattern seems to be that the second movie in each mini-sequence is a dud – Thor 2 and Iron Man 2 very much spring to mind (although I really wish they didn’t). The good, of course, is that MCU movies have in the main been far far better than the DC superhero (DCU) movies. Thor Ragnarok (Thor 3) was undeniably entertaining and Black Pather was a triumph. There again, MCU movies are very formulaic, relying almost entirely on ‘male bantz’ (macho heroes boasting about their prowess – even Black Panther is ultimately phallocentric) and then a big special FX scrap. It really has to be asked, then: do we need a movie like Avengers Infinity War in which all the different mini-franchises collide and there are more superheroes than minutes in the movie’s actually running time (2hrs40mins!) ? Really? Isn’t it just going to be a horrendous mess without time for genuine characterisation?

Well, Infinity War just about pulls it off, to be honest. The trick, you see, is that the movie follows the baddie’s (Thanos’s) story rather than the story of any do-gooder. We get to understand the baddie’s rationale for his extreme actions and engage with him intellectually even if we cannot identify with his cosmic ambitions. We expect him to lose out ultimately, but that is not necessarily the case in this movie. He is a being of devastating power who actually brings proper jeopardy to the ‘good guys’. Indeed, a host of major heroes end up dead (not gonna spoil who, but it’s a bit shocking).

So, as the audience, we are caught between following Thanos’s quest (almost empathising with him as he makes terrible personal sacrifices) and rooting for the likes of the annoying Iron Man, the overly square Thor and the ridiculously immature Spiderman. At the end of the movie, the audience I was with sat in stunned silence – with no certainty about how to react to what they had just seen. They all hung on to see if there’d be an extra scene after the credits to make everything ‘feel better’. I ain’t gonna tell ya.

So how would I rate the movie? Well, I do rate it. Just not with a score. It’s a movie that is there on its own terms. Very much worth a look… but I’m a Marvel fanboy who knows a lot of the MCU mythos. If you’re not up-to-date, you might end up entirely bewildered by it all.

 

Westworld 2 too clever for its own good #WestworldSeason2

Having enjoyed season 1 of Westworld so much, I was hoping for good things with this 70-minute opener to season 2. Oops. I’m sad to say there wasn’t a single likeable character in the whole piece. There was no moral dilemma to keep us wondering what we’d do ourselves in such a scenario. There was no satire of human behaviour. There were only very brief moments of humour or irony…

And then there was the so-called plot. We followed Bernard in two different timelines/iterations (as a military team arrived in Westworld to clean up the chaos and mess that followed the season 1 finale)… but the two narratives didn’t illuminate each other or provide interesting juxtaposition or create any proper mystery for us to try and solve… they just kept us permanently confused and bewildered about what was going on. And Bernard was either silent, forgetful or malfunctioning… so we couldn’t engage with him either.

Sitting through 70 minutes of that? It’s asking a lot. Look, a season opener is meant to grab us and get us onboard for the ride. It can’t trade on our liking season 1 for long. If episode 2 doesn’t deliver, then I fear people will be switching off in droves.

Beyond Bernard, we followed Thandie Newton’s character for a bit (she’s still looking for her daughter, like in season 1, so nothing new there) and the character of Delores (intent on revenging herself on humans, like in season 1, so nothing new there either). And The Man in Black… who instead of finding the labyrinth (which he failed to do in season 1) now has to find some unexplained door, apparently, but we don’t know why. Sheesh.

Saving graces? Hmm. Well, it’s all beautifully filmed and produced. There are some high concept bits here and there (although they’re very much thrown away). There are plenty of tantalising (if ultimately frustrating) allusions and references for us to ponder (though I’m not sure we care enough to do so). There are a few new characters… although they’re nowhere near rounded enough.

Let’s just hope it’s a false start and that things improve next episode. After all, season 1 had the odd duff episode too. I’m willing to give them another chance… just because I can see they’re working hard at it. Yes, I think that is actually the thing that gives me hope.

The Satanic in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Did you know that the word ‘satan’ appears 27 times in the Old Testament, but never as a name? It’s just a general noun in Hebrew. Satan does not appear as a character until 500 years later, when the New Testament was written, at a time when Christians were being persecuted by the Romans. Indeed, in the city of Pergamon (‘where Satan ha[d] his throne’), the Christian bishop was boiled in his own skin within a hollowed out metal statue of a bull. Yikes.

So, chapter 1 (of 4) of the new book now complete. Oof. Hard work, this shizzle. Gotta have it finished by Xmas. Still, chapter two will be quicker, cos I can borrow from ‘The Sub-Genres of British Fantasy Literature’, ain’t it. Shh. Don’t tell anyone.

In other news, I’ve applied for the position of Lecturer in Fantasy at Glasgow University. Who would have thought such a job existed? Onwards!