Category: random

The intimidation of rationality: Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, ruminationsLeave a comment

Extensive spoilers for Death on the Nile, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” and BBC’s Sherlock.

So, I’m back again.

And earlier today, I was listening to a video someone made about the many flaws of the BBC show Sherlock, which was a massive success as a show but also a terrible Sherlock Holmes adaptation. For many reasons, but I think the biggest one is that they fundamentally got Sherlock Holmes WRONG as a character, depicting him as an obnoxious, self-absorbed sociopath who desperately needs to be taught about the wonderfulness of friendship and empathy and rainbows and sunshine and puppies, et cetera. Feel free to vomit.

And it occurred to me as I listened… this isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like that.

I saw it a few years ago in the absolutely heinous big-screen adaptation of Death on the Nile by Kevin Branagh, which absolutely raped every single character in it. Zero attempts to make it feel timeless, realistic or elegant, zero attempt to adapt Christie’s brilliant story, motives or characters; just trashy Hollywood crap. Seriously, if you want to watch the story, watch the old 197os version with Peter Ustinov, Mia Farrow and David Niven. Pretty faithful (they condense a few characters and add a motive, but mostly correct), visually stunning, and not as obnoxiously horny or preoccupied with current-day politics.

But one thing that really galled me was the need to depict Hercule Poirot as being a detective ONLY because he’s traumatized and grieving. Apparently Kenneth Branagh… cannot grasp a human being who wants to understand the mechanics of a crime, who wants to unlock a puzzle, who relies on rationality, intelligence and deduction. He evidently thinks that a person who has those qualities must have been traumatized into it, because otherwise he’d “care” more and abandon being a detective.

And I think the same thought process went into Sherlock. Spoilers for a show that’s been out for years and everybody has already heard about it, but in case you haven’t and you still want to watch it, I’m going to spoil the final episode.

Ready?

Ready?

Ready?

Okay, in the final episode of Sherlock it’s revealed that Sherlock’s entire personality has been shaped by the fact that his sister murdered his best friend when he was a then-normal little boy, and that’s why he’s a “high-functioning sociopath” who’s obsessed with solving crimes. Everything he does, everything he is, is once again the result of horrible trauma that made him a “broken” person who needs to be shown the power of friendship and empathy. Gag me with a spoon.

… not to mention that Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss seem to think that superior deductive abilities are essentially a precognitive superpower. They pretty clearly have a surface-level-only understanding of what an intelligent person’s mind is, and how it works; that kind of intelligence apparently seems like magic to them, whereas the original Holmes stories always explained Holmes’ deductions in detail, and the character himself always emphasized that other people could learn to do what he did.

These two depictions of legendary detectives are… really weird. The people making them seem to think that only a broken, mentally-scarred person could become a pragmatic, intelligent, deductive person, and that something is “wrong” or “missing” from them. That’s… a scary attitude to have. Not scary to the people who have it, but scary for the wildly anti-intellectual bent that it shows.

I think what both of these abominations show is that some people are extremely frightened of people who are genuinely intelligent – not just smart or clever, but geniuses or in some sort of elite field. They themselves are not intelligent – sometimes they’re really, really stupid – and so they try to defang what frightens them by imagining that those scary, scary smart people are actually just broken and scared, and that’s why they value intellect.

Furthermore… I think this is also coming from people who not only are scared of intelligence, but genuinely devalue it. I think they’re people who mainly value “feelings” and emotions and empathy, and think those are the most important factor. The existence of characters like Sherlock Holmes (the patron saint of deductive reasoning) and Hercule Poirot (he of the little grey cells) upset them, because those characters rely primarily on rationality, deduction and knowledge, not emotions and feefees. Even their knowledge of emotions and feelings tends to be psychologically based – they analyze and they apply their knowledge to figure out motives and actions. They do NOT turn into neurotic emotional messes who need extensive therapy because of their crippling personal problems.

And contrary to the stereotype of Holmes, he and Poirot are not people devoid of emotion or connection to others. In Death on the Nile, one of the most striking series of interactions is Poirot’s interactions with Jacqueline de Bellefort, a young woman seemingly stalking her ex-lover and his new wife (who was also her best friend). Due to his knowledge of psychology and the nature of evil, Poirot recognizes that Jackie is falling prey to evil, but knows she still has the chance to turn back and save herself. He genuinely wants her to not put her murderous plan into motion, not just for the sake of her victim, but for the sake of her own soul. She doesn’t do as he urges, and it genuinely saddens Poirot by the end that this bright young woman ultimately chose to destroy herself and several other people, when it could have been avoided easily.

Sherlock Holmes doesn’t usually get quite as personal in his stories, but he often shows sympathy and compassion for others in his stories. “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” is notable for ending not with an arrest, but with Holmes letting the thief go because it’s Christmas, and he’s confident that the man won’t offend again. That’s not the actions of an emotionally stunted sociopath, but of someone who does care very deeply about others, even if he tries to stay detached.

So making these stories, you have people who are not very smart… and who rely on emotions and empathy for everything, including their storytelling… while ironically being so un-empathetic that they can’t grasp the mindset of a person who is rational, intelligent and deductive, so they depict someone different from themselves as “broken” or “defective.”

I guess it’s not surprising that such Moffat, Gatiss and Branagh can’t grasp the value of a steel-trap mind, or detective stories written by two of the greatest masters of the genre. Their own minds are mush. So I’d like to ask them, most politely: stop adapting mystery stories. Stick to bad melodrama, which is more your speed. You’re not good at mysteries, and you’re not good at writing geniuses.

Recommendation: Unpublished Brandon Sanderson

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Every author has a trail of half-finished outlines, ideas or books that just didn’t work out. Books in embryo, which may or may not eventually be finished and released to the public. And apparently Brandon Sanderson is no different… he’s got whole novels that just aren’t published.

I’ve been reading them lately, and honestly, it’s a shame that these books weren’t published and canon to the Cosmere, because they’re pretty good overall. Although I understand why, obviously, Way of Kings Prime isn’t – it’s basically an earlier draft of a now-published novel that is drastically different in form now. It’s interesting as a look into the evolution of the novel we eventually got.

But the other two books are different. One was revised and released as a graphic novel, with some significant changes (such as a supporting character’s gender and family life) and the other just hasn’t been published officially in any form, although as I understand it, the worldbuilding is canon. White Sand takes place on a tidally-locked planet where half of it is in darkness and half in light, and the main character is a very weak sand mage who ends up accidentally becoming the leader of his order. And also they’re on the verge of being disbanded, and most of them have been murdered, and he has to somehow fight with sand-magic without being able to do more than a small amount of it.

The other is Aether of Night, kind of a cross between a Shakespearean comedy and a high-stakes high fantasy. It follows a prince/priest who ends up becoming king when his identical twin brother, who was the actual heir, is killed by mysterious shadow creatures, along with their father and a lot of other people. And those mysterious creatures are constantly invading their country and trying to overwhelm the populace, and they’re associated with a pair of feuding gods.

… and at the same time, there is also this comedic aspect, in that the former-priest-turned-king has to also select a wife from several candidates. They’re from different countries, religions and cultures, with different attitudes towards getting the prize, and some of them have their own agendas, and there are diplomatic repercussions to his choice. So as much as I enjoyed the book, I can see why Sanderson wasn’t really satisfied with the combination of high-fantasy potential apocalypse/Shakespearean comedy. You’re like, the world is potentially ending and over half the population is gonna die… so why are we hearing about some guy trying to figure out which girl he’ll marry?

And I just found out that he has another unpublished book called Dragonsteel, which I do not know anything about and which I now have to read. So stay tuned.

It’s bad to be an advanced reader?

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, ruminationsLeave a comment

So, watch the above video before reading more. Be sure to see other videos by KrimsonRogue – he’s one of the few Booktubers I follow religiously, and watch every video he makes.

I am not entirely sure what this man he’s talking about is on. I have personal experience in this, because – not to boast – I was a pretty advanced reader as a young child. In first grade, I read The Hobbit. The next year, I read The Lord of the Rings. I read so quickly and at such a level that my teacher effectively stopped expecting me to read the books supplied by the school for a book club, because I blew through them too fast. Then she tried to hold me back from surpassing my peers, but that’s a tale for another day.

And then there was the library. I went there at least twice a week, and over the next years, I was able to find plenty of books that were appropriate for kids, but advanced enough for my reading skills. Just in the kids’ section, there were the Chronicles of Prydain, the Dark is Rising Sequence, Diana Wynne-Jones, the Riddlemaster trilogy, the Green Sky trilogy, the Earthsea books, and so on.

And I did not restrict myself to the adult section – I prowled through the teen section and the adult sections as well, and picked up a number of authors that I still read – stuff like Arthur C. Clarke. Not just in fantasy and sci-fi either. I developed a love for murder mysteries then, thanks to Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Elizabeth Peters, etc. I also checked out biographies of various people who sounded interesting. And, of course, I checked the new arrivals religiously, in case there was something there that I might be interested in.

And the options for reading for kids were far, far more limited back then. There was no Rick Riordan, no Five Nights at Freddy’s, no Shannon Messenger, no Marissa Meyer, Garth Nix was early in his career, etc.

I’m sorry, but I don’t buy for a second that there’s some sort of shortage of books for children who read at a more advanced level. It doesn’t make sense logically, because a child who can read above their grade is capable of reading books for older readers… AND FOR KIDS. The pool of available books is not diminished, it’s INCREASED. I was capable of reading books like Lord of the Rings, sure, but I still read plenty of high-quality, intelligent, challenging books aimed at kids.

I can think of a number of books for younger readers that are as complex and well-written, if not more so, than many adult works I’ve read. Take Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles – I would have eagerly devoured a series about a cyborg Cinderella. Such books are usually aimed at young adults and kids not because they lack the qualities supposedly required by adult fiction, but because their protagonists are young.

Evidently this guy didn’t learn the lesson that the Harry Potter franchise supposedly taught us – that you’re not locked into a particular age group’s reading material. Adults can read kids’ books, and kids can (if properly screened) read books for older readers. I read books for 9-12-year-olds, young adults AND adults – and I do not have a dearth of books to read these days. Even though a lot of the new releases don’t appeal to me, I still have a to-read pile that is dauntingly huge.

And yet, with countless people telling him how wrong he is, that kids are not doomed to have nothing to read if they’re more advanced readers… he still is willing to die on this hill. Insisting that having kids who are academically advanced – especially in reading – is bad for them and is only inflicted on them by borderline-abusive parents. Considering that the American school system is a global joke that regularly churns out illiterate adults with no skills or relevant knowledge, we could use a lot more kids who are not just learning, but learning beyond what could be expected of them.

And as KrimsonRogue points out, the professed cost of constantly obtaining books is easily offset with a library card. Fun fact: library cards are free. So is checking out anything with them. For a bookish child, there’s nothing more delightful.

Despite protestations to the contrary, I have to wonder if he truly has kids who are ahead of their grade, or whether they’re dead average… and that bothers him, so he insists that it’s actually better for kids to NOT be smart and advanced to offset his discomfort. Maybe I’m wrong. But he seems very insistent that this is the case, and not willing to listen to anyone else’s perspective.

Youtube Recs – Village Cooking Channel

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, recommendationsLeave a comment

I don’t understand a word of any language spoken in India.

But somehow, that isn’t really a barrier when watching the Village Cooking Channel, a pretty major channel with 26 MILLION followers. Sure, the only part of the video I can really understand is “always welcome you,” but the content is so much fun and so wholesome that it doesn’t really matter.

The contents of the channel are pretty simple: half a dozen Indian men from a rural village go out into a remote field, start a fire, and cook. They cook a lot. They cook very, very large quantities – sometimes it looks like they’re cooking enough for their entire village. Whole goats filled with biryani, five hundred fried chicken legs, giant whole tuna, dragon fruit milkshakes, the world’s largest popsicles, hundreds of quail, and huge quantities of popcorn.

And some of the dishes are either unusual or unknown to American palates – think chickens cooked inside watermelons, soan papdi, goat brains, chicken in bamboo, stingray, rose cookies, goat feet, kizhi parotta, jelly cake, and so on. It’s a fascinating glimpse into how other cultures eat and the wide variety of foods that have developed in India. And despite the frequent deep-frying, most of it is probably much healthier than the average Western diet.

The guys in it are pretty fun to watch – they’re energetic and shout out the names of the ingredients as they prepare the food. They harvest some of it themselves, and so everything they make is pretty much entirely made out of whole ingredients that practically glow with freshness. Even the water looks delicious in these videos. I don’t know how you make water look delicious, but they’ve managed it.

And the best part? After the men have eaten generous portions of the food they’ve prepared, they always give what they haven’t eaten to elderly poor people living in their community. It’s heartwarming to see, and a reminder of what actual organic community looks like.

Uncle Roger, Jamie Oliver and Changing Recipes

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I’ve been watching a lot of Nigel Ng’s Uncle Roger videos lately. If you aren’t familiar with these, Uncle Roger is Ng’s comedy character, a divorced middle-aged Asian man who critiques videos (mostly about cooking various Asian dishes, but sometimes other stuff like dating reality shows), complains about his cheating ex-wife, makes odd sex jokes, rhapsodizes about MSG and complains about British chefs doing strange things to Asian food.

And I recommend you watch his videos. He’s very funny, very witty, and provides a lot of insight into the proper preparation of different dishes which Americans/Brits may not be entirely familiar with, like Thai curries.

And one thing he also did was introduce me to Jamie Oliver’s cooking. Now, I was previously aware that Jamie Oliver existed. But because I don’t cook much (and most of what I make is taco meat, frozen pizza or salads) and he doesn’t have a primetime reality show where he yells at chefs a lot, I didn’t know anything about the man’s cooking abilities. It turns out that… he’s not very good. Not very good at all.

For one thing, he makes food oppressively healthy. I understand he’s a health nut and on a personal mission to make everybody eat the way he thinks we should, but he cooks “healthy” food the way a person who hates health food would imagine it to be. He tries to make things vegetarian sometimes, and tries to cram vegetables where they aren’t wanted or needed. Jamie, listen – if you want to eat vegetables in a dish that doesn’t have vegetables in it… just eat a salad on the side. No need to inflict a “dense ball” of spinach on anybody.

And he seems to be on a one-man crusade against flavor, which both British cooking and healthy cooking are notorious for lacking. He uses low-salt/low-fat ingredients, makes spicy dishes as bland as possible, and seems to try to use water instead of stocks or oils sometimes.

And what flavor there is… is wrong. He often makes massive changes to the core recipes, leaving out important elements and adding random new ones for inadequate reasons, like “it’s a red curry, so I will put in red bell peppers to make it red” or “it’s an Asian food, so I need to put soy sauce and bok choy in it.” He adds ingredients to dishes that don’t work with the other flavors on it, without regard for how it’s actually going to taste – like when he made Thai green curry and half of it was mushrooms. Or when he made a Pad Thai and the sauce was made out of mashed-up silken tofu (WUT?), soy sauce and sweet chili sauce. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t like the idea of soy sauce and sweet chili sauce mixed together and… nobody cooks tofu that way!

I’m honestly not sure why he does this, aside from trying to make things healthier. Especially since some of his errors are just…. being wrong, like when he used the wrong noodles for ramen.

But some of these are just… changing things. Is he really so filled with hubris that he thinks he’s improving on these recipes by changing so many things about them? Because it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when a chef’s attitude is, “Hey, these are beloved and well-regarded dishes from other cultures, but they’re not good enough to be faithfully reproduced. I have to FIX them to make them acceptable!” It feels gross and condescending. Kind of like ranch-sauce pizza, which is also an abomination.

When you make alterations to a recipe, you need to actually stop and think about whether it NEEDS to be altered. From all across the world, very few classic recipes need to be “fixed” or updated, because they are often the result of decades, centuries or even millennia of development and experimentation, and flavors that work harmoniously with other flavors from the same region.

That’s not to say that food shouldn’t evolve or adopt new things. Organic growth is amazing, like how Indian cuisine has integrated tomatoes and potatoes, and married them to other uniquely Indian flavors. In fact, potatoes have been embraced worldwide, in many cultures which had no contact with them until fewer than five hundred years ago. But that was about embracing something new and finding new and culturally unique ways to cook it as a part of the existing cuisine, not trying to avoid the established and beloved flavors and foods that already existed.

Anyway, that was my unhinged rant on the subject, and maybe I’m being too harsh, but the man annoys me.

Sonya Blade – Badass Lady Fighter

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I have a confession to make: I kinda like the Mortal Kombat movie from 2021.

I mean, it’s not as controversial as saying you’re an unironic fan of Battlefield Earth or something like that. But as I understand it, fans of the video games didn’t like it a great deal, even just compared to the 1990s movie.

And I won’t lie – it’s flawed. Cole is a pretty bland lead character who isn’t from the games, though he’s inoffensive and he avoids the whole Gary Stu character aspect. Kano is lots of fun to watch, and I suspect the actor had a ball playing him. Shang Tsung is not really very intimidating, There’s some eye candy for women and a small number of men (Liu Kang is basically this ALL THE TIME). The special effects are pretty decent. Hiroyuki Sanada and Joe Taslim are basically perfect as Scorpion and Subzero, and there’s a reason the entire climax is about these two whaling on each other.

But I think of all the characters, I enjoy watching Sonya Blade the most, because she is an example of a warrior woman written correctly. And we don’t have a lot of those anymore – a lot of female characters in current-day action movies are essentially written as power fantasies…. which are okay, as long as it’s acknowledged that they’re nothing better than that. These characters are coldly constructed to maximize feelings of shallow empowerment without risking upsetting anyone by making the character look “weak” by having them be vulnerable, struggle to do anything, or need anything from a man.

Disney, I’m looking at you. You gave us Rey, Live!Mulan and Captain Marvel.

Sonya Blade is literally not like the other girls… and for once, that’s a good thing. The first thing to note is that she is always depicted as a butt-kicking badass – she’s a military veteran who’s good enough to fight in Mortal Kombat, and she’s strong and skilled enough to capture Kano and keep him chained up in her house. When Subzero is chasing down Cole, she’s the one that Jax sends him to to keep him safe.

But it’s worth noting that in raw physical power, she’s not the strongest. On average, men are much stronger than women physically, which many movies and TV shows don’t want to acknowledge because… I guess acknowledging it would be considered misogynistic. But Mortal Kombat does implicitly acknowledge it, because Sonya is shown going toe to toe with physically powerful men not based on raw muscle power, but using her brains, her training, and her agility. Her part of the climax is a wonderfully intense game of cat-and-mouse, where she not only has to battle Kano’s physical power but his laser eye, which she manages through manipulating her surroundings as well as physical attacks.

Which brings me to another aspect of Sonya that many other action heroines don’t have anymore – she struggles. Watch the Disney action heroines mentioned above, and you’ll be lucky if they EVER struggle to take down their enemies.

In the shallow minds of the people writing these stories, I think they imagine that a woman struggling would make her look weak… and that idea is bad storytelling. Seeing your hero struggle is part of the experience of wanting them to triumph – you watch them sweat, get punched, collapse to the ground and struggle to get up again, and lose their initial fights. That makes it all the more cathartic and satisfying when they finally triumph – because you know they worked for their triumph over the bad guys, and all the sweat, blood and tears were worth it in the end.

If the hero’s only flaw is “he/she needs to realize how AWESOME he/she is!”, and they breeze through, effortlessly winning the day without breaking a sweat… the only people who find that satisfying are people who just want a power fantasy.

And yes, Sonya struggles. She follows the arc of HERO FIGHTS –> HERO FAILS –> HERO REGROUPS/TRAINS –> HERO FIGHTS AGAIN –> HERO WINS AFTER STRUGGLE, like Luke Skywalker and other classic heroes. Her ultimate triumph over Kano – and gaining an arcana – is narratively satisfying because we watched her grapple with him right to the end, and it was a near thing. So when she looks at her dragon mark and laughs, it feels earned.

I do not get that feeling from a Captain Marvel, a Rey, a Live!Mulan. They don’t struggle to win, so there’s no cathartic satisfaction when they do win. It’s like watching Usain Bolt outrunning a toddler. Who’d find that satisfying?

I also really like Sonya’s relationships with the men around her. She doesn’t really interact much with the female characters – I think she only encounters Mileena, who skips out on murdering her because she wouldn’t get Mortal Kombat street cred from it. I guess she probably meets Cole’s wife and daughter at the end of the film.

Anyway, throughout the movie Sonya interacts mainly with the male characters, and for the most part… they treat her no differently than if she were a man. The only exception of Kano, who is a walking mass of personality defects, who is sexist to her because he’s casually offensive to everyone (and also he’s salty that she chained him up). But the men on her side treat her with respect and admiration, not considering her any less worthy because she’s a woman, and it’s hard to imagine that, say, Cole would treat her any differently if she were a guy.

That also goes for her relationship with Jax. I’m not sure what the age difference is between them, but it seems like they have a big brother/little sister connection, with a hint of mentor/student.

One thing I’ve noticed about movies in recent years is that women are often not allowed to be the mentees/students of men anymore – a woman must either know everything she needs automatically, or she must learn from another woman. See Rey, Captain Marvel, etc. That makes it kind of wholesome when Sonya admits that when she first entered the military, she wanted to make Jax proud, and that was clearly an important motivation in her training and her service.

It’s also worth noting that in the second act, she also spends a lot of time just supporting Jax. She’s told that she can’t train for Mortal Kombat because she doesn’t have a dragon mark that gives you superpowers, and instead of pouting or kicking up a fuss, she decides to go support her best friend, who just lost both of his arms and has been given little dinky robot ones instead. She doesn’t make it all about her, but about her friend who needs help.

On the subject of Sonya not having an arcana, I also liked that she’s demonstrated to have actual morals rather than a vague sense of goodness that is never challenged or confronted with temptation. You see, Sonya wants an arcana because she wants to engage in Mortal Kombat (DA DA DA, DADADA DA DA DA!), but there are only two ways to gain one. Either you are an elite fighter and vague supernatural powers bestow it on you, or you gain it by killing someone else who has the marking.

Kano has the marking. Now, Kano is a person who has done all sorts of hideous criminal things, and killing him would probably make the world a better place. In fact, he keeps taunting Sonya about killing him, even to the point where she fights him but does not kill him, just to demonstrate that she can in fact beat him. But she doesn’t kill him, because at that point he was technically an ally and wasn’t a direct threat.

Does she kill him? Yes. But only after he turns against the group and tries to murder her twice, in self-defense.

The same way a hero has to struggle for his success to mean anything, a hero’s morals have to be challenged for their morality to have any depth. If the hero is never tempted to do the wrong thing, then their morality doesn’t really mean anything. This is especially true in a situation where doing the wrong thing feels like it might be the right thing, such as killing a loathsome murderer who will get superpowers and probably misuse them to kill even more people.

Anyway, those are my scrambled thoughts on the character of Sonya Blade in the Mortal Kombat movie, and why I liked her far better than most action heroines in current-day films. She’s tough, she’s smart, she’s compassionate, she’s skilled, and she fires pink laser beams. Not bad.

Cruella and the illusion of genius

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Sorry it’s been awhile since I last ranted about something that bothered me, but upon watching JLongbone’s rant about the movie Cruella, I had to talk about it.

Specifically, I had to talk about how… I am not sure how Disney came to the conclusion that Cruella was a genius. The movie is crammed with her referring to herself as a genius, and others talking about her genius, and the narrative acts as if she’s a genius even though she does very little geniusing. The entire movie revolves around the idea that she’s not just an artistic genius, but a criminal mastermind who can dominate and manipulate everyone.

Just… where did this characterization come from?

Because I have seen 101 Dalmations, and she is most assuredly not a genius. She is literally just a rich bitch who hires other people to do minor crimes for her. Even if she did the criminal acts in person, it wouldn’t be genius – it would be breaking into a middle-class London house and stealing baby animals that can be easily stuffed into a sack. That’s not Mission: Impossible. It’s not even Ocean’s 11. Actually, I was never quite sure why Roger and Anita never had the police investigate her, since she was literally the only suspect.

And lest you think that she was a fashion design genius… no, she was a consumer of fashion. There are plenty of bibliophiles who can’t write four coherent words, and there are plenty of fashion enthusiasts who know absolutely nothing about making fashion. They’re called celebrities. Ba-dum-tish.

The point is, wanting a coat made out of spotted dogskin is not the same thing as being a fashion designer of genius caliber. Hell, in the original book, Cruella’s husband was the one with actual fashion knowledge and experience; she just took advantage of his position to get lots of furs. Yes, someone actually married… that.

And of all the Disney villains I can think of off the top of my head, Cruella is arguably the least genius of them all. The closest to her in lack-of-genius is Gaston, and… well, at least Gaston knew how to rile up a crowd and manipulate people. Cruella just screams at them, hits them and throws money at them, and then ends up crashing her vehicle and being outwitted by a pair of dogs.

Who looked at this loony rich skank and thought, “Yes, she is a true genius”?

Maybe its one of those really sad attempts to inspire young girls by telling them that they’re brilliant and brave and talented and all-around glorious when… the majority are not, and likely never will be, and setting them up with big egos and inflated self-image is just going to make things rocky later on. Maybe people think that all girls will be amazing brilliant girlbosses if they have self-confidence, and that’s just not true. Self-confidence is often bestowed on people with nothing to back it up, and they typically make life harder for everyone around them.

And don’t even get me started on how the movie makes Cruella not do evil things. This is a woman that is famous for wanting to skin baby animals – whose bright idea was it to have her be kind to dogs? It’s like Disney wants the edgelord cred of having movies about villains, but they’re too cowardly to have their villains actually… do anything villainous.

Remember that one Justice League episode where the Flash and Lex Luthor switched bodies, and Flash declared that he wasn’t going to wash his hands “cuz I’m evil”? That was more evil than Cruella.

More about the Eternals and why they’re boring (spoilers)

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No, I haven’t finished it, but something struck me when I was considering the excessive largeness of the cast and how it probably could have been pared down to at least half without losing anything.

In addition to the fact that none of the characters are developed very well, and there are way too many of them, they aren’t interesting to me because… they all have the same backstory. They all come from the same place, with the same mission and goals, and for about six-and-a-half thousand years they pretty much do the same things over and over with each other around. That gives their characters a sameness that just isn’t appealing in an ensemble cast.

Let’s compare them to the Guardians of the Galaxy, a similarly obscure team who was a rousing success and instantly beloved instead of… whatever the Eternals are. Each of the Guardians comes with a different backstory – they each have experiences, tragedies and struggles that are unique and distinct, but which bind them together when they do finally find friends. Rocket’s backstory is wildly different from Drax’s, and his experiences logically affect the way he sees the world and interacts with other people.

That’s why the Guardians feel like such well-rounded characters by comparison – each one is different. With the Eternals, all the differences feel very shallow and surface-level, because there’s not really anything in their histories to make them stand apart from each other.

I mean, imagine if every single character in the MCU was some variation of a rich, talented, arrogant man who is badly injured and humbled, and ends up becoming a nobler version of himself who uses his power and influence for good. That’s fine for Tony Stark. Some people complained that Dr. Strange was too similar, but their wheelhouses are far enough apart that it’s tolerable. But if every character came from the same background and experiences as Strange or Stark, it would be dull and none of them would stand out.

That’s why Ikaris and Sersi’s relationship feels so boring, dull and flat. What do these characters see in each other beyond “I’m hot, you’re hot, let’s do it”? It’s one of the worst romantic relationships I’ve ever seen, because neither one has any actual characteristics that could lead someone to find them attractive beyond the purely physical. Yet we’re supposed to believe they were so in love that they got married and spent over six MILLENNIA together.

And that’s not including the fact that many things about the Eternals that don’t make sense if you think about them for half a second. If they’re basically fleshy androids designed for their mission, why do they feel attraction? Why are they given the capacity to disobey and think for themselves, rather than being designed and programmed to simply do what they were designed to do? Why not just design them so they value the Celestials above all other life, and humans simply won’t matter to them outside of their function for the Celestials? That seems a lot more efficient than constantly tricking them and mind-wiping them so they’ll never find out the truth.

And if you could design a perfect artificial life-form, one indistinguishable from an organic being and possessing immense superpowers… why would you DELIBERATELY give them a handicap like deafness?

This movie is just very poorly-made, poorly-conceived, and very dull. Marvel has a reputation for putting out shiny, competent blockbusters, but they’ve been very shaky lately – Shang-Chi was just okay from what I heard, and Black Widow was a trainwreck. The Eternals just has so many elementary things that should have been fixed in the early stages of screenwriting, long before it went into production.

I mean, this is a movie where Kit Harington is one of the most dynamic and engaging characters. Kit Harington. A man who made a career out of making puppy eyes and sad mouths, and nothing else.

And yes, I’m going to finish it. I promise.

But I probably won’t enjoy it.

“The Eternals” should have been a TV show (not much in the way of spoilers)

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, ruminationsLeave a comment

I kind of went off the Marvel Cinematic Universe after Avengers: Endgame, primarily because it bid farewell to most of the original Avengers who made the brand what it was, while ushering in an era of much, much lesser superheroes. It also was when Marvel started spewing out Disney+ TV shows like a geyser, and so far all of them have had serious issues of varying degrees.

But there is one Marvel show that should have been a TV show, and that’s The Eternals.

I admit that I am only about halfway through this Chloe Zhao superhero movie, but I sincerely doubt that it’s going to turn around and suddenly blow me away in the second half. It is, to put it simply, plodding. It just trudges along rather than sweeping the audience in its wake, never making you excited about anything that happens. Even when something shocking or cataclysmic occurs… you don’t feel it.

In the first half of the movie, there is a horrifying revelation about the protagonists, their natures, their mission, their very existence and everything they believed about themselves… and their general attitude towards this is, “Aww, that sucks a little.” It is so anticlimactic, and it just made me even more indifferent to most of these characters, most of whom are generic (Thena, Sersi), bland (Ikaris) or annoying (Sprite, Druig).

Remember when Captain America discovered that HYDRA had been infesting SHIELD for the past seventy years, and had corrupted it completely from within? That was a shocking moment, and it held the weight of its import. But I don’t feel that with The Eternals.

I should care. It doesn’t make me care.

Part of the problem is just that Chloe Zhao’s direction is very uninspired, and the script is extremely meh. It’s just boring. But even if there was some pep and zing in this movie, it would still have some serious issues that need to be addressed… and most of those could have been handled by making it a TV series rather than a movie. Ten, maybe twelve episodes could have told the same story, but with more meat on its bones.

Part of the problem is that the main cast is too large. Look at the Guardians of the Galaxy – they have five members of their main cast, and a small number of supporting characters bouncing off them. Each of the Guardians has a distinct personality that complements or conflicts with every other member, and the cast is small enough that nobody gets lost in the shuffle. This is not the case with The Eternals – there are too many Eternals in the main cast, and thus there isn’t time enough to explore any of them except maybe Sersi. Most of them are extremely underdeveloped, and I just ended up thinking of them as “the Superman clone” or “the guy who looks like Credence Barebone” or “the little annoying one.” The only character traits that really set them apart were that some of them were very bitter and pissy.

This problem would probably be lessened in a TV format, where we could have episodes focusing more on the many different characters and what sets them apart from each other, as well as their feelings about their mission, their history, and the events of the story unfolding in the present. Maybe they could give Ikaris a personality.

The other problem is simple: the scope of the story is too big for a movie with this many characters. The Eternals have been on earth for seven thousand years, and supposedly have been defending and assisting humanity for most of that time. We get some flashbacks to their time in the past every now and then, but again, it feels pretty underdeveloped, and it doesn’t really give the feeling of those seven thousand years. We need more to really grasp it.

A TV show? You could introduce multiple glimpses of the past, all across the world, and you could work your way through those seven thousand years incrementally, all the way to the present, rather than hopping straight from 5,000 BC to the 1600s, with a ten-second wedding detour.

I admit I have not finished the movie yet, but the handling of it so far has not given me confidence that Chloe Zhao is suddenly going to give me a wild, exciting experience. It’s been dull and plodding, and all signs point to it continuing to be dull and plodding.

What Ghostbusters: Afterlife brings to the table that the 2016 reboot didn’t

On By E. A. SolinasIn random, ruminationsLeave a comment

The Ghostbusters franchise is getting something that few do: a reboot of an unsuccessful reboot.

Usually when a franchise has a dud reboot, the attitude from the suits is either that the IP is poisonous and nobody wants to see it, or that they just need to wait awhile before making another bad reboot. They most definitely don’t listen to fans, who are considered the bane of entertainment companies – creators and companies will not only give the fans stuff they hate, but will insult them for not liking it.

But after the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot embarrassingly failed to bring in audiences – partly on the back of an obnoxious “if you don’t like this, you’re sexist” campaign – something unusual happened. Sony actually listened. They announced a new sequel to the original Ghostbusters movie, directed by the son of the original movie’s director, with the three surviving Ghostbusters returning (and Sigourney Weaver and Annie Potts).

What immediately made people happy was that… this is the kind of movie that fans had been screaming for for years – the classic Ghostbusters passing the torch to a new generation, and suitable respect being paid to the original.

And despite some retreading of familiar territory (demon dogs and Staypuft marshmallow men), respect and passing the torch is what the trailers are all about. We see familiar sights such as Ecto-1 and the PK-meter, and there’s a thrill to seeing them resurrected in a modern movie. There are even brief glimpses of a collection of spores, molds and fungus, showing that even throwaway gags from the original movie are being taken into consideration here.

They even found a way to make Egon Spengler central to the story, even though Harold Ramis sadly died some years ago. While Egon has passed on in the Ghostbusters universe, his work and legacy are clearly very important to the story, and his family members are central to the action. It feels like he’s still playing a part in the story.

And despite Leslie Jones’ howling about how the new Ghostbusters would all be men, it looks like it will be an even split between boys and girls. The kid most prominently displayed in the trailers is a young girl who looks like a female clone of Egon, and seems to act like one as well. This is pretty pleasant – there was a nasty undercurrent of “go feminism, down with stupid men!” to the 2016 reboot that extended to both the marketing and the script, so it’s nice to see some actual equality and the inclusion of female characters without the exclusion of males.

It even has greater racial diversity, since it looks like there will be an Asian kid in the mix as well as a black one, which also means they aren’t just making new versions of the same characters.

It also has something the 2016 version didn’t really have much of – innovation. That movie provided some proton-pack variations of weapons, but none of them felt like anything but supernatural pistols. But the trailers for this movie show the kids doing some new stuff – specifically a chase scene in the Ecto-1 where Phoebe pops out of the side on a seat, allowing her to fire a proton pack while the vehicle is moving. At the same time, there’s a trap with newly-installed remote-controlled wheels that allows it to move independently.

That’s fresh! That’s new! The 2016 movie tried to dazzle us with giant slabs of incomprehensible technobabble about the tech from the original movie, which drained all the life from the already-bad dialogue and just highlighted how inferior it was as a film. This new movie shows us the innovations being made to existing technology, and it feels natural and organic.

Then again, Ghostbusters 2016 didn’t bring a lot to the table, except a “villain is an incel” plot twist that nobody liked. It’s one of those reboots that really highlights how good the original one was. Okay, the original Ghostbusters wasn’t high art or anything, but it was tightly-plotted, clever, witty and creative. The reboot was a disaster, a mess of bad improv, a flabby incoherent script, stupid lowbrow jokes, sexism and a quartet of howling hammy harpies at its center.

Two words: Melissa McCarthy.

It also lacked scares. Though the original Ghostbusters was and is regarded as a comedy, it’s actually pretty much a horror movie with some genuinely impressive, suspenseful scenes devoid of laughs. Ghostbusters 2016 not only is not scary, but it doesn’t realize that a funny movie doesn’t have to be funny ALL THE TIME and can take itself seriously.

In short, the original was a serious movie that just happens to have a lot of comedic dialogue.

It’s hard to tell just from the trailer what the tone of the new movie will be; it seems a bit more somber, which admittedly is more a typical supernatural-movie/TV atmosphere in the 21st century. It will have some humor in it from what I’ve seen, mostly of the dry Venkman variety. I do like that it seems to be taking the whole storyline seriously as a supernatural thriller rather than just going “yuk yuk, the villain is an incel nerd troll! Let’s shoot him in the crotch! LOL! Fart jokes, dancing and screaming!”

So overall, I’d say that from what we know of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, it sounds much more promising than the 2016 movie… although that admittedly wasn’t saying much, since that movie was a stillbirth of a project. At the very least, this reboot seems like it has its heart in the right place, in terms of respecting the original and the fans, and yet trying something new and different.

And I’ll be showing my support financially for Afterlife, in order to support those who treat their fans and franchises right.