Strange New Worlds: A Case of Chiaroscuro

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds continues to bring us a new show every week (almost a completely new show) with "A Case of Chiaroscuro."

Una, M'Benga, and Uhura are sent on a shuttle mission at the edge of Klingon space -- in a region where stellar radiation flattens the visible color spectrum to black and white. When they're forced to set down on inhabited planet, they must disguise themselves as locals to blend in among a Klingon occupation. But for Una, "blending in" isn't an option; she is mistaken for the leader of a dissident movement and is quickly drawn into its plans. Meanwhile, aboard Enterprise, La'An investigates potential tampering with a spy probe.

I felt it necessary to post my thoughts on Spider-Noir before getting to a review of this episode -- because I'm quite sure that watching that series affected the way I received this installment of Strange New Worlds. After I'd watched Spider-Noir brilliantly thread the needle of poking a little fun at film noir conventions while simultaneously honoring them, I couldn't help but feel that this episode was not that. Put simply, there's more to film noir than putting on a certain kind of costume and filming in black and white. That's where "A Case of Chiaroscuro" fell short for me.

The "A plot" of this episode is an interesting storyline for Una: as she reminds the audience, she has a lot of experience pretending to be something she's not... but this time she's doing it for a cause bigger than herself. And with a backdrop of opposing a totalitarian regime, the story has topical echoes that are ripe for Star Trek to tackle. Throw in some solid moments for Dr. M'Benga and Uhura (particularly between the two of them), and you've got the makings of a decent episode.

But the thing is... it's not film noir. Actually, it's Casablanca. This isn't a beat for beat remake of that classic film, but you can clearly see where character roles, story elements, and visuals are inspired directly by that movie. (Perhaps never more so than the scene where locals in the bar start up a beloved song to drown out interlopers.) Casablanca is, of course, a black and white film. But that's just a consequence of when it was made; that doesn't make it a film noir. 

Indeed, it's the "B plot" aboard the Enterprise that tracks more closely to the elements of a true film noir. La'An is a detective trying to get to the bottom of a mystery. She sees a larger conspiracy in a place where "the authorities" have dismissed it. She uncovers the truth and learns that things aren't... (ahem)... black and white. Force this analogy past the breaking point, and maybe Spock is some kind of "femme fatale" figure who betrays the detective (by not believing in her)?

Yeah, this doesn't quite fit the film noir formula either... possibly because it feels a bit thin. Still, it highlights the jumble I felt in this episode's conception. Down on the planet you have the fedoras, the suits, the Dutch angles, the deep shadows... all the visual trappings. Up on the ship you have the actual mystery, the questioning suspects, the uncovering of a deeper plot... and none of the visual trappings. "A Case of Chiaroscuro" is nominally the episode where "Strange New World does film noir." Yet it doesn't. It prepares all the ingredients for a meal and then leaves them separate on the counter without cooking.

Yet even though I found the episode to be somewhat disappointing, I didn't think it was bad. As I mentioned earlier, I think all three main characters on the planet had interesting moments. And there was also fun in getting a (p)return of a classic Klingon character, Kor -- and getting to actually see his "mind sifter," which up until now had been mentioned only in one classic Star Trek episode to never be spoken of again.

Overall, I give "A Case of Chiaroscuro" a B-. It might be an example showing that, thanks to its great cast, Strange New Worlds will still be decent even when it stumbles.

Happy Brim-Day to Me

Over 40 years ago, director Ron Howard made the movie Cocoon -- a "probably couldn't get made today" tale of how alien life force rejuvenates a group of retired seniors. Among the movie's cast of older actors was Wilford Brimley. I imagine Brimley may not be known at all by today's younger generations, but there was a time he was known universally for talking about diabetes, eating oatmeal, and being perpetually grizzled. He was the exactly the sort of actor that a movie like Cocoon needed.

And, impossibly, on the day that Cocoon release in movie theaters (June 21, 1985), Wilford Brimley -- professional cranky old man -- was 50 years old. The archetypal example of "older than the hills" was 50 years, 9 months, and 6 days old to be exact.

Many years later, this led to an internet meme I've found quite funny over the years: the Brimley/Cocoon Line. This website and feed have been around for a while now to essentially point out that 50 isn't what it used to be, by pointing out when famous celebrities have crossed the "Brimley/Cocoon Line," the age at which they're now as old as Wilford Brimley was on the day Cocoon was released. It was a headscratcher when Christian Bale crossed it, quite funny when Paul Rudd crossed it, and instantly aging when Drew Barrymore crossed it.

Today, I cross it.

I'm now "Wilford Brimley" old. Nothing left to do, I guess, but wait for alien intervention. At least I have family and friends, many of whom already crossed the line ahead of me. Now we can all sneak out of the retirement home together to use the neighbor's pool

Black and White, but Not Plain

Like most people who saw Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, I was entertained by the parade of increasingly unusual parallel universe heroes. But did that mean I was clamoring for an eight-episode television spin-off about Spider-Noir, the film noir inspired character voiced by Nicolas Cage? Not really. And yet, that Spider-Verse movie itself had come at a time where there was no shortage of Spider-Man movies, when "no one had asked for this," and it had turned out to be really good. Could that history repeat itself with a new TV series?

Set in a crime-ridden 1930s New York, Spider-Noir follows private investigator Ben Reilly. Devastated by the loss of a loved one, he's hung up his superhero alter ego, The Spider. But when superpowered villains begin to terrorize the city, he must step up once again.

I'm sure I've blogged this many times -- so at the risk of repeating myself: I don't really care for film noir. I've watched a lot of the classic movies of the genre, and found only a couple that I enjoyed. Generally, I think they're too cliché, from the performative accents to the mandatory character archetypes to the formulaic plots. I was sure that's what I was in for Spider-Noir.

It turns out: I was, but in all the best ways. The developer and show runner of the series, Oren Uziel, clearly knows all the trappings of film noir -- and clearly loves them dearly. Well, no one can do parody quite like a person who deeply knows and loves the thing they're parodying. Spider-Noir isn't a straight-up Mel Brooks-style joke fest poking fun at a genre... but it is a show that knowingly turns the film noir cliches up to 11 and doesn't quite play everything straight.

And if you ask me, that's a perfect thing to fuse into the superhero genre. "Taking everything super-seriously" is about the only way a superhero movie or show gets made these days; even when the results are supposed to be a little funny and irreverent, they almost always turn serious for the big climax. But all the while, there's a fundamental over-the-topness to comics that edges oh-so-close to silly. And it turns out that for me, putting that together with the same qualities of film noir was like mixing peanut butter and chocolate.

Better still was casting Nicolas Cage in the lead role. This was, of course, no casting coup; Cage voiced the character for Into the Spider-Verse. But it's hardly a given that a man in his early 60s would be the smart choice to play a romantic lead and superhero on an action-adventure show. Here's where I confess that however skeptical I am of most film noir, I'm doubly so of a performance by Nicolas Cage. That's because I find him broad to the point of self-parody. But as I just covered, that is exactly the tone of Spider-Noir: it dances right along the line of making fun of itself, occasionally putting a toe on the other side of that line only to playfully drag it back. In that recipe, an over-the-top Nicolas Cage performance suddenly feels like exactly the right ingredient.

He's one "ingredient" among several in the cast that I think works great. Karen Rodriguez is fantastic as the takes-no-guff assistant to private investigator Ben Reilly. Lamorne Morris is quite funny as his reporter best friend. Filling the noir-required roles of the heavy and femme fatale are are a wonderfully menacing Brendan Gleeson and effectively alluring Li Jun Li. Those are just my favorites; the bench of superpowered villains are a lot of fun too.

In the end, much to my surprise, I quite loved Spider-Noir, and give it an A-. Two final notes on it. One, it's a perfectly packaged little mini-series, and I find myself hoping they don't actually try to make more. Two, you can view it either in full color or in moody and authentic black-and-white. I did the latter, only checking out a minute of how it looked in color when all was said and done. (Wrong, wrong, wrong. Don't do it.) Indeed, Spider-Noir may have set a bar high enough to make me enjoy this summer's Spider-Man movie a bit less.

An Epic Movie for an Epic Poem

With the collective insistence that IMAX was the definitive format for seeing The Odyssey, it took me several weeks to finally catch up with it (at a showing with decent seats). But this past weekend, I finally got to see what all the hype was about.

I have a pretty distant relationship with the original source material. I never had to read The Odyssey for school. I was well aware of many of the plot elements, though perhaps unclear about which details were part of this classic Greek story or that one, or perhaps just part of Greek mythology generally. I assumed that I certainly wouldn't notice which details were altered by writer-director Christopher Nolan for this adaptation.

But I am someone who has seen all of Christopher Nolan's movies. (Yes, even Following.) He's only ever made one film I didn't much care for, and several I really love. Suffice it to say, I feel quite able to pick out his "signatures." Whether they were always there in The Odyssey, drawing him to that for his next movie, or they were something he imposed upon it for his version, the result is a strong vision -- a Venn diagram of "Oscar bait" and "action fantasy" we haven't seen at the movies since the original The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Like the other blockbuster I recently caught up with, my feelings were mixed. Starting with things in the "plus column": the visuals. While they might have been a touch too desaturated on average for my tastes, they were stunning throughout. The supernatural moments were clear standouts, from a monstrous and menacing Cyclops to a truly horrific and uncomfortable sequence about Circe's witchcraft. But even more mundane images looked great; the many scenes in Penelope's dining hall never became repetitive thanks to raucous staging and subtle camera positioning.

It may be that Christopher Nolan is incapable of telling a story in pure, linear fashion. But I thought the jumbling of time frames here helped the story overall. The use of flashbacks helped avoid clumping all the action at the beginning and end of the story, and also served to highlight different perspectives on the same events. All of this heightened a moralistic theme I feel fairly sure was minimal (maybe even wholly absent) from the original story: this version of The Odyssey is not a story about one man being punished by the gods so much as it is about one man punishing himself.

Clever as that inversion is, I'm not sure the source material quite supports the adjustment... and here's where I get started on more of a "minus column." The Odysseus of this story has profound regrets over his actions, most keenly that he chose violence in condemnation of Zeus' law. But after we watch him beat himself up about that for hours of screen time, the story culminates in him doing that again and apparently feeling no reservation or remorse about it. That's the ending here because Homer told us that's the ending, but it's an ending that doesn't quite fit the message that seems to have been imposed (or at least highlighted) here.

Also in this "sort of minus column," the casting. Christopher Nolan is a director who likes to work mostly with the same actors. At this point, he's built up a lengthy contact list of people -- with still more admirers who would be happy to work with him in any capacity. And so The Odyssey is an epic movie with an epic cast: an almost endless parade of A-listers, or at least recognizable faces. I don't think this is always to the movie's benefit.

Sure, you have Matt Damon ably carrying the movie, Anne Hathaway playing an unexpectedly strong-willed Penelope, Samantha Morton giving us an eerie and memorable Circe, and John Leguizamo in a surprisingly serious role as Eumaeus. You have "fine" work -- neither exceptional nor bad -- from the likes of Tom Holland, Himesh Patel, and Robert Pattinson. But then you also have a lot of squandered talent: thanklessly small and uninteresting roles for Zendaya, Charlize Theron, and Lupita Nyong'o. And even though you could argue this telling of The Odyssey turns entirely on the character of Sinon, Elliot Page doesn't get much screen time to make an impact.

Still, while Spider-Man: Brand New Day has turned out to be a "fine" movie that's wilting in my estimation with each passing day since I've seen it, The Odyssey might be a "fine" movie that's growing in the opposite way. The more I think about it, the less I fixate on whether this movie is a "waste of Zendaya" and the more I appreciate how novel and new it made very familiar material seem. I'd give The Odyssey a B-. For now. I may be revisiting the movie one day, and my opinion of it.

Strange New World: Human Best Friend

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds continues its model of weekly tonal upheaval in its latest episode, "Human Best Friend."

In need of rest and rejuvenation ahead of important peace talks, the crew of the Enterprise heads for shore leave on a resort planet with an atmosphere that induces intoxicating effects. Though most of them head off on their own separate journeys, Scotty and Ortegas are forced work through their personal differences and pair up: they must trace what happened to them during an overnight blackout and locate a missing shuttle.

This episode might be the most "Lower Decks" feeling episode of Strange New Worlds since the one that actually featured characters from Star Trek: Lower Decks. The hijinks are as broad as ever and the tone is relentlessly silly. Dave Foley from The Kids in the Hall is here to underline that fun is the mission in this mashup of The Hangover with Dude, Where's My Car? And since Lower Decks is my other favorite Star Trek series of the modern era, I'm totally here for this.

The thing I found revelatory about Lower Decks is that it was genuinely funny. Almost every series in the Star Trek franchise has taken a run at a comedic episode on occasion, but the results are usually mixed. At best, they can be quite fun and can put a smile on your face... but are rarely laugh out loud funny in the way the best sitcoms are. Lower Decks was consistently laugh out loud funny. And so was "Human Best Friend."

I was the "Leonardo DiCaprio pointing" meme when Doctor M'Benga declared of his drink: "It's green." I tittered at Anson Mount's hilarious take on drunk Pike. I snickered every time Spock saw Ortegas as a cactus. (The "special sauce" on that joke being that she always raised her hands right before we saw Spock's POV.) I belly laughed at Ethan Peck's delivery of Spock's reply to being told he didn't look drunk: "absurd!" I snorted at all the spins Celia Rose Gooding put on the word "journey" as Uhura resisted anyone trying to harsh the vibes of her party.

A good friend of mine who never quotes movies or TV texted me this week: "They stole my eyeballs!"

I gather from some of the response online that many viewers aren't into tonal whiplash this extreme -- or at a minimum, not something this zany on the heels of an episode that was straight-up horror. But I love that in an age of television that forces you to binge-view almost everything, Strange New Worlds is a series best not binged, putting some breathing room between each installment to reset expectations.

My expectations this time were well and truly satisfied. I give Human Best Friend an A-. I certainly don't want Strange New Worlds to be this every week. But when it decides to be, this is exactly what I want.

"New" Isn't Always Better

With its nearly billion-dollar opening weekend, Spider-Man: Brand New Day clearly didn't need the people attending Gen Con to show up at the theaters for a smash success. But the fact remains, almost no one attending Gen Con actually got see the movie in its first week of release. But when I finally got my first "regular weekend" in what felt like ages, I did catch up.

The newest Spider-Man MCU movie pits the web slinger against a mysterious villain with the ability to possess almost anyone to use them as a human puppet. But it's hardly the only crisis facing Peter Parker. Years of isolation have left him at the edge of depression, and now he has a worrying mutation to deal with. We all know this won't be the end of the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. But will it make for a good movie?

Kind of?

Here's the thing. The MCU struck gold years ago when it cast Tom Holland to play this hero... and then struck gold again in his first stand-alone movie when they cast Zendaya to play opposite him. Each is a charismatic and talented performer on their own, and the chemistry between them is off the charts. (It seemed that they seemed to think so in real life as well.) All that is to say that with the two of them anchoring a Spider-Man movie, you've basically set a floor where no matter how badly written, no matter how poor the visuals, the movie is still going to be enjoyable in many ways.

It's probably exaggerating to say the Brand New Day is "poorly written." I certainly can't claim it has poor visuals; there are some truly inspired action sequences, with unique camerawork that we somehow haven't seen even in any of the mountain of previous Spider-Man movies. There's fun banter. The key new actor in the story, Sadie Sink (whose role was kept secret in the publicity), gives a solid performance and winds up having her own interesting kind of chemistry with Tom Holland too.

But it's not the smoothest ride. All the most critical plot elements in the narrative are unjustified; there's no reason why the act two turn or act three revelation happen, it's just the time in the story where they're supposed to happen. There certainly aren't enough scenes between Peter and MJ (though as I mentioned, Tom Holland and Zendaya absolutely make the most of what's there). The movie sidelines the established "Spider-Man movie characters" in general -- an extra disappointment after how cleverly they were integrated into the very complex story of the previous No Way Home.

Instead, Brand New Day is clearly a movie about using Spider-Man and Tom Holland to shovel more coal into the engine of the MCU, which has lost some of its steam over the past few years. Not only is the movie stuffed with MCU cameos (some of which play better than others), the whole thing pretty explicitly ends up being "about" setting up pieces on the board for the future.

The result is a movie that did deliver some satisfaction as I watched... and then began to fade for me almost immediately after I walked out of the theater. Maybe it's just that the bar for Tom Holland Spider-Man movies had been set rather high by what came before.

I give Brand New Day a B-. As for the other movie in theaters right now featuring a surprising number of the same actors? I caught up with The Odyssey as well this weekend, and will get to my thoughts on that later this week.

The Film That Doesn't Exist

I caught a rather thought-provoking documentary recently (as good documentaries generally are): Zodiac Killer Project. It's the work of filmmaker Charlie Shackleton, who narrates himself (sometimes appearing on screen) to tell the story of a film that never came to be.

The Zodiac Killer is arguably America's most notorious serial murderer, and the fact that his identity was never confirmed has only fueled interest and speculation. Countless books have been written about his crimes and his possible identity, some recently, many more contemporaneous to the murders themselves. One such book was by a California police officer, Lyndon E. Lafferty, who had his own theory of the killer's true identity -- and a somewhat fanciful tale to go along with it.

Charlie Shackleton was this close to securing the rights to make a film based on that book, The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge. He was deep through all the pre-production planning, head swimming with the footage he'd collect, when the bottom suddenly dropped out. The rights holders refused to sign the contract, Shackleton lost access to the book, and his entire film collapsed. So instead, he made a movie talking you through the movie he would have made.

The result feels to me like the cinematic equivalent a young child licking their palm and holding it half an inch from their sibling's face as they taunt, "what, I'm not touching you!" A more highbrow way of expressing that sentiment might be to say that, having been denied the opportunity to make a serial killer documentary, Charlie Shackleton chose instead to burn the whole format down.

With relentless precision, Shackleton talks you through all the metaphorical boxes he was going to tick in his abandoned film. There would have been a shot like this, because these movies always have shots like this. The credits were going to have this kind of dark and suggestive footage, as they do. There would have been this kind of music, because of course there would. His narration is a wistful dichotomy: showing you how deeply he'd thought about the genre and the movie he wanted to make, while perhaps unaware of how cliche and uninventive a movie it would have been.

In a way, it's very clever. I'll certainly never be able to watch a crime documentary the same way. This is the sort of thing magicians fear should their secrets ever be revealed: once you know exactly how the trick is done, the amazement evaporates. I think this is what Shackleton is going for: holding up the mirror to the audience as if to demand, "Why do you even like this stuff? It's so formulaic!"

But I also found that to some extent, the movie might have been too clever for its own good. Is Shackleton holding up that mirror to us because he isn't quite willing to look in it himself? The only regret I sense in his narration is that he didn't actually get to make his movie. That's a totally reasonable reaction from an artist who poured his time and effort into something that will never be seen by anyone. But while he's "made lemons out of lemonade" with a meta film that basically asks why we like this garbage, he never seems to ask himself "why did I want to make this garbage?" I feel like the grade A version of this documentary would have demanded not only of the audience, "are you not entertained?" but would have explored a bit more why he himself was complicit.

Still, I do love a good peek behind the curtain of how things get made. And, evidently, how things don't get made. The Zodiac Killer Project may not have been that grade A experience I imagine it could have been, but I thought it was worth the time. I give it a B+. If it sounds interesting to you at all, I think it won't disappoint you.