#25 Streaming Into 2021
Hello, everyone.
My son is out of the hospital and on the long road to recovery. It will be weeks before he can work full time again. Between that and navigating the medical bills we are beyond thankful that so many have stepped up and donated to his GoFundMe campaign. It’s going to allow my son to hit the ground running when he’s ready.
As for me, I’m gearing up for my last residencies at Goddard College. Like last semester the residencies are virtual and like last semester they’re letting students attend both the Vermont and the Washington residencies. Vermont’s begins next week. Washington’s begins in the middle of February. I’ve completed the first draft of my thesis, a historical fiction novel based on a true story in Tacoma in the 1940s. At the moment it’s 65,000 words long, but I expect revisions will make it longer given the method I’ve used to put it together.
Welcome to 2021. I would apologize for the sporadic nature of this newsletter in 2020, but I think we should all just be thankful that we made it through the year alive. Not everyone was as lucky.
But there are reasons to believe that life is going to get better. We have a new President. It looks like we’re going to have a Democratic majority in the House and the Senate. Vaccines are slowly but surely being rolled out. The Mandalorian’s second season was actually better than the first. And despite history’s worst attempt at a coup, we have a new and much more competent President. There is reason to be cautiously optimistic.
For 2021, I’m going to shoot for one newsletter a month. I feel like this will give me enough time to work on my other projects and still devote the time and energy necessary to make this newsletter worth reading.
I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately.
What I’m Watching
Terminator: Dark Fate
For those who don’t know, though this is the 57th movie in the Terminator franchise, it is acting as though it is the third because the last time there was a good Terminator movie Bill Clinton was in office. One would hope that with such a bold move, a similarly bold movie would come out that was every bit as revolutionary as Terminator 2: Judgment Day. In preparation for watching Dark Fate, I watched the first two movies again for the first time in years. Both movies hold up surprisingly well. So well in fact that they made Dark Fate seem underwhelming. It’s not that Dark Fate isn’t good. It’s that it’s just as good (or bad) as all the previous sequels. It tries to be interesting by having a mostly female cast, but that’s not enough. More than anything it just feels kind of forced. I absolutely love the first two Terminator movies. I was hoping to love a third, but that just didn’t happen.
New Mutants
This is a movie that was filmed three years ago and has had five release dates since then. There were rumors of reshoots. There were scheduling problems. Then Fox got bought by Disney. Then there was a pandemic. I honestly expect that this last Fox X-Men movie would never actually be released. With so many problems and delays I also expected this movie to be terrible. And so, going in with that expectation I was pleasantly surprised. New Mutants isn’t a great X-Men movie. It’s not a great anything. But it is an overall solid superhero movie that leans into horror movie tropes. If you’re at all familiar with the comic books that are the source material for this movie, none of the big twists will come as a big surprise. (For example, one of the ‘mysteries’ is just what are Dani Moonstar’s powers.) But it still remains an entertaining and engaging movie. There are some problematic aspects to the movie. The two characters of color are white washed. Native American culture is bastardized and exploited in a way that it shouldn’t be. And for some, that would be more than enough to write the movie off. But maybe I’m just too much of a comic book fanboy to let a lack of political correctness get in the way of being entertained by a movie. I applaud movies that effectively make stances for social justice, but I’m not going to condemn every movie that doesn’t.
Ad Astra
The incredible visuals and a solid cast make Ad Astra seem like a movie that would fit nicely on a shelf with Interstellar, The Martian, and Gravity, but unfortunately I found this movie to be mostly ‘meh’. There were moments that I’m sure were breathtaking in the theater, but the story wasn’t nearly as compelling. I had trouble connecting with the characters in any way that allowed for me to feel anything. I don’t have much else to say about it.
Soul
After the enjoyable but also forgettable Onward, Soul is a welcome return to form for Pixar. Soul follows a music teacher voiced by Jamie Foxx who finally gets his big break only to be dealt the biggest of setbacks. It’s a love letter to music and probably the best feel-good story about death since The Good Place.
Wonder Woman 1984
I’ve always been a Marvel guy, but even so I really enjoyed the first Wonder Woman movie like most everyone else. It was easily the most well received of the DC movies (with the exception of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy but since they seem to ignore it so will we). So naturally there’s a sequel. But this sequel was shot in 2018, had some reshoots, got scheduled, and rescheduled thanks to the pandemic, and now has arrived in the theaters that are open and on our screens on HBO Max. And it is as big a mess of a movie as Batman vs. Superman. I could go into details, but I think it’s safe to say that maybe spending $200 million on a movie that has a plot centered on a magic wishing rock is probably a bad idea even if you’re going for high camp.
Uncle Frank
The biggest surprise in movie watching for me this year was Uncle Frank. I didn’t know the movie existed until I watched it. It’s a movie that takes place in the 1970s. Beth (played well by Sophia Lillis) is a teenager in a tiny town in South Carolina. Her favorite relative is her Uncle Frank who shows up for family gatherings, but lives in New York. Uncle Frank is played by Paul Bettany, but he’s nearly unrecognizable in the role. He gives one of the best performances of the year. Uncle Frank is written and directed by Alan Ball, the guy who gave us American Beauty and Six Feet Under. There are moments in the film that might come off to some as a little too on the nose or liberal fantasy, but I think it absolutely works.
In Praise of the Slow Watch (Or What Else I’m Watching)
In early December I started watching the Netflix limited series The Queen’s Gambit. As of this writing, I just finished watching the fifth of eight hour long episodes. The Queen’s Gambit is a show one could easily watch in a day or two. And these days this tends to be how we consume our television. Entire seasons of shows are often released on the same day. Netflix and other streaming services literally want you to binge watch their shows. And I’ve been known to do exactly that.
The advantages of binge watching are obvious: It becomes easier to see the bigger picture, it allows audience members to make connections they might not otherwise make without the previous episodes so fresh in our heads. Many television shows these days operate as a long movies and so it often makes sense to watch the whole thing in just a sitting or two.
With The Queen’s Gambit I am watching one episode every two weeks. This was initially just due to circumstance. I had other things I was watching and other things I was doing. But after doing this with a couple episodes it became more intentional.
By spacing out my watching of each episode I’m allowed to spend more time in that world. I end up thinking more about the show simply because I have more time in between the episodes. And in the case of The Queen’s Gambit this has led to a very rich experience.
From here on out, if I watch an episode of a new piece of television and it’s exceptional, I’m going to wait a week or two before I watch the next episode. Like good food, good television is worth savoring.
- Jack Cameron