Movies, Mayhem and Tech-Dystopia (but with a fuzzy message at the end)
Updates
We’re nearing the end of Issue #3 of Curriculum. Page 13 is currently up with an emotionally laced ending still to come. Stay tuned!
This week has mostly been spent plugging away at another short prose story as well as whittling down ideas for future comic projects. It’s interesting how there are some ideas that are too weak or thin to thrive on their own, but still manage to stick in the brainpan. Then, in some unexplainable process, they brush up against another idea and something new is born.
I’ve spent a lot of time this week catching up with my comics pile (digital and physical). I had about 10 issues worth of Tom King’s Batman run to get through. His focus on digging into the facets of what drives the character, as well as his failings is fascinating. He even manages to juxtapose it against traditional superhero action-orientated scenes without missing a beat.
I also had the pleasure of reading the latest Velicity Jones tale by Lee Robson, Bryan Coyle and Bolt-01 from Aces Weekly link. I hadn’t read the previous installment, but my reading of the current issue didn’t suffer any. It’s a gleefully old-school spy thriller with globe-trotting, snarky one liners and some cool action set pieces. Check this link on the forthcoming issue for details. Definitely one to keep an eye out for!
Movies 2018
Predictable, I know. Let’s get into it. As last week these are in no particular order:
Mission Impossible: Fallout
One of the best action movies ever made. Believe the hype. Take your pick. A HALO jump over France filmed by strapping an IMAX camera to its aerial photographer. Minutes later we have a savage bare knuckle brawl in a Parisian bathroom that gave us the GIF that keeps on giving:
The film truly does not let up from there, despite running a healthy two and a half hours. Dig in and enjoy, because there’s no way Tom Cruise can keep this up forever.
Sorry to Bother You
Boots Riley’s first movie is a comedy of many parts an absurdist, scathing take down and dark rumination on the era of late stage capitalism we currently find ourselves in. The cast is excellent with Lakeith Stanfield in particular proving he’s Atlanta‘s MVP and Armie Hammer showboating and having a whale of a time as the face of rampant consumerism. I’m not quite sure the movie sticks the ending, but its ambition outweighs all of that giving us a movie for the mess we find ourselves in.
Mandy
So much has already been written about this movie, most of them focusing on Cage’s kinetic central performance. For me the movie burned itself into my consciousness because of Comatos’ imagery in the second act. He gives us a world where ruin and chaos sit at the fringes, buttressed by a hallucinogenic pallette of colour (shout out to Benjamin Loeb). With these elements there are scenes here that would not look out of place as paintings, comic book covers and, yes, metal album covers. Equally trippy, visceral and grimy, Mandy demands your attention.
Annihilation
I love the source material. If you do too it helps in thinking of the movie as a different take or, as author Jeff VanDerMeer himself says, an ‘alternate expedition’. The movie takes many of the themes, ideas and imagery present in the novel and weaves it into something different but no less compelling. The cast is truly excellent (Tessa Thompson is as great here as she was in Sorry to Bother You) and the imagery seems designed entirely around making the viewer uncomfortable. I’ve heard/read a lot of debate as to whether this is a horror movie or not. Go watch the movie, wait until you get to the scene with the bear and tell me this is anything but a horror movie.
Revenge
A female director plays with the tropes and expectations of the rape-revenge movie, turning it into a hyper-real feminist body horror movie laced with righteous vengeance. Coralie Fargeat plays with the male gaze too (see the introduction of Matilda Lutz’s character, Jen) shows us the evil men do, before giving her heroine a painful rebirth scene and then drenches the movie in gore and payback. I cannot wait to see what Fargeat does next.
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Honourable mentions: Paddington 2 (you can’t watch this movie and not feel good), Strangers: Prey at Night (purely for that pool scene), Game Night (a studio does a mainstream comedy and it doesn’t suck), Upgrade (John Wick by way of Robocop), Unsane (Soderberg’s ‘retirement’ continues to be excellent).
Links
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Probably relevant to some of you - How to balance full-time work with creative projects is part of The Creative Independent website. There’s some really excellent and helpful articles up at the site for you all to peruse.
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This article on ‘The Digital Maginot Line’ has been doing the rounds. Some choice quotes:
“The combatants view this as a Hobbesian information war of all against all and a tactical arms race; the other side sees it as a peacetime civil governance problem.”
” AI-generated audio and video deepfakes will erode trust in what we see with our own eyes, leaving us vulnerable both to faked content and to the discrediting of the actual truth by insinuation”.
Yay.
Couple that with this news about a generative adversarial network being able to create incredibly life like (but completely computer generated) images of people and we are on the cusp of being unable to sort fiction from fact in a very scary way (although some might say we already teetered into that abyss years ago).
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The Guardian has a ‘populist panic’ problem, Jacobin reports.
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Good piece at SideQuest about how the new Spidey game has some problematic portrayals of the main character’s interactions with the NYPD.
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A splendid post on the disruption of the clockwork mechanisms that make up Hitman 2 levels. This in turn reminded me of Manaugh’s A Burglar’s Guide to the City and Confessions of a Cat Burglar which presents cities and environments almost as abstract puzzle pieces to be solved by those who dare. Hitman and its sequel definitely scratch that itch.
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Chances are that at least one of you has gone through the special kind of grief that comes with losing a pet. I present to you Adam R. Shannon’s excellent (and gut wrenching) short story On the Day You Spend Forever With Your Dog. Not one to read in public.
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It’s funny how in death we forget, isn’t it?
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The Beat and Tor have some pretty nifty ‘Best Comics of 2018’ lists up.
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Speaking of lists and comics, it was super cool to see Eternal make the list of Paste Magzine‘s Best 25 Comics of 2018 list. Ryan, Eric and Dee deserve the kudos for this book and it has some truly excellent company on the list. I’m incredibly proud of this one.
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This will be the last newsletter before Christmas, but there will be one more edition before we’re yanked out of the frying pan of 2018 and into the fire of 2019.
Thank you to all who subscribe and continue to say nice things about this newsletter. As I’ve said before, as well as enjoying putting it together, the newsletter also acted as a place to keep my writing regular when everything else fell away.
Once again, a huge thank you to all who read and spread the love - Merry Christmas!