Ancient Logic

I’m going to take a slightly abbreviated approach to this year’s best-of lists and mostly focus on movies. It’s not that I didn’t read or listen to music but for whatever reason I feel uninspired to talk about either topic. C’est la vie! So in no particular order are five movies I greatly enjoyed watching this year. Firstly, Avengers: Endgame. Well, I guess there is some order to this list because literally the first thing I thought of in terms of movies I’ve seen is this movie. It is inevitable! This is the one MCU flick it’s hard for me to remember as simply a super-hero film. Although I found its predecessor a bit more more compulsively watchable, I really enjoyed this film. First of all it’s tone, which veered from despair, heist hijinx, parental reconciliation, to epic mega-brawl was never boring. Even the gorgeous mess which is that final fight has its own interior logic and sports some of the best looking cinematography this side of Black Panther. With Endgame MCU found a...

Anything that persists for an entire decade as a recurring entertainment event begins to mean more than simple entertainment. It’s inevitable that once a franchise like the MCU has continued for long enough that its overall significance has to be factored in. I don’t think fans quite appreciate what genre movies like these used to be like before MCU. Battle on Titan Avengers: Infinity War 2018 It’s really not the special effects or effective mix of humor, action, and character development. It’s the fact that all three of things happen within the persistent universe. Because no Marvel movie is the last Marvel movie, and there’s always another one to develop the characters, fans have a different relationship to this franchise. It’s more like what comic books are, obviously, where no matter what crazy stuff goes on in a crossover event, you have a reasonable expectation that your favorite character will be back the next month or the month after that. There have been good MCU movie...

To continue my year-end best-of list, I’ll next move to movies that I really enjoyed this year. As usual, this is not a list meant to be what I think had the highest artistic merit of all movies released this year. I watch a lot of movies but I don’t watch nearly enough to be able to make a statement that sweeping. These are movies I liked a lot and I continued to think about for the rest of the year (however long that might be at this point). #5: Annihilation. I honestly didn’t think this was going to wind up so far down my list (number-wise). I loved the book this movie is loosely based upon by Jeff Vandermeer, and think that in terms of capturing the mood and translating the basic idea of the story for a wider audience this movie does an incredible job. It is a beautiful, awe-inspiring cerebral science fiction and damn unsettling to boot. It’s not at the top of this list because ultimately it didn’t seize my imagination or hit me with a hammer blow of feelings like some of the o...

I'm going to try to collect together a random assemblage of things I've been reading recently. As usual my interest falls on things I enjoyed rather than things I didn't. For the most part, reviews are for me a way to process what I'm experiencing for my own endeavors. That said, the world is full of movies, television shows, novels, songs, and short stories that I wager some have never heard of. For that reason, I hope you might find some value in these write-ups. Assemblage by Morgan Crooks (2018) Joy as and Act of Resistance by IDLES. I bought the IDLES other album after seeing it still mentioned in music review sites months after its release. With acerbic, strangely jubliant song shards like Stendhal Syndrome and White Privilege, this album worked an unexpected magic upon me. I found my self growing increasingly taken by the juxtaposition of harsh art-punk songs overlaid by singer Joe Talbot's sing-shout anthems. Joy as an Act of Resistance is the same as Br...

Despite the release of a single novel and a few short stories, 2017 has to rank up there as one of the more Stephen King ascendant years. No less than four movies based on his works appeared, including one of the most successful horror films of all time, the first part of IT. 'The Mist' (Stephen King) by Dementall.deviantart.com Of course, with King, for every high, there are plenty of lows and 2017 also provided a number of examples of how to do his works wrong. But let's start with the good stuff. The movie adaptation of IT, directed by Andres Muschietti and starring a number of talented young actors (including Finn Wolfhard of "Stranger Things" fame) really captured, for me, a lot of what I liked about the original novel. Being scary certainly helped, but with King, the horror slice is never really the whole cake. What makes King King, at least for me, is the combination of earthy, believable characters with lurid, "Tales from the Crypt...

On to movies. Overall, 2017 was a great year for speculative movies. Three above average MCU movies, a bunch of interesting reboots, and a Star Wars movie makes for a decent period to be an SFF fan. Correspondingly, I ended up seeing relatively fewer non-SFF movies this year despite there being several (Baby Driver, Wind River) that I really do want to see.  "Chasm" by Morgan Crooks (2017) Below are my picks for the movies of the year. #1: Dunkirk. No real surprise there. I felt this was basically the movie of the year in July and little transpired between then and now to change my mind. Essentially this is a war movie built around a complicated structure weaving three disparate threads into one complete narrative. I'm not someone who thinks all war-movies are anti-war simply by virtue of showing the terrible fates of young men. This movie, for example, strikes a bleak and, at times despairing tone, to bring the drama of sacrifice on the beach of Dunki...

Waiting for the opening crawl for Episode VIII, I thought about what I wanted The Last Jedi to include. What stuck in my head was I wanted to 'learn something.' I think I assumed there would be plenty of action, daring rescues, a bit of humor and amazing spectacles. (First SPOILER among many to follow - there are) But, I ask a bit more from movies like Star Wars. As foolish as this perhaps sounds, I wanted this movie to always be about something. More than Rey's parentage or the mystery of Snoke, I wanted some greater message from the experience.  Rose Zico and Finn in Canto Bight. So what did I learn? Towards the end of the movie, Rose prevents Finn from sacrificing his life (most likely in vain). Catching up with her, Finn asks her why. Rose's reply, "to save what I love," stuck with me. In ways both big and small, this movie invested a lot of energy into describing and elaborating upon that message. The heroes are never more heroic than when th...

There are some albums I buy that lift me off the floor the second I hear two or three songs, and compel daily repeat listens until I exhaust every ounce of interest I ever had in them. There are other albums I feel sort of meh about initially which grow on me over time until they become something indispensable. What I'm trying to get at is there are some works of art that burn like incredibly bright fireworks only to vanish utterly and then there are works with enduring value. One side of ledger you have Offspring's "Smash" which I absolutely adored in 1994 and can safely say I've never listened to once since. On the other you have PJ Harvey's "To Bring You My Love" which I put on at least once every month. What's the difference? I think there is a certain type of art that leans hard on the spectacle, the easy and cheap emotional high requiring little deep investment of emotion for a pay off. Another type of artist is willing to sacrif...

Blade Runner 2049 is not as indispensable as its predecessor Blade Runner. It is better than that almost anything else I've seen this year and a sincere redrafting of the original. What was great about Deckard's hunt for rogue androids in 1982 is updated here, explored in more detail or juxtaposed with other ideas. This is not simply a reboot or a redo. It is a child of the original movie. It shares creative DNA with its ancestor mixed with enough inevitable mutations to be a distinct and separate expression. The plot here is wrapped in several layers of spoiler-bait. An replicant cop, K (short for KD9-3.7 )   goes to retire a rogue android and discovers a secret literally buried for decades. A secret that pushes him to reconsider his own existence. Let's talk first about why I think a lover of movies might want to see this film. Ryan Gosling's work here is top-notch and his role in the film, as a questioner and thinking being in the grip of an existential crisi...

My fandom of Stephen King and his adaptions is complicated by the sheer volume of his work. King has written some of my favorite books of all time (Pet Semetary and The Stand) and others I can barely believe I read five pages through. However, no matter what I or anyone might say, King is an unescapable fixture in the world of 20th century and 21st century literature. Most of the people I've ever met have read at least one of his books and I generally find it's a good sign if a person has read a bunch of them. "IT," in particular, occupies a special place in my mind. It was one of the first adult books I read as a kid - way back in the summer of sixth grade at summer camp. I didn't understand all of it on a conscious level but experienced it on a deeper, emotional level. The story of a gang of 'losers,' desperately trying to survive in the face of indifferent adults, hostile bullies, and a monstrous clown made a great deal of sense to me. As...

I'll start with Dunkirk even though it was the second movie I saw this weekend. Dunkirk made a strong claim for the movie of the year for me. Similar to Fury Road from a couple years back, this is an exercise in sustained action and tension. Its story, although cleverly folded up within three time frames, is remarkably straight forward. The characters in the movie are either trying to get off Dunkirk beach before it is overrun by Germans in 1940 or they are trying to help those attempting to leave. This basic story is told through three threads, land, sea, and air as essentially anonymous characters work to survive. Other than a few blurry shadows and the strafing of dive-bombers, the human enemies are not pictured on screen. It is rather nature itself: water, wind, fire, and steel which closes in on the characters, snuffing out one life after another. A reoccurring image is the screen filling with water, as though the camera gives the audience the POV of impersonal, crus...

After looking over my notes on a few prospective Ancient Logic posts I realized that I am hopelessly behind schedule. The current WIP and the web fiction I write, "Agent Shield and Spaceman," have taken up almost all of the energy I usually devote these 'side projects.' Anyway, in the past couple of months, I saw (in order of recall) Wonder Woman and Spiderman at the theaters, Magicians, American Gods, and the current season of Preacher on the small screen, and finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140. The last item will get its own review but here are some quick thoughts on the others:  Wonder Woman: This remains my favorite superhero flick this year. Yes, Guardians was a lot of fun and Spiderman (which I'll get to) was one of my favorite recent Marvel films, but in terms of consequence, and meaning, and shear mythological epic-ness, Wonder Woman takes the cake. As others have noted, some of this impact surely comes from how lit...

As it turns out, I have a bit more to say about the second Guardians of the Galaxy film. After a rewatch I'd rate the movie a notch or two higher than what I wrote in my previous post, mostly because its craft and attention to detail became more apparent the second time around.  CAUTION SPOILERS AHEAD! First of all, the use of "Brandy" in the film approaches genius and just that little bit of foreshadowing really helps sell the way Ego manipulates his son. Later in the film Ego tells Quill that he is a 'sailor,' and that while he loved his mother, he also knew that Meredith Quill would 'steal him from the sea.' In his first discussion, Ego suggests that the 'sea' is simply a metaphor for his need to travel, his urge to explore. The idea of a planet-sized celestial seizing upon the ethos of ramble-rock makes a twisted sort of sense but that metaphor as simply a step up to Ego's true intention. What Ego thinks is that the 'sea'...

While there are worse ways to spend your money, Alien: Covenant is far from must-see movie-making. The earlier of these Alien reboot movies, Alien: Prometheus, was a hot mess - throwing half a dozen half-baked, super-ambitious ideas into the air and trying to catch them on the same saucer. It didn't work and mostly serves as a good example of why story must be the first, last, and everything in a movie. Covenant is bit more coherent, if for no other reason than it really only has one idea in mind: getting us to a fully-formed xenomorph engaged in quality chest-ripping and murder-dicing. Which it does with reasonable competence. Did I want more out of this movie? There are some moments that hint at a much more interesting and epic movie behind this one - the visit of the android David to the home planet (?) of the Engineers is one example. The idea of the evolution of the Xenomorph being a kind of machine directed domestication is intriguing. But really this movie is the...

I'll keep this short because although the reasons this film fails are many and complex, the end result is fairly easy to state. Don't watch this movie. It's worth neither your time nor money.  Emma Watson as Mae Holland with a plausible reaction to watching this film. It disappoints me to have to write the above because I did have high-hopes for this work. I read the novel when I learned who would be starring in the movie version of the book. Having read the book I thought The Circle was one of those rare works which might work really well as a movie. Sadly, this isn't the movie I imagined. It's not for lack of trying at the outset. The producers were able to bring in undeniable talent for this film. Tom Hanks in the semi-villain role Eamon Bailey, Emma Watson as the trusting and ambitious Mae, and half a dozen actors and actresses you've heard of before. The story is timely (although already rapidly fading in topicality - the half-life of near-fut...

This movie exceeded my expectations by a wide margin and the more I think about it the more excited I become of what the film's director could produce in the future. I read the source material for the movie -- an eponymous non-fiction account of Percy Fawcett's early 20th century explorations of Amazonia and the lost civilization he was certain lay hidden within its depths -- a few years ago. The book stuck with me for three reasons. Firstly, the descriptions of the "Green Hell" of the Amazon rainforest, where every creature from microbe on up to man actively sought the explorer's destruction, are vivid and terrifying. David Grann, the author of the Lost City of Z, was very successful in convincing me I don't want to go into a rainforest. Grann was also, to move to my second point, adept in pointing out the many paradoxes and complexities of Fawcett's search for his city. Described as one of the last great explorers, Fawcett's efforts drew signif...

I saw "Ghost in the Shell," on Friday and overall I think I'd recommend it. There are plenty of cyberpunk or influence-by-cyberpunk movies coming out this year but I think this will carve out its own distinct niche: stylish, garishly beautiful in places but ultimately middling science fiction. Things I liked: the action scenes are very cool, sharply executed, and kinetic. It gave me the impression that the director Rupert Sanders has spent some quality time watching the first John Wick movie, which I mean as a compliment. The version of the future here is neon-drenched and weird, with enormous holograms peeking out from behind sky-scrapers kaiju style. The streets crawl with criminal low-lives, augmented with ghastly prosthetics and weaponry, and everything is sort of splashed on the screen without exposition. For some one raised on Ghost in the Shell, Akira, and Neuromancer the effect was strangely comforting - ah, here's the future I was promised! - but I co...