Ancient Logic

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...

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...

In preparation for the panel on Preacher (Gone to TV), I've been thinking about what this television series, and the graphic novel that inspired it, mean. The big take-away I have, reflecting upon both, is the extreme good fortune I feel we, as the television watching public, currently enjoy having this story taking shape on the small screen. Despite being an excellent story, with memorable characters, it surely falls within a class of works posing a challenge to bring to the screen.  Alright, let's talk for a moment about what the graphic novel is, and why at heart, I'm still incredulous Garth Ennis' work has made it to AMC. Pared away to simplest elements, The Preacher is a story of a man named Jesse Custer who goes on a long road trip across the United States and parts of Europe to have a few words with the all-mighty creator God. He meets up with an old flame, Tulip O'Hara, and an amusing Irish libertine by the name of Proisinois Cassidy who al...

I am HOOKED on Netflix's "Stranger Things," the exclusive mystery/horror series released last week. Seriously, folks, this is a good show - and probably one of my favorite things I've seen on the small screen this year. Everything, from the retro-style of the production, the smart casting  choices (Winona Ryder is fantastic), to the intriguing "Demigorgon" monster works so well. The Duffer Brothers (Matt and Ross Duffer) deserve credit for much of this, having woven together the spectral and mundane elements of the story with confidence and style. It helps that the nostalgia this show mines is congruent to my own experiences as a child of the mid-80s. Without being annoying about it, the show hits all of the right notes - from the awesomely boxy cars, to the amazement shown a 22-inch television screen and a Laz-E-Boy, to the inspired soundtrack choices. This feels like the 80s. Better yet, this retro setting doesn't feel like a gratuitous...

I enjoyed the AoS finale. It was epic, exciting, and built with vigor on the developments of the previous season. After two hours I was still interested in what happens after one more careful reset of the series (one or two every season apparently). Something about the events of the finale and the teaser at the start of the first half promises AoS will serve as a valuable bridge between the Earth-bound and Galactic corners of MCU. AoS Collage, Morgan Crooks 2016 The finale also serves the useful function of highlighting how much the Marvel Cinematic Universe has changed over the years. When MCU first started, we had a rich dude who sold weaponry in a world not all that different from our own. Tony Stark was certainly an out-sized personality playing with versions of technologies not present in our own world but, for the most part, Phase One of the MCU painted in the conservative tones of late 00's techno-thrillers. No supervillains, just out-of-control versions of the ...

This last five best list is the hardest one. All of the movies listed below are terrific. The next two movies I didn’t include on this list are also pretty great. Yet, I think there is a virtue in ordering experiences and with that in mind, Mad Max beats out competitors. I’m not sure if this is a better movie than Spotlight or Ex Machina, but it certainly occupied more of my attention this year.   Mad Max: Fury Road. To be clear, this is an action film. A well-made, sincerely wrought exercise in mayhem to be sure, but ultimately this is a long car-chase. But there is something about Fury Road that, for me, goes beyond a good movie and enters the realm of myth-making. This movie didn’t work on all of my friends and I’ve seen very detailed break-downs on how Imperator Furiosa is not a new-wave feminist icon, or how the plot has major holes, or this and that. But in the end, this film stands unmarked by carping. It found a way to make action movies cool again, sketching in 120 minut...

Well...That was disappointing. I actually watched the finale of True Detective's finale Monday but it took me awhile to want to sit down and discuss what went wrong with this series. All the pieces were there if you wanted to see them. The fragments, blueprints, and characters for a truly great LA Noir story. It's like someone showed up in an abandoned lot with all of the finest timber, most exactly carved moldings, beautiful stained windows, all of the best furniture and appliances and then just dumped them in the dirt and walked away. Nic Pizzolatto had all he needed for a great house and then he forgot to put it together. I had some hopes for the finale. After all it was expanded to 90 minutes which I thought might allow for some truly epic storytelling. I wanted something like the 'sprawl' of the first season with maybe a bit more into the whole weird costumed cult angle. What we got was 90 minutes of the same series we've been watching. Action, death,...

Picking up The Leftovers because it seemed vaguely tied into my interest this year - post apocalyptica - I discovered a work of unprecedented wonder. It's a show that's depressing because it is about depression. The Departure event where two percent of the population vanished one October 14th didn't just deprive the survivors of loved ones. The show details a very special sort of doomsday: the collapse for all meaning. What seems normal on the surface is already crumbling away beneath.

Daredevil, the new Netflix series developed in partnership with Netflix is a wonderful, if somewhat frustrating, origin story for one of Marvel’s oldest and most interesting super-heroes. A lot of this story works exactly as designed. Reflecting the gritty source material, the brutal fights have repercussions, and the needs of the characters drive the story. The cinematography is top-notch, creating a world of neon glittering in the damp murk of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. Still from Netflix's "Daredevil" Trailer The entire series functions as one long origin story for Daredevil, introducing quixotic defense attorney Matt Murdock (played by Charlie Cox) as he attempts to fight injustice on the mean streets of Manhattan. The show offers sketches of Murdock's beleaguered father (John Patrick Hayden), his best friend Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), and the semi-love interest of Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) with an economical and wrenching style. One ...

Agent Carter is one of the best shows on television right now and certainly one of the best arguments for a feminist critiques of culture. Whenever I get really interested in a show, to the point I start structuring my schedule around it, I have to wonder why. Why this show? What is it that appeals to me? Agent Carter Promo Picture The actress playing the title role, Hayley Atwell is a big part of that. She was a highlight of the surprisingly entertaining if flawed first Captain America movie and, in preparation for the Agent Carter mini-series, appeared in a couple of cool vignettes during the first half of this year’s Agents of Shield. In all of these, Atwell portrayed Agent Carter as an extremely capable and stylish agent, unafraid to use her keen wit or powerful right hook to get the job done. In a one-shot filmed by Marvel and tucked into the extras of the Iron Man 3 DVD, Agent Carter is coping as best she can with the aftermath of losing Steve Rodgers, and the contempt of h...

The winter finale episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was a nifty screen capture of that moment when a show passes beyond something merely watchable, and actually becomes necessary to watch. I started watching Agents last year because I really liked Agent Coulson and I thought it would be a sort of the Google Labs of MCU, a place where the weird, unmarketable characters could appear and future movies could be teased. Oh yeah, and Joss Whedon, I’d be lying if I didn’t ‘fess up to that basic misconception of the show. SPOILERS aplenty to follow. As we now know, what Agents  provided last year was a surprisingly safe and predictable procedural crime drama. Like NCIS with super-powers. Although the connection with the rest of MCU firmed up towards the end of the season, I left more than a few episodes baffled why I was sticking around. The characters were flat, the dialogue ranged from obvious to grating, and I couldn’t quite shake the sense the show was spinning its wheel...

LOST is a show for, by, and about cons. I don't think I'm the first person to point this out, but the series really operates on a very simple premise, how long are you willing to watch something on the basis of faith alone? It might say a lot about you depending on how long you watched the show when it was first on. A skeptical person watched the first couple of teasers way back in 2004 decided the show was a bunch of hokum and left it at that. At the other end of the scale, you have the completely credulous person, addicted to the show from the first episode, watching every episode religiously, pouring over the theories and web discussions, never losing faith that the show was finally going to be about something . Characters in the show are generally either perpetrators of cons or victims of cons. John Locke is taken in by his parents' insistence that he is special, eventually losing his kidney to his grifter dad. James Ford (Sawyer) becomes a con-man after that same guy...

I've been on a bit of a television watching binge lately and after burning my way across 14 seasons of Star Trek, the 15 episodes of Arrested Development's newest season (available through Netflix) offered the grand luxury of a succinct story fully told. For those with exposure to this show, the adjective 'succinct' might seem a bit of stretch. Afterall, the interweaving, interposed, constantly self-referential hyper-linked narrative following 10 main characters is, in a word, exhausting. But it also carries with it the sense of a the shortest possible route between two points. Each of the episodes follows one of the main characters as they trace the bleak wreckage of their lives from the moments immediately after the Bluth matriarch Lucille (hilariously venomous Jessica Walters) hijacked a cruise ship in order to escape arrest. What makes the season interesting (and hard to review without spoilers) is that each of these narratives flows in and out of the others. ...

Last post I laid out a few story arc that weave through the mostly episodic mass of Star Trek: The Next Generation, lending some continuity to the overall series. Whether we're talking about the Borg, Q, Klingons, or Data's quest to be more human, these stories provide a sense that the series is moving forward, that one episode's story can communicate with another. This same purpose is also met by a few of the series' big themes: man's relationship to technology, utopian noninterventionism, and exploration. When you put together the stories that introduce "strange new life" and "new civilizations," you discover a largely consistent world view from the show: discovery for discovery's sake is good; irrationally closing one's minds to possibilities is bad. One other theme that really emerged during my rematch of the series: the consistent questioning about the nature of reality. At times this question was overt. One o...

Even the weaker seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation had their stand-out moments, enough that it's quite a challenge to whittle down the dozen or so obvious classic episodes to a best of list. I don't think my list represents anything radical, although I have omitted the two or three classic episodes that always appear on these sorts of lists. I'm not doing this because I dislike the episodes but rather because I'm hoping to use my 'best-ofs,' to highlight key themes in the next few essays. So, keeping that disclaimer in mind, here are my favorite five episodes:  #5) The Measure of a Man: This is my pick for a 'new-to-Trek' story. Lt. Data, an artificial life form serving as a Lt. Commander on the Starship Enterprise, receives an order to submit to disassembly by a Starfleet scientist named Maddox. While intrigued with the possibility of creating more androids like him, Data is not convinced the research will work, and might even render him i...