There are movie summaries, and then there are movie summaries. Variety reports that Brazilian director Iuli Gerbase will make her English-language film debut with This Blue Is Mine, which is described as an “original, psychosexual sci-fi drama." These are already some very intriguing words—words made more intriguing when you learn that the film is set to star Zazie Beetz (Deadpool 2) and Elizabeth Debicki (Widows).
But then you get to the summary, and this is where you might want to hold onto your butts.
This Blue Is Mine ... is set amidst a family holiday at a tropical resort, where Arthur, a guilt-free bon viveur, surprises everyone by bringing his new beautiful and enigmatic girlfriend, Ivy (Debicki). Ivy’s arrival and her odd behavior throws the already delicate dynamics off balance with Arthur and his daughters. Connie (Beetz) is still recovering from the trauma of a recent miscarriage and her older half-sister Laura can be a bit suffocating in her efforts to support her. One evening, after Connie gets very drunk, Ivy quietly reveals to her that she’s actually an alien visiting Earth. While Laura is quick to write Ivy off as an aspiring trophy wife, Ivy’s strangeness makes Connie, and with her the audience, question if she could actually be an alien. Before she knows it, Connie is being seduced by Ivy and invited to follow her back to her planet, an invitation that sound more seductive as the family drama heightens. But is Ivy really an alien? Or is Connie having a mental breakdown? Connie may have to take a leap of faith.
That text is directly quoted from Variety; bless them for this thoroughly intriguing string of words. My initial instinct was skepticism—surely Ivy isn't really an alien, this is a drama, right?—but the movie is, quite notably, described as sci-fi.
And Gerbase's previous film, The Pink Cloud, definitely looked science fictional, unless some city has experienced a descending pink cloud and I just missed it in the flurry of other news. Harper’s Bazaar called that film “the existential, claustrophobic, cozy, and horny quarantine movie you didn’t know you needed.”
This Blue Is Mine is expected to begin filming this fall.[end-mark]
Hugh Jackman, who is about to reprise his role (sort of) as Wolverine, a character who died in 2017’s Logan, is once again set to portray a legendary character as he meets his death. But this time, he's playing Robin Hood.
Michael Sarnoski, who also directed the upcoming prequel A Quiet Place: Day One, is directing The Death of Robin Hood, which also stars Jodie Comer. According to Deadline, "The film is a darker reimagining of the classic Robin Hood tale. Set of its time, the film will see the title character grappling with his past after a life of crime and murder, a battleworn loner who finds himself gravely injured and in the hands of a mysterious woman who offers him a chance at salvation."
"Set of its time" is a touch on the vague side, but then so are the origins of Robin Hood; tales about him have been around for a very, very, very, very long time.
Sarnoski is also the writer on this film, which has among its producers folks who worked on Arrival and The Prestige.
It's been a minute since we had a Robin Hood film, and when I say "a minute" what I really mean is that I had entirely forgotten that a mere six years ago, Taron Egerton starred in a movie called Robin Hood. Have you ever found yourself entirely unable to remember if you saw a movie or just the trailers for said movie? This is one of those. As Emmet Asher-Perrin details in their review, this particular Robin Hood was neither good nor memorable.
It will be a while before The Death of Robin Hood comes around; production isn't expected to begin until early 2025.[end-mark]
In a teeming sea of sequels and series and reboots and remakes, here is something entirely different. The upcoming film from director Romain Gavras is, according to Deadline, about the following: "a high end charity gala is raided by a violent group of radicals on a mystical quest to fulfill a prophecy."
The first half of that sentence was interesting enough, but you throw in "a mystical quest to fulfill a prophecy" and suddenly it's a whole new ballgame. Deadline notes, "The son of the great filmmaker Costa Gavras (Z and Missing), Gavras has woven into the plot the Greek mythology tales he grew up exposed to by his dad and mom, the French film producer and journalist Michele Ray-Gavras."
The cast for this film already includes Chris Evans (Knives Out), Brendan Fraser (Doom Patrol), Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa, pictured above), and Salma Hayek Pinault (Black Mirror), and with more actors yet to be announced. This will be Gavras’s first English language film, and he co-wrote it with Will Arbery, a writer and producer on Succession. I don't think we have to worry about it pulling its punches.
Anya Taylor-Joy will star as one of the violent radicals; Chris Evans apparently plays "the movie star she has tapped to die." This gets even more meta if you want it to, by which I mean it is not the first time Evans, a movie star, has played a movie star facing death and/or deadly combat. (I'm talking about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, obviously.)
Filming on Sacrifice is set to begin this fall. The premiere, whenever it happens, cannot come soon enough.[end-mark]
Is it time forthe world of The Exorcist to get good again? Deadline reports that Mike Flanagan—he of The Fall of the House of Usher and, perhaps more relevantly here, Midnight Mass—is in talks to direct the next film in the current Exorcist trilogy.
In the words of resident Exorcist and Mike Flanagan expert Leah Schnelbach, "he's so good at 'furious former catholic' he might be too right for this gig?"
But one assumes that Blumhouse and Universal's Exorcist sequel might be too tempting for Flanagan to pass up. (If you have seen Midnight Mass, you get it.) The last film in the series, The Exorcist: Believer, was directed by David Gordon Green and released last fall, and was not generally beloved. Green then left the franchise.
The second film in the trilogy is, or was, titled The Exorcist: Deceiver.
The entire Exorcist Cinematic Universe is an epic tale full of ups (the William Friedkin-directed original film) and downs (Renny Harlin?), some of which Schnelbach gets into in their review of The Exorcist: Believer. Given that that piece is titled "The Exorcist: Believer Will Make You Doubt Your Faith in Movies," it seems clear that this series is presently at a point from which it can only go up. And Flanagan might just take it into the stratosphere.[end-mark]
Once upon a time—in the 1930s and ’40s—Enid Blyton wrote a series of books about a trio of children who find a magical tree in an enchanted wood. She wrote a lot of other books, too, and while she is not necessarily a household name in the U.S., in the U.K. she was, in 2008, voted the country's favorite writer. At that time, The Guardian noted, more than eight million of her books were sold every year. But there has never been a live-action movie adaptation of her work.
Now, an impressive team is working on changing that. Andrew Garfield (The Amazing Spider-Man) and Claire Foy (The Crown) are set to star as the parents of the aforementioned children in The Magic Faraway Tree, which will be directed by Ben Gregor (Brittania, Bloods) and—possibly most importantly—has a screenplay by Simon Farnaby, who co-wrote Paddington 2. (Farnaby also co-wrote Wonka, but let's ignore that for now.)
The Magic Faraway Tree follows Polly (Foy) and Tim (Garfield) and their children Beth, Joe and Fran — a modern family who find themselves forced to relocate to the remote English countryside. Soon after the family’s arrival in the countryside, the children discover a magical tree and its extraordinary and eccentric residents including treasured characters Moonface, Silky, Dame Washalot and Saucepan Man. At the top of the tree, they are transported to spectacular and fantastical lands and, through the joys and challenges of their adventures, the family learn to reconnect and value each other for the first time in years.
Blyton's work has been criticized, over the years, for being racist, sexist, and otherwise full of outdated stereotypes and attitudes. Updated editions have come and gone, and it will certainly be interesting, for Blyton fans, to see how this adaptation plays out. No premiere date has been announced, but filming is expected to begin next month.[end-mark]
If you haven’t watched the Paramount+ series Evil, you should. If you don’t want to crank up a Paramount+ subscription to do so, however, I have fantastic news for you! In the lead up to the Season Four premiere of the show, the entire third season—all ten episodes—are now available to watch on YouTube.
You can catch the first full episode here on Paramount+’s YouTube channel. As I type this, that episode has 666 views, so something is right (or wrong) with the world.
If you’re not caught up with the series at all, here’s the premise of the show:
Evil is a psychological mystery that examines the origins of evil along the dividing line between science and religion. A skeptical female psychologist joins a priest-in-training and a contractor as they investigate the Church’s backlog of unexplained mysteries, including supposed miracles, demonic possessions and hauntings. Is there a logical explanation, or is something truly supernatural at work?
Season Three sees Katja Herbers (the skeptical psychologist), Mike Colter (the Catholic priest), and Aasif Mandvi (the contractor) face off against agents of the actual devil, impeccably played by their human(?) leader Leland (Michael Emerson) and the psychologist’s mother (Christine Lahti).
It is a wonderful, fascinating show, and now you can catch up at your leisure before Evil’s fourth and final season premieres on May 23, 2024. [end-mark]
We now know more names who will be on the call sheet for the film, the plot of which is still under wraps—though it's been described to the trades as “a multi and inter-related story horror epic that tonally is in the vein of Magnolia.”
In addition to Brolin, Julia Garner (Ozark, Apartment 7A) and Alden Ehrenreich (Cocaine Bear) will be headlining the production. Today, we found some of the actors in the expanded cast. According to Deadline, Benedict Wong (seen above in Netflix’s 3 Body Problem), Amy Madigan (Fringe, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels), Austin Abrams (Euphoria), and Cary Christopher (American Horror Stories) will also be in the film in undisclosed roles.
Weapons, like Barbarian, is written and directed by Zach Cregger, who will also produce, along with Barbarian alums Roy Lee and Miri Yoon at Vertigo, and J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules of BoulderLight Pictures.
No news yet on when Weapons will make its way to theaters, but given the talent in front and behind the camera on this one, we’ll be sure to get a big marketing push to let us know when the horror film arrives. [end-mark]
Sorry, I forgot to stop reading and got all the way through Chapter 6! So that’s where we’re reading up to this week.
Summary
Tiffany is at the end-of-summer scouring fair on the Chalk. Two girls approach to give her a bouquet meant to attract a beau and ask if she has any “passionate parts” as a witch (since they’ve been told not to become witches on account of witches not having those parts). Tiffany tells them that witches are just like everyone else that way, just more busy. She goes to watch the cheese rolling, which turns to mayhem due to the Feegle turning up and unleashing Horace on all the unsuspecting and unsentient cheeses. Rob Anybody tells Tiffany he was sent on behalf of the kelda, who just wants to make sure that Tiffany is okay. Then Roland pauses on his journey home after seeing the injuries on the cheese-rolling field. Tiffany assures him that nothing wrong, and he leaves with his new paramour, Letitia. Later that night, Tiffany is sent to Mr. Petty, an angry drunk who has beaten his daughter until she miscarried, to warn him away before the men in town come to kill him. Then she has a talk with her father about why Petty became the sort of man he is, and the fact that his daughter might not be his biological child. Tiffany tells her father to get the old stone barn cleared out for her.
The Feegle are nearby listening. Tiffany asks them to help her get Petty’s daughter Amber up to their mound where she can be helped. Jeannie, the kelda, and the Feegles aid the girl, who is still unconscious. Jeannie then has Tiffany fed and tells her that she’s been having visions in her brain that danger is surrounding her, but she cannot tell where the danger comes from this time around. She warns Tiffany to be cautious and invites her to stay the night and rest. Tiffany does and wakes to Amber laughing: The soothings that Jeannie performed have worked well on her, and she can begin to heal. Tiffany leaves swiftly to head back and bury the stillborn child, but she sees a figure with a walking stick that vanishes. Then she sees a hare that bursts into flame, runs off, and also vanishes. When she gets back to Petty’s barn, she finds Mr. Petty has come back and put a ring of flowers around the baby’s body, then tried to hang himself from the rafters. Tiffany cuts the rope with Rob’s help, saving his life. She brings Amber to her home and learns that Mrs. Petty went back to find her husband, claiming he was attacked. Tiffany’s father says the rest of the town need to look after the family and not everything can be Tiffany’s job.
Tiffany goes to the Baron next to help take his pain away, and his nurse Miss Spruce is talking about how she doesn’t hold with Tiffany’s magic and thinks that people shouldn’t fall to demonic forces. The Baron talks to Tiffany for a while and asks if she saved his son’s life all those years ago—as her father apparently told him recently. She admits that she did, and he gives her fifteen dollars: old money made of mostly gold, which will fetch a very high price. Tiffany doesn’t want to accept it, but he insists. He asks if he’s going to die soon, and she admits that he is. Tiffany shows him the fire trick she does to sanitize her hands, and it brings up a precious memory for the Baron, a song about a hare going into fire, and he dies happy. Miss Spruce is quick to accuse Tiffany of murder and theft, though the head of the guards, Brian, knows Tiffany and isn’t too concerned about that. Tiffany suggests that she go to the city to inform Roland that he is Baron, which everyone agrees to. She arrives at the Feegle mound to find Amber back there; Jeannie thinks Amber should be trained as a witch, as she learned their ancient language just by hearing it. Tiffany goes to talk to Mrs. Petty and has the Feegles clean her kitchen, which terrifies the woman.
Tiffany comes home to find that Wentworth has been in a fight with a local boy who was saying mean things about her being a witch. Tiffany’s mother warns her that things are getting strange out there, and that she needs to be more careful. Tiffany and the Feegles start toward the city, but Daft Wullie sets fire to Tiffany’s broomstick, necessitating a landing on a carriage that’s carrying a disco ball. The coachman, William Glottal Carpetlayer, has jumping bones. Tiffany tries to help him when a figure suddenly appears—a man with no eyes, who casts no shadow and promises to find her wherever she goes. The Feegles attack him and he’s gone, and the coachman is so grateful for having his bones fixed that he agrees not to charge Tiffany for scraping the carriage’s paint job. They make it to Ankh-Morpork, where Tiffany heads to Boffo’s Joke Shop and meets Derek and his mother Mrs. Proust, the witch who all the warty stereotypical witch masks are actually based upon. Mrs. Proust tells Tiffany about witching in a big city and takes her to see dwarfs who can repair her broomstick. When they find out she’s friends with the Feegle, they agree to do her repairs at no charge.
Commentary
Unsurprisingly, as Tiffany approaches adulthood, she finds herself doing too much and expecting that she can somehow shoulder the whole thing by sheer force of will. Or, as the narrative helpfully hands us:
Perhaps that was the trick of it, Tiffany thought. If you kept yourself busy you wouldn’t have time to go nuts.
Gurl. That’s not how this works.
I dunno, I love that while a good witch’s work is predicated on doing what needs to be done that other people are leaving by the wayside, this book is peeking over the top of that summit and finding… oh look, there’s just more work. And Tiffany is in a prime position to allow this to happen because she has always been like this, always believed that other people couldn’t manage without her and always trying to do everything herself. It's very easy to blow right by the Self-Sufficiency mark and careen straight into burnout being your life’s default state.
This is a subject I happen to be a little belligerent on personally, due entirely to personal experience. I will grab my more Type A friends by the face and lovingly whisper “If you don’t take a break, your body will decide when you take it in the most dramatic way possible” every chance I get. I wish I could do the same for Tiffany, but that is the point of this story.
These coming-of-age lessons for Tiffany always deal in both rather than either-or as a rule of development, like a finely balanced seesaw: In previous books we’ve seen her take responsibility for her community, learn that most of life is in doing the gritty awful jobs that you’d rather look away from, but now we’re getting the inverse of that, an acknowledgment that being part of a community does involve relying on it in some fashion, and also that no one person can be everything that people need.
We’re also arriving at the point where many of Tiffany’s personal relationships are reshaping themselves into what they will be when she’s an adult, and the changes there are rocky, to say the least: Her potential romance with Roland is over—he’s moved on to Letitia—and her relationship to her family is altering too. Mr. Aching would hardly be the first parent to realize that his kid’s grown up a bit faster than he’d prefer, but the real tragedy is in Tiffany looking at her family and not believing for one moment that they can aid her, that she can trust them to pick up slack.
It’s going to be a rude awakening.
Asides and little thoughts
Of the Baron: “To him, the pain was a bully, and what do you do to bullies? You stood up to them, because they always ran away in the end. But the pain didn’t know about that rule. It just bullied even more.” Yeah. Um.
I’m trying to remember if it was ever suggested that the Baron was such a genial fellow, because I feel like this is a sizable retcon on Pratchett’s part. The guy we heard about in the first couple books sounded pretty distant, haughty, and cold to me. Granted, dying probably makes a difference, but he’s still a lot more affable than I would have expected.
It seems important that Mrs. Proust says she’s teaching young people respect for other people’s property, not because vandalism is in and of itself some kind of high-grade evil, but because a lack of respect for it “would, you mark my words, have resulted in him getting a new collar courtesy of the hangman.” A teach-to-the-outcome sort of plan.
Pratchettisms
She sidled away as politely as she could, but as noise went, it was sticky; you got the feeling that if you let it, it would try to follow you home.
For the onlookers, of course, it was just another show; you didn’t often see a satisfying pile-up of men and cheeses, and—who knew?—there might be some really interesting casualties.
What a name. Halfway between a salad and a sneeze.
The world was always very nearly drowning in mysterious omens. You just had to pick the one that was convenient.
At last someone had taught a boy something useful!
With the finale of Star Wars: The Bad Batch there are currently no major animated arcs coming in the Star Wars canon. Which is a shame because since the launching of The Clone Wars series, the animated projects have made up some of the best storytelling that Star Wars has seen in the last twenty years. The Bad Batch easily ranks among them, and the paltry three seasons we received were never going to feel like enough. But, like everything about Clone Force 99, the way that they left was singular and unlikely to be matched.
[Spoilers ahead.]
Season three of Bad Batch is largely devoted to little/big sister Omega coming into her own and getting prodigal… you can’t call him a son, I’m going with prodigal reluctant dad, Crosshair back into the arms of his family. While his inhibitor chip initially prompted Crosshair to walk straight into the arms of the Empire as the fascist organization came into power, by the end of season one, he’d chosen to stay of his own free will, furious over the Batch’s refusal to choose him and join up. Season two showed us what this spiteful decision cost Crosshair as the realization dawned that the Empire would be nothing like the Republic.
It was a key journey to showcase: Crosshair’s mistake was effectively a stand-in for every clone who chose to stay with the Empire. Regardless of their own personal moral leanings (and every clone is different, of course), it makes sense that it would be difficult for many of them to grasp what the Empire truly was at first glance. None of them were designed to question, to learn about the political motivations of war, to buck a lifetime of conditioning and subvert their “purpose.” But after losing someone important to him, Crosshair finally breaks and kills an Imperial officer, getting him sent to a secret base on Tantiss where Omega is also delivered at the end of season two.
Omega bonded to every member of the Batch in her time as their big/little sister slash adopted daughter over the show’s run—she even tried with Crosshair when she met him, fruitless though the attempt seemed. With the setup more blatant than ever on Tantiss (he’s literally stuck in a cell that she walks by on her rounds every day), Omega finally has the opening she needs to do what she does best: Make people better. When she moves to escape the base, she takes Crosshair with her, along with a once-vicious lurca hound that she has named Batcher. Cue awkward family reunion, but more importantly, cue an entire subplot of Crosshair not only returning home to deal with his PTSD, but also getting a therapy dog out of the deal.
The final season tips the possibility that Omega might be Force-sensitive into the pot as well; part of the reason she’s valuable to the Tantiss research facility is that Doctor Hemlock is among the first scientists working on Emperor cloning, and Omega’s high midichlorian count has the potential to make a clone that can wield the Force. But in a wild U-turn away from Star Wars’ favorite narrative cue—that everything must ultimately center around the Jedi and their powers—The Bad Batch makes the choice to essentially ignore this revelation. Omega gets to meet Asaaj Ventress (who is, thankfully, alive after a rough turn in the novels that suggested otherwise) and try out some training, but there’s no indication in either direction about her potential Force-wielding abilities. And that’s because showrunner Jennifer Corbett and her team seem to rightly understand that it doesn’t matter. Omega’s true abilities lie in her compassion and her ability to encourage others toward that end.
Image: Lucasfilm
Of course Omega is eventually recaptured (her choice) and of course it means that the Bad Batch have to mount a wild rescue mission that immediately goes sideways. But what’s astounding is that a mission that should have “Total Party Death” written all over it winds up making way for… precisely the opposite.
So let’s get into what that means. Because it’s hard to talk about that finale without the context.
Star Wars stories belong to their name with all the strife that entails, often upbeat in their execution, but far from content for the characters involved. There are very few tales that result in happy endings of any sort—I could count them on one hand. There’s nothing wrong with that choice per se, but it’s also technically a recent change to the mythos; for decades (unless you read the Expanded Universe novels) the central Star Wars story, being the OG trilogy, ended on a high note. As the fictional universe grew, it deprioritized that viewpoint and aligned far more to the prequels side of things, mired in tragedy of a decidedly operatic nature. With all of those stories spinning out to offer a vantage point on the galaxy that is darker than ever, it seems pointed to note that the Bad Batch have joined the ranks of those lucky few characters who get a kinder ending. And the reason that it seems so pointed is precisely because of where they came from and what they lost.
What the animated Star Wars shows built much of their legacy on is attention paid to the clone army, commissioned for the Republic at the secret behest of then-Chancellor Palpatine. That the prequel stories relied upon the presence of a brainwashed slave race who were bought, grown, and trained for the sole purpose of dying for the Republic has been a cornerstone of the narrative since 2002's Attack of the Clones… but the prequels weren't built to tell that part of the story. Animation was well-suited to the task of shining a light on the humanity of the clone troopers; after all, it's easier to animate thousands of identical men than it is to CGI composite thousands of performances from one actor. And so the animated shows became the place to showcase just that, and the clone army was given a space where they could be presented as people rather than identical cannon fodder.
That choice led to some of the best stories Star Wars has told. But it also created a vicious little conundrum: The characters that many viewers counted among their favorites never had a shot at a real life. They were forced to be soldiers in a war they had no part in causing, for the side that paid for their birth and programming. They were created to serve and then to die.
While it didn't come clear until the end, The Bad Batch turned out to be a story about a few of those clones getting a chance to choose their own futures. Corbett and crew took that opportunity to narrow focus in on the clones’ experience and bolted with it, seemingly straight for the finish line without ever once looking back. And in many ways, it used tragedy toward a far more meaningful coda than Star Wars often offers.
And that’s all because of Tech.
Having assumed a much harsher ending was coming for these characters, I was dismayed—both as a critic and as a fan—at Tech’s death in the end of season two. It was beautifully written, but it felt like either a probable warmup to greater loss, or a possible fakeout, which Star Wars has pulled too many times. (“Somehow, Palpatine returned” is likely to get etched on J.J. Abrams’ grave at this rate.) The point was that I doubted the death would continue to be meaningful in retrospect, which is unfortunately a common problem in fiction today. We’ve gone so far in the direction of death for the sake of shock or realism that it has actually ceased to have narrative weight in most cases.
But the Bad Batch all survive this fight. Every last one of them. And they go back to Pabu and live safe, completely outside their function and programming as soldiers. And Omega gets to grow up with the people she loves surrounding her and guiding her. And suddenly, Tech’s death isn’t just a precursor to more terrible misfortune in an unfair universe—it was for this. His family living on a world that he loved, figuring out who they are outside of that armor and spending time doing whatever moves them. Omega getting the childhood that Phee pointed out she was missing. Clone Force 99 growing old together.
Image: Lucasfilm
Yes, Omega leaves home in the end to join the Rebellion, but that’s just where growing up leads. (He’d be proud of her, in any case.) And yes, something needs to be said about the many clones who died in service of them getting that ending. (Star Wars needs to have a talk with itself about how it renders collateral damage, but that is truly another conversation for another time.) And yes, there is always the chance that someone will come along and undo the whole thing with a later tale.
But for now, Tech’s final words are the perfect punctuation at the end of their story: “When have we ever followed orders?”
Never. And look how that paid off for them? Perhaps it’s time for a few more characters in that galaxy far, far away to sit up and take note. [end-mark]
Honestly, are other details necessary? Kristen Stewart (Love Lies Bleeding; that other vampire movie) and Oscar Isaac (Moon Knight, pictured above) are set to co-star in the next film from Panos Cosmatos, the director behind the trippy-ass Nicolas Cage film Mandy, and also the somewhat-less-seen Beyond the Black Rainbow.
Flesh of the Gods, as this film is dramatically titled, is written by Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en), with a story by Walker and Cosmatos. The Hollywood Reporter says the film "follows a married couple, Raoul (Isaac) and Alex (Stewart), who descend each evening from their luxury skyscraper condo and head into an electric nighttime realm of 80’s LA. When they cross paths with the mysterious and enigmatic woman and her hard-partying cabal, Raoul and Alex are seduced into a glamorous, surrealistic world of hedonism, thrills, and violence."
I love the phrase "hard-partying," like if you do it enough, it becomes akin to hard work.
In a statement, Cosmatos said, “Both propulsive and hypnotic, Flesh will take you on a hot rod joy ride deep into the glittering heart of hell.”
Sign me up. Sign us all up.
Flesh of the Gods has not yet begun production, so it's anyone's guess when we will get to ride this hot-rod all the way to hell's sparkly, presumably blood-drenched heart. But we're waiting. Patiently.[end-mark]
There’s a new sci-fi horror film coming our way called Lumina, and it looks like a mind-twisting watch.
Here’s the synopsis:
A terrifying sci-fi thrill ride, Lumina follows four friends desperately searching for their abductee friend in a DUMB—DEEP UNDERGROUND MILITARY BASE. Whether they find their friend or not, what they find in the desert of the U.S. to the sands of the Sahara, will change their lives forever.
If the above confuses you, here’s a bit more context: The story centers on a group of friends. One of them is rich and named Alex, and he holds a party at his house. Suddenly, bright lights flash in the sky and one of them, Alex’s girlfriend Tatiana, disappears. Alex becomes obsessed with finding her and, after a few months, drags three of his friends into the desert because he believes Tatiana is being held in a DUMB (Deep Underground Military Base) and may have been put there because she had contact with aliens. Things get dangerous for the group from there as they face both human and extraterrestrial threats in their search.
The film was directed, written, and produced by Gino McKoy and stars Eric Roberts (who played The Master in 1996's Doctor Who: The Movie), Rupert Lazarus, Eleanor Williams, Andrea Tivadar, Sidney Nicole Rogers, Ken Lawson, and Emily Hall.
Lumina premieres in theaters on July 12, 2024.
Check out the DUMB and what it may contain in the purposefully confusing trailer below. [end-mark]
The Prime Directive is one of the most complicated tropes to come out of the Star Trek franchise over the past 58 years. Created as it was in the shadow of the Vietnam War (and with the Korean War a recent memory), the notion of a directive that keeps the Federation from sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong (a grave oversimplification) was, I’m sure, very appealing to Gene Roddenberry and his various writers.
Probably the best discussion of the PD was in a TNG episode, “Pen Pals,” specifically a scene in Picard’s quarters. Scripted by the great Melinda M. Snodgrass, the scene beautifully illustrates the complex issues surrounding the non-interference rule. In particular, there’s a line Picard has when he says that the Prime Directive “protects us—to prevent us from allowing our emotions to overwhelm our judgment.”
However, something went horribly wrong with the PD as TNG went on, and it’s infected the remainder of the franchise far too often. In “Pen Pals,” Worf comments that the PD is an absolute, and the entire rest of the scene is a refutation of Worf’s statement. But then the franchise itself doubled down on Worf’s words, leading to—among other things—turning our heroes into idiots in the moronic “Who Watches the Watchers?” and into murderers in the morally repugnant TNG episode “Homeward,” one of the nadirs of the franchise. (See also Enterprise’s “Dear Doctor.”)
“Whistlespeak” is one hundred percent a Prime Directive episode, and it continues the trend—seen also in SNW, particularly “Among the Lotus Eaters”—of moving away from TNG’s dumbshit absolutism.
Because first and foremost, Star Trek is heroic fiction. There’s a reason why so many Trek episodes start with the protagonists responding to a distress call. Trek has always stood out as the franchise that gives us compassion over combat, talking over fighting, and finding ways to help people.
We start this week with the Discovery crew doing what it does best: working its way through a scientific problem. Back in season two, Ethan Peck’s Spock matter-of-factly stated “I like science.” (Peck himself owns a T-shirt with that saying on it that he has worn to many a public appearance.) That’s pretty much the Discovery ethos, and some of the best scenes in this show’s five-year history have been various crewmembers tossing ideas around to figure out a problem. In this case, it’s Stamets, Adria, Tilly, and Burnham trying to determine what the clue they found last week is supposed to mean—which is hard, as it’s just a vial of distilled water with some scratches on it. They’re aided in this by Kovich, who has been able to find a complete list of all five scientists who worked on the Progenitor Project (and who left the clues and erased evidence of their existence). Of the two who are left, they detemine that the latest clue was left by a Denobulan named Hitoroshi Kreel, who did work with weather modification technology, including water reclamation stations that can make it rain. They eventually find a world Kreel designed a water tower for.
The problem is that it’s a pre-warp society. In fact, it’s a pre-technology society, which has built traditions and religion around the water stations, which are high on mountains. It’s assumed that Kreel built them on mountains to avoid PD issues, but he was only partly successful. And the tower itself can’t be beamed into due to some kind of interference. Burnham and Tilly beam down in native garb, and with native markings on their foreheads, to try to get into the tower.
They wind up joining a pilgrimage to the tower, where they meet several locals, including one who is coughing up a proverbial lung due to being stuck in one of the dust storms. At one point, she starts choking to death, but they’re able to cure her by several people getting in a tight circle and each running a stick around a metal bowl, creating a loud resonant sound. The sonics are able to dislodge the dust from the woman’s windpipe.
Credit: CBS / Paramount+
Our heroes soon learn that there’s a ritual involved in getting into the tower involving a race. Because they have to pretend to be natives, Burnham and Tilly don’t ask questions about how the ritual works. Too late, they learn that the race to the tower isn’t just a race: it’s a re-creation of an event from the past, when a woman ran to the tower without water, having sacrificed it to give others water. To that end, they all have to take pills that dry out their throat and they’re not allowed any water until the end of the race. If you drink water—and bowls are left all along the race, thus giving you an easy out, and also proving that they’re not completely insane—then you’re disqualified.
Burnham notices that some moss looks like it’s been contaminated by radiation—something the locals wouldn’t know about—and it may be that there’s a control console she can mess with. She drinks water, disqualifying her, and follows the moss, while Tilly continues to run the race.
In the end, Starfleet training prevails on two different levels. The last two runners are Tilly and Ravah. The latter is that most tired of clichés, the willful child of the single-parent leader who wants to prove themself. Their father doesn’t want them to run the race, and what seems to be over-protectiveness proves to be far worse.
Before we find out how it is, Tilly has to show the other part of Starfleet training, besides the physical fitness: that aforementioned compassion. The last bit of the race is run while holding a bowl of water in hand. Ravah drops their bowl, emptying it, which disqualifies them. But Tilly stops, dumps some of her water into Ravah’s bowl, and they can finish it together.
That’s when the other shoe drops: in order to get rain, the locals make a sacrifice. Whoever wins the race goes into the tower, yes, but the tower also goes through cycles of being sealed.
Aided by Adira, Burnham is able to fix the busted console, and now everything works right. But by this time, Tilly and Ravah are trapped in the tower and going to die, and Discovery can’t beam them out.
So Burnham goes full violate-the-PD and beams into the vestibule even though Ravah’s father is there, lamenting over the fact that he sent his child to their death. Burnham breathlessly explains that it’s a machine, the sacrifices are meaningless, the machine was broken, she fixed it, and get your child and my friend the fuck out of there, please.
Credit: CBS / Paramount+
Because yes, the PD is important to protect both the Federation from imperialism and less-technology-developed worlds from being taken advantage of. But it shouldn’t get in the way of stopping people from dying. Worf’s statement and subsequent episodes notwithstanding, the PD is not an absolute and it should never ever ever get in the way of saving lives that can be saved easily. (That “easily” caveat is important.)
And in the end, everybody lives, the locals realize that sacrificing lives to get rain isn’t the best idea, and, oh yeah, it starts raining.
Two other plotlines at work here, continuing some character work. Rayner assigns Adira to the bridge, as they wanted more time on the bridge, and they’re tasked with helping Burnham fix the tower. The problem is that they’re not sure they’re up to the task, and they try to get Rayner to let someone else handle it. Rayner, however, doesn’t take any of their nonsense, reminding them that the time bug was not their fault, even though they’re carrying major guilt over it.
And we also continue Culber’s trying to come to terms with the zhiantara he went through in “Jinaal.” He talks to a holographic re-creation of his abuela, which is adorable, and she’s the one who convinces him to give himself a medical checkup, make sure there’s no neurological reason for his weird feelings. He also asks Stamets to help—“Nothing as romantic as a neural scan,” Stamets jokes—and they determine that there’s nothing wrong with him physically. Stamets then urges Culber to do something he doesn’t seem to have considered: enjoy it. He feels more connected to everything, and while that is weird, that doesn’t make it bad. We haven’t seen much of Culber and Stamets as a couple lately, and this is a welcome return to it, especially this more mature Stamets who is much better at seeing the big picture than he used to be.
Credit: CBS / Paramount+
I’m a little disappointed more wasn’t done with the whistling method of communicating over long distances. Ultimately, it’s there to show that the people are genuinely alien, which is certainly appreciated, but given that it’s the title of the episode, I was expecting it to play a bigger role in the plot. Ah, well. And I do like that they have retinal tricorders and subcutaneous communicators for ease of clandestine infiltration…
The scratches on the vial turned out to match a number in the native language, specifically the number five. The next piece of the puzzle was in Tower #5, as well as some writing in the Betazoid language. Since the fifth and final scientist was a Betazoid named Marina Derex, this makes sense. One assumes we’ll find out what that text said next week…[end-mark]
In 2022, writer-director Chris Stuckmann ran a successful Kickstarter for his debut horror feature, Shelby Oaks. The movie, which raised $1.39 million in its campaign, is now in post-production, and Stuckmann along with his partner Aaron B. Koontz at Paper Street Pictures, have brought Mike Flanagan and his producing partners Trevor Macy and Melinda Nishioka at Intrepid Pictures on as executive producers.
Here’s the official synopsis of Shelby Oaks, per the Kickstarter:
Shot as a traditional feature, but with some elements of found footage, Shelby Oaks is a horror film about missing paranormal investigators (the paranormal paranoids), the dark legacy they uncovered, and the far-reaching effects their investigation has as Mia searches for her sister Riley, the lead paranormal investigator, 12 years later.
As Mia uncovers new and disturbing leads related to Riley’s disappearance, she uncovers evidence of a hidden supernatural evil dating all the way back to her and Riley’s childhood.
“It’s been inspiring to watch Chris working toward his dreams over the past few years, and the tenacity and DIY spirit he displayed while bringing Shelby Oaks to life reminded me so much of my own journey over a decade ago,” Flanagan said in a statement to Deadline. “It’s been an honor to walk a few steps with him on his path, and to offer support for Chris’ vision for his ambitious, unique movie. I can’t wait to see where he goes from here.”
The cast of Shelby Oaks includes Camille Sullivan as Mia, Sarah Durn as Riley, as well as Brendan Sexton III, Michael Beach, Robin Bartlett, and Keith David. In addition to Flanagan, Macy, and Nishioka, it’s also executive produced by Adam F. Goldberg, Paul Holbrook, Sean E. DeMott, and Tony Killough.
No news on when the film will premiere on a screen near you. [end-mark]
After the breakout success of M3GAN, a Blumhouse film about an AI doll with killer dance moves and murderous predilections, it’s no surprise that a sequel, M3GAN 2.0, was rapidly approved.
We don’t know much about the upcoming film, however, other than the fact that Allison Williams would reprise her role as M3GAN’s creator, Gemma, and Violet McGraw would once again play the young girl that M3GAN became violently protective of.
Until today, when Deadline broke the news that Ivanna Sakhno has joined the cast for the sequel. If you watched Star Wars: Ahsoka, then you’re familiar with Sakhno’s work: She played Shin Hati, the apprentice of former Jedi Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson).
Saknho got deserved attention for playing Shin, and it seems that the creatives behind M3GAN 2.0 took notice. Those creatives include writer Akela Cooper, who penned both M3GAN and the sequel, as well as director Gerard Johnstone, who is also helming both films. James Wan (The Conjuring and Saw franchises, as well as the Aquaman movies), Jason Blum, and Williams are also producing the sequel.
Details on the plot of M3GAN 2.0 aren’t yet known, and we also don’t know anything about what role Sakhno is taking on in the film. We do know, however, that the movie is set to premiere in theaters on January 17, 2025. [end-mark]
Portrait of Emile Verhaeren by Théo van Rysselberghe (1915)
I have always wanted to be a person with a magic bag. You know the kind—they dump their tote/purse/satchel/bag of holding out on a table, and everything you’d ever need and 15 things you didn’t know you wanted come spilling out. There are surprises, and sometimes cash. It seems very magical to me, a person who pulls a bag out of the closet, puts the four things I absolutely have to have in it, and leaves the house. I have tried to be a magic bag person, but I get twitchy. Those things should be put in their right places! And what if I want to carry a different bag?
This feels, in a way I cannot precisely pinpoint, akin to the way I feel about books, and the things you might find in them. Notes, underlines, passages marked with multiple exclamation points. Postcards, receipts, love notes. Post-its with chicken-scratched mini-manifestos, concert tickets, movie ticket stubs.
A bit of hypocrisy: I would love to be a person who writes in books, but I hate it when I buy a used book and discover someone else’s notes or highlights. I don’t want their moments of emphasis, their important lines, their opinions, overlaid on my own. It feels like reading one of those websites where random sentences and snippets have been put in boldface type, to draw your eye; it is virtually impossible to read those sentences in the order their authors intended.
And yet there is something about writing in books—about making your books your own—that speaks to me. Yes, it’s just a simple thing, a little note here, an underline, an emphasis. Just do it! the people who think there is a simple answer to everything might cry.
I can’t.
I have tried. I put so many post-its in one collection of Ursula K. Le Guin’s essays that I eventually did give up and just started underlining, but then, is there a point to underlining when you are underlining sentences on every page? At what point are you just saying to yourself, Yes, yes, cram this into my brain, make it stay there, please? At what point should I simply start transcribing most of the essay into the commonplace book I am also trying and failing to keep?
A commonplace book seemed, to me, a good middle ground between wanting to be a person who writes in their books and absolutely failing to be that person. The idea, as I understand it, is that you write in the book things that you would like to remember: quotes, great lines, what have you. I’m sure this is very effective for some, and possibly more so if one did not foolishly buy two very nice pens with which to write things in one’s nice notebook (one color for the quotes, one for the attributions) and then decide that one’s handwriting is so messy that it’s sullying the beauty of the words one is trying to write down.
And herein lies the problem: I cannot get past the feeling that I am messing up my books. They’re mine, yes. It should be fine if I mess them up with my rusty handwriting and my mundane observations. It is fine if anyone else does that; it is not fine if I do. I have one or two books that used to belong to my stepfather, and I keep them because they are full of his notes. Will I ever read The Will to Power cover to cover? Uncertain. But I know his scribbles are in there, his thoughts, the things that mattered to him. And so the book matters to me a great deal.
Some part of me knows why I can’t do it: it’s a long-lived habit born of years spent never quite having exactly the things I wanted to have. It’s the same impulse as buying a nice article of clothing and then never wearing it, because I’m “saving” it for some special occasion that may never arrive. Some part of me balks, not wanting to mess up the books I have so carefully collected and moved across the country (twice). But is it messing up a book to write in it? Or is it just making it your own?
Once in a very rare while, you might pick up a book in a bookstore and find something falling out of it. A note, a bookmark from a place you've never been. A postcard, once, addressed to someone named Paul. A well-worn paperback hidden among the brand-new books in a small store, a little story inscribed in the inside front cover. The only books I’ve managed to write in are the ones I read in college; I wrote the class titles and semesters inside the back covers. I still know, without looking at my scribbles, what classes and years those books were from. I made my little mark and I marked them in my memory at the same time.
Sometimes there is value in doing the things it feels so strange to do.
We are all capable of containing multitudes. I can believe that the important part of a book is the story within it, not the short-lived physical object, and yet still be essentially incapable of wanting to muck about with that object. I can think it is somewhat silly to decorate a home with unread books just because of how they look, and yet not want to take the dust jackets off my own books, even though I always, always take the damn things off when I’m reading them. I can want to find bits of magical ephemera in books, and still be afraid that if I stick anything even slightly meaningful in one of mine, it will be forgotten, lost forever.
I think there is a way—a dreamy way, a way I don’t know how to be—where a person's library is more than just a library. Well, no: A person’s library is always more than just a stack of books, because it has been curated, chosen, weeded, winnowed down, expanded, selected, shaped. But I mean this more literally: Books can hold other things. I love the idea of keeping all one’s mementos in one’s beloved books—all those notes and tidbits and scraps of meaningful paper that accumulate in a lifetime; receipts from first dates and meaningful occasions, birthday cards, the terrible joke someone passed you in a meeting one day that you can never repeat but you still think of every time you think of Game of Thrones.
A collection of books is a collection of things, stories, ideas, characters that matter to you, right? But what if there were also your own things and stories and ideas, tucked in between the pages? Isn’t that what writing in books is, sort of? Isn’t it a way of pressing yourself between the pages? [end-mark]
