"The Mandalorian" Season 2

 

Imagine if the Sequel Trilogy had had a sensible release schedule (i.e. one every three years, as was done with the Originals and even the Prequels) and in late 2020 we were still a year away from Episode IX, or perhaps even two years if Michael Arndt had been given the time he needed for his original Episode VII script. Instead the Sequel Trilogy is done, and increasingly feels like ancient history, and the fresh hot new Star Wars content we got was the second season of The Mandalorian, i.e. the one where they went completely the other way from the first season and inserted tonnes of shit we already knew.

I won't get ahead of myself. I was reasonably excited for the new season of The Mandalorian. Season one was solid, simple fun. It wasn't the most dramatically groundbreaking storytelling of all time, but it was well-acted, benefited from solid writing, and actually did push visual boundaries in its use of the Stagecraft virtual set technology, which allowed the show to take place in lavish sci-fi environments while looking considerably more real than any green screen could. As I said in my first impressions article, the biggest strength of the first season was probably the writing/production/directing talent behind it, with Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, and many of those with whom they worked, having backgrounds in family and/or children's entertainment, leading to a tone and style of storytelling more appropriate to Star Wars than a lot of what we got in the Sequels.

I was hoping for more of that in Season 2, and to its credit, Season 2 was never exactly any more complex than Season 1. Much of it still kept the storytelling straightforward and took as its strength existing genre plots in a Star Wars setting: slay the monster, infiltrate the base, survive in the wilderness, that kind of thing. At the same time, it had more of a narrative thread than the first season, with Din Djarin, the titular Mandalorian, seeking the Jedi, the "people" of his young charge The Child, aka "Baby Yoda", real name later revealed to be Grogu. This was presumably something that was easier to accomplish than in the first season which was, I believe, repurposed from a film script, which is why episodes four to six feel like isolated digressions from the main plot in that season.

But at the same time I felt that this through-line made parts of the season feel a little like Mando was on a never-ending video-game quest: go here to talk to this person, who sends you to talk to this person, who sends you on to this person. Mando talked to the cyclops guy who sent him after Cobb Vanth who didn't actually have any info for him but by coincidence he met the frog lady who sent him on to Bo Katan who sent him to Ahsoka who sent him to the planet Tython where Grogu was kidnapped which led him to hunting down Moff Gideon.

There's nothing wrong with this per se, but it does feel a little bit mundane. Go here, talk to this person, follow that lead to the next person, and so on. Behind it all, admittedly, you have Din's character driving the narrative, which is to say his desire to protect Grogu and his devotion to the Mandalorian creed and thus his duty to return Grogu to his people. But on the surface it feels a little bit strung-together, and at times there were episodes where I just didn't feel terribly invested in what was going on because I expected the latest encounter to just direct him to yet another stepping-stone. This was also not helped by the fact that several chapters (11, 12, 15 and 16) all involved Din and one or more allies attacking and/or infiltrating an Imperial base or ship. Some of the episodes melted into each other in my head.

The other issue is the amount of references this season had to other Star Wars media: we had appearances by a character from a novel I haven't read (Cobb Vanth is from the Aftermath novels, I believe), two characters from the Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons (Ahsoka and Bo Katan), and two from the main films themselves (Boba Fett and, of course, Luke with R2 in tow). I'm sure for many viewers, only Luke and maybe Boba Fett were familiar, and of course even I, Star Wars nerd that I am, don't go in for the novels and didn't actually know the Cobb Vanth character. Nonetheless, compared to the first season, this glut of appearances by existing characters had the same effect which such franchises often have of taking a supposedly large and busy world and making it feel small. I feel that Boba Fett didn't need to appear and that Ahsoka's use, while appropriate, would have made more sense had the show established (as both Clone Wars and Rebels repeatedly demonstrated) that Ahsoka is no longer a Jedi, having refused to rejoin the order after the Council's failure to support her when she was framed. I also thought it was strange that there was no role in Ahsoka's appearance for her main actor, or voice actor as the case may be, Ashley Eckstein, given that she has brought the character to life for so many years in both Clone Wars and Rebels. This seemed especially odd given Katee Sackhoff's live action casting as Bo Katan, having voiced her in the cartoons.

I felt like, given the story they were telling, at least the inclusion of Bo Katan and Luke made sense; as the last known legitimate ruler of Mandalore and the last of the Jedi respectively, they're the only characters who really qualify within the Star Wars universe for the roles for which they were needed. It does seem odd to think that, Rebels included, Bo Katan has now been deposed as ruler of Mandalore twice and has had to have the Darksaber given/restored to her by another Mandalorian (Sabine in Rebels' case). And I do honestly hope that this story plays into a third season of The Mandalorian, assuming that it is made. But if this is the case, I would actually like the show to explore the Mandalorian creed a little further, if their society, as seems to be the case, is turning into some kind of Galactic punching-bag that, despite their martial prowess, is constantly being conquered and victimised by other, more powerful, factions.

This leads to the other issue I had with the second season of The Mandalorian, one which admittedly was carried over from the first: the lack of "fun". Star Wars is, in my opinion, at its best when it is driven by fun, likeable characters, with an undercurrent of spiritual or philosophical meaning. The perfect example is in The Empire Strikes Back, the two central plot lines of which encapsulate both sides of this: the bantering tension between Han and Leia on the one side, and the quasi-Buddhist and pantheist teachings of Yoda to Luke on the other. To me, this is what makes Star Wars work: it's fun, with something a little more serious and contemplative underneath.

The Mandalorian suffers, I think, from having these elements but not quite taking them far enough. Din Djarin is a very serious character who lives by a reasonably strict code of personal and cultural ethics, although admittedly this season did give him some lighter dialogue occasionally. Most of the characters he meets are pretty serious too, with pretty serious goals. That doesn't mean there weren't some lighter characters, like Cobb Vanth, or the Mythrol, or to an extent Cara Dune. But often these are just one or two characters, and there's not much room for lightness between them. I was disappointed that, for instance, Chapter 9 didn't have a third character for Din and Cobb to bounce off, as none of the town locals were afforded any substantial characterisation; someone like the Weequay bartender could have been used for this. Obviously Grogu offers a bit of this in a similar manner to one of the droid characters, but a bit more between characters who actually talk wouldn't have gone astray. In the same way I would have enjoyed a little more contemplation of the significance of the Mandalorian creed and its different interpretations, as represented by Din and Bo Katan respectively. This wouldn't mean a deep exploration of the fictional creeds themselves, but more of the idea of what a culture's code of ethics means in a broad and diverse reality. Admittedly we get a little bit of this in Mayfield's appearances in Chapter 15.

I do wonder, however, if all of these issues stem from, as is now apparent, the fact that Season 2 of The Mandalorian was a cross-promotional exercise in marketing upcoming Disney+ shows, including an Ahsoka show and a Boba Fett show that was literally announced in a post-credits scene in the manner of a Marvel film. I do feel that this probably interfered with the writing and obliged the show to set up certain things and include certain characters that weren't strictly necessary. And it's a bit disappointing that the show seems to have so briskly been forced down that path rather than being allowed to stand on its own. I was hoping that past examples of this not working in the case of, for instance, the recent DC Comics films, might have encouraged Lucasfilm to recognise that just because something works for Marvel doesn't mean it works all the time. The original season of The Mandalorian worked through decent marketing and a level of quality that sustained interest over eight weeks. Lucasfilm and Disney's need to market their new content through the existing, proved, brand of The Mandalorian belies a lack of confidence in the swathe of new products they are apparently intending to present on their service in the next couple of years. As above, I'm disappointed to see that the Ahsoka show in particular is going to be a live action one, and possibly continue the search for Thrawn (and thus the story of Rebels) in that medium rather than its, in my view, natural home in animation with the voice actors from the previous shows. Its setup in live action in The Mandalorian actually makes me less interested in it.

You may have noticed that in all this I've spoken very little about Din or Grogu, our two notional protagonists, in any depth, and this is because I feel like the season didn't quite give them the narrative they needed. We already knew from the first season that Din was protective of Grogu and wanted to do right by him. The Ahsoka episode implies that the bond that has developed between them is stronger than Grogu's existing connection to the Force, and this leads to a nice moment in the season finale in which Luke tells Din that Grogu wants his permission to leave, but these are some pretty sporadic moments when otherwise I felt like we were continually having our attention placed on that episode's guest characters. We see at the start of the season that Din has developed from the previous; for instance, he's lost his antipathy for droids. But he already intended to return Grogu to his people at the end of the first season, and at the end of this season that's what he does. It doesn't feel like he developed too much more past the previous season, or that his relationship with Grogu did either, beyond him becoming more aware of it. Pedro Pascal's performance is always strong as the stoic title character, although sometimes I felt like his dialogue was uncharacteristically chatty or wry, but this perhaps linked to his increased willingness in this season to remove his helmet, suggesting that he is outgrowing the strict form of the creed by which he was raised. I just would have liked to have seen these parts given greater focus.

One other thing I would like to discuss with the season is its greater emphasis on having a relationship with the Original Trilogy. The first season clearly presented a Galaxy in the aftermath of the Empire, with Stormtroopers in dirty armour and Moff Gideon in command of only a small contingent of men. In this season we see more of this, perhaps leading towards the eventual rise of the First Order in the Sequels, and perhaps the experiments with Grogu are, as others have also discussed, intended to foreshadow the cloning techniques which will be used to create Snoke or resurrect Palpatine, i.e. trying to spin something out of two of my least favourite parts of the Sequels.

But we also hear characters talking about the destruction of the Death Stars as relatively contemporary events, and see a thirty-ish-year-old Luke Skywalker voiced by the (as of writing) sixty-nine-year-old Mark Hamill. Compared to the Sequels, which were set a plausible thirty years after Return of the Jedi, it feels very odd to see actors who were in some cases probably not even born when some or all of the Original Trilogy was first released playing characters discussing these events as if they're recent history. To me it makes the setting feel a little unnatural and awkward, and at times I found myself wishing that the show was set after The Rise of Skywalker rather than after Return of the Jedi. In addition, the inclusion of Prequel actors such as Temuera Morrison and Prequel-era spinoff characters such as Ahsoka and Bo Katan makes the show to me actually feel more distant from the Original Trilogy rather than closer, and creates a dissonance between what the setting of the show is meant to be and what it feels like it is in my gut, i.e. more like a continuation of Clone Wars and Rebels than something with a meaningful relationship to the Original Trilogy. Obviously this isn't some huge issue with the show, but it does feel odd.

I might as well talk a little bit more about Luke's appearance at this point. Yes, the CGI face on a stand-in's body is weird, but it's also strange, albeit unsurprising, to see how people have reacted to how Luke enters the action, effortlessly cutting down Dark Trooper droids to save the day. As audience members we're obviously meant to appreciate this, but it's dissonant to think that from Din's point of view he has no idea who Luke is — nor, apparently, do any of the other characters. And so the "cool" factor of seeing Luke in action, body double notwithstanding, is to me undermined by the fact that it doesn't service Din's story in any particular way. The comparisons people have made with the popular, but meaningless, scene of Vader killing the Rebels in Rogue One are a double-edged sword; a fan favourite character without any immediate relevance to the actual protagonist's narrative showing up to steal the limelight in a display of power, and I was actually disappointed that we didn't get to see Din and company using their limited effective resources (presumably the Beskar staff and the Darksaber) to defeat the Dark Troopers.

It's also worth noting that Luke's appearance here, hailed as some kind of "true" appearance of the character by certain commentators, potentially feeds exactly into how he was portrayed in The Last Jedi, as a "legend" whose raw power engendered both pride and fear. And while it does counterbalance Vader's Rogue One appearance, and the visual reference seems obvious, this is not, personally, how I see Luke: I don't see his character growth encapsulated by him cutting down droids with a lightsaber. Remember that Luke's defining character moment in Return of the Jedi was him throwing his lightsaber away rather than letting his destructive impulses control him. That doesn't mean he shouldn't fight; quite rightly, in this episode, he is using his power to defend the lives of people less powerful than himself. But it shouldn't be praised, as it seems to be by fanboys, as some kind of triumphalist display of might. This is why the received wisdom online that Vader massacring helpless men at the end of Rogue One is some kind of amazing scene is stupid because most of its advocates seem to just revel in the scene as a celebration of ruthless violence and not perceive Vader as evil or cruel (and, in fact, the scene in question seems to frame Vader as "cool" more than as terrifying or monstrous). Similarly, people seem to be glorying in Luke's destruction of the Dark Troopers simply as an impressive display of force rather than seeing it as something potentially sinister. I wonder if the episode would have been better served by presenting Luke's appearance as more a kind of defense; it all depends on how we're meant to interpret the scene. Ultimately this is just me being frustrated with Star Wars fans who seem to view the franchise through what I see as a warped, simplistic lens of "power levels" and action for its own sake. It isn't necessarily a problem with the episode itself, just how it's being interpreted.

So that was Season 2 of The Mandalorian. One more thing I should praise is Ludwig Göransson's score, which manages to be distinctive and memorable while almost never referencing anything by John Williams. It's watchable enough television — I appreciate that the episodes aren't too long — and it's quite strong as Star Wars spinoffs go, although my heart is definitely staying with Rebels for now. But it feels like too much of this season was dominated by the need to introduce supporting characters to get their own spinoffs, and not enough was carried by the central protagonists. I would have also liked to have both a bit more fun and a little more of a spiritual or philosophical exploration of the characters' beliefs. If a third season is in the works, and I think it is, I hope it is allowed to stand on its own a bit more, and maybe give more attention to our helmet-headed hero, and rely less on franchise references and cross-promotional marketing.

"The Good Place"

My foray into "Netflix shows everyone else has already watched" continued with The Good Place. I'm pretty sure everyone knows the initial premise, about a woman waking up in a supposedly heavenly afterlife which turns out to not be all that it appears. And while the first season at times suffered, I felt, from budgetary issues (in fact the whole series does), overall it was a nice little character piece and exploration of the idea of an afterlife. It had overtones of a few shows I like, such as The Prisoner (a protagonist kept in an affectedly idyllic place with a dark underside) and Red Dwarf (four characters with clashing personalities trapped in an inescapable situation, high-concept focus on philosophical questions). I managed to avoid discovering the end-of-season twist, but I did know there was a twist of some description, and it was pretty predictable: they're not really in any kind of heaven at all, but a subtle and ironic hell.

The second season of the show evolved the premise in a seemingly natural way, with demonic architect Michael reforming and seeing the error of his ways and, evocative of sci-fi, artificial life form Janet developing an ever-greater sense of humanity. At the same time, the relationship between the two primary protagonists, Eleanor and Chidi, was able to develop further as well. I never found the secondary protagonists Jason and Tahini to be particularly complex, but I don't think that was ever the point, although I did feel like the jokes involving them were a bit repetitive.

The point I'm trying to reach is that as interesting and charming as The Good Place was, I always felt like it lacked a certain degree of imagination. Even in the first season, while the heaven was intended to be false, the representation of a "neighbourhood" of good people taking part in structured activities often seemed to me to not be the main "torture" aspect — that was the clashes of personalities between the four human characters — and the rest of it just suggested that the writers couldn't imagine what an afterlife would be like apart from wish-fulfilment. Similarly, I felt this sense of "sloppiness" evident during the plot in Season 2 in which Michael, trying to hide the failure of his ironic hell from his superiors and attempting to reform, allows "Vicki", another demon, to run the neighbourhood. But we never really see Vicki or the other demons even trying to torment the four humans; they seem to just take Michael at his word that he's doing it. I get that it would have gotten in the way of the show's focus on the philosophy of ethics, but it felt a bit fast and loose to me. Perhaps the intention was that the demons were lazy and stupid, which is why they allowed Michael to get away with it, but this needed to be articulated more clearly. Similarly I felt that in addition to the conflict between the characters Eleanor should have noted that one point in favour of the Good Place actually being the Bad Place was because it's just a bit naff.

All this aside, The Good Place was good enough in its first two seasons but, I felt, started to get a bit disoriented in the third and fourth. I became lost with experiments and points systems; I understood what was happening, but was not entirely sure why I cared. This wasn't because there wasn't a goal, which was first to save the souls of the main characters, and then to save those of all humanity. But I felt that the characters had undergone virtually all of the development necessary for them by the end of the second season, and that they didn't have much further to go. As a result, I often found like the narratives of the third and fourth season were more plot-driven than character driven and were less compelling because they were based on imaginary premises.

This leads to the finale; having finally, truly reached the Good Place, they discover that it's much as Heaven is described by Talking Heads: a place where nothing ever happens. With the infinite ahead of them, humans sink into a torpor, with no passion or drive. When they have decided that they are satisfied with the afterlife, they can pass on to a kind of nothingness, which I've seen perceived both as some kind of final nihilistic act of self-destruction or as a Buddhist "letting go" of possessiveness. If nothing else, it was an interesting thought experiment for how an end to eternity might be reasonable.

And obviously the whole premise functions as an analogy for human life, especially modern life, which can, moreso than ever, be long and pleasant in an unprecedented way. Hence in the show's afterlife humans are still, essentially, human except that they can't be killed and seemingly can't be permanently physically or psychologically injured. They still need, or at least want, food, sleep and intimate interpersonal relationships; they still perceive the world through sensory experience. And their desires are still based in a modern, liberalist, individualist and even consumerist framework. The show does not represent a spiritual or post-mortal existence as transcendental or incomprehensible. This is fine; changing it would fundamentally alter the message of the show. But at times I also found it limiting. It made the philosophical discussions of the show, however well-intentioned, inherently constrained by the limitations of the imagination of the writers.

Ultimately I feel like The Good Place suffers from the same problems as Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which is to say that both of them went for too long or the writers didn't have enough ideas to sustain them for as long as they did. Again, this is often a shame because these shows can be carried past the point of exhaustion by the charismatic performances of well-cast actors, which both shows possessed. But that's not quite enough, and I wonder if it raises questions with the whole nature of the streaming-era series, which has been touted previously as the successor to the film as the high point of writing and production. A good film, like a good novel, is made and then it's done. Unless meticulously planned, a television series has to sustain itself for a potentially variable number of seasons, not all of them necessary for the fulfilment of a thematic purpose. And if these shows want to deal with serious and substantial issues, I feel like they really need to seem as if each episode is a necessary piece of the puzzle or step of the journey. But, again, these were all shows that started in the mid 2010s, and the more coherent one-and-done limited series have come later. Maybe the learning is already starting. Unfortunately outside of the Good Place we don't always have the luxury of infinite experimentation.

"Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt"

Why the hell am I writing an article about Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt? I just marathon-ed the whole thing in just over a week, interactive special included, and I think it's worth discussing, if only briefly, because of its quality as something more "watchable" than "exceptional". Does that make sense? I'm not a believer in an approach to entertainment in which you just "switch your brain off", but I'm still capable of watching something I don't think is particularly spectacular while at the same time being engaging enough to keep one suitably entertained. Does that make sense either?

I heard of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt back in (I think) 2015 after I finished watching 30 Rock, but I didn't watch it at the time because it seemed too removed from what I'd just been watching. Having been able to watch the whole thing now consecutively, it's an odd experience, because while the premise of the show is interesting, it doesn't feel to me as if it ever quite met its potential.

The idea of a protagonist who has been kidnapped and imprisoned for fifteen years is a very dark one, and quite heavy for a sitcom, but I appreciate the idea of the show that it was about people, and women in particular, not having their lives defined by trauma and patriarchal abuse. Yet at times I felt as if the show either couldn't figure out how to treat these issues in a sufficiently sitcom-friendly way, or couldn't think of enough ways to do it, because to me the show, after the first season in particular, felt very unfocused, to the extent that this theme didn't receive the level of attention it deserved due to its need to juggle them against the narratives of the other main characters.

The show has four main characters: Kimmy, whose narrative is to overcome abuse and trauma; Titus, who needs to overcome his own selfishness and defeatism; Lillian, whose main motive is to resist the gentrification of (I think) Lower Manhattan; and Jacqueline, who wants to find meaning and purpose in the shallow world of the New York upper crust, as well as reconciling with her Native American heritage, although the weirdness of a white woman in that role is a whole different thing. Regardless, those are a lot of different character stories to fit into episodes of a half-hour sitcom, streaming or not, some of them quite complex and serious, and in my view, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt never quite got to grips with everything as well as it could.

The premise of Kimmy's story seems absurd but is sadly realistic, with many women having been subject to extended kidnapping and abuse and/or cult religious indoctrination, in this case both. It's a lot to get into. I noticed that the cult element is, with the exception of episodes about the Gretchen character and parodies of Scientology, mostly dropped after the first season (apart from the weird episode about going to church). It's sometimes unclear to what extent Kimmy bought into the cult brainwashing and to what extent she perceived herself before her rescue as a victim of kidnapping, and I think at times that muddles elements of that story, but that's possibly intentional.

But it could also be symptomatic of what at times feels like a "first draft" quality of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt which I find suggestive of either a lack of ideas or a struggle to handle the core premise in an effective way in a sitcom. It's possibly worth comparing to 30 Rock, which was on network TV, generally ran for twenty-ish-episode seasons and had time to focus on the interconnecting stories of Liz, Jack, Tracy, Jenna and Kenneth. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt doesn't have the core premise of being focused on the humorous clashes of large personalities. While Kimmy and Titus are both larger-than-life characters, this is not typically used to generate conflict; in fact it's so rare that I was startled when, in Season 3 Episode 8 ("Kimmy Does a Puzzle!"), Kimmy becomes so frustrated with Titus's selfishness that she loses her temper at him and moves out (for all of five minutes or so).

None of this is to say that sitcoms all have to play to the same formula; of course they don't. But without this kind of structure, I think it can be difficult for a show to have much focus. Watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, at times it was almost exasperating how divorced the different characters' stories often felt from each other, with some episodes giving more or less an entirely different story line to Kimmy, Titus, Lillian and Jacqueline each. Given that the show's core concept is Kimmy and the overcoming of trauma and abuse (in addition to the fact that the show was, as I understand it, written as a vehicle for Kimmy actor Ellie Kemper) it seems odd that the show so often feels distracted from her story.

I think often the show was most successful when it (rarely) used the existing characters to enhance each other's storylines; a good example might be in Season 3 Episode 2 ("Kimmy's Roommate Lemonades!") in which Lillian and Jacqueline are competing over a local political issue and discover that Kimmy (who is involved in her own separate story line in the episode) is the district's only registered voter — of course she is, because she's the only non-cynical member of the local community. This kind of writing in which the character's stories overlap and intersect feels a lot more effective than each character going off on their own or perhaps pairing up with one other. A lot of the time I found myself getting impatient when the stories were digressing onto individual plot lines and wishing it would focus more on Kimmy. I also found myself wondering if certain plot elements and gags were written because they couldn't think of what else to do or a more elegant analogy for a theme, such as Kimmy joining Jacqueline's spin class in Season 1 Episode 11 ("Kimmy Rides a Bike!") or the parody of old 90s Mentos commercials in Season 2 Episode 6 ("Kimmy Drives a Car!"). While I understand that the former plays into the idea of fraudulent men manipulating women and pitting them against each other, the actual concept still feels clunky and sitcom-y; the latter feels almost entirely pointless, intended to be funny purely by being a reference to something old and cheesy.

I think the show also did reasonably well in demonstrating a number of its core ideas: abuse does not define you; being optimistic and resilient is undervalued in modern society (while not being a universally healthy approach to life); abuse and harassment are endemic to society, not restricted to isolated individuals; reactionism typically arises from ignorance and emotional immaturity; encouraging people to be compassionate and kind will produce a better world. At the same time, I thought there were issues that it treated very oddly for a show that started as recently as 2015: a white actor playing a white-passing Native American character; a Vietnamese character being called "Dong" and having a thick stereotypical accent; Asian protestors being depicted as irrationally outraged over a play and then enjoying it so much that they "offend" themselves; and university students being obsessed with intersectionality. At times the show feels like it's entrenched in a Gen X social worldview in which certain perceived problems in society are horrific and need addressing (as they indeed are) but that others are "taking it too far". And that gives the show a weird vibe at times, such as in Season 3 Episode 6 ("Kimmy is a Feminist!") which implies that Kimmy's college friends only care about the things they do because they're young and trying to find a sense of belonging by parroting cliché intersectional talking points, rather than considering that maybe they're important too.

It almost seems odd to think about a comedy like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt ending after only four seasons, but I couldn't help but feel by the third season that the show had either started to run out of steam or was struggling because the foundations set by the first two seasons weren't strong enough. I think season one on its own would have been quite solid as a one-and-done Netflix experience, like the commendable Norwegian single-season Netflix sitcom Home for Christmas (which now has a second season, so this comparison didn't age well), or the single-season US Netflix comedy drama Living with Yourself. I think in Kimmy Schmidt this seemed especially possible with the closure provided by the final two episodes of the first season. However, as it played out, I think the show would have had more of an impact if it had focused more on Kimmy's story and used the other characters to support that rather than trying, as felt more and more common as the show went on, to play as a traditional sitcom ensemble piece. I'm almost inclined to argue that the premise would have worked overall as a comedy-drama, and a more light-hearted approach like a sitcom would have been better served by one of the unused ideas for Kimmy's backstory which was later touched upon in Season 4 Episode 9 ("Sliding Van Doors") in which Kimmy was in a coma for years. But maybe I'm being defeatist myself in thinking that a sitcom wasn't the best way to tackle the issues that Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt wanted to address. Yet I think that when the show does address these issues it does it well; I just felt like it didn't focus on them enough.

I will say that Ellie Kemper and Tituss Burgess are both great in the lead roles. The Kimmy character is one that I've thought in the past would be a good sitcom role, i.e. a character whose defining trait was being positive, upbeat and eager to help and befriend everybody, and maybe a little naïve, without (as such characters often are) being stupid and completely gullible. And the show also does a good job of showing that positivity isn't everything, and it needs to be moderated with a healthy acceptance of negative emotions. But I think the show would have been stronger if it had focused on these two together more. As a matter of fact, this is why I think the 2020 interactive special was in some respects more enjoyable than the actual series finale, which I found to be rather anticlimactic, because not only did it keep Kimmy and Titus together, but it focused on Kimmy's character and her story as the driving force of the plot and thematic exploration, and used the other characters more in supporting roles. I still at times found the cutaways to the other characters to be a bit exasperating, especially Jacqueline stalling outside Titus' trailer on the film set, but Daniel Radcliffe is always good value. John Hamm is also good fun in all of his appearances throughout the series. I also enjoyed the recurring gag (which culminates in the special) of sentient androids becoming a mainstream part of society. When Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was good, it was good: funny, charming, empowering and insightful. But at other times I found it to be slow, unfocused, clunky and tone-deaf, and a few times too often I think I found myself mousing along the thumbnails in the Netflix timeline so that I could anticipate when the story of an episode would get back to Kimmy.

I don't mean to be too down on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; I watched the whole thing, after all, and am spending the time writing this blog post about it. I think that a lot of what it addressed and had to say was important and relevant. And maybe I'm not giving the show enough credit, and the thematic consistency of the plots would emerge were I to apply more critical rigour to what I watched. I just think it also is a good example of where a show can maybe not recognise its own strengths or have a degree of mismatch between premise and mode. It was, I think, the first significant sitcom to be released on Netflix, and it was originally developed for network television, so it really stands between the worlds of traditional TV and streaming services. Maybe in that respect it's a good example of what does and doesn't work in the current era; for instance, I appreciated that the show was less likely to have guest stars for a single episode, instead letting their stories play out over a few, and having a stronger sense of continuity than is typical in, for instance, syndicated shows. But from a thematic perspective, I think focus is important and I think that was something Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt demonstrates the need for, if only due to its (at times) noticeable absence.

"Bill & Ted Face the Music"

When I was a kid, Bill & Ted was one of those things that I was aware of without having ever seen. All I really knew was that "Bill & Ted" was a comedy film about two guys who travelled through time in a phone booth, like Doctor Who (and when I was a kid I didn't know much about Doctor Who either). I also knew that they said "excellent" a lot, which resulted in them kind of morphing into a blob in my mind with Wayne and Garth from Wayne's World (which I've still never properly watched). In my Twenties, I watched Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey at a movie night, but not having seen the first one I wasn't really into it. Since then, my biggest exposure to Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure was because I'm interested in the history of the Napoleonic Wars; clips of Napoleon from Excellent Adventure get used as GIFs a lot when people are making jokes about that era online. That was pretty much it. So a few months ago, when I friend of mine said "Check out the trailer for the new Bill & Ted film!" I was like "Uh... okay."

The trailer seemed amusing enough, so when it came time that Bill & Ted Face the Music was actually going to be released in theatres (pandemics notwithstanding), I thought "I'd better actually watch Excellent Adventure, and rewatch Bogus Journey." So I did. And those two films, as I expected/remembered, were amusing, light pieces of comedy which benefit from a spirit of fun; things happen in these films because they're funny, without much effort being needed for explanation. Thus Billy the Kid can become friends with Socrates, who can only speak Classical Greek (so no one can understand what he's saying, and he can't understand them) and Napoleon, accidentally displaced from 1805 to 1989, is perfectly happy to eat ice cream, go tenpin bowling, and hog the slides at a water park.

In many respects, I actually found Bogus Journey to be a good deal better than Excellent Adventure, not only because it's more visually interesting and creatively shot and directed, probably due to a higher budget, but also because of William Sadler's amusing turn as Death, which works very well with the cheerful, likeable performances of the young Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, back when both of their careers were quite different. Based on the trailers, I figured that Face the Music was probably going to be more or less a trip down memory lane of the comedy concepts of the original film, just with the addition of Bill and Ted being middle aged and having daughters. I wasn't really expecting anything new.

And, for better or worse, that's what Face the Music is. The plot is essentially the same as both of the originals, except instead of having to pass their history assignment or play in the Battle of the Bands, Bill and Ted have to compose and perform "the song to unite the world". They travel through time and the afterlife in pursuit of this goal. They're hunted at one point by a killer robot sent from the future. Meanwhile, their daughters, Thea and Billie, have a mini Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey of their own, assembling historical musicians and inadvertently making a detour to hell. In the end they reunite (including with Death) and play the song at just the right moment. And all, as expected, is well.

Bill & Ted isn't the kind of film series that you criticise from a story or character standpoint: Bill and Ted are silly and so are their adventures. Really, the issues with Face the Music come largely from a production perspective, although I will say that, writing wise, it would have been nice if writers Solomon and Matheson (creators and original performers of the characters) could have done something new. Production-wise, though, I thought the film was visually a bit cold, not only in the way it's shot but also in terms of effects. There's something too clean about modern lenses and digital recording that especially makes flat wide shots look like something from marketing material rather than cinema. Similarly, the use of modern CGI tends to be quite sterile and lacking in grit; I would have rather have seen more of Bill and Ted's own homes and environments different to the polished CGI-enhanced future and hell locations.

That aside, Bill & Ted Face the Music is fine. It's reasonably funny, quite funny in parts, and the premise of the two leads trying to hunt down the future song from various older versions of themselves is entertaining. I actually wish that this had been used to a greater extent; perhaps the best, most Bill-&-Ted-esque moment in the film is when the two, desperate to ensure that their hostile future selves won't know what they're up to, put buckets on their heads and fall out a window in order to deliberately give their future selves unclear memories of the past. Most of the best moments come from these interactions with various future selves and how they try to trick each other, and I think more of this wouldn't have gone astray. As a number of people have stated, Alex Winter seems more familiar as Bill than Reeves, with his latter-day John Wick-esque action man persona, not seeming as comfortable as Ted; he just feels a little bit too sad, although he gets some funny moments arguing with his future self.

The other major aspect of the film involves the daughters, Thea and Billie, and while this is enjoyable in itself, in many respects the two characters are more sweet and likeable than they are laugh-out-loud funny, and I think it's a shame they weren't afforded more moments to be outright humorous. Every Bill & Ted film now has its cutaway story, the role occupied by Napoleon's hijinks in the first film and by Evil Robot Bill and Ted in the second, so it feels appropriate to do something similar here, and using the time machine for actual musical purposes makes sense, although with Mozart showing up in this one after Bach in Bogus Journey and Beethoven in Excellent Adventure I think they've run the full gamut of well-known Early Modern German musicians. It's nice that Bill and Ted discover that their daughters can lead the composition of the "song to unite the world", and the film benefits from a heartwarming and positive ending. And that's not hugely different from the originals, so, again, it's appropriate, although as I say it's more "nice" than particularly funny. Probably my only complaint is that I wish there had been a little more William Sadler as Death. It was nice for Ted's dad to show up once again.

I don't know how I've managed to write over one thousand words on Bill & Ted Face the Music, but there you go. It's a silly, sometimes funny, sometimes just "nice" film with some strong performances and some iffy visual qualities. That's about all it needed to be. Was it everything a third Bill & Ted film could have been? I don't even know if that's a meaningful question. I think it lived up to the existing standard of the original films. Surely for a sequel made nearly thirty years later that more or less constitutes success. We wouldn't necessarily suffer from more films which showed the potential for people to like each other and get along. Who knows? Maybe this will turn out to be timely and after everything people have gone through lately they might start seeing things more like the Prestons and Logans. Maybe we really have seen a little glimpse of the future. Maybe.

The Dreamlike, and "I'm Thinking of Ending Things"

SPOILERS for various things follow.

When, as I do, one watches a lot of weird horror films and a lot of David Lynch films, one becomes acclimatised to certain things. I'm always looking for the Weird Itch to be scratched, and lately I've only really been able to do so through literature, namely the weird fiction of Thomas Ligotti and Jon Padgett, and to a certain extent the postmodern oddness of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. So when I heard of the new Netflix release I'm Thinking of Ending Things described as functioning on "dream logic", I was immediately intrigued.

Those who've watched I'm Thinking of Ending Things know what happens in it, and those who haven't probably are best served by not reading any kind of plot summary, so I'll refrain from including one. Suffice to say it's unsettling and dreamlike, a narrative of eerie delusion not unlike the works of Lynch. However, the film it most reminded me of was 2017's Ghost Stories (not to be confused with A Ghost Story), in that a disturbing sequence of events is ultimately revealed to be an elaborate morbid reverie on the part of a comatose or dying person, a tradition dating back through things like Jacob's Ladder to the classic Ambrose Bierce short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and probably beyond.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things was almost everything I wanted it to be: intentionally disjointed, dreamlike, discomforting, a musing on the collapsing of identity and reality, as well as being stylish and powerfully-acted — right up until the end. To me, the final sequences somewhat damaged the ambiguity of everything that came before, as it becomes wholly apparent that the protagonist is actually a figment of another character's imagination, and that said character appears to have been living out either an elaborate fantasy throughout his life or just as he dies.

Such narrative conceits are entirely valid. There's nothing wrong with them, even if, considering the examples I've listed above, they're a little tired. Apparently the novel on which this is based makes this concept even more obvious, although I haven't read it. I'm generally reluctant to watch films based on novels without having read the novel first, but I felt like seizing the moment. In any event, they can make for quite moving ruminations on the nature of regret, self-loathing, and the fragility of a sense of self and presence in the world in the space of our short lives.

However, I can't help but feel that Dreamlikes, as I'm terming them, of this stripe, exist in a certain degree of contradiction with their presentation. The Dreamlike tends to be crafted from a consistent set of elements: a shifting sense of time, place and character, the intrusion of otherwise unconnected elements from waking life, the expression of a world which seems to only exist in the immediacy of experience, flowing into a new shape from moment to moment.

There is a reason why Lynch is a master of the Dreamlike, and why many other usages of the mode fall short: they never fully engage with this sense of immediacy. In so many Dreamlikes, things are symbolic, they are clues, they are hints to some terrible secret lurking just below the surface which, when pieced together, demonstrate to us the tragedy of human experience. And yet this in itself provides a somewhat comfortable narrative in which things ultimately make sense: the ghost our hero saw is actually the living person in the waking world trying to revive them, the rambunctious friend is actually a projection of suppressed elements of their own personality, and so on. Note the amusing parody of the conclusion of A Beautiful Mind at the end of I'm Thinking of Ending Things.

What a more Lynchian Dreamlike achieves is the much more unsettling and yet more accurate representation that, in dreams, things largely do not make sense. The "story" of a dream may have a certain direction, but is accompanied by or even assembled from largely disconnected and even random elements floating upon the surface of, or nested deep within, our minds ("We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along it."). And this is, in many respects, a more powerful reflection of reality, because, in many respects, reality does not make sense either.

Just as the dream assembles itself without our control (putting lucid dreaming aisde) from the countless images firing in our resting brains, life is pieced together through the interaction of an external world over which we, as beings with agency, have no external control, and an internal world, the organic jumble of lenses, sensory, psychological, cultural, biological, etc., through which we experience it. In most Dreamlikes, things ultimately come together: there is a stabilisation. But in reality, as in dreams, there is only constant transformation; Jon Padgett's narrator in his short story "Origami Dreams" observes that even death "is only a transition into yet another borrowed reality." This is why the ending of the third season of Twin Peaks has, to my mind, more allure than any narrative revealing a protagonist's dying or deluded imaginings (as another example of the latter, consider also Shutter Island), in that it evokes what I see as the true impact of the Dreamlike in general.

None of this is to say that I'm Thinking of Ending Things is not worth anyone's time. It's certainly worth watching for its own merits and arguments about loneliness, anxiety and fantasy. Ghost Stories, incidentally, is worth it for similar reasons. And I will also say that its use of the Dreamlike is effective in rendering a representation of the constantly rearranged, borderline delirious quality of deeply-involved fantasies and delusions. But things do ultimately settle into a state of equilibrium. I just wish that writers and directors utilising what I have here termed "the Dreamlike" were more willing to engage with what I see as the power it possesses that I feel only Lynch has truly tapped into in the cinematic field. Almost all of the Dreamlikes I've seen have used the mode to produce evocative, through-provoking, unsettling and challenging works, but the mode has the potential to go even further. There is always the inherent opportunity to exceed presenting difficult interpretations of reality, in order to query the notion of interpretability itself.

"LOOM"

When I was a kid, my dad "borrowed" and never gave back (i.e. stole) a CD of LucasArts games from his work, a disc for Macintosh computer featuring The Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, and, if I recall correctly, Pipe Dream. The first of these would go on to be one of my favourite games of all time (bested only by its own sequel). But another game on that disc was LOOM.

These days I think of myself as someone who knows LucasArts adventure games, but the truth is the games I really know are The Monkey Island series, and the other ones I've played and finished are the two Indiana Jones games (Last Crusade and Fate of Atlantis), Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and Grim Fandango. I've played a bit of, but never finished, Maniac Mansion and Zac McKracken, I don't think I've ever played The Dig, and the one time I tried to play the full version of Full Throttle its unintuitive (in my view) puzzles annoyed me so much that I stopped. But I always forget about LOOM.

I definitely played LOOM as a kid, albeit without the copy protection information allowing the player to leave the opening island, and saw m'colleague playing the rest of it later in my youth, but I'd never played the full thing until this last week in which I decided to sit down and experience the full adventure of Bobbin Threadbare of the Guild of Weavers. The game has a point-and-click interface in which Bobbin must use his magical distaff to interact with objects in the world by playing various "drafts", i.e. magic spells. There are no dialogue trees and there's no inventory.

The two things people generally say about LOOM is that it's easy and it's short. I'm not entirely sure of the first part — as with all LucasArts adventure games I feel like some puzzle solutions suffered from not clearly indicating that it was even possible to try certain actions, let alone accomplish them. The second part I definitely agree with. The game feels as if it has only just established its world and cast of characters when it rushes to its dénouement. Maybe it was because I was only familiar with the first section, but the opening Loom Island portion of the game, in which you are introduced to the distaff mechanic, I always assumed was a mere prologue to a much larger experience, but it isn't really. After you escape from Loom Island, the game only has one other "open" section, Crystalgard, which really only features a single puzzle, and it then becomes more or less a linear sequence of set pieces until the end.

So LOOM feels a little bit underdone, especially compared to the LucasArts games which came out around it, namely Indy 3 and Monkey 1. We don't get to spend much time with any characters, and the plot moves extremely quickly. The whole thing almost feels more like a proof-of-concept for a larger experience that never came to fruition, and I suppose given that it was designed with the idea of two sequels which were never developed this makes sense, but again the linearity of the second half of the game emphasises a sense of unfulfilled potential, in which there could have been much more room for experimentation.

Like all LucasArts games, one thing LOOM does well is atmosphere. Partly this is due to its Tchaikovsky-derived soundtrack and early-90s LucasArts' ever-pleasant pixel visuals. However, it's also enhanced by the world that it imagines. LOOM's world is truly fantasy, with much magic and no visible modern technology, but it doesn't just present itself as a pseudo-medieval pastiche; there are no kings, knights or bedraggled peasants, just guilds of different artisans who all use magic in their own unique ways: shepherds who render themselves invisible to stealthily guard their flocks, blacksmiths who craft weapons of exceptional quality, clerics who dabble in necromancy, glassmakers who make scrying spheres, and the weavers, who warp the very fabric of reality itself. The guilds have distinctive outfits, unique visual styles and appropriate names. Thus the game presents itself with a fantasy world which truly feels "fantastic", a world of high magic and possibility, not just medieval Europe with wizards. One thing I especially appreciate is that the game does not use invented languages or similar, instead creating names from suitable arrangements of English words.

Of course, in some respects, this refreshing potential only makes LOOM's short and simple nature feel more unsatisfying. However, I'm immediately intrigued by the bits of story we hear about the past; when did the Age of the Great Guilds come into being, and how? What were the First and Second Shadows that seem to have threatened the world previously? Maybe this is revealed in the audio drama which accompanied the game's EGA graphics release (I've listened and it doesn't add much), but it creates a sense of wonder, of a world we can both understand (the professions are relatable, albeit magical), and speculate about regarding its broader story. Perhaps it's a shame that there were never any sequels to LOOM, but equally perhaps there's no harm in it being left to fire a player's imagination thirty years later. That's also something to say in favour of the LucasArts adventures; unlike some games of their era, they're still actually playable without immense frustration. And perhaps with the benefit of hindsight we can interpret LOOM less as a sprawling puzzle game in the vein of Monkey Island or Myst, and more as an early graphics-driven example of a visual novel or interactive storytelling with a puzzle element, which of course has only become more and more common as game development tools have become more accessible.

With that in mind, then, I think LOOM is worth thinking about in two ways: firstly, it's a taste of what was to come in player-driven audio-visual experiences. Secondly, and strikingly, however, it's a good example of what fantasy could be and, in my experience, still rarely is: something truly distinctive and imaginative, while simultaneously having a grounded narrative. Imagine what could be made with today's tools yet with the simple, but powerful, spellbinding of LOOM? And thirty years later it feels like it's still waiting to be the creative inspiration it deserves to be.

Hindsight: A 2019 Cinematic Retrospective

If you'll excuse the inevitably rapid senescence of this contextual gag, back when you could go to the cinema I went and saw a bunch of films. Many, if not most, if not all of them, are your usual Hollywood fare. But let's begin at the beginning, shall we?

Films I didn't see in 2019

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

This didn't half bomb, did it? I only saw the first one shortly before the trailer for this one came out, and it looked reasonably amusing, I suppose. But then it came out and no one cared. I'm kind of curious as to why this did so badly at the box office, but all the articles I've read on the subject are rather wishy-washy. My gut instinct is that it was a combination of poor marketing and too great a distance of time between the first instalment and this. Market saturation has been blamed but I don't think anyone cared about Lego Batman or the Ninjago (?) movie. I think they just waited too long and didn't push hard enough. They probably didn't give the public enough of a reason to be interested in seeing the continuing adventures of Emmet, Wyldstyle and friends.

The Curse of La Llorona

I think I've given up on the spinoff parts of the Conjuring franchise after The Nun. Heard it was bad, didn't even bother. It's always directors with absolutely no experience doing these things, isn't it? Writers/script editors who are just dumped in the director's chair because James Wan and now David Sandberg are too busy making expensive films.

Dark Phoenix

Heard this was bad too, but admittedly I've never bothered to watch any of them at the cinema since either First Class or Origins: Wolverine, whichever came last. Might check it out one day if I'm really desperate for some X-Men. Wasn't this directed by the same guy who wrote X-Men 3, which was also about the Dark Phoenix storyline and was also bad? God knows what Fox were thinking there. "Give him another chance, eh?"

Annabelle Comes Home

See my remarks re La Llorona above. Even the presence of Wilson and Farmiga (which I assume was brief) couldn't entice me back. Plus they recast the role of Judy, yet the original actress is going to be in Conjuring 3, I believe. Hard to make it feel like an effective side story.

Zombieland: Double Tap

It's been obvious for years that a sequel to the original Zombieland was on the cards because the Facebook page has been maintaining a steady if low rumble of marketing for a long time. But in 2009 when the original came out I was 19 and the revived zombie apocalypse craze was at its height with the Left 4 Dead games and the like. Ten years later, my interest is just not really there.
Update: Yet I watched this a few days later. It's pointless, the cast surely all have better things to do, it has none of the freshness of the original, the plot is sloppy and lacking in structure, and virtually none of the alleged emotional moments are afforded any weight, yet I laughed and had a good time watching it. Perhaps it could have made more of the significance of the "evolved" zombies, of the relationships between the main characters, and the dramatic potential of the new characters, but evidently that wasn't really the point. Completely inessential, but surprisingly fun.

Films I wouldn't mind seeing

Ophelia (maybe)

I don't think this is actually meant to be that good, but it'd be nice to see Daisy Ridley in a more serious role.

The Lodge

The trailers looked a bit silly but it got good reviews. And even "okayish" horror films are often more engaging or at least more atmospheric than "okayish" films in bigger-budget genres. I hope to check this out at some point.

Update in 2020: Having now watched The Lodge, I can confirm that it was an entertaining watch overall, engaging in an interesting navigation of predictable and unpredictable genre elements and leaving you, as the viewer, simultaneously sympathetic for and horrified by the actions of both parties in the film's central conflict. It feels like they were going for a Hereditary-esque vibe while also intersecting different types of horror tropes with each other. In this way, appropriately enough given the comparability to Hereditary, it shares some qualities with Midsommar (see below) in terms of creating a constant sense of unease and disquiet through the use of disparate horror elements. Worth a watch.

Films I did see

The Favourite

Technically a 2018 film, but I saw it in 2019. Everyone knows it was good. I just want to point out what an odd rarity it is to watch a contemporary film in which the historical background is the War of the Spanish Succession. Not my favourite Lanthimos, that's probably The Killing of a Sacred Deer (although I haven't watched Dogtooth yet), but it lived up to the hype.

Captain Marvel

It was decent, like most of the Marvel superhero films. See my review here.

Us

Like a number of people who saw Us, I fall into the "I wish he hadn't revealed what was going on with the doubles" camp. Other than that I thought it was pretty thrilling, maybe even better than Get Out, although they're both very much cut from that quasi-Twilight Zone mould. Plus this one had Tim Heidecker in it.

Shazam!

More fun than Captain Marvel, if a bit sloppy. Full review here.

The Wind

This originally came out on the festival scene in 2018 but didn't get a cinematic release in the States until 2019 and only got a DVD release here. It's a sort of dual narrative, with a present storyline interspersed by flashbacks, and this structure is laboured somewhat excessively in my view, but the present narrative is a great highlight with a terrible, crushing feeling of isolation and paranoia. This was brought to my attention by the tie-in game by Airdorf, maker of the excellent FAITH series of horror games, and I'm glad to have seen it.

Avengers: Endgame

Meh. Full review here.

Tolkien

It's a tepid biopic without much focus or direction. Is it about Tolkien's romance with Edith, his friendship with G.B. Smith, his writing inspiration, or his experiences in the war? The film doesn't seem to be entirely sure, and doesn't deliver much insight about the man. A particularly obvious issue is the fact that the film leads up to him starting The Hobbit, which is to say the work of his with which general audiences are familiar, and completely omits the decades of narrative writing he did, admittedly mostly for his private interest at the time, beforehand. If anything, the story of The Fall of Gondolin is the most immediately relevant tale of Middle-earth for his early life because it's the one he wrote first, but the film either can't mention this because of copyright issues or won't because it's scared of alienating the general audiences who probably wouldn't have gone and seen this film anyway. His life simply wasn't that interesting, and the film avoids real issues, such as much of the influence of Catholicism on his life and how that affected his writing and relationships. I know lots of people have said that, but a lot of people who have said that are, I suspect, Catholics who want to indulge in conspiracy theories about why the Church would be passé in a light biopic (as if any of us need more reasons). But I'm not religious and am certainly not a Catholic, yet it still stood out to me. It's just not much of a film.

2040

This is my local item, a nice little documentary about how already-existing technologies, if implemented more effectively and widely, could drastically improve the Earth's environmental conditions right now. I do feel like it was a bit soft, putting too much onus on the community and not enough on governments and industry or business, but it also implies that that is an additional benefit, i.e. that community environmentalism might foster the, ahem, withering away of such things. I appreciated that.

Toy Story 4

I was intrigued about this being a story reuniting Woody with Bo Peep, but I didn't feel like this added anything new to Toy Story, which more or less wrapped itself up neatly in the near-perfect third film.

Spider-Man: Far From Home

This was pretty good, confirming Tom Holland as most likely the best cinematic Spider-Man and presenting an effective continuation of the "cinematic universe" after Endgame. Mysterio was handled appealingly and his illusions made for some engaging set pieces, and the balance between the Peter Parker stuff and the superhero stuff was funny and reasonably heartwarming. Probably better than Homecoming and almost certainly the best of the three cinematic universe pieces of the year.

Midsommar

It's good! But so was Hereditary, and while Hereditary felt in many ways like a moodier, classier take on the classic familial deal-with-the-Devil tale, Midsommar was a little too familiar having seen the original The Wicker Man not too many years ago. That being said, it's visually striking and the representation of passive-aggressive mind games and gaslighting does give it unique qualities. Probably the best stuff, however, is the opening and the occasional flashbacks to the horrific family annihilation sequence that starts the film.

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood

It's okay? Yeah, it's cool that Tarantino still has enough clout to do his own thing, and parts of this, such as the cowboy show scene, were fun, but I found chunks of it a little too slow for its own good, and in my head it's completely melting into the Coen Brothers' Hail, Caesar! from 2016. But I get that the film is good (and also bittersweet) simply because it exists, even if it didn't blow my mind.

Joker

Taxi Driver with clowns. See my full review here.

Jojo Rabbit

Taikia Watiti takes what sounds like an incredibly disturbing novel about the Holocaust and turns it into a relatively light-hearted and life-affirming comedy. This was a fun watch, but it suffers from, in my opinion, the general issue with Watiti's films, which is that they become unfocused. The first act, with Jojo at the camp, is strong and clear, but after he goes back home things become rather more fragmentary just as the narrative actually gets going, with Jojo negotiating between his Nazi brainwashing and the presence of a Jewish girl in the house. As I say, it's quite funny, and Stephen Merchant's scene is great. It just feels a bit sloppy, Scarlett Johansson is hardly giving her all, and the young lead feels a touch out of his depth.

The Lighthouse

Much like Midsommar to Hereditary, The Lighthouse is perhaps not quite as good as The Witch, although it's still very tense and stylish. It just perhaps plays its "the characters are insane" concept a little too heavy-handedly. Dafoe and Pattinson play off each other very well, and the depiction of isolation, drudgery, sordidness and "cabin fever" are well realised. Visually it's also very tight and suffocating, in almost a square aspect ratio and entirely in black and white. A touch overplayed, but gripping nonetheless. 

Marriage Story

"Being aliiiive! Beeing aliiiiive! Be-ing a-liiiiiiive!" Anyway, this is quite an engrossing character piece, although it's slow and, once again, I wasn't super impressed with Scarlett Johansson, but it was certainly the Adam Driver performance I preferred of the two I saw in 2019. In fact, Driver is the highlight in my view, although Laura Dern and Alan Alda both give memorable performances too. Not being either a divorcee or a child of divorce, I'm not sure this had the impact for me that some people have described, but it's still both moving and funny; however I think my attitude towards Joker might be applicable to this if you've seen Kramer vs. Kramer.

Knives Out

Whaddya know, Rian Johnson continues to be a good writer-director. Full review here.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

It's dumb and squandered the best parts of The Last Jedi to make what is basically a DC fiasco in a galaxy far, far away. My extended thoughts are here.

1917

Watch out for those wicked Jerries! It's like watching someone play a video game, the Germans are cartoonishly evil, and the characters are pretty thinly-written, but it's visually engaging, fairly historically accurate in terms of costumes, props and the like, and you do feel the men's desperation. Definitely one of the stronger war films of recent years, and good to see the First getting some attention rather than the Second.

So that brings us to...

Worst 2019 film I saw

Easy. The Rise of Skywalker. And not because I think "Disney ruined Star Wars" or something; I mean I overall like... half... of The Last Jedi, for goodness' sake. No, it's because Rise of Skywalker was sloppy, lazy and dramatically inert.

Best 2019 film I saw

Maybe Knives Out? Nothing stands out as a particular highlight; a number of strong items such as Midsommar and The Lighthouse, plus some better-than-average Hollywood fare such as Spider-Man and Shazam! are at least worth mentioning. I guess more good ones are better than a bunch of crap and only a single highlight, maybe. Maybe I just need to watch a wider variety of films.

 

Update: I might be that guy and award "best of 2019" to Under the Silver Lake for its engaging portrayal of paranoid conspiracy theorising on the part of an understimulated layabout, although I thought it was a little too long.