Wool

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There’s this show on Apple+[1] called Silo. The year it came out (2023 maybe?), I called it the best sci-fi on TV, and I stand by that assessment. A long time later, albeit by my standards pretty rapidly, I’ve picked up and read the first book in that trilogy (which covers the first two seasons of the show).

Wool tells the story of a, well, a silo. It is underground, some 140 or so levels into the earth as measured from the up top, through the mids, and into the down deep. It contains a large but necessarily limited number of people. They all have jobs (porters who run things up and down the silo, mechanical who keeps the generator running, farmers, doctors, a sheriff, IT, even a mayor), and eventually everyone in every job has a shadow, learning to do that job from the previous generation. It is a perfect closed system, and nobody ever leaves.

Well, that isn’t quite true. There’s an exit, right next to the jail cells in the sheriff’s office on the top level. The exit leads up a ways to the surface, where there’s a door to outside, and cameras in all directions surround the door. Those cameras show an utterly destroyed landscape in greys and browns, with constant windblown particles, constant rushing clouds in what might otherwise be called a sky, a decayed city full of what are no longer skyscrapers in any useful sense off in the distance, but with a ridge that prevents view of anything nearby. The silo is in a depression, is what I mean. The view from these cameras is shown in the nearby top-level cafeteria, a warning of what leaving the silo would mean. And yet, if anyone asks to leave, they are not only allowed to do so, but by law must. The only caveat is that they are asked to clean the cameras when they go out, since the view is forever being worsened by the blowing dust. For this, they are given a square of wool. Anyone who goes out does clean, even those who swear they will not, and anyone who goes out dies within minutes, soon enough to become a part of that pre-ridge landscape, a warning that it is not yet and may never be safe to go out.

I’ve already said rather a lot, so I’ll stop here. Either that description grabs you and makes you want to know where a story would go in this setting, or it does not. But I have a few pieces of additional commentary relative to the show. The main one is, for better or worse, the voice of Juliette and the voice of Deputy Marnes are just irrevocably overwritten into the voice of their characters in the book. I think probably for better, in both cases. The second is that most of the changes made for the show were probably improvements, even if they stretched out the story a bit. (Plus, some of them might turn out to be due to retcons for future books I’ve yet to read.)

Lastly… well, this one is complicated. I must say first of all that Wool is a complete story in itself. If nothing else had been written, I would be completely satisfied by its ending. That said, in discussions online about the TV show, I was lambasted for not really caring what was the source of the disaster that led to these people being trapped in this silo. Like zombies in that flavor of apocalypse, the blasted landscape is setting. Who cares why there are zombies? There just are, the story is influenced by the setting, the setting is not a part of the story. And honestly, I stand by that assessment. This book being a complete story in itself just proves to me that I was right.

However.

I will say that the book managed something the TV show did not, which is to make me interested in finding out how we got here after all. Cleverly, therefore, book two is all about that, and I suppose I’ll read it pretty soon.

[1] the streaming service whose name I may or may not have correct

Death of a Unicorn

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Last night, I saw a sneak preview for Death of a Unicorn[1] at the Alamo Drafthouse[2], which comes out today or Friday and so I must quickly review, lest it all have been in vain. Unfortunately, despite the straightforward spoiler of the title, it is somewhat difficult to describe.

Okay. You know Mary Poppins? I’m sure there’s a better example, but I cannot think of one. Anyway, if you leave Mary Poppins out of the movie, it’s fundamentally a movie about a dad[3] who spends too much time at work focused on his career, when really all his kids want is more time with him, not the things he provides for them by working so much? Paul Rudd plays about as far against type as I can imagine in the role of that dad, and his nebbishy helplessness really makes it hard to believe, even though the character is written in a way where it could still work. It’s not to say he was bad in the role, just that I think the casting was too far of a stretch.

Anyway, he and his thankfully college-aged daughter Jenna Ortega are travelling to a corporate retreat where Rudd is hoping to get the promotion that will, after a few years, have them set up for life where she’ll never want for anything ever again, and it’s clear Ortega has heard this song and dance before, because she could not be more done with it. And this “will he or won’t he” family drama schtick might easily have been the entire movie, except that while driving through the nature preserve toward their destination, distracted by a fight and allergies, he plows into a little white horse crossing the road.

Well, okay, it’s not a horse.

A handful of other events ensue, and also the remainder of the cast is introduced, and now the movie is instead (also? probably also) about what the several characters will do with the situation that has fallen into their laps. Have they a panacea? A miracle that will change the world? A way to get rich beyond any dream of avarice? Or, based on Ortega’s research into a pretty cool series of real life tapestries, do they simply have a problem?

One of the genres into which this movie falls should provide a hint.

[1] Eagle-eyed subscribers to this site will note that I did not see Captain America 4, about which fact I have a pretty complicated set of emotions. But it’s probably indicative of something. Especially since the odds of another date night before it leaves theaters is…. low.
[2] Side note from the half hour of cool random film geekery: did you know that the Three Stooges made a movie (well, probably a short, but I don’t know for sure) about traveling to Venus to meet a unicorn, and also it was a musical, and also it was in 1959??? I knew Moe lived into the 1970s, but I had no idea they were still working that late! …and still in black and white that late, though if it were made for TV I guess that would not be weird after all.
[3] I wonder if they’ve ever made this movie about a mom. I think they have not.

Lucky (2020)

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I don’t know that I exactly liked Lucky, but I respect the amount of catharsis it must have provided for the writer / star, Brea Grant, and probably for a non-trivial number of people who have watched it.

So there’s this self-help author whose premise is Go It Alone, ie how to fix yourself instead of relying on someone else to fix you, and that premise was a best selling big hit with multiple printings, but now the publisher is not sure if they even want her next book, plus she doesn’t especially have one. Okay, fine, but then at night in bed with her husband, she sees someone outside, and he’s very blasé about how it’s the guy who comes to kill them every night. She is understandably confused about this, so he calls her a drama queen and leaves.

And then the dude comes back. And keeps coming back. Unraveling what the actual hell is going on constitutes the remainder of the movie. We learn more about May, more about her husband, a little more about her career, and a lot more about how capable she is at self-defense / how incapable the dude is of killing her. It’s sometimes pretty funny, usually mind-bending, eventually over the top in a way that was probably not necessary to get the point across, and ultimately a little opaque right at the end, post- the Message Received part.

I think the best chance this has to be a good movie instead of a useful one is if it was a critique of her self-help premise, in addition to the rest of what it was, which was a metaphor about the lived experience of American women. But I’m not 100% sure if it actually was both, since, like I said, it’s a little opaque. Probably it lost its way making sure we got the metaphor part.

All in all, I preferred Promising Young Woman.

The Gorge

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A few days ago, before I got entirely sick, I watched The Gorge, whose preview I had been intrigued by while watching, I don’t know, probably an episode of Severance? I cannot say with any certainty if it was entirely a popcorn flick or if the fault is my being sick, but yesterday when I was preparing to write this interview, I had no idea what I had watched, only that I was pretty sure it was, y’know, something.

So there’s this guy who’s a sniper who is completely detached from his life and his job, just adrift, you know? And Sigourney Weaver offers him the chance to get away from it all via a year-long, top secret, completely isolated assignment. Like, too secret for her to even explain it, but when he gets there (via parachuting and a several mile hike), the guy he’s replacing is there to explain the deal.

Here, then, is the deal. Two towers, on opposite sides of a gorge. He is on the western side, representing the countries of the west, who have been tasked to guard the gorge from there. Also, there’s an agent in the eastern tower representing the countries of the east, who presumably has been offered the same deal, but since the two towers are not allowed to have contact, it’s impossible to be sure. In the gorge is… something. Perpetually clouded, but things crawl out sometimes, and the whole mission is to prevent them from escaping. Premise: set.

Execution: well, mostly good? Lots of exciting action set pieces, yay. Anya Taylor-Joy as the eastern agent was just fun all the way around. The main dude was… well, okay, more than a little wooden, and I could not decide if it was the character or the actor, so that’s at least better than it could have been on average, but honestly a wooden character isn’t much fun, either, so. Effects were, I was going to say A+, but all special effects these days are either great or (rarely) abjectly terrible, such are these days of the future.

Mostly worth checking out, with one caveat: the last line of the film is just an awful stinker. Be warned!

Blind Rage

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Since October, I have been buying cheap (or often free) Kindle books. Like, 99c for seven books kind of thing. I’ve spent maybe $30, and increased my digital library by hundreds of titles. Are most of them garbage? Okay, probably. But it gives me something to read when I don’t have anything but my phone handy.

The first of these books that I’ve actually read is Blind Rage, the first volume of an eight book series called Under the Breaking Sky. It steals heavily from Cell, and is otherwise about what you’d expect out of a not quite zombified airport thriller. Set in Denmark and with maybe five or so main characters, it tells the story of the day a weird hole appeared in the sky that causes anyone who looks at it to go blind and enraged, such that they hunt down anyone they can hear, to rip them apart or bash them to pieces. (But not each other.) Then the thing in the sky goes away, until it comes back again 12 hours later. And again. And again.

So, I lied earlier though. A small percentage of the population is unaffected. Most of the main characters are this type, and the book (and probably the series) is entirely about them trying to stay alive, and maybe eventually trying to figure out how this is even happening? Beats me, and I’m not holding my breath. It’s an apocalypse, I’m just a long for the ride.

Körkarlen

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And then there are some nights when you sit down to watch a silent Swedish film that is spiritually ripping off A Christmas Carol, but if the Ghost of Christmas Future is the only one who showed up to berate Scrooge, and if Tiny Tim were a consumptive self-deluded Salvation Army worker.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and Sister Edit is dying, while David Holm is getting drunk in a cemetery. What do these scenes and people have in common? This informs the entire plot of The Phantom Carriage, except for the part about the carriage itself, which we are notified in Act I is driven around all year helping Death to reap souls, by whoever died closest to midnight the previous year. (If nobody dies on New Year’s Eve, I think the previous person keeps the job? This doesn’t seem a likely scenario, however.)

At first, as per my cheeky but fair summary above, I did not consider this to be a horror movie. Just because there’s a horse ghost and a guy in a hood with a sickle, it was still mostly a drama about bad decisions. But somewhere in the second half, it goes dark, and it goes hard, and I gotta say, in the end I was impressed. Between the depth of darkness and the (for 1921) technical prowess of the special effects, I can understand how this has turned into a classic’s classic. (You know, people in the industry love it, people outside the industry never heard of it. Like the anecdote about how only 300 people heard The Velvet Underground’s first album, but every one of those people went on to form a successful band.)

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

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In December, Game Pass got a big Day One release[1], Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. This is a graphics intensive first-person puncher in which Indy races a rival Nazi archaeologist to solve the mystery of why Vatican giants are stealing cat mummies. Aside from the punching and the field archaeology, it’s mostly a puzzle and collections game, which is a style I’ve been enamored of for most of my adult life, and then I’ve been enamored of Indiana Jones for even longer.

So you can imagine how cool it was to see the introductory scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark in a somewhat controllable scenario, before the actual game (set a year later in 1937) kicked off. From there, it’s all a Nazi-punching, globetrotting, graverobbing good time, interspersed with cut scenes that really could have come right out of an unfilmed script.

Plus, there are definitely plots left unresolved enough for a sequel or at least a substantial DLC release. …which they might make me pay for, but I hope not! Especially because I might fall for it, you know? This thing was like catnip, as evidenced by my 100% completion and 970 of 1000 gamerscore points over the course of a month and a half. I basically never finish AAA games anymore, but, here we are.[2]

Downsides: I can only think of one, which is the game started nagging me to move forward / how to move forward, much too early. I like the idea of the helpful voice, whether internal or external, telling you to investigate the thing you might have not been able to find or understand. But wait like 5 minutes, not 30 seconds. (And then the time I really did need help, there was no help forthcoming, which is also sort of a problem when you’re nagging so hard the times I don’t.)

[1] This is to say, for those out of the loop, it arrived on Game Pass the same day it became available to purchase outright.
[2] Continuing to help: DLC = DownLoadable Content, ie expansions instead of sequels; gamerscore is points that mean functionally nothing that you get for completing main or side plots, or doing difficult or implausible things that the designers thought were funny. (Bragging rights, maybe? But functionally, worthless.) AAA = I don’t know what exactly, just big budget big studio or something,

The Curator

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A book has been sitting on my nightstand instead of my to-read shelf, for somewhere between one and a half to two years. Long enough that the top part of the pages are yellowed from the sunlight through the window behind my nightstand. I got it from someone for my birthday or Christmas, and I honestly don’t know who or why. Did I put it on a wishlist? I cannot rule this out, but I don’t know why I would have. And yet I cannot think of another reason it would have appeared, and nobody has asked me about it in the meantime.

But appear, it did.

The Curator, by Owen King[1], tells the story of a fictionalized probably European, probably 19th Century independent city[2] in the throes of revolution. See, the rich but liberal students at the University, after an inciting event, have taken it into their heads to free the extremely poor people in “the Lees” from their oppressors among the nobility, and the attempt is astonishingly successful, except… now what?

In the midst of these happenings, a maid lately employed by the university named Dora finds an opportunity to look into her older brother’s mysterious final moments, from when he died during her childhood, by becoming the owner of the newly vacated Society for Psykical Research, in which he had spent some time before that death and the complete failure of her family’s fortunes. Alas for her plans, it has burned completely to the ground, one odd doorframe in the middle notwithstanding, and so she becomes the Curator of the National Museum of the Worker next door, instead.

The remainder of the book, in a meandering style that the jacket copy accurately yet somehow non-pejoratively calls Dickensian, explores her new museum, and a city and its inhabitants in rudderless transition, and the mostly poor folk religion surrounding the many, many cats in the city, and the strange disappearances that are beginning to mount up, and the Morgue Ship that used to reside in the harbor as a penny dreadful curiosity until it got swept up in the inciting event I mentioned earlier, whereupon it disappeared, except rumor has it all those disappeared people are being abducted onto the ship as a part of their disappearance. Which is ridiculous, of course.

By way of recommendation, I must say that it’s been a while since I’ve been so invested in the fate of a new-to-me character, and almost all of the characters had something endearing to offer. I’m somewhat surprised I haven’t seen more noise around this one.

[1] of the Maine Kings. You might know him from his collaboration on Sleeping Beauties.
[2] Or I suppose it’s the capital of a fictionalized country? On the one hand, it never seems like more than a city and surrounding estates, but on the other, it has a king. Those kinds of details hover in the no-man’s land between sparse and irrelevant.

Mama (2013)

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If I remember correctly, the random elements of this week’s movie[1] were “witch” and “Latin-American”. Mama is definitely a Latin-American movie, sort of. It was produced by Guillermo del Toro on the strength of a two minute film by a guy from let’s say Colombia, about two young girls who, upon realizing that Mama is back, quickly plan their escape. It is easily findable on YouTube and well worth the watch. That said, it’s not immediately apparent to me that anyone from that short is attached to this movie, and, well, del Toro or not, that’s problematic? Also, not a witch to be found, although there’s certainly a witchy vibe.

Anyway.

After the 2008 housing market crash, this investment firm guy kills his business partners, and then kills his (ex?) wife, and then takes his daughters (ages 3 and 1) on the run. All three completely disappear, but the dude’s brother never gives up looking for the girls, and they are found 5 years later, living ferally in a cabin in the woods near where the father had a spin out in the ice car accident.[2]

So the brother and his thoroughly not into kids rock band girlfriend win custody over the protests of the dead mom’s sister, and work to rehabilitate them from feral to, you know, whatever 6 and 8 year old girls are on any given day of the week. And I know what you’re thinking: this could be any family drama. What you don’t know is that someone or something, which they call “Mama”, was in the woods with them this whole time. And just because they left the woods, that doesn’t mean she’s done with them yet. …or with anyone who stands in her way. Spooky!!

I did not hate the way this ended, and I expected to. Which is not low praise.

[1] Reference: the week in question is 4/12/2021
[2] To be clear, the car is found the same day as the girls; it’s not like people knew about this in advance but never glanced around.

Fast & Furious

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Finally, after one side movie that was only a sequel for one character and one side movie that was basically its own thing (and for no apparent reason), The Fast and the Furious has a true sequel with all of the original characters involved[1]! It is, how you say, about time.

The wildly original title, Fast & Furious, conceals a halfway decent plot. Paul Walker has been reinstated to law enforcement, as part of the FBI. (Or maybe he was in the FBI in the first place? Impossible to know.) He is honestly still no better of an FBI guy than he is an actor, even though five years have passed in the story world and eight I suppose in the real world. But that’s okay, because he can still drive. Vin Diesel is still on the run from the law and still using fast cars to jack trucks. So nothing much has changed, despite the two prior movies that would pretend a lot has happened. I’m not saying they are eminently skippable, but… oh, wait, no, I totally am saying that. It’s the central thesis of this paragraph, in fact.

“Halfway decent plot,” I said. So, after being on the run for all these years, Diesel’s Dominic is back in LA investigating the murder of a close friend. Meanwhile, Walker’s Brian is investigating a Mexican drug lord who is trafficking a lot of heroin across the border, somehow. They are suddenly thrown together when Dom’s murder and Brian’s infiltration end up at the same street race audition to be one of the drivers for the drug lord’s smuggling operation.

Can they get hired so their investigations can continue? Can they get over the sins of the past and learn to work together again? Can they stop destroying so very many fast cars? Can Brian finally seal the deal with Dom’s sister? Can Dom seal the deal with Gal Godot[2]? Oh, right, and can they solve their cases?

The answers to these questions might surprise you, but, well, I bet they don’t. That’s okay, though, as they are mostly not the point. The point is car stunts and an incremental progression in the lives and relationships of these characters. And, the movie finally delivers on that second thing, in a way that episodes 2 and 3 decidedly did not. Hooray!

[1] Okay, that was 2009, which is as of this writing a pretty long time ago. But it is “finally” in my personal chronology. So.
[2] In what is essentially her first role. Who knew?