George Miller casts a spell with his gorgeous new grown-up fantasy

Plus a few other odds and ends in a weekend quickie

It’s Saturday, August 27th, and here’s where we are…

It’s been a pretty spiffy week, all things considered, but I can’t say why.

That’s the damnable thing about this business. There are incredibly long fuses on things before you can share them with people, and that’s not the way the Internet has trained me over the last few decades. The work I do here may get time-shifted a little bit, but not by much. I’m pretty much writing these newsletters like I’m Indiana Jones running from that giant boulder, doing my best to stay ahead of my various deadlines while also carving out some time for outside creative effort. This week, though, I’ve been allowing myself room to imagine a thing that makes me almost absurdly happy, and it’s a great feeling even if the odds of it ever being a thing are a zillion to one, and the work to get there even if it does happen is just at the very, very beginning of a very long process.

When I was younger and just starting out in this business, I had this attitude that I had a god-given right to have my work produced and distributed and anyone who stood between me and that goal was an obstacle, a jerk, a thing to be battered down and blown through. I’m 52. I’ve had enough experience now to see things very differently. Creative work is a privilege, and while I have always wanted to make films and television shows, no one owes me anything just because of that desire. This is a business built on two different pillars, and one of those pillars is personal relationships. Being right or doing something your way may be satisfying or important in the moment, but collaboration, by definition, involves more than one person, and it’s interesting how an experience like VOIR changed my entire perspective on what real collaboration feels like, and how it can make you crave more of the same.

image courtesy of Roll7

I’ve been writing. A lot. There have been a few days this week when it feels like I’ve had smoke pouring out of my ears. I’ve been playing Rollerdrome on the PS5 whenever I’ve wanted a break from whatever I’m working on, and it’s absurdly fun. The ‘70s cult classic Rollerball is obviously an influence here, but there are plenty of other ingredients that went into making this the eminently-replayable game it is. Anyone who has ever played Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1&2 will immediately recognize the basics of the game mechanics, but you add an art style reminiscent of Borderlands, a very cool slow-motion modifier that feels like the best version of bullet time from The Matrix, and a whole lot of fun weaponry and aggressive bad guys, and the result is pure high-speed fun. My favorite thing about it is how I can turn it on, play for 20 minutes, then turn it back off and feel like I got the entire experience. Yes, there’s a “campaign,” but it is not terribly difficult to play through once. The replay value here comes from mastering the gameplay and the tricks you can do and putting combos together and basically just getting good at doing ridiculously cool shit that no human being could actually do. It feels absurdly good when it all comes together, and if you dig deep into the settings and don’t care about posting your scores to leaderboards, there are some very cool modifiers available that turn you into an absolute superhero.

Speaking of superheroes, I spent the morning watching Samaritan on Prime Video. Filmed in 1994, the film was shelved until a new company bought the rights as part of a larger package. They restored it then sold it to Amazon where you can now…

image courtesy of Prime Video

… wait, my research says that is completely wrong and Samaritan is in fact a brand-new movie. But that can’t possibly be right. This feels like it was made at a point where Meteor Man was the cutting edge in superheroes on film. This feels like the movie-within-a-movie where they want you to knowingly laugh at how ridiculous it is. Beyond that, the entire thing is built around a twist that is telegraphed in the first twenty seconds of the film, even though they make you sit through most of the next 102 minutes pretending you don’t know exactly where they’re going. There’s no real chemistry between Sylvester Stallone and his young co-star, and that’s a big issue, but it’s like number seventy-two on a much longer list of things that don’t work. This one’s a big bag of yikes.

I read a lot, mostly at bedtime as I’m trying to wind down, and this week, I ran into a book that utterly surprised me. I read all kinds of things, both fiction and non-fiction, but I certainly have my interests that I actively indulge, and one of those is hard-boiled crime fiction. With The Devil Takes You Home, Gabino Iglesias has crafted a beautiful heartbroken noir story about a father who loses his daughter to a sudden, awful illness, then loses his marriage to his own weakness and grief. Drowning in debt, he’s given a chance to earn some money doing some very bad things. It’s a simple set-up but a powerhouse execution. It’s a stunning exercise in voice, deeply felt and completely unnerving. As Mario makes his decisions, each one taking him a few steps further away from the light, there’s this growing sense of dread and moral compromise. I read several books a week, but this one’s going to stick to me for a while. It feels genuinely doomed, and even as I read a few other things after it, this is the one I kept thinking about over and over.