Is there an echo in here?

Similar ideas in separate projects are the focus of this Friday's Free-For-All

It’s Friday, January 15, and here’s where we are…

Last Friday’s newsletter was a freebie and it was absolutely jam-packed. This week was largely about preparing things for the year ahead and getting some groundwork laid to be able to publish things for you guys in the weeks and months ahead. I’ve got a lot of stuff cooking for you right now, and as a result, I’ve been thinking about my workspace and how it affects my workflow.

The New Year is an arbitrary reset date for all of us. There’s no specific reason I should be any different as a person on January 1st than I was on December 31st, but we largely embrace the cultural idea that each year is an individual thing, a new opportunity. I think that’s because the idea of redemption and renewal is hardwired into us. It is a deeply held ideal, something we believe in because it gives us hope for ourselves. We want to believe that we can make a choice that will impact us in a positive way. We want to believe we’re never too old. We want to believe that things can be better tomorrow and that yesterday is not some peak we will never see again.

I believe that in my own life. I struggle with it, but I believe it. My entire life is built around cycles, ups and downs, highs and lows, and managing the ride between them has been the only way to navigate any of it. I think of who I was at 40 and who I am at 50 and the gulf between those two people is startling. At 40, I told myself I was happy and content with things, but it’s pretty clear that the way things unfolded proved that wasn’t true. By the middle of the decade, my marriage was over and I was in the worst physical shape of my life, catastrophically fat and unable to sleep, broken in all sorts of ways. Now I’m in better shape than I was at 30, I’m in a stable and loving relationship that has healed parts of me I didn’t realize were broken, and my kids are happy and healthy. Professionally, things are still turbulent, but I’m here. I’m working. I’m doing something I feel good about doing, and there are new doors opening even if others stay frustratingly closed.

Part of managing all of this is how you view something. When we rented this apartment five years ago, our landlord told us there was a room that was an “extra” room. It’s a weird apartment anyway, part of a building that was all one piece at one point, and it’s clearly been reconfigured differently for each of the four units in the building. We’ve got three bedrooms… one for my girlfriend and me, one for the boys, and one for our office. In addition, there was a room that opened off of the office, and since we moved in, we’ve always used that as the TV room. We were told upfront that at any time, they might decide they needed that room and they might annex it for our neighbor.

The other shoe finally dropped. Our landlord reached out to us right after Thanksgiving to tell us they were going to need the room and to ask us what kind of timetable we could follow to get everything out. As of about four days ago, all of the construction is finished and it’s like that room never existed. Rearranging the rest of the apartment to fit this new configuration of things is one of those things that could be very frustrating or annoying or upsetting, but we decided to embrace the moment and lean into it as a chance to put together something better than what we had. We replaced some furniture, we upgraded the TV, we had it wall-mounted, and we’re rearranging the living room to make it more inviting overall.

As a result, movie night is already very different, and my workspace is radically different, and it’s an adjustment. The older I get, the clearer it is to me how important my habits are for my productivity. If I’m going to get things done, I need to be in the right environment, and it’s exciting to redesign that environment as part of the start of this new year. For me, comfort isn’t about luxury; it’s about having what I need and about keeping the noise out. We all define comfort differently, though, and we all have a different checklist of what we need to feel truly safe or secure.

Today, let’s look at a double-feature of films about people who are forced to eschew comfort and the familiar for some reason, as well as two TV shows that do the same thing. I don’t think any of these people were directly inspired by each other, but I do find it fascinating the way certain ideas will land on pop culture at the same time from a variety of voices. It happens all the time, and it makes you wonder how people end up taking these radically different routes to somehow end up at the same place.

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IS THERE AN ECHO IN HERE?

Paul Greengrass began to paint himself into a difficult stylistic corner as a filmmaker after the success of his Bourne films. I went to a test screening of Green Zone at Greengrass’s invitation, and afterward, I stood around with him and a handful of other people to talk about how successful he’d been at conveying some of the film’s key information. It’s easy to boil everything he was doing at that point down to the description “shaky-cam,” but there was obviously way more going on in those aesthetic decisions than just shaking the camera, and he was definitely feeling on that particular night like he had gone too far and managed to confuse his audience.

Greengrass has always been interested in trying to capture the feeling of something in very stark emotional terms, and he’s leaned heavily on the visual language of documentaries in doing so. I get that. There’s something about watching footage shot during a crisis or a battle or a disaster that is compelling because all of the careful consideration is gone, out the window, unimportant. There is an urgency to simply capturing the details of what is happening, conveying some sense of the reality of it. Using that energy to shoot a concussive James Bond-style action film was bold and innovative when he did it, and it showed real vision for the producers to hire the guy behind Bloody Sunday for a Bourne sequel in the first place. United 93 was the perfect place to deploy this approach, and it managed to perfectly capture the way everyone felt on the actual day of 9/11, chaotic and raw.

That night after Green Zone screened, though, he seemed unsure about how far he’d gone, and I could see him already considering whether he could push it any further. By the time Captain Phillips came out, it felt like he’d reconsidered and eliminated much of the chaos from his visual language, refining his style so that there’s still a rough-hewn immediacy but there is also a sense of a considered visual plan, and there are times he is willing to slow down and let things linger now. Even his return to the Bourne series felt like he had reigned himself in considerably in the nine years between entries.

News of the World is downright sedate by Greengrass standards and better for it. Based on a novel by Paulette Jiles, it tells the story of a man who finds a young girl alone in the Western wilderness who embarks on a dangerous journey with her to get her to her family, no matter what. I watched it two days before I watched The Midnight Sky, George Clooney’s new film about a man who finds a young girl alone in the Arctic Circle who embarks on a dangerous journey with her to warn off a space station crew who are trying to return to Earth. Seeing the two of them back-to-back was very strange, especially considering how radically different the settings of the film are but how much the two of them have in common in other ways.

News of the World is set in the days just after the Civil War, and the America that Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) travels is still tender from its recent conflict. Kidd reads newspapers as a kind of public performance, charging people ten cents a seat to listen to him put together the most interesting or entertaining headlines of the day. While he’s on the road, he encounters Johanna (Helena Zengel), a young girl who is dressed in Kiowa clothing. He ends up charged with transporting her to her last surviving family members, since her parents are dead and she’s been living among the Kiowa for some time, and on the road, the two of them have to learn not only to communicate but also to trust one another.

image courtesy of Netflix

The Midnight Sky is also based on a novel, Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, and Mark L. Smith’s adaptation is really two different films playing out in reaction to each other. Or at least, it seems that way for much of the running time, and when it finally comes together, it’s meant to land a major emotional punch. The problem is that Clooney’s film feels like it wants to be a giant spectacle and an intimate character study in equal measure and neither one of them fully connects. Augustine Lofthouse (Clooney) is a scientist working at an Arctic base during a global catastrophe. He tries to contact the Aether, a deepspace exploratory craft that’s returning from Jupiter, to warn them not to come back to the Earth. His base’s antenna is too weak, though, and he has to head to a different base through insane conditions. Just before he leaves, he finds a girl named Iris who can barely communicate with him, and he has to take her along.

These films both depend in large part on the chemistry between the characters, and here’s where News of the World wins in a walk. Helena Zengel gives a tremendous, natural performance, and Hanks is great at making room for her to shine. They build a real relationship and their connection pays off in a profound emotional conclusion. You’ll see it coming but it’s earned. The opposite is true in The Midnight Sky. Because of the way Clooney stages his giant action set pieces, everyone (including Clooney) ends up feeling more like a prop than an actual character. When the film does lay out its emotional cards, it still feels mechanical, like we’re getting the conclusion to a riddle, not something that’s going to move us. The Midnight Sky isn’t a bad screenplay; you can clearly see what each piece is meant to do and each individual piece is well-built. But taken as a whole, there’s no spark. It never quite comes to life or coheres properly. It just remains a collection of set pieces in search of something to make us care.

Meanwhile, the impression I have of News of the World isn’t about the individual action scenes or the spectacular scale of them but about the overall emotional impact. Hanks and Greengrass clearly have a strong collaborative bond and Greengrass is well aware of what Hanks brings to the table as a film icon and as an actor. Those are different things, too. Hanks could coast on his iconic weight if he wanted at this point, but as an actor, he remains deeply engaged with the process, and he does a great job charting Kidd’s emotional journey with Johanna. In a way, he’s playing a Scrooge story here, and much of the film depends on us believing that he gradually warms up to this girl and then eventually sees that his life is incomplete without her, and Hanks sells that transformation completely at each stage. I also think when you see a great performance from a young actor, part of that is because of the adults they are acting with and how much they make space for their younger, more inexperienced collaborators. Hanks and Zengel genuinely connect, but I don’t feel like the same is true of Clooney and Caoilinn Springall. Springall’s fine and does everything she’s asked to do, but her character is too thin and the film is too big. She gets lost in it. Because Clooney’s film is all built around a narrative trick, the emotional punch they are trying to land is more about the audience doing a bunch of math than simply watching something unfold, and that’s always trickier.

I will say this for The Midnight Sky… the photography is absolutely breathtaking. Clooney shot the film using large-format Arri Alexa 65 cameras, and it is stunning. I look at the space sequences and it feels like Clooney’s never quite shaken the experience of working on Gravity. When you look at his work as a filmmaker, it’s clear that he has paid close attention to the filmmakers he’s worked with. It is also clear that being smart and determined doesn’t always result in a film that lives and breathes.

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SAVE WAYNE

I love Wayne.

If you’re like me, you may not have heard of Wayne during its initial run on YouTube. Like Cobra Kai, this was a scripted series that was supposed to help turn YouTube into a viable home for scripted programming. And, like Cobra Kai, the show has now found a secondary home where viewers can catch up with the series if they’re interested.

Cobra Kai had a built-in advantage, though. There was an existing property, an existing audience, and while that doesn’t automatically mean something will work, it’s a head-start. With Wayne, there was no head start and there’s no easy hook you can use to explain it to people. It’s only ten episodes, and by the end of the ten, I found myself feeling fiercely protective of what I’d just watched. I have no idea if Amazon would still be willing to pick this show up for more episodes, but I have a feeling if more people knew the show existed and actually saw it, the desire to see those episodes would definitely be there. It’s just a matter of making the audience aware that it exists.

The series, created by Shawn Simmons, tells the story of a kid who just can’t let shit go. If you just judge Wayne at first glance, he seems like a troubled kid, always getting in fights, constantly at the center of problems. But that’s mainly because he can’t resist the impulse to wade in and set things right when he sees someone picking on somebody. Mark McKenna plays Wayne and it’s one of those perfect matches of actor and role. He’s a scrappy little bastard and you can’t help but root for him. The same is true of Ciara Bravo as Del. Del’s “the girl.” She’s the one who stops Wayne in his tracks, the one who suddenly gives him a direction in life, and she’s also the one he runs away with when his father dies. She looks like someone made a Funko Pop of teenage Valerie Bertinelli, and between the two of them, they’ve got enough bad attitude to fuel a dozen ‘70s punk bands.

Wayne’s father sounds like the exact same kind of ill-tempered sonofabitch as Wayne, driven by a decent heart underneath a bruised exterior that many people don’t understand. By the time we meet him at the start of the show, he’s been sick for a long time, and Wayne’s anger has just been building and building and building. He can’t do anything about the illness that’s killing his father, so he rights all the other little wrongs he can actually do something about, damn the consequences for himself. As the show kicks off, Wayne meets Del as she’s selling cookies door to door, and almost immediately, he asks her to be his girlfriend. He is all aboard right away, and when his father dies, Wayne decides to go looking for his mother, who left the two of them when Wayne was very young, taking his father’s prized Trans-Am with her. He wants the car back, and when we see the car, it’s being driven by her stepson, a turd in a tracksuit played with disturbing glee by Francesco Antonio, setting him on a collision course with this unstoppable force named Wayne.

image courtesy of Amazon Prime

I really can’t say enough good things about the work by McKenna and Bravo. Young lovers on the run is an entire genre of film, and much of what makes the great stuff great is about that intangible connection between two people onscreen. These two have it. These are good kids. You care about these kids. You just want good things for these kids. Even when Wayne’s kind of awful or Del’s wildly abrasive or the two of them make terrible choices, you just can’t help but love them both and love them together.

The show also thrives because there’s a terrific community of actors around them. Mike O’Malley has never been better than he is here as Wayne’s principal, a man who gives a shit about this hard-headed asshole of a kid despite all evidence he should stop. I am equally fond of Stephen Kearin’s brilliantly strange work as Sergeant Stephen Geller, a cop who thinks Wayne needs a chance and outwardly seems about as threatening as a half-glass of warm buttermilk. By the time the final episode ended, I was ready to watch an entire show about this guy as well as another full season of Wayne and Del.

Problem is, I don’t think I’m going to get that chance. Doesn’t seem that way, anyhow. You can tell when a show is catching on in secondary life. There’s a buzz around it. You see mentions of it everywhere. It seems like it’s spreading. Ted Lasso is doing that right now, and it’s so gratifying to watch people discover this show that I was ranting about like a madman while it was actually being released. I figured that would happen with Lasso. They just started production on a second season and I know for a fact they’ve already written a full third season as well. That show managed to slowly but surely build momentum as a cultural reference, and I think when it returns, it will be much bigger.

With Wayne, I’m not seeing that chatter. I haven’t heard other people talking about it. I’m honestly not even sure why we tried it. There are so many streaming services that we browse, and I was vaguely aware of the involvement of producers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese. Beyond that, I didn’t know anything. I saw a poster for it and was baffled by what they were trying to sell, and then watched one trailer. Introducing a new show into the rotation with my girlfriend is always a matter of trial and error. I want to pick things we can watch together and both enjoy and be genuinely interested in. She’s willing to watch some stuff that is darker or more intense, but that’s not the primary type of thing she enjoys. She’s not into horror movies or weird for the sake of weird. Ted Lasso? A perfect show to share with her. Somebody Feed Phil? Fantastic. The Stand? Nope. Not at all.

That’s fine. I like curating different ways for different people. When I’m not sure about a show or when I’m walking into it cold myself, I like to watch with her because you learn about what gets someone interested in something. This one was a blind watch for both of us, and I just threw it on with no preamble. The show is shockingly violent at times and it can be blisteringly profane. There is not a variant of a swear word that goes unsaid here. There is a rowdiness to it, from the blaring metal soundtrack to the overall coarseness of its sense of humor. It seems on the surface like exactly the kind of show I would watch without her most of the time…

… but then there’s that heart. Wayne is just as sweet as Ted Lasso and just as desperate to believe in the good in people. It just approaches those ideas in its own blood-spattered way. She was all aboard by the end of the show’s run, and when she saw how it ended, she was crushed. I wish Amazon would commit to at least one more season because as it stands now the ending is a brutal knee to the groin for anyone who has become invested in these richly-realized characters. There’s a happy ending, and then the show lasts about nine more minutes and those nine minutes are just one punch after another. It’s a savage sort of cliffhanger, and after the hell that Wayne and Del suffer for the entire run of the show, they deserve their grace. Wayne deserves his happy ending.

Late in the series, Wayne does finally connect with his mother, and Mikaela Watkins does remarkable work as this woman who has convinced herself that the choices she’s made were the right ones. We see the cracks in that facade, and we see just how weak she was in the first place. It’s lacerating work, and the real balancing act of Wayne is that I would overall describe this as a comedy. I even think it’s a cartoonish comedy. But underneath that, there is a sad broken heart to Wayne and a profound belief that love can mend anyone if it’s the right kind of love. Shawn Simmons and his collaborators love these characters… all of them, even the imperfectly rotten ones… and that love is contagious. One of the things that good television does is give you a compelling reason to come back, episode after episode, setting emotional hooks for you. Well, Wayne is great television, and the hooks are in deep.

I just wish I didn’t feel so alone.

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WONDERING ABOUT WANDA

Whatever Marvel fans were expecting as the big return after a long layoff between movies, it’s safe to say WandaVision wasn’t it.

Grief is a hell of a thing. Films about grief often treat it in symbolic terms, moving past it quickly, unless they dig deep like Manchester By The Sea, in which case they can genuinely test an audience. No one knows how they’ll handle grief until it lands on them, and that can be true even if someone’s death is peaceful and fully anticipated. You add trauma to the grief, and the results can break people. It’s common, and it’s totally understandable. We are only made to process so much at any one time. It doesn’t matter who you are… these things can absolutely destroy you.

We are deep enough into the superhero cycle in general that we should start interrogating would it would be like to actually live in these elaborate worlds that are being built. Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) has been grappling with grief and trauma from the moment she was introduced into the Marvel universe in Avengers: Age of Ultron with no real opportunity to heal. The one time she’s found any respite, it was with Vision (Paul Bettany), and that ended horribly with the arrival of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. There was no real time for anyone to process the events of that film or Avengers: Endgame until now, and I’m not sure where this was originally supposed to appear in the line-up of releases. I’m sure Black Widow would have been out already, and it’s possible we would have already seen Eternals as well.

It doesn’t really matter. There’s no clean set-up here by design. It’s actually better that we feel a little disconnected from that constantly churning machine. All we know as the show begins is that Wanda and Vision have moved to a town called Westview, where they’re trying to settle in for a normal life as a married couple. There’s nothing normal about their existence, though. They’re literally living a sitcom lifestyle, and every episode of the show (I’ve seen three of them so far) is a different sitcom, with their home and their supporting players all reconfiguring into whatever the new shape is.

The first two episodes both largely follow the shape of the sitcoms they’re using as inspiration. First up is The Dick Van Dyke Show and in the second episode, it’s Bewitched. Sure, they’re drawing from a number of sources, but there are some very specific reference points here that are unavoidable. There’s an entire workplace supporting cast for Vision, whose job is some sort of ambiguous number-crunching under the supervision of Mr. Hart (Fred Melamed), and there’s also a suburban supporting cast led by Agnes (Kathryn Hahn), the nosy/helpful best friend/neighbor character. Melamed is absolutely pitch-perfect at playing all the variations as reality twists around him, as is Hahn, and they both also do a great job of selling the larger conceit that’s lurking behind everything.

After all, a sitcom world is completely bizarre and insane if you’re taking it at face value. Sure, the rhythms of sitcoms are comforting to us, especially if we grew up with these shows, but the worlds themselves are so strange and heightened that if you found yourself really living in one, with all the leaps of logic inherent to them, you’d start to feel like something was very wrong. It’s the third episode where things really start to unravel and considering this is a nine-episode series, it feels like the end of act one is exactly what it should be as the curtain starts to peel back and it’s starting to become clear that something is very wrong with Wanda and the world around her.

I know that the show, created by Jac Schaeffer and directed by Matt Shakman, is drawing from a variety of source material about these characters, and I can already see threads of everything from House of M to Tom King’s cuckoo-bananas Vision miniseries, but it feels like they’re doing their own thing, synthesizing all of that into something very specific to this version of Wanda. My kids pretty quickly made the connection that this is like The Truman Show, where one person is the center of an artificial world and everyone around them is either determined to keep the illusion intact or working to pierce that reality. The question here is going to be about how they’re going to snap Wanda out of this grief-induced illusion and who all of these people actually are. It’s too early to say how well they’re going to pull all of this together, but the set-up is involving and meticulously made with a real fondness for all of the pop culture it’s using as a springboard.

The one thing that gave me pause is that I saw two totally different reactions to the show in my own household. My girlfriend has seen a good smattering of Marvel movies since she started watching things with me and the boys, but they’re not her cup of tea. She can enjoy them, but she’s not invested in them. The boys, on the other hand, have grown up deeply invested in the Marvel movies, and they’re tuned in to every little nuance of these characters.

Watching the show, the boys were definitely fascinated by what’s going on in terms of what it means for Wanda and Vision, but they sat through big chunks of the first two episodes silently while my girlfriend and I were laughing at the laser-accurate ways they were riffing off of these beloved sitcoms. Keep in mind, those beloved sitcoms were on the air 70 and 60 years ago, respectively, and even though my kids were more familiar with The Brady Bunch as a reference point (the third episode makes a jump to a distinctly ‘70s vibe), they still didn’t have any actual viewing experiences to draw on. Much of the work on WandaVision is going right over their heads, and it’s got to be a little bizarre to see the kind of plotting they’re leaning on for the episodes if you aren’t familiar with the tropes.

image courtesy of Disney+/Marvel Studios

In the first one, Vision invites his boss and his wife over for a fancy dinner, but Wanda thinks it’s their anniversary, and comic mayhem ensues. In the second episode, Wanda’s trying to make a good impression on the queen bee housewife in the neighborhood by entering the two of them into a neighborhood talent show, but Vision accidentally swallows gum and shows up to the talent show seemingly drunk. Both Olsen and Bettany are spooky good at playing that broad sitcom delivery, and the fact that this whole cast not only knows the difference between the tone of Bewitched and the tone of The Brady Bunch but can actually play it is impressive. Many young Marvel fans will have no idea what they’re looking at for these first few episodes, while my girlfriend got all of the references easily but had no idea what was going on or how Wanda could do any of these things.

It’s a strange show, and that’s fine. I’m all for some strange in the Marvel universe. They’ve had one of the most commercially successful runs of all time and now they’ve earned the right to experiment and try new things. This is an encouraging start to this era of Disney+ programming, and while I know everyone wants you to wade in my hyperbole, this is neither “FANTASTIC!” nor “A DISASTER!” It’s an intriguing approach to pushing a previously-sideline character center stage just as she implodes from the weight of everything that’s happened to her so far. With six more episodes to go, dropping weekly on Disney+, I’m curious to see how they play this out, not only in this show but across the rest of the Marvel slate.

By that metric, you’d have to call WandaVision a success no matter what happens.

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AND FINALLY…

I’ve been working on that next Star Wars piece, and it looks like Monday’s the day. Definitely no later than Tuesday. It also won’t be the last piece in the series, not with the launch of The High Republic last week. I’ve read the first two books and the first issue of the comic series and I definitely have some thoughts on the way they’re trying to launch this next expansion of my favorite fictional universe.

I’m also going to have a special piece for you called 20 Reasons 2020 Didn’t Totally Suck, which is not the same as a top ten list. It’s an overall look at the things that got me through this crazy hellyear, a piece that is all about spreading some much-deserved love.

Both of those pieces are for subscribers only, and you’ll also be getting at least two more entries in The Library this week. I’m writing about Eve’s Bayou, Seconds, and A Shot In The Dark right now, and those are all coming up soon.

It’s just $7 a month to get access to everything I send subscribers. Even less if you buy an annual subscription all at once. Seems entirely reasonable to me, and I hope you’ll consider joining everyone who’s already on board.

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Here’s my media diary for the week. As always, anything in bold was particularly enjoyed.

THIS WEEK’S BOOKS: Pick of the Week / How Music Works by David Byrne
also - Star Wars: The High Republic - A Test of Courage by Justina Ireland; Old Bones by Preston & Child; The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 edited by Rich Horton; Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison

THIS WEEK’S COMICS: Pick of the Week / Darth Vader #7
also - Star Wars: The High Republic #1; Star Wars Omnibus: Knights of the Old Republic Vol. 1; Star Wars Omnibus: Knights of the Old Republic Vol. 2; Hellboy Omnibus Vol. 1

THIS WEEK’S PODCASTS: Pick of the Week / The Kingcast - “Different Seasons with Wil Wheaton”
also - Blank Check with Griffin & David - “teneT”; Doughboys - “Panera Bread 2 with Monica Ruiz & Chris O’Malley”; How Did This Get Made - “Minisode 256.5”; The Boogie Monster - “Holiday Wrap-Up”; Screen Drafts - “Shakespeare Part II”

THIS WEEK’S TV: Pick of the Week / Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist S2 E2
also - Star Trek: Discovery S2 E1; His Dark Materials S1 E1, E2; Search Party S1 E1 - E3; Somebody Feed Phil S4 E2; Pretend It’s A City S1 E1; The History of Swear Words S1 E1; 90-Day Fiancée S8 E3, E4; WandaVision S1 E1 - 3; The Stand S1 E5; Letterkenny S9 E5; Cobra Kai S3 E4 - E6; George Harrison: Living In the Material World S1 E1, E2

THIS WEEK’S GAMING: Cyberpunk 2077

THIS WEEK’S MOVIES: Pick of the Week / Mad Max: Fury Road (4K)
also - Strange Days; Homicide; Die Hard 2; Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker; 28 Up; Fatale; Tenet; Wonder Woman 1984; The Empty Man; The Master Touch