Things I Have to Watch at Work

[mesonoxian]

I work as a home health aide. There are many elements of my job that are rewarding on multiple levels. The work is steady, I am mostly doing something useful, and I have a lot of fun with some of my clients. I also watch a lot of things on TV I would never normally see. Ever since I wound up watching Disney Descendants 3 (apparently there are multple terrible live action movies where the kids of Disney animated characters live in something like the modern world and engage in embarrassing dance numbers!) and Things to Come (1936) in the same week I have thought I should write about some of them, but I haven't bothered to until now.

So, let me start this thread by pissing everybody off.

I have a client who is a scifi fan with really indiscriminate tastes. Today we watched another episode of the Syfy original series Vagrant Queen. It isn't mindblowing or high art, but it is a fun and funny little action adventure show with more than a passing resemblance to FarScape and weird neon special effects I liked.

And we watched Serenity, (the movie based on the TV show Firefly, not the newer one by that name) and suddenly I became unsure Vagrant Queen wasn't high art. It was at least a hell of a lot better.

[Spoilers and nit picking ensue]

Boy howdy this movie sucked. I know that at least some of the actors in it are talented (Nathan Fillion was great in Slither), so I can only assume the director is responsible for making the lot of them seem dull as ditchwater. The captain character was unlikable, and his dramatic arc felt wholly unearned. The attempts to insert dialect into the dialogue was embarrassing and clumsy. Having characters who talk normally 99% of the time but throw "t'other" or "addlepated" in while trying to make it sound natural is super lame. If the characters had a consistent accents or dialects that might have been an interesting character note, but instead it came off as super cheesy. (Throwing "gorram" and mangled Chinese in didn't help.) Also, where the hell were all the Asian people? There is Chinese writing and tacked on references to Chinese culture, but no Chinese people.

The characters are paper thin. There's Nathan Fillion as the captain. He's a jerk who alternates between selfish jerk, self righteous jerk, and tossing off one liners that fail to be funny. There is a mean guy who is dumb and likes fighting, a space sex worker who seems to exist for the captain to moon over, a nonentity and her husband the pilot (who at least had a pretty funny death scene), a mechanic who seems to exist for the doctor to moon over (and has some truly cringe inducing dialogue), the doctor and his sister, a crazy psychic murder waif. I really disliked the murder waif. Her dialogue was even lamer than the other characters, and the actress entirely lacked the physical presence to make the fight scene between her and the space zombies seem anything but funny. (The earlier fight scene in the bar isn't as jarring, though it wasn't very interesting either.)

Also, the villains include space zombies who just grunt and scream and murder/death/kill and torture people but also fly spaceships in fleets. But they are stupid enough you can fool them by (literally) splashing some red pain on your ship and tying some corpses to it. Because apparently they aren't just crazy, they are super ostentatious about it.

The other villains are the Alliance, who beat the space confederacy in a space civil war and are evil because of various science atrocities but otherwise seem like they are doing pretty good job. The captain hates them because they beat his side in a civil war, but given that murderers and bandits run everything outside their reach, I'm not really sure they are any worse. And the way the heroes beat them is by broadcasting evidence the government accidentally created the space zombies while trying to end war through invisible emotion manipulation. Which seems super optimistic. I mean how many atrocities are we actively aware of our governments committing intentionally without remotely threatening their control. The most surprising thing would be finding out they had good intentions.

The plot is full of "twists" that are obvious. The dialogue is full of attempts to be clever that are extremely clumsy, but are framed as if we're supposed to find them bad ass or funny. I generally dislike Whedon's dialogue, but I know a lot of people love it. But this felt decidedly worse to me than his stuff in Alien 3 or The Avengers. And Nathan Fillion, beautiful creature that he is, just isn't Michael Wincott or Robert Downey Junior. The sets are boring and monotonous and the space guns look super dopey.

Okay, sorry, I know I have slagged this movie pretty hard, but it wasn't all bad. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays the nameless antagonist who represents the Alliance and does so with style and menace. He doesn't tell any dumb jokes, which makes his dialogue decidedly more pleasant. I was disappointed when he apparently abandoned a cause he was willing to kill and die for when he found out the government does bad stuff some times. Given that he was on board with murder and torturing kids, it seemed pretty unbelivable. But the actor was great and the character seemed genuinely interesting.

Trying to think of anything else I liked. The holographic displays were a pretty cool effect. David Krumholtz who was on Numbers played an annoying space hacker, but it is always nice to see David Krumholtz in anything. Nathan Fillion was shirtless a lot.

I promise I won't fill every post with crapping on beloved scifi films.

Sometimes I will get in depth about which episodes of Bonanza are best. Because old people love them some Westerns. (It's the two parter that opens season 14.)

 

[FortePlus]

Boy howdy this movie sucked.

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"Mesonoxian critiquing cinema", 2020 (colorized):

 

[Phigment]

That's pretty reasonable criticism, I'd say.

Serenity was the followup to Firefly, and it doesn't really stand on its own well. A bunch of characters get all their development in the TV show episodes. Likewise, a lot of the setting only gets explained in the show.

So it's not a strong movie on its own merits. But it's also not a great movie in the context of the show. I liked the show, but it ended with a lot of dangling plot threads that were clearly intended to play out over multiple seasons. And the movie tried to squeeze all the development and resolution of those threads into a single movie, not even a season of episodes, and it's really clunky.

Like, River, the psychic murder waif, is barely able to function in the show. She's an experimental subject that was badly, badly hurt in the course of the experiments, and can hardly hold a conversation. There's a few scenes where it's suggested she has some kind of psychic powers, and the show is intentionally coy about not confirming that, and there's one scene where she does something unexpectedly combat-badass, by shooting a handful of people, shocking everyone who knows her. But there's no kung-fu beatdowns of crowds of goons. In the movie, she's suddenly Psychic Buffy the Reaver Slayer.

 

[ScottishMongol]

I think it's been long enough that we can all admit that Firefly actually wasn't that good.

 

[Bea]

The characters are paper thin. There's Nathan Fillion as the captain. He's a jerk who alternates between selfish jerk, self righteous jerk, and tossing off one liners that fail to be funny.

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It was nice, though, that Joss evidently allowed Nathan Fillion to basically be able to play himself but in space.

I've said before that I honestly am glad that I never got into Firefly because I doubted I'd like it, and so I'm honestly not surprised that Serenity wouldn't work for somebody today. I think it's quite likely that like Buffy, if you were there, in the 90s, watching it as it was made, you got a lot more enjoyment out of it than anybody looking back on it today.

 

[mesonoxian]

It was nice, though, that Joss evidently allowed Nathan Fillion to basically be able to play himself but in space.

I've said before that I honestly am glad that I never got into Firefly because I doubted I'd like it, and so I'm honestly not surprised that Serenity wouldn't work for somebody today. I think it's quite likely that like Buffy, if you were there, in the 90s, watching it as it was made, you got a lot more enjoyment out of it than anybody looking back on it today.

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Is Nathan Fillion a jerk in real life? I didn't know that. That's kind of a bummer. That jawline deserves better.

I did watch Buffy when it came out, thanks to a roommate of mine. I didn't care for it, though at this point I don't remember why other than finding the dialogue grating.

 

[Bea]

Is Nathan Fillion a jerk in real life? I didn't know that. That's kind of a bummer. That jawline deserves better.

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Yeah, according to two of his coworkers on the show Castle, he'd cause his co-lead Stana Katic to break down in tears- according to one basically nobody liked him.

I did watch Buffy when it came out, thanks to a roommate of mine. I didn't care for it, though at this point I don't remember why other than finding the dialogue grating.

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Yeah, Whedonspeak annoys a lot of people; personally I don't mind it overmuch- I kind of like hyperstylized dialogue to be honest, even if it does have a Is This How The Kids Talk These Days feel to it. I think there are so many other things about the show that would have annoyed me more.

 

[mesonoxian]

So, Saturday we mostly watched Greatest Raids of WWII, which is a pretty cool documentary series about individual military actions. I thought it was good. It broke down the individual situations with nice graphics and focused on individual soldiers through the chaos of the action, and was unabashedly celebratory about Allied soldier kicking Nazi butt.

We also watched a ... western? I guess. A weird romance/historical drama set in the west anyway.

It was a 1956 Audie Murphy movie called "Walk the Proud Land". And it was super awkward, because it was trying very hard to promote peace and anti-racism... by the standards of the 1950s.

So, the movie is based on a biography of a real US "Indian Agent" by the name of John Clum, based on his biography, written by his son some two decades earlier. Whether any of the incidents were accurate to history is unknown to me, and I am not really willing to do the research to find out.

The movie is about how Clum was put in charge of an Indian Reservation called San Carlos, and is considered mad by the local population of rustic whites (you know ... morons), for trusting them with rifles in order to hunt. Though they have to turn the rifles in at the end of each hunt, except for his police force. He is similarly distrusted at first by a former army sergeant named Tom who becomes his right hand man.

Clum's opposite number is Geronimo (played by Jay Silverheels, better known as Tonto in the Lone Ranger television series). Geronimo is a stone cold badass who gives zero fucks and wants to keep killing Anglo invaders till they leave or kill him. Clum tries to convince him that peace (aka assimilation and surrender) are the way of the future and the only way to save his people. Much is made of him being the first white man to "have words with Geronimo" and live. This turns out to be a mistake on Geronimo's part, as Clum eventually ambushes him with his police force and imprisons him at the films climax.

This sounds like it would be a cool set up for a tense story of diplomacy and cultural conflict, but inexplicably the script is mostly preoccupied with Clum's domestic situation. He is "given" a widowed young woman, whom he takes into his home and treats as a housemaid. This is Tianay, played by Anne Bancroft in redface. She is also wearing what I presume must be traditional Apache pink lipstick. She has a son, Tono, who walks the line between cute and annoying, but more often winds up as the latter. (Though that probably has more to do with the script than the little guy himself. Saying "emeny" instead of "enemy" doesn't stay endearing long.) Tianay is being wooed by an Apache man, but she puts him off because she's into Clum. Clum refuses her advances because he is devoted to his fiancee back east.

There is an embarrassing sequence in which Tianay tries to convince him he should have two wives, but he objects explaing that "his people's God" demands that each man have only one wife. This is apparently news to her and she spends a while trying to talk him into it in a way that seems very desperate. It ends with him explaining that "our God is a jealous God. Our women are jealous, too". When said fiancee shows up (and immediately weds Clum), she is scandalized by the presence of a native woman living in her husbands home. He tries to brush off her worries as her needing to adapt to the natives customs, in a way that reads more ambiguously than I think the script writer intended about exactly what arrangement he expects her to accept with regards to Tianay. This being a 1950s movie, nobody can either directly ask nor directly answer whether he is having sex with Tianay, though the movie pretty clearly communicates earlier that he is not.

Eventually Geronimo and his warriors start attacking settlers. Clum decides to go try to deal with Geronimo and his wife tells him she is going back east if he goes. But he goes anyway. Tianay talks her into staying with Clum to support him. Clum and some of his police decide to capture Geronimo, which they manage in a fairly anticlimatic scene in which they surround his camp with police and walk in. When he tries to capture them, his police shoot one of Geronimo's men and Clum tells him they are surrounded. He goes back to camp to find the army has taken over the governing of the Arizona territory. He plans on quitting, but the reservation Apaches and his wife both ask him to stay, so he does, and the film ends with a note that San Carlos was turned over to Apache control in 1955.


There are few interesting incidents, but they never amount to much. An Apache tries to rally the others against Clum and is gunned down by his own brother, who then decides he wants to be blood brothers with Clum. I'm like 90% sure blood brothers aren't a historical part of Apache culture, (and if they were, I am pretty sure the ritual wouldn't be carried out in English). Tianay's son runs off with his best friend to join Geronimo's band, but Clum finds them and convinces them to come back. There is a repeated pattern of doing things which look like they might result in tension and then resolving them almost immediately.

This movie, yeesh.

It's message is that the Apaches are people, just like white people, and that they can become just as civilized as white people, if white people will just help them abandon their culture and surrender their land to white exploitation, and submit to beneficent white leaders who dictate how they are to live. The only native character with agency is Geronimo, who is clearly framed as the primary antagonist. The Apaches are presented as having a choice between following Geronimo and being destroyed by bad white people, or following Clum and being saved by good white people. Casting a white woman as a native woman has also aged like fine milk

The upsides were Audie Murphy at his wholesome gee-golly-goshest and Jay Silverheels as Geronimo. Everything else is either silly (the two women being in totally anachronistic make up, the shoehorned in saloon fight early in the film, and Tono) or racist in a well meaning way that somehow makes it more awkward.

 

[mesonoxian]

Today we watched more Vagrant Queen, which is shaping up to be quite a fun little show.

We also watched the first two Maze Runner movies.

[Here there be spoilers]




The movies themselves are pretty standard YA scifi dystopias. The world has gone to hell for unspecified reasons (which later turn out to be solar flares and a zombie plague). The solution is wiping kids memories, torturing them in a weird murder labyrinth full of monsters that changes shape over night, because somehow that is the simplest way to put teenagers under stress, even though it keeps killing their vital supply of special disease immune kids.

Eventually a Very Special White Boy shows up and is weirdly good at everything and accomplishes stuff that none of the other imprisoned kinds managed. He is followed by a Very Special White Girl who has the same generalized competence and they and a few other kids escape the labyrinth. They wind up in a lab belonging to a group called "WICKED" (seriously). They are given the impression the guys in the lab were murdered by a separate group, but that is another trick by (sigh) WICKED to move them to another facility where they can harvested for Old People Saving Juice. Faking a rescue seems way harder than just gassing them and locking them up, but we have no time for such trivialities!

They escape into a desert, which the barely survive crossing. A thunderstorm appears and seems to be actively malicious. I suppose the premise is that the solar flares made the storms worse, but it seemed to produce substantially more lightning strikes near them than it was producing on approach, and seems to be actively aiming for them by the end. Anyway, they wind up in the lair of a gang that want to sell them back to WICKED. But they wind up with an adult and his teenage ward who want to trade them to a difference, nicer group called the "Right Arm" for reasons that are never explained that I notice. (By the way, I initially misheard the name of the opposition as the "Red Army" and was equal parts disappointed and baffled when I realized what it actually was.)

They go to a wrecked city to get information from a creepy guy who throws weird drug parties and sells doped up kids to WICKED. After beating information out of him, the teenage ward (who I think was named Brenda and who I am going to call Brenda regardless) and the VSWB get chased through some badly damaged buildings by weird zombies in a deeply improbable but very cool sequence. The buildings are in some cases leaning over, and the chase ends with Brenda falling onto a window in a building leaning at a sixty degree angle, overlooking a several story drop. It starts to crack under her weight. Then a zombie jumps on it too, and they fight on it, then VSWB jumps down and fights it and the glass finally breaks and the zombie falls to its death and we cut to the two kids walking at street level. Whatever the window is made of seems to have a heavily narrative dependent tenacity, but it was a pretty cool scene anyway so I won't nit pick. Brenda gets bitten, which is apparently a way you can become a zombie, even though it seemed like the disease was an aerosol earlier. Oh well. She apparently will take a while to turn.

The plague zombies are really weird. The movie presents them like they are just victims of a disease which turns them psychotic and unaffected by pain, but then you see the long infected, who are apparently almost immobile when not attacking, and covered with weird gnarly vines that attach them to walls. But once they start moving they turn into screamy parkour ninjas. Like a disease that turns people into screaming flesh eaters and covers them with weird pulsing veins but doesn't kill them is a bit of a stretch, but this is well beyond the movies' allotment of impossible things. But the design for the advanced cases looked pretty cool so I'll give it a pass.

So they meet up with the Right Arm, A doctor lady in the right Arm camp recognizes the VSWB. Everyone seems to be getting along pretty well, but VSWG betrays them to WICKED who show up to force them all onto a helicopter. Another reasonably entertaining action scene follows and we end with the VSWB staring determinedly into the distance. And then we ran out of time so we'll be watching movie three next week.

Everything about the movies that was pure filmcraft was well done. The monsters looked cool, the acting ranged from passable to quite good (especially for so many young actors), the action scenes were pretty well sold and exciting, and the sets looked really cool.

Everything about the movies that relied on worldbuilding and plotting was pretty weak. I know they were written for kids, but a lot of stuff doesn't add up. I mean the whole premise is that the world was running out of resources and suffering a massive plague, but they can build massive labyrinths full of monsters? It seems like there are a lot of simpler ways to put kids under stress. Or the characters being largely unsuspicious that their rescuers showed up immediately after the escape the maze in a helicopter. There were no roofs on the place the lived while they were trapped in the maze and plenty of clearance for a helicopter to set down and there is no way a thing as massive as the mazes would be hard to spot, so beyond the timing, that should have been pretty obvious. And of course the super dumb names for things. The groups are "Right Arm" and "WICKED", the monsters are "grievers" and "cranks", the disease is called "the Flare", which seems like it would be really confusing given the actual solar flares that happened before hand.

They were much better than I expected. Nothing I would recommend anybody run out and watch, but it beats the hell out of being stuck with Fox News or televangelist scammers.