#((which makes this also a bit of interesting commentary on the whole hard-hitting-hero genre))

[age-of-moonknight]

“8-Ball,” Vengeance of the Moon Knight (Vol. 2/2024), #5.

Writer: Jed MacKay; Penciler and Inker: Alessandro Cappuccio; Colorist: Rachelle Rosenberg; Letterer: Cory Petit

[stagandsteer]

Complete transcript of the Wonderland interview, by Catherine Santino, below the cut :)

In 1993, the year in which Freeform’s new thriller series Cruel Summer opens, actor Froy Gutierrez was yet to be born. Chat rooms and beepers, just two of the symbols of 90’s culture featured in the show, were absent in Gutierrez's own childhood. Instead, the 22 year old grew up among the endless, glowing feeds of social media — and the inevitable pressures that they create.

“There’s a kind of self-awareness that comes from growing up with the internet, which everyone in our cast did,” Gutierrez, who stars in the upcoming series, tells me over Zoom — his boyish charm tangible across the screen. “We’re all technically Gen Z or like, older Gen Z. And so you have to unburden yourself from curating a persona online.”

Due to the dizzying evolution of technology in the past two decades, Gutierrez and I had drastically different experiences with the internet growing up — even though he’s only seven years my junior. I fondly remember a time without the prevalence of social media, while Gutierrez was born into an era where internet presence was not only common, but expected.

Like most of Gutierrez’s peers, the actor was active on social media from a young age, but his presence has quietened over the years — even with 1.7 million instagram followers. “If there’s a general consensus on the internet of a certain readership or viewership, you know about it, because people tweet about it directly to you,'' he says. “There’s a kind of lumping in of the character you’re playing with who you are, that people do. I don’t know if it’s intentional. It’s probably just a human thing, but that happens. And it can be hard not to internalize what you read about yourself, you know? Words have power.”

In 2017, Gutierrez appeared on supernatural MTV drama Teen Wolf, a show with a massive internet fandom. Suddenly, fan theories and commentaries about his character, Nolan Holloway, came in droves, something that the young actor wasn’t necessarily prepared for. “I was still a teenager,” he says. “Around that time, you're an adult, but you’re still figuring things out. So I learned where to set my boundaries because I didn’t know where they were beforehand.”

When Cruel Summer came around, Gutierrez assumed he would be portraying the “desirable young male” he was used to auditioning for. “The first time I read the character, it definitely felt like an archetype. When I auditioned for it, I walked in and was very much myself, and Michelle Purple and Jessica Biel responded very well to it.” However, after he got the role and production ramped up, he was pleasantly surprised. “It didn’t really hit me that they were wanting to take him in such a unique direction until I showed up for wardrobe one day to do my first fitting for the pilot,” Gutierrez recalls. “I looked at the mood board for Jamie and it was like, young Heath Ledger, Keanu Reeves and Kurt Cobain. And I was like ‘Oh shit, I need to step my game up,’” he laughs. “I couldn’t get by doing the same thing that I’ve always done when it comes to characters like that.”

Cruel Summer takes place over the course of three years — ‘93, ‘94, and ‘95 — showing splices of each year in every episode. Produced by Jessica Biel, Tia Napolitano, and Michelle Purple, it centres around the kidnapping of a teenage girl and the fallout of the crime in her community in Skylin, Texas. Gutierrez plays Jamie Henson, the boyfriend of the missing girl, Kate. In her absence, a quiet nerd named Jeanette suddenly rises the social ranks and assumes Kate’s place — including dating Jamie. When Kate returns, Jeanette is suspected to be involved in her disappearance, throwing Jamie into some seriously challenging circumstances. His character could easily be a one-dimensional archetype — and truthfully, I expected him to be — but Cruel Summer took the opportunity to explore toxic masculinity and its widespread impact.

We see Jamie caught in the middle of conflict, unsure how to respond to a traumatic event that certainly no teenager expects to be faced with. He’s not a hero, but he’s not a villain either. It’s unclear whether we’re supposed to root for Jamie or not, which makes him that much more interesting to watch. “He talks a lot about his desire to protect the people around him, regardless of whether or not they asked him to protect them,” Gutierrez says of his character. “He kind of superimposes his own idea of what the people around him need. In order to maintain the peace of the people around him, he kind of robs the people around him of their agency. It’s just a really fascinating character to play in that way.”

Gutierrez has also been able to explore the ethics of true crime in a time when the genre is exploding in popularity. Though Cruel Summer is fictional, it questions the effect that public opinion can have on criminal cases — and perhaps more importantly — the well-being of the people involved. “When it comes to the investigation of a crime, you have to weigh the good it can bring into the world versus the bad it can bring. Or making one person seem suspect, or airing the dirty laundry of a private citizen for the viewership of loads of people.”

Despite his eloquent reflections on Jamie throughout our conversation, it’s clear that Gutierrez doesn’t take himself too seriously. He speaks into the camera like we’re old friends on FaceTime, and when my dog unexpectedly jumps into my frame, he gushes excitedly and asks what her name is. He’s able to laugh at himself one minute and share poignant truths the next. It’s refreshing, much like Cruel Summer.

Another likely contributor to the show’s authenticity? The fact that the cast was kept in the dark when it came to overarching plot points. Instead of knowing the show’s trajectory ahead of time, the actors would receive scripts for the next episode while they were filming — and they were subject to change. “We didn’t know where it was going,” Gutierrez says. “And we were told, “‘This might happen here, or this might happen there.’ And it would shift around.”

Without foresight into their character’s arc, the actors have no choice but to focus only on where they were in that moment — a difficult task when a single episode spans three very different years. Gutierrez faced an even greater challenge, as, unlike the two female leads, his character didn’t undergo any drastic physical transformations over the three years.

“I didn’t really compartmentalise the character,” he explains. “I kind of thought of the different years as different phases in my own life. The first year, ‘93, was a complete absence of any regret. You’re still very young, I was just thinking of like, a complete golden retriever,” he laughs. “A 16-year old boy who just wants the best and isn’t aware. ‘94 is me right before I made the decision to go to therapy, where I was making all these bad decisions and I didn’t know why. And then ‘95 was a whole desire to wrestle with those things and really look at yourself in the mirror and take accountability.”

Gutierrez didn’t only infuse personal experience into his behind-the-scenes work — some aspects made it onto the screen. The actor, whose father is Mexican, grew up spending time between Mexico and Texas and is a native Spanish speaker. Because Cruel Summer is set in Texas, Gutierrez suggested creating a similar background for Jamie.

“I was talking with Tia Napolitano, the show-runner, and I was like, ‘Hey, you know what would be really cool? What if the character is half-Mexican, too?’” Gutierrez says. “And she's like, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s write it in the script.’ And I got to write a couple lines in Spanish, which is really cool. [Jamie] could have been this mould of a cool, likeable jock. And then he ended up being this very nuanced human being, which is awesome.”

Though he is learning to appreciate all parts of his heritage, Gutierrez hasn’t always embraced his identity. “I remember feeling like I might have been not American enough for America, and not Mexican enough for Mexico,” he says. “And I remember having a bit of time in which I had an accent in both languages. Even my name — in Mexico I always went by ‘Froylan’, which is my full name. And then in the U.S., I went by Froy, because I thought it would be easier for other people to say.”

He continues: “I identify as Latino, but I”m also very wary of auditioning for Latino roles because I’m aware I don’t look like a typical Latino person. I don’t want to be someone that you can just sub in for that role, when I’m really white and blonde. And so whenever I do get a role like this, one where he’s not written to be any particular direction and we’re able to collaborate, I’m able to inject some of myself in there. So it’s been really cool to embrace all sides of my history.”

But of course, as is true for Gutierrez, Jamie’s cultural background is only a small part of who he is. Cruel Summer is committed to portraying him as a nuanced character that breaks the moulds of masculinity while tackling complex inner conflict. “Living in his shoes and walking in them, a big question that came up for me was, ‘What is the difference between guilt and shame? [Jamie]’s coping mechanism was terrible and unhealthy, and caused more pain for the people around him. But at the same time, the shame that he internalized made it worse for him. One thing I really learned, is that shame is about yourself and beating yourself up. And guilt is about taking accountability and apologising, moving forward without expecting the relationship to come back. It's just about trying to heal what happened and then moving on, on the terms that the other person sets. It’s not about you, and I think that’s what the character learns throughout the show.”

[commentaryvorg]

Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 5.10

Be aware that this is not a blind playthrough! This will contain spoilers for the entire game, regardless of the part of the game I’m commenting on. A major focus of this commentary is to talk about all of the hints and foreshadowing of events that are going to happen and facts that are going to be revealed in the future of the story. It is emphatically not intended for someone experiencing the game for their first time.

Last time, everyone finally started being sensible as they decided to rescue Kaito and in doing so began having some actual hope, I got very mad at how amatonormative Tsumugi was being about Maki and Kaito, then Shuichi visited Kaito in the hangar and they had an adorable conversation which also implied several interesting things: Kaito has come to terms with Shuichi being more of a hero than him and may well have fixed his black-and-white view of heroes and sidekicks in general, he might be trying to believe completely baselessly that what they saw outside wasn’t the whole truth just for the sake of not giving up, and he wasn’t even sure he’d survive until the next morning to see them again.

Now, it’s the morning of the rescue mission! In other words, Kaito is now a murderer and is hiding inside his Exisal waiting to deceive his friends and convince them that he’s dead. Just a point of note I thought I would mention.

Shuichi:  (Kaito… just hang on! We’ll save you!)

Shuichi, of course, is completely oblivious to everything that went down last night and is just being adorably optimistic about rescuing his friend. This is totally going to go smoothly, right? (You get this line by examining Kaito’s door on the way out.)

Maki looks… distant, as Shuichi first pays attention to her in the dining hall. Not surprising, given that she believes she killed Kaito last night, and she’s trying very hard to tell herself she’s okay with that.

Shuichi:  “Maki, where’s your Electrohammer?”

Maki:  “…I don’t need it. I’d rather not use a weapon I’m unfamiliar with…” [showing a knife] “…This is much better.”

Yes, because you definitely couldn’t use both an Electrohammer and a knife together, and a knife will totally work on an Exisal. This is definitely a logical argument and not an excuse.

She’s also totally not planning on using that knife to murder Kokichi on sight or anything. After all, she promised yesterday she wouldn’t kill him.

Shuichi:  “A knife? Well… I suppose you know best.”

Shuichi, you really should be questioning this a little more.

Shuichi:  “I scouted out the hangar yesterday…”

Maki:  “You scouted out the hangar…?”

Maki’s giving him a disgusted look upon hearing this. She’s got to be worried he saw some of what she got up to last night. Which is a fair worry, because Shuichi didn’t, but Keebo did.

Keebo:  “I thought maybe I could get through to Kokichi before we carry out our plan. So I went to the hangar last night and tried to talk to him.”

Credit where it’s due – Keebo always does seem to care about trying to find the peaceful solution to situations whenever possible (at least until chapter 6… so maybe actually this is partly down to his inner voice). He was clearly never going to get through to Kokichi and change his mind in this situation (not if even Kaito couldn’t manage it back when Kokichi was somewhat before the point of no return), but good on him for wanting to try.

Himiko:  “Wh-What? What… did you witness?”

Maki is not the only one who’s antsy about people having potentially witnessed what they did yesterday. Himiko promised Kaito she’d keep the fact that she gave him a crossbow a secret, so she’s hoping Keebo didn’t see… but he totally saw that too.

In front of the hangar shutter, everyone’s raring to go and ready to use their Electrohammers against the Exisals if they need to, but…

Maki:  “…”

Himiko:  “What’s wrong, Maki Roll? We’re… all ready to start, y’know?”

Maki:  “…Yeah, alright.”

…Maki is distracted enough that she didn’t even react to Himiko calling her Maki Roll (which she would have appreciated even less than usual right now if she’d noticed). She’s definitely not worrying about the fact that they’re about to find Kaito dead in there from a poisoned arrow, or that she’s fully intending to murder Kokichi in front of them all, or anything.

Shuichi:  “…Hm?” (The control panel was covered in marks, as if damaged by something sharp…)

Maki:  “Shuichi, what are you doing? Hurry up.”

Maki’s got a threatening face on here. She does not want Shuichi to stop and think too hard about why that control panel could be damaged. (And she probably doesn’t want to think too hard herself about the way she was feeling when she did that to it.)

Keebo:  “The Remnants of Despair end here and now!”

Since Keebo is very anti-murder, I don’t know how he thinks that rescuing Kaito is somehow going to “end” the Remnants of Despair, but sure, Keebo, you spout the line your inner voice is probably telling you to say.

First time around, I was genre savvy enough to be certain they were about to find someone dead in here. It’d been long enough without a murder, which was still definitely going to happen since this was only chapter 5, and the hangar was clearly this chapter’s murder scene. I knew it had to be either Kaito or Kokichi and desperately didn’t want it to be Kaito… but at the same time I’m pretty sure I was subconsciously expecting it to be Kaito and just dreading the confirmation, which was exactly what I thought I’d got when I saw his sleeve in there. The narrative had successfully done its job of convincing me Kaito was totally just going to get randomly killed.

But of course, the characters who aren’t Tsumugi don’t have any sort of narrative argument about when a murder should happen, so all of them (except for Maki) are completely unprepared for the horrific emotional whiplash they’re about to face here.

Monokuma:  “Ah-hahahahahahahaha! The killing game just keeps going and going! The despair’s not over yet!”

Monokuma seems happy about this. He was probably quite annoyed that the killing game had basically ground to a halt for a couple of days. Even though he has no clue who the culprit in this one is and is at risk of screwing things up and breaking the rules, he’d still genuinely rather have this than no murder at all. After all, this is entertaining, and that’s the most important thing. Kokichi’s plan is still just blatantly playing into the gamemakers’ hands.

Shuichi:  “What is this? What’s going on!?”

Clearly someone is dead, Shuichi; there was a body discovery announcement and that is a lot of blood. But it looks like he’s just kind of bluescreened here and needs to reboot.

(The creepy choral music as the BGM right now is quite effective in helping get across that horrific feeling.)

Tsumugi:  “The body discovery announcement… Does that mean… someone’s in that press?”

Shuichi:  “Wh-Who…?”

Keebo:  “The only ones in the hangar were Kokichi and Kaito. It must be one of them.”

Shuichi:  “…What?” (Either Kokichi or Kaito… is dead?)

Yes, Shuichi, keep up. Apparently he just short-circuited at the oh god that’s a lot of blood, and didn’t even properly register until now that it has to be one of those two.

Shuichi:  “Those clothes! They’re… Kaito’s…”

…Let alone the fact that the sleeve specifically suggests it’s Kaito. The body discovery cutscene makes it look like he’s being horrified at his best friend’s apparent death, but actually this is the moment when it hits him.

Himiko:  “Then… the one in that hydraulic press is…”

Maki:  “…”

Maki has a dark stare. Even she was not prepared for this. She was expecting Kaito to be dead; she wasn’t expecting him to be this dead.

Shuichi:  “N-No… it’s not possible…”

And Shuichi’s mind has already started to nope away from this possibility, because he just cannot deal with the thought of losing Kaito.

Now would be an appropriate time to remind everyone that Kaito is in fact not remotely dead and is right here in this hangar, hidden inside the red Exisal, listening to every bit of the reaction his friends are having to this and knowing that he’s the one responsible for putting them through this pain.

Monokuma:  “Puhuhu. Looks like you have a lot of twists and turns to sort out during this class trial.”

Yeah, they sure do. Lots of twists and turns that they have to sort out for your sake.

Monokuma:  “Don’t say you’re getting bored of this! Cuz things are about to get interesting!”

…Are you talking to the audience, Monokuma. They must have been complaining about being bored until now, after all.

Monokuma:  “I hope you pour your heart and soul into this investigation, too!”

Oh, I bet you’re hoping Shuichi and friends do that. If they don’t, you’d be in trouble.

Keebo:  “If the killing game is still continuing, and Monokuma is still moving, then…”

Maki:  “It means the mastermind, Kokichi, is still alive.”

Aaaaaaand this right here is basically the entire reason Kokichi pretended to be the mastermind, and murdered two people for the sake of making that lie just a little bit more believable: so that when this happened, everyone would assume that he has to still be alive.

Which is actually a really pointless part of his plan when the whole point of the plan is to fool Monokuma, who obviously knows he’s not the mastermind in the first place and wouldn’t make this assumption! It barely helps fool Monokuma at all! It only helps ever so slightly to prevent Monokuma learning the truth from Shuichi figuring it out, in that it makes Shuichi slightly less likely to figure it out.

That’s it. That’s the entire reason why Miu and Gonta died. That’s what their deaths were worth to Kokichi: a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the actual plan. Even if he had done this plan for the sake of saving everyone by ending the killing game – which this very heavily suggests is not the case, and there’ll be yet more evidence of that later on – holy fucking shit those two deaths were not worth this.

Shuichi:  “No… that’s not possible! There has to be some mistake! There’s no way Kaito could die! It has to be a lie!”

I love the way Shuichi is talking as if he wants “there’s no way Kaito could die!” to be a logical argument on its own. Kaito is invincible, right? Of course he’d never just die on them like this!

(I wonder if Kaito, hearing this, is realising what a testament this is to how much Shuichi still looks up to him. Or he’s only seeing it as a sign of how much pain Shuichi is trying to run away from and feels awful for hurting him like this. Probably that.)

Shuichi:  (I made a run for the body when…)

Maki:  “…Calm down.”

Shuichi:  (Maki’s hand stopped me.) “Calm… down…? How can you say that, Maki!? Kaito is—”

Kaito is what, Shuichi? Didn’t you just say he definitely wasn’t dead?

Maki:  “I’ve seen so much death already. Death of both good and bad people… It doesn’t bother me anymore.”

Yes, Maki, it does. It always did, and you just suppressed that. All you’re doing is suppressing this, too.

Shuichi:  “It doesn’t *bother you*!? What are you talking about—”

But of course Shuichi is in too much of a panicked state of mind to consider that that’s what Maki is doing. He just can’t get his head around why she apparently wouldn’t care that their best friend is d – only possibly dead.

Maki:  “More importantly… where’s Kokichi?”

She’s saying this because she needs to murder him. If she can find him and murder him here, before the trial, then she can confess to her crime and not get all of her friends executed because Kokichi will already be dead anyway. So long as she kills him, Kaito’s death won’t be for nothing. That’s the thought she’s clung to all night, and she’s not letting it go.

(Please also consider what Kaito would have been expecting Maki to do here. He’d think, since she believes that she killed him, that she’s bound to confess so as to not get any of her friends executed, right? No matter how many times he ran potential outcomes of this situation through his head last night, I don’t think Kaito would ever have been able to conceive of Maki doing anything other than that. He has to be so confused and worried to hear that that’s not what she’s doing here. Surely she can’t actually be planning to…?) 

Keebo:  “He should be somewhere in this hangar—”

Tsumugi:  “He ran away! We need to catch him immediately! He’s obviously the culprit!”

Keebo:  “Let’s split up and look for him! Leave no stone unturned!”

Keebo makes the correct suggestion that Kokichi (or, at least, the survivor) is likely to be somewhere in this hangar. But then everyone moves on to assuming he ran away and imagining him being anywhere but in the hangar, which probably contributes to nobody realising throughout the investigation that there is actually one place in the hangar where he still could be.

(I don’t think it’s relevant that Tsumugi is the one to suggest this, since she knows even less about what’s going on than Monokuma does.)

Shuichi:  “…Wait. We… can’t leave yet. We don’t know for *certain* if that dead body is Kaito. We haven’t explored all of the possibilities yet.”

But Shuichi is having none of everyone just jumping to assume Kaito’s obviously dead. Mostly because he can’t bear to accept it, but it also seems from the way he’s a little calmer as he says this that his detective’s instincts are kicking in and telling him they shouldn’t be jumping to conclusions so quickly.

It was around this line that first-time-me started to realise that maybe there was a chance Kaito wasn’t actually dead after all. If Shuichi was pointing this out in a way that wasn’t just obvious denial, then maybe that could be where the story was going with this after all. Maybe the narrative actually cared about Kaito more than I’d given it credit for and was going to do a great thing here? Maybe? 

Keebo:  “And if Kaito is alive, why hasn’t he shown himself yet?”

However, this was the biggest thing that prevented first-time-me from coming up with a plausible theory of events in which Kaito was alive, as much as I desperately wanted to believe that almost as badly as Shuichi did. I couldn’t conceive of any reason that Kaito wouldn’t immediately show himself and do everything he could to help them all understand what the heck had just happened.

Himiko:  “Are you saying… he’s hiding because he’s the culprit?”

And even if Kaito was the culprit (which I thought was quite likely if he was alive) and had killed Kokichi in some desperate attempt to protect everyone somehow (obviously the only reason he’d ever do so), he would never hide that from them. He would have no hesitation in taking responsibility for his own actions and accepting the consequences.

(Or at least, he would never decide on his own to hide anything like that from them – but that’s the trick, because doing that wasn’t his idea. Nothing about Kaito’s actions here make sense until you realise he was co-operating with Kokichi, and that’s not something there’s any reason to assume until late into the trial.)

Maki:  “Don’t say such a stupid thing! Kaito being the culprit is even more impossible than him being dead!”

It’s adorable that, despite how jaded Maki is to the idea that people kill each other, it is completely inconceivable to her that Kaito would ever kill anyone, no matter the reason, even if it’s the target that she herself was so determined to kill. Kaito was the one who started to drag her out of that mindset that killing is just how life works, so surely he would never compromise that and turn out to be just another person from her world after all?

It’s also notable that she says it’s “even more impossible” than him being dead, implying that she still sees Kaito being dead as one level of impossible even though she believes it’s the truth. She did offhandedly comment when the murder was going down in chapter 4 that there’s no way Kaito would actually die despite what an idiot he is. So she also apparently has some extent of that irrational belief in Kaito’s invincibility, at least on the level of him not dying on them, that Shuichi has.

But of course, if there’s any kind of impossible thing that Maki can make possible… it’s killing someone, right?

Tsumugi:  “And his opponent – the mastermind of the killing game – could control the Exisals at will.”

Tsumugi would like to remind everyone that Kokichi is definitely the mastermind of this killing game.

Tsumugi:  “How could Kaito have killed someone like that when he was sick and wounded?”

And, just like Shuichi, she is also still fully aware that Kaito is sick. (Because of course she is.)

Shuichi:  “I don’t know, I just… I’m just saying it’s possible…”

It sure is – we’ve had examples even here where a stronger person was killed by a weaker person catching them by surprise (Rantaro) or getting them to lower their guard (Ryoma, Tenko).

Shuichi:  “Ah, and even if it is Kokichi that was killed, that doesn’t mean that Kaito is the culprit.”

…But of course, Shuichi also quite quickly nopes away from the possibility that Kaito is the culprit as well, not just because he doesn’t want to believe that his friend would do that, but also because he doesn’t want him to be executed. He just desperately does not want to lose Kaito to this trial, no matter how it happens. He has no idea that that’s a pointless thing to hope for because Kaito was already going to die today anyway, murder or no murder.

Shuichi:  (The initial evidence suggests Kaito is dead… But I just… can’t believe that. Or perhaps… I don’t want to believe it. I… can’t believe Kaito is dead.)

In the previous case, “the Ultimate Detective” and “Shuichi Saihara” ended up quite separate from each other, with Shuichi able to unflinchingly pursue the truth on the one hand even as he hated condemning Gonta to death beneath it all. But this time it seems the shock of possibly losing Kaito has prevented Shuichi from being so detached, and his two sides have merged together to the point that he isn’t sure whether his refusal to believe this is really because of his detective’s instincts telling him there’s more to this or just because he can’t bear to lose his best friend.

Shuichi:  “I don’t know if we’ll find hope or despair… but we have to find the truth.”

Technically he wouldn’t really be finding hope here – if he finds that Kaito is still alive, he’s found relief. The “hope” part here is simply the act of believing Kaito might still be alive despite the evidence suggesting otherwise, and continuing to search for proof of it.

Kaito:  “You’re an impressive detective, through and through. You might not only reach the truth, but something even beyond it.”

…

Shuichi:  (That’s right… I have to do this. To keep my promise to Kaito…)

Shuichi is still gaining encouragement to do his best in investigations from Kaito, even now! If only Kaito could realise that he doesn’t even need to necessarily be alive to be able to inspire Shuichi and give him strength. That’s something it’d really, really help for him to know.

Meanwhile everyone else is still very much assuming Kokichi is obviously the culprit.

Maki:  “Then, it’ll be easy to deal with him. We just need to vote for him in the class trial.”

…Except that Maki doesn’t really believe it, of course. It seems she’s now given up on the possibility of murdering him before the trial starts and is going to do it using the class trial instead, even if that means she has to sacrifice everyone else.

(Kaito is already dead because of her. She’s already in despair. Nothing else matters to her except for making sure his death wasn’t in vain.)

Shuichi:  (I understand the others… But why Maki? Why is she accepting Kaito’s death so easily…?)

Because she always does. Because just accepting it is the way she’s always had to deal with everything awful that’s ever happened to her.

(Obviously she’s accepting it on a logical level because she was there and believes it to be the indisputable truth, but this is why she’s then able to accept it on an emotional level despite how painful it is for her.)

The Monokuma File is delightfully empty of information. First-time-me was very happy to see this, because it proved that this really was what the narrative was doing with this case and so there was still about a 50/50 chance that Kaito was alive, which was far better than the odds had seemed when I first saw the body discovery.

This Monokuma File could just seem like it’s Monokuma doing his usual thing of not giving away any information which would reveal the culprit, since the identity of the victim is obviously a key to this case… but nope, this is actually everything that Monokuma knows.

Shuichi tries to persuade Maki that Kaito might be alive by telling her about the promise Kaito made to him yesterday that he was totally going to do something about this.

Shuichi:  “I want to believe in the promise Kaito made. I want you to believe in that with me—”

It is pretty adorable how much faith Shuichi has even in Kaito’s grand declarations for which he clearly has no idea what he’s doing and no actual plan. In fact, Shuichi usually does not have so much faith in those kind of claims of Kaito’s, so the fact that he’s suddenly doing so here is definitely more of him running away from the truth. Obviously Kaito did have a plan, right, and this could be part of that…? Kaito is totally good enough at elaborate plans that his faked death and secret survival could be the result of something he came up with… right???

(And Shuichi’s not precisely wrong, because the one part he is right to believe in is Kaito’s desire to do something about it and make a difference, no matter what it takes. Even though this plan is not Kaito’s and not remotely what he was talking about when he made the promise yesterday, this is Kaito doing everything he can to make that difference and live up to that promise. And Kaito is hearing Shuichi say this! He’s hearing Shuichi believe in his determination to do exactly what he’s doing right now!)

But despite hearing this from Shuichi, Maki doesn’t piece together the fact that this means he and Kaito must have made up at some point. She’s too busy blocking out her pain to think about that kind of thing right now – she doesn’t want to think about anything Kaito might have said to anyone.

(Also, consider that Kaito made a very similar promise to Maki yesterday as well, that he would totally do something about all this, when they both believed that he was dying from her poison arrow and had no conceivable way out at all. That… can’t be fun for her to think about either.)

Maki:  “…I refuse to investigate with you.”

See, this is what it looks like when the culprit doesn’t want to investigate with the Ultimate Detective to avoid arousing suspicion.

…Though that’s probably not the only reason Maki’s refusing; it’s also because she can’t bear to hear Shuichi constantly talking like Kaito might still be alive. Hearing other people talk with hope when you’re convinced there’s no hope anywhere just hurts.

Maki:  “Right now, you’re acting like Kaito… back in Gonta’s class trial. It was like this at that time too, wasn’t it? You can’t fight despair with just belief. It’s not that simple.”

She’s not precisely wrong; this is somewhat like Kaito was back then. Kaito refused to accept Gonta’s guilt simply because it hurt too much, even though everything kept pointing towards it, and to protect himself from that pain he just desperately clung to a hope that was completely baseless. That is essentially what Shuichi is doing right now about Kaito’s apparent death.

(Also consider that Kaito is hearing this, and given how much he thoroughly regrets everything he did in Gonta’s trial and knows that it was weakness and an inability to face the truth, he’s probably not too happy at the suggestion that Shuichi might currently be being this weak as well. But I’m sure he believes in Shuichi’s ability to overcome that and face the facts objectively even if it hurts. Shuichi’s always been better at that than Kaito, after all.)

But Maki is wrong to say that this isn’t a way to fight despair. Despair is just a feeling! Anything that prevents you from feeling that, even if it’s irrational and baseless, is fighting it! Shuichi is not in despair right now precisely because he is clinging to a currently-completely-baseless hope that Kaito might not be dead! And if he keeps clinging to that, maybe he’ll find some actual basis for believing it, which he’s never going to find if he doesn’t even try to believe it exists in the first place. The impossible is possible, you just gotta make it so – and to do that you need to believe that it’s possible in the first place!

Maki, meanwhile, is completely in despair: she is thoroughly convinced that Kaito is definitely dead and isn’t even trying to believe there could be any other possibility. When she talks about “fighting despair”, she’s talking about the meaningless buzzwordy concept that the Flashback Light brainwashed her with – the idea that despair is basically analogous to “evil”, something that can be defeated by removing the evil people, rather than something that you feel and simply defeat by not feeling it any more. That’s why she’s still trying to kill Kokichi. That’s why she thinks sacrificing everyone else to do so is worth it. She has no conception of the fact that doing that would be actually letting despair win, in that it would be letting the despair that she’s feeling take control of her and make her do something even worse because she’s already in so much despair that nothing else feels worse any more.

Keebo:  “There’s something about the air in here that’s making me feel… off… I don’t know if the Electrobomb is to blame, or if I’m malfunctioning somehow… But I’m starting to feel… somewhat sick.”

It’s almost certainly the Electrobomb – but it’s actually pretty neat and a testament to Keebo’s humanity that something like this, even though it’s an electronic thing that affects him because his body is electronic, makes him feel sick, like a human would if something had messed with their body.

Also, since the Electrobomb kills wireless signals… shouldn’t Keebo be unable to hear his inner voice right now? He never mentions that, but you’d think it’d be a thing, and therefore that the very end of this chapter is in fact not the first moment he’s been without it.

Himiko:  “It’s gotta be because of the Electrobomb. Keebo’s an electronic appliance, after all.”

Himiko, geez, could you not be so goddamn robophobic right now!? It’s never a good time for it, but especially not now when somebody is horribly dead!

I really get the unfortunate sense that Himiko’s awkward unnecessary robophobia is simply a result of bad writing. Apparently the writers decided for some stupid reason that it is vitally important that someone is always being a dick to Keebo – because Himiko only does it when Kokichi is not around to do it instead. Hence there suddenly being a bunch of it in this chapter (most of which I’ve ignored here).

Himiko awkwardly wanders further into the hangar to investigate alone as well, leaving Tsumugi to speculate that she might suspect someone other than Kokichi or Kaito.

Shuichi:  (I did suggest that possibility… The culprit might not be Kokichi or Kaito, but a third party…)

The way Shuichi brings this up like he almost forgot he suggested it really does indicate that he never did so because he actually believed the culprit could be one of the remaining four people. He just suggested it because it’s the only way for Kaito to get out of this alive.

Tsumugi:  “We were united towards hope before all this, but now we’re split up… Could it be… that’s why Kokichi killed Kaito?”

Shuichi:  “To disrupt our harmony…”

You could almost say he’s… Killing Harmony.

…Which is to say, this is the closest the game’s localised subtitle ever gets to being relevant in the entire story and they really shouldn’t have called it that because it’s basically meaningless otherwise (especially since that’s not the actual intent behind this murder at all). The original Japanese subtitle of the game has an actual point behind it which will come up in trial 6.

Tsumugi:  “In the end, we were all gathered around Kaito. He was the one keeping us together.”

He was! And… of course Tsumugi realises that, because that’s what she wrote him to be. That’s all he is to her, and that’s all that killing him is to her. It’s not like Kaito dying would ever matter to Kaito, only to everyone else, right?

Since she presumably believes Kaito is dead here, she’s probably thinking, “welp, guess I never actually needed to give him the virus after all, he went and died as scripted anyway, excellent.” Kaito may be a murderer now, but he’s not the worst murderer in this room.

---

[Next post]

[eng2100]

blog 08 - neuromancer

So as an introductory note, I’m actually quite a big fan of cyberpunk. I’m a hobbyist DnD player and the first campaign that I’ve Dungeon-Mastered for was actually a simplified version of Shadowrun that I wrote all the backstory and lore for. It’s in what I would call a “sequel” right now that I’m very much enjoying. So bla bla bla I was excited to get to Neuromancer this whole time because I’m a genre fan.

a brief primer to cyberpunk

So western Cyberpunk owes its roots largely to the detective fiction genre-- most notably the hardboiled detective archetype, a darker western interpretation of your Sherlock Holmes type who is usually a jaded antihero that works for money, but still has a sense of justice deep down. You see this more reflected in Blade Runner than you see it in Neuromancer’s Case, but there are still a number of correlations (Funnily enough, Neuromancer and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep both end on nearly the same line-- “He never saw Molly again.” and “...and I never saw her again.” respectively.) Interestingly enough, Case kind of spawns his own kind of cyberpunk hero trope-- the rebellious hacker, seen in Neo. 

If detective fiction owes itself to the inescapable aura of The Great Depression, then cyberpunk owes itself to the Reagan administration. Cyberpunk’s whole thing, at least in the west, springs forward from the fear of unregulated corporate growth in tandem with the rise of technology, and what the mixture of the two might bode for humanity at large. Both Neuromancer and Blade Runner owe their entire aesthetics to the vision of a world taken over by neon advertisements, bereft of nature, replaced by plasticity. 

Now, why the primer? Well, I think it’s important to preface the discussion of this novel with the idea that cyberpunk is a deeply political genre in a way that not many other genres inherently are. (All fiction is, of course, inherently political, whether intentional or not, but most genres don’t regularly feature as much political charge as cyberpunk, is what I mean.) Neuromancer is politics from an era before most of us in this class were born, and as such, atop being a seminal work of genre fiction, it’s a lurid look into what the landscape looked like in the 80s. We are living now in the times that 80s Cyberpunk once called “the future”-- and, well, what does it look like for us? Are we living in the Urban Sprawl?

not quite

Our dystopian future is significantly more...mundane than coffin hotels and the television sky over Chiba. You might say we got all the corporate deregulation and none of the glimmering aesthetic slickness of cyberpunk-- we really are living in the worst timeline. If i’m going to have to labor under capitalism for the rest of my short life, couldn’t I at least have a slick pair of mirrorshades?

the text

There’s a lot about Neuromancer to like. It earned its reputation wholeheartedly-- it is definitely the legendary cyberpunk novel that it is well-known for being. Its writing style can often be abstract at the same time that it’s luridly detailed, and it uses strange and interesting words to create vivid images in the reader’s mind of this foreign landscape of the Sprawl. It uses a lot of “old world” associations to lend deeper weight to its descriptions (the Tank War Europa game comes to mind in tandem with the Screaming Fist operation that looms over the plot). 

The book doesn’t shy away from the visceral nature of its own plot and setting-- drug binges and cramped love affairs in coffin hotels, fear and violence are all described in visceral detail that grounds the book hard in its reality while simultaneously indulging in a sort of dream-like surreality. I really admire the ways in which Gibson writes physical sensation whether it comes to the sex or the pain or the weirdness of cyberspace. The introduction of the novel sort of failed to catch me until Gibson went into detail about Case’s harrowing journey after losing his ability to jack into cyberspace and the intense, surreal affair with Linda Lee. Perhaps my biggest issue with the writing of Neuromancer is, however, Gibson’s tendency to throw a lot of world-building terminology at you really fast. Nothing bogs down a fictional story more than having to pause to wonder what certain words mean.

Describing cyberspace during a time in which VR wasn’t even a thing yet had to have been a challenge and a half, but Gibson found interesting ways to visualize the experience, and coined interesting terminology for it (ice and icebreakers, most notably). The Sense/Net bits are also pretty cool, but I’m also biased because anything that gives Molly Millions more screentime is just the best thing.

Did I mention Molly is my favorite character? I just can’t get over her. It sucks that her and Case break up in the epilogue, but it also feels fitting in a weird way. She really struck me as a standout character for a woman in a cyberpunk novel-- she’s an active player in her own sexuality, she’s violent and the stronger of the two between herself and Case. She has a sort of unapologetic way about her that feels very fresh even today. The first time Case uses Sense/Net to see through her eyes, I was hit in an unexpectedly hard way by the description of people in a crowd moving out of the way for her-- for most girls in real life, that’s a fairly unheard of experience, and to me, as a female reader, it did a lot to establish to me just how powerful she is.

That being said, this is a good place to segue into the conversation you know my Obnoxious Feminist Ass has been waiting to bring up.

cyberpunk vs women

You can tell a lot about a person’s base assumptions about the world by the way they talk about people in their works of fiction. Now when I say “base assumptions” I don’t mean their political leanings, I mean something that’s on a deeper, more subconscious level-- in this way, base assumptions are inherently neutral in a way, they’re incapable of being truly malicious, even if they’re harmful, because they’re just the base coding of how a person regards things inherently.

What I’m getting at is that at the time of writing this book, I don’t think Gibson had much of a regard for women at all. When the first mention of women in your novel is calling them whores, I’m going to be forced to assume both that you don’t like women very much and that women are primarily sex objects to you-- or at the very least that women factor into your view of the world in a very marginal way that is largely informed by porn culture. Now, let’s suppose that maybe it’s actually the POV character Case that’s just a raging sexist-- that theory might hold water if this were a character trait that is brought up as a flaw, or indeed, if it were really brought up at all in his personality, but it’s not.

To my great frustration, in the Neuromancer world, it seems like “whore” is about the only job available for women! Who knew the job market would shrink in such a way? Now, perhaps you could argue that Gibson was actually trying to make a point about the way in which porn culture commodifies women into sexy leg lamps for male consumption, and I won’t claim to know his intent, but to me, it doesn’t really seem that deep. It seems like to me that, to Gibson, women being mostly vapid sex workers in his dystopia is a foregone conclusion-- he didn’t think about it that hard, that’s just his stereotypical image of what women in an criminal underbelly do.

This problem of a lack of regard for female perspectives in cyberpunk narratives that largely concern themselves with themes of objectification and oppression under capitalist systems and the regurgitation of harmful sexist tropes certainly isn’t exclusive to Neuromancer. Cyberpunk is a economic-political type of genre, so oppression in the genre tends to fall upon class lines rather than race or gender lines-- and perhaps, this could occur in a far flung future in which capital manages to supersede bias, however, I can’t help but feel that this is a lazy way to write a political narrative. Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, and The Matrix all have distinct problems with addressing the idea of intersectionality when it comes to the ways in which ones gender and race plays into their role in a capitalist system. 

Cyberpunk, for all its shining successes as interesting fiction and pointed political commentary, totally fails in the regard that it co-opts the struggle of lower-classes and applies the romanticized aesthetic to white male characters completely unironically. (You can read a pretty good take on Dystopias and post-racialism here.)

east versus west

So, when I went over the primer to the rise of Cyberpunk earlier, I left something out (on purpose!). During the 80s, there was another prime ingredient to the mix of the nascent genre’s formation: the rise of Japan as a technological leader in the global market. Before World War 2, and indeed, during it, American’s conceptualization of the future, was, well, American. They viewed themselves as the originator of innovation within the world and the blueprint from which the rest of the world should be based. However, this all changed in the post-war era as Japan began to participate in the market, leaving behind their isolationist ways-- suddenly, Japan was what the vision of the future looked like in American imagination-- the Tokyo urban sprawl.

The imagery of Japan is ubiquitous in western Cyberpunk, whether hardcore or or softcore or simply an incidental portrayal of futurism. Disney’s Big Hero 6 features San Fransokyo, San Franciso and Tokyo jammed together complete with neon signs in Japanese letters. During the 90s, Marvel launched Rampage 2099 and Spider-man 2099, both set in glittering neon cityscapes. The series Firefly featured a strange universe in which everyone seems to speak Chinese pidgins (but there’s no Chinese people in the show, funnily). MTV had Aeon Flux, a U.S. take on anime. Even movies like Total Recall borrowed the bright neon flavor. Video games such as Deus Ex and Cyberpunk 2077 feature these influences heavily, with less-bold-but-still-there influence being seen in games like Remember Me and Detroit: Become Human.

There’s an interesting cultural exchange going on between the east and west when it comes to Cyberpunk, as the 90s were rife with cyberpunk fiction in both places-- The U.S. saw The Matrix (which was inspired by Ghost in the Shell, as admitted by the Wachowskis in a phrasing that I find really annoying as an animator: “We want to make that but for real”.), while Japan had the seminal Ghost in the Shell and Akira. It’s interesting to note the stark contrast between western and eastern Cyberpunk-- eastern Cyberpunk misses entirely western Cyberpunk’s detective fiction roots, for one. For two, eastern Cyberpunk tends to concern itself more with philosophical questions about the nature of the soul in relation to technology and deep-seated cultural fears about weapons of mass destruction and government.

Neuromancer is deeply entrenched in eastern aesthetics-- many Japanese brands are brought up explicitly by name within the model (Mitsubishi, Sony, etc.). Gibson cites the “Kowloon Walled City” of Hong Kong as something that haunted him after he was told about it, and the idea of Coffin Hotels owes quite a lot to it. Gibson is quoted as saying:

“Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk. The Japanese themselves knew it and delighted in it. I remember my first glimpse of Shibuya, when one of the young Tokyo journalists who had taken me there, his face drenched with the light of a thousand media-suns - all that towering, animated crawl of commercial information - said, ‘You see? You see? It is Blade Runner town.' And it was. It so evidently was.“

One of Neuromancer’s primary settings is The Night City, a supposedly gaijin district of Tokyo on the bay-- this...sort of explains why there don’t seem to be a lot of Asian people in Asia, but the issue still stands. This isn’t a game-breakingly “I wouldn’t recommend this book” bad case, but it is something that I felt I should point out. Neuromancer is a foundational work to the genre, which means that not only are its successes carried over, but many of its flaws as well. Now, I don’t want this cricitism to sound like I think William Gibson is a raging bigot or anything-- I really don’t! I follow him on twitter and he’s a perfectly likable guy, actually. Problems aside, I really enjoy his work.

conclusions

Going into the future, I don’t think Cyberpunk is going away anytime soon, and certainly much of it owes its roots to Neuromancer. With shows like Altered Carbon and games like Cyberpunk 2077 on the horizon, I’m interested to see the ways in which our current economic political climate may effect what our vision of a technological dystopia may look like. Cyberpunk is easily one of the most interesting genres of fiction, and if you haven’t looked into it deeply, I highly recommend checking it out.

[therummesoccupied]

A Swing and a Hit - A Review of Spider-Man: Homecoming

           Many say that the superhero movie genre is getting tired, that the market’s oversaturated and that we’ve been flooded with too many context-dependant “cinematic universes.” To a degree, this is true. It’s astounding how much you needed to know about the universes and lore behind DC Comics before seeing Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice in order to even begin to understand the movie, let alone the information provided by the context set up in Man of Steel. Legendary Pictures is now gearing up for the third installment of their “MonsterVerse,” all leading up to a climactic standoff between monster film icons Godzilla and King Kong, and Universal Studios has been trying for years to re-establish its own movie monster universe, most recently with the apparent blunder that was The Mummy. However, one cannot have the conversation about the cinematic universe craze without discussing Marvel’s own “Marvel Cinematic Universe,” or as we have all come to know it, the MCU. The MCU is set apart from its competitors however, by a number of factors. One of which is history – the fact that the MCU was built from a single superhero movie, and has been introducing new characters and elements piece-by-piece organically since 2008. Another factor is the varying “flavors” of the movies. While each story certainly feels like it shares a world with the rest, the vast majority of the films are noticeably different from the others, making each stand out well enough to make watching any one of them on its own an enjoyable experience without feeling the need to marathon them all. The last characteristic factor of the MCU is organization, with Marvel splitting its stories up into “Phases,” or groups that all build up to climactic crossovers like The Avengers, sort of like seasons of a television show; this, I have found, is the most enjoyable way to look at these films. No one gets upset about needing the context from past episodes to fully understand the season finale of their favorite prime-time sitcom, and I honestly think to continue to apply that formula in the world of film is a daring and profitable move on Marvel’s part.

           Now, the latest installment in Marvel’s “cinematic television series” is Spider-Man: Homecoming, a solo flick centering around Marvel’s main posterboy, the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Many fans feel this piece has been a long time coming, with Spidey’s movie rights being held on lockdown for several years by Fox. After working out a deal on the rights, however, the web-slinger was able to join the party, first appearing in Captain America: Civil War. While Civil War’s context plays directly into Homecoming, the movie is not strictly required reading in order to get the general jist of the film’s plot. Peter Parker is given a new and improved spider-suit by Tony Stark and shipped back to New York City to continue his street-level super-heroics, but feels the need to prove himself capable of being a fully fledged Avenger. Tom Holland returns as Parker, bringing with him an energy that is a breath of truly fresh air to the MCU. Up until now, every hero we’ve seen has been unswervingly mature or noble or cocky or smart or something. Whatever a hero in the MCU is, they’re supremely confident and grounded in their character, making them seem always sure of whatever they’re saying or doing. Holland’s Spider-Man is able to bring a believable uncertainty to his character, always questioning his next move or the words that leave his mouth. Peter Parker is a teenager, and he’s going through a turbulent time in his life. On top of his typical puberty-ridden crises, he’s also got superheroing to worry about. Honestly, neither Toby MacGuire nor Andrew Garfield were able to bring this youthful conflict to the character, and when they did, it came off as the moans of a worker who simply didn’t like their job, because, simply put, Toby was too old and Andrew was too cool. Tom Holland has an astoundingly pretty face for 21, and has no trouble passing for a 15 year old, and he’s simply too adorable to be the cool guy. Sorry, Tom. Whatever the case, “conflicted geek kid” seemed to fit Holland like a glove. Holland’s performance was supplemented by the rest of Parker’s high-school crew, namely Jacob Batalon and Zendaya, who portray characters Ned and Michelle respectively. Neither of them are quite present enough to overtake the film, but both are able to contribute to Parker’s youthful energy enough to remind us that Peter is, in fact, a real high schooler. Part of the problem with past Spider-Man films is the lack of many school elements in Parker’s life. His relationship with others is usually limited to Aunt May and an obligatory love interest. We were never shown that Peter had a real boy’s life away from the red tights, and the simple act of giving him some friends was more than enough to ground this film in the hormone ridden halls of late childhood.

           Peter is also helped along by his mentor figure, Tony Stark, continuing to be played by acclaimed actor and MCU icon, Robert Downey Jr. Before the film was released, I heard a lot of talk about from folks worrying that RDJ might steal the show. Rest assured, fellow viewers, the Armored Avenger hardly occupies the screen for ten minutes of this entire movie. I’d thank the people upstairs, too, as there is something… off… about RDJ’s performance. He comes off as a bit more calm and mature than usual, almost dad-like, which I suppose might be the angle they were going for, but it doesn’t seem to suit Stark well. In the past, Stark takes every opportunity he can to be snide and mean-spirited unless an issue is serious enough to truly upset him. Giving Peter his “son, I’m disappointed in you” talk while neither making an inappropriate joke nor raising his voice just seems very out of character for him. It seemed like Downey was given a choice to be either too hard or too soft on Peter, but chose to fall somewhere in the middle, which, while a suitable choice, didn’t seem to be quite the right one.

           Speaking of old superheroes, Michael Keaton, popular within the genre for Tim Burton’s Batman and the odd commentary, Birdman, takes another center-stage role as the film’s main antagonist, Adrian Toomes, who fans will recognize as classic Spider-Man villain: The Vulture. Keaton manages to bring one of the first genuinely intimidating auras to the MCU I’ve seen. The character’s motivations are ones I’m sure we’ve all seen before, aging labor worker gets ripped off by rich folks and takes matters into his own hands by undergoing criminal activity to support his family, truly and dangerously believing he’s in the right the whole time. The difference comes once the plot twist concerning the character is shown, which I won’t spoil, but I’ll say it makes him seem all the more real as a person, somehow making him much, much scarier.

           Visually, the film is largely standard MCU fare. Vibrant, bright colors, over-the-top action scenes, and interesting spins on the more mundane scenes so they never get to be boring. I suppose that there’s no need to fix what isn’t broken. One of the things that sets this movie apart from other MCU flicks is the way it does motion. Being a Spider-Man film, a great emphasis is placed on the way Spider-Man moves – fluid, not-quite erratic flips, and clever use of momentum give this film’s action scenes a very unique visual flavor. Unfortunately, not much of this is ground that hasn’t been covered in Spider-Man films made in the past. What this one does that the others did not, however, is give us a view of New York City we don’t see in a whole lot of movies. The joke is often made among comic enthusiasts, “how would Spider-Man get around if there weren’t tall buildings for him to swing around on?” Honestly, neither TV Show, comic book, nor movie have really addressed this query up till now. This film seems to make a point of showing Spider-Man in places that are not Times Square. We see Spider Man in the back alleys, and in the suburbs where we are welcomed by the familiar sights of grass, trees, and even the occasional wooden fence. Getting to see Spidey operate somewhere other than the crowded city streets was a welcome surprise.

           In addition to settings, I adored the look of the outfits, especially the spider-suit. When it was first announced that Spider-Man would be joining the MCU, I was skeptical – I had been disillusioned with Spider-Man for years (which just goes to show how well Tom Holland did to bring me back). As soon as I saw the spider-suit, though, my doubts almost completely washed away. The classic look, the bright colors, the expressive eyes, everything about it was quintessentially the great Spider-Man I remembered from my childhood – with a few touches of modern flair that only helped to make the suit look even better. We also got a much better look at Peter’s old spider-suit from when he was introduced in Civil War, and I’m just as in love with it - a clever visual reference to the Scarlet Spider design from the comics that manages to be both fun to look at and functional. A third spider-suit shortly appears in the film - an ugly, armored contraption reminiscent of DC’s mislead New 52 designs that I’m so, so glad doesn’t get used. As I said before, don’t fix what isn’t broken.

           The movie’s story and themes, while easy to follow, lead to a couple confusing conclusions. There is not a single reference to Uncle Ben or the line “With great power comes great responsibility” in the entire film, and while I’m glad I didn’t have to sit through Spider-Man’s origin story again, I’m a little disappointed that the very core of Spider-Man’s character was never brought up in Spidey’s first solo step into the MCU. Still, the concept of responsibility is one of the central themes of the movie… I think. The movie spends a lot of time emphasizing that Peter isn’t ready to become an Avenger because he steps outside of his boundaries and tries to solve problems that aren’t his to handle, and at the end of the film, he redeems himself by… beating the bad guy he’s been told several times not to take on? I suppose one could interpret the movie’s core message as “to achieve greatness, one must be great.” Spidey must grow as a hero to accomplish the task before him and save the day, and by acting recklessly before he was ready, he screws up pretty bad. It’s only once he’s accepted the risk and responsibility that comes with being a hero that he can show how great he truly is. It’s a simple enough conclusion to understand, I guess, but it takes some effort to get there that the movie could have easily lessened with a bit of dialogue change or shift in focus.

           Still, the movie manages to tell a strong and effective story with the most relatable Spider-Man to date. I couldn’t tell you whether Spider-Man: Homecoming is the best Spider-Man film out there, but its performers certainly bring a unique and youthful presence to it and its visuals manage to meld old and new together to create an impressively fitting and engaging look at the world of everyone’s favorite webhead. With effective characters and a compelling setting, the challenge and fun of the story fall right into place – giving the movie a fantastic tone that falls somewhere between the excitement and adventure of The Avengers and the endearingly comedic romp that is Guardians of the Galaxy. Spider-Man has found himself fitting right in with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I’m glad to see my friendly neighborhood hero come home.

[ryanjdonovan]

Donovan's Oscar Prognostication 2017

What can we expect at the Oscars this year?  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you can expect a lot of sociopolitical commentary from underqualified celebrities.  If you want to know what else to expect (like who will win), read on for my 18th annual Oscar predictions.  

BEST PICTURE:

SHOULD WIN:  Hell Or High Water WILL WIN:  La La Land GLORIOUSLY OMITTED:  Sully INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED:  The Nice Guys

Do I think La La Land SHOULD win Best Picture?  Let me put it this way: It's a movie about idiots chasing idiot dreams for idiot reasons with idiot excuses, spending time with other like-minded idiots.  If I ran the marketing campaign, my tagline on the poster would be: "Everybody has dreams.  Nobody achieves them.  Grow up." I think the audience's opinions of the characters in the film can be categorized into 3 groups:  1) Struggling actors or musicians, who are gushing, "These people capture EXACTLY why I want to be an actor/musician, including all the passion and heartbreak!"  2) Actors or musicians who have actually made it, who are thinking, "These people are morons."  3) Adults with real responsibilities, who are like, "Are you f---ing kidding me with these people?"  I couldn't help but think of Judge Smails: "Well, the world needs ditch-diggers too."  Let's just say, I'm clearly not the target audience.  If you want a movie with a similar theme, stronger chemistry, and frankly, better music, watch 500 Days Of Summer.  So, the more appropriate question: Do I think La La Land WILL win Best Picture?  Almost undoubtedly.  Hollywood is practically falling all over itself to congratulate this film… which is, of course, essentially congratulating itself.  The fact that it tied the record for most Oscar nominations ever (14!) is absurd and obscene.  Between the critical praise, huge box office take, cleaning up precursor awards, and being one of the few nominees that's not cripplingly depressing, it's a pretty safe bet to win the big prize.  (Incidentally, the biggest question of all after seeing the film was: How old is Tom Everett Scott??)

Most people will tell you that there are two films with a (small) chance to knock out La La Land for Best Picture: Moonlight and Manchester By The Sea.  This is not true.  There is a film with a chance to pull an upset, but it's the underdog about underdogs: Hidden Figures.  How could this happen?  For starters, La La Land wasn't nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Best Cast award, and only one other film in that situation has ever gone on to win the Oscar for Best Picture (Braveheart, in 1995) - so history is not on its side.  And when there IS an upset for Best Picture, it's often the SAG Cast award that portends it (remember Spotlight, Crash, or Shakespeare In Love?).  And this year's SAG Cast winner?  Hidden Figures.  (On the other hand, the SAG Cast winner only goes on to win the Oscar about half the time.)  Most importantly, Hidden Figures is gaining steam at the right time: It's been universally praised by reviewers and audiences, it's the highest grossing of all the nominees, and it's a triumphant, crowd-pleasing story that stands out against most of the other films which are, put simply, huge bummers.  Detractors argue that it's a little predictable and safe, leans heavily on social context, borrows too liberally from the Apollo 13 playbook, and doesn't have a whole lot of bite to it.  But given the harshness of the competition, these may not be such negative things.  It's not a bad time for a feel-good, heroic, unifying, patriotic, adversity-conquering, well-crafted story based on true events.  It may just be enough to steal the Oscar.    

The most fashionable upset pick by the pundits is Moonlight.  In my opinion, it's a strong film, but it's too enigmatic to be a serious threat for Best Picture (I think it will have to settle for an Acting award and a Screenplay award).  It's an existential puzzle box - it poses a lot of questions, but doesn't necessarily answer many.  It gives us a sense of the main character, a hint, but leaves a lot up to possibility.  It ultimately leaves us wanting more - which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't help if we are looking for a sense of closure or finality to the story.  (It also doesn't help that the main boy in the story endures more horrible things than any child ever should.)  The main question the film poses to the boy (and to everyone) is: What makes a person who they are?  And beyond that, it asks: Is a person a product of their environment?  Their relationships?  What they say?  What they don't say?  Their actions?  If it's none of these things (or all of these things), then how is a person supposed to know who they truly are?  Is it one thing, or many things?  Does it evolve, or do they always have one constant true self?  Is it even possible to know?  Moonlight presents us with a main character who's trying to answer all these questions, but doesn't say much at all.  It's an interesting choice, and a maddening one.  We get a sense that maybe at the end he finally knows the answers to the questions, but he's not about to tell us.  (And if YOU can answer any of these big questions, then congratulations, you've solved humanity.)

The other film favored by a few critics is Manchester By The Sea - the one where the filmmaker decided, "I'm going to make a movie about the most depressing family ever."  While it's competent and convincingly acted, it's hard to get real enjoyment out of it.  There are some moments of lightness and humor (which are dearly welcome), but it basically starts with melancholy, takes a couple dips, takes a huge dive in the middle, and then only mildly recovers.  What makes it worse is that you expect that the story will go in a fulfilling direction, but it never does.  There's a certain sense of 'Jeeezus, what now?' throughout the movie.  At a certain point, it's like, Are there any more terrible things that could possibly happen to this family?  Do they have a dog that will get mutilated by a coyote or something?  The 'Life is messy' rationale in movies only goes so far with me.  And more than that, I think there are a few cases where the script is overly-manipulative, and doesn't feel true to the story.  Ultimately, I came away thinking: I bet the town would be gorgeous if it wasn't in a Kenneth Lonergan movie, and apparently "F-ck you" is how you say "I'm so sorry for your loss" in Massachusetts.

My personal choice for Best Picture would be Hell Or High Water, the modern Western that came out of nowhere.  Most of the film's critical praise is for taking a tired, hackneyed genre and invigorating it in a slick new way.  I fully agree, but I'd take it a couple steps further.  It makes what is ostensibly a farcical adventure of epically bad decision-making seem sympathetic and understandable, if not downright inevitable.  Bottom line, it's a fun ride: good old-fashioned cops and robbers, where the bad guys are good and the good guys are interesting.  I'll get more into this film, and my other favorite, Arrival, in the other categories.  

Shane Black has mastered a lot of things, first as a screenwriter, now as a director: seedy faux-glam noir, slick one-liners, overconfident buffoons, the LA crime caper, idiot heroes and the straight players who balance them out, and most of all, fun movies.  His type of humor is literally one of the reasons why I watch movies.  In a perfect world, the release of each of his new movies would be a highly-anticipated event.  (We can probably leave Iron Man 3 out of this conversation; while it was a solid action pic and had some of Black's signature irreverence, it was squarely a studio-machine product, not an auteur piece.)  Unfortunately, Black has somehow been relegated to being an afterthought compared to mainstream Hollywood.  He's not a guy that fits the mainstream studio mold, he's too offbeat and puckish for mega-hits, and he's too "big idea" for the indie world.  In my aforementioned perfect world, Black's film The Nice Guys would have been nominated for Best Picture (among other categories).  The excellent comedy about a pair of mismatched, bumbling, low-rent private investigators tweaks convention, stereotypes, and tropes.  It generally eschews sentimentality, except for a few key moments (that feel earned).  Unfortunately, it got clobbered at the Box Office.  Maybe Black can boost his career by trimming budgets; The Nice Guys was a pricy $50 million, but it probably didn't have to cost that much.  (On the other hand, would it have been nearly as good for $2 million starring Mark Duplass and Jake Johnson?  Definitely not.)  So what can we expect the reception to be for his upcoming Predator film?  In this imperfect world, probably indifference.

Surprised not to see Star Wars in my Best Picture conversation?  Oh, just wait.  I was sooooo tempted.  I kept it confined to the Adapted Screenplay category, since it was such a surprisingly strong story.  But don't worry, there's going to be a new Star Wars movie literally every year for the rest of eternity, so I'm sure it will make it back into this category in future articles.  

For my Gloriously Omitted choice, I've gotta pick on Sully, Clint Eastwood's latest.  Eastwood is operating at a level where every film he releases in the fall gets serious Oscar consideration.  Sully is no exception, but it turned out to be a bit of a clunker, story-wise.  It's thrilling, to be sure, but it simply isn't enough to carry a complete movie (especially considering the real 'Miracle on the Hudson' events just took place a mere 8 years ago).  It should have been a 1-hour TV special (even allowing for 15 minutes of commercials).  An attempt at a narrative is framed around the investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board - manufactured drama for the sake of the movie.  The problem is that there is no real opposition - the investigation into the pilot's decision-making is illogical and unrealistic, and we know how it's going to play out - so the film forces some ordinarily talented actors to ham it up as 'villains'.  (By comparison, the movie Flight used a similar construct, but was much more effective.  This is partly because it was completely fiction - we didn't know how things would turn out - and partly because the protagonist was hiding something critical from investigators - creating dramatic tension and conflict… things missing from Sully that are, you know, essential to a movie).  On the plus side, I will give Eastwood a lot of credit for his staging the water landing itself - that is the part of the movie worth watching.  The splashdown is an absolute dynamo.  The sequence is completely riveting, and emotional in a way I was not expecting.  We know exactly how the events will turn out, but by putting us right in the action - giving us the perspectives of the people involved and on the periphery - the stakes become huge.  That's a really difficult thing to pull off.  (Eastwood also borrowed from the Apollo 13 playbook - a common theme this year.  Maybe that's why he cast Tom Hanks?)  Unfortunately, I only have one takeaway from the film: Landing an airplane on the water doesn't look that hard.  

BEST ACTOR:

SHOULD WIN:  Denzel Washington (Fences) WILL WIN:  Denzel Washington (Fences) GLORIOUSLY OMITTED:  Tom Hanks (Sully) INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED:  Ryan Gosling (The Nice Guys)

This category promises to be the most dramatic of the evening.  It could come down to a coin flip between Denzel Washington (for Fences) and Casey Affleck (for Manchester By The Sea).  They've pretty much split the run-up awards, with Washington claiming the most important - the Screen Actors Guild award - and Affleck making off with secondary prizes like the Golden Globe, Critics' Choice and BAFTA.  As a performer and as a person, Affleck is polarizing, while Washington is dependable.  Comparatively, fewer people absolutely love Washington's performance; but also, fewer people loathe it.  Smaller camps of passionate fans (think: a few 1st place votes) tend to beat out the larger warm-ish ones (think: a bunch of 2nd place votes) during the nomination process due to Academy rules, but it tips the other way when it comes to the actual winners.  (That's how Viggo Mortensen snuck into this race with Captain Fantastic, but he has no shot at winning.)

So how much of the vote will they get?  With Affleck, one challenge will be to decide how much of his performance is "acting", and how much is coincidence that he plays a character with the same mush-mouthed, dopey, mopey aloofness that he has.  Personally, I don't think it's the best performance of the year, but I'll concede it's a good one - it may not be riveting, but it feels authentic and earned.  The other (and possibly bigger) challenge is if voters decide to judge Affleck the man.  In the film, his character says that he's "just the backup"; funny, that's exactly how the world feels about Ben Affleck's little brother in real life.  More importantly to his voting peers, there are the harassment allegations from his train wreck of a project with Joaquin Phoenix, I'm Still Here.  (By the way, how did Phoenix manage to emerge from that catastrophe with his reputation unscathed?)  So how did I reconcile seeing (and supporting) Affleck's film in light of the accusations against him?  Well, I watched it… but I didn't pay for it.  

With Washington, there really are no challenges.  He is, predictably, fantastic.  But that's the catch: "predictably".  With his reputation and resume, nobody is surprised (like they are with Affleck) that he hits a home run.  And more than that, he's ALREADY been great in this role - on Broadway, where he won a Tony a few years ago.  Voters will consider if there's a need to reward him for more of the same.  Putting the voting into larger context, a win for Washington would put him in the exclusive 3-Oscars Club - becoming the 7th actor, joining recent inductees Meryl Streep and Daniel-Day Lewis.  Many voters will agree that it would be a fitting honor for one of the finest actors of our time.  On top of that, Washington also directed and produced Fences.  The Academy loves a multi-hyphenate, and members that think he deserved a nomination for Best Director won't hesitate to vote for him here.  

So for my prediction of who Will Win, I think the SAG win tips the scales slightly in Washington's favor.  It shows he has the support of actors - it's the biggest branch of the Academy, and the one that will probably judge Affleck's accusations most harshly.  And for my Should Win, I'm also going with Washington, because I can't bear to imagine a world where Affleck has an Oscar and Gary Oldman doesn't.  (And not for nothing, but have you seen Affleck recently?  He actually LOOKS like Joaquin Phoenix in I'm Still Here.  Maybe… a sequel?  One can dream.)

Ryan Gosling deserves to be nominated in this category… but for The Nice Guys, not La La Land.  (If you're only going to see one of those movies, do yourself a favor and skip La La Land.  If you're going to see both of those movies… watch The Nice Guys twice.)  You would think that in a musical, the male lead should be able to, you know, sing.  The song 'City Of Stars' may well win Best Song, but criminy, couldn't they get Marni Nixon to dub his vocals?  "I thought he sounded pretty good," sniffed Russell Crowe, still believing his agent's high praise of his singing in Les Miserables.  (Come to think of it, Crowe and Gosling really should have had a duet in The Nice Guys.)  And while we're being honest, I think the best music in La La Land is the cheesy 80s music that's meant to represent the antithesis of the goodness and purity of jazz.  After sitting through some snoozy musical numbers, I perked up when Emma Stone's character jokingly requested that Gosling's band play 'I Ran (So Far Away)' by Flock Of Seagulls: "Aw, hell yeah!  Here's where the movie gets good!"

Andrew Garfield is an intriguing inclusion in this category, scoring his first nomination for Hacksaw Ridge.  After emerging about 10 years ago, I figured he'd be an award-season candidate, but he's taken a more circuitous route than I expected.  I thought he'd be a bit more independent-minded, eschewing quantity for quality and aiming for smaller and smarter films… but hey, I suppose money is nice, too.  With Hacksaw Ridge (and the less-admired but no less prestigious Silence from Martin Scorsese) he at least seems to be half-way headed in that direction, following a natural trajectory from other winning films like The Social Network and 99 Homes.  Just please, no more franchises.  (And if you want to see a film that foretold Garfield's Oscar-caliber abilities, skip the Spider-Man movies and watch Boy A - in short, he's remarkable.)

For my Omitted choice… Playing the titular role in Sully, Tom Hanks is in a familiar bind: He's excellent, but not excellent by Tom Hanks' standards.  To his credit, he plays Captain Sullenberger (he of the heroic airplane landing on the Hudson River) in a fairly realistic, understated way.  Unfortunately, the performance underwhelms, and doesn't seem terribly different from Hanks himself.  The film tries to play up some of his inner turmoil - grappling with fame and family troubles - but ultimately he's a character that doesn't say much, has almost no dynamism or magnetism, and reacts to his own heroism with a shrug.   Scenery, un-chewed.  (By the way, the film was much more enjoyable when I imagined Sully played by Will Ferrell as Ron Burgundy.  I'm getting a Kickstarter campaign to make it happen.  Who's in?)

BEST ACTRESS:

SHOULD WIN:  Natalie Portman (Jackie) WILL WIN:  Emma Stone (La La Land) GLORIOUSLY OMITTED:  Marion Cotillard (Allied) INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED:  Amy Adams (Arrival)

If only the Best Actress race was as unpredictable as the Actor race.  While it's not a lock, Emma Stone appears to be pulling away.  If there was a still a chance for Natalie Portman or Isabelle Huppert to surpass Stone, Stone's victory at the SAG Awards pretty much ended it.  It doesn't hurt that Stone's personality is custom-made for the Oscar press circuit.  Much like Jennifer Lawrence, she comes off as talented, confident, intelligent, and beautiful, but also disarming, funny, self-deprecating, and most importantly, cool - to both women and men.  In short, she's easy to root for.  (Lip Sync Battle, anyone?)  Hollywood voters lap up her role as an earnest actress struggling to make it while remaining true to herself.  Female voters can relate to Stone's character much more than they can to Jackie Kennedy.  And male voters can imagine her as the fun, unpretentious girlfriend or the easy-going, sarcastic friend.  (Portman is insanely talented, but nobody would ever believe her being amused by Jonah Hill's dick jokes.)

Not to be dismissive of Stone's performance in La La Land (don't worry, I'm plenty dismissive of the film itself), but her triumph here will be in part due to fortuitous circumstances.  She can thank her lucky City Of Stars that Amy Adams (Arrival) or Annette Bening (20th Century Women) aren't nominated - either one of them would have been a clear sentimental favorite.  With 5 previous nominations for Adams and 4 for Bening (and probably a bunch of 2nd-place finishes), voters would be anxious to reward either of them.  

Stone's slate of competitors bode well for her, too.  Her presumptive biggest threat, Portman (for Jackie), already won an Oscar while pregnant , like she is now.  Doesn't it seem like accepting an Oscar in a maternity gown is probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing?   Huppert (the Meryl Streep of the French Cesar awards) scored her first Oscar nomination this year for Elle, and like Charlotte Rampling last year, it feels like the nomination was a lifetime achievement nod of sorts for decades of admired work in foreign films.  (I give Huppert extra credit for starring in the underappreciated I <HEART> Huckabees.)  Ruth Negga, starring in Loving, is a relative unknown (outside of the big Preacher fans out there), and her nomination in itself was a bit of a surprise.  

And then there's Meryl herself.  Does anybody care less about Meryl Streep winning than Meryl Streep?  In her 20th (!) trip to the Oscars, she's probably bored, especially because she knows she's going to lose.  (I mean, despite being so celebrated, she actually LOSES at an astonishing rate: 84% of the time!  And she's by far the best thing in Florence Foster Jenkins; without her performance elevating the film, it would be a trifle.)  After 3 victories, she doesn't care about winning, either.  Or does she?  While she holds the unbreakable record for most acting nominations, she's 1 behind Katharine Hepburn for acting wins.  And I'm sure Hepburn would be quick to point out that she won all of her Oscars in the Lead category, while Streep slummed it in the Supporting category for one of hers (kidding… Hepburn didn't even care enough to attend the ceremonies to accept any of her statuettes).  In a quest for a legacy that only Tom Brady would understand (damn him), Streep needs 5 Oscars (2 more) to achieve the undisputed title of Greatest of All Time.  Think she doesn't want the Oscar this year?  Then you don't know Meryl.  I'm just hoping she follows Florence Foster Jenkins with Florence Griffith Joyner.  Streep in a tale of triumph, controversy, and mortality, as the 1988 Olympic sprinter, 100m/200m world record holder, and one-legged-track-suit fashion icon?  Now THAT would get her one of those elusive Oscars.  

My vote?  It would probably go to Portman, with less enthusiasm than I had for her Black Swan performance.  Frankly, a good portion of the time it looks like she's doing Jackie Kennedy as a high-society spoof of Black Swan: paranoid, isolated, terrified, duplicitous, unreliable.  Other times it comes off as more of a boozy, breathy Marilyn Monroe (another one of JFK's lady friends).  But for the sake of posterity, the real question is, after dozens (hundreds?) of Jackie portrayals, does she bring anything new or novel to the character?  I mean, how can she possibly plumb new depths unexplored by Minka Kelly, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Katie Holmes?  My biggest disappointment with the film is that Big Edie and Little Edie (the Beales of Grey Gardens) don't show up, along with their live-in raccoons.  That's the movie I want to see.  (Totally random side-note worth mentioning: In German, Jackie is titled "Die First Lady".  I'm not kidding.)

My Gloriously Omitted choice is, of course, Marion Cotillard, for her role as The Villainess in The Curious Marriage Of Bradley Pitt.  Team Angelina!

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

SHOULD WIN:  Mahershala Ali (Moonlight) WILL WIN:  Mahershala Ali (Moonlight) GLORIOUSLY OMITTED:  Aaron Eckhart's mustache (Sully) INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED:  Chris Pine and Ben Foster (Hell Or High Water), Tom Bennett (Love & Friendship)

When most of America watches the Oscars on TV, this will be the "Guy From" category, where nobody actually knows the names of the nominees.  The bad guy from Man Of Steel.  The military guy from The Hunger Games.  The kid from Slumdog Millionaire.  The kid from… I don't know who that kid is.  And the guy from all the Jeff Bridges movies.

One thing's for sure, one of the guys from this category won't be the "Guy From" much longer.  In case you haven't been paying attention, Mahershala Ali is going to be a gigantic movie star.  After he wins the Oscar for Moonlight, he's going to be at the top of the list for any franchise looking for an anchor, regardless of the tone or genre.  In 2016 alone, he managed to star in 4 feature films (2 of which were nominated for Best Picture: Moonlight and Hidden Figures) and 2 hit shows (House Of Cards and Luke Cage).  He's not a shoo-in to win the Oscar, but he's clearly the best bet, and in my not-so-humble opinion, the most deserving.  The biggest knock against him is that his screen time is relatively limited in Moonlight.  After he disappears at the end of Act I, I think everybody wants the story to follow him - his character Juan deserves his own film.  His portion of the film builds to such a compelling moment - the only moment of true dramatic conflict between him and the main boy, Chiron - that it's shame that it ends.  It's meant to be a turning point for little Chiron, but it appears to be just as big a turning point for Juan, someone who supposedly "knows who he is" (the key theme in the film).  The child deftly turns the tables on Juan, and challenges him to define who is really is - and in that moment we see Juan realize that he really doesn't know at all.  And then, unfortunately, he's gone.  While it's ultimately a minor role, I think Academy members will be impressed by his character's grace and contradictory nature.  It certainly doesn't hurt that Ali also does charismatic work in crowd-pleaser Hidden Figures, and impressed voters at the SAG awards with his inspiring, humble speech and impeccable pearl-white tux.  

The next most popular choice will be Jeff Bridges, for Hell Or High Water.  If he hadn't won recently (for Crazy Heart), he'd probably be the front-runner.  He has the benefit of being essentially the second main character in the film - one with his own story, his own decisions, his own spotlight.  The portrayal itself is just good ol' boy fun - Bridges looks like he's having a blast, with a guttural, fricasseed voice and a Texas swagger that invokes the late Richard Farnsworth and his own Rooster Cogburn.  Though I have to say, as Bridges ages, it seems he's getting more and more like that in real life.  I think he liked this character so much, that he's decided to stay in it.  

Speaking of Hell Or High Water, I'd like to mention both Chris Pine and Ben Foster for my Snubbed spot, for delivering surprisingly strong performances as ill-prepared bank-robbing brothers.  (Particularly Pine, whose surname is an apt description of his typical on-screen personality.)  Both Pine and Foster are generally unlikeable actors, but they both summon something I've never seen before, and create an impressively magnetic duo together.  It's possible I actually cared about their characters (but still wanted to see Jeff Bridges shoot them).  Most critics are calling Pine's performance the best of his career - which isn't saying much - and I agree.  

Is there a chance for Dev Patel or Michael Shannon to sneak in here?  They're both possibilities, but probably not.  For his lauded role in Lion, Patel won the BAFTA, which bolsters his chances… but then again, he's a Brit, so that doesn't count.  Shannon snuck into this category by somehow supplanting his Nocturnal Animals co-star Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who managed to win the Golden Globe but then got passed over for the Oscars.  (Christmas cards should be awkward this year.)  Shannon is the only actor to make Ali look lazy in 2016, with a whopping 10 feature films, plus a starring role on Broadway.  I'd be happy to see him win; he's a Chicago theater actor whose unique look and style have enabled him to methodically carve out a niche career, score kudos (including 2 Oscar nominations) for pretty much every one of his movies that's not about Superman, and somehow stay relatively anonymous and tabloid-free despite having about a zillion screen credits.  His agent must hate him, because every project that seems to attract him (or he attracts) is low-budget and, for lack of a better word, weird.  A small sampling: Elvis & Nixon; Midnight Special; Take Shelter; My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done; Let's Go To Prison; The Broken Tower; Bug; and of course, Kangaroo Jack.  (And yes, that's him at the diner as a teenager in Groundhog Day.)

I'm a little puzzled by the nomination for Lucas Hedges in Manchester By The Sea.  (But given how puzzled I am by the movie itself, I guess that shouldn't be a surprise.)  I just don't know what's so impressive about his performance.  To me, he just seems like a smart-assed, foul-mouthed, horny 16-year old; in other words, every 16-year old.  For all we know, that's what he's like in real life - so is it great acting?  For a character whose father has just died and whose mother abandoned him years earlier, his performance just doesn't feel that authentic to me.  There are interesting flashes of denial, but it seems like the film mostly glazes over that element, instead of using it to elevate the character.  More than anything, I'm struck by how much he seems like a teenage version of Matt Damon - voice, accent, posture, performance.  It's no accident that Damon is a producer on the film - he probably held New England-wide auditions to find his mini-me, to star alongside Ben Affleck's mini-me.  In terms of advice, I'm guessing Damon just handed Hedges a VHS tape of Good Will Hunting and said, "Hey Lil' Matt, watch this movie, because I think I'm amazing."  For my money, I would have preferred to see any of a number of actors take Hedges' place in this category: Pine or Foster (see above), Tom Bennett (a hilarious Victorian moron in Love & Friendship), Hugh Grant (playing his weaknesses as strengths in Florence Foster Jenkins), or even Robert Downey Jr. (in a tiny, magnificent cameo as the corpse of a porno director in The Nice Guys).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

SHOULD WIN:  Viola Davis (Fences) WILL WIN:  Viola Davis (Fences) GLORIOUSLY OMITTED:  Anna Gunn (Sully) INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED:  Kathryn Hahn (Bad Moms)

This is the biggest lock of the night: Viola Davis will win for Fences.  She's winning everything.  Literally everything.  She's even winning awards that have nothing to do with this movie.  I'm pretty sure she just beat out Beyonce for a Grammy.  If she would have announced her candidacy for President the day before the election, she would have won that, too.  And it's overdue: I'm in the camp that thinks she should have won the Oscar for The Help.  She's been the prohibitive favorite here since the movie adaptation of August Wilson's play was announced; after all, she won a Tony for the same role on Broadway.  And the critical consensus is that she's even better in the film than she was on stage.  Even her nostrils give an award-winning performance during her crying scene.  (Oh my, that's a runny nose.  Which brings up a lot of practical considerations: Did director Denzel Washington call for the amount of snot in each take?  Did he ask for a variety, so he had snot options in the editing room?  Do they have continuity checks for snot?  Did the script specify the viscosity and texture of snot?  Do close-ups require 'hero' snot?  Can Davis snot on cue?  Is there fake snot for the days she can't get the nose-works going?  Does that fall under the Makeup department, or is a there a specialized Snot Wrangler?  Is there a separate casting call for snot, and if so, which agents specialize in it?  So many questions.)  If Davis is emotional during her acceptance speech, let's hope they hand her a kleenex - or five - along with the Oscar.

Nicole Kidman has said she felt a strong bond with her character in Lion, as they're both adoptive mothers.  Many credit that real-life connection and perspective with propelling Kidman to her 4th Oscar nomination.  In order to secure a nomination in her next film, she's planning to play a woman who marries a celebrity in order to conceal his closeted sexuality.  "I could play that role in my sleep," she said.  "Come to think of it, I've played that role twice."  Does she have a chance to win this year?  She already has an Oscar.  Next.  

Octavia Spencer gives a strong performance in Hidden Figures, but it seems that she's something of a surrogate for the entire SAG-winning cast, a way to recognize all of them.  (They could have easily nominated Janelle Monae, who infused Figures, as well as Moonlight, with a welcome burst of energy.  Pretty impressive for a singer in her first acting roles ever.)  While Spencer is steady throughout, her portrayal is fairly businesslike; she doesn't have many showy scenes that would stand out to Oscar voters.  So does she have a chance to win this year?  She ALSO already has an Oscar.  (And even she is rooting for Viola Davis.)  Next.

Perhaps the biggest revelation of all this year's nominees is Naomie Harris, for her role as a struggling drug-addict mother in Moonlight.  She's been recognizable in a variety of roles over the past decade and a half, but she hasn't shown anything like what she does with this role.  But does she… I think you know where this is going.  Next.

That brings us to Michelle Williams, for her role in Manchester By The Sea.  She's quietly racked up 4 career Oscar nominations without a win - she's venturing into Amy Adams territory.  She's been consistently strong since the day she paddled out of Dawson's Creek, so a lot of voters WANT to pencil her in.  But with such a tiny role in this film, there's simply no compelling reason to do so this year.  Frankly, I'm not even so sure she deserves one of these slots.  She only pops up in a handful of scenes, mostly to fill in emotional backstory for Casey Affleck and to make us feel terrible about life in general.  (And gahwd, that accent.)  So… no.  

BEST DIRECTOR:

SHOULD WIN:  Denis Villeneuve (Arrival) WILL WIN:  Damien Chazelle (La La Land) GLORIOUSLY OMITTED:  Stephen Frears (Florence Foster Jenkins) INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED:  David Mackenzie (Hell Or High Water)

This category, a collection of refreshing, talented directors with unique voices, probably represents the future of cinema.  (And that's including Mel Gibson - there will always be at least one racist old coot in the establishment.  I guess if the Academy forgave Roman Polanski, they'll forgive anybody.)  There's very little doubt here that Damien Chazelle will prevail for La La Land.  I'm more okay with the film scoring the Director prize than Picture, due to the daunting technical nature of the film, but I would still choose someone else.  I was frankly more impressed with Chazelle's previous (and more poignantly intimate) film, Whiplash.  After all the hullabaloo surrounding La La Land, I kept waiting for it to transform into a unique, original take on the musical romance genre… but it never does.  I don't think the opening freeway musical number is as much of a dazzler as everyone else seems to.  And the dancing… Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone don't look like naturals, they look like contestants on Dancing With The Stars, going through the paces after a couple weeks of rehearsals.  To Chazelle's credit, there are a lot of nice touches in the film, and the final sequence is outright fantastic (more on that in the Original Screenplay category).  I just expected more to justify the hype… and the slew of Oscars it will win.

I'm much more impressed with Denis Villeneuve's vision in Arrival.  Besides crafting a film that's visually stunning, narratively captivating, and intellectually stimulating, he managed to make a deeply personal film about what's effectively a silly sci-fi alien invasion.  (Though the title is inauspicious: Dithering voters might confuse it with that other alien invasion movie called The Arrival, the 1996 masterpiece starring critical darling and Hollywood treasure Charlie Sheen as a - wait for it - brilliant astronomer with a goatee.)  This year's hipster nomination, Villeneuve may appear to be a newcomer, but he's been a darling on the French-Canadian art-house scene (Is that a thing?) for two decades.  (Credit where credit's due: I predicted he would be the next big thing back in 2000 at the Toronto Film Festival; it just took 16 years, that's all.  Next up for him?  The SLIGHTY high-profile Blade Runner sequel.)  If you want to impress your film-snob friends, check out his French-language film Maelstrom, a twisty, dark thriller / love story with bits of absurdist humor thrown in for good measure.  (Oh, and it's narrated by a fish.  In a butcher shop.  Being chopped up into pieces.  I’m telling you, the French-Canadian art-house scene.)

It's a real longshot, but a win here for Barry Jenkins (director of Moonlight) would be a pleasant surprise.  Jenkins took a tiny, potentially difficult, urban art film and turned it into a true sensation.  The feat is even more astounding considering it's only his second feature, his main actors are mostly inexperienced, and he tells a story about the internal conflicts of an introvert who barely speaks.  To top it all off, he chooses to split the story into 3 pieces, spread out over 15 years. As narratives go, it's about as tough as it gets.  Moonlight is not going to be everybody's favorite film, but it's a marvel, and Jenkins is someone we'll be hearing plenty more about.

It's actually been 10 years since Mel Gibon's drunken, expletive-ridden, anti-Semitic rant during his DUI arrest.  Just long enough for Mel Gibson jokes to be funny again - and since Jimmy Kimmel is hosting the Oscars, I think you can expect one or two (or twenty).  How to explain Gibson's nomination for Best Director for Hacksaw Ridge?  I think an old episode of South Park featuring a loony Gibson put it best: "Say what you want about Mel Gibson, but the sonuvabitch knows story structure."  Want to know a totally, completely true fact?  Gibson fought hard for a couple of titles to his World War II drama, before the studio forced him to change it to Hacksaw Ridge: "Guess Who's Responsible For WWII (And All The Wars In The World)" and "Sugar Tits".

While I respect Kenneth Lonergan as a filmmaker, I haven't been overly impressed with any of his films.  I mean, I WANT to like his movies.  They're just… tough to digest.  I know that, above all, he strives for realism.  Referring to typical Hollywood movies, he recently said in an interview, "I see them sugarcoat and pass over experiences everybody in the world has had.  It annoys me, because it seems like a lie."  He certainly doesn't sugarcoat anything in Manchester By The Sea, where Lonergan's form of realism is exceptionally harsh.  And maybe that's my problem - when I watch a movie, realism isn't always exactly what I want to see, especially when it puts me in a depressed mood for a couple days.  Aside from the tone and story, I actually have problems with the awkward editing and incongruous musical choices.  They make the film seem unpolished, beyond the point of realism.  It feels, I don't know, almost lazy.  I'm sure it's all intentional, but I just don't understand why.  When it comes to Lonergan, I guess there's a lot I don't understand.  

David Mackenzie got passed over for an Oscar nomination for Hell Or High Water, but he may still win a Nobel Prize… for coaxing an actual lifelike performance out of Chris Pine.  I was hoping Mackenzie would sneak into this race.  The Scottish director filmed in New Mexico with a West Coast actor and somehow managed make a film that feels authentically like West Texas - without casting Tommy Lee Jones.  (I damn near had to turn on the subtitles to understand those accents.)  His wide lens captures something both intoxicating and toxic about the region.  How do you make geography look so beautiful and so crappy at the same time?  There are plenty of postcard-worth landscapes in Odessa, but Mackenzie will be damned if he'll use those.  But instead, here's an extra helping of rural decay!  The West Texas office of tourism has to absolutely hate it every time a new movie is set in the area.  Based on what we see in movies, we assume it's depressive, repressive, oppressive, backwards, racist, redneck, violent, callous, dead-end, dying, undereducated, sweltering, and corrupt.  Maybe that's why they filmed Hell Or High Water in New Mexico: they weren't allowed in Texas.  "If you're not going to film La La Land 2 here, then git the hell out!"  

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:

SHOULD WIN:  Taylor Sheridan (Hell Or High Water) WILL WIN:  Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester By The Sea) GLORIOUSLY OMITTED:  A million people (Zootopia) INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED:  Anthony Bagarozzi, Shane Black (The Nice Guys)

It's not uncommon for one of the screenplay awards to serve as a runner-up for the Best Picture race, particularly when there's a chance to reward a writer-director.  This year, probably both screenplay categories will serve this purpose, which is unfortunate.  While La La Land certainly could sweep every category and claim this prize, it's more likely that Manchester By The Sea will take it.  Personally, I'd rather see it go to a more enthralling piece of writing, Hell Or High Water.  

As movie writers go, Kenneth Lonergan is about as unassailable as they come.  No stranger to accolades, Manchester By The Sea is his 3rd screenplay nomination (following You Can Count On Me and Gangs Of New York), and he's got a pile of other film and playwrighting awards (including a Pulitzer nomination).   I would be an idiot to criticize his writing, but I’m going to do it anyway.  (I think I've proven that I’m an idiot in the past, so I might as well embrace it.)  Simply put, I don't think Manchester has a strong story.  I won't go so far as to claim that the emperor has no clothes, but if you spent 20 seconds on the Internet, you'll find tons of people who feel that way about Mr. Lonergan.  I suppose I would categorize this script as a tragedy (in the ancient dramatic sense), but there isn't really anywhere for the main character to fall from.  It strikes me as more of a portrait (admittedly, a rich, vivid one); it seems to take more cues from the stage world than screen.  I don't want to say too much to spoil anything (but just in case you're going to see this movie, skip this paragraph to avoid spoilers).  Probably my biggest complaint (other than the fact that it's a serious downer) is that the story is set up as a classic redemption story, and then… there's no redemption.  Instead, the main character resigns himself to failure.  (And please, I'm not saying "I wish it had a Hollywood ending.")  There's a clear crossroads in the movie where, after the 'Lost Point' (the main character's lowest point in the story, about 3/4 of the way through), the character would choose a redemptive path (through an epiphany, an active decision, drastic measures, etc.).  But he simply doesn't.  And then the rest of the story just peters out from there.  The frustrating thing is that the character recognizes the opportunity for redemption (taking responsibility for his deceased brother's teenage son), but he refuses it.  Lonergan clearly sets this situation up, tempts us to follow him, gives us a head-fake, and runs off in the other direction.  (In his defense, there is an intriguing - and potentially heartening - hint of self-sacrifice on the part of the main character, but I think it's too faint to truly pay off.)  This is a long way of saying that after a 2-hour journey of unrelenting grief, I wanted more of a reason for the journey to be worthwhile.  

As I mentioned, there's a good chance that La La Land will win Best Original Screenplay instead of Manchester, but brother, I hope it doesn't.  I'm not even sure why it's nominated here in the first place.  The genre and music notwithstanding, there isn't much motor in the story.  I find no compelling reason to be invested in the romance between the drippy, selfish faux-idealists.   There are no real obstacles.  There is no conflict other than superficial conflict for its own sake - internally fabricated by the characters to get in their own way.  It's like they're trying to make their lives harder for no particular reason.  How do these wistful whiners get past practical inconveniences, like filing their income taxes?  (I'm sure their 1040s are met with an abundance of longing sighs.)  But believe it or not, I have to say, I think the ending is superb.  It almost redeems the movie… almost.  (It's the one part that I like, and not surprisingly, the one part that my wife hates.)  I can't say much without ruining the movie (and trust me, I REALLY do want to ruin the movie for you), but it effectively turns the entirety of the movie into a fairly poignant metaphor.  It gives weight to many of the themes that were, up to that point, trite, and adds legitimacy to some of the lazy aspects of the screenplay.  It attempts to answer the question (with some success, I admit) of what it means to dream - with all the perks and perils that come along with it - and whether a dream can ever truly become a reality.  I'm certain there are different interpretations of the ending; I prefer a cynical one.  What if you achieve your dream - is that even a good thing?  I guess my primary lament about the script is: If writer-director Damien Chazelle had such a cool trick up his sleeve for the finale, why did he drown the rest of the movie with such lifeless material?  

I'm rooting for Hell Or High Water, written by Taylor Sheridan.  Besides what I previously mentioned, probably its biggest strength is that it wisely does not dwell on backstory.  It doesn't spend time in the beginning "setting up" who the bank-robbing main characters are, or shoehorn in flashbacks to fill in the gaps (ahem, Manchester By The Sea).  It jumps right into the story in the opening scene and never looks back, giving us just enough of a sense of the characters' backgrounds and motivations to keep us on track - without EXPLAINING it all to us.   (The price of that is a few clunky expositional lines of dialogue, but in general it's handled pretty well.)  Credit the director and editor on that front as well: knowing that anything that is NOT part of the story does NOT belong in the movie.  The message of the script, a clear allegory, is an admirable - if damning - one.  Besides condemning the evils of greed and "the bank", it hammers home a theme about the sins of fathers (biological and generational) and redemption of (or rejection by) sons.  Unfortunately it teeters into preachy, heavy-handed territory occasionally.  (There's an awkward, unintentionally funny scene where Jeff Bridges' lawman stops his truck to allow a ranch hand to corral his cattle across the road.  As he's struggling to herd the cattle away from a blazing prairie fire - clearly a life and death situation - the rancher pauses to casually deliver an absurdly jarring, unprovoked, preachy, expository speech.  Given the circumstances, I don't think I'd be up for much conversation with a random driver, other than, "Watch out for my cows, a--hole!")  Unlike many of the nominees this year, the film delivers with a resonant, satisfying ending.  The only detriment is that the final scene (which had the potential to be understated, sly, and truly great) is a little on-the-nose.  I have a feeling the studio gave a note… that should have been ignored.  

It seems that whenever Mike Mills writes a script about his family, it gets nominated for Oscars.  A few years ago, he wrote Beginners about his father, and Christopher Plummer won Best Supporting Actor.  Now 20th Century Women, written about his mother, is nominated for Best Original Screenplay.  I can't wait for the script about his goldfish.

Ah, The Lobster.  This is the most intriguing and refreshing nominee in either screenplay category.  It's as strange as you would expect from a filmmaker named Yorgos Lanthimos.  After seeing it, the only thing I know about it for sure is that the story can't be taken at face value.  It's clearly a satire, with subtext serving as the point of the film.  (Some would argue that subtext ALWAYS serves as the point of any film, and that a film should never be taken at face value.)  At its most obvious, it's a send-up of the absurdity of the "rules" and social norms around being a romantic couple and being single.  However, I'd argue that it better serves as an allegory for pretty much any arbitrary dichotomy, with 2 diametrically opposed sides or points of view.  It applies in particular to any situation where the line between the 2 sides is essentially fabricated, and people are forced to choose a side.  It applies well to important things like war, religion, and political parties, as well as more trivial concepts like cola wars, sports fans, and late-night talk show rivalries.   The film poses the questions that should be obvious: Why can't there be a 3rd point of view?  Or even infinite points of view?  Why are there any sides period?  Why do we have to choose?  I wish all this meant that it was a great movie.  The premise and the absurdity, especially in the first half of the film, are a strong draw (dialogue like: "Do you have any pets?" "Yes: my brother."), but the harshness is a little too sobering.  The story is whimsical, but in a rigid way: there are rules in the world of The Lobster, and they are relentlessly, brutally severe.  Going into it, I thought it might be quirky-fun (in the vein of Michel Gondry, Charlie Kaufman, or Wes Anderson), but it's quirky-disturbing.  There's a sensibility to The Lobster that's almost masochistic, which is belied by the comically flat and simple dialogue.  (All the characters deliver their lines like Europeans with 3rd grade English skills - appropriate, considering it was written by Greek men with 3rd grade English skills.)  It's more akin to A Clockwork Orange or Brazil, in terms of the skewed definitions of "normal", and the frightening prices people pay for not being "normal".  But unfortunately it's not nearly as good nor as enduring as those films.  

I know it's not fair to pick on a kids' movie like Zootopia, but am I the only one who thought the sloths-working-at-the-DMV gag was unfunny and unoriginal?  I guess so.  

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:

SHOULD WIN:  Eric Heisserer (Arrival) WILL WIN:  Barry Jenkins, Tarell Alvin McCraney (Moonlight) GLORIOUSLY OMITTED:  Todd Komarnicki (Sully) INGLORIOUSLY SNUBBED:  Tony Gilroy, Chris Weitz (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story), Whit Stillman (Love & Friendship)

Ever since Moonlight was shifted from the Original to the Adapted Screenplay category, it's been the favorite, not having to compete against Manchester By The Sea and La La Land.  And once it beat both of those scripts at the Writers Guild Awards, it became a virtual lock for the Oscar.  Anyone that considers voting for it as Best Picture or Director will almost surely vote for it here.  But truthfully, I think the screenplay is one of Moonlight's weaker elements.  It's probably because I'm an advocate of a strong narrative.  And while there is a narrative thread across the film's 3 segments, I think other elements orchestrated by writer/director Barry Jenkins are what make Moonlight such a triumph.  So I'd probably vote for it for Director or Picture before Screenplay.  But to be fair, the script has many unique elements rarely seen in cinema, and people are clearly responding to it.  Whether it was the story, theme, production, direction, or acting, I found the film to be entrancing in a way I didn't expect.  

On the other hand, I love the script for Arrival (by Eric Heisserer), which has a very strong narrative.  In fact, it toys with narrative by dismantling what we've come to expect from flashbacks.  Flashbacks are often derided as a screenwriter's crutch, so Heisserer preys on that notion, then manipulates it into something new.  The story even takes a novel approach to the Alien Invasion genre: What if the aliens aren't the most important thing in the story?  

So, Moonlight will win, and if there's an upset, most people expect that it will come from Arrival.  But not so fast.  As I mentioned earlier, it's possible that a groundswell for Hidden Figures could conceivably propel it to a Best Picture victory.  And if that happens, look out, because it could well carry over into this category as well.  Never count out a story that people absolutely love.  (That said, the film's lack of nomination for Best Director makes this scenario much less plausible.)

I expect Fences will also get its share of votes, from a small group of passionate devotees.  It would be a way to honor the late August Wilson (who adapted his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play into a screenplay years ago).  But since Wilson had no active involvement in this incarnation of his story (he died in 2005), it won't approach the support that Moonlight is getting.  

Of course, we can't forget about Star Wars.  I really would vote for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story for Best Screenplay.  While the film on a whole was excellent, Screenplay is where it truly excelled.  Imagine the audacity of it: It takes a few throwaway lines from the opening crawl of the first Star Wars movie, and turns them into a clever thriller that culminates in a breathless firestorm leading smack into the first scene from the original masterpiece.  I expected cool action and mythology; I did not expect such an emotional story about characters that have never before even been mentioned in the series.  While I would also give full credit to director Gareth Edwards and the entire production, screenwriters Tony Gilroy and Chris Weitz (leveraging a story from John Knoll and Gary Whitta) are the MVPs.  By comparison, the story is unquestionably superior to The Force Awakens.  (Why, you ask, is my wife such a fan of Gilroy?  Because she's a bigger Star Wars geek than I am?  Because he was nominated for Screenplay and Director Oscars for Michael Clayton?  Because he was the mastermind behind all the Jason Bourne movies?  No.  Because he wrote The Cutting Edge.  That guy could cure cancer, and he would still be best remembered for the words "toe pick".)