Category Archives: Movies

Movie Review: Spider-Man: Far From Home

The first post-Avengers: Endgame  Marvel Cinematic Universe movie Spider-Man: Far From Home  opened this weekend and reviewing it will requires spoilers for Endgame,  though I will refrain from spoilers for Far From Home  as much as possible.

Set five years after the events in Infinity War  and shortly after the return of the ‘snapped’ and after Iron Man’s sacrifice ending Thanos’ threat Far From Home opens with Peter Parker trying to resume his abnormal life as a high school student, he and all his emotionally relevant friends lost five years due to the Snapture (thanks to NPR’s Glen Weldon), while trying to cope with the loss of Tony Stark.

A new threat appears on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s radar when monstrous forces called elementals begin appearing around the world and the sole survivor from a parallel universe Quentin beck where these forces destroyed the Earth is recruited to save this version of Earth. With the major former Avengers either dead, aged out, crippled, or unavailable, Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. conscripts Peter Parker to help Beck save the world.

Peter wants nothing more than to leave the world saving to others, enjoy his high school class’ European Vacation, and possibly get closer to his crush Mary Jane Watson, but the continuing and escalating threat upset Peter’s plans and being the heir apparent to Stark’s mantle carries with it a level of guilt and responsibility that test’s Peter’s character.

Spider-Man: Far From Home  has exciting action set pieces, fine acting, deft, quirky, and often funny dialog but it lacks a strong story leaving it in the midlist of MCU movies. Unlike the last outing for Spider-Man where a padded plot dragged down the pacing this time the flaw is the central conceit of Peter’s motivation as character. As a protagonist Peter is simply far too passive.

In the Western tradition stories are constructed around a protagonist who desires a goal, something the protagonist much work to achieve, and the obstacles that the character most circumvent, defeat, or overcome to achieve their objectives. What your character wants and why they cannot simply have it is the core of a story’s plot. In this movie Peter wants to be left alone. He wants to go his vacation, not be ‘Spider-Man,’ and explore his relationship with M.J. Peter’s objective is not to do the thing the audience is here to see him do and as such the plot must repeatedly intervene and force Peter back onto the track that leads to dashing heroics and exciting action. In short he is pushed and pulled by the plot rather than driving the plot himself with his actins, choices, and needs for an objective. When the script makes the turn from Act 2 to Act 3 it finally creates enough pressure that Peter can no longer hide from his responsibilities and his objectives changes and for the final act he is driving the story, but this transformation comes too late to prevent the majority of the movie from being subjected to rudderless piloting.

How much this passive protagonist bothers someone will be a matter of individual taste. As I have mentioned this time the film’s running time doesn’t feel padded and each action set piece has a strong narrative purpose. There are plenty of humor and character moments to carry a viewer along but for me the lack of a plot driven by Peter’s needs drags the final product down into the mid-tier range of MCU movies.

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Further Thoughts on Aladdin 2019

So my mind keeps circling this year’s release of Disney’s Live-Action version of Aladdin.It feels to me that the movie just didn’t quite work and as a writer I want to dissect the corpse and find out why. I may not have found the primary cause but I think at the very least I diagnosed a serious complication and contributing factor.

In the 1992 release the character of Jasmine, Aladdin’s love interest, is principally a human McGuffin. The set-up of the story is that Jasmine, by law, must marry before she turns sixteen, as the only offspring of the ruling Sultan, Jasmine becomes the route to power. Her husband will rule and Jafar, the scheming adviser/sorcerer, wants to marry her for that power while Aladdin, the good hearted ‘diamond in the rough’ wants to marry her for love and thus will wield that power more justly. Jasmine simply wants to choose for herself and not be ordered to marry someone she doesn’t love. Jafar and Aladdin have opposed goals, only one can achieve their desired end and as such the plot has conflict between its two poles of good and evil. Jasmine has no song in the 1992 version because there is very little she is trying to achieve and very little character beneath her surface motivations.

The 2019 release of the story has made critical changes to the plot. Jasmine is no longer forced to marry on any timeline, removing the ticking clock that helped drive the earlier version. Jafar, with somewhat deeper motivations, has plots to seize power without the requirements of a royal marriage, which removes the conflicting goal between him and Aladdin. The two characters are no long directly opposed ceasing to be well-defined protagonist and antagonist.

Complicating matter from a structural standpoint Jasmine has now been given her own goals and motivations and a song. She is presented as smart, capable, and with a burning desire to serve her people as a leader, but thwarted in this because of her sex. She wants the throne not for vain glory or to make the Kingdom a great power but because she wants what is best for the populace, placing her in direct conflict with Jafar. It terms of the plot Jasmine and Jafar are now our respective protagonist and antagonist.

This would be perfectly fine if  the script had been re-written with the dynamic had formed the spine of the story but the movie insists that Aladdin is the hero, he is the protagonist in a story in which his stakes are secondary when compared to other characters.

Look at the stakes for each character.

Jafar, failure means loss of position, imprisonment, or death because if you move against the Sultan and fail it will end badly.

Jasmine, failure means the people loss her leadership, her empathy, and she is consigned to a lifetime of watching an evil man ground the populace in the war plans.

Aladdin, failure means he continues his life of poverty. Aladdin’s stakes are improvement of his life or stasis; he stays where he is. No ticking clock, no disaster befalls him, not the sort of things the Jasmine and Jafar are facing.

To fix this they needed to either give Aladdin stakes that mattered as much as Jasmine’s or Jafar’s or they need to re-conceive the story with Jasmine as the lead, the protagonist, the hero.

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Movie Review: The Dead Don’t Die

It is said that when a genre cycle nears the end of the ‘life’ and the dramatic idea within that genre run dry the artists turn to comedy. I am not sure I buy that even as a general rule and I certainly do not buy in to that for the subset of horror movies built around zombies as flesh eating undead. 2004’s Shaun of the Dead  is often credited as a film that helped re-launch the zombie movie and its comedic nature is undeniable. An even older than that example is Return of the Living Dead  from 1986, a direct sequel to 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, a dark comedy, and the movie that forever implanted in popular culture the concept that zombies eat brains. So the release of this month’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die  is not in my book a sure sign that the genre had reached its end. Though I will admit that finding really good zombie movies is always a difficult pastime.

Written and Directed by Jim Jarmusch the filmmaker behind the vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive  The Dead Don’t Die  is a story of the zombie apocalypse as experienced in the small one horse town of Centerville USA. Roughly centered on Police Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and police officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) the film follows a diverse set of quirky characters including Farmer Frank Miller (Steve Buscemi), Hermit Bob (Tom Waits), and new comer to the town and apparently a Scottish samurai undertaker Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton) and a smattering of other famous actors and musicians playing smaller parts.

Unlike most comedies this movie is paced, quite deliberately, at a quite sedate speed. Things unfold in a slow steady progression and scenes play out with a languid sense of timing. Some of the humor comes from character and context but this film also plays with the a meta-narrative that has at least some of the characters seeming aware of the convention of zombies film and even through own more questionable reality. While there is zombie flesh eating action it is far from graphic in this presentation and Jarmusch replaces zombie blood and gore with a wispy black smoke effect that makes this a nearly bloodless horror film.  Near the resolution in the movie’s third act I was reminded of the Spierig’s brother low-budget indie zombie comedy Undead, but only is a passing manner due to a few shared story elements.

The Dead Don’t Die  is not a film for everyone. The humor is often understated, the pacing more fitting to a foreign film than a typical US theatrical release, and the meta-narrative keeps the viewer at distance, but conversely there are some terrifically understated performances, Bill Murray gives perhaps his quietest comedic line readings ever, several interesting ideas are presented on the nature of life versus unlife, and throughout the movie’s run time I was never bored as I was with the much faster paced Dark Phoenix.

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Movie Review: Dark Phoenix

One of the many signs that a movie is in trouble is when I am saying the lines of dialog before the character utter them. That usually indicates that the writers have taken the first and blatantly obvious choices in constructing their scenes. Throughout Dark PhoenixI predicted the characters’ dialog many times word for word.

The fourth installment in the re-booted X-Menfranchise Dark Phoenix  is the second attempt to adapt an iconic storyline from the source material onto the silver screen and while it is not the garbage fire that the most recent entry in the series was this movie managed to provoke big action boredom. Set in 1995 with an utter disregard to all of the characters’ ages, remember that the re-boot of this series started in 1962 by mixing mutants into the Cuban Missile Crisis and now thirty-three years have passed and none of the characters have appropriately aged, the X-men are now beloved by the world as heroes and saviors. Jean Grey, seen briefly in the previous installment, participates in rescue of a NASA shuttle crew and become empowered with a strange cosmic force.  Wielding her newly enhanced abilities Jean, for *reasons* (I’m sarcastic there nothing in the film is properly motivated.) engages in destructive behavior, assaults local police that responded to an unauthorized jet landing, and is then on the run from her friends and the law, all while being pursued by malevolent aliens who want her cosmic powers but are also somehow unable to possess them.

Of this film’s many great failings is the lack of a central story or even consistent theme. There are the bones and threads of an emotional and impactful story here about hubris, lies, and what happens when we start to believe our own press releases, but none of that is developed with any skill or tact. Characters speak in the plainest fashion, always revealing inner thoughts that most people obscure or in an overly expository explaining to each other what they already know. Things that might have been emotional reveals if held back as secrets as revealed in a straightforward linear fashion, draining later scenes of stakes and meaning. Characters are forced into the plot because the actors are under contract not because they belong in this story, yes I am looking at you Magneto, and set-piece battles happen because they are expected to happen at this act break.

Over all this film was dull, plodding, and wasted the talents of many fine actors, not worth your time at any price.

 

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Movie Review: Guardians (2017-Russian)

Not to be left out in the gold rush of Superhero film franchises Russian entered the fray with 2017s Guardians, an answer to Marvel’s The Avengersthough with even less set-up than DC’s Justice League.

In the film’s backstory, during the Cold War, for you youngsters out there a period from 1947 through 1989 when the world’s superpowers the USA and USSR stood ready with nuclear annihilation in their bitter rivalry, the USSR experimented on people, creating the Guardians, super-powered individuals. After the Soviet’s collapse these people dispersed to the four winds, losing themselves in the vast terrain of the Russian Federation. Simultaneously a competing Cold War project to protect the motherland, which focused on mechanical powers created by the mad scientist August Kuratov, succeed in giving Kuratov the ability to control any machine. Now Kuratov is back and bent on world domination. With the military’s vast forces neutralized by his ability to usurp control of all their weapon systems it is up to Major Elena Larina to locate and reunite the Guardians in the hopes that thy can defeat Kuratov.

As a set up that doesn’t exactly suck, but the movie Guardians,  suffers from both a lack and over abundance of character issues to create a compelling plot. The film seems to have no central character to act as a point of view and with a brief running time of a mere 88 minutes it simply can’t explore all the set-ups that it attempts to utilize. There’s the question, where have the Guardians gone? Well, that’s knocked out in a fast montage of computer searches and rapid-fire location changes as Major Larina seeks and recruits the four members. Instead of any tension the sequence becomes route exposition and introduction. Each of the Guardians presented in the film have deep character issues, but without the focus on any particular character all of the issues are given short shrift and thus come as flat and uninteresting.

The movie picks up in the third act with a climatic battle against a villain atop a tower in a metropolitan center surrounded by a force-field with the Guardians having to learn to fight and work together to save the world from domination.

Overall this was slightly less than passable with much missed promise.

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Movie Review: Rocketman

A common thing I hear is to compare this film Rocketman  to last year’s movie Bohemian Rhapsody. Both movies explore the history of well know rock performers from the 1970s and 1980 but truly I do not think that these films are really all that similar. Bohemian Rhapsody   is a much more standard example of a biographical narrative film such as I Saw The Light  Hank Williams or Sweet Dreams  with Patsy Cline. In all three movies well respected actors take on the roles of iconic musical legends, either perform or lip synch some of their most famous songs while recreating those musicians musical performances this is not what happens with here.

Rocketman is a biopic exploring the life of rock icon Elton John but this movie is a full on musical using the best-known song from John’s catalog as their vehicle into his life. There are a few examples in the movie of ‘here’s Elton John performing at this famous venue’ but unlike the other films I have mentions these performances are the exception and not the form of Rocket Man. With little regard to the chronology this film has the characters bursting into these famous tunes as a method of exploring the emotional inner lives and this is not limited to Elton, but rather to a wide swath of the cast.  If you go hoping to find the source of the inspiration to songs such as Saturday Night’s Alright,  or Your Song, then you will be disappointed. This is much closer to a movie such as The Sound of Musicthan Bohemian Rhapsody.

t is very meta but also a wonderful tool using the music of Elton John to explore what it felt like to be Elton John. Taron Egerton plays adult Elton john and his performance is one that gut punched me. There are moments where with a single expression Taron fully involved me in Elton’s pain and torment as he struggled with his life, his music, and his identity. His acting is open, accessible, and raw, a very far cry from the performance I witnessed in Kingsman: The Secret Service. Jamie bell plays Elton’s long time collaborator and lyricist Bernie Taupin and together they give us a rare thing in today’s major motion picture, a deep, very emotional, and very real relationship between two men that isn’t built upon sex. Of course the movie explore Elton’s journey into his sexuality but the core dramatic issue if John’s battles with drugs and alcohol. In addition to using the famous tunes as entry points into the psyche of the characters the film also using the unreality of the medium to give visual poetry to their inner lives. In the trailers you can see people literally floating off the ground as they are lifted by his performance but the fantasy aspect run much deeper than that demonstration but rather the movie often becomes much more interpretive than descriptive and frankly this works much better than a simple linear narrative. When the movie ended I felt as if I had shared in the emotional truth of the character’s life though I doubt I learned anything of an actual factual nature. This is not a documentary with musical interludes but rather emotional exploration via images and music in search of tone, a feeling, which hopes to capture an essence that reflects Elton John. It is well worth seeing.

 

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The Worst Film Noir by the Worst Director

While exploring the content on some of the Roku streaming channels dedicated to Film Noir  I discovered what is possibly the worst Noir ever produced, Jail Bait  directed by what many consider to be the worst director of all time, the auteur responsible for Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), Edward Wood Jr. Full spoilers follow.

Jail Bait(1954) has the elements of a film noir but like mayonnaise left in the summer sun it has gone quit bad. Don Gregor is the son of a wealthy, world-famous, Plastic Surgeon (This will be important later, putting Ed Wood ahead of Benioff and Weiss in understanding Chekov’s Gun.)  but Don, for *reasons* likes to carry pistols and hang around cheap hoodlums. At the movie’s opening Don’s sister Marilyn, played by Ed Wood’s girlfriend Dolores Fuller, bails Don out of jail after the police arrest him for carrying a revolver. After getting home and wasting time with stilted exposition laden dialog Don quickly takes his father pistol from its hiding space inside a book and leaves to hang out with his hoodlum friend, Vic Brady. Vic drags Don into a robbery of a theater that of course goes badly and end up with a retired cop dead and a woman shot. But it did net them 23,000 dollars which is over 200,000 dollars adjusted for inflation, so that theater must have been showing Avengers: Endgame. Within hours the radio’s exposition specific station is now broadcasting the news of the robbery, along with Don’s and Vic’s names and identities, here is where we learn that Don’s father is a ‘world famous’ plastic surgeon, but the reports even positively identify Don as the gun man who murdered the retired cop. Don goes back to his father, confesses to the crime and Dr. Gregor extracts a promise from Don to turn himself over to the police later, it has to be later for *reasons*. The police arrive and Don scoots out the back way. The police seem to know everything except the location of the back door but because Dr. Gregor is such a great upstanding citizen they don’t press him on anything. By the way the junior police lieutenant is played by legendary muscle man Steve Reeves but I doubt this is the movie Frank-N-Furter had in mind when he suggested an ‘old Steve Reeves movie’ in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Any who Vic nabs Don coming out of Dr. Gregor’s officer and forces him back to Vic’s hideout where Vic’s girl Loretta is waiting. There more tedious dialog and to shut him up Vic kills Don. To escape the law, Vic decides that he needs a new face because apparently only the face is used to identify people as fingerprints an apparently lost tech in this alternate 1954.  Threatening to kill Don, who is of course already dead, Vic forces Dr. Gregor is perform surgery and give him a new face. Ed Wood apparently could not afford a hospital set in his budget, nor an operating room staff, so the doctor performs this major reconstructive surgery assisted by his daughter and with Vic chloroformed on a living room sofa. Now before the doctor could perform this living room plastic surgery he needed a basin of hot water, apparently facial reconstruction and delivering babies have the same equipment requirements, and while searching for a basin in Vic’s kitchen he discovers Don’s *standing* dead body. Dr. Gregor completes the surgery and advises Loretta that Vic must come to him in weeks when the healing will be complete. The two weeks pass and the police are baffled how two people can just vanish as they have found neither Vic nor Don and that just seems impossible. They get a call from Dr. Gregor and leave to get to his house. Vic and Loretta get the doctor’s house and before the bandages are removed the police bust in. Vic is smug and confident that he’s in no danger, assuring the police he is not the man that they are searching for. The bandages come off and Vic is revealed to have Don’s face. The police go to arrest ‘Don’ and there’s a gun fight which ends with Vic/Don dead face down in the house’s pool, a vision shameless stolen, poorly from Sunset Boulevard.

For those of you who have seen Ed Wood’s magnum opus Plan 9 From Outer Space you may have considered that the man had little talent as a filmmaker but I assure you that Ed’s skills had matured by the time he produced, wrote, and directed Plan 9. Jail Bait,and despite the poster the title has nothing to do with the women of the film, in addition to a most laughable surgical scene posses the dullest car chase ever committed to celluloid. Many noirs  have a nightclub scenes where the romantic interest of the protagonist performs some sultry song and while Jail Bait  has a night club scene in the middle of the movie it involves none of the characters, has no torch singer in a slinky dress but instead presents that most offensive of all club acts an honest to god white man in blackface minstrel show. So this move is not just bad, it’s deeply racist and has been, until the advent of streaming and YouTube, justifiably forgotten.

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Movie Review: Brightburn

Sunday morning I ventured alone to see the new film Brightburn  as this movie held little interest for my lovely sweetie-wife. The one line description of this feature is ‘The Superman origin story done as a horror film.’

This is a modestly budgeted movie, R-rated for horror, graphic violence and imagery that succeeds on its own terms. Produced by James Gun who is best known widely for the writer/director of the Guardians of the Galaxy  franchise inside the massive machine that is the MCU, though for those of us more familiar with his body work Brightburn  represents a return to the genre where we first discovered his unique vision, horror. Brightburnis also a family affair with Gunn’s brother Brain and cousin Mark writing the screenplay while David Yarovesky directed.

Elizabeth Banks and David Denman star as Torie and Kyle Breyer a loving couple living on an farm in the middle of Kansas struggling with infertility and desperate for a child when a spaceship, more of a pod than a ship, crashes on their property its sole occupant a infant boy. Passing the child off as one that they had adopted Torie and Kyle raise the boy they named Brandon as their own. When Brandon reaches the edge of adolescence his begins to manifest powers and abilities  unlike anything found in nature and the Breyer’s suddenly have to confront the reality behind their fairytale of adoption.

Brightburn  knows what it wants to achieve wastes very little screen time with subplots or extraneous stories focusing on its core theme, what if someone with fantastic powers was simply evil? Jackson A Dunn who plays Brandon caries off the role with a subtle and creepy performs managing to convey menace with only body posture and his expression. David Denman is perfectly adequate as Kyle but the real star of the movie is Elizabeth Banks as Torie, she walks that line portraying a mother who loves her son, does not want to believe the worst is true, and yet has the strength in the end to face reality.

The production design on the film is outstanding. Normally when someone is aware of the production design it is because it captures some sort of beauty, usually an unaffordable one to the audience or an unearthly one such as in Thor: Ragnarok  but neither case applied to Brightburn. The Breyer’s home reflect a reality I recognize, despite having inherited a sizable farm with a large home they are not people of wealth, not even solidly middle class but rather they exist towards the lower end of the middle class. Too often in Hollywood productions this is either made to look much richer than the characters are, with stylish furnishings and art works, or it is made to appear cheap and trashy, but Brightburn  avoids both extremes, presenting a realistic home, one I recognize from my own life.

The violence and injuries in this movie are graphic fully earning the R Rating from MPAA. This movie may not be suitable for younger audiences, certainly children should not see this movie, the themes of vengeance and parents turning against their children in addition to the bloody scenes are too intense for most children, for younger teenagers, depending on their level of maturity, caution should be exercised. Over all I enjoyed this movie and for anyone who is a fan of horror this should be on their list of movies to see.

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Movie Review: Aladdin (2019)

Disney continues their adaptations of classic animated feature into live actions productions with Aladdin from 1992 now exploding across silver screen as a ‘bollywood’ inspired musical staring Will Smith and a cast of new faces. I am a major fan of the original animated Aladdin, I was blown away in the theater, grabbed the soundtrack at once, added to that with an album from Lea Salonga who provided Princess Jasmine’s singing voice, and of course the DVD. To give the 2019 feature a fair shake I did my best to set aside expectation and memories, judging the film on its own merits but the very nature of the movie and its production history makes that nearly impossible.

Perhaps the most famous stand out element of Aladdin 1992 is Robin Williams’ memorable vocal performance as the fantastic Genie but critical to that character and its integration is that fact that writers from the very start envision Williams performing the part and when he signed to do that molded more of the script as well as allowing serious latitude in Williams famous propensity for going off-script, something that became a seri9ous challenge for the animators. The match of concept to performer is a large part of the alchemy of film production. Will Smith in Aladdin 2019 has been hampered by the fact that not only will his performance be compared to Williams but that too much of the original Genie character remains in the script, forcing Smith to perform a character that was designed for a singular performer. At times this is a great weight holding back Smith from his own winning charm and screen charisma and at other points in the film he’s given a character more tuned to his performance and there he soars but the see-sawing between the two styles hurts the overall production and is unfair the Smith.

Sadly the other weight dragging down this movie is Mena Massoud as titular character Aladdin. let me clear it is not because Massoud is a bad actor or even a bad singer, were he paired with actors and singer of a comparable quality I doubt I would have seen him as a fault in this movie but caught between Will Smith and Naomi Scott his performance suffers. Naomi Scott is the break out actor of this movie. She is compelling, convincing, and her vocal talents as a singer are on a par with Lea Salonga’s iconic and mesmerizing voice. She commands the scenes she appears in, delivers dialog that at time is written flat with a realized character’s voice, and project a charisma that filled the theater, compared to her quite a few actors would have been found wanting.

Aside from those hard to ignore elements Aladdin 2019 over all is a decent film. Not one that I loved but certainly an enjoyable evening at the movies. The major beats and story elements remain unchanged, though a few have been given a twist. Jasmine now instead of existing solely as a prize has her own goals and gifts beyond wanting select her own husband and the reason for her isolation in the palace is more fully developed as part of her back-story. Jafar is given a little more to want but frankly it wasn’t quit enough and I think another writing pass on this character, just a few lines here and there, would have done wonders for fleshing him out. The CGI animation is spot on and the CGI tiger and monkey are amazing. A new subplot has been added concerning the new character of Dalia, Jasmine’s hand maiden, but essentially this is the same story but expanded and now with impressive effects. Aladdin  2019 is worth seeing at least once but it is unlikely to find a home in my video library.

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And Now Our Watch Has Ended

Spoilers Follow

So, Game of Thrones, that cultural moment when so many joined the geek community and discussed dragon, zombies, magic, and noble houses has reached it conclusion and many are left — well not the way that they thought they would be left.

As a viewer/consumer of the series I have feelings and as a writer I have feelings and those two identities don’t always agree on how things need to go down. I started the series about the time it began airing. A friend brought over a recording of the pilot episode and I was intrigued but certainly not completely sold and for the first few season that’s how it went. He would record bring over a disc and my sweetie-wife and I would enjoy, once HBO Now launched we got our own subscription stayed up to date on our own.

Over all I enjoyed the series, the shocking turns with Eddard’s Stark’s demise, followed by the Red Wedding, and a rich tapestry of political and social forces that constrained the character made for compelling storylines. (Side note: I speak only of the series, I never read any of the books. In general I read more SF than fantasy.) However once the show outpaced the novels the stories seemed simplified. Great houses fell and the positions seemed vacant, prizes to be awarded without any pesky ‘Bannermen’ seeing their shot and moving in for an increase in station. Winterfell seemed to burn down and rebuild with alarming speed and the vast distance that occupied entire episodes compressed to ‘down the block’ trips. Ravens carried news with the speed of the Internet and rescue missions from Dragon Stone to beyond the wall hardly earned a mention. Now we have come to the end, the final resolution to all this blood, fire, toil, and death and how do we feel?

Eh.

It was okay but hardly a great ending. For me endings are very special things, it is often in the ending that I feel we see the real point of the story Personally I cannot write a short story or novel unless I know how it ends, that is my north star, the reason for setting out on the journey to begin with and what did we end up with at the end of GoT? A decent person sits on the Throne, but that itself a somewhat inconsistent characterization. A season ago Bran was so disconnected from the rest of humanity he was unable to see the emotional trauma he left in his wake, dismissing people who had borne great sacrifices without even a thank you and now he’s a wise and compassionate rule? This is an ending that has been hammered into place and not one that grew organically from the characters and the theme. I never fell into the Daenerys is a hero camp. She never actually seemed to care about the people she ‘liberated’ and instead they only seemed to server her ego and inflating her reputation as a breaker of chains when in actuality she simply broke and re-forged them to herself. Her cruelty laid the groundwork for her eventual turn, but as with the vast distances of Westeros it was compressed beyond any sensible recognition. Arya I liked much more but in the end her story was also cut short and badly constructed. Her deep motivation was seeming abandoned by one ‘special episode’ chat and that broke with season of suffering and drive that had brought her to this place and time. It could have worked had they taken a little more time and performed the emotional transformation as a consequence of the final battle at Winterfell when Arya truly seemed to meet the god of Death and learned that when we say ‘not today’ we mean not just for ourselves but for those we do not kill today. She then could have left Cersi to others ready to find something other than death to live for. Jon’s ending seemed under paid. If Daenerys was the love his life and yet his duty compelled him to kill her he needed to pay a far higher cost than exile. Peter Sagal, host of NR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, had an alternative ending for Jon that worked wonderfully. Basically after killing his love Jon would sit on the throne and order Drogon to melt it and kill him. Sansa had the best and most character arc satisfying ending, she learned from everyone who tormented her and became a powerful figure of the north.

Still, I have seen worse endings and overall I enjoyed the ride but I will view D & D future project with some suspicion as it seems clear that best elements of the show came from Martin and not their minds.

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