Category: movies (Page 2 of 3)

I generally resist comedy shows. I find most comedic efforts strained; they tend to mug for the camera and are rife with canned laughs. There are small number of comedy TV shows I’ve liked: Seinfeld, MASH…Okay, I think that’s it. Where I’ve enjoyed comedy has been in unintended shows, small snippets. I did watch shows like Frasier and Cheers and Friends, The Big Bang Theory (well, it seems that I mostly stopped watching TV after the 1990s, I guess). Some of these had funny moments. Seinfeld had great characters, unique. The best shows have those types, more so than the series as a whole, you have great individual parts.

I’m sure a few years ago I caught a clip of the opening of Derry Girls and dismissed it as juvenile mugging. Yet somehow I watched a clip somewhere again this month, and it resulted in binging both seasons of the show on Netflix. Not only that, but I on occasion watch clips from the show just to keep the laughter fresh.

Derry Girls is a show about Northern Irish teenagers in Derry, set during the midst of the Troubles in the mid-1990s (a period that warrants its own Wikipedia entry and a capital T, the Troubles was a conflict between Protestant and Catholic, Irish and English, where thousands were killed and many more injured; it was not a good time). Rather than focusing on the Troubles, the show focuses on teenage who happened to live during those times. The actors in Derry Girls are older that the 15 and 16 year olds they portray, which lends them a skill far beyond people that same age. There are currently only two short seasons of Derry Girls, although a third and final season has completed production after a COVID-imposed delay.

There are five main teenage characters in Derry Girls, and one of them is a boy. Other teenage character appear, as well as adults (parents and other authority figures, for the most part). It’s through and through comedy, with tinges of realism such as the IRA, Orange marches, bombings, peace talks, rifts between Protestants and Catholics, and Irish and English. While I’ll never fully understand the two last parts, not being either Irish or English, or fully Protestant, I’ve always found myself deeply in love with most things Irish. Both my children bear names that trace back to Irish roots. I’ve been to Cork, albeit briefly (side note: I once found myself in a rough Cork pub bathroom, where I did my best Irish accent imitation in a discussion as I tried to extricate myself from a nasty stall). There’s Irish slang that required some research (boke, for example), and uniquely Irish traditions such as Rock the Boat at weddings. There’s also drugged scones, fish n chips, and a huge variety of shenanigans (if that isn’t an Irish word, it should be an Irish word).

In Derry Girls, the five main characters try to navigate teenage life in the 1990s. They’re in a strict Catholic girl’s school, though one of them is a boy. Each of the main characters are wildly different, from the artistic Erin, the somewhat on-the-spectrum cousin, Orla, the nervous (and lesbian) Clare, the booze/drug/boy/swearing Michelle. Then there’s the unfortunate English-born cousin of Michelle, James, who is dropped into the girls’ school because it’s supposedly safer. I guess one has to appreciate the Catholic-Irish hatred of the English to understand why.

As mentioned, I tend to stay away from comedies, but I found myself laughing quite often during Derry Girls. I wasn’t able to watch most of it without subtitles, though a few phrases skipped past me the first time (much better than when in Cork and I could don’t understand my taxi driver at all). The escapades of Michelle, with her constant raging at her cousin and her boy-crazy efforts, mixed in with her wild boozy side, seemed at times over the top, but looking back on my teenage years I do remember people like this (and this was not in Ireland). Then there’s Clare, the nervous, serious one; she has many funny moments. Orla seems a little spacey, in contrast to her more serious cousin, Erin, my favorite of the bunch. She tries too hard at everything, but has the best facial expressions. The main male character, James, an English actor, suffers throughout the series, but has the purest heart of the lot.

With the third and final season due out (maybe) in 2022, it will be interesting to see how they end this show. It’s a series that I almost wish never ends. I really wish it had more episodes, and I look forward to seeing when it comes out, as no doubt it will have many funny storylines. Derry Girls came out of nowhere (to me), and I didn’t expect to like it. This goes to show that surprises can be found anywhere and everywhere.

After the disappointing third chapter in this Star Wars series on Disney+ (the House of Mouse taking over all avenues of entertainment), this latest installment is a refreshing return to action and adventure.

Once again we are thrust back into the past, as Boba Fett’s dreams in his Bacta Tank take us back into the recent past. He remembers how, in his quest for revenge (chapter 3), he stumbled across the dying Fennec Shand. Here we cross over into the timeline of that other Star Wars show, The Mandalorian, just prior to Fett retrieving his armor. Fett saves Fennec, his bounty hunter nature mellowed by his time with the Tusken tribe. We see Fennec modded to replace the dying organs from her gut-shot with tech that makes her part cyborg. Together they retrieve Fett’s ship, Slave I (although we can’t say that word any more), from deep within Jabba’s palace. One wonders how and why that ship is still there and operable after five years, and why there was a silly kitchen chase scene, but all that aside, there’s some cracking action. With his ship Fett can exact revenge, and does so both against the raiders who destroyed his tribe and the Sarlacc which tried to digest him.

We then return to the present, as Fett tries to bolster his standing with other criminal gangs against a bigger criminal gang, the Pykes. He manages to wrangle a non-aggression pact from the three other gangs on Tatooine, which means he needs more muscle. The episode ends with the strain of The Mandalorian, setting up a possible team-up. Who else will Fett recruit in his war against the Pykes? With three episodes left, it will be interesting to see where this goes. I doubt the clones from The Bad Batch are still around, though Omega could be alive. Any other clones would be ancient at this point, and I doubt other Mandalorians would join Fett against the Pykes. Still, the closing episodes might bleed into season three of The Mandalorian, or possibly other Star Wars shows. Hopefully any other shows will keep the Star Wars universe, but ditch the major characters from the movies; they’ve had their moment.

The third installment of Disney+’s Star Wars Boba Fett series was a bit of a disappointment. There was a chase scene that came over as slow and poorly choreographed, more like cut from Back to the Future II than the French Connection or Ronin, two movies with great chase scenes. Even the brief one in Solo was better. There was a confrontation with the Hutt twins, quickly dismissed. There was a battle with a large Wookie, also quickly settled and with minimal bloodshed; if you want to kill someone in a Bacta tank, shoot them or chop them with an axe, don’t haul them out and throw them across the room. Then there was Fett’s Tusken tribe, which met the fate of Luke Skywalker’s aunt and uncle.

With four episodes to go, it seems like the show it setting up some “big-bad” confrontations or build-ups for future seasons, not an arc for the current season. A crime syndicate has been making headways on Tatooine, and this syndicate, the Pikes, seems to be those big-bads. There are rumors that someone else is behind them, possibly someone from the Solo movie, which makes the show less about Fett and more about pleasing the fans again with easter eggs and nods to other movies, or books or comics. Just tell the freakin’ story without weaving in every possible thread from elsewhere so the “true fans” will nod and point and say “That’s so and so,” with a knowing wink. At least, that’s what I think, and I’m far from a Star Wars fanatic. The “new story” aspect is what made The Mandalorian great, at least until it introduced some more famous Mandalorians, and even some noted current and former Jedi, which then switched focus away from the titular person, and onto the cameos from more well-known characters.

There a degree of tension, though, with Disney+ releasing new episodes every week, vs. the “dump ’em all” philosophy of Netflix. Recently I watched season two of The Witcher, a Netflix show. Even though all episodes were available, it took me a few weeks to watch them all. Still, I did like the fact they were all there, vs. the wait one week method with Disney+; they did the same thing with Hawkeye, the only Marvel series I watched, as well as The Bad Batch, an interesting though uneven show. This is the way it was done with traditional TV, though most traditional TV isn’t episodic, like these shows. You had to wait a week until the next one, but for the most part the episodes were disconnected. I remember Babylon 5 as something unique (at the time), while most other shows on broadcast TV that I watched were just brief flashes—fun, yes, but still only flashes. Meanwhile, Babylon 5 set up a long arc, and most (but not all) episodes were connected. Then again, I watched Babylon 5 in reruns, with “new” episodes each day, a schedule that can be tough to meet. That was back when you either recorded to VHS or Tivo, or made sure you were in front of the TV when the shows aired. None of this “on-demand” stuff of today.

At least with the Disney+ shows you don’t get gaps with re-runs (for now), but can depend on new episodes dropping each week, until the limited run of episodes ends. It’s a shame these shows run only 6-8 episodes. They seem all too brief, unlike the Marvel shows that came out on Netflix (until they were cancelled, of course). I’m talking about Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, The Punisher. Those shows combined the best of both worlds: all available to binge (if you so wished), and all more than a dozen episodes per season. I miss those shows.

This episode, almost an hour long, takes place mostly in the past. The present portion deals directly with the assassination attempt on Fett from Chapter 1, and his meeting with the mayor of Mos Espa. It also introduces Jabba’s twins, who lay claim to Fett’s new role. Then we switch to Fett’s dreams of the past.

The past involves Fett’s life between his Sarlacc snack and resurrection in The Mandalorian. Here we see Fett as he grows in his role as a member of a Tusken tribe. He introduces them to technology, in the form of stolen speeder bikes. He teaches them to ride the bikes and jump between them, a precursor to jumping on a speeding train. They hijack the train, establishing Fett’s role as a leader and trusted member of the tribe. He then walks a spirit walk, and gains a proper Tusken staff and role within the tribe.

With five episodes to go in the series, it’s doubtful they will spend as much time in the past as with this episode. Still, the past is important to Fett. He’s no longer a solo bounty hunter, but a part of a family. What, then, prompted him to emerge from the wilderness to save Fennec Shand and then reclaim his armor. Did his tribe get wiped out? Did they cast him out? Did he decide it was time to leave? My bet’s on the first option. How this influences his future life remains to be seen. Will he try to persist in his role to supplant Jabba, or will be move on to something else? We shall see.

Nonetheless, this was a much better episode that the first one. I still think the actor is two decades older than the role, but he still conveys the gravitas needed for his new role. It’s a bit too similar for Dances with Wolves for my taste, and I think it will end in the same way as that movie, but so far the visuals have been superb. This is a corner of the Star War universe far more interesting than seeing Luke Skywalker mope around and drink blue milk.

Strong characters never die, at least not in the movies. When last we saw the galaxy’s most feared bounty hunter, back in Return of the Jedi in 1983, he was unceremoniously dumped into the Sarlacc pit on Tatooine. Since then he’s refused to die, at least in the minds of fans across the decades, who have speculated on Fett’s survival and eventual emergence from the Sarlacc.

In Disney’s season two of The Mandalorian, Fett’s survival became canon, as they say. Now, with The Book of Boba Fett, a seven-episode series from Disney that debuted in late December 2021, the story continues. Played by the same actor who played his father in Attack of the Clones (2002), Temuera Morrison, this Boba Fett seems much older than the one who was disposed of so easily only a few years ago (in terms of Star Wars chronology). Morrison is around 60 years old during the time of filming; the events in the show take place around 9 ABY (after the battle of Yavin in Return of the Jedi), so he should technically be in his early 40s, as he was born 32 years before Yavin. Perhaps getting partially digested by the Sarlacc, and then spending 9 years hanging around with Tusken raiders have aged him, and no disrespect to Mr. Morrison, but this Boba Fett seems somewhat diminished at this point. He spends time in a healing chamber; he loses fights and gets wounded. How will he not only survive, but hang onto his new role as the replacement for crime lord Jabba the Hutt?

I do think that if a younger actor played Boba Fett, his journey from the wilderness to crime lord would make more sense, as at this point in time he’s still so new to his role that mistakes will be made, he will be forced to grow and assert himself. With six episodes to go, it will be interesting to see how this story develops. He does have a loyal (at the moment) associate, the assassin Fennec Shand, but will she remain loyal for long? He’ll face takeover attempts, assassination attempts, and other dangers, for as he says, he seeks to rule with respect, not fear. I fear that in the underworld, respect doesn’t keep you on top of the hill for long.

Could another actor have played Boba Fett? Sure, it would have disappointed loyal fans, but there are limits to fandom, especially where art is concerned. Nostalgia, here, has won the day. It’s a nod to the modern fanboy culture, with its callbacks and easter eggs, and the reluctance to let go and experience with new ideas. It’s the reason the newer Star Wars movies failed, in my opinion, as they just couldn’t let go of old characters. Then again, we’re about to see two more Star Wars shows with old characters – Obi Wan and Ashoka. What made The Mandalorian so unique was the brand new character, yet in a familiar universe. I wish the powers at Disney/Star Wars would see that as a way to explore newer stories, and not strip mine old ones.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe spans 20+ movies. For a while there also existed , separately from from those movies, various shows like Agents of SHIELD, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, The Punisher, Daredevil. The TV shows acknowledged the movies, while the movies ignored the shows. No sign of any of these heroes in the Endgame battle, no mention of Agent Coulson’s return from the dead in any of the Avenger movies. Once Disney absorbed Marvel, those TV shows fizzled. I’d watched most of them, though I gave up on the final seasons of Iron Fist and Jessica Jones once I heard these would be the last ones, and those characters and actors shunted off to the side. I didn’t read those as comics, unlike Daredevil; their story arcs meant little too me, though I wasn’t bothered like some others about the person who was Iron Fist.

With the massive success of most of the MCU movies, from individual episodes (with sequels), to the ensemble installments, I thought that Disney would pick up those shows. Instead, the launched limited series based on known characters: Loki, Wanda and Vision (the dead never stay dead in superhero life), the Falcon and Winter Soldier. I caught two episodes of Falcon and the Winter Soldier, then stopped watching, and never saw a single episode of Loki or WandaVision. These shows all seemed irrelevant, made of characters that meant nothing to me, arcs that were meaningless. However, that changed with Hawkeye.

In the MCU movies, Hawkeye has no special powers. He’s not a god, not a genius, not a super soldier or gamma-augmented shapeshifter. He’s just phenomenal with a bow and arrow. His character arc in the movies went from minor to slightly more than minor, but to me he always seemed like the everyman, more so than the childish Ant-Man. Played by Jeremy Renner, Hawkeye seemed like a reluctant hero, yet one who went through major emotional turmoil. He lost his wife and kids in the Thanos snap. He lost his best friend in the effort to bring back his wife and kids. He lost himself twice, first when Loki took over his mind, and second when he became Ronin, and went on a rampage against organized crime. When Marvel/Disney announced a Hawkeye TV show (or rather, set of 6 episodes), I though nothing of it, as I figured it was a strange concept. Of the previous shows, I enjoyed Daredevil the most, as he came across as a tragic figure, yet still able to rise each time. How would the writers pull off a decent show about the least powerful Avenger?

They would do this by lining up Hawkeye’s next generation Avenger, someone who actually might figure in future Marvel movies. As far as the other newer TV shows go, the Falcon might be the new Captain America, the Loki show is simply the writers on some heavy drugs, and WandaVision sets up crazy multiverse and magic stuff that can always be undone. With Clint Barton likely aging out and moving on, there needs to be a new Hawkeye, and what better than to introduce a character in their early twenties who can play the role for a few movies? While Disney/Marvel can’t let go of certain characters, they can reimagine them. The Falcon taking over as Captain America? Weird but ok, I guess. No super soldier serum there, but maybe the mantle means more. Iron Man is dead, so who will take over his role? I’m sure they’ll find someone. As for Hawkeye, why not a young woman? This actually makes better sense than a junior Clint Barton.

I don’t know much about the actor playing the role of Kate Bishop. I haven’t read the comics upon which the show is based. I therefore don’t care how loyal the show is to the comics. What I care about is whether the show works, and two episodes into Hawkeye, I think it does. It’s tough to analyze a 6-show venture. The first two or three episodes will generally introduce characters, which leave two or three episodes to push along a good story and wrap up an arc. So far, that’s what’s happened. The first episode introduced Kate Bishop, the person who will likely take over as the new Hawkeye. The second showed more of Clint Barton. Since the next episodes will be released once a week, I expect these will now feature both characters as they learn to work with each other.

So far I’ve not seen anything in the first two episodes to make me not want to keep watching Hawkeye. Unlike Falcon and Winter Soldier, the social commentary is at a minimum. The actors in both series are great, but in Hawkeye it’s more about the story. And, so far at least, it’s fun. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier show came across as dreary. Why watch a show that just beats you over the head again and again with misery?

I know there’s an entire industry out there trying to predict Disney/Marvel ventures, spinning up YouTube entries on speculations and insider information in an effort to build up their own rep and cred. My few words here aren’t part of that, but rather a musing on why one show means more to me than others. I’d throw this in the pot about why I probably won’t watch the Boba Fett show, and would rather see the Cara Dune character in a series played by the original actor (even though I know little about actor herself, she played the character well). It’s all a matter of taste, and in some cases I think certain shows work, and others don’t, but I realize other people have other opinions. So be it. In the end, my simple musing mean little to the powers behind those shows. The fact that I’d like to see more Daredevil shows with Charlie Cox means nothing to the powers that be, nor to Mr. Cox.

Still, whatever happens in the Hawkeye show, and whether or not the actor playing Kate Bishop takes over the mantle of the famed archer in future movies, the two episodes so far have been a worthwhile way to spend a few minutes of my time. I hope it continues. I hope it bleeds over into the movies.

At some point in the future, the MCU will lose steam. It will come to an end. People may tire of superheroes. They for sure will tire of crap stories. As long as the stories are interesting, they will matter. For now, I think Hawkeye fills that need. It’s a heck of a lot more fun and meaningful than the other Disney/Marvel shows.

Addendum: I drafted this after only two episodes of Hawkeye, and before reports exploded on web sites that the Charlie Cox could (would/) replay Daredevil somewhere in the MCU. Since then I’ve watched two more episodes, and the show only gets better. Two episodes remain in the Hawkeye show, and I really wish there were more than just six. It seems we’re only introducing characters, and I just don’t want that show to end.

I don’t remember much about the introduction of Black Widow, aka Natasha Romanoff, into to the MCU during Iron Man 2. Frankly, I don’t remember much of Iron Man 2, as it was a forgettable movie, much like Iron Man and Iron Man 3. The best Iron Man movies were ones with ensemble casts, where each (somewhat) equally powerful characters played off one another.

Black Widow in the MCU has appeared in multiple movies, including a couple of Captain America movies and all the Avenger movies. Played by a somewhat robotic Scarlett Johansson, she’s a tough ex-Russian spy who defected and joined SHIELD. Her background seemed ripe for a solo movie, but it took years to bring such a feature to fruition. The much delayed solo film finally debuted in America on July 8th, quite some time after her demise in Avengers: Endgame.

A major flaw with super-hero movies these days is the origin story. Even in re-boots, we still sit through the origin story of the character, which takes up a good third to half the movie. Most of the viewers already know the background, but Hollywood keeps pushing different version of their beginning, most egregiously in the Spider-Man movies, or at least the first two versions. The Tom Holland version at least skips this part, and puts us in the middle of the aftermath of his spider incident and the death of his uncle. Captain Marvel, a character maybe not as familiar to movie-goers as someone like Spider-Man, went the origin route, as did Captain America, Iron-Man, and Ant-Man. As for Thor, well, he’s been around a few hundred years when we meet him in his first movie. The ironically named rag-tag band of losers known as the Guardians of the Galaxy, the least interesting of the lot, get introduced to us in their first movie as well. Thankfully, the movie Black Widow skips this part, aside from a few flashbacks, but then, we’ve already seen her in eight movies so far, so we know who she is, and a little bit of her origin. Though it’s not a knock against Johansson, she’s in her mid-thirties now, and going through her origin in the Red Room and her escape from this is better off told in brief flashback, anyway.

In terms of timeline, Black Widow takes place immediately after the events at the Berlin airport in Captain America: Civil War. In that scene, Natasha Romanoff switched sides. She helps Rogers and Barnes escape, which puts her in violation of the Sokovia Accords, and a target of General Ross, who seems to like being an all-around jerk blindly chasing super-heroes. The movie begins with a flashback to 1995, when Romanoff was a young girl, living in Ohio with a fake Russian family — sister, mother, father. They act like a normal family, until the “dad” arrives from work and tell them their cover is blown. They make their escape to Cuba, where all are separated, and Romanoff and her younger sister sent off to the Red Room, a training ground for assassins.

The scene then switches to General Ross and his soldiers supposedly having Romanoff surrounded in a building. They chat on the phone. His team moves in, only to find the phone connected to a remote device, and Romanoff stepping out of the bathroom in a ferry in far-away Norway. As a (former) Norwegian I recognized western Norway right away. I was almost surprised she didn’t head down to the cafe in the ferry and buy a coffee or hot dog. Instead, she buys supplies as a local grocery store and finds an old mobile house in some desolate location. Here she intended to hunker down and stay under the radar, but it doesn’t take long before she’s thrust back into action.

The impetus to that action is one of a few things that annoyed me in this movie. Her contact, who set her up with the mobile home in Norway, drops off mail from a former safe house in Bulgaria. This brings her into conflict with Taskmaster, someone trying to secure items in a box from that mail. I could understand somewhat how Taskmaster appeared: maybe the box had a tracking device. Still, when Romanoff heads to Bulgaria, who does she run into but her former sister, Yelena. How did Yelena end up in the same safe house, and how do the other Russian assassins and the villain Taskmaster immediately track them down to the same exact location? Maybe there are deleted scenes that explain this, but this just made no sense. The suspension of disbelief in action scenes are one things, but the logic here is jarring.

Natasha and Yelena make their escape, break out their former father from prison, and find their former mother, in order to once and for all destroy the Red Room; we learn in this movie, that the Budapest reference from the original Avengers movie is tied to Romanoff and Hawkeye trying to destroy the Red Room and thinking they had succeeded.

There are several great action scenes in the movie, which make it seem shorter than the two-hour run time. We see a more mature Black Widow, one who has experienced many battles, faced humans, gods, and aliens, and one who still has a couple more battles left to fight, and then a tragic end. The post-credit scene seems to set up Yelena as an important character in the MCU, but whether she’s good or evil remains to be seen. Marvel does make small changes to characters that differ from the various comic appearances of those characters.

It’s disappointing that it took so long to get a solo Black Widow movie. There are strong female characters of note in the MCU — Captain Marvel, Wanda Maximoff aka Scarlett Witch, and Black Widow, Hope Van Dyne aka the Wasp, Nebula and Gamora from Guardians, Valkyrie from Thor: Ragnarok to mention a few. Still, it’s great to finally see Natasha in her own movie, even though she seems at times like a supporting character and not a leading one.

It is somewhat bittersweet to watch Black Widow, knowing the fate of her character in Avengers: Endgame. The movie fills in some gaps, gives us more of that particular universe, and aside from my noted annoyances is a superb movie. The reviews that I’ve read have all praised Florence Pugh, who plays Yelena, and deservedly so, as she’s a tough fighter and ready with quips at the drop of a hat. David Harbour as the Red Guardian is the comic relief, something I wish movies would leave out completely. Rachel Weisz has a restrained and almost dour presence, and could have been written better. A question for the future: Does Yelena become the next Black Widow, or Red Widow? Does she join the new Avengers, who take over after the events of Endgame? The continuing story does seem to call for younger actors. I wonder how she plays off against Peter Parker, Dr. Strange, Ant-man and the Wasp, or even Thor or the Hulk. Not that I expect the latter two to show up again in any new Avenger movies. Thor likely is done after his next solo movie, and the Hulk? If the events of the Avengers are anything to go by, he’s settled into his strange hybrid character, aka Professor Hulk.

As the above demonstrates, I am a fan of the MCU movies. I haven’t read any of the comics in decades, as from my experience the comics do weird things that break all story-lines. But the movies follow a stronger, less random path. Still, now that the major 20-movie arc from the first Iron Man to Endgame is over, the question is: where do they go from here? There are at least eight or nine announced movies in the MCU, with two of those appearing this year (Shang-Chi and the 3rd Spider-Man installment). With the exception of The Eternals, I’ll likely watch them as they appear, as I’m by now somewhat vested in the characters.

By chance I recently watched the first episode of Alice in Borderland, a strangely titled show on Netflix. The opening seemed somewhat boring; three loser friends run around Tokyo goofing off, hiding in a toilet when they think the police are after them for some silly act. When they emerge from the toilet, however, the resulting scene actually made me sit up and take notice. It was almost on par with the scene of Neo waking up in his pod in The Matrix. For, instead of a bustling downtown Tokyo, the friends emerge to an empty city. This made me think of the Twilight Zone episode, where a man wakes up and finds himself alone in a small city. Did they cross into another reality, I wondered. Is it a game, a dream, or simulation?

Walking around the empty city, the three friends, Arisu, Chota, and Karube, come across one other person, who cryptically says something about an expired visa before a red laser shoots from the sky and through the man’s brain. It’s a shocking moment, for neither the characters nor the audience expected this to happen. The next thing they see is a sign pointing to a “game.” They follow the sign, entering a building where they encounter two young women. A voice instructs them to each pick up a mobile phone, which shows a playing card, and begins a countdown. They must find their way out of the building, from room to room, before the room catches on fire. It’s a harrowing experience, and their introduction to life in this new world, where to keep living you earn visas by playing games. Each visa lets you live a few days. The games are deadly, but not playing them, just as deadly.

With Chota injured by the flames in the first game, Arisu and Karube enter another game to try to figure out more about this strange new world. They join a large group in a game of tag, pursued through an apartment building by a machine-gun wielding man wearing a horses’s head. Arisu, the show’s protagonist, learns the meaning of the cards: Spades correlate to games of strength, Clubs are team battles, Diamonds are a battle of wits, and Hearts correlate to games of betrayal. Their first game was clubs, and this is a game of spades. They’re joined by new characters: the agile climber Usagi; the brooding ex-soldier Aguni; and the aloof and mysterious Chishiya. Of all the characters, Arisu seems the one most capable of surviving in this strange gaming-based situation. He figured out how to beat the first game, and how to beat the second one. However, as they need to extend the visas for Chota and a young woman who survived the first game with them, not every game is winnable.

Their third game is a hearts game, which as Arisu learned means betrayal. The quartet don strange headsets in a botanical garden. To their horror they learn that they’ve strapped bombs to their heads, and the game is set up so that only one of the four will survive. It’s a tragic situation, and as Arisu emerges as the sole survivor, he is wracked by guilt. He lays down in the street to die, having given up, as by living he caused the death of his friends. He’s saved by Usagi, the climber from the game of tag. She has learned to survive, hunting for food in the deserted city, foraging for materials to build a small sanctuary. As Arisu slowly returns to life and finds the will to live, they team up, hoping to live through the games and find a way home.

Eventually, they find their way to “the Beach,” a community of survivors who live in a resort, teaming up to solve games and extend their visas. They meet Hatter, the enigmatic leader of the Beach, as well as his executive committee and a violent group of gun-toting maniacs. Arisu protects Usagi from the rapacious Aguni, the leader of the militants, and earns their enmity. He gains the trust of Hatter and the other leaders, but when Hatter is brought back dead from a game, the world turns upside down again. The militants take over. A new game takes place inside the Beach, and the militants go on a killing spree, intent on murdering every inhabitant in the Beach.

As the season ends, Arisu and Usagi find their way to the location of the gamemasters, the people who have been orchestrating all the games. As they wander around the room they see that all the gamemasters are dead. They run into two other survivors, and as they wonder what’s next, a person appears on the screens, announcing a new level of games to challenge them all, laughing with excitement.

It’s a breathtaking series, a nail-biter of a show. I didn’t know what to expect, and the writers threw in twists and turns in nearly every episode. Few people are safe. After I finished the show, some research informed me that Arisu is Alice, based on how this is pronounced in Japanese. Usagi is the White Rabbit. Hatter, of course, the Mad Hatter. There are other analogies to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. The always smiling Chishiya is the Cheshire Cat. The woman who appears at the end might be the Red Queen. Kuina, a trans person who partnered with Chishiya, is the blue caterpillar (she always wear blue and goes through a transformation like caterpillars). Not every character in the show has a matching source in Carroll’s books, and the plot, aside from falling down the rabbit hole into a strange and mad world, is vastly different.

A sequel is in the works. It will be interesting to see where it goes, and what this world means. How could Tokyo be turned into a deadly video game on such a grand scale? Are all the deaths real, or imagined? What’s Chishiya’s backstory? Will any characters survive and if they make it back to the real world, what happens to them? The easy way out would be for the loser Arisu suddenly to realize that he’s wasted his life, and now he has a chance to take control and make a difference.

Long review of part 1 of the recently released Atlas Shrugged movie. Not sure if or when it will make it to theaters near me, but it has been many years since I last read the novel.

Long and interesting post by J. Neil Schulman on his movie project and a possible rip-off. Happens so often in the movie buz.