Notes on The Umbrella Academy 'Season 3'

 So... 

• The Sparrows are like the Umbrella Academy only more diverse, more boring, and more obnoxious? So much for likeability and shades of grey! (And imagine if the black boy had also been called Luther. Ah well!)
• We don't get the title until 20 minutes into the first episode. Starting to feel Pythonesque! (Deliberately?) How stupid exactly is the Rumour supposed to be? (Black chicks never watched Back to the Future? Are girls generally too up themselves to notice when things have changed? I'm not saying this is grossly racist and sexist*, but...)
• Doesn't the gay one like men's underpants? Why does he freak out just because they belong to a man that he has lived with all his life?
• Crimefighters who have their faces on billboards can get away with shoplifting? Are we going to find out how that works?
• Hmmm! Violent Amish? Didn't you guys see Witness? (C'mon! It got a shoutout in the first Stranger Things.)
• And Luther gets off with a girl. I mean, I'm pretty puritanical about such things. But for the first time in the entire series one sort of feels good for the guy. He's big, he's dumb, and now that that's finally "priced in" he's starting to feel like a proper character in his own right - rather than just the token white jock dude. (In Episode 5 Luther even gets to be sassy, which is a nice change-up for the character.)
• It's actually a recurrent problem that the female characters stand about worrying about their feelings when there are mysteries and universe-threatening problems to be solved. (And oddly enough it's Ben who comes up trumps when he's the first person actually to put the appalling "messy bitches" officially in their place.)
• Black females, on the other hand, are of course allowed to murder people now. That's a thing. Apparently! (And tranny "boys" are allowed to hit them? Whatever!)
• On the plus side, the relationship between Klaus and Hargreeves is absolutely boss. And we've moved on from Doctor Who to Torchwood - except that Captain Jack's reanimation powers were never played for laughs.† (When obviously, if you think about it, they should have been.)
• When the actress who plays the mom-bot with one eye blinks she blinks completely naturally but with just one eye. That's good acting. And it's good sci-fi. Every now and again one comes across artists who are masters of their craft, and in genre this is what it takes.

*And Ellen Page is still playing a female - for some reason. (But then of course she gets a haircut and changes her name to 'Victor'. Because apparently that's all it takes.)

†Or maybe they were. After all, most of Torchwood was unwatchable, brainless filth - which I didn't watch.

'What next for Ukraine's captured soldiers' says the BBC. (Was that supposed to be a question?)

Well, I for one cannot believe the "neo-Nazis" of the Azov Battalion are going to be treated very much better than the Russian soldiers who've been captured by the Ukrainians.

But at least the Ukrainians are upholding the Geneva Convention. Right?

All Right on the Knight

Seen it all before? Maybe! Light then dark then light - like the Bonds? I suppose so. But you didn't realise that angry Batfleck (of the Snyderverse, no less) was the light version until what came afterwards. (Ditto Brosnan! Everyone thought he was a "serious" Bond until Craig came along.)

Batman as Zorro? Bit odd! Thomas Wayne as villain? Ditto! But at least there's a sense here that Hollywood is now coming down from its (anti-Trump) woke high of a couple of years ago. (How exactly you make feminist fantasies like Aliens and T2 even more woke-feminist was never clear - and it wasn't a good idea.)

Gordon's been race-swapped, which makes him feel at worst like the black Felix Leiter from the Craig Bond films and in practice no worse than Danny Glover in the Lethals. And so the handsome rich English public school boy World's Greatest Detective gets to whitesplain batsplain things to the poor black gumshoe. If this is woke, I suspect they didn't think it through. 

And Catwoman is now black too, again! But then no one minded Eartha Kitt back in the '60s, and this one more than exorcises the memory of Halle Berry. (And obviously one minded Harvey Dent being black in the Tim Burton Batman, but then that was probably because he was played by Billy Dee Williams - proof that back in those days race-swapping could actually make you cooler.)

All-in-all, it's good to see the Caped Crusader back on form. Most of the boxes get ticked, the grunge-emo look works well (and the sound!), and the moral complexity of Joker has survived into a "mainstream" series. Yes, there are disappointments. (No Justice League! No Wayne Manor! No Robin - duh! And de facto no Alfred either!) And the chances are that after all the Schubert and the Fauré (not to mention Vengeance's own "Fasolt and Fafner"-type leitmotif), as well as the beautiful night-time visuals, you'll be nodding during the last half-hour (when - spoilers! - Bats singularly fails to stop the villain's dastardly plan to flood Gotham City and turn it into a literal crime-infested swamp).

But it could have been sooooo much worse.

Aliens and Dead People

There's no real doubt that the Democrats won the 2020 election by fraud. The COVID-1984 scam allowed them (and various other anti-Trump conspirators) to change the rules and massively increase the number of postal ballots. The rest was simply a well funded harvesting operation, so that once again the familiar American order was able to re-establish itself. In other words, the money won. Again.*

The bad news is that they have no intention of doing it just once. If they get their way, voter registration will become automatic, including for illegal aliens and dead people. State oversight too will become a thing of the past, and ballot-harvesting will become a permanent norm. (And any attempt to return to an even vaguely fair and open system of representative government will of course be shouted down by the MSM as "voter suppression".)

On the one hand, a party composed of extraterrestrials and zombies would help to explain politicians like Al Gore and Joe Biden. In truth though it's a pretty bleak outlook for the western world, as politicians become ever more detached from reality and any possibility of arresting the decline of our culture through constitutional means is removed.

*Of course, the fraudulent winners were ably aided and abetted by the spectacular incompetence of the losers, but that was only to be expected. Never underestimate the Stupid Party's capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. 

Looking shady!

Hadrien Pierre Mazelier, probably photographed by Jannis Tsipoulanis, and doing his bit for transatlantic goodwill

Afterthoughts

Perhaps I should have called this post 'Laughterthoughts'. Unfortunately though, there aren't that many laughs in the new Ghostbusters soft reboot - although OTOH it could have been much, much worse. It is scary, in parts, but with the honest exception of Paul Rudd's performance it's not really funny.

The decision to go full Stranger Things was brave and mostly worked. Wolfhard now plays horny teenage everynerd more or less pat, though his character is underwritten and underused. He's basically the new Peter Venkman except that he fails to get into the girl's knickers. And of course he's not funny either. His consolation prize - and it's a fairly meagre one, given that he's the only one of the "kids" who can feasibly do it - is that he gets to drive the Ectomobile. (Having him as an anaemic Michael Taylor at least meant we were spared a Short Round.) The younger children are also OK. The girl is better than the boy: she's Spengler's granddaughter and a reasonable stand-in for her grandpa, and the boy just about captures Stanz's slow-witted, well-meaning enthusiasm. Only the token black girl - who by process of elimination is there to be a female Zeddemore* - really lives down to expectations.

In theory of course Ghostbusters as a concept should work just as well with any group of early middle-aged, middle-class white men (and their token black friend) who are down on their luck (sacked academics dressed like plumbers going into business in the real world) but make it big by doing something whackily fantastical in a relatively cool, deadpan, Noo Yawk sort of way. In practice though, the camaraderie between Egon, Ray and Venkman was something special, and the real-life friendship between Ramis and Murray was extra special. (Murray's double take at the end of Afterlife when Venkman sees Spengler's ghost is funnier and more emotional than anything else in the whole film.) The first film was originally envisioned for Belushi and Eddie Murphy, and it would no doubt have been perfectly good with them. But without Bill Murray it would only have been half the film it turned out to be, and even today Murray could almost certainly improvise his way half-way through a Ghostbusters film without breaking sweat.

Including the original Ghostbusters at the end was the right decision. Unfortunately in just a couple of minutes they demonstrate what was lacking in the movie - which was, of course, them. Murray in particular proves quite how much of the original film really was just him, and manages to improvise in the space of a few lines more humour, charm, pathos and excitement than the rest of the cast does in the previous hour and a half.

And of course the real ghost elephant in the room is Melissa McCarthy. There's a real sense of Ghostbusters: Afterlife's being really just a franchise palate-cleanser, and as such it was certainly worth it. 

*Winston Zeddemore was originally supposed to be ex-military. By the time of the videogame he's got a PhD. In practice he arrives only just in time to be the straight man (i.e. just before Sigourney Weaver becomes a dog), albeit only narrowly avoiding being the "comedy stupid one" (and let's face it, that's more or less what he is in Ghostbusters II).

Déjà vu... all over again!

Lost in Spice

The Bad

The characters mumble. Not much of the book's "poetry" has survived. And in fact the film generally is altogether so artsy that a lot of it is literally too dark, too blurry, too indistinct and, quite simply, too cool.*

Conversely all the female characters seem to have been miscast. None of them is remotely so cool as in the book or, for that matter, as in the Lynch version. (The Spice Girls they ain't!) Obviously no actress has ever been so cool as Siân Phillips.  But Jessica has been reduced from being an elegant and invincible matriarch to being a scowling, whingeing Karen. And Zen-dire, who plays the same character she plays in the Spider-Man films, is never so cool as she thinks she is anyway.

The Fremen, meanwhile, are "diverse". No attempt has been made to make them into a realistic race of people, or indeed to subvert expectations. Why not have a black Paul Atreides and the Fremen all blond-haired and, er, blue-eyed? It could have been interesting, at any rate.

Duncan Idaho on the other hand is cool. (Jason Momoa is cool. Duh!) So why does he have a crap death scene? (Actually that whole subplot is fairly boring and could easily have been cut, as it was in the Lynch version.)

I never noticed the Atreides' hyper-masculine homoerotic thing before. But why don't we hear Gurney Halleck sing? (Can Josh Brolin sing?)

In fact there's actually too much prophecy in the film, so that by the end of Dune: Part One we already know what's going to happen in Dune: Part Two before it's even begun filming.

And the Harkonnens' "pet"? WTF? Is Villeneuve trying to make up for the lack of Guild Navigators, not to mention heart plugs and cat-milking?

Finally, the "voice" is realised on screen just as stupidly here as in the Lynch version. And in fact there's still too much of Lynch's Dune altogether. There's no real conflict between the "liberal" materialism of the Harkonnens and the traditionalist honour of the Atreides. There's none of the book's "Ruritania in Space", which even Lynch (and George Lucas!) kept a certain amount of. And yet, sed contra, Lynch at least made the effort to explain all sorts of things, such as the Mentats, and indeed why the spice is so valuable. This is crucial plot background that never so much as seea the light of day here. So the book's poetry has gone for a burton, but there's precious little of the book's "science" either. (Maybe there'll be more in Part Two!

The Good

The military stuff is all good, and in practice I quite enjoyed all the homoerotic hypermasculinity.

I loved the ornithopters.

All the goody male characters are actually well cast, including Duncan Idaho. Chalamet, strange but true, actually has a lot of youthful gravitas. 

Yueh is Chinese. WTF?

Hans goes Wagnerian in the final scene.

The sign language and the Fremen walk are well realised.

And whereas Lynch's worms were giant willies with giant foreskins Villeneuve's are proper trad vaginae dentatae again. Nice!

*Elizabeth Bachmann in Stranger First Things observes somewhat archly 'due to cool, blue-toned lighting, some unconvincing CGI, and the fact that the actors rarely broke a sweat, Villeneuve’s desert left me feeling rather chilly.' Touché!

Only one of the following countries is not using Covid passports. Can you spot it? 🧐 pic.twitter.com/HX22yTspA2

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) November 12, 2021