Back in the Cage

Last night I finished watching the second season of Luke Cage. It wasn't as strong as the first season but it was still lightyears beyond the new Marvel shows on Disney+, at least in terms of writing. Some of the performances are top notch, too.

The second season lacks the presence of Mahershala Ali, who played villain Cornell "Cottonmouth" Stokes in half of the first season. I think it's likely Ali's memory of the good writing on Luke Cage led him to demand better writing on the upcoming Blade film he's set to star in, for which he's forced Disney to recruit Nic Pizzolatto. Good for Ali. I hope the deal survives the strikes. Someone really needs to sit Disney down and talk to them about writing, it's beyond embarrassing at this point.

It's hard to believe Luke Cage's second and final season was only five years ago. It seems like a lifetime. The writing on the show isn't always perfect. There are a few episodes of padding in the second season, like episode 11, where scenes and dialogue get a little repetitive. But one episode that seemed mostly filler, episode 9, where several characters are forced to lay low in one of Danny Rand's buildings, turned out to have one amazing scene thanks to Alfre Woodard.

On paper, it's basically just a rehash of her character's, Mariah's, backstory established in season one. But Woodard's performance as she tells her daughter about being raped, is truly amazing. She really is this show's Wilson Fisk. She refers to her rape again in the final episode, where she uses it as an excuse for the fact that she's unable to feel love for her daughter. That was a bold move from writer Cheo Hodari Coker who forces the audience to think about it and ask, "Does rape do this or is this something unique to Mariah's experience?" This is how you do MCU for adults.

Simone Missick continues to be captivating as Misty Knight. She had a courtroom drama series after Luke Cage that's been cancelled. I hope that means she's free to show up as Misty in future MCU projects.

Mike Colter as Luke Cage disappointed some fans of the comics but if nothing else he's physically right for the role. I can suspend disbelief and think of Krysten Ritter or Finn Jones as super strong but it helps a lot when you can actually see massive muscles on your star.

Finn Jones guest stars as Danny Rand in the season's tenth episode and I was amused to see him brace himself when he gave Luke a hand to get to his feet. Colter has really quick reflexes, too. Daredevil, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist all had some amazing fight scenes, especially compared to what we get in the MCU now, Shang-Chi being the sole exception. I wonder what the odds are of Shang-Chi ever meeting Iron Fist.

Luke Cage is available on Disney+.

X Sonnet #1731

Potato schisms ever split the roots.
Implore the feather bed to fly away.
For while the rest awaits she'll wear her boots.
There's precious little else the elves convey.
The stalwart zebra stood and spoke a word.
Returned and now a carrot, flesh revives.
And yet excitement rates about at curd.
But little depth through mindless haze survives.
A gentle whistle closed the club at dawn.
And now the mighty fold a song inside.
Removing brains enhanced the latent brawn.
But smaller ears have set the sound aside.
In hollow hay, nutrition kicks the horse.
An angel's dreams were dragged a diff'rent course.

The Devil Returns

Word came recently that Charlie Cox will be reprising his role as Daredevil from the Netflix series. Now, of course, he'll be on Disney+, hopefully with something approaching the quality of his previous appearances, despite Disney once again cheaping out on the writing staff. Showrunners on the new series will be Matt Corman and Chris Ord, whose previous credits aren't nearly as illustrious as the legendary first season of Daredevil. News of the new series came at around the time I finally finished watching 2017's The Defenders, the big team up event series that followed the first two seasons of Daredevil and the first seasons of Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage. The Defenders had some strong moments but overall it was disappointing.

I also recently finished watching the first seasons of Luke Cage and Iron Fist. Luke Cage was by far the superior of the two. The uneven writing on Iron Fist got a little better near the end with an episode about his sidekick, Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick), coming to the realisation that she's been part of a murderous cult her whole life. There was some actual good stuff about how two good people can be fundamentally opposed, with one of them deeply, tragically mistaken. There were also some surprisingly nice moments with David Wenham's character but mostly the series sinks under the ineptitude of Finn Jones as the title character.

I felt like the creative team was actually making fun of him a little in The Defenders. In a scene where Elektra (Elodie Yung) has him tied up in an underground cave, she asks him if he can read some runes on the cavern wall. He angrily asks, "You brought me here to be your translator?" He sounded so much like Derek Zoolander that I laughed. Events that subsequently unfolded did nothing to dispel the impression that he's a complete doofus.

Mike Colter as Luke Cage didn't give an especially great performance but one that's good enough for a series that turned out to be more about its supporting characters. Of all the MCU movies and series, Luke Cage season one is one of the best I've seen for making the hero feel like part of, and a symbol for, a community. It's not artificially jammed in, Cage has a history with people in Harlem. The owner of a barber shop, a couple guys playing chess there (one of whom is a thug from Daredevil), and assorted other regulars on the street. When Luke meets one character, he might also know her sister or someone else might have a brother who was friends with so and so. It all feels like like a neighbourhood of real people.

And, my goodness, the performances on this show were outstanding, to say the least. Mahershala Ali, Theo Rossi, Erik LaRay Harvey are all phenomenal. Alfre Woodard is creepy as hell especially because of how plausible she makes her psychotic politician character. Rosario Dawson is, of course, great as always as Claire Temple, but the real star of Luke Cage is Simone Missick as Misty Knight. Her performance is creative and intelligent, finding real substance even in relatively cliche crime show moments.

I'd seen the first season of Jessica Jones years ago and I loved it. So I was excited for the team-up promised by The Defenders. I can understand the complications behind such an undertaking, weaving so many characters and storylines together while making them dramatically meaningful to the one going on in The Defenders. Unfortunately, this often resulted in retcons, narrative leaps, and and characters just plain not acting like themselves. The biggest crime of this sort was perpetrated on Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) whom we left in Daredevil season two not knowing Matt Murdock is Daredevil but advocating for the usefulness of vigilantes. In The Defenders, suddenly she's known his identity for some time and is trying to get him to stop being Daredevil, treating it like an addiction, a particularly annoying interpretation usually given to the very annoying character Foggy, Matt's lawyer friend.

Still, the series had its moments. It was cool seeing Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) and Matt Murdock together, especially in a scene where they interview a girl about her missing father. I am hoping I will see Jones in the future. Aside from the already promised Daredevil and Wilson Fisk, my list of the Marvel Netflix characters I'd like to see again most would probably be Misty Knight, Jessica Jones, Karen Page (I do love Deborah Ann Woll), Kilgrave, Diamondback, Claire Temple, and Colleen Wing.

Iron Cage

So I've started watching Iron Fist and Luke Cage with the idea of finally being caught up enough to watch The Defenders. I'm three episodes into Iron Fist and two into Luke Cage--I've been alternating--and I'm further with Iron Fist because I watched its premiere episode first. I did this because I remembered everyone hated Iron Fist and I like to get unpleasant things out of the way first. But, while it's nowhere near as good as Luke Cage, I am enjoying Iron Fist. The writing is astonishingly bad but it has a kind of momentum to it that keeps me engaged. Luke Cage, though, appropriately enough, really is a love letter to anyone who likes Blaxploitation, and I'm definitely in that category.

A lot of people think the term "exploitation film" means lots of gratuitous sex and violence, that such films exploit the basest human instincts. Exploitation films do have a lot of sex and violence, but not always. What defines an exploitation film is that it takes a hot-button, "ripped from the headlines", topic and exploits it for entertainment. Blaxploitation films exploited the public imagination in reference to racial strife in American cities in the civil rights and early post-civil rights eras. So a film like Coffy or Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song or Across 110th Street spend an improbable amount of time, for crime films, featuring characters discussing the larger significance to the black community of a particular heist or drug deal. Sometimes it can be truly thought provoking, like Mahershala Ali in the second episode of Luke Cage, playing the gangster Cottonmouth, discussing how becoming a ganglord is the appropriate path for a black man seeking to upend racial power dynamics in America.

Head-writer Cheo Hodari Coker undermines Ali's speech by showing two of his thugs going against his orders to kill one of his oldest friends. Is his power an illusion, a pretty veneer over ugly chaos? Luke Cage nicely introduces things for us to think about.

The original comics came out in the '70s and were influenced by Blaxploitation at the time. The TV series wisely follows those films in other ways, including with a really groovy soul soundtrack and lots of sex.

It's kind of silly to think of how people made a big deal about a sex scene in The Eternals when Luke Cage has a topless woman giving a lapdance in the first episode. The sex scene between Luke Cage (Mike Colter) and Misty Knight (Simone Missick) is much more sensual and evocative than the scenes between Cage and Jessica Jones, as much as I do like Krysten Ritter. Overall, Colter gives a much better performance on his own series than he did on Jessica Jones. He seems more relaxed and conveys a broader range of emotion. I guess it's not unlike David Boreanaz after he left Buffy the Vampire Slayer to star on Angel.

Iron Fist has been pretty uneven. Sometimes I think Finn Jones is okay as Danny Rand/Iron Fist, sometimes he sounds a little flat, possibly due to trouble with his American accent. It doesn't help that his character seems to change from episode to episode, even scene to scene. In the first episode, he's a cheerful bare-footed wanderer, come to New York on a lark to reclaim is vast inheritance. But the third episode, he's lawyered up--with Carrie Ann Moss's character from Jessica Jones--and is staging angry scenes in restaurants with the Meachums, the siblings who usurped the Rand corporate empire.

Ward Meachum (Tom Pelphrey) is a pretty broad, uninteresting villain so far. David Wenham plays his powerful father, also a villain, and mercilessly chews scenery and seems like he'd be at home in the Adam West Batman series. Danny befriends a kendo instructor called Colleen Wing, my favourite character so far. Though she's another English actress playing an American and her accent tends to sound a little like Elmer Fudd.

The worst parts are whenever Danny flashes back to the mythical monastery and we're treated to fake snow that looks like it belongs in a Christmas department store window.

And yet I am caught up in the story and really do want to see how he finally gets his company back. So they did get me hooked. Still, I'm not sure I could do it if I didn't know The Defenders was at the end of this road.

Iron Fist and Luke Cage are available on Disney+.