2022 on the Small Screen

Happy New Year, everyone. It's after 9am on Sunday in Japan so it's already well into 2023 here. Normally around this time I make a list, ranking all the movies I saw in the preceding year. But as television has become a more and more prominent medium, I'm going to do two lists now and I'll start to-day with my television list. To-morrow I'll post my movie list.

This is a ranking of all TV shows I saw in 2022, excluding shows I only watched the first episode of (Interview with the Vampire, Severance). I included shows that concluded in 2022, so I'm not counting Willow, which will count for 2023, and I am counting The Book of Boba Fett, which started in 2021 but concluded in 2022. I'm also not including specials--the Doctor Who specials, the two Marvel specials. But that still leaves me with a list of 19 shows! I watched 19 TV shows last year! Good grief.

Anyway, here we go.

19. The Rings of Power, season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Is it fair to call it the worst show I saw last year, when it had such expensive visuals? Yeah. The writing was that bad.

18. Tales of the Jedi (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Dave Filoni squeezes most of the life out of some of our favourite Jedi, giving us some backstories that reveal Count Dooku and Ahsoka Tano are duller than we as yet suspected.

17. Ms. Marvel, season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

The first couple episodes are pretty cute and engaging and Iman Vellani has real charm as the protagonist. But then it all rapidly spiralled into a dull mess and Vellani's performance mysteriously became somnambulent, as though she knew this was crap.

16. Obi-Wan Kenobi, season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Ewan McGregor and Andrew Stanton managed to drag this show out of the morass of notoriously bad writing to give us a few decent moments.

15. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

In a pattern everyone is becoming familiar with, this show had a pretty good first couple episodes followed by astonishingly bad ones written by inexperienced or plain talentless hack writers. This one had a few other good points, including a memorable appearance by Daredevil, but it completely choked with its arrogant, tone deaf finale.

14. Wednesday, season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Jenna Ortega, Tim Burton, and Danny Elfman work some real magic, managing to bring some quality to a show with average quality writing.

13. Kimetsu no Yaiba season 2 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

It's nice to catch up with these great characters but the makers of this show made two big mistakes--they rehashed the movie in the first half of the season and, in the second half, extended a bloody battle sequence across several episodes, stretching the story well past its capacity to hold the viewers' interest. They were two mysterious choices for a show based on a lengthy manga with presumably plenty of story at hand to fill a season.

12. The Expanse season 6 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

It used to be one of the best shows on television but, sadly, its final season was made ridiculous and incoherent by external politics. Still, it had enough of its old self lingering on to make one or two aspects worth watching.

11. Moon Knight season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Oscar Isaac delivers a magnificent performance in a show that, at its best, wove a good supernatural adventure tale mixed with psychological hallucination.

10. Spy x Family season 1 (Wikipedia entry)

The latest anime to take Japan by storm, this one is an excellent outlet for the country's famous fetish for Western aesthetics while also offering a sly commentary on the modern Japanese family dynamic.

9. Only Murders in the Building season 2 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez continue to be a magnetic combination and this season's roster of guest stars were certainly memorable. Shirley MacLaine in two appearances showed she still possesses the extraordinary instincts of a real movie star.

8. The Book of Boba Fett season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

The writing went off the rails at points but Boba's life among the Sandpeople was an engrossing story. Robert Rodriguez pulled off some good action sequences, some highlights being Boba's encounter with a sand monste in the first episode and his showdown with Cad Bane.

7. Stranger Things season 4 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Some disappointing retconning of the superior earlier seasons and a waste of several characters couldn't totally detract from this show's positive qualities. New character Eddie Munson was another all too brief hit for the show and the memorable use of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" justly brought that song back to mainstream popularity.

6. The Orville season 3 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

The third and possibly final season of The Orville is its most visually spectacular and its most tightly written. Some of the political pandering became a little tiresome but, at other times, the show was as thought provoking as the '90s Star Trek series that inspired it.

5. House of the Dragon season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

Giving us back some of that sweet, sweet fantasy soap opera we knew and loved on Game of Thrones before Benioff and Weiss wrecked it, House of the Dragon was an absolute pleasure from week to week.

4. The Sandman season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

The deviations from the source material diminished this show, most notably when it came to scenes with Satan and Rose Walker. But, for the most part, the show is faithful to Neil Gaiman's great achievement in '90s comics and we're all better off for it.

3. Peacemaker season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

This is James Gunn at his best. Building off his fabulously fucked up take on The Suicide Squad, this show settles down and gets drunk on thoughtfully fucked family and espionage drama. It was brilliant, captivating, and a whole lot of fun.

2. Better Call Saul season 6 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

The subplots about Gus and Lalo never really became interesting and the final episode was a bit of a letdown. However, in the characters of Jimmy/Saul and Kim, this show gave us some of the best writing in television history. Standout episodes "Nippy" and "Waterworks" are like great standalone films, masterpieces of tension and psychological exploration.

1. Andor season 1 (my reviews, Wikipedia entry)

This one is flawless. Tony Gilroy brought Star Wars back in a big way with this show that is a thought provoking treatise on politics, a captivating character drama, and a suspenseful war narrative. And best of all, it's about how all three of these things work together, making each other more brilliant. To borrow a phrase from Huey Lewis, the heart of Star Wars is still beating.

The Gun is Top Again

With all due respect to the late Tony Scott, 2022's Top Gun: Maverick is a better film than the original. The story is still very softball, playing within the bounds of a very narrowly defined fantasy world, but the use of practical effects, especially having the actors actually in jets, push this film into genuinely good territory.

Tom Cruise returns to the role he originated twenty-six years ago. Still a hotshot flyboy, now he's tasked with training a team of young pilots to take on an impossible mission: a strategic strike at an unnamed country.

It's kind of amusing how successfully the film avoids any and all specifics as to the enemy country's identity. We hear no names of people or places, no scraps of language, we don't see any flags or insignia except a generic red bird painted on the side of an old jet. It's amazing because so much of the last, very exciting, portion of the film hinges on the details of fighting this nameless enemy.

Before that, we get a lot of downtime in my hometown, San Diego. Maverick spends some time connecting with the new kids and with his old flame played by Jennifer Connelly.

In her first appearance in the film, in her bar, you can hear David Bowie's "Let's Dance" in the background, presumably reminding the audience that her big star-making role was opposite Bowie in Labyrinth, released the same year as Top Gun. Connelly was not in Top Gun, Kelly McGillis was the love interest. Where's McGillis? According to Wikipedia, her last role was in 2018 Lifetime movie called Maternal Secrets. My suspicious is the makers of Top Gun: Maverick ruthlessly aimed to make the movie pure indulgence--Connelly has aged a lot better than McGillis.

It's true, Val Kilmer's not looking great these days, but, on the other hand, he's a much bigger star and his ordeal with cancer has garnered more public attention. Still, he only has one scene in Maverick.

I do find it curious that Kilmer's health would not permit him to take part in the Willow series yet he managed to show up in Maverick. I suspect he knew something about the people and the intentions behind both projects. I forgot to write about the latest episode of Willow which featured Christian Slater in a small role--obviously in a modified part originally written to be Madmartigan, Kilmer's character. The show is reminding me a little of She-Hulk (unsurprising since it shares some writers) as it seems often to be written by people who not only hate action scenes, they hate anyone who likes action scenes. The same could certainly not be said for Top Gun: Maverick, thank God.

You seeing this, Disney? One of these made a billion dollars, one of these can't scratch the top ten in the ratings. You really want to keep doing this?

Twitter Sonnet #1655

A pixie stick's composed of swirling clouds.
Ascension blanked before the mind of God.
Between the golden husks she hid from crowds.
A horror harvest damned the feast of odd.
We now return to giant Gumby men.
It's Pokey's tail that Eeyore's tuft would touch.
Between the body lights they built to win.
The planet's big, their words were nothing much.
A box of cards delivered light to cash.
A stolen car returned a pizza late.
Retreat's a dream behind a custom bash.
A line of birds was green but truly great.
The final words were wrote in future's past.
Beyond the reach of stars the spell is cast.

Your Future is Moist, Jake Sully

That crazy old James Cameron really did it. Avatar: The Way of Water was not only filmed and released but has become a massive box office success. And even I enjoyed this one. I wasn't a fan of the original but there are moments in this second one where I really appreciated a feeling of seeing something extraordinary.

Partly I think it's because we've all gotten accustomed to really bad cgi. So to see cgi that was meticulously crafted over five years almost feels like spotting a woolly mammoth at the mall, especially with the 3D on top of it. I mean, just think about--it's an over three hour movie about big blue people in 3D--and it's a worldwide box office success. It seems to defy all reason, as the first one did. And I haven't noticed any strong Avatar fandom holding on in the 13 years since the first film. Mostly whenever people talked about it it seemed like it was to joke about how it's a Pocahontas rip-off.

I watched the first Avatar again a couple weeks ago and I appreciated it more, though I still think Pocahontas is the superior film. But I do get caught up in the suspense of the film's last act.

Really, the story is more like Princess of Mars than Pocahontas and the follow-up feels like it cribs even more from Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Like the first movie, it has far too much exposition, a more egregious problem since we should all be relatively familiar with the characters and world by now. Yet the first 15 minutes or so of the movie are Jake (Sam Worthington) narrating the events that took place between the two films, rather needlessly. Now Jake is a resistance leader, coordinating Na'vi guerrilla attacks on Earthling colonists. When Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), resurrected in a Na'vi avatar body, targets Jake and his family, Jake realises he needs to pack up and move to another part of the planet.

This is one of many points in the film where, if you think about it for two seconds, it falls apart. Do the resistance strikes continue without Jake? Wouldn't the Earthlings just go after the next leader? Would they waste their resources going after an exiled leader? Would they even know Jake had moved on? Since the Na'vi and humans aren't in constant conflict, were there ever any formal peace talks? Were there any kinds of treaties or discussions about the possibility of peace talks? If not, why doesn't anyone bring this stuff up?

Anyway, Jake and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) have reduced roles in the film which mainly focuses on their kids, biological and adopted. Sigourney Weaver is back, now playing the teenage Na'vi called Kiri, who gestated in Dr. Augustine's (Weaver in the first film) avatar. A lot of the film's best visuals involve Kiri communing with nature.

First with the forest, then with the astonishing underwater environments.

The writing still isn't great, bogged down with simplistic environmentalist morality and a repetitive plot in which the kids get kidnapped again and again. But everything is elevated by the level of detail in the worldbuilding, both in terms of Na'vi culture and the physical environment. The underwater shots are captivating and one has to marvel at the complex, totally imagined, ecosystem carrying on with its business.

If the weather and pandemic permits, I heartily recommend seeing this in 3D if you can. The spectacle really is 90% of the cake here but what a spectacle it is.

Avatar: The Way of Water is in theatres worldwide.

The Djinn is In

Few directors have the ability and confidence to so quickly and thoroughly envelop a viewer in a fantasy world. George Miller shows his genius for it again in 2022's Three Thousand Years of Longing. Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba star in what is easily the most sensual new film I've seen in years.

Swinton plays Althea, a professor who either has occasional hallucinations or who tends to perceive supernatural creatures no-one else can. The film leaves this point unclear.

She's a narratologist, someone who studies storytelling patterns throughout history and all over the world. It's implied she chose her career after having a hallucination at a young age. It seems as though her life of study was a method of keeping herself sane. This was before she met her biggest challenge, a handsome Djinn (Idris Elba) who pops naked and giant out of a bottle.

As Althea goes from trying to decide if he's a hallucination to trying to decide if he's a trickster, the djinn tells her of his long life history. He begins with his love affair with the legendary Queen of Sheba and continues with two more, equally engrossing tales. I found myself thinking of Terry Gilliam, particularly his Baron Munchausen film, from the way Miller introduces historical and fantastic elements rapidly yet organically. The only thing he ever feels the need to explain is the characters' feelings, and that's all he really needs.

It's a delicious film of the supernatural lover genre. Fans of Ghosts of Mrs. Muir or Anne Rice might dig this film, especially the first two thirds. My only complaint is the lack of a real sex scene between Althea and the djinn. The film feels needlessly disconnected from Althea after that because it breaks with her point of view. But otherwise, this is a terrific film. It's about the importance of embracing fantasy instead of compulsively putting it on the autopsy table. I approve of this message.

When Peace Isn't Good Enough

Do people need to fight each other to stay sane? In 2022's The Banshees of Inisherin has a man dissolve his longtime friendship with another for no apparent reason beyond the assertion that the other man is "dull". This simple act sets off an avalanche of misery on a small Irish island in this fascinatingly grim comedy.

Colin Farrell plays Padraic, the dull man, while Brendan Gleeson is Colm, the friend who can't stand him anymore. As Padraic continually asks for explanation, Colm finally vows to cut off his own finger if Padraic speaks to him once again, and then all his lefthand fingers if Padraic persists after that.

The film is set on a fictional Irish island called Inisherin during 1923, near the end of the Irish Civil War. Occasionally one of the characters sees ordnance fire across the water but takes only faint interest in it, never knowing who is firing at whom.

I wonder if writer/director Martin McDonagh thought of the story as taking place in the same reality as The Quiet Man. It's set in the same time period and its depiction of a cosy Irish community in tweed and corduroy has a similar vibe of being just a little too precious to be real. But like The Quiet Man, it is a delight to tarry in this community of big personalities and their petty dramas. The main difference is that The Banshees of Inisherin follows the boring modern tendency to portray police and clergy as pederasts and cowards.

Farrell and Gleeson are both fantastic, especially as both roles require so much subtlety. Colm is both sad and ridiculous, you kind of understand him and you kind of hate him. Padraic's complicated feelings as he's torn between respecting Colm's wishes and needing resolution and clarity--and most of all his friend--result in phases of confusion, anger, and despair.

There are two important supporting characters--Kerry Condon as Padraic's sister and Barry Keoghan as Dominic, a very troubled local boy. I've seen Keoghan in a few films but this is the one that finally showed me why he gets so many accolades. As a vulnerable little punk he is nothing short of astounding. His performance alone is worth watching the movie for but there's plenty else to recommend it, too.

The Banshees of Inisherin is available on Disney+ and HBOMax in various places.

Twitter Sonnet #1654

Above the town a figure views the Yule.
The Shadow watched a million lights below.
Electric joy exempts the man from rule.
Computers broke to reign the thunder glow.
Atlantis lost was found again reduced.
The heavy bucks were sunk in Gummy Rex.
The turtle under Earth had puke induced.
The model Id would fain refrain from sex.
The plain returning cake was flat as pans.
Another heap of butter balanced soy.
A baking bread was worse than plastic cans.
You look to beaches there to find a boy.
The ham was crushed against the stomach hold.
Retired fists remember nothing bold.

Hidden in the Bowels of the Box Office . . .

Major studios and companies make expensive, stupid blunders all the time, and yet I can still find myself astonished when confronted with such an error. 2022's Strange World is a good example. It comes at a time when most major studios seem to be making big, disastrous mistakes, and Disney in particular has been squandering its good reputation with a string of stupid Disney+ content, with Andor standing alone as a diamond in the rough. But Strange World is baffling also because it hearkens back to Disney Animation Studios' early 2000s flirtation with science fiction, a series of films that performed badly at the box office, a steep drop from the '90s renaissance, conveniently serving to demarcate the eras. In fact, Strange World is so similar to Atlantis: The Lost Empire it's nearly a remake. I guess it's a sign of how poorly Atlantis is remembered that Strange World was made at all.

Like Atlantis, Strange World is a Journey to the Centre of the Earth pastiche that ends with a heavy-handed environmentalist message. It also borrows a vintage pulp aesthetic, as Atlantis did. But while Atlantis had attractive characters and great designs by Mike Mignola, Strange World belongs to a trend in modern American media that deliberately avoids making characters physically appealing.

None of the character designs are really good but the biggest crime is Ethan Clade (Jaboukie Young-White). As Disney Animation's first openly gay character, you'd think they'd have gone out of their way to make this character appealing. Instead, he looks like Ned Beatty, isn't funny, and his problems aren't interesting. We learn at the beginning of the film that he has a crush on a guy in his school but this guy never becomes a proper character in the film. Mostly the central conflict is between Ethan and his father, Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal), and between Searcher and his father, Jaeger, played by Dennis Quaid, who seems to be doing a Kurt Russell impression.

I'd bet you anything the role was written for Kurt Russell but Russell couldn't or wouldn't do it. There are signs the story was meant to be making reference to John Ford's The Searchers, hinted at in the names of the characters Ethan and Searcher as well as in an inclusion at the end of the famous, often imitated, "Searchers Shot".

The Searchers starred John Wayne. Kurt Russell has memorably parodied or paid homage to Wayne in movies numerous times. So the casting would have made sense. But I don't know what Strange World thinks it's saying about The Searchers. Jaeger goes missing at the beginning of the film in a tragic accident but it's not like Ethan and Searcher go "searching" for him. They assume he's dead and it's only when the Pando, this film's metaphorical fossil fuel, starts to get a strange disease that an expedition is launched to find the cause and, perhaps, a better source of Pando. The name recalls Pandora, appropriate since this film also seems to crib a bit from James Cameron's Avatar. Not as egregiously as Raya and the Last Dragon cribbed from Avatar: The Last Airbender, though. Both movies, incidentally, were written by Qui Nguyen. Disney's choice to hire Nguyen again after Raya was unsuccessful might not be so mysterious when you consider Strange World was likely in production before Raya hit theatres. If Disney continues to hire Nguyen after this, we can take it as a symptom of madness.

I didn't hate Raya, as you might recall, and some of the pulp adventure moments I liked in that film had not dissimilar moments here. I also really liked the creature designs in Strange World which mainly consisted of kinds of gelatinous, mollusc dinosaurs.

But, even though the underlying conflicts in Raya made no sense, at least the main character was pretty. Strange World's characters just come up empty on all counts. The anxiety over becoming one's father versus a father's desire for his son to follow in his footsteps is a nice enough prompt. But in execution, Strange World has too much nonsense. Ethan's unwavering pacifism doesn't make sense, even when the movie has nonsensical things occur to support it. Searcher's issues with his father are never adequately developed. The environmental message is largely responsible for the last act of the film dissolving into a series of forced plot points so the moments when tension is supposed to be at the highest it's at its lowest. The movie is altogether a slog to get through and requires active effort on the viewer's part to find its meagre positive qualities.

Strange World is on Disney+.

...

This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan
Fantasia 2000
Dinosaur
The Emperor's New Groove
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Lilo and Stitch
Treasure Planet
Brother Bear
Home on the Range
Chicken Little
Meet the Robinsons
Bolt
The Princess and the Frog
Tangled
Winnie the Pooh
Wreck-It Ralph
Frozen
Big Hero 6
Zootopia
Moana
Ralph Breaks the Internet
Frozen II
Raya and the Last Dragon Encanto

Illuminated Christmas

Merry Christmas from the top of Umeda Sky Building! That's me last night (which was December 25th in Japan). Isn't it marvellous that masks have been normalised? I had to hold onto my hat because of the heavy wind.

I went with some friends to Osaka last night to look at Christmas lights.

The city really goes all out. We watched an amazing hologram light show at Osaka City Hall. There were lights everywhere.

There were blue lights on the street:

It was nearly 9pm when I got home but I managed to get to the supermarket in time to buy one of the last Christmas cakes:

Christmas cakes are traditional in Japan. Many Japanese people believe this sponge cake with strawberries is traditional on Christmas in America (it's not). But I'm happy to partake in this.

For my Doctor Who Christmas special, I watched "The Runaway Bride", the Tenth Doctor's second Christmas special from 2006. I realised that, for the first time in many years, I could watch Doctor Who with hope for the future. For the future of Doctor Who, anyway. A trailer for the upcoming 60th anniversary specials was released yesterday, too:

Donna was always my favourite of Ten's companions (in no small part due to "The Runaway Bride"). If they were going to bring back a Doctor/Companion combo from the modern era, I think this was probably the best one for it.

If I were to theorise, I'd say Neil Patrick Harris has something to do with the Doctor turning into Tennant again and he's deliberately trying to bring back Donna's repressed memories of him. For what diabolical purpose, I know not! I'm looking forward to it, though.

Yesterday I also read Washington Irving's "Christmas" from The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon and a bit of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield. Not a bad Christmas at all.