Devil Again

It's finally here; the first two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again premiered on Disney+ last night. It doesn't really hit the ground running, in fact these two episodes have a real swiss cheese quality with lots of holes. But showrunner Dario Scardapane, who came in to reconfigure the show after half of it had already been shot by a showrunning team Disney decided was inferior, may well fill those holes with--I don't know, brie, pimento, something good. Scardapane was a writer on Punisher, a show within the same formerly Netflix MCU universe. So he probably knows what he's doing and, by the way, don't watch Daredevil: Born Again until you've seen the first three seasons of the old Daredevil (I wouldn't read the rest of my review, either, if I were you).

It's pretty easy to guess what's newer footage and what's from the misbegotten original take, which was going to distance itself from the old Netflix series. Right off the bat, we have a scene featuring Karen and Foggy, Matt Murdoch's two sidekicks from the original, and aside from some bad cgi (getting roundly dunked on throughout the internet to-day), I was pleased with the opening. It had some very good ideas, my favourite being the decision to kill off Foggy. That's something I was hoping would happen throughout the whole of the original series. I'm sure he's a nice guy in real life, maybe, I don't really know, but Elden Henson cannot, and has never shown any ability to, act. His performance is good enough for a guy who gets killed off within the first few minutes but somehow he stuck around for years. And his character was often written as an annoying scold. You know what I don't particularly want from a Daredevil series? A character constantly telling Daredevil he shouldn't be Daredevil.

The first scene has an action sequence that emulates the long take, Oldboy style hallway fight that the first series famously put together, except, of course, it's clearly cgi now so it's not so impressive. Actually, the best action scene so far comes at the end of episode 2 and that one doesn't even pretend to be a long take. Instead, it's wonderfully, kinetically edited. It was the one moment in the two episodes that brought a genuine smile to my face.

It's mostly easy to discern what's new stuff and what's edited in. There's a new, alternate set of supporting characters; a detective who helps Murdoch, there's his new partner at his new firm, and his new love interest, a therapist called Heather. She just so happens to be Wilson and Vanessa Fisk's couples' therapist, which I sure hope is not mere coincidence. New York City is not such a small town, for Pete's sake.

Fisk on the Netflix series was a commentary on Trump even before Trump became a serious contender in politics so it's interesting to see him again now as New York mayor. It's good that he's not simply a Trump allegory: he doesn't have Trump's charisma, bluster, or fragile ego. In fact, it seems odd that this big man who always seems to be fighting the urge to grind his teeth, connected with voters. But interviews within the show have people on the street talking about how they're frustrated with the lack of political change and want a strong man who can do something. This simultaneously makes Fisk's character make sense and makes it a worthier comment on Trump.

It's a rocky start, some of the writing feels like old USA network or CW crap, but I can see this getting ironed out by Scardapane.

Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.

Trump Negotiates Like a Gorilla

In the wake of the U.S. suddenly halting military aid for Ukraine, I finally went back and watched the disastrous press conference/meeting from last week between Zelensky, Trump, and Vance. What an extraordinary piece of television, and not in a good way. Trump even remarks at one point that it will be great television and I'm forced to wonder if, on some level, that's still a priority for him, even when the stakes are millions of human lives.

One thing is clear; Trump and Vance have absolutely no respect for Zelensky. When Zelensky points out, quite reasonably, that Putin has repeatedly broken peace agreements, and asks what Ukraine is supposed to do in that situation, Vance responds by accusing Zelensky of a lack of gratitude. After Vance's little dog barking, Trump, who'd been bragging about his negotiation skills, also apparently becomes offended at Zelensky's failure to recognise his godhood. How dare Zelensky speak as though Ukraine has a respectable position in the conversation? It was like watching a gangster slap his wife for daring to make a comment during a meeting.

It really seems like some powerful interests decided Russia would have Ukraine some time ago.

Even so, it's hard to say exactly how much Trump's violent petulance is a remarkably undisciplined reaction of the moment and how much of it might be theatre. Giving an impression of his erratic temper may even have been a tactic. It felt eerily like watching Paul Sorvino in Goodfellas or Jack Nicholson in The Departed. It really feels like we have a gangster president.

A Night of Anora Anointed

I can't remember the last time my favourite movie of a particular year swept at the Oscars. I don't think it's ever happened. But Anora won last night. I refuse to feel validated! I know if I do, Lucy's going to yank the football next year and something like Chicago or Paul Haggis' Crash will win. But I guess I can enjoy this moment.

I really appreciated Sean Baker's acceptance speech for Best Director (for directing Anora). I don't know that impassioned pleas for preserving a dying part of the culture have ever been effective but I certainly shared his sentiment. Movie theatres certainly seem to be much healthier in Japan but it's still rare for students to tell me they saw a movie over the weekend. I don't think anything can reverse this trend unless the price of movie tickets starts to come down.

Anora won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and, most controversially, Best Actress. I thought Mikey Madison was terrific in Anora but, as much as I didn't enjoy The Substance, Demi Moore took a hell of a lot of risks in that role. I do kind of hate it when an actor or actress wins for a career rather than for the role they're nominated for so maybe I don't mind this so much. Mikey Madison was certainly radiant in her acceptance speech.

Sanctioned Brain Paths

Mostly these days I've been reading history books but I needed something for my soul last week so I was reading Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in a Norton Anthology. A print edition, mind you. Then I opened YouTube and a performance of Antony and Cleopatra was a recommended video. It's gotta be a coincidence, right? Life's real serendipitous events are getting lost in the couch cushions of algorithm.

Yesterday I watched Bill Murray on Joe Rogan:

It seems one major takeaway from the election is that Joe Rogan is the man now. He's the kingmaker, he's certainly replaced Howard Stern. This Bill Murray interview already has more than 1.5 million views and that's not counting people who just listen to the podcast. I also watched his interview with Elon Musk. I can dig what they're saying about getting rid of empty bureaucracy and counterproductive DEI programmes but I can't accept Rogan or Musk or Trump as agents of the truth when Trump's obvious pandering to Russia isn't even part of their reality. Rogan and Musk laugh about how claims of Trump's collusion with Russia were obvious fraud. Were they, though? And if Rogan can't even admit the possibility, how am I supposed to trust him as some kind of dedicated truth teller?

Anyway, the Bill Murray interview was good. Murray seems to be speaking from a bygone perspective, recalling his work practices in the '70s and '80s where he could really get along with most people so long as they didn't start talking about politics. It was nice listening to his recollections about Hunter S. Thompson and hearing Murray and Rogan talking about Steve McQueen.

Murray's been making the interview rounds on major talk shows and he's appearing in three upcoming movies. He was also on the recent Saturday Night Live anniversary show. All this is less than a year since he was excluded from press junkets for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire because he was supposedly cancelled. Is that over now? I guess for people whose popularity isn't dependent on one political side. Folks like Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon aren't so lucky. Whedon basically got cancelled for being rude. The claims against Gaiman are extremely thin and sketchy to anyone who actually reads through them. You have to start to wonder if they got cancelled because they did something amoral or because they didn't do something amoral. But we're not supposed to think about conspiracies.

X Sonnet 1923

Another turn reveals a Christmas ball.
It's trapped in spring as though a frozen fish
Had eaten up the cheer the locals call
A holiday for falling grades of wish.
No study time could meet the needs of lunch.
An empty stomach shades the day to night.
For after dawn, the dreams become a hunch.
For ev'ry wrong, we think another right.
Gorilla blankets change the shapes of men.
And now the human race is naught but fat.
Impossible to swim the lake of gin
We opt instead to cross the carbo vat.
For all the pain, we hope to gain a crumb.
But morning renders Bach and Wagner dumb.

Sirna Kolrami Sucks!

Last night may have been the first time I watched "Peak Performance", the penultimate episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation's second season. I certainly don't remember watching it before. Fishing through the murky waters of my memory, I think I stopped watching the show during the first season (1987) and then started watching again in the fifth season (1991), when I heard it'd actually gotten good. I kind of remember watching the two parter "Time's Arrow" that bridged season five and six. I then went back and caught older episodes in syndication but I think I usually turned it off when I saw the tight, no collar uniforms, which they got rid of in season three. I still think season three is the best season of the series but I'm enjoying revisiting season two and, I think, in some cases, seeing bits of it for the very first time.

"Peak Performance" was written by David Kemper who later became a showrunner on the great sci-fi series Farscape. I see now he hasn't written anything since contributing a story to the short lived CW series Cult in 2013. I guess he's retired. I hope it was voluntary. Anyway, I almost always enjoyed his teleplays.

"Peak Performance" was the first of two episodes he wrote for TNG and centres on a combat training exercise. The Enterprise crew splits into two teams, one of them, headed by Riker, taking control of a starship called the Hathaway. Using simulated weapons and shields, the Hathaway and Enterprise engage in a skirmish.

But the real point of the episode seems to have been to humiliate a character called Sirna Kolrami (Roy Broksmith), who comes aboard the Enterprise as a technical advisor. He's also a grandmaster of a game called Strategema. Over the course of the episode, he's shown to be arrogantly wrong in his judgements about Riker (whom he calls too "jovial") and Picard. There's a subplot in which Data even beats him at Strategema. Brocksmith does a good job making him a smug bastard for the viewer to hate but I still couldn't help wondering why. I wonder if he was kind of an effigy of someone Kemper had it in for.

This was a cool moment between Data and Picard:

Star Trek: The Next Generation is available on Netflix.