Eruditorum Press

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Review: Joker: Folie à Deux

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The problem here isn’t that Folie à Deux betrays the first Joker. The first movie was clear about Arthur Fleck’s importance being a laughable self-delusion. Most likely a lot of fans of the first movie are uncomfortable with Folie à Deux because it’s not actually very different from Joker. Like Harleen Quinzel tells Arthur Fleck, “let’s give the people what they want.”

But Folie à Deux doesn’t give the people what they want. It doesn’t even give them what they fucking deserve. Hell, it doesn’t even give those of us who were cautiously looking forward to a Joker musical with Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn the pleasures of, well, that. It’s hard to tell if Todd Phillips thought he was giving anything to anybody, except a two-and-a-half-hour handjob to Joaquin Phoenix. And if Phoenix’s idea of a good time is starving himself and showing his protruding ribs on film, well, good luck to him. His narcissistic wet dream bombing is what he deserves after walking out on Todd Haynes and company five days before shooting was supposed to begin.

The nerds ranting about Joker: Folie à Deux are angry for the wrong reasons. They can see this is a bad movie, but they hate it for emphasizing the subtext of the first movie. Joker‘s ultimate flaw was that, despite its 20-odd minutes of excellence, it’s not about much more than the misery of this one guy. It had moments of genius — the talk show scene is an all-timer — but its critique of neoliberalism and the destruction of support systems really boil down to “this guy’s life sucks.” Joker took on the trappings of Taxi Driver, a nightmare about the monsters that the United States creates abroad and unleashes on American streets, and used them to say “man, crazy dudes sure have it hard, don’t they?” while painting mental illness and violence as the children of violent and unstable women.

I don’t hate Joker. It succeeds at being something that I appreciated more five years ago than I do now. And Folie à Deux mostly follows in its footsteps, serving as a functional companion piece to that movie. Arthur Fleck remains a symptom of a sick world. Gotham is still a cracked reflection of Robert Moses’ New York. There are moments of cleverness in the mix. But everything that was ugly about the first movie gets dialed up to 11 here. I walked out of the theater feeling nauseous and angry, like I’d been complicit in something evil. For all of Joker‘s problems, that wasn’t my experience of it.

Unlike its predecessor, Folie à Deux doesn’t make overtures at being about interesting things after its halfway mark. Early on, there are dalliances with Joker being a sick media creation by a diseased news and culture industry. There are a few genuine laughs in here. The Warner Bros-style cartoon that opens the movie is fun. And the first time Arthur Fleck burst into song, I started cackling with delight — an effect I believe was wholly intended by the movie.…

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Review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

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Nice to see that Tim Burton still has a good movie in him.

Obviously it’s another legacy sequel, but that’s more of an indictment of the state of big-budget Hollywood movies than of Burton. And if you’re going to do a sequel to a pop classic from the Eighties, you can do worse and more banal than Beetlejuice. A lot of the core players return for this one, and nobody is just repeating their shtick from the Eighties. If you’re going to make a legacy sequel, try to do it like this.

Like every legacy sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is about the longevity of its predecessor. Lydia Deetz is a middle-aged celebrity, coasting on the fumes of her traumatic childhood. Her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) hates her for her emotional absence and her ghost bullshit. Delia Deetz is the curator of the worst Brooklyn art show you’ve ever seen. Justin Theroux is Lydia’s awful and exploitative manager, and one of the funniest parts of the movie. And Jeffrey Jones’ character is fucking dead under hilarious circumstances.

Meanwhile in the netherworld, Beetlejuice is working a shitty desk job while trying to outrun his ex-wife Monica Bellucci. His assistant Bob has a shitty little afterlife. And Willem Dafoe is an action movie star spending his afterlife as a ghost police detective.

With that setup, all the movie really has to do is let the characters run wild. And it does just that, allowing these characters to run in and out of each other’s paths. It’s cleaner than it could be, although a lot of subplots end abruptly (not forgotten, just resolved very quickly). The results are hardly radical, but they’re great fun. More of this and less Mary Poppins Returns, please. Michael Keaton, stop motion, grim ghost shenanigans, and goofy lip syncing is all you really need from a night at the movies.…

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An Evening’s Entertainment

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On Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee (2000, BBC Scotland)

This essay is intended as a light introduction to a series on the ghost story writer M.R. James, some of his stories, and their television adaptations, as well as some related texts and phenomena, which I hope to post fairly regularly over the next few months.

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In 2000, on four evenings over the Christmas period, BBC2 aired a series of half-hour programmes entitled Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee.

In a previous essay, I wrote a little about my childhood introduction to ghost stories.  I’ve spoken on podcasts about my near-lifelong love of Hammer films.  It will be no surprise then that 24-year-old me tuned in to this series, and recorded the episodes on a home VHS recorder.

Three of the episodes have long been available on the various versions of the BFI DVD/blu-ray box-set of television Ghost Stories for Christmas, whereas one – ‘The Ash Tree’ – was never released owing to rights issues over music used in it.  The BBC – with its special rights arrangements – used part of the musical score by Howard Shore for the 1986 film The Name of the Rose in the background of the Ash Tree episode, which subsequently made it impossible to release commercially.  The episode has since been repeated – for the first time in years – on BBC Four, as part of the resurrection of the whole idea of British television ghost stories at Christmas which began in the mid-aughts.  For a while, however, the only way people could see the Ash Tree episode of the Christopher Lee Christmas Ghost Stories was the rip of my own old VHS recording which I uploaded to YouTube.

While I was already enamoured with ghost stories and Horror in general, it was this 2000 series which began my fascination with the work of M.R. James.  With respect, I am not so interested in the man, except insofar as his life illuminates his work.  (L’homme c’est rien—l’oeuvre c’est tout, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle misquotes Flaubert in ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League’.)  But this television series was a quiet revelation to me.  A slow revelation too, as it only gradually dawned on me how great it was, and how great was its source material.

These episodes are the greatest screen adaptations of the work of M.R. James.  That is a bit of a claim, given the love and esteem in which the 1970s Lawrence Gordon Clark films are held.  Before I (sort of) defend it, let me talk around the issue a little.

As mentioned above, in the early aughts the BBC suddenly decided to remember its old tradition of adapting ghost stories – most famously the work of M.R. James – for Christmas dramas, and to resurrect the tradition.  (The early aughts were, of course, famously the moment when the BBC resurrected one of its other vintage series, with great success.)  The resurrected Christmas ghost story drama genre soon came under the stewardship of Mark Gatiss, and he also presented a documentary about M.R.…

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Review: Shadow and Flame

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What a weird show.

P&M have finally figured out some of the fundamentals of drama. It would be easy (and somewhat unfair) to say they’re just learning how to do drama by drawing from Tolkien, but “Shadow and Flame” proves that the successes of this season weren’t a fluke. P&M have a creative vision, and it’s one they’ve realized more or less competently this year.

To a degree. Everybody has acknowledged that this show’s pacing is ass. But it becomes most clear in the season finales. I couldn’t tell you, two years on, what the hell happened in the first season of Rings of Power. And this season, while at least structured around three specific, thematically related events — the decline of Eregion, Moria, and Númenor — doesn’t do much better on the pacing front. By the end of this season, Númenor is… closer to becoming Atlantis. So is Moria. Eregion has the decency to actually fall. But the other two stories feel like they’re just waiting for a finale. It’s exhausting. I can’t imagine they’ll do more than another two seasons, but man. There are episodes where seasons happen and seasons where episodes happen.

And those are the three plots that more-or-less unambiguously work. The now-Gandalf/Nori plot doesn’t resolve so much as abruptly end, in a way Chris Chibnall might applaud. Once again, we’re getting a finale is mostly structured around teases of the next season. Ciarán Hinds makes a great Saruman, drawing more from the books’ tantalizing, seductive character than Christopher Lee’s operatic evil (a respectable, even necessary choice). But he’s there to abruptly displace the Stoors in an extremely contrived development — I’d say it’s out of character, but we don’t really have an idea who this version of Saruman is. Now-Gandalf concludes the season as he began it — wandering in the desert and having things explained to him.

That’s a running theme here. Galadriel also has a lot of things explained to her in lieu of doing things. Characters disappear from the story for long periods of time only to return and do… not much. Isildur returns and reunites with That Kid from Season 1 right before getting captured by Númenor’s Madison Cawthorn. And most egregiously, the promise of Adar gets thrown out the window when the Orcs — suddenly and without explanation — murder him (though apparently we can Simon Tolkien for Adar sticking around this long). We had a moment where we could have seen Orcs developing an agenda beyond that of Sauron, and that got chucked out the window.

At the same time, Adar’s murder by his own children is thematically in touch with the rest of the season. Durin watching his father sacrifice himself fighting the Balrog makes for the defining setpiece of the entire show. This season is about something in a way its predecessor wasn’t. And the death of Celebrimbor, at the hands of his tearful foster-son/brother/lover? Sauron, elevates both characters (even if it gives Celebrimbor an obnoxious title drop).…

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Pop Could Never Save Us: Blackboard Jungle (1955)

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Holly and James, your preferred podcast pals, kick into their pop music movie series with this slice of shitty-school-sploitation that rocketed Bill Haley up to the stars. Using his rendition of Rock Around the Clock to open and close proceedings, the film is less a cheerful teen pleaser than a serious look at the failing state of an inner city New York school and the man (Glenn Ford) tough enough to get through to these damn kids, including the magnetic Sydney Poitier and brilliant Vic Morrow (later sadly helicopter murdered by John Landis on the set of the Twilight Zone movie).

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/bonus-you-aint-got-no-blackboard/id1665362470?i=1000671468159

Holly and James talk about the movie after a newsreel segment including a furious Holly talking about Chapell Roan’s abuse, a jubilant look at Sean Combs’ incarceration, and sending Kris Kristofferson to pop Valhalla.

They analyse the film’s politics, look at the story of teddy boys incited to mad carnage by the raw, pumping sounds of Bill Haley and admire Poitier’s performance, and the psychological hold that Freud had on child-rearing for so long.

For an in-depth look at Haley’s most famous recording, we recommend Andrew Hickey.

Episode 20: “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets

Next up will be a traditional run down of the top 5 songs in the British charts, and then things get a bit fab up in here, with A Hard Day’s Night, the 1964 film about a reliable British public transport system. …

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“The Earth Hath Bubbles as the Water Has” – On ‘Don’t Look Now!’ (1973)

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The ideas in this essay were developed in conversation with Elliot Chapman and George Daniel Lea.  It is respectfully – perhaps presumptuously – dedicated to Frederic Jameson.

 

“And so, no more than the seasons to its unflowering inlets of the sea, do modern years bring any change to the gothic city… I wished to find myself face to face with my Venetian imaginings…” – Marcel Proust, The Captive

 

  1. You Can Skip This Bit

Criticism is the art of reading in public. There is precious little value to such an activity if it is not itself creative.  Wilde called criticism “a creation within a creation”.  But, as with all creativity, it produces better results if it is kept within certain limits, if it is a game with a particular context, social objective, and self-imposed rules.  That – as Wittgenstein illuminated – is how language, and hence meaning, itself works.  Meaning cannot exist outside of such a game anymore than a mind can exist outside of a body.

The purpose of the game of criticism is to approach the text not only with oneself (as a reader) but also with itself.  It is to interrogate a text with its own textness, its own form and content, but also its own social embeddedness, its producedness, its own material and social history.  If a text ‘says’ certain things, it is the job of criticism to suggest why, to base such suggestions not only on the text’s material self but also upon the social selves that made it, and their social and historical positioning.

The solution to every riddle is that it is a riddle.  The solution of every puzzle is that it is a puzzle.  A jigsaw puzzle is not the picture which is formed when all the pieces are assembled in a certain ‘correct’ way; a jigsaw puzzle is the entropic mess in the box when you buy it.  Without its fragmentation, it is just a picture.  A maze is not the path which takes you to the centre; it is the obscuring of such a path.  The meaning of a maze is not that straight path; the meaning of a maze is that it is not just a straight path, and yet is nevertheless walked.  The meaning of a jigsaw puzzle is the game whereby assembling it in a certain way gives one the illusion of reversing entropy.  The meaning of a Rubik’s Cube is not a small plastic box with a different primary colour covering each side; the meaning of a Rubik’s Cube is the process of integrating each and every flat plane of colour.  The meaning of a Rubik’s Cube is also the history of consumer capitalism, nostalgia, youth, the semiotics of era, and so on.

We cannot solve a work of art such as the one under consideration here, the film Don’t Look Now! (1973), directed by Nicholas Roeg, based on a short story by Daphne Du Maurier which was published in 1971. We cannot decrypt it or decipher it, as it shows us itself, with its own self-interrogations which lead nowhere. …

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Doomed to Die Review

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maybe not. But also, what the fuck?

To Payne & McKay’s credit, they’re finding new ways to fuck this up. Instead of mangling a version of the show that wasn’t working anyway, they’re juxtaposing the best parts of The Rings of Power with… weirdly mean-spirited fridgings? Elrond/Galadriel incest? The A-plots of about five different episodes? There was a good 40% of this episode that worked, and the rest of it felt like a P&M script.

Celebrimbor is the part that works. Annatar keeping Celebrimbor in a time prison, where he forges rings as Eregion burns, is glorious, taking one of Tolkien’s most dramatic stories and injecting it with fresh human emotion. The scene where Sauron tells Celebrimbor about being tortured by Morgoth is the single best bit of writing of this show’s two seasons (Charlie Vickers starts coming to life when he gets to be a sneering villain). And Celebrimbor having to lose a part of his body to save his soul forms a nice parallel with Frodo and Maedhros. That part of the episode is genuinely phenomenal and tragic, everything you’d want from a filmed Silmarillion.

The rest of the episode is… so, what the fuck? We’re dealing with some George R. R. Martin-style plotting, where we’re constantly groping for new bits of plot. Tonally, we’re doing some weird stuff, and putting dramatic emphasis on bizarre things (the horse? the lady elf archer getting shot to death?). Galadriel continues to be The Rings of Power‘s Thirteenth Doctor, getting lectured at while breathlessly intoning words of motivation to men in despair. It’s not that Tolkien was innocent of making women the support systems of men, but like, Éowyn and the Witch-king this ain’t.

There’s not a whole lot to say here. It’s Part 1 of the finale. Part 2 is the episode where we get to have opinions. But in the meantime, we’re stuck waiting around to see just how badly P&M will fuck this up. …

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Where Is He? Review

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Like not-Gandalf in “Where Is He?”, The Rings of Power faces a crossroads. Pre-season finales have a tricky part to play. They need to set the stage for the ending, synopsizing the season to date and making an argument for how it should end. By that standard, “Where Is He?” is a shining success that capitalizes on all the most compelling parts of The Rings of Power‘s second season.

Perversely, this makes me even more concerned about the finale. We haven’t seen a Payne & McKay script since Season 1’s final episode, which was… I think they revealed Galadriel’s squeeze was Sauron? Maybe Celebrimbor forged the Three Rings? They’ve gained some competence since then. Season 2 has proved they know how to staff a writers’ room. The season’s good episodes exist because P&M allowed them to. To deny their role in the better episodes of this season would be as disingenuous as saying that Seinfeld only worked because of Larry David. Do I trust these guys to land a season finale? After last time, basically no, but for the first time, I’m actively hoping — perhaps futilely — they don’t fail instead of surrendering to the seemingly inevitable.

Not that “Where Is He?” is a masterpiece. Galadriel’s role in the episode (and most of the season) is to get lectured at by Adar and other male characters. She gets leered at for the entire episode, making few decisions except spilling her guts to Adar and unwittingly helping him to besiege Eregion. The fascist dweebs whining about diversity should be assuaged by this move, which outdoes Tolkien on the reactionary front.

The series’ usual faults are present. Charlie Vickers remains positively ligneous as Annatar, even as the scripts handle his character pretty well. The not-Gandalf and Harfoot subplots lack any momentum (The Rings of Power‘s pacing has only improved since Season 1 by dint of things actually happening this season). The Stoors evoke (probably on purpose) the quasi-Aboriginal children from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome in a racially uncomfortable way. And not-Gandalf getting the Dagobah treatment from Tom Bombadil is a downright grating piece of Hero’s Journey-ism that contributes nothing to the season’s saga of complicity, guilt, and sundered families (I yelled at my TV when I heard Tom Bombadil say “many that live deserve death”).

But once again, these flaws are mostly frustrating because the meat of the episode is so solid. Sanaa Hamri is TROP‘s best director to date, creating drama with her shot choices that aren’t there in the script. An aerial shot of Númenor that directly parallels the island with Minas Tirith is downright jaw-dropping, as is the night-to-day rotating shot of Sauron in Eregion. Hamri even draws out some tension in the not-Gandalf/Bombadil scenes with a slightly unnerving low angle. And the Jaws homage on the shores of Númenor rivals anything Peter Jackson ever shot.

The rest of the episode is fairly excellent. Celebrimbor takes an Othello-like turn as his Iago Annatar coerces him into creating the H-Rings, torn apart by guilt and gaslighting.…

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Pop Could Never Save Us – Country Matters

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Your popcast pals are back to talk Taste, Backbone, Smiles, Anger, and Hot To Go by Chappell Roan. With Sabrina Carpenter suggestively taking about kissing, Stormzy hooking up with Chase ‘n’ Status to bring some of that old school grime feel to old school drum and bass for a great piece of gym music, Oasis being back, and fans being crazy, we’ve got a classic slice of Pop Could Never Save Us for you to race into your ears. Does most of that seem like youth centered gobbledydook? Don’t worry, friend. We got you. That’s what we’re here for. Let’s hang out.

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/holly-bo/episodes/Country-Matters-UK-Official-Charts-13th-19th-September-2024-e2ocf7b
…

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Halls of Stone Review

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“Here, we bring the sun to us. At last, it is daybreak once more in our mountain!”

In its own way, The Rings of Power perfectly demonstrates Tolkien’s contention that all good things can be used for evil purposes. The show has some strong writers turning in good scripts and great scenes. A handful of actors — particularly Charles Edwards, Owain Arthur, and Lloyd Owen — routinely give strong performances. The second season has even had moments that elevate the source material. On weeks like this, it’s even almost good. But the show’s flaws are so gaping that even the light of Ëarendil can’t lead it out.

Perhaps the show’s biggest onscreen problem — aside from its aesthetic flaws — is Sauron. Charlie Vickers has the range of a two-by-four, walking through each scene with the same vacant facial expression that somebody on the set has mistaken for ambiguity. You could argue that Sauron is pretty much a void himself, but the show wants us to believe that Annatar is a seductive, beautiful force. Vickers would be a problem if he played Isildur or even Arondir. The fact he’s playing the fucking Lord of the Rings is show-breaking.

And that’s a shame, because it means that this week Vickers is ruining one of this show’s two actually good scripts. Vickers isn’t making Annatar the warm, seductive, dangerous figure he’s supposed to be, but the character on the page is an excellent foil for Celebrimbor. Annatar forces Celebrimbor into what amounts to a stupor of guilt, forced to craft the Rings because he’s cut himself off from the outside world. It’s a damn good depiction of gaslighting, not least because somebody on the set was clearly gaslit into believing that Vickers can act.

The whole episode is dramatically united around moments of hope before the Fall, generally with fathers and sons having their relationships torn apart. The scene with Durin’s Door is quite good, making one of the great scenes of The Lord of the Rings even more tragic (a sign of the lost friendship between Dwarves and Elves). It’s good stuff dramatically. Visually, it has all the pitfalls this show tends to suffer from (weak directing, awful lighting), and that certainly prevents this from being a strong episode of TV. But let’s call it the second best episode of this probably doomed season.…

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