At first glance, there are relatively few similarities between Brick and The Brothers Bloom. Brick is a self-consciously dour noir film about ruined masculinity. The Brothers Bloom is an ostentatiously colorful heist film about the power of stories. There seems very little that one can conclude about things like Rian Johnson’s style based on them. This is, of course, pretty much all a director can hope for after their second film. Make two similar films or, worse, more or less the same film twice and you’re pigeonholed. Make a surprisingly dark high school noir and then turn around and make a quasi-Wes Anderson heist film, on the other hand, and you’re well on your way towards seriousness.

Brick was a good film. The Brothers Bloom, on the other hand, is a great one – one I instantly fell in love with when it finally came through Gainesville on its meandering limited release tour. Looking back at it, I realize it must have been a small and quiet influence on TARDIS Eruditorum, with “there’s no such thing as an unwritten life, only a badly written one” getting to the point a solid year before “we’re all stories in the end; just make it a good one.” And it is with this closing moral that the connections with Brick also become clear. Brick, after all, is also about storytelling – a fact most explicit in its closing scene, where Brendan’s revelation that Laura was behind Emily’s downfall is framed explicitly as a story, with Brendan’s accusation called a “tale.”

But in Brick this was more or less a silent thematic element. It’s present in the mix, and entirely sensible – a detective’s job is, in many ways, to uncover the story of events. But it’s fundamentally subdued. But, unsurprisingly given that the heist film is already an inverse of the detective film, The Brothers Bloom takes the latent metaphor and expands it wildly. Stephen’s cons are written “the way dead Russians write novels, with thematic arcs and embedded symbolism and shit.” His explicit goal and vision of the perfect con is to “tell a story so well it becomes real.” This is entirely straightforward and true: a con is a story, and all stories are cons.

Obviously this gets very meta very quickly. The Brothers Bloom demands that we understand it as a con, and Johnson as a con man. But this is not in and of itself significant without some understanding of what a con is meant to be. Once again the film is happy to go for text instead of subtext as Stephen says that “the perfect con is where each one involved gets just the thing they wanted,” a line that’s repeated over the ending because this is not a film that’s shy about making its aesthetic points. So obviously Stephen’s central con around which the plot revolves is judged a success. Stephen gets to die on a job (Bloom had earlier suggested he’d like just this), and Bloom and Penelope get each other.…

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It’s the sort of week where the Waffling’s a day late, basically. The extra work of Doctor Who S10 has me typically behind on everything, and I’m scrambling to get back going on things. (I’m working on long-term fixes for my workload, but they’re necessarily long term.) Anyway, in light of the fact that I’m awful and behind on everything I can’t really complain too loudly that we’re $17 a week shy of me doing Game of Thrones reviews, but I figure I should be clear that those look like they’re not happening and like I’ll get to actually watch the show with Jill consistently.

But I did want to mention some other Patreons. For instance, Sam Keeper’s Patreon, from which you can get her fabulous new book on Star Wars. Or Jack Graham’s, which is $14 away from dragging him kicking and screaming back to watching Doctor Who. If you don’t decide to throw money at the likely doomed Game of Thrones goal, well, those are great places to throw it instead. (Of course, you could also just fund all of us. But I know that’s not an option for everyone.)

Back tomorrow with a post I only just got around to sending to my Patrons. Until then, I usually wrap these up with some sort of question for the comments section, so let’s go with this: for you personally, what’s the most awful aspect of the Trump era (whether you’re American or not).…

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I sit down with one of my favorite nonfiction writers, John Higgs, to talk about The Doctor Falls. Then, after a brief secret message from the future, I interview him about his new book Watling Street: Travels Through Britain and its Ever-Present Past, a psychogeographic tour of the oldest road in Britain. One that, notably, runs up Shooter’s Hill and through Northampton. You can download that here, and you can buy Watling Street on Amazon here. It’s not got a US publisher, so if you’re US based you’ll have to import it. It’s worth it.…

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I first encountered the work of Rian Johnson while reading about Terry Gilliam’s My Neighbor Totoro remake Tideland on Wikipedia, where I stumbled across the factoid that Johnson had declared it and Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain to be the two best films of 2006. This claim was notable for being A) self-evidently correct and B) a completely insane statement that nobody but me would actually make. And so I was immediately fascinated by this previously unheard of filmmaker and decided that, on the basis of his taste alone, I’d check out his existent film, a high school noir called Brick. (Also, it was only like $5 on Amazon.) Since then I’ve followed his career on the general logic that he was going to get really big some day. Which, sure enough, he did, so let’s put that knowledge to populist use. (And I’ll just spoil it up front, my favorite Johnson film is The Brothers Bloom, my least favorite is Looper.)

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Brick is that it isn’t funny. Sure, there are moments that are humorous – the recurring urgent discussions about who people eat lunch with, for instance, or any scene whatsoever with the Pin’s mother. But although these things are funny, Johnson makes no effort whatsoever to actually get the viewer to laugh. The scenes are not played with comic timing, the humorous aspects are not pushed to the foreground, and none of the actors deliver their lines as if looking for the laugh.

What’s unusual about this is not that it’s an incongruous genre mashup played straight. What’s unusual is that one of the genres is high school. When you take the other great incongruous high school genre mashup to launch its creator to directing a major Disney franchise film, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it took place not only in a high school, but in an overtly funny high school of the sort familiar from Saved by the Bell or Ferris Bueler’s Day Off or, if you prefer to go back further, Happy Days or Grease. It’s not that Brick is the only serious high school movie ever made, but the core texts of the genre are those comedies or ones like them. So to do a genre mashup that is an objectively funny idea when one of the genres is largely comedic and have it be deadly serious is, on the face of it, interesting.

A genre mashup, done well, is about liminal spaces. In Brick, the key one is the tunnel where Emily is murdered. It’s where the film opens, and it returns there constantly, with Johnson’s camera endlessly cycling back to open mouth and to characters sinking into and emerging out of its darkness. It also returns constantly to the image of Emily’s arm lying in the water, her murder being the key event to take place in this space. This image also features on most of the film’s posters, becoming, along with the line drawing that represents the tunnel, the film’s main visual icon.…

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There’s probably a few people who wanted something more like Blink (or, more plausibly, The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang) out of Moffat’s last finale, but it’s hard to imagine what more you could actually ask from it. It’s an episode that has at least one big moment catering to virtually every sensible aesthetic of Doctor Who and one or two of the dumb ones too – the rare thing that manages to solidly delight both GallifreyBase fandom and queer Tumblr fandom. (Although the Moffat Hate crowd is managing to treat Harold’s misogyny as the voice of the author because of course they are.) Entirely separate from any questions of ranking or comparison, it’s self-evidently successful as a finale, anchoring Series 10 as firmly in the “good” column.

Now for comparisons. The obvious point of comparison is The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, the equivalent “finale before the era-ending regeneration” story from the Davies era. It’s not that it’s quiet per se – it’s a multi-Master story, after all. But it’s quiet in comparison. Its defining decision, in many ways, is having the Doctor’s big speech be delivered to Missy and Harold, a quiet speech about kindness and decency in which the Doctor explains why this is the hill he’s going to die on. It’s not aiming to outdo Hell Bent or The Day of the Doctor. Like Extremis, it is visibly a work of late style. It’s aiming small and careful, relishing in its details.

Which isn’t quite everything. The Doctor’s reluctance to regenerate is unearned – there’s a line of dialogue with Bill that’s clearly there to set it up, but it’s a pro forma bit of foreshadowing as opposed to something that feels genuine. Heather probably should have come up somewhere, even if only in dialogue, since April 15th. And, perhaps most fundamentally, there’s not actually a reason for Missy and Harold to be here other than so they can listen to the Doctor’s speech – they’re not actually part of the same story as Bill’s salvation. But these are all small problems. It’s not like Missy and Harold clash with the Bill plot, after all. This is an episode that moves between two things, deft at both of them and, for that matter, at the transitions between them. The parts don’t quite add up, but that’s kind of how the whole being greater than the sum of its parts works.

More to the point, though, the whole is more than the sum of some absolutely astonishing parts. This is a story where the details are exquisitely crafted. The switches between the human and the Cyberman versions of Bill were done perfectly, maintaining the agonizing horror of it while not getting in the way of Mackie’s farewell performance. There’s a lot of coasting on the body horror of World Enough and Time, but the point of a forty-five minute windup is surely that you can coast on it after, wringing vast amounts of emotion out of a few seconds of carefully deployed Tenth Planet voice.…

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I’ve got nothing today.  I was trying to get something written about Wonder Woman but it’s not ready yet, and may not be good (or tactful) enough to publish anyway.  Meanwhile, a podcast I’m editing is presenting big audio-quality problems.  So, yeah, coupled with other stuff going on IRL… I ran out of time.  Sorry everybody.

So instead, here is a little round-up of stuff I’ve been reading lately.

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Here’s Andrew Hickey saying important stuff about Autism and Empathy.

Josh was kind enough to send me this interesting article in the New Yorker about ‘the occult roots of modernism’.  Essential for modernism geeks.

Cameron L. Fantastic wrote a review of Zero Books’ much-anticipated Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle… and it’s not pretty.  I have to say, my hopes weren’t high because I think Nagle is overrated.  Her Jacobin articles have been okay(ish) but shot through with frankly bizarre problems.  I can’t say Mr Fantastic (?) is right about Nagle’s new book, because I haven’t read it, but if half of what he says about it is true then it’s a major disappointment (though not, as I say, to me).

This demolition of Bill O’Reilly’s rubbish history books was fun, from Harpers’ Magazine.  Fish in a barrel, but hey… a very unpleasant fish that richly deserves to be shot (metaphorically).

Here’s Richard Seymour being very astute (I think) on the prospects for Corbyn and Corbynism, and what needs to happen.

Relatedly, here’s James Butler on similar issues.

Here’s Jonathan Cook giving an account of Seymour Hersh’s investigation of claims that Assad ordered a sarin gas attack in April (the basis of Trump’s much-lauded bombings), and of how Hersh’s investigation has been ignored by the media.

Here’s Ali Abuminah putting the kerfuffle at Chicago Dyke Pride into context.

And finally, the first example of genuine, solid-gold comedy genius I’ve seen for a long time.  Kaleb Horton at MTV (whose podcast with our very own James Murphy, The Last Exit Show, has just returned from hiatus, and deserves to be heard) presenting selected highlights of the script of Sully.  Trust me.

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Needless to say, my liking for all these things doesn’t imply that any of them necessarily have any kinship with each other, or with anyone else.  Nor does my linking to these articles mean that I myself necessarily agree with everything in them.

Laters.

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