Buffy v Angel: Dawn of Josstice

So, we’re currently binging Buffy & Angel. I’ve seen Buffy all the way through before, but I’d only seen maybe a third of Angel. We’re alternating between the two series, following a guide that ensures we see the episodes in the right order. I’m also following someone on Twitter who’s watching them for the first time, and their insights are often hilarious.

I love Buffy, even though some aspects of it haven’t aged well (especially the creator). Just a couple of nights ago we reached “Once More With Feeling” (s06e07), and it remains one of the greatest episodes in TV history. I still have the songs stuck in my head two days later. Okay, that’s partly because I put the soundtrack on my phone and listened to it at lunch. I’m also a big fan of “Hush” (s04E10), which is just an all-around amazing episode.

I’m not digging Angel, though. There are reasons I never finished it before. When you’re going back and forth between the two shows, the difference in quality is striking. Every night it’s like, “If we sit through an Angel, we get to enjoy a Buffy.” I’m glad we’re mostly alternating, because Angel is a real slog on its own. If I wasn’t determined to see it through this time, I’d have given up on Angel already. People keep telling me it gets better, and I hope they’re right. There’s several episodes I’m looking forward to, like the one where Angel gets turned into a puppet.

The character of Angel is just so incredibly mopey and dull. He’s easily the least interesting character on his own show. David Boreanaz has decent comic timing, but the writers don’t let him quip enough (so far). He just spends so much time standing around and looking sad.

They keep flashing back to Angel’s past, which kind of reminds me of watching the Highlander TV series. That would be fun, except Angel is just as uninteresting in the past. At least Duncan Macleod went to other countries and assumed new identities, palling around with famous people and having period-appropriate adventures. Angelus spent his entire past wearing the same clothes and terrorizing identical villages. No wonder he’s so depressed all the time. I seriously can’t tell one episode’s flashback from another’s.

The whole concept of Angel feels like the kind of spin-off people parody. They took all the characters Buffy didn’t need on her show any more, moved them to Los Angeles, and had them start a detective agency. Doesn’t that sound like something you’d see on the Simpsons? I do love Angel’s supporting cast, especially Fred and Lorne. But I also know not to get too attached to anyone, because the writers are known for killing off some of the best characters for the sake of easy drama. And it’s that much harder to get invested in a show when you know that.

Look, I understand that “dark & edgy” was popular in the 90s. But Angel’s not what I’d call dark so much as boring. “Let’s have Angel brood in this corner for a while. Now let’s have him wander off alone because he thinks it’s the only way to protect his friends. Now let’s have him obsess over his past sins. So entertaining! Oh, we’re losing viewers? Better kill off a character. Maybe they’ll mistake it for drama. People like it when their favorite character dies, right?” I’m honestly amazed it managed to last five seasons.

Anyway, we’ve got less than two seasons of Buffy left, and then it’s Angel all the way. I hope Angel’s strong enough to stand on its own by then. I remember Buffy gets pretty dark towards the end as well. But so far, the darkest Buffy episode is still more fun than the most lighthearted Angel episode. I hope to get proven wrong about that though.

The Marvels

Wow, that was fun! I'm not sure why this movie didn't do better, but I have some ideas. The Marvels is a great time, that doesn't take itself too seriously. No, it's not groundbreaking, but it doesn't need to be. It's just an enjoyable popcorn-muncher like Ant-Man.

One of the things it does right is the way it handles Monica's and Kamala's origin stories. Since both were already told in the TV shows, the movie doesn't have to be bogged down explaining it again. They do sum them up, but it's given about the same amount of screentime as Peter's origin in "Spider-Man Homecoming" - the spider's dead, let's move on.

Which got me thinking - in a lot of superhero franchises, the second movie is better than the first. Sometimes the reason for this is that the first movie focuses on the hero's origin story, and doesn't leave much time for a deeper plot. Maybe Disney+ should be "origin story central" going forward. A hero's true fans can learn their origins on TV, and later their movie can just sum it up and get to the real plot. And the beauty is, they could shoot both at the same time.

For those that complained that Carol didn't have much personality in the first film, well, you're idiots - they explained that in-universe by way of her amnesia. Anyway, she's a lot less wooden in the sequel, and it turns out she can actually be pretty funny. Of course, some sexist pricks still won't be satisfied.

The villain in The Marvels is... um... honestly I don't even remember her name. And you won't either. She's basically discount Ronan The Accuser, and she's even less interesting than the bad guy in Thor: The Dark World. But it doesn't matter, the action scenes are still great, and the body-switching thing gives the whole movie an almost Gilligan's Island vibe.

Important: It has a mid-credits scene that you won't want to miss. Even if you're such an insufferable incel that you'd rather die than watch a movie with a female lead, at least look up the mid-credits scene. You'll want to know.

The bottom line is that it's a fun, if forgettable movie. It has a lot of comedy, but not a lot of substance. Nobody is going to claim it's the best Marvel movie, but it's more fun than at least half of them.

When The Trailer Is Better Than The Movie

I love scary movies where there’s a sense of “wrongness” instead of an obvious monster. You know, movies where the vibe is more unsettling than scary. However, most of these movies end up disappointing me by the end. It seems like nobody can write a payoff that lives up to the original concepts. Sometimes these stories would have worked better as short films than full-length features. For that reason, the trailers for these movies are often more interesting than the movie itself. In some cases, I’d happily watch the trailer over and over again, just because they’re like short films in themselves.

Lights Out was a great short film. I can’t comment on the full movie because I haven’t seen it, but from the reviews I’ve read, it wasn’t very good. And that makes sense. The concept of Lights Out just doesn’t work as a two-hour movie. The scare was based around a single special effect – a shadowy figure that only appears in the dark, and vanishes when the lights are on. I don’t think that concept would even work for a half-hour “Tales From The Darkside” episode. But as a 5 minute film, it’s pretty scary.

Vivarium had a really cool concept. A couple is in the market for a house, and looks at a place in one of those cookie cutter communities. When they’re ready to leave, they get lost trying to find their way out of the neighborhood. After dozens of turns, they end up back in front of the same house. They try again and again until they run out of gas, and always end up in front of the same house. At one point one of them climbs up on the roof for a better view, and just sees an endless neighborhood of identical houses, as far as the eye can see in every direction. The trailer for Vivarium pretty much sums up the first half hour of the movie, which is the best part. After that, it just goes downhill. The writers just couldn’t think of anything that could top the concept itself. It’s still not a bad movie, and it has a few cool ideas, but the full movie just can’t live up to the trailer.

Don’t Worry Darling is pretty much the same way. The trailer shows an ideal, almost utopian community from the 50s or 60s, but you can tell something dark is going on behind the scenes. Unfortunately, when you see the full movie, the actual twist is nowhere near as cool as whatever you were building up in your head.

Smile wasn’t bad. I enjoyed it, I really did. But it wasn’t nearly as creepy as the movie I thought I was going to see. It doesn’t help that the coolest scene in the trailer turns out to be a dream in the film itself. Given the title of the movie and all the smiling people in the trailer, I thought the smiling aspect was going to be a bigger part of the plot. But it’s more of a standard killer ghost story, and smiling before death is just one symptom of its curse. Note that Smile was also based on a short film.

A little off-topic, but I absolutely hated Cabin Fever (2002). It doesn’t really fit the “creepy and unsettling” theme of this blog, but it’s a great example of a horror movie with misleading trailers. I knew it was about a disease, but I thought the disease would make people attack each other like zombies. But no, it’s just about a quick-spreading flesh-eating virus. People catch it, they get sick, they die. I know it sounds like I was just disappointed that it wasn’t a zombie movie, but even for what it is, it’s a snoozefest. It never goes anywhere particularly interesting, and some of the characters are downright annoying.

The bottom line is, some movies just work better as short films. And sometimes the people who edit trailers are more competent than the people who write movies. But none of this is going to stop me from seeing the next cool-looking movie with a five-minute concept. You might say I never learn, but the truth is, I just have nothing better to do with my time.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Not bad, but nothing to write home about. I’ll probably watch it again, which is more than I can say for Crystal Skull. I’d like to say Destiny is about as good as Temple of Doom, but I can’t. Temple has a several iconic action set pieces, like the mine cart ride. Destiny has a couple of scenes that stand out, but nothing that makes me want to go back and see it again.

Unfortunately, the Indiana Jones series just hasn’t aged well. It has a lot of elements that are considered racist and sexist today (and probably even then). Even the core concept of the character – a guy who takes artifacts from their native lands to put them in a museum – is no longer considered a good thing. And frankly, I agree.

But I still think there’s room for Indiana Jones movies that don’t make the above mistakes. I really wish they had made more of them when Harry was in his prime. I mean, it just feels like there should be more Indiana Jones movies out there, doesn’t it? It’s a series that was meant to be serialized, with dozens of adventures that take place at different times in the character’s life. The numerous spin-off books, video games, and tv show are proof of that. In a perfect world, there would be as many Indiana Jones movies as there are James Bond.

But the character really is tied to the actor. I just don’t think anyone could pull off Indy like Harrison Ford. And worse, if there is an actor who could fill Harry’s shoes, he wouldn’t be cast. Hollywood would pick some upbeat babyface actor instead, when the character should be played by someone more grizzled and cynical.

But more than that, I think Indiana Jones just made more sense in the 80s and 90s, before over-the-top action movies were a dime a dozen. These days, what does Indy offer that John Wick doesn’t, other than a different time period? I honestly think Hollywood missed a golden opportunity, by not milking the series dry in the 90s.

Ranking the Indiana Jones Movies:
1. Raiders of the Lost Ark
2. Last Crusade
3. Temple of Doom
4. Dial of Destiny
5. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

What If…? Season 2

What If…? is still my favorite Marvel TV series, but I can’t say I liked season 2 as much as season 1. For starters, it just didn’t seem long enough. Secondly, the concepts weren’t as good as season one’s. But most of all, too many of the episodes were connected.

I’ve seen a few people complain that Marvel is “shoving Captain Carter down our throats.” I won’t go that far. I like Captain Carter. I think she’s a fun character, and I’d like to see more of her. I even hope she gets her own series. A lot of the complainers would have no problem if it was a male character getting all that screentime.

But that said, I do think What If…? works better as an anthology series, where none of the stories are connected to each other. Sure, the finale of season one was fun, where they took a character from each episode to form the Multiverse Avengers. But I don’t need to see them revisit that concept again.

The whole point of an anthology series is that we get to see something new each episode. And the whole point of What If…? is to show us unique versions of the Marvel universe. It ruins everything when I’m watching an episode and I’m like, “Oh goodie, Evil Strange is back.” An anthology show shouldn’t have recurring characters (other than the narrator of course).

Maybe they just don’t feel there’s enough content to draw from. Sure, there’s over 30 movies in the MCU, but that’s still a relatively small pool of characters compared to the comics. There’s only so many “what if x had y’s powers” or “what if z got the infinity stones” stories you can write. Maybe they should postpone season 3 until after the MCU has X-Men and Fantastic Four movies to work with.

But regardless of when season three gets here, I really hope they resist the temptation to give it a series arc. Just give us some individual stories with creative concepts, like the comic books series it’s based on. ‘Nuff said.

Now Available: Geek Cutes

My latest book is now available on Amazon and Other E-Retailers. Only 99 cents!

Geek Cutes is a collection of eight light-hearted short stories, spanning a variety of genres, with a focus on lesbians (both cis and trans).

Stories included in this anthology:

Dungeon Therapy: Two women meet over an online tabletop RPG.

Gilded Cage: A young tech expert is locked in her room by her homophobic parents.

Mother's Day: A cop teams up with an occult expert to track down an otherworldly monster.

Fairy Dust: In a war between fairies and dragons, one pixie must embrace her destiny.

Hero Worship: A woman goes on a blind date with a superhero, but is it safer to stay single?

Think Tank: A team of scholars struggle to break a divine code, racing against the most serious of all deadlines.

Strangers in the Void: When the power goes out on a space station, two strangers work together to find the cause.

Vigilante: In a neighborhood riddled with violent crime, a masked hero protects women from the local gangs.

Across the Spider-Verse

Minor Spoiler Warning

Like the first one, this movie is chock full of eye-candy. It's seriously funny, and has lots of cute references for fans of the comics and memes. There's so much to look at, it's honestly exhausting at times. My only real complaint is that it feels a little bloated, and yet it ends with "To Be Continued." It's hard to say until I see the next one, but it feels like they padded it to make it into two movies.

Renfield

Renfield is extremely funny, with great action scenes, and unlike anything I've seen in a long time. It's gory, but the gore effects are so over-the-top cartoonish that it doesn't bother me. Cage really hams it up in the most delightful way. 

See it.

Knives Out and Glass Onion

Knives Out is damn near a perfect movie. Excellent script, perfect cast, great plot. I really can’t think of a single complaint. Okay, there’s a couple of scenes where a character throws up, which makes me nauseous (I’m emetophobic), but that’s my problem. Five star movie, ‘nuff said.

Glass Onion is almost as good. It still has an excellent cast delivering perfect performances. It has a decent plot and a snappy script. But the plot relies on a couple of contrived tropes. Anytime I see either of these particular tropes in a movie, it feels like lazy writing to me. Still, it’s impossible to watch this movie without a smile on your face, and its only real crime is not being as perfect as its predecessor.

By the way, if you want to see more of my movie ratings in one place, follow my Letterboxd account here.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods

Fury of the Gods is fun and enjoyable. It's extremely cheesy, but if you've seen the first one, you should know that going in. There's a few over-the-top parts that you'll either love or hate, like the "Skittles unicorn" scene. And like the first movie, there's a lot of tone whiplash - sometimes it seems a little dark for kids, but other times it's too light for adults.

If you liked the first one, you'll like this one.

Scream VI / Ranking the Scream Movies

We watched Scream VI last weekend. I thought it was pretty good; in fact, I’d say it’s my second favorite Scream movie.

My ranking would be:

1. Scream (1996)

2. Scream 6

3. Scream 2

4. Scream 5 – a.k.a. Scream (2022)

5. Scream 4

6. Scream 3

However, there’s still a huge gap between the original Scream and all the sequels. I like how each one carves out its own specialty – Scream makes fun of horror tropes, 2 makes fun of sequels, 3 makes fun of trilogies, and so on. But nothing beats the originality of the first one. It practically invented a new genre of self-aware horror.

It does drive me crazy how superhuman everyone is in the series, especially in the later installments. Nearly every survivor gets stabbed at some point, often in the stomach or chest area. It gets harder and harder to tell which characters have just suffered mortal wounds, and which ones are going to walk it off in a few minutes. 

Yes, humans in real life often survive injuries they shouldn't, but the reason those stories are so amazing is that they aren't very common. The Scream series would have you believe that one can build up an immunity to stab wounds.

Still, it's a fun series, and the newest one is one of the high points.

M3GAN

M3GAN is a fun movie, though it felt like I’d seen it before. The whole “A.I. takes its job too literally” trope is pretty common, but M3GAN is a standout just for its visuals. The title character is performed so well, that it makes me forget a lot of the other movies with similar plots. Unfortunately, the plot falls apart at the climax, when the movie stops following its own rules.

It seems like the writers just really wanted to show certain scenes, but couldn’t find a valid way to work them into the plot, so they just did it anyway. One line of dialogue could have fixed it. And maybe it did, and I just missed it. But if so, they needed to make it more obvious.

Somehow, Palpatine Has Returned

I'm so sick of “Somehow, Palpatine has returned” memes. It’s kind of a berserk button for me. It reminds me of how unpleasable Star Wars fandom has become. Palpatine’s resurrection is perfectly explained in the movie, but everyone quotes that one line from Poe as if that’s the movie’s only explanation. Of course Poe doesn’t know how Palpatine returned, why would he?

There’s a shot where the camera pans across some cloning tanks. With one shot they manage to answer two questions – it reveals that the new Palpatine is a clone, and that Snoke may have been a failed attempt to clone Palpatine. I mean, there's more to it than that – like, Palpatine’s force spirit was so powerful that it was able to possess his own clone – but please don’t tell me there was no explanation whatsoever.

People always tell writers that they should “Show, don’t tell.” Then this movie comes along and does exactly that… and everyone misses it. Stupid, toxic fans. Regardless of how you feel about the rest of RoS's pacing and exposition, the backlash against Palpatine's "unexplained" return is unwarranted.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3

The first two GotG movies are two of my favorite MCU films. GotG 3 is great, but it's not as laugh-a-minute as the first two. The animal cruelty and other seriousness means I probably won't rewatch it very often. I didn't like the soundtrack as much, either. 

I did love the villain, though. I also watched Quantumania this weekend, and I think the High Evolutionary is a much better villain than Kang.

Quantumania

I think the critics were a little hard on Quantumania. It's not a great movie, but then, none of the Ant-Man movies have been "great." It was no better or worse than the previous two films, though it is certainly different. Taking place almost entirely in the Quantum Realm, and therefore abandoning the comic relief characters from the previous movies, it's a bit of a tonal shift. It still has plenty of humor, but it doesn't feel like a flat-out comedy the way the first two did.

The movie is full of plot holes, or at least things that aren't explained as well as they should have been. There's several points where I wanted to ask, "Why don't they just..." and the writers may have even had a valid answer for these questions. One or two lines of dialogue would have saved lots of complaints. But oh well. It's a comic book movie with comic book science and comic book logic. You either buy into it or you don't.

Overall, it's a fun, if average, Marvel movie.

Blood Samples

 I've just published my fourth "book," though this one is just a collection of six short stories. It's called Blood Samples, and it's a prequel to my other books. It's also free on most e-retailers (99 cents on Amazon). You can get it here: Amazon  Other Stores

If you like it, please check out my other books here:

Xine Fury's Books

And if you haven't already, make sure you check out my writing blog:

Bloodhunters Blog

My Third Book Is Out

I've just published the third novel in my Bloodhunters series. If you're interested, you can get them here:

Books by Xine Fury

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Finally, a good D&D film. I was beginning to think the property was cursed. I mean, how hard is it to make a decent movie about Dungeons and Dragons? Given that D&D is such an open-ended system, technically every medieval fantasy movie is a D&D movie. But it seems like whenever they intentionally try to market the D&D brand, it’s a failure. Okay, to be fair, I actually liked “Wrath of the Dragon God,” but that says more about my taste than the quality of the movie.

Honor Among Thieves is a good time regardless of whether or not you play tabletop RPGs. If you don’t like D&D, then just look at it as a generic fantasy movie. It’s not as grandiose as Lord of the Rings, it’s more of a lighthearted heist movie with a fantasy setting. If you are a D&D player, you’re going to spend a lot of time pointing at the screen and saying, “I understood that reference.” All the locations are taken from Forgotten Realms lore, and every creature is straight out of the monster manual. But you don’t need to know any of that to enjoy the movie.

The actors were carefully chosen so they could pretty much play themselves. Chris Pine is his usual quippy self, Hugh Grant is at his smarmiest, and Michelle Rodriguez is the typical tough gal. The rest of the cast don’t stand out as much, but they play their parts adequately. I really liked Sophia Lillis as the druid, though her performance was kind of subdued.

The movie is not without its plot holes, if you really want to look for them. There’s a dozen places where the druid’s shapeshifting ability could have solved a problem a lot faster than the solutions the characters came up with. They could have fixed some of these with a simple line of dialogue, but the movie takes the “look, something shiny!” approach instead. And that’s a good thing. Over-explaining the limits of each character’s abilities would have bogged the movie down, and I really think the movie’s “this is what we’re going with” approach keeps the story moving at a proper pace.

Bottom line, it’s a fun popcorn-muncher, and I think you’ll like it even if you’ve never touched a d20. But if this movie encourages people to finally give the game a try, so much the better.

Bloodhunters

So, I wrote a book. You can buy it here if you wanna:

Bloodhunters v1: Bad Blood

You can also follow my Bloodhunters blog here:

Bloodhunters Blog

Thor: Love and Thunder

Eh, I thought it was ok. 

I kept thinking it reminded me of the Burton/Shumacher Batman movies. In both cases, the third movie in the series changed the tone drastically. In both "Thor: Ragnarok" and "Batman Forever", this lighter/flashier tone worked pretty well. So for the fourth movie in each series, they leaned too far into the new tone.

I loved Ragnarok. It's one of my top five favorite MCU movies. I loved how nuts it was, and the humor was great. But Love & Thunder leans into the stupid just a little too much.

Highlights: Great visuals. Sweet soundtrack. Fun action scenes. Jane Foster's Thor is pretty cool, and I love the new moves she does with the hammer. The villain was so perfect, so well-acted, so creepy, that frankly, he was too good for this movie.

Lowlights: A lot of the humor falls flat. The plot isn't very cohesive. The editing feels off.

Bottom line: It's just... ok. I had fun, but I wish it had been better. I'll give it another shot when it comes to Disney+.