Train ride - Feb 20

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Sometime earlier this year, I pulled a Sheldon Cooper, (no this is not going to be about TBBT and its’ fandom), and rode an express train rather than a bus, through the GTA. The impression? The express train was fast, naturally, and quite comfortable to sit in; but the view outside was something else: I never realized just how downtrodden the GTA, and especially its’ outskirts, can be. Everywhere I looked, there was desolation, emptiness, and graffiti; the latter were certainly colorful, but there was no one and nothing to appreciate them, and given their proximity to the railroad tracks, I wonder if the graffiti artists were paid to draw the artwork in question, in order to decorate the scenery around the tracks. If so, it did not exactly work, as for such a desolate place, the tracks certainly had a lot of garbage around them.

No, seriously, I kid you not – everywhere we rode, (in a straight line, true, but still), there was garbage and trash – on tracks, next to tracks, on the streets next to the railroad, there it was. Again, there were no people to manifest it per se, but it was there already. If ‘The Last of Us’ or some similar franchise wanted to shoot a scene there, or even several, the place was right for the shooting: empty streets, dead vegetation, (since it is February – the end of winter), no animal life, and buildings, covered in graffiti by people, who’re long gone from this place, apparently. This scenery goes all the way into Toronto’s downtown, BTW.

Now, the downtown of the city where I live – it is a different story. It is a bustling metropolis, or at least it attempts to – the U.S. cities, such as NYC or Washington D.C. are much grander and bigger than it is…but their outskirts are the same story: see the paragraphs above. It is the same mess, although more spread-out, proportionally. The city of Buffalo, located in the New York state, however, is not in the league of the bigger U.S. cities, and is just as bad as Toronto is, with a greater crime rate, proportionally. Isn’t real life grand?

Back to Toronto… so my family lives in the outskirts of the city, which is proportionally greener than the downtown is… at least during the warmer half of the year. Right now, at the end of winter, there is no greenery at all, and, admittedly, the sight of bare tree/shrub branches, black against the still-light evening sky is decidedly disturbing and scary for the soul. At least the downtown is still illuminated by artificial lights, even though the winter holidays are over. Toronto really does go for the entire metropolis that never sleeps look – good for it. Anything else?

Yes, the wildlife. In Toronto’s outskirts/suburbs, where we live, one can usually see some type of wild/feral animal or bird, even in winter, even if it is just the rock pigeon or the grey squirrel, (which are predominantly black-colored in Toronto). There are also the red-tailed hawks that hunt the pigeons, (though with mixed success), as well as gulls, house sparrows, lately – some of the local songbird species, so there is wildlife. In downtown, there is not even them, just humans, and sometimes their pets, (but mostly not). Again, it is depressing and kind of sterile. No wonder that those American Apocalypse/dystopia stories tend not to show any sort of wildlife in their narrative – the American society does not really have a place for it. Even GM, whose Westeros is notably different from the RL planet Earth, but who is also British rather than American, has some sort of animals in his novels, even if they’re just window dressing at best. The same can be said about another British author – the late and great J.R.R. Tolkien, whose Middle-Earth works – all of them, BTW – are decidedly anti-industrialist. His villains – Morgoth and Sauron - hate everything natural, and their domains – Angband, Utumno, Mordor – are devoid of natural wildlife and vegetation; by contrast, the domains of the ‘good guys’, such as Galadriel, are often lush and green. The dwarves, it should be noted, are more ambiguous: their best kingdom, Moria, fell to the Balrog because the dwarves ‘dug too greedily, dug too deeply’, (or something to that effect), and upset the natural balance.

…Mind you, in the original novels, the Balrogs were depicted differently than in modern culture: rather than stereotypical demons, with hooves and horns, the Balrog from the novels was little more than a featureless shadow, sometimes wreathed with dark fires, sometimes not, but always deadly. Gandalf killed him all the same though, but we digress.

Well no, not really. My point was that Tolkien did not care too much for cities or industrialism, and his Middle-Earth works reflect that. GM is not as extreme in his series, but he also does not seem to be too fond of the cities; whereas American novels tend to be urban, as is the rest of the American mass media – it is a difference. After riding around Toronto outside, the reasons behind that American outlook has become somewhat clearer for me, that is all. Real life sucks, you know?

This is it for now, see you all soon.

Ant-Man 3 - Feb 7

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us move onto the ‘Quantumania’ movie instead.

…Then again, things do not appear to be improving, as the reviews of it are mixed, almost as bad as the ‘Eternals’ movie had been. However…

…However, whereas the latter was an experiment of Disney/MCU in movie genres, ‘Ant-Man 3’ is a standard slash typical Marvel film; actually, it is a standard superhero film.

Work with me, here how ‘Ant-Man 3’ goes. The hero is a hero. They become complacent and too comfortable in their heroism. A villain comes along and gets the best of the hero via their complacency. The hero has to work twice as hard now to succeed, (because they have no other choice, duh). They succeed and the villain dies. The end. Pause.

Now, if that sort of scenario sounds familiar, that is because it is. For examples, both the second ‘Puss’ film and one of the final episodes of ‘PJ Masks’ S7 (I think, how many seasons does the effing series have?), have similar scripts, with the main difference from ‘Ant-Man 3’ being that the villains, (not all the villains), don’t die there.

Now, Tom Holland’s 3^rd ‘Spider-Man’ film, (‘No Way Home’), has the same thing – the Spider-Trio actually manage to redeem/cure, (in a manner of speaking, but still), their villains, while ‘Ant-Man 3’ doesn’t.

…Oh, wait, there is the new M.O.D.O.K., aka the old Darren Cross/Yellowjacket, who got revived and remade by Kang – and who turned on him; wait, evil always turns upon itself. Never mind. At least the now-cancelled M.O.D.O.K. of team Hulu had been authentically original and entertaining – that is probably why it got cancelled.

On a more serious note, though is MCU’s multiverse. So far, the only real successful Marvel movie/other creation that had involved the multiverse was the aforementioned ‘No Way Home’, as it actually showed it in action – and it worked. Everything else, though – not so much. ‘What if?’ S1 was really a variant Avengers series without anything truly new, (but with plenty window dressing), while the ‘DS2’ film was a live-action version of one of the ‘What if?’ plotlines, and this brings us to ‘Ant-Man 3’.

‘Ant-Man 3’, again, does not bring anything new to MCU: the plotline is typical of the other MCU movies, except for the fact that if previously team MCU killed-off its’ villains in every film and so forth, quickly running out of them… now it can do the same, just with the confirmation that it can also – when it wants to, or needs to – pull out a new Kang/Scarlet Witch/Thanos/Ultron/etc. out of the multiverse, since it has done this to Kang two times in a row now, and neither Kang was the actual Kang, apparently. Fancy that!

As for MCU Phase 5, in general… listen. MCU’s Phase 4 was about transitions, and we have talked about that at length. Contrastingly, ‘Ant-Man 3’ didn’t have too many transitions; what it had were resolutions, something that the first phases of MCU were, and are, well known for; whatever MCU was doing, and was going for, in its’ Phase 4, appears to be over, and what we are left with?

Same old that we had before Phase 4, it seems. Phase 4 of MCU actually experimented with different genres, sometimes successfully – i.e. ‘Spider Man: No Way Home’, and sometimes not – i.e. ‘The Eternals’ – but experiment it did. Now, it seems time for cinematographic experiments is over, and MCU returned to where it had started, with tried and tested true, old-school, done by the book, works. The details might be different, but the underlined idea is the same… save that now MCU can access the multiverse, bringing the same villain in different incarnations over and over again, diminishing itself, and the success of its’ heroes, even further than compared to the level that the ‘Kamala Khan’ and ‘She-Hulk’ series have brought MCU to – and that might be part of the reason as to why Mr. Feige seems to be cutting down on the number of MCU TV series since MCU’s Phase 4 – but that is another story.

As for ‘Ant-Man 3’… it is an entertaining movie, but little more; once you look past all the sound, the color and the furious noise, this film doesn’t appear to be living up to the hype that it’d generated, and the critics have realised it, hence why they appear to hate it… at least some of them have. Guess we will just have to wait and see as to what MCU will do next.

For now, though, this is it. See you all soon!

PJ Masks 2 - Feb 8

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us talk about something else. ‘Ant-Man 3’ is due only in nine more days, so let us find a more mundane topic. Since this is my first entry for Feb 2023, let us talk about PJ Masks once more.

Now, you may be asking yourself: why? Because, I answer, after my initial discussion of them, people have been calling me out and explaining that PJ Masks are a fable; each – or almost each – episode has a punchline or a moral that explains everything that happens, more or less. And to this, I answer: you are correct… but mostly for the first two or so seasons, and then it all goes wrong. Why?

Let us start from a distance: what is a fable? The answer to this question may vary, but in the West, it is usually a short story with a moral at the end. ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’ is a typical fable, as is ‘The Lion and the Mouse’. They, ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’, ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’, ‘The City Mouse and the Country Mouse’, are all built along similar lines: a short story, only a few paragraphs long, (on paper, in other media this may be different), with a moral at the end.

From the characters’ point of view, the characters are barely there: their depiction is minimalist and follows from fable to fable: the fox is cunning, the lion – noble, the wolf – greedy and gluttonous, the hare – cowardly, the cat – sly, the mouse – tricky but weak, the donkey – stubborn, and so on. Conversely, they may not even have characteristics, or appear only once or twice in all of the fables, (we are talking mostly Aesop’s fables, for simplicity): i.e. the titular characters of ‘The Oak and the Reed’ fable appear only in ‘their’ fable, and nowhere else.

However, in case of ‘PJ Masks’, the situation isn’t like that of the oak and the reed – rather, the titular characters are the main characters, as are their archenemies – Romeo, the Night Ninja, and Luna Girl. Those half-a-dozen characters are the primary characters, and most of the ‘PJ Masks’ episodes are about their interactions… so where do the fable elements come in?

In the first seasons, they were obvious. For example, if the moral was Slow and Steady Wins the Race, or rather You Must make a systematic plan to succeed, then the PJ Masks had to do exactly that – make a systematic plan in order to defeat Romeo. Yes, part of that plan was to befriend Luna Girl, however temporarily, but because the latter barely had any personality to speak of, that was no problem, especially since at the end of the episode she just leaves, without any hard feelings – no one cared hard enough about her, especially the followers of canon… so, where did it go wrong?

When the show owners began to make the episodes more complex. On one hand, they introduced new characters into the mix, such as the wolfies. On the other, they tried to make the episodes more complex and less fable-like, pardon the pun. Armadylan is a good example of that.

Armadylan was a hero/anti-hero, and the first of PJ Masks’ allies, (Luna Girl is a special case). He was big, he was strong, and he was easily angered. Throughout S2 (and 3, I think), PJ Masks did their best to teach him the ‘right way’ of being a hero, until they succeeded… and Armadylan became a much less recurring character… who seemed to have learned nothing… and the PJ Masks don’t appear to be caring… Armadylan is stuck somewhere between being a character and a prop… as characters in fables are.

No, seriously – on screen, the titular characters of a fable, (say, ‘The Lion and the Mouse’), can come across in any way, but on paper, the lion is noble but arrogant, (hubris), while the mouse is weak, but helpful; they are stereotypes, clichés, little else. And ironically, for the first seasons, for as long as the PJ Masks and their foes were stereotypes themselves, the fable elements of their show worked. Both the PJ Masks and their foes were little more than stereotypes, they were practically interchangeable within their teams, and the main way as to how they differentiated from each other were their depictions – physical depictions. Each of the PJ Masks has their own unique abilities as do their enemies; the main difference here being that the PJ Masks need to solve problems, and their enemies ARE problems, or rather – part of them. The PJ Masks need to heroically solve them, and so they do…

…And then the creative team began to move away from the fable format into the regular show one: the PJ Masks, their enemies and allies began to stop being just clichés and began to be more full-rounded characters…while sticking to their initial depictions. Just like any attempt of trying to sit on two chairs at once, the result is a failure rather than a success.

Look at Luna Girl: as a villain stereotype, (the bad girl one), she worked without any questions or doubts. As a character she is all over the place – she goes from being a foe to the PJ Masks, to an unnecessary drag-along to an ally from an episode to an episode, from one season to another, and-?

And it does not exactly work. The Western culture, especially their mass media, have the concepts of ‘frenemy’ and ‘wild card’, among others, and this may be who Luna Girl now is, but still, you would think that sooner or later the PJ Masks’ temper would fray and they would ask Luna Girl if she is with them or not – regardless of how long a rope is, it will still end. However, this does not happen, as neither the PJ Masks nor Luna Girl apparently care if Luna Girl is good or bad, if she is a friend or foe… and if that is the case, then the PJ Masks themselves are less heroic and more mercenary in their approach to other people… the Speed twins, (a couple of gearheads), have helped them to defeat Luna Girl, Romeo and the Night Ninja, and the heroic trio doesn’t even acknowledge them… Hell, they disappear from the show after this… ‘PJ Masks’ the show treats its’ characters worse than PJ Masks the characters treat their erstwhile allies and friends… They are no longer fables, but neither are they proper characters – not yet. This is why I do not like ‘PJ Masks’ and me don’t think that they are a good show – at least not anymore, not at the moment. This may change in the future, but I do not hedge my bets either…

Well, this is it for now. See you all soon!