Doolittle-2020 - Jan 23

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. It sucks just because, and your family, as well as yourself, are a part of it. Yes, every new day is different, one way or another, but as a rule – real life sucks. You may want to discuss the long-tailed duck or something, but you cannot, simply because real life sucks, and your personal life sucks, and you suck. Plus – priorities. No matter how much you love nature, sometimes you just cannot master the enthusiasm to write about the ducks, (or the woodpeckers, hedgehogs, squirrels, etc.). So, let us talk about something else – the doctor. He, (i.e. Doolittle), is in the house!

…And apparently, he sucks almost as much as real life does, according to many reviews and critics. They are wrong. ‘Doolittle-2020’ is not bad. It is insipid.

Does anyone remember Marvel’s ‘InHumans’ that’d aired several years back? If not, it is not surprising – the show lasted for a single season, and it numbered only eight episodes. Yes, in the pre-Disney+ era Marvel TV shows didn’t last for more than two or three seasons, (AoS is the exception, period), but even so, ‘InHumans’ stood-out: they were that bad.

And yet… there did not appear to be something that was specifically damning that prevented them – in theory – from continuing from another season or two. (Marvel’s ‘Runaways’ ended after 3 seasons, for example). Instead, it was an entire assimilation of small flaws, including bad script and rushed acting that did Marvel’s ‘InHumans’ in. In different hands, under different management and circumstances, they could have been good, but because real life, they failed to launch instead. ‘Doolittle-2020’ is in the same boat, even though it is a single film and not a TV series instead.

On one hand, it had a lot going for it, actually, starting with the Iron Man being the titular character and a story plot that sounded good on paper. On the other, with such an illustrious name playing the main lead in a film that just couldn’t be anywhere near the level of the last two Avenger films, (let’s be honest – even in the best of circumstances ‘Doolittle-2020’ wouldn’t be anywhere near the level of ‘Infinity War’ and ‘Endgame’), enough people would feel gipped, as if this was a step down or something – and they were probably right.

 …And top of those failed expectations and the subconscious feeling of being cheated out of something that is Avenger-level film, the film itself is flawed, let’s be polite. The plot felt rather like Stark’s new Welsh accent – completely unnecessary and a straight-out failure. Queen Victoria is poisoned, so Stark – er, Doolittle – is off to bring back the miracle cure? What is this – the Avengers, Victorian era? Well, maybe – we did also get Sony’s current version of Spider-Man voicing a dog, so it could have been a start. Instead, we got a failure with a bunch of grown-up jokes in a decisively pro-child film, (children under the age of 10 will enjoy ‘Doolittle-2020’ moreso than their parents, yes), the titular character farted by a dragon, (what is this – mockery of GoT? If so, then ‘Doolittle-2020’ is excessively late for this party), and, oh yes, a gorilla fighting a tiger, (sort of) among other things.

Off topic, if a gorilla fought a tiger for real, who would win? In AFO, when a gorilla faced-off with a leopard, it actually won, but a tiger is much bigger and heavier than a leopard is and carries a much heavier punch than a leopard does. In a feline clash, tiger will triumph over a leopard, as ‘Jungle Book-2016’ showed openly and clearly – even though it is fiction, it actually did a good job of being realistic, at least to a point. But a gorilla is completely different beast than a leopard is. A tiger is a professional hunter and killer, but if it fails to get a drop on the modern world’s biggest and strongest primate, period, then it can go either way – and, of course, ‘Doolittle-2020’ went in a completely different direction to begin with. What next?

Well, for me, Chee-Chee the gorilla brought back memories of the Soviet adaptation of Doolittle, (where Chee-Chee was actually a capuchin monkey instead). To wit, this adaptation consisted of one large poem where the Soviet Doolittle went to Africa to cure all the cute animal babies there, because they all were sick; and of another large poem, where the good doctor comes to Africa to rescue a couple of human children from the Soviet analogue of Rassouli; and also a couple of novellas for children where the good doctor crosses swords with the pirate leader time and again, until he defeats the villain for good. Not such a small assimilation, especially by children’s standards, after all.

…And then the Soviet cinematography produced a cartoon series, and a couple of movies, all about the good doctor confronting the wicked pirate and his crew, and frankly, one of them, ‘Soviet Doolittle-66’ is just as crazy, but much more coherent and enjoyable than the U.S. 2020 version. Not unlike the gender-flipped ‘Ghostbusters’ reboot, ‘Doolittle-2020’ is just bad as in uninspiring and insipid, which brings us back to Marvel’s ‘InHumans’ TV series – they had the same problem and collapsed, though compared to them, ‘Doolittle-2020’ is better, (and it is certainly better than ‘Cats-2019’, cough), simply because the younger children will enjoy it with all the poop and fart jokes as well as periodic clothing, and, hey, the Iron Man is riding an ostrich in this universe, while a giraffe is talking to him in voice of Selena Gomez. Fun! Anything else?

Well, the second ‘To all the boys…’ movie is coming out on Netflix on Feb 12, 2020. Why before 2020’s Valentine Day – who knows; who cares, too – while the first film had its’ flaws, clearly, the entire franchise has proven to be tough, enduring and popular enough to bring forth a second movie. (Jenny Han wrote a trilogy about LJ’s adventures, so there is at least one more movie in store for LJ and her love life). By comparison, ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ franchise apparently hadn’t – so far there’s no news about a second movie in this franchise; maybe because it tried to be a pro-American propaganda piece among other things back when it aired and ‘Boys-1’ didn’t? Who knows, but ‘Boys-1’ was a very good romantic movie, surprisingly so, given all the flaws of both it and the original novel…but it was not insipid. It delivered. It gave enjoyment to the views. It made real life slightly more endurable than it is on its’ own. I am actually looking forwards to ‘Boys-2’ coming to Netflix next month. Yay.

…This is it for now, see you all soon!

Real life & etc. - Sep 20

…Sometimes, life sucks. Sometimes, some days just feel wrong, no matter what, and sometimes, you just think about the future and wince: you can see what is coming clearly, you just cannot figure out a way to get out of it.

Or maybe you can, you just are not sure, (or maybe you are), if the way out is not worse than staying on course is. Or maybe it is worse, but you are just going to go that way anyway, because which is the lesser evil here? …But we digress.

…No, not really, we do not. The hurricane Florence is gone, whatever is going on down with Kavanaugh and his accuser is a storm that few people want to touch, and whatever changes the ‘me too’ movement was supposed to bring were not brought, and people are beginning to experience backlash from it instead. That is important, because if ‘me too’ does not begin to bring-in sociopolitical advantages, but brings disadvantages instead, its’ support, official or unofficial, may begin to dwindle and then…it would end, leaving everyone right back where they have started…if by ‘everyone’ one means Americans. Even Canadians never got as much involved with ‘me too’ as their southern neighbours did, never mind the Europeans, and-

And nothing. The Americans love to believe that they are the entire world when they are not. Post-1990s they could – and did – impose their will and values onto the rest of the world and it worked…until it did not. Everyone and everything, even a country, even its’ regime, have a time limit, and once it runs out, that is it. You are screwed. Well, not necessarily screwed, but certainly done, and will have to invent something new or bide your time until the next opportunity to bring back your old bag of tricks. What next?

Yes, Russia, (and maybe China, and other countries), have participated in steering the U.S. in the direction of the mess that it is currently in, but so did the U.S. itself – it has no idea where it is going; it still has, well, democracy as its’ political polar star/lighthouse/traffic light – you make the metaphor – its’ light has grown vague and indistinct, and this is bad.

Look at Russia – it doesn’t have anything like democracy in its’ system of values, not anymore: Putin is apparently setting himself to be the modern Ozymandias: ‘look at my works, yet mighty, and despair!’ with not a sentient soul around to appreciate the colossal wreck – but it still has plenty of will and determination…and also an idea, or even – the idea, that democracy and Western-style politics is good, and it tries to go there, and maybe, one day, they will even achieve it, whereas the U.S….

Whereas the U.S. does not have that, or perhaps – it has too many majorities in it instead. There are too many people who have, well, ideas, of where the American democracy should go, and they all are pulling it in different directions, set against the background of the still-weakened state/country of U.S.A. The concept of ‘Balkanization’ of U.S. is not anything new; it is actually a common American dystopia, depicted in ‘into the badlands’ show among other things, for example. Will it come true in real life? We will have to wait and see.

Does the mention of ‘Badlands’ bring us back to the realm of fiction? In there, various goings-on are happening, too. The ‘Charmed’ reboot is happening in October 2018 and already there are people praising it for being ‘woke’ (or whatever), for having a mixed-racial cast. Sigh. The various films have already tried this out. ‘Black Panther’ – with a primarily Afro-American cast. It was praised…until people realized that ‘Black Panther’ was not about ‘real life’ Africa, but more about an idealized, American version of Africa – and the hype about that movie quickly died. ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ had a primarily Asian-American cast, (if not an exclusively one), and the same thing happened, only quicker, because as far as movies go, ‘Asians’ were less fictional than BP was, so its’ differences from reality are starker and more obvious. ‘Charmed’ isn’t a movie, it’s a TV series reboot, one that deals with witches and demons (among other things; the original series also had ghost pirates, ancient Greek gods and demons, and anything else, really), and the real-life racial issue didn’t really feature much in it; from the trailers of the reboot, it seems that the reboot will go down the same route, the races of the actors and actresses playing regardless.

The worst that can happen? ‘Charmed’ v2 will be a variant of ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’, in which Rowling has racebent Hermione, making her Afro-British, and by extent, Rose and Hugo Weasleys, (Hermione’s children with Ron) into biracial people. (Though yeah, I do not remember Hugo being in the story, but still. Let us mention him by default). And what happened next?

The play did not bomb, but only because the actors delivered – yay for them. There had been rumors of a musical/movie adaptation of the play, but the matter of Hermione and her race has come back once more. Either she really is Afro-British, in which case we need an Afro-British, or an Afro-American, actress in the HPCC movie, and that…isn’t something that is easily done by anyone, not even Rowling herself, who is very pointedly involved with the ‘Fantastic Beasts’ movie series, (where the bulk of characters, and especially – main characters, is Anglo-American, or European…basically, Caucasian), and not with anything ‘Cursed Child’-related. This means that all of her words in defence of Noma Dumazveny had been just that – words, and if the readers/viewers/fans are not buying them, J-Ro will easily switch back to an Emma Stone-Hermione, as she did with Jim Kay.

To be more precise, in collaboration with Jim Kay, J-Ro has started to re-release her HP books: they are already up to ‘Prisoner of Azkaban’, and the Hermione featured there is more like Emma than Noma, to put it blankly. Merlin knows why, of course, but if people are praising J-Ro for being ‘woke’…then maybe they should not, and she is not. Not really.

This, of course, brings us to Rick Riordan, who in his last novel, ‘Burning Labyrinth’, or ‘Burning Maze’, or whatever, also showed that he didn’t have to be ‘woke’ either if it didn’t deliver, and who has also started to release illustrated hardcover versions of his novels; so far, there’s only ‘The Lightning Thief’, done by John Rocco, (who seems to be Riordan’s artist of choice, when it comes to illustrating his novels and mini-novels in color), but it’s a start.

The dramatic irony is that J-Ro’s novels, illustrated by Jim Kay, are not selling so hot, and neither is the illustrated hardcover edition of ‘The Lightning Thief’. People just are not buying those books as much anymore, so both J-Ro and Riordan have their work cut out for them and need to invent new tricks or something, (as we have talked in the beginning, here). J-Ro is already doing this approach with her FB films; Riordan…we will have to wait and see.

Speaking of movies… a Disney/SW representative has made a statement, that they will be slowing down with the new films; after the SW9 movie is release, no new SW movies will be made for a while. This isn’t surprising; in fact, after ‘Solo’ this statement was to be made soon or later – right now, Disney has brought SW and itself into a corner when it comes to SW movies; but there’re always TV series to keep the SW franchise afloat. Maybe it will work in the end.

Anything else? No, not for the moment; see you all soon instead!

Iron Fist & etc. - Aug 29

…Saw the latest trailer/clip from ‘Iron Fist’ – this one is focusing on the show’s second season’s fight scenes. Apparently, they are going to be quite different from what happened in S1. Well, cannot blame a show for trying to improve itself – whether it will succeed is another question. Given all the excitement that is coming down lately, it has to, because-

Because it already had flak before the series’ premiere that the titular character is not an Asian-American actor, but Ser Loras Tyrell, the Flower Knight, who decisively is not. An Asian-American anyone, that is. That said, it really wasn’t the problem for S1 ‘Iron Fist’ – other issues were, but the whitewashing of the titular character didn’t help either, so here we are, at a moment in time when the USA media is doing its’ best to cash in on the Asian-American factor of its’ international sector. There’s ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ – did wonderfully back home, less wonderfully abroad, but they still made money, as Huffington Post pointed out, (or a similar website did), so they are in the gravy, at least in the short term. In the end, it all comes down to the money, so the titular characters of the novel trilogy and movie, (and the movie is likely to have a sequel), are/were onto something, after all.

The same goes for the LJ Netflix movie – proportionally, it has as much restructuring as KK’s movie – i.e. ‘Asians’ – did. As it was said before, the titular heroine is not biracial as she was in the novels, (and let us be fair, this is a big deal), she is wholly Asian, her father is not her father, but is her stepfather, and etc. As far as novels-to-movies adaptations go, this is mild staff; when Rick Riordan’s novels began to be turned into movies they suffered a much worse treatment, to the point where the author himself publicly denounced them, apparently starting some sort of a chain reaction: to this day, only the first two novels of his, (and he had written over a dozen about Percy and Annabeth, the Kane twins, Magnus Chase and his friends and so on), became movies and no talk has been raised about any repeat experience. Some of the novels were adapted into comics, but so far only the Kane chronicles were adapted completely; clearly, Riordan’s works have a reputation of some sort by now, so there is that. What next?

FH and its’ new heroes, that is what. It was discussed earlier that it was somewhat weird that the new heroes of the game also came from the Far East/Orient, just as the Samurai did, making it something of a repetition, but it is still very – convenient for FH that their new heroes are Oriental, thus giving team Ubisoft an extra edge to cashing-in on their fans – and team Ubisoft is firing on all cylinders here. They are fixing the technical issues and they are improving their story-telling aspect too: now FH has an arcade mode, which is something of a Choose Your Own Adventure sort of thing, complete with varying quests and levels of difficulty, something new and exciting. Go them! They are playing their cards close now, their level of cooperation with such YouTube channels as GameSpot, IGN and AWE Me has vanished, but maybe this is justified: in the past such alliances didn’t give Ubisoft much of an advantage, so they went in a different direction, and it seems to be working better, so good luck to Ubisoft, one guesses.

And now we are back at ‘Iron Fist’, who, as a show with – at least partially – Asian-American cast should be in a right place for some extra PR and benefits, as Ubisoft’s FH game is. Only it has not aired yet, (and it already has a weird reputation), so its situation is more ambiguous. Bugger. Still, it could be worse; it could have been like the ‘Dragonballs: Evolution’ movie or the 2017’s Power Rangers’ movie reboot. Both failed so miserably, that they are largely gone by now, so there is that.

…Well, I guess this is it for now; see you all soon!

KMT and co. - Aug 22

Sigh. Firstly, real life sucks, when you least expect it to do so… or when you see it coming, (sort of), but it is equally bad in both cases. And then the Americans have Hollywood.

Not so long ago, an IGN member made a brief speech on YouTube, which conflated ‘Crazy Rich Asians’, ‘To All The Boys that I Have Loved’, and – KMT, also known as Rose Tico on SW, the current trilogy. So what is the problem?

In fact, the IGN member has conflated – as the rest of U.S. may have done – a number of social groups. There are Asians who live in Asia, and whose relationship with Americans, as well as Asian-Americans is one thing. There are Asian immigrants to the U.S. as well as their direct descendants, the Asian-Americans: them and their social position in the greater American society is another thing. The third is the power struggle between the Asian-American actors (and that includes celebrities) in Hollywood and the rest of the American entertainment industry and the other power groups, including Anglo-Americans and Afro-Americans. It is very possible that there are other groups lumped with those three, but let us put them outside the brackets for the moment.

Now, KMT. The fact that she was driven from Twitter, (or Tumblr, or some other social media platform) by Internet trolls (or whoever) is abominable, no human deserves this, but-

But KMT is not just some average Asian-American citizen, (unlike the IGN member who spoke up in her defense on YouTube recently); she is a celebrity, actually. She is famous, she is talented, and she is certainly not an average person. As such, she is not just ‘a face in the crowd’ and should expect unusual treatment, both good and bad. This is the essence of free will: everyone judges everyone else freely and expresses this judgement freely. No one can be liked by everyone else, not even a deity: just read the New Testament as to what happened when the Savior played with the free will of people – it really went horribly wrong, or horribly right, but horrible either way. Judaism, and Islam, and in a different way – Buddhism – do not go this way: it is either God’s way or the highway, and you do not want to go there.

…Or maybe you do, for this is how free will works: once Moses got the Jews out of Egypt and they started their travels through the desert, the man had to have his Levites make several bloodbaths to ‘tame’ the newly liberated 12 tribes and to stop them from rebelling and returning the fleshpots of Egypt. Since the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, is full of tales when the Israelis turned their back on God and went to worship other gods, idols, Moses was not really successful, though he tried hard and implemented truly draconian tactics – but we have digressed.

On a less epic note, what happened to KMT was wrong, but it was not unexpected, because a famous person always draws attention both good and bad. At that time, KMT got hit with more bad than good attention, apparently, but it had nothing to do with her race, but with the fact that Disney/SW merger went on in an unexpected direction and seems to have split its’ fan base, or at least – diminished it to a point where ‘Solo’ made only tens of millions of dollars, and not hundreds, as Disney expected it to. Now, it is not known where SW movies will go, in what direction: there is vague information about the SW9 movie, an Obi-Wan Kenobi movie, but nothing concrete, no indication of how the audiences will react to the future SW movies. The merged Disney/SW team might have wanted something new, progressive and radical…well, so did the Netflix-allied folks behind ‘Insatiable’, (though again, Debbie Ryan doesn’t appear to be associating with Disney anymore), and we know how that went down instead.

To rephrase it. The IGN member, who is an Asian-American, somehow conflated KMT, who is a single person, a real life individual and so on, with ‘Crazy Rich Asians’, a good, solid, American romantic comedy that got hyped so much that it strove to achieve a status of international importance – and failed, and now all the hype is dying down quickly, leaving behind nothing more than a romantic comedy of a movie; and with ‘To All The Boys that I Have Loved’, which is also a romantic comedy movie, a young adult one, and one that is less hyped. It also is different from ‘Asians’; and in the original novels, the racial angle wasn’t too important; in the last novel, the father of the family married a Ms. Rothschild, who was certainly not Korean or even Asian.

Listen: even as this article was wrote, ‘Scientific American’ has released an article online about female climatologists being sexually harassed in a manner that looks similar to what KMT went through, a woman herself – but it isn’t about race. Not primarily. Such trolls are angry at what KMT and other progressive people are doing – and they are using free will to express their anger, whether it is wrong or right.

The catch of course, that this is to be expected; if KMT expected only accolades to have come her way post the SW8 movie…then it genuinely sucks to be her, and maybe she should star in something less controversial: a romantic comedy, maybe. (Note that for a variety of reasons she apparently was not considered to be a ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ material). She is going to replay Rose Tico in the upcoming SW9 movie, but again, until it is actually aired, this can go in any direction.

Seriously, look at ‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’. There was supposed to be a scene that depicted Zia in coming out as a same-sex person, but it got cut and there is no indication that it will be revealed, or play a role in the next JW film. So where does it leave the actress and the JW franchise? The latter was trying to be progressive itself…until it did not. What will happen to SW now that ‘Solo’ has indicated that even a Disney/SW juggernaut can start feeling the hits if they accumulate. Will they pull a Riordan and leave all the progressive values behind to salvage the financial situation? And either way, where will it leave KMT and the other actors?

…And keep in mind, that none of the above matters either to ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ or to the adventures of LJ and friends, regardless of whether they will have sequels or not. LJ and friends did not really try to be politically progressive, more like mundanely romantic, and neither did ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ within their movie-verse. Their real life cast and crew did, and now there’s some backlash as well, and with the Donald still at the helm this is something ‘Asians’ and the real life U.S. don’t need – but that is another story.

…Well, this is for now – see you all soon!

To All The Boys That I Have Loved - Aug 21

…And, since we have talked about Jenny Han and her LJ trilogy before, let us talk once more about the movie.

Why? Firstly, because of timing – it isn’t known if it was intentional or not, but it came out just as the ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ did, and so it got to ride their wake, because the LJ movie is also a movie about the Asian-American people, who actually live in a mixed-culture family: their dad is Anglo-American, while their mom was from Korea, and now she’s dead. There is the spectre of Jane Austen hanging over the entire LJ trilogy, and it is likely to be intentional for whatever reasons the author has.

The movie has toned down that influence: the film’s LJ is much more spunky and athletic than the novels’ version is. Jenny Han did her best to show LJ as a young woman who is just coming into her womanhood throughout the trilogy…with some humor, but also some drama and tragedy. The movie has that too, but the humor is more boosted, just as it is in the ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ film.

True, we did discuss it before: the LJ novels feel more like a ‘Maid in Manhattan’, not ‘Fools Rush In’ or ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ (mostly, in the latter case). The author put the emphasis on romance, not on humor, while the movie feels more like a mixture of two. This makes it better than the ‘Insatiable’ series, as far as YA Netflix productions go, while ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ differ from it by trying to go international and beyond their rom-com parameters.

Listen: there are still plenty of accolades for ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ coming from…within the U.S. Abroad, even in Canada, there are more sceptics than in the U.S., and it is beginning to show. ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ is an American movie, or maybe even an Asian-American one, but it isn’t an Asian one, and if the American society doesn’t understand the differences, then it has problems. The American society, not the ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ movie. The latter does its job – it entertains. So does the LJ film, as well as the original novels, (in both cases). It’s just that LJ is less ambitious in its message or scope than ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ are, which makes sense, because Netflix isn’t Disney, and it isn’t as formidable as the big league movie companies are, either.

(Apparently, Netflix did offer to make ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ a part of its’ menu, but the director decided to go for the big screens instead. Small world).

Finally, about ‘Reverie’. So far, it is still uncertain if it will be renewed for a second season or not. That is not surprising – it got potential, but little excitement, and on occasion, it was known to focus on Sarah Shahi, (who plays Mara) and her legs a little too much. It is not exactly a hot mess, nor is it insipid as Marvel’s ‘InHumans’ had been; it is just rather lackluster and sometimes – it felt hollow, unsupported, loose.

That and the fact that it ripped-off Marvel’s AoS’ framework plotline, of course. Cannot forget that either. Not surprising, then, that the face of ‘Reverie’ is still hanging in the balance. Good luck to it, though.

This is it for now; see you all soon!

Crazy Rich Asians - Aug 19

…‘Crazy Rich Asians’ have aired this month at last. Already there are issues with them. How come?

Firstly, the plot. Despite the statement that the movie drew its’ material from the entire trilogy, it is still largely based on the first novel, the initial ‘Crazy Rich Asians’. Before anyone begins to argue, let us immediately agree that yes, the novel is about the nouveau-riche of Asia, the new aristocracy that is supplanting the old, European one, so calling the movie derived from the novel some sort of a breakthrough is a misdirection. …Or is it?

Before we discuss this matter further, let us look on the more technical aspects of the movie, how it is different from the novel. One notable difference is Astrid’s plot line – in the movie, it is downplayed; she and her husband break up and this is it. In the novels,…it lasts for the entire trilogy, and it is one of the least comic plotlines there, too. It is an inverted mirror to Rachel and her man, Astrid married outside of her class, a poorer man, and their marriage didn’t work, as he became a jerk and a stereotypical domineering husband, (in a bad, non-sexual way). Fortunately, her ex-boyfriend was there to save the day and help her and her son, so it all works out at the end of the trilogy. Yay! …But with fewer laughs than you might think.

…That is actually an interesting point. Not unlike the LG trilogy by Jenny Han, KK’s CRA trilogy is not exactly as comic as the movie may make you think; there are plenty of comic moments, but both trilogies have plenty of drama, too. This is reminiscent of yet another supposed rom-com movie, ‘Maid in Manhattan’, back in 2008. Remember? It has starred J-Lo and some other celebrities? It was a good movie, but it was not exactly a comedy, for a number of reasons.

One is that J-Lo is not really a comic actress; Salma Hayek, (re: ‘Fools Rush In’ from 1997), is, but J-Lo is not. Her current TV series, ‘Shades of Blue’, is a very good TV show, but it certainly is not a comedy either, and ditto for ‘Maid in Manhattan’ film. There were a number of comic/funny scenes in that movie, but as a rule, J-Lo was not in them. Funny just does not come naturally to her, and neither does romance, apparently: there was zero chemistry and Ralph Fiennes in all of the scenes that they were together, which was bad, because they were the lead characters in the movie.

Mind you, ‘Maid in Manhattan’ had plenty in common with the CRA film – both films talk about social inequality; both movies are set in big, famous cities, and etc. Both movies are also American, but mayhap we are getting distracted?

No, not really: another major difference between the CRA film and the novels is the downplay of the fact that Rachel’s biological father was an important member of China’s communist party – it is not featured as prominently in the movie as it is in the book.

…This was actually a point of realization for me, when I read the novel: it was set in Singapore (primarily), yet the characters came across mostly as Chinese, so I actually did some research about Singapore and China and learned, to my embarrassment, that Singapore wasn’t all that close to China, but actually quite far away, which brings us to the next point.

Firstly, the critics of the movie are not wrong: CRA is downplaying the multiethnicity of Singapore, focusing primarily on its’ elite, which is apparently mainly of Chinese origin, both in the movie and the novels. As such, it raises an issue: just how much of making the movie is an international win?

This brings us to Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’, (released in Feb 2018). It is a different movie from CRA, but it had been handled similarly – it was proclaimed to be an African movie, an Afrofuturistic movie, and etc. – and then people began to examine it more closely, look at the technical angles, and began to realize that it actually didn’t have too much to do with Africa, especially with real life Africa, such as it is: Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’ featured an idealized American, or Afro-American, version of Africa, which is another matter altogether – and the same thing is going down with CRA. It has less to do with real life Asia and more with a stylized, fictional Asia of the novels’ author first and the movie’s actors, filming crew, scriptwriters, the director, etc. second. It is still a very impressive feat of cooperative achievement, very important for Asian-American actors in Hollywood, but just like ‘Black Panther’, CRA appears to be reaching out for being a movie of international importance – and this is where it falls flat, as Asians abroad, (especially those native to Singapore), have very different opinions of it than the people back in U.S. do, and it shows, as all the hype about CRA the movie is dying down already.

Does CRA matter? Yes, because right now U.S. is wrestling with the temptation of getting rid of its’ international utopia…for good. This is an ambiguous move, not because if the States do it, it is the end of the official-unofficial Pax Americana that has been going on since the end of the Cold War. Fewer people outside of U.S.A. want to get rid of it than the Americans pretend, but it is enough for the Americans to grow increasingly disillusioned with the utopia that they have been building since the 1970s, actually, and this is not good either. If U.S. stops even trying being an international arbiter, (as they have pretended to be in the post-Cold War years), this is it. The end of an international democracy and the end of a world that we have lived in for more than twenty years by now. What comes next will be different – just different, but we got sidetracked.

No, not really. CRA is a good movie adaptation of a novel, with plenty of technical differences from its book cousin. This is a regular occurrence for such films – the LG movie is different from the book as we have discussed earlier, and so’s ‘Freaky Friday’, or rather – its’ latest reboot, (that has also aired in August 2018). Somehow, people forgot that in the original novels… that is right, there were at least two novels – in the first, mom and her daughter switched places, in the second – a father and son, and they were all one family, a stereotypical nuclear family. In most of the adaptations, the family usually misses a father, and the son is much younger than his sister is. Somehow, there was never any stink raised over this odd development, so there is that. The latest FF movie version was wonderful all the same, too, but we are talking about CRA here.

…And it is the same thing. Whatever justified criticism CRA’s message might be bringing forth, the setting – the city of Singapore – well, does not. Everyone likes it, but many people loved ‘Black Panther’s’ Wakanda too, and let us be honest: while the setting can have some importance to the plot, (i.e., in ‘Main in Manhattan’, Manhattan and NYC did play an important role in having the plot go along), people usually stay to watch any movie for its’ actors – and this is what they’ve done for CRA: they watched it, and they judged it. As a movie, CRA is a success; as an attempt to affect real life politics, especially outside of the U.S., it is not so much, just as ‘Black Panther’ was not, (do people even talk officially about that film anymore?), so let us just accept it and move on.

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

Insatiable II - Aug 8

Life cannot be avoided, and while it can be changed, even that is not done easily. The end of the introduction, now onto more pleasant – and unreal – topics.

Firstly, more info about the ‘Insatiable’ series proper. Just like the trailer, the series itself is a bunch of good ideas executed badly, an approach that can, well, backfire onto the original messages; there are some scenes in the episodes that cast a bad light on the entire ‘me too’ movement in real life, (where it already encounters issues not foreseen by its’ makers), for example.

Again, this is no end of the world, ‘Insatiable’ can fix it, if it survives beyond the first season; and if it does not, that is the end of that. Debbie Ryan used to star in Disney shows, so she still got some momentum left, most likely, and will survive that setback too. Whether Netflix and co. can afford it in the increasingly toxic and politic atmosphere of the U.S. society is another matter.

This brings us to MCU, because as we have discussed earlier, it, and especially AoS, had its own share of problems regarding good ideas depicted badly. This time, though, people have pointed out that ABC, aside from AoS, AC and ‘InHumans’ had also fiddled with a TV series called ‘Most Wanted’ that was supposed to star Nick Blood and Adrienne Palicki, aka Hunter and Morse from AoS. But! ‘Most Wanted’ failed on its pilot episode level, so it does not count. It certainly matters – Blood did return to AoS in S5: for a single episode, where his role was almost superfluous and unnecessary on one hand, and for an interview, which was very brief and perfunctory too. There’s clearly some bad blood between AoS (MCU?) and those two actors, something that AoS (and the rest of MCU?) could do without…so it is unlikely that ‘Most Wanted’ will appear on TV, or at least – not as how it was initially planned.

The other possibility is regarding ‘Damage Control’, which was a subsidiary of S.H.I.E.L.D., or something related, that was supposed to fix S.H.I.E.L.D.’s mistakes on a physical, obvious level. There were rumors about a show based on that back in AoS S3, but nothing came out of it, even the rumors died, so it is hard to say just how likely that a show like that will happen.

This brings us to the movies in general. The month of August 2018 brings us such diverse films as ‘The Meg’, which can be called ‘Not Another Fictional Shark Monster Movie’. I do not remember if we have discussed in detail or not why the fictional megalodon does not have much in common with the real life shark that died out during the Miocene-Pliocene epochs, but it is irrelevant; ‘The Meg’ is coming to the movie screens, and everyone sounds excited; couldn’t someone make a sea monster movie starring a good old-fashioned sea serpent instead? Now that would be unusual!

And then there are the ‘Rich Crazy Asians’, yet another movie-version of a novel. It already sounds like an opportunity for Hollywood’s Asian-American actors. Yay! However, the novel itself? It is a soap opera-drama-etc. with only some ethnic Asian flavor; having read it, I found it actually bland; there are some Asian features in the novel, but mostly as decoration; beneath it, ‘Rich Crazy Asians’ is generic, and it showed: the sales of novel and its’ sequels, (again, it is a trilogy), were very low. Maybe the movie will be better; so far, it is anyone’s guess…

Well, this is it for now; see you all soon!