Kurt Pankau Dot Com

🥷 She's the devil in disguise... [SPOILERS FOR DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN ] The first season of Daredevil: Born Again  ends on an interesting cliffhanger. Kingpin has become the mayor of New York City and has turned a bunch of corrupt cops into his own private army at the Red Hook dock in Hell's Kitchen. He's declared martial law and his "task force" are executing masked vigilantes--or anyone they can put a mask on while no one is looking--with impunity while donning Punisher regalia. They've holed up in the port in a fortified position and taken Frank Castle, the actual Punisher, hostage along with a host of New York's wealthy elite. Daredevil is set to go in and start busting heads, but realizes that he cannot win, since he's hopelessly outnumbered and sporting a fresh gunshot wound. So instead he goes to ground. And starts talking about drumming up an army. The tease here is that Daredevil, a.k.a. Matt Murdock the lawyer without fear, intends to reform ...

 🧝‍♀️ Because I'm Sick of Myself When I Look at You... The Crime:  Loki The Guilty Party: Series creator Michael Waldron, probably? Overview: Instead of multiverse shenanigans from a trickster god, we get a lazy, plodding, and kinda icky character drama that's bogged down with franchise building. Why I Hate It... Loki  on Disney+ has, at the very least, an excellent pitch. At the midpoint of  Avengers: Endgame  an alternate-timeline version of Loki escapes the Battle of New York with the Tesseract and is now traversing space and time causing mischief before ultimately stumbling across Kang the Conqueror. There's a lot you can do with that premise. There are also a few unique storytelling challenges that come packaged with it. The Loki that audiences know has undergone a lot of character growth that this version has not. He's also a very big and bombastic character who's something of a punching bag. This is all well and good for villains and sidekicks, but it c...

😈 He's a Tramp, But I Love Him... Since taking over LucasFilm, Disney has developed a bit of a scoundrel problem. Not that there's too many, per se --scoundrels make for great characters. Han Solo is one of the most iconic scoundrels in all of cinema. But since they started making  Star Wars  content, Disney has gone all-in on anti-heroes, scamps, and ne'er-do-wells. The problem is, though... they kind of suck at writing them. I mentioned this being one of the main problems plaguing  The Book of Boba Fett , but it's endemic to the franchise at this point and goes back at  least  as far as  Rogue One . Now, don't get me wrong, I liked  Rogue One  quite a bit, and not just because I was crushing super hard on Felicity Jones at the time. But think about Jyn Erso's character progression in that movie. And if your immediate reaction to that question is "What character progression?" then you know exactly what I'm talking about. Jyn makes practical...

🚀 Any Trick In The Book, Now Baby... The Crime:  The Book of Boba Fett The Guilty Party: Jon Favreau Overview: Less a TV show than a collection of fan service and poorly-executed ideas all chess-pieced together into a meaningless action set-piece finale. Why I Hate It... Do you know the difference between a story and a premise? This isn't a set up to a joke or anything. It is, rather, the sort of question that comes up if you spend enough time hanging around with writers. A premise is simply an idea. For it to be a story  you need a character journey rooted in the choices of the protagonist. You need stakes. You need agency. You need an internal conflict that must be overcome. If you don't have that central character journey, then all you're left with is just a bunch of stuff that happens, divorced from meaning or consequence--full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. This is the classic amateur writer mistake. Newbie writers  love  a good premise. They ...

💍 ... Comes Great Responsibility... I'm a more-ardent-than-average Tolkien fan. I've read The Silmarillion . I've read Lord of the Rings  multiple times--and in fact am in the middle of yet another re-read. I've pondered the lore, studied the weird details like what happened to the other palantíri or why Aragorn is heir to both Gonder and Arnor. I'm not like a Stephen Colbert level of Tolkien nerd, but I'm up there. So I want you to keep that in mind as I ask the following question: Why does The Rings of Power  exist? I don't mean from a storytelling perspective. That's easy. Does it need to exist? Of course not. Does Amazon have the rights to the source material that would be necessary to tell the story properly? Hellz no. But is it nonetheless attached to a widely-beloved property and people will watch it anyway just so they can participate in the discourse? Certainly. And does it offer new filmmakers and artists a chance to offer a compelling and un...

🧝🏿 ... For Mortal Men Doomed to Die... Author's note: One thing I don't engage with at all in this essay is the notion of representation, not because it isn't important, but more because a lot of people more qualified than I am have already weighed in. Instead, I'm sticking to things that I am more familiar with: storytelling tools and white self-identity. So there's been no shortage of hubbub lately around color-blind casting in epic fantasy prestige television. People are getting awfully upset that there are black Targaryans, or black elves and dwarves in The Rings of Power . They claim that Tolkien intended The Silmarillion , the lore of which is the basis for The Rings of Power , as an ancient history of England, and that to put non-white people in it does not accurately reflect a time before widespread travel would allow for intercontinental race-mixing. And why would the Noldor or the Eldar or the proto-Hobbits be non-white? And others have pointed out that,...

  🕰️ Time is on my side, yes it is... The second season of Netflix's Russian Doll  is dropping next week. If you didn't watch the first season, it tells the story of Nadia, an NYC programmer who is struck by a car after her birthday party and finds herself stuck in a time loop. It's a darkly funny drama about helping others and forgiving yourself, and it had the kind of conclusion that prompts inane "The ending of ______ explained" think-pieces and YouTube videos. Similar to Encanto , this is a show where the thematic elements bleed into the literal narrative, and re-watching the first season has had me thinking about the ways that works. So, with that in mind, let's talk about non-diegetic storytelling. SPOILERS FOR SEASON 1 OF RUSSIAN DOLL... AFTER THREE PARAGRAPHS OF TABLE-SETTING Let's do some vocabulary work. Diegesis is the world of the story. It's what characters are aware of and interacting with. You frequently hear this term in the context o...

The long-anticipated live-action adaptation of Robert Jordan's epic fantasy cycle The Wheel of Time  landed on Amazon Prime last weekend. I've watched the first three episodes and I have opinions! I'm a fan of the books, but I had a decidedly mixed reaction to the show. There are things I really like about it. I like the diverse casting. If there were ever a property that could be diversified while still holding to its medieval sword-and-sorcery roots, it's this one. This is the series that asks the question: "What if desert bedouins were Celts, but also ninjas?" I like the location shots. They're beautiful and unique, and very clearly not shot in New Zealand. I loved the design of Shadar Logoth. And I'm mostly fine with the changes from the books so far, with one big Perrin-shaped exception that I'll get into later. What I'm less thrilled about is the mostly unlikable characters, the grim-and-gritty vibe, and the need to shock and depress audi...

I have a theory about Westworld . It's not about the world outside the park or whether or not Ed Harris is a cylon. My theory has to do with the show itself, which seems fixated on the concept of narrative. Westworld  is already drawing comparisons to Lost  and Battlestar Galactica , two shows that trafficked heavily in managing and playing with viewer expectations, but they were still narrative shows that took place in their own worlds. Westworld  is a slightly different animal. Thematically, it's about entertainment that turns against its consumer. So while it has echoes of Lost  and BG , and the obvious antecedents of the 1973 Westworld  film and Jurassic Park , I think there's a strain of influences that are more akin to The Ring  and Mulholland Drive , horror movies that invite the viewer to be just as much of a victim as the characters on screen. The former posits a world in which viewing a film is a death sentence. The latter creates a distorted and ...