Kurt Pankau Dot Com

😈 Watch Out Boy, She'll Chew You Up... Last week I had occasion to watch the new  Predator: Badlands  and I gotta say... it did not work for me. I'm not saying it's a bad film, just that I didn't care for it. I watched it at the insistence of my wife, who had already seen it and was itching to watch it again. She thoroughly enjoyed it. And she usually has a pretty good barometer for how much I'm going to like a movie, too. But this one was a miss, and it was a miss for reasons that I can very clearly point to. I know exactly  what I didn't like about this movie. For one thing, it barely feels like part of the franchise. They didn't bring back Martin Sheen or Sissy Spacek, there was no mention of the murders, not even a stylistic nod to Terrence Malick and... hold on, I'm being told that this is actually a Predator  sequel, not a Badlands  sequel. Recalibrating... Anyway, I felt like talking about what I thought didn't work, because it comes down to ...

⛈️ Are You Telling This Story or Am I... [SPOILER ALERT] Over the holiday weekend we took the kids to see Thunderbolts*  at the theater. It was my second time seeing it, and I have to say that it really resonated with me. I'm still enjoying the MCU, even if the bloom has come off the rose in the public perception. And I freely admit that a lot of the recent content has been not great ( Eternals ) and occasionally quite bad ( Secret Invasion ). At the end of the day, I'm fine with sitting through a so-so movie if I get to spend it hanging out with characters I like. But Thunderbolts*  is actually pretty good, and it manages to tell a compelling story about something that you don't see represented well in mainstream blockbuster action flicks. Thunderbolts*  is a movie about depression. Which is something I've struggled with off-and-on for my entire life. Let's take a step back, shall we? One of the things that I love about speculative fiction is the way it externalize...

🤺 And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger... Two blog posts in a week. What madness is this!? Anyhoo... Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith  was back in theaters this week to celebrate its 20th anniversary. My kids are big Star Wars  fans and never got to see this one in the cinema, so we went. They had a lot of fun. The prequels are pretty popular with kids as well as the Zoomers who were kids when they came out. As for me? It... uh... has not gotten any better with age. But it is interesting to revisit it as an older filmgoer, free from the intoxicating hype of people still thinking the prequels were any good. And as someone who now spends a fair amount of time thinking about story structure and narrative, I have a better understanding of what doesn't work about it. But first! A little history! I saw Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith  at the Arclight in Hollywood, because it came out during the long weekend I spent living...

🥷 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 ...

🐀 Despite All My Rage... My wife has a sticker on her car that reads: "More rights for others doesn't mean fewer rights for you. It's not pie." It's one of those things that is so glaringly obvious that you shouldn't have to say it. And yet... we live in a country where sizeable portion of the population is voting for an "anti-woke" agenda, even if it will hurt them economically and infringe on their own rights--and potentially end democracy in America. How can people vote against their own self-interest like that? Are they that  motivated by racism, sexism, and homophobia? And the answer is no... but also yes... but also no. (But also yes.) The motivation isn't overtly about those things--although let's be very  clear that these people are  being racist, sexist, and homophobic, whether they're willing to acknowledge it or not. But what's actually motivating them is something more sinister, but also more understandable. It's abou...

⚠️ It's Dangerous To Go Alone... The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild  is my favorite installment in one of my all-time favorite video game franchises. It was the killer-app launch title for the Nintendo Switch and was hailed as a return to form for a series that had gone so deep on its own lore that... uh... I think the technical term is "it's head had disappeared up its own asshole." Breath of the Wild  reoriented the gameplay on exploration instead of story progression, and it was such a success that seemingly every other AAA series started putting out imitators. This is how we ended up with an open-world Sonic the Hedgehog  game, which is not a thing that needs to exist in any universe. While it's considered story-light for this series--most of the narrative is told in snippets of flashback--the storytelling is actually one of my favorite things about it. For starters, I am a sucker for being drip-fed parts of a narrative and being forced to fill in the gap...

🧑‍⚖️ It's a Little Bit Me, It's a Little Bit You... This last weekend was the 47th  Archon , the local speculative fiction convention here in St. Louis. I started attending as a panelist right after things opened up post-COVID. Needless to say, overall attendance was down and they were in pretty dire need of speakers, so I fast-tracked my way onto the "Pro" tier. I've gone every year since, and I've developed a bit of a reputation as a fantastic moderator. To wit, five minutes into my first Saturday panel. I'd just wrapped up my opening spiel and was about to start the discussion-proper when the panelist on my right turned to me with what I initially thought was exasperation. "Oh my god," she said, "can I bring you to all of my panels to moderate?" This panelist just happened to be the Toastmistress of the con. As Toastmistress, her schedule was stacked, so I can see her being extra appreciative. A badly-managed panel is exhausting to ...

🎄And I'll Walk as Damn Hard as I Please... It's time once again for the annual debate about whether or not Die Hard  constitutes a Christmas movie, and since y'all know how these things works I'm just going to skip to the part where I say: It is for some people and that's fine; it's not for me, but I don't care very strongly about it. I'm just not compelled by the arguments for it. Does it take place at Christmas? Yes. Is Christmas integral to the plot? Absolutely. Is it thematically about Christmas-y things? No. No, it's not. And before you bring up "it's about bringing family together," that is a stretch and you know it. Reconciling with your ex is not "bringing family together," not in the holiday sense, and oh yeah, bringing family together isn't even a Christmas movie theme. Christmas movies are about discovering or re-discovering the true meaning of Christmas, full-stop. Now, this can take a number of forms, and bri...

🥖 Well You Know We All Want To Change The World... Victor Hugo's magnum opus Les Misérables  is kind of like The Ramones. It's important, it's influential, and it's left an indelible mark on the culture... but is it actually all that good? Oh, there are great moments in it, to be sure. But, like, it's also got long boring stretches and is very much of its time in a way that's impenetrable to a modern consumer. And... okay, this metaphor is breaking down so I'm going to abandon it. It's weirdly structured, droning, and melodramatic. And yet it's oddly compelling. The best-known adaptation is the musical, originally penned in French in 1980, and whose English translation has been a staple of both the British and American stages for nearly four decades now. Additionally, there have been a total of nine film adaptations going back to the 1930s, plus a concert film, multiple miniseries, and an anime. And it just so happens that one of these adaptations i...

🦸 And 4, 4, 4 For My Headaches... Even the most devoted MCU fanboy (read: me) has to admit that the content of Marvel's "Phase 4" has been lackluster. For a little context, I started this rant while I was writing up my critique of the Loki  Disney+ series and it quickly became evident that I had too many digressions and needed to break this out into a separate post. But I think it's useful to keep Loki  in mind when considering all of this because the problems plaguing the post- Infinity-Saga  Marvel content are evident there in microcosm, from the re-arranged schedules to the inability to do anything interesting with a multiverse to the seeming lack of quality control especially in the scripting. Indeed, these problems started with Phase 4 and are continuing into whatever phase we're in now--5, I think?--but Loki  was the first indication that the wheels were coming off the wagon. So, with that table-setting out of the way, what are the problems with Phase 4? T...