Episode 172: Autumn 2023 Movie Roundup

In this week's episode, I take a look at the movies I watched during fall 2023. We also have a brief digression about historical inaccuracies in crossword puzzles.

This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of CLOAK OF WOLVES, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CLOAK OF WOLVES for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code:

OCTWOLVES

The coupon code is valid through November 8th, 2023, so if you find yourself wanting to get caught up before CLOAK OF EMBERS comes out soon, why not start with an audiobook?

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 172 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October the 22nd, 2023 and today we're going to talk about the movies I saw in autumn 2023. We also have a brief digression about historical inaccuracies in crossword puzzles. Before we get into that, let's do Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Cloak of Wolves as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Cloak of Wolves for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: OCTWOLVES-that's OCTWOLVES and that will also be in the show notes. The coupon code is valid through November 8th, 2023. So if you find yourself wanting to get caught up before Cloak of Embers comes out before the end of the year, why not start with an audiobook?

Now let's have an update on my current writing projects. I am 44,000 words into Cloak of Embers, which only puts me in Chapter 6 of 22 so far. So I think we would have to split up some of those chapters into smaller ones. I think Cloak of Embers is going to be the longest book I write in 2023 and I'm hoping I can get it out before American Thanksgiving at the end of November, though it might be long enough that it will slip to December, but we will see. In audiobook news, since I recorded the last episode, Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer is now available. You can get it at Audible, Google Play, Kobo, Chirp and all the usual audiobook stores. Brad is hard at work on Dragonskull…what is the next one? I don't remember off the top of my head. That's how many Dragonskull books I've written. I can't remember the title was off the top of my head, but Brad is hard at work on the seventh one, which is Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock, and so hopefully we can get that out before the end of the year.

00:01:56 History Lesson via Incorrect Crossword Puzzle Clue

Now for a brief digression into historical inaccuracies in crossword puzzles. Recently, someone I knew was working on a crossword puzzle, and one of the prompts was “Sacker of ancient Rome”-three letters across and the answer was “Hun” and that is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong! The Huns never sacked Rome. The Huns did, however, sack a lot of the Western Roman Empire. In the 400s AD, the Western Roman Empire had entered its final decline, with a lot of its foreign territory getting carved up into new barbarian kingdoms. The Huns were a group of Eurasian nomads and were indirectly one of the causes of the collapse of the Western Empire. Their migration west had inspired a lot of terrified tribes to flee west as well to get away from them. Those terrified tribes became the barbarian invasions that overran much of the Western empire, but the Huns were still coming from the east. Under the leadership of their king Attila, the Huns became even more formidable, capable of taking walled and fortified cities, which was traditionally difficult for nomadic horsemen to do. Anyway, the Romans and their Visigothic allies had previously repulsed the Huns at The Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451 AD.

Attila returned the next year and essentially destroyed northern Italy and his army pushed towards Rome. Emperor Valentinian the Third sent envoys to meet with Attila at the River Po and one of those envoys was Pope Leo the First and no one knows exactly what happened next. According to one story, when Atilla met Pope Leo, he saw Saint Peter and Saint Paul flanking the Pope in all their holy radiance with drawn swords in their hands, promising Attila that he would die if he entered Rome. So impressed was Attila that he turned his army around, left Italy, and Leo was credited as the savior of the city.

The truth is probably somewhat more prosaic. Attila’s army was running out of supplies, since Italy had already suffered a couple of bad harvests before Attila had burned down most of the northern half of the peninsula, which as you can imagine, did not help. In addition, a serious disease, probably dysentery, was spreading through Atilla's army. The Eastern Roman Emperor had sent an army of his own to attack the Huns’ current homelands in central Europe on the Danube, and until Attila to go deal with that problem. Another account says that Atilla’s advisers feared that Attila might suffer the same fate as the Visigothic Alaric, who died shortly after sacking Rome a little over forty years earlier. There is a good chance that Atilla was superstitious in a way it is hard for the modern mind to grasp, but until the start of modern science and the universities in the Middle Ages, people generally did not distinguish between natural and supernatural causes for events. Considering Alaric’s fate might not have been that outlandish for Attila when it came to his calculations. Pope Leo was also a man of great intelligence and charisma.

Perhaps he simply pointed out all these facts to Atilla and the Hunnic king, knowing that he was overextended and potentially in serious trouble, decided that the possibility of divine wrath was an acceptable face-saving excuse to turn around. We'll never know what happened at that meeting, but whatever the reason, Attila turned his army around and left Italy without attacking Rome. The new Eastern Emperor had stopped paying tribute to the Huns and Attila planned to deal with him next, but he died of a nosebleed on his wedding night in 453 AD. Attila’s sons immediately embarked on a civil war with each other and the Hun’s empire fell apart in short order. So the Huns never sacked Rome. Granted a lot of other people did, in fact sack Rome in the 400s AD, but the Huns never did. And that crossword puzzle annoyed me so much that I just spent the last five minutes talking about it!

00:05:24 Main Topic: Autumn 2023 Movie Reviews

Now on to our main topic, the movies and streaming shows I watched over autumn 2023. We are well in fall now, with winter just over the horizon and that's means it's time to discuss those shows and movies. As always, we will start from my least favorite and work up to my favorite. So we'll start with The Flash, which came out in 2023. This movie very famously failed at the box office, and it's not hard to see why. It's like the CG artists finally had their revenge on Warner Discovery for being overworked and underpaid because a lot of the movie’s CG looks like something a beginner might crank out in an older version of Unity or Daz Studio. Plus there's all these various serious crimes that the lead actor has been accused of, which makes the main character rather less likeable. Also The Flash, like many modern movies, simply cost way too much money to make, which meant it had to make big money to earn back a profit. If your movie cost $50 million to make, a $200 million return is good news. If it costs $220 million, you're in big trouble. To be fair, the movie was not without its good points. The Flash realizes he can run faster than the speed of light, which means he can travel back in time and attempt to save his mother (since she was murdered earlier), unfortunately doing so breaks the space-time continuum and threatens to destroy Earth and Flash tries again and again to set things right. Michael Keaton does well as an older Batman, and Supergirl was pretty cool.

There are also several genuinely funny bits in the movie. However, the movie leaned hard into two of my least favorite plot devices: time travel and the multiverse. The problem with time travel and the multiverse is that with an infinite number of alternate versions of the characters, the stakes ultimately become meaningless. I think it also shows how the superhero genre film has kind of run out of gas. Instead of telling new stories and new plots, all the multiverse movies are just churning up slightly alternate versions of old characters and stories. It's like playing a computer game you've already finished but making slightly different choices this time, like playing as a fighter/mage instead of a fighter instead of a thief/mage, or something. Overall grade: C-

Our next movie is Black Adam, which came out in 2023. I think this was slightly better than the Flash, though not by very much. There is a somewhat complicated back story involving the Council of Shazam, wizards, a demon possessed crown, and a magical champion. In the modern day, the story takes place in the nation of Kahndaq, which is clearly meant to evoke modern Egypt and Iraq. Kahndaq is currently ruled by a British mercenary company called Intergang, but don't worry about them. They just disappear halfway through the movie without any explanation. The leader of the resistance against Intergang is an archaeologist named Adrianna, and her son Amon, who is the kind of annoying kid who uses words like “neo-imperialist occupier” with a straight face while outrunning mercenaries on his skateboard. Anyway, Intergang is looking for the evil magic crown and Adrianna tries to stop them. In the process, she actually releases Teth-Adam, the champion of Kahndaq, from his tomb. Adam annihilates the mercenaries chasing Adrianna and then tries to come with term with the fact that he's been asleep for the last 5,000 years.

Now that would have been a more interesting movie: a superpowered Bronze Age warrior wakes up and tries to come to terms with the modern age. Or he decides that the decadent modern age needs enlightenment to reach proper Bronze Age warrior values. Instead, we get the Justice Society (I assume they're the store brand/Sam's Choice version of the Justice League), who show up to fight Black Adam. Unfortunately, after they convince Black Adam to stand down, the Crown's evil magic wakes up and chooses a host and only Black Adam can save the world. Like the Flash, this movie had its strong points. The CG was a lot better than in Flash, and Dr. Fate was an interesting character. So was Hawkman. Unfortunately, like The Flash, the plot didn't make much sense and relied too heavily on hooks to the rest of the DC universe. But on the plus side, no time travel. Overall grade: C

Next up is Haunted Mansion, which came out in 2023. This movie flopped at the box office, but it wasn't that bad for a movie about a Disney ride. It wasn't a scary movie. It was a scary movie in the tongue-in-cheek way that jack o’ lanterns are scary. Like, the original purpose of a jack o’ lantern in Iron Age societies was apparently to keep malevolent spirits at bay during the harvest. That was serious business back then, but now it's sort of play acting to entertain small children. Haunted Mansion is the same kind of tongue in cheek scariness, overlaid with quite a bit of comedy. The plot centers around a bitter and disillusioned former ghost hunter hired to use his ghost camera to take photos of spirits at a haunted house. The ghost hunter goes along with it, hoping for a quick payday, but quickly becomes ensnared in the curse surrounding the Haunted Mansion. He then has to team up with a crazy professor, a fast talking priest, a medium with good Yelp reviews, and a widowed doctor and her precocious son to defeat the malevolent Hatbox Ghost who rules over the ghosts of the Haunted Mansion. I am not, generally speaking, a big fan of the Disney corporation. But I am told that the movie has many Easter eggs referring to the original ride for people who appreciate that kind of thing. The movie didn't do well in theaters, but I expect it'll have a long afterlife on streaming. Overall grade: B-

Next up is Men in Black 3, which originally came out in 2012. The original Men in Black was a near perfectly constructed science fiction comedy. Men in Black 2 was good, but not quite on that level and I think Men in Black 3 falls at about the same ranking. In this one, a lethal alien named Boris the Animal breaks out of a secured lunar prison and embarks on a rampage of revenge against Agent K. To facilitate his vengeance, Boris steals a time travel device and goes back to 1969 to kill a younger K at a critical junction in the timeline. Once Agent J realizes what has happened, he obtains another time jump device and goes back to fix things. As I've mentioned many times before, I don't really like time travel stories. However, this one works because it's pretty funny. To make the time jump work, you literally have to jump off a building of sufficient height to trigger the device. The other comedy parts are good, and Josh Brolin does a pitch perfect impersonation of Tommy Lee Jones as the younger agent K. Overall grade: B

Next up is Men in Black International, which came out in 2019. I'd heard bad things about this movie, but it was actually quite enjoyable. Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth star as Agent M and Agent H. Based on the movie’s advertising, I thought Agent M would be an almost tediously infallible Girlboss character with Agent H as her dimwitted sidekick. Fortunately, this turned out not to be the case and both characters had considerably more depth. Agent M is a nerdy probationary agent who desperately wants to prove herself while Agent H is a charismatic, somewhat lazy hedonist who always manages to pull off his assignments in the end. Agent M's and Agent H’s first assignment together is to bodyguard an alien royal who promptly gets himself killed by two mysterious shapeshifting assassins. As things go haywire in the aftermath, the agents realized that the royal had a dark secret, and there's a traitor somewhere within the Men in Black. I thought it was an entertaining movie and probably should have done better than it did. Agent M and Agent H make a great comedy duo and they were also excellently funny bits. Liam Neeson was also good as Agent T, the commander of branch office, and there are no time travels or multiverses in this one. Overall grade: B+

Next up is Ahsoka, which came out in 2023. I would say Ahsoka is good but unfinished, since only two of the major plots get resolved and in such a way that it sets up future adventures. I realized the other the other day that Star Wars is the American equivalent to Doctor Who. The similarities are remarkable. One, both are long running sci-fi franchises. Two: but they're definitely not hard science fiction. Three: both are under the stewardship of large, ponderous, frequently ineffective organizations (whether Disney or the BBC). Four: both have spawned a vast maze of tie in novels and comics and games. Five: both have fandoms that act like religions, complete with a crazy fringe and six: and like religions that break into warring factions, both have fandoms that decide upon a particular era or releases the best one and argue vociferously about which part of the franchise is the best, with almost the same fervor as people arguing about whether Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, or John Calvin had the correct interpretation of the Bible. This isn't to be glib, but to know that the same self-destructive tribal instinct that humanity exhibits in politics and religion also seems to appear in far less serious arenas like football supporters and science fiction franchises, or even in something as silly as game console brands, as a single glance at an online argument about the respective merits of the Xbox and PlayStation will demonstrate. Anyway, that was a philosophical digression. Back to the Ahsoka show. It was better than I expected. Once again I thought that Ahsoka would be another tediously infallible Girlboss type character, but she was nothing like that. Instead she made several serious mistakes, faced enemies who were stronger than her, and had to learn and adapt and grow to survive her challenges. In other words, a compelling protagonist. All the performances from the actors were good, especially the late Ray Stevenson. His Baylan Skoll character really stole Episode 4, and if this was destined to be Mr. Stevenson's last performance, at least it was a great one. Diana Lee Inosanto was great as Morgan Elsbeth, who asked to be one of the single most competent villains in all of Star Wars- evil, but she gets results.

I also really liked the way the lightsaber duels are presented. They seem more like something out of a samurai movie. The combatants are careful of their footing and their stances, only to explode into some motion, rather than the more acrobatic flipping and spinning around in the prequel movies. I have to admit, in the publicity stills for the show I kind of thought that the show's version of Grand Admiral Thrawn looks sort of like Elon Musk transmogrified into a Smurf, but that was just a bad angle. Combined with his voice and mannerisms, Lars Mikkelsen’s performance as Thrawn really works. I suspect Mr. Musk only wishes he had this version of Grand Admiral Thrawn’s air of gravitas and authority. The show ends on sort of an Empire Strikes Back style cliffhanger. I hope the story will continue, but I have my doubts. Disney wasn't in great shape even before the writers and actors’ strikes, and I wonder if the company is simply going to run out of financing for ambitious projects like Ahsoka. One more point: the soundtrack by the Kiner family was A+ work, with the Japanese style musical motifs for the lightsaber duels, the long, ominous horns from the Night Sisters, and the blasting pipe organ from when Thrawn makes his return. Overall grade: B+

Next up is Collateral, which came out in 2004. This is a superb neo-noir thriller. Jamie Foxx stars as Max, a hapless LA taxi driver who picks up Vincent, played by Tom Cruise, who claims to be in town to secure signatures for a real estate deal. Vincent offers Max $600 to drive around for the night and in need of the money, Max agrees, except it turns out Vincent is actually a hit man in area to kill five targets, and when Max realizes what is happening and tries to bail, Vincent forces him to continue. I really like this one. Tom Cruise's perpetual intensity works very well in the villain role, and the psychological duel between Max and Vincent was compelling to watch. Vincent claims that his targets are bad people who deserve their fates. But once Max figures out that Vincent's final target most definitely does not deserve her fate, the race is on to save the target's life.

The movie did have the overused trope where the LAPD gets mad the FBI is taking over their case, which was a thing even way back in Die Hard. In fact, that was a major plot point in Die Hard, now that I think about it. In real life, the FBI's interaction with local law enforcement mostly involves providing consulting and lab services and local law enforcement is actually often eager to hand a troublesome case over to the Feds because it then becomes somebody else's problem. I also thought the soundtrack seemed a bit off in the first half of the movie, but those are minor quibbles. Collateral was a thoroughly enjoyable thriller. Definitely recommend if you like the genre of film. Overall grade: A.

That brings us to the last movie I saw this autumn and I think it would tie with Collateral for the favorite thing I saw this fall and that is A Haunting in Venice, which came out in 2023. This is the third of Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot movies. I really like the first one he did, Murder on the Orient Express, but I thought the second one he did, Death on the Nile, was only so-so, which was disappointing because Death on the Nile is, in my opinion, one of the best of the Hercule Poirot books. But A Haunting in Venice is on par with Orient Express. The movie takes place in 1947 and Hercule Poirot, soul-sick and weary after the horrors of World War II and all the depths of human evil he has seen in those cases, has decided to retire in Venice. His friend Ariadne Oliver (Agatha Christie’s self-parodying author insert in the Poirot novels) turns up to ask him to help debunk a medium preying upon a grieving mother. Poirot immediately demonstrates the medium is a fraud, but soon afterwards someone tries to kill him, and a few minutes later the medium herself is killed. It's then up to Poirot solve the case, even as the suspects become increasingly convinced that supernatural powers are behind the killing. This movie also had one of my favorite plot devices from the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie: the rationalist detective confronted by a seemingly supernatural mystery.  Branagh's provision of Poirot is darker, rather more angsty than the book version, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Tina Fey was also an excellent choice to play Ariadne Oliver. Overall grade: A.

So those are the movies I saw this autumn, and check back towards the end of winter, when we'll do a winter 2023-2024 Movie Roundup episode. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. It really does help. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.