Castlevania Season 3 Review

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRETY OF THE NETFLIX CASTLEVANIA SHOW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. 

With the recent coronavirus outbreak canceling all my classes, I’ve suddenly found myself with an abundance of free time. Like most people, I decided to spend said free time catching up on shows I haven’t finished yet. One of these shows was among the handful of Netflix originals I still bothered with – I am, of course, talking about the latest season of Castlevania.

Some context: the first two seasons of Castlevania dedicate themselves to retelling the general plot of the Castlevania games. Dracula wants to destroy humanity, and a Belmont must stop him. This plotline ended with Dracula’s death at the climax of the second season. With the games’ proverbial script concluded, the third season had much more creative freedom than the first two.

 Going in, I had two expectations. I wanted to see what was established in the first two seasons be built upon, and I wanted the plot to go in a direction unbeholden to the games. The question is: did this season of Castlevania accomplish these goals?

After watching the entirety, I’d have to say…kind of.

If there’s one word I could use to sum up Castlevania’s third season, it’d be schizophrenic. The writing quality varies drastically. It dedicates entire episodes to setting up a cultist’s evil plan…only to reveal the entirety of said plan in a brief expository monologue. It gets us invested in several new characters…and then reveals that said characters were evil all along, for no discernible reason other than shock value. Overall, it’s a choppily-made season that feels like it was only made to set up the fourth.

Some structural problems shared with the first two seasons also remain. The main one is its overreliance on exposition, particularly through dialogue – head writer Warren Ellis’s experience is mainly with comic books as a medium, and it shows. There’s also the ham-fisted anti-authority messaging that was most blatant in the first season, except somehow it’s even more inept – a zealous bishop is one thing, but a town judge that moonlights as a child murderer is another.

The character arcs are similarly choppily done. We see Alucard try to break out of his shell by training two Japanese vampire hunters, only for said hunters to backstab him and force him to mirror his father’s actions. Isaac starts to question his misanthropy in several genuinely moving scenes, only to double down on them when he must kill an evil wizard.

Castlevania’s third season is at its strongest, I feel, when it’s a philosophical meditation on themes like human nature, power, and reality. And to its credit, it does do that effectively sometimes – like I said, the writing quality is schizophrenic. But overall, it’s rather choppily made.

Captain Marvel Review (Spoiler-Free)

Meh. It was okay.

If you’re a hardcore anti-feminist dudebro looking for ammo for your agenda, please look elsewhere. I don’t care about the politics surrounding the film and just want to watch good movies, and if you’re trying to polarize me one way or the other, you should probably just piss off.

Also, if you’re a hardcore anti-feminist dudebro in general, grow the fuck up. Seriously.

The fact is, Captain Marvel has merits – it does a couple of cool things for the MCU’s worldbuilding, there are a couple of neat twists, and some of the jokes made me laugh. It’s just that what merits it has aren’t enough to make up for an ultimately mediocre film.

Brie Larson is, thankfully, the highlight of the film. She does the best that she can with the screenplay, but Captain Marvel is so inconsistently characterized that it’s hard to care about her. One moment she’s a super-serious space cop, the next she’s trading quips with Samuel L. Jackson, and then there’s this really forced “girl power” aspect to her characterization near the end.

The cinematography is all over the place. It can be confusing at times, and there’s nary a hint of directorial style anywhere. Now, it’s unfair to expect everyone to be Taika Waititi or James Gunn, but come on people. The fight scenes are at least mildly entertaining, if not on the same level as Winter Soldier’s or Civil War’s.

Ultimately, there’s nothing Captain Marvel does that other MCU films don’t do better. Guardians 2 is a better space film. Thor: Ragnarok is a better film about a ridiculously strong protagonist. First Avenger is a better time period piece. Winter Soldier is a better spy thriller. It kind of feels like the TGI Friday’s of MCU movies; okay-to-mediocre at a lot of things, but not the best at any of them.

And that sucks, because I’ve seen the impact a film about a marginalized group can have. Black Panther and Wonder Woman made waves when they dropped. Captain Marvel, by comparison, is just…eh. Another MCU film to add to the list. Competently made but little else, and certainly not memorable enough to rank on the same level as those two films.

Buybust Review

Erik Matti uses his signature style to take on the most pressing issue facing our country right now. But does he deliver?

Walking into the theater, I was admittedly expecting something more from the film than just punching and shooting. After all, this was the creator of On the Job, one of the best commentaries on the state of Philippine politics today. Because of that, I left the cinema feeling…unfulfilled. I expected something more intelligent.

It’s helpful to think of Buybust not as a political thriller, but as a 70s-style action movie. Buybust’s social commentary is admittedly snappy, but – unlike previous Matti work On the Job – seems to be there mostly to be provocative. In other words, it’s just there as window dressing: there’s no serious attempt at having an in-depth discussion of the War on Drugs, it’s just used as a veneer over all the punching and shooting.

And honestly? I’m OK with that. Part of me should probably be offended by the use of such a sensitive topic for shock value, but that’s where the good parts of the film come in. Buybust’s real strength is in its well-choreographed fight scenes – there’s one scene that gives me so much respect for Anne Curtis, at least until the next shitty rom-com with her name on it comes out. The level of work put into this film is stunning, and shows readily.

To summarize, go see Buybust, but don’t go in expecting any particularly deep insights about the Philippines’ drug war. It’s just punching and shooting; really well-made punching and shooting, but punching and shooting nonetheless.

Why I Don't Like Duterte

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve written a fair few alarmist pieces, all of which I now regret writing. (Thankfully, most of them haven’t gotten much attention.) Considering this, I think it’s worthwhile to approach my stance from a more dispassionate point of view, so I’ll be explicit about this. My primary issue with Duterte isn’t partisan, it’s philosophical.

I’ll be direct. Duterte seems to be operating under utilitarian logic. Utilitarianism here is defined as “the doctrine that actions are right if they are useful or for the benefit of a majority.” And as Edgar Lores outlines on joeam.com, this seems to be one of the justifications for the current War on Drugs.

Presidential Spokesperson Ernesto Abella has made statements consistent with this characterization. Here, he is reported as saying that our culture cares more for the “common good” than it does for “individual rights.” In addition, he compares Duterte’s leadership style with Singapore’s.

Comparisons between Duterte and Singapore seem to be a recurring theme within the current administration, so I don’t take that as a one-off thing. Singapore, of course, operates under a highly utilitarian ethos – Lee Kuan Yew ensured as much. Like Duterte (via Abella), Lee believed that the benefit of the majority outweighed all individual concerns.

So with that being said, why do I resent this utilitarian worldview so much? Because at heart, I’m a classical liberal, and – drawing on Kant – I resent this form of utilitarianism because it doesn’t respect the dignity of the individual.

Pictured: Someone who dislikes this state of affairs as much as I do.

As one Rajan Rishyakaran points out, individual rights do not matter in Singapore. For instance, if my freedom of speech proves inconvenient for the majority, then the government has the right to censor me so that a few more people can be better off. This is inimical to the values I was raised with, values which state that no end justifies violating my human rights as a means.

(Again, allow me to emphasize that I am deliberately trying to be dispassionate about this. So if I’m coming off as cold here, that’s why.)

And honestly, if people believe in all this utilitarian shit? That’s fine by me. As long as they don’t try to force it on me. That’s the reason I don’t say much about Singapore, and why I didn’t criticize Duterte until it became apparent to me that he was running for President. 

It's when such utilitarian logic is elevated to a national scale that it becomes my concern. It's an existential threat to me in both senses of the word – it attacks both my chances of living to see another day and the reason why I live. This is all just a means of pre-emptive self-preservation.

Thank you for your time.

A High and Lonely Destiny: Lewis On Magicians

“Ours is a high and lonely destiny.”

Many fantasy novels involve wizards. Thanks to Harry Potter, most of these novels deal with wizards positively; they are beneficent and friendly towards the protagonists, if not protagonists themselves. If there are evil wizards, there are just as many good wizards, and in the end these good wizards will win.

The Magician’s Nephew is one of the few fantasy novels that portrays wizards in a wholly negative light. The only two wizards in the novel are titular magician Andrew Ketterley and Jadis, better known as the White Witch of sequel the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Andrew is a preening, vain buffoon who in his cowardice sends two children into an unknown realm instead of going himself. The White Witch, meanwhile, is an arrogant and entitled individual who kills an entire planet with the powerful Deplorable Word spell, simply out of frustration for losing a war to her older sister.

The rationale they use for their actions is that they are supermen, bound to a “high and lonely destiny” which allows them to ignore common moral laws. Although they speak very highly and very well of themselves, even child protagonist Digory can see that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes – in his words, they’re just individuals who think they can do what they like with no consequences.

Not exactly what Nietzsche had in mind.

One could rationalize this away as Lewis’ strong Christianity and resultant contempt for magicians – however, I believe this does a disservice to him. Lewis wasn’t a Jesus-obsessed Luddite, he was a very well-read and well-spoken professor at Oxford University. A close reading of the text reveals a very different stance; in The Magician’s Nephew, magic is a metaphor for science.

What makes this stance clear is the novel’s ending. Aslan mentions that soon humanity may create a weapon with power comparable to the Deplorable Word’s. Written near the beginning of the Cold War, it would be obvious to then-contemporary readers what weapon Aslan was referring to.

I find this metaphor fascinating because of how well it lines up with then-contemporary science fiction trends. C.S. Lewis was in fact a science fiction writer himself! Even his Narnia books incorporate science fiction themes other than the ones being discussed – the concept of Narnia time was derived from Einstein’s theory of relativity, for instance.

Before WWII, science fiction was focused on the wonders and marvels of technology. Humanity (well, Europe, at least) had progressed to a point where they no longer had to wage wars! Science fiction reflected that; in the world of sci-fi, enough technology made the need for war obsolete.

This notion was, of course, always complete Eurocentric nonsense. Even before WWII we had the British-induced Indian Famine and Leopold’s abuses in the Congo, to name a few. The War just brought human cruelty to Europe’s front door, eradicating any lie Europe’s people could use to justify naivete and apathy towards it.

World War II thoroughly disillusioned everyone of that notion. The atomic bomb made people realize that technology gave us more destructive power, not less. Similarly, the Holocaust made it clear that human cruelty was not only alive but thriving on an industrial scale. More technology doesn’t curb the worst in humanity, it exacerbates it.

After WWII, we saw in writers a kind of fear. People realized that technology was, at its core, a kind of power; they had seen the worst excesses of this power with their own eyes. Instead of the wonders of new technology, writers wanted to deal with the people that created and used said technology. And the conclusion they came to was as contemptuous of those people as Lewis was of his magicians.

C.S. Lewis was not concerned with what magical laws the rings or the Deplorable Word operated under. Rather, he was concerned with the kind of people who had access to it. It didn’t matter to him if magic worked through the law of sympathy, the law of attraction or through nuclear fission. What matters was what it could do, and what kind of person would seek it out.

To my knowledge, the real world does not have magic words that can kill every living being within it. It does, however, have weapons capable of similar levels of destruction. And the people with access to them don’t have fancy titles like Magician or White Witch – their titles sound more like President or Prime Minister.

So, do you trust these people?

Pictured: U.S. President Donald Trump, North Korean President Kim Jong-un, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

I know I don’t.

The Killing Joke, The Dark Knight Returns and how to do adaptations

The Dark Knight Returns film fucking rocks.

A lot of people forget that animated film is a fundamentally different medium than comic books. Comic books are a highly visual medium, but they still rely on words to convey ideas and feelings more than films do. By contrast, films have sound, light, motion – multiple ways of showing what they want to show. Conveyance is the keyword here; conveyance of ideas and feelings through careful use of all these elements.

Misunderstanding of conveyance is why The Killing Joke’s animated adaptation fell flat on its ass. The Killing Joke is painfully faithful at times, but is hamstrung by poor production values and a misunderstanding of the themes that made the original comic one of the definitive Batman stories. And even the stuff that got carried over was conveyed poorly, with some exceptions – the ending, for instance, is wonderfully done.

The Dark Knight Returns, on the other hand, understands exactly what made The Dark Knight Returns (and Frank Miller’s work, by extension) good, arguably better than what even Miller himself has displayed given the Dame to Kill For film. Because this movie is pure, raw, unfettered emotion, delivered by Peter Weller (RoboCop) with so much power and precision that you’d be forgiven for mistaking him for Batman himself.

Remember the scene where Batman interrogates the mutant on the rooftop? Here’s the relevant scene’s equivalent in the comic book.

Just as chilling on the page, but a direct adaptation would be long and dragging. The film understands this and adjusts accordingly. There’s no need for a monologue, just masterful usage of shots, angles and chillingly minimalistic voice acting to convey height, confusion and fear.

Hell, this is what made the original Legends of the Dark Knight short so good too. Look at the Mutant Leader fight scene:

It wouldn’t be as effective if we saw Batman breaking the Mutant Leader’s leg. There’s just a flash of lightning accentuated by the mutants’ (and Robin’s) shocked faces, followed by the rain washing the mud off Batman’s hunched, shadowed face.

That is what all adaptations should do. Don’t give me the comic book, except with moving pictures. If I wanted the comic book, I’d buy the comic book. Use the differences in the medium you’re adapting it in to convey the same themes and invoke the same emotions as the source material.

Both halves are available now on digital and DVD. Buy this masterpiece.

How Chester Helped Me

I always knew that Chester had a shitty life.

The thing about emotional songs is that independent of quality, I can always tell whether the emotions are real. Evanescence’s Bring Me To Life was fake. The Killers’ Mr. Brightside was real. Limp Bizkit’s Nookie and Simple Plan’s I’m Just A Kid were fake; You’re Beautiful, creepy as it was, was real. Hell, I could tell even if they were from the same band – Clocks was all real brooding, while Fix You was just Chris Martin smoking waaaay too much dope.

All of Chester’s songs were real. All of them.

Having grown past the age of 10, I can see why people dismiss Linkin Park’s discography so fast. Crawling and Numb seem like cheesy, over-the-top tracks dealing with ostensibly (and gravely in retrospect) serious topics. For a lot of people, those tracks seem more like some adolescent angst than very real and very adult pain.

But watching the videos on MTV was…this wasn’t something a teenager mad at his dad would make. All that imagery, the isolation, the vulnerability – all of that’s stuff only someone who’s been shaken, beaten and broken can come up with. Even as a kid I understood that this was all in his core, something he felt to the point that it defined him.

The thing is – when you make songs that are always real, people won’t always like them. That’s just how these things go. If you puke out everything you are on the disc tracks, sometimes the stuff that gets dredged out doesn’t look so good. But it’s sincere and when it blooms, it blooms and grabs people in ways that the most meticulously crafted fake song could never do.

I rediscovered Linkin Park at a very bad time in my life. I had yet to be diagnosed with depression, and…well, that’s a story for another post. Then through happenstance, I listened to Burning In The Skies and decided to give the band a second shot. That wasn’t a decision I regret making.

Ostensibly a parable about nuclear power and the possibility of Armageddon, Thousand Suns is as much the journey of one man as it is the journey of the whole human race. There are some weak tracks here and there, but as a whole the album is powerful and knows when to be subtle and when to be all-out.

I remember listening to When They Come For Me and feeling it. This went beyond simply immediate reactions to victimization, this was when you’d been used to exhaustion by others and just had enough of it all. This is what cynicism sounds like – when you’ve been hurt so badly that the only way you could live through it was to grow fangs of your own.

And the next track made me cry when I heard it. Dubbed simply Robot Boy, it took the singer of When They Come For Me and gave him a good, long look in the mirror. His defenses have made him strong, but they’ve taken something away from him, too – was all that cold, unflinching invulnerability worth the loneliness it brought as its price?

That’s something everyone has to answer on their own. Chester gave us his answer, and while the world is the poorer for it, I see no point in judging him for what he did. And while I don’t have my own answer, I’m grateful to him for asking me the question in the first place.

Thousand Suns was more than Linkin Park’s first legitimately great – not good, great – album. It was about a man who’d been torn apart, and his attempt at stitching himself back together.