Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special/Wednesday/1899
Before we dive into the bag of goodies for more holiday treats, we’d like to point out two recent articles on the blog, both of which are of pressing and immediate interest to all of the people who receive this newsletter. The first is a small offering of consideration for those of you buying for anyone in the Geek Nation; recommendations that you can purchase that will delight whomever you are buying for, with the assurances that your money won’t vanish into some billionaires’ moonbase retirement scheme.
Read The Shopping Notice from the NTAB Department of Trade and Commerce right here:
https://northtexasapocalypsebunker.com/2022/11/28/a-shopping-notice-from-the-n-t-a-b-department-of-trade-and-commerce-2022-christmas-edition/
The second post is an updated Public Service Announcements for all of the chefs, bakers, home cooks, and treatmakers who cannot wait to break out their tried and true baking recipes this time of year. It’s a simple, direct request that shouldn’t be controversial but somehow always is.
Please Keep Your Nuts to Yourself:
https://northtexasapocalypsebunker.com/2022/11/24/from-the-vault-keep-your-nuts-to-yourself/
I don’t make this request lightly, and I the fact that I have generously shared my nuts with all of you over the years should not be lost on any of you.
Podcastery
Over on the 42Cast, me and the gang have a big ol’ powwow about Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. If you like the good Doctor and can’t get enough learned discourse in your diet, this podcast is an excellent supplement to your recommended daily allowance: https://42cast.com/index.php/2022/11/23/the-42cast-episode-165-horror-story/
The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (Disney+)
Quill is missing Christmas because he got carried into space as a young man and missed out on X-Boxes. So, the gang shanghai—eh, you’re gonna watch this anyway, and the trailer spoils it—Kevin Bacon and take him back to Knowhere as a Christmas Present for the Star-Lord who has everything.
James Gunn invokes the spirit, but never the aesthetics, of the maligned Star Wars Holiday Special by showing us what a thoughtfully produced holiday extravaganza in space with music and animated sequences might look like, rather than one that was cobbled together on the fly with masking tape and too many cooks in the kitchen. I say this with all due respect to the former, but what good is history if we don’t learn from it?
The script is charming and everyone is the character that they are in the movies, which is nice, but the story and the execution of same is intentionally a Christmas Special. It’s best not to invoke things like “continuity” or “canon” and instead enjoy it for what it is: a really expensively-made Christmas card to all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe fans from the creatives involved with the series. It’s a bonus, a thing you weren’t expecting, and—I need to keep bringing this up—a thing your teenage comic book reading self never imagined seeing beamed into your home for your perusal. Mantis does Kung-fu. That should be enough.
I really liked the Christmas songs. And Kosmo is no longer in the background shots. As Christmas Specials go, I can think of 250 worse ones, all playing on the Hallmark Channel as we speak.
Wednesday (Netflix)
Teenage Wednesday Addams (and her younger brother Pugsley) aren’t really fitting in at public school, so our eponymous lead character is bundled off to Nevermore Academy, a private school for the Other, monstrous and human alike. Against her will, she is drawn into the school and its mysteries and secrets, but can Wednesday (and Thing) survive her perky blonde roommate?
This is a wonderful fusion of Charles Addams’ classic cartoons, the movie versions of The Addams Family, and something Tim Burton would have made. In fact, he directed some episodes, and you can see his fingerprints on some other things, too, like the design for the main monster. But here’s the thing: Tim Burton checked most of his ego at the door and just shot and directed the episodes with his usual kinetic grace. The storytelling is sharp, the script is sharper, and dark, dark humor runs through the show, pouring out of Wednesday’s mouth like sarcastic molasses.
The one false note in the show is the casting of Luiz Guzman, who physically matches Addams’ original Gomez better than any other actor to date, but regrettably, lacks the charisma of Raul Julia. This is not enough to spoil the show; everyone else more than makes up for it, starting with Jenna Ortega as Wednesday. She’s in nearly every single scene and she is perfect. Wednesday is a wonderful mash-up of private school hijinks, a la Harry Potter, and Nancy Drew, if Nancy was a practicing sociopath. The show makes some smart choices and leaves a lot hanging, which means they are eyeballing a Season 2. Good. I barreled right through these and would gladly have kept going if they were available.
1899 (Netflix)
A giant luxury ship crossing the Atlantic gets a distress signal from another ship in its line, that went missing four months ago. With over a thousand passengers on board, the captain makes the decision to investigate in case there are survivors. What they find sets in motion a serious of head-bending, reality-altering events that force the characters to work together to survive as they search for the reason for the missing ship’s sudden re-appearance.
Symbols, hatches, weird noises, strange technology. The comparisons to Lost are inevitable, and it’s fair to say I’m getting the same kind of runner’s high from the eight episodes as I did from the first two whole seasons of Lost. This is both awesome and unfair. 1899 is sailing on a flotilla that Lost built, and even though it was an ambitious show whose reach far exceeded its grasp, it gets credit for moving TV forward to the point that we have 1899 in 2022. You don’t get one without the other.
I didn’t know there was a dubbed version. That seems both weird and unnecessary, since most of the people in the show are from other countries and speak their languages out loud at each other. Having to read the subtitles has made me pay a little closer attention to the context of what is going on, which is really helping my immersion.
The series asks and answers questions in turn, every episode, so that there is no wasted space. At the halfway point, there’s a turn and you can start to see what’s going on. It’s refreshing, really, to know that there is a better ending coming (again, not fair), and that your time was more or less well-spent. If you were a Lost devotee, then 1899 is your Dieselpunk Do-Over from the celestial navigators of television.
I find that certain Hallmark Christmas movies are fine as long as you approach them with the right mindset - specifically, anything with magic is actually a horror movie and we're watching the monsters get what they want while the ordinary humans have their lives torn asunder by the magic of Christmas. The height (or depth) of these is "Christmas in Evergreen" in which a little girl doesn't want to fly to Florida for Christmas so she makes a wish to stay in Evergreen and a BLIZZARD shuts down the entire region, causing who knows how many deaths. It's the old Twilight Zone episode with Christmas instead of the cornfield.
As for captioning vs dubbing people's own languages, I first saw that technique in a Jackie Chan movie, where he traveled the world and spoke several languages, all captioned into English (including spoken English) so we heard what people actually sound like and could read to get the meaning. I liked it.
Thank you for the reviews. I do look forward to viewing several of these.
For a wonder, we both watched pretty much the same shows this week. The Holiday Special was fun, and thankfully not Pratt-centric. I don't dislike the actor, but I have been less than thrilled by the GotG series-hazards of remembering the original comic a bit too well. The opening song was a blast, and hopefully will become a standard. ;) Haven't finished WEDNESDAY yet, but with two episodes to go, I feel comfortable enough commenting. The thing that struck me from the get go was that while the real darkness in the series has always been there, the more violent aspects have always been implicit, rather than explicit, and WEDNESDAY pretty much throws that out the window. Wednesday herself has a bit of growing up to do, and as is common to coming of age stories like this, seems to be making progress. I guardedly agree with you about Guzman-though I think it is more an underwritten and marginalized role rather than a failing of the actor. Pugsley, on the other hand, seems far too placid, fishing techniques notwithstanding. Does Fester show up in the last two episodes? If he's been there at all, I think I must have blinked. We really should talk more about this anon-
Finally, 1899...I can't remember when a series or a film kept me guessing ( and frequently guessing wrong) about where it was going right up to the end. And I still have questions, though if this winds up being the run of the series, I will content myself with considering it the apotheosis of surrealism in cinema.