#taika coming in with universal human truths

[insanityclause]

Over the past 13 years, Tom Hiddleston has died more times than he can recall. “Let me think about this,” the actor tells us, pausing to count in his head. “I think, officially, there were two big ones.” 

He’s referring to his many exits from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the blockbuster franchise in which he’s played shape-shifting Norse god Loki Laufeyson since Kenneth Branagh’s 2011 film “Thor”—the son of Asgardians Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and Frigga (Rene Russo), and the half-sibling of Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the god of thunder. 

The character has since bounced between villain and reluctant antihero across five films, a handful of post-credits scenes, and Michael Waldron’s Disney+ spinoff series “Loki,” which Hiddleston also executive produces. The show wrapped its second—and supposedly final—season last November. The finale presents an end for the character, but not one of the aforementioned “big ones.” 

Hiddleston’s first “official” farewell came in Alan Taylor’s 2013 sequel “Thor: The Dark World,” which saw the god of mischief take a sword to the chest to save his beefy brother. “As written in the first script, it was a true sacrifice,” Hiddleston says. Unfortunately for Marvel’s long-term plans, the actor had done too good a job playing the trickster.

“When Marvel [executives] were testing the movie, they’d given [viewers] questionnaires that said, ‘Is there anything you didn’t understand?’ ” he remembers. “Literally every single audience member said, ‘Well, obviously, Loki’s not really dead.’ ” 

In classic comic-book fashion, the character did return, gallivanting alongside his brother in Taika Waititi’s 2017 follow-up “Thor: Ragnarok.” He died again one year later (“big one” number two) in the Russo brothers’  “Avengers: Infinity War.” There were no smokescreens or questionnaires this time; audiences watched as Loki’s neck was crushed by the purple fist of intergalactic warlord Thanos (Josh Brolin). 

Hiddleston remembers arriving in Atlanta to shoot his final scene and immediately bumping into Brolin. “He came up to me, gave me this huge hug, and said, ‘I’m so sorry, man.’ ” 

He meant it, too; everyone meant it. The sun, it seemed, had actually set on Hiddleston’s MCU journey. “At the end of that scene, I got a big round of applause, and everybody was so sweet and kind and gracious,” he says. “I got notes and emails saying, ‘Tom, you’ve done so much for us—what a journey. Come and see us anytime.’ I really thought that was the end.” 

And it was, for real, right up until it wasn’t—when the time-traveling shenanigans of 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame” blasted a younger version of Loki out of the established canon and into his own series. Over two seasons, the multiversal storyline envisions the title character as a figure who exists outside time and space. Across all there is, was, and may come to pass, there will always be a Loki, in some form, wreaking havoc. 

Hiddleston has long since accepted what this means for him as an actor. Maybe “Loki” Season 2 really was his last time in the role; or maybe he’ll play him until the sun burns out. “I’ve realized that, in human consciousness, that’s who Loki is,” he says. “Loki is this ancient, mythic character, who, in our collective mythology, represents the trickster, the transgressor, the boundary-crosser, the shape-shifter—somebody who’s mercurial and spontaneous and unpredictable who will always confound your expectations and wriggle out from underneath your certainties and convictions. Someone who we need and [who] is necessary.”

Hiddleston pauses, getting emotional. “Maybe Loki escaping death a couple of times is sort of an emblem of who he is in our culture,” he says, grinning at his own gusto. The actor has a habit of being self-deprecating about the depth of the character’s lore. “I spend a lot of time thinking about Loki. You can probably tell.”

You can tell, and it’s incredibly endearing. Talking to Hiddleston about Loki feels like discussing Shakespeare’s Richard III with Laurence Olivier or Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois with Jessica Lange. They were actors who put their definitive stamps on those roles by returning to the well and constantly digging deeper. 

In conversation, Hiddleston is equally as likely to reference comic-book arcs as he is the ancient, anonymous Old Norse scribes of the “Poetic Edda” or Richard Wagner’s epic four-cycle opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen.” He speaks reverently of actors who embodied the trickster god before him, like Jim Carrey in Chuck Russell’s 1994 comedy “The Mask” and Alan Cumming in Lawrence Guterman’s 2005 sequel, “Son of the Mask.” He also heaps praise on those who played the part after him, such as his “Loki” costars Sophia Di Martino, Richard E. Grant, Deobia Oparei, and—in one very surreal Season 1 moment—“some alligator they found somewhere.” He cites legendary Marvel creators Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Walter Simonson alongside the likes of English essayist Walter Pater and Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, who once wrote of life as a “splendid torch” to keep burning for those who follow.

“Loki is ‘a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment,’ ” Hiddleston quotes, “and I want to make it burn as brightly as I can before passing it on to future generations.” 

This level of study started before he even landed the role. He recalls the 24 hours leading up to his “Thor” audition, when he was 28 years old. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2005, he quickly earned small-screen and stage acclaim—but he hadn’t yet achieved a major breakthrough. When he received the script for “Thor,” it felt familiar. “I remember thinking, This is almost Shakespearean, this language,” Hiddleston says. “What’s the best example I can [look to] of an actor who managed to humanize and make real this elevated world of myth?” 

He found the answer in Christopher Reeve, who played the title role in Richard Donner’s 1978 blockbuster “Superman.” “He’s masterful in that film,” Hiddleston says. “In a way, it’s a similar premise: He’s a god or he’s a being from a different realm, and it’s not naturalistic in the way that we might expect. He does it so truthfully, and it’s so clear and clean and open and honest. I thought, If I can even approximate or get close to the kind of clarity that Christopher Reeve had in those films, I’ll be lucky.” 

And then, the morning of his “Thor” audition, Hiddleston went for a run, “which is my habit before doing anything unusual,” he explains. 

Running has remained a constant throughout the actor’s MCU tenure. At any given moment over the last decade, the god of mischief was likely doing laps around Marvel’s go-to shooting location, Pinewood Studios (now Trilith Studios) in Atlanta. “Life is movement; I really believe that,” Hiddleston says. 

“I find when I’m running or walking, the repetitive nature of it relaxes the mind and allows ideas and inspiration to come from a deeper place. I see my work as an actor—especially in preparation for a project or a scene—as almost preparing myself to be open and ready to receive ideas, to receive energy from other actors, to receive energy from my imagination.”

Hiddleston found the technique particularly helpful when he was filming a scene for the “Loki” series premiere that he calls “one of the most thrilling challenges I’ve ever had as an actor.” In it, Loki has been poached from the flow of time itself by the temporality-policing Time Variance Authority and forced to watch what is, essentially, a highlight reel of his entire MCU arc. It’s one of the most deeply existential moments you’ll ever find streaming alongside the likes of “Bluey” and the “Cars” movies. Here is a man watching the sum total of his life—his hopes, his dreams, his failures, his own death—play out in a 30-second clip that ends with the cold, clinical words: “End of file.”

“I just kept imagining: If you were afforded the opportunity or forced to watch your own death as a bystander, it would bring about an existential shock and crisis unlike any other,” Hiddleston explains. “It was a scene where I thought, I don’t have a reference for how to play this. I just have to allow shock, disgust, disgrace, shame, disbelief, acceptance, incredulity, and sorrow to exist in the center of me.” 

As an executive producer on the series, Hiddleston had a say as to which of Loki’s many misdeeds would play in the sequence. He chose clips like Frigga’s death in “Thor: The Dark World” and his father’s final words in “Thor: Ragnarok”—moments Hiddleston knew would most fill the character with regret. As production was preparing to shoot the scene, he asked first assistant director Richard Graves for a 20-minute warning.

 “I decided to jog around the stage and internalize as many of those memories of those people, those characters, those actors [as possible]—to try and find the center of my own vulnerability,” Hiddleston says. “Part of the joy of it was just going back to basics, trying to simplify this very complex thing…. Go for a jog, get into your body, allow yourself to be open, and just be there; just feel it.”

One “Loki”-like time jump later, Hiddleston found himself in a similar situation as he was preparing to shoot his final moment of Season 2—a scene that effectively caps Loki’s 13-year arc. Across 12 episodes, the show guided its title character toward a truly heroic end: With all of existence on the verge of collapse, he steps out of time to tie the strands of every reality together. As the credits roll, Loki sits at the center of time, holding in place all that is—alone. 

It’s a lot for any actor to internalize, especially one who’s performing solo in front of a blue screen. With 45 minutes to cameras rolling, episode co-director Aaron Moorhead made a suggestion. “He said to me, ‘Why don’t you go back, if you can bear it, and watch some of your work [over] the last 15 years?’ ” Hiddleston remembers. “ ‘Take it in, see what it means to you, and then carry it when you step out onto the stage.’ ” 

The actor took Moorhead’s advice to heart. And suddenly, without meaning to, he was mirroring the moment that started the series: absorbing the sum total of Loki’s MCU run. But this time, his regret had been replaced with gratitude. Hiddleston watched clips from “Thor,” remembering a time when he and Hemsworth had yet to ascend to the A-list. He recalled working with powerhouses like Hopkins and Russo, and the bonds he forged with the “original six Avengers” in 2011. He thought about how fun it was to film “Thor: Ragnarok” with Tessa Thompson and Jeff Goldblum, and of the more recent friendships he found with his “Loki” castmates Di Martino and Owen Wilson. 

“I thought, What Loki is doing, he is doing for his friends. And so, Tom, why don’t you do it for your friends?” Hiddleston says. “That’s where the two of us met in that moment. And then I was so grateful I had this most amazing crew, and we did it together.”

The actor is, of course, noncommittal as to whether this is actually the end of his MCU run. The franchise is scheduled out until at least 2027, and Hemsworth has mentioned his desire to make another “Thor” film. And if Loki’s past has proven anything, even the most official endings can be undone. 

Either way, it seems to Hiddleston that something significant has ended, even if it’s just Loki’s full-circle arc. “I hope it feels redemptive because his broken soul is partially healed; and you see that this character, who is capable of love, has made a decision from and for love,” he says. The actor cites the “beautiful prologue” of the first “Thor” film, in which Hopkins’ Odin tells his two sons: “Only one of you can ascend to the throne, but both of you were born to be kings.”

“At the end of Season 2, Loki is sitting on a kind of throne; but it’s not arrived in the shape he expected, and there’s no glory in it,” Hiddleston explains. “There’s a kind of burden, and he’s alone. He’s doing it for his friends, but he has to stay there without them. There’s a poetic melancholy there which I found very moving.”

For now, Hiddleston “can’t even conceive” of his life without Loki. He only hopes that he’s lived up to his guiding ethos as an actor, which he sums up with a plea from E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel “Howards End”: “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.”

“The feedback loop for actors is that we get to inhabit a fiction,” Hiddleston says. “But hopefully, that fiction bears the shape of a truth that we recognize about life—that what we do reflects the ups and downs, the peaks and troughs, and the breadth and profundity of all of our lives.”

Hiddleston exists in that space between fiction and reality, the work and the resulting art, the prose and the passion. Long after we’ve moved on from our interview and started casually discussing the cherry blossoms blooming in New York, his eyes light up. He’s made another connection, remembered one more thing—just one last thing he’d like to impart about Loki. 

He spends a lot of time thinking about Loki. You can probably tell.

“I’m so aware that the reason I’ve been able to play him for so long is because of the audience’s curiosity and passion,” Hiddleston says. “I’ve been delighted to find that for a character of such stature, he’s remarkably human. Many of the characteristics that people connect to in Loki are deeply human feelings. That’s been the pleasure, is infusing this elevated character with humanity.”

Even then, honestly, it feels as if Hiddleston, like Loki, could go on forever. Unfortunately, outside of the MCU, time moves in only one direction. Once again, he has to run.

This story originally appeared in the June 6 issue of Backstage Magazine. Subscribe to In the Envelope: The Actor's Podcast to hear our full conversation with Hiddleston (out 6/6). 

[mirkwoodest]

Universal truths in boy's own adventure

By MICHAEL BODEY THE AUSTRALIAN 12:00AM AUGUST 25, 2010

TAIKA Waititi is still pinching himself at the success of his second film, Boy.

He concedes New Zealand films don't do as well on their home turf "as, I imagine, many Australian films don't do crazily well".

Boy doesn't exactly scream "hit", being a coming-of-age story set in 1984 on NZ's rural east coast and starring an unknown 11-year-old.

But Waititi's film is the highest grossing local film in NZ history. Its box-office take to date of $NZ9.3 million ($7.4m) surpasses Once were Warriors and The World's Fastest Indian, both of which earned more than $NZ7m.

"In my head I thought around $NZ2m would be nice, twice what my last film [Eagle vs Shark] made, and it's just kept going and going," Waititi notes.

"The feedback and response by local audiences is something none of us really expected."

Boy has been a success because New Zealanders want to see themselves on screen, but its tone is more tragicomic, self-deprecating and relaxed than audiences are used to. It focuses on universal themes of family and the insecurity, clumsiness and wonder of growing up.

James Rolleston is the Boy, a Michael Jackson-obsessed kid living on a farm with his Gran. He idolises his father, Alamein (played by Waititi), a man he imagines is a deep-sea diver, a war hero and a relative of Jackson.

The reality is underwhelming: his itinerant and unreliable dad has been "in the can" for robbery and is little more than a rebel biker without a cause.

"Anyone who has a parent can relate to this idea of not quite understanding who your parents are or making up stories about them," Waititi says.

"Then there are the realities of who they are and their secrets and [realising] they're not superhuman human beings."

Global audiences understand the film, he adds, even if some are surprised to discover it's not a family movie. A Hawaiian festival director programmed the film before seeing it. "Halfway through he asked me, 'Just out of curiosity, is there much more swearing or violence?' "

Australians will find Boy sweet, raucous and lovably NZ, with its recognisable cultural references, language and intonations. It won the audience awards at the Sydney Film Festival and Melbourne International Film Festival this year.

The film upends certain cliches about NZ cinema globally, although Waititi is still smarting from one US review, in trade newspaper Variety, that accused it of misrepresenting Maori culture.

"[The reviewer] almost took it personally that there weren't ghosts and people in villages riding whales," Waititi says.

Waititi played against local expectations, too, after winning an Academy Award nomination for the short film Two Cars, One Night. "Essentially that was a dramatic short and people assumed after that I would go down the drama road and make typical New Zealand films, dark films about kids who die," he says.

"So I ended up moving away from that and trying to inject some quirkiness and comedy. Maori get pigeonholed into the idea they're spiritual and telling stories like Whale Rider and Once were Warriors, quite serious stuff, but we're pretty funny people and we never really have had an opportunity to show that side of ourselves, the clumsy, nerdy side of ourselves, which is something I am."

Waititi is something more than clumsy and nerdy. The 35-year-old has a background in painting and photography, having exhibited in Wellington and Berlin. His acting and comedy emerged on the side, as he performed with mates including Flight of the Conchords's Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, directed episodes of their US series and gave popular stand-up comedy shows. The semi-autobiographical Boy was the first, tentative screenplay he wrote as he mulled the prospect of being able to move from shorts to feature films.

"I kind of freaked out a bit, I didn't want to leap into it because the transition between short films and feature films is the same as short stories and novels," Waititi explains. "Some people just can't write a novel and some people can't make a feature film, it's just the way it is sometimes. Maybe I couldn't have made a feature film."

Now that one's settled, Waititi is in the enviable position of being able to juggle directing and acting. He has just finished filming a performance in the big-budget studio superhero film, Green Lantern, and expects a sequel to follow.

"Yeah, for my film work I'm in a good position in New Zealand. I could probably make my next film pretty easily," he says with honest understatement. "You're always fine until you stumble and then obviously it becomes harder. The acting thing crept up. I'm not sure how much attention I'll give it.

"I'm lucky my main job now is filmmaking, so it's not like I'm rushing off to LA to do all these auditions and desperately trying to be an actor.

"I think I'm a better filmmaker than actor, so I already know that. That's OK, I can handle not being a famous actor."

He remains unsure whether he can sustain himself as a filmmaker in NZ, even though he doesn't appear particularly rushed to take up any international offers.

He believes he can remain in NZ "if you don't expect what we all thought was the high life of a film director in the 90s when people were being paid squillions of dollars just to do anything".

The money in filmmaking has dried up; today it really is just like any other job.

"The glitz and glamour has gone and you get paid a normal wage to do a job that isn't extraordinary," he says. "So it's kind of fair. I think people were overpaid for what the job is, having fun and telling stories and getting all this cool stuff."

Waititi appreciates that the films he wants to make won't generate the fortune of blockbusters such as Green Lantern, but he doesn't want dedicate two years of his life to a project he's not passionate about.

"The stuff I'm passionate about is what I write, it isn't multi-million-dollar franchise movies," he says.

But with the success of Boy, could there be pressure to create a sequel or franchise out of its characters? Waititi looks across to Rolleston and raises an eyebrow.

"Maybe I'll just make this into a franchise, do the Truffaut thing and just keep hiring him until he's 40."

Boy is in cinemas tomorrow. SBS One screens Eagle vs Shark on Saturday.

[reushq]

ABOUT

Name: Orion Hyria. Suggested Occupation: Creative consultant for HELE-N. Age: 40s. Gender & Pronouns: utp. FC Suggestions: Gael García Bernal, Benedict Wong, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Ray Panthaki, Taika Waititi, John Cho. Can be seen: Directing commercials for HELE-N with Clytemnestra at his side, perusing Aegean Waters’ pamphlets for their archipelago, storyboarding would-be movies late at night and into the morning, huddled around with Menelaus and Briseis at the Arcadia’s most exclusive bar, visiting the cinema alone.

STATS

Influence  ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ Charisma  ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ Protection  ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ Information  ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ Experience  ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

CODEX

Born on an island too small for a name, Orion is raised with every childhood-dreamt indulgence. He watches the stars rise and unfurl as he sits and listens to his parents weave tales and fables, spitting watermelon seeds into the surf. He walks on water to get to school, feet splashing through the low tide between islands. He swims through lazy mornings and lazy afternoons, learns how to craft a fishing spear, a rabbit snare, all the small wonders particular to faraway fantasies, all in his backyard, as it is for children of the Aegean Archipelago.

He learns to thread stories. Stories to prevent his parents from looking at him with a disappointed gaze, stories to make his friends roar with laughter in the scrub of a playground, stories to sidestep punishment, stories to get a date. At first, he blurs the line between fiction and reality with his voice, then in a camera angle, carefully cropped. He plays with truth until it becomes spectacle, plays with ambiguity until it becomes fact. He learns that it is not what you say, so much as how you say it, weaving the personal and universal into a greater whole, a truth ridged with both fact and fiction that blurs them both. It feels par for the natural course of stars that he outgrows his home, tired of being written off with the weight of a local gossip in their tenth cup. As ripples of a new future for Aegea begin to spread, Orion leaves the island for broader shores and bigger screens.

He begins by working his way up through the smaller studios, showing his strange little films whenever and wherever he can. His big break comes in the form of a minor producer from Delos, who sets him up with bigger and bigger gigs, and for years he is the hottest new thing on the Olympian block, a true breakout virtuoso of cinema. The industry gossip mill picks him up, rumors spreading about the dark horse hotshot from out of town who isn’t afraid to push the envelope. The papers call his work brash and audacious, note his unrelenting gaze towards human nature; audiences demand more and more. He lands a creative partnership with Artemis Rhea, he the mentor and she the muse, just as his rising stardom grants him nearly unlimited access to resources and funding. In less than a decade, his name is common-place, his work renowned across Gaia as some of the best of his generation.

Throughout this time, he keeps up a tense but teasing relationship with Delos, almost but never quite straying outside the box of respectability they place around him in their work together. For the most part he chooses independence, the freedom of seeking out his own funding, but when he needs access to greater coffers he bends to a power greater than his own. His edge and persona grant the studio a bit of a rebel flair, respectability in circles outside their other usual blockbusters, and in turn they extend their resources to produce his genius. Occasionally, he pushes things too far, his work sliding too close to controversy, and for a moment Delos retracts. Then Orion parries, changes the direction of a project or releases a statement to the press, and the great beast settles back to work around him again, appeased.

But he steps wrong, or he’s just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and despite all his acclaim, Orion is still a pawn in the greater game of titans and gods. Against Zeus’ wishes, he pushes a project deemed too contentious for the current moment, and when Delos shoots it down, he takes to the press to complain. It’s a season of bad luck and low sales all around, the public on-edge after a series of recent exposés on Delos talent, and the Rhea king takes personal insult with the stunt, abruptly ending Orion’s relationship with the company and all their partners, including an under-table blacklisting that effectively boots him from the industry wholesale. But Orion knows the patience of the hunt, knows the power of more than one kind of tale. He concedes to Zeus, heads to Arcadia, and once again calls his fictions truth. He dwells for a while, not eager to surge forth into new beginnings so soon, but it is Clytemnestra and Agamemnon who approach him first, hearing tell of his success and his undoing - they ask for him to come aboard HELE-N in a creative capacity, to help tell the story of HELE-N - its past, and its future as they envision it for Gaia. They promise a revolution, ask him to paint the picture of its hereafter. And he accepts.

CONNECTIONS

Familial connections: None.

Professional connections: Clytemnestra Tyndareus (direct superior, high intellect, higher expectations). Agamemnon Mycenae (big guy. hard to converse with, personally, harder still to know what he’s thinking).

Social connections: Orpheus Aoide (wonders if they’re still beguiled by Olympe). Briseis Krisia (attempt at guidance; they always refuse). Artemis (former muse and mentee; no grudge harbored). Apollo (past collaboration, thinks he’d flourish in Arcadia). Odysseus Laertes (temptation. their loyalty to Zeus complicates things). Diomedes Delyle (envy. luck has always been their companion). Zeus (avoidance, would prefer not to incur his wrath again, thanks). Menelaus Mycenae (close friend, pet project).

WRITTEN BY N/A.

[theadrogna]

@singledarkshade​ came up with the Dream Show challenge, where we had to give her a list of 7 TV shows or films and we were given a cast of 7 actors in return. Then I got carried away and this is the result: Diaspora

Synopsis:

Earth seeded the galaxy with colonies, sending out ships full of colonists in suspended animation with everything they needed for a life elsewhere. That was a generation ago and now a new ship, the Linnaeus, has been sent to check on the colonies that Earth founded. Have they prospered and conquered new worlds or are they failing and in need of help to survive? The Linnaeus with its team of scientists and problem solvers is Earth’s mission to re-establish contact. The colonies are a long way from Earth and the rules are different when you’re so far from home.

Cast:

Dr Aneurin “Nye” Castell (Arthur Darvill): Nye is the team’s xeno-ecologist and scientific lead. He’s something of an idealist, and a brilliant academic, but never saw himself going into space again. Parsa is an old friend and talked him into joining the crew as an opportunity for furthering his research. He specialises in finding out what makes an Earth-like world inhabitable for humans, and looking at alien ecosystems to investigate how they function. He usually ends up doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to sorting out what’s going wrong with a colony. He is able to make intuitive leaps that can be hard for others to follow, but is accepting that not everyone can always keep up. He doesn’t particularly enjoy walking into the unknown, but his scientific curiosity is why he’s here.

Dr Parsa Nazari (Cas Anvar): Leader of the expedition. Originally a scientist himself, he left academia and moved into the role of mission specialist. He’s the one to make the tough decisions, even if sometimes that doesn’t make him popular, especially with his friend, Nye. He’s been working towards leading the Linnaeus mission his whole life, and recruited only the best for the expedition. He has to juggle the scientific side of the mission with the political, and that isn’t always easy, but he’s good at finding acceptable compromises. He leaves behind a divorced husband and two kids to head up the Linnaeus mission.

Rosalind Fitzroy (Torri Higginson): A politician. She’s not well liked amongst the crew, and Parsa fought to exclude her but failed. She is ambitious, but so far her career hasn’t gone as planned. She is able to read people and manipulate them, although often less effectively than she thinks. She’s on the team to remind the colonies that they’re still subject to Earth law and that they’re expected to help their home world, but her role is also smoothing the way for the team with the local authorities. If the colony need advice on how to set up new systems of government or on their economy then Rosalind can help with that too. This could be the most important job of her life, but it’s one that most politicians wouldn’t want, but she sees it as a stepping stone to something better.

Dr Carrie Joshua (Hannah John-Kamen): Carrie is a medical doctor. Her job is to assess the physical health of the colonists and help them with medicines, nutrition and fitness. One of her biggest concerns is how human biology interacts with the new worlds. She enjoys trekking and climbing, and can be found on the ship’s meagre fitness equipment most days before she begins work. On planet, she’s enthusiastic to explore, even in areas which appear dangerous. She is also fearless when it comes to putting her patients first, something that has been known to get her into trouble. She’s one of six siblings, and misses her big family more than anything else while she’s in space.

Kira Sokolov - (Jodhi May): As both the ship’s engineer and technical problem solver, she thinks fast on her feet to fix broken technology with limited resources. Her motto is that “perfect is the enemy of good”. Ed likes to tease her by calling her MacGyver, but it isn’t that far from the truth. She is tenacious and loyal to the team, but has little time for Rosalind because she used to be the representative for the province where Kira grew up. Her family still live there and have to deal with food shortages and rationed water. She’s bilingual and enjoys learning new swear words in every language she meets, but her most annoyed exclamations are in her mother’s native language, Ukrainian.

Ed Avalino (Taika Waititi): The pilot. He drives the bus, but has to double as the lab technician and general assistant to whoever needs him most when they’re on planet. He is the closest thing that the team have to a security person, and does his best to protect them when on planet and assess threats. He is relatively easy going by nature, but can quickly shift gears to deal with a crisis. He gets on with all of the crew, even Rosalind, but shares a love of danger with Carrie. Parsa apparently met him in a Martian jail, but neither of them will talk about that incident, despite Nye desperately wanting the details. Rumours about his past missions as part of the Earth military are probably untrue, but he doesn’t dissuade anyone from exaggerating them further.

Dr Grace Blackwell (Nafessa Williams): Grace is the xeno-psychology expert on the team. The humans in the colonies are not alone and someone is needed to work out what the aliens want. She also often applies her psychology skills to the humans as well. She’s the youngest and most inexperienced member of the team, and was something of a prodigy. She looks up to Nye as a mentor, but occasionally finds his pure pursuit of the academic to be too much and prefers to listen to her gut. No one ever questions her knowledge of her subject, but she sometimes lacks confidence in herself. She knows that this is a once in a lifetime chance to make a difference and she’s grabbing it with both hands. She is a natural ray of sunshine, but finds the long journeys between planets are the hardest part of the job.

Episodes:

1: The Flight of the Linnaeus (Pilot) – Nye Castell is researching far away planets but hasn’t left the safety of his university in years, when Parsa Nazari invites him to join the Earth’s first trouble shooting mission to the Colonies. Nye is unwilling at first, but Parsa plays upon his need to investigate and learn, and eventually he accepts. Flashbacks give a taste of exactly why he is so unwilling to leave the planet. He puts his Earth-bound affairs in order and reports to the Linneaus facility to begin work. Parsa and Nye build the team, but are blindsided by their superiors’ need to include Rosalind Fitzroy, and an attempt to destroy the entire project by an anarchist spy who claims to know something they don’t.

2: Planetfall – The Linneaus arrives at its first destination, the colony of Gessner. This has been chosen as an easy first test of their readiness and skill, since Gessner has been in regular contact and appears to be doing well. Appearances can be deceiving though. The colonists thrive when they’re young but rapidly die when they reach 60, with one notable exception, the governor of the colony who was elected partly due to his magical longevity. It’s up to the Linnaeus crew to find out what’s going wrong.

3: Downfall - Having discovered that the elderly are being deliberate poisoned when they become older and less useful, Rosalind tells the crew that Gessner is no longer their problem as the solution is beyond their ability to fix. Nye, Carrie and Grace disagree strongly, but Ed points out that they have no resources to forcibly change the leadership of the colony, whilst Parsa sides with Rosalind much to everyone’s surprise. Grace outlines a system of psychological pressure points that could be used to change the governmental structure, but is this really the job of the Linnaeus crew?

4: Homesick - After leaving Gessner, the Linnaeus crew have a long journey to the next planet. Nye sleeps badly and sees his long dead mother in the corridors of the ship. It seems like Nye might be suffering from “orbital fever”, a psychological condition that affects astronauts on long voyages and he reluctantly goes to see Carrie. She agrees with his self-diagnosis and tells Parsa that Nye will need to be taken back to Gessner, as the condition typically worsens rapidly to become psychosis if not treated. As the crew readies to turn back, Grace reveals that she’s being visited by the ghosts of her childhood pets. Other members of the crew also start seeing things, leaving the team in no doubt that something else is going on here. Nye works out some of his childhood issues with his hallucinations.

5: All at Sea - Everyone is pleased to reach their next destination, Aelian. Here the colonists share their world with a primitive, but sentient, species of sea dwellers, which hadn’t shown up in the original survey of the world. This has produced a dangerous tension, and one which Grace is ill-equipped to handle despite this being her area of expertise. The entire crew find themselves drawn into what could be the build up to war between the two species who regard Aelian as home.

6: Adapt and Survive - The Linnaeus lands at the colony site of Ellis to find that the landing site is deserted. All that greets them is the remains of buildings and abandoned vehicles. Nye, Ed and Carrie trek into the jungle to see if they can find any trace of the humans who are supposed to live here, while Parsa, Grace, Kira and Rosalind investigate the ruins of the colony for clues. Nye and his group find the colonists, but they’re changed beyond recognition. Parsa discovers the reason and it becomes clear that the Linnaeus needs to leave rapidly.

7: Lost in Space – The rapid departure of the Linnaeus from Ellis leaves the crew with repairs to make to their broken ship as the Linnaeus drifts further from its course. Kira and Ed lead the effort, putting the scientists to work. Nye reveals a little more about his reluctance to come on the mission. Carrie is sure that Rosalind is hiding something, but he has no idea what. Soon the crew are fighting for their lives, racing to make planetfall before the ship breaks down completely.

8: Borderline – The Linnaeus’ crew are faced with a failing colony, known as Genera, where the colonists never seem to manage to make much progress, but are kind and welcoming. Despite the apparent fertility of the world and its ecosystem, the crew of the Linnaeus realised that the colony could only have a single generation before if it dies out completely. Nye refuses to give up in finding a way for the colony to become viable, but Parsa thinks they should cut their losses. Kira takes a young engineer from the colony under her wing. Rosalind attempts to get a message back to Earth.

9:  Hooked on a Feeling - Genera still remains something of a mystery to Nye, until Carrie informs him that Kira’s apprentice is suffering from withdrawal symptoms. Nye and Parsa investigate, coming to the conclusion that the entire colony are hooked on the same addictive substance, apparently unwittingly. Nye uses all of his skills to find the culprit.

10: Letters from Home – While the ship continues to deal with the ongoing issues of Genera, Ed receives a message packet from home for the crew. Now in addition to the problems of the colony, the crew find that their life on Earth has caught up to them. Rosalind accidentally ends up revealing just how important their mission is, angering the crew who were not kept informed. The Earth is desperate for resources and dying. Perhaps all they can do is to make their mission a success.

11: Mushroom Stew - The Linnaeus has left Genera behind and is on its way to Dorrien, a planet that seems to favour fungi over almost every other form of life. The colonists have faced difficult growing conditions for their crops, which must be kept in vast greenhouses to protect them from contamination with fungal spores. But as rapidly as the colonists clear land, the mushrooms seem to be doing their best to retake their planet.

12: The Great Chain of Being - The colony of Jekyll was a paradise when the colonists landed, but now the local wildlife is dying out, with great tracts of land becoming barren. Nye and Parsa desperately search for the reason behind the devastation, while the rest of the team try to help the colony deal with the effects of the dying ecosystem. It’s up to the crew of the Linnaeus to find a way that the ecosystem and colony can be saved.

13: Paradise Lost - The colony of Masamune is bland and calm. Even the animals don’t eat each other, but something is killing the colonists. Rosalind is under pressure to report positive findings back to Earth, and asks the team to falsify their reports since every colony they have visited is struggling in some way. She drops the bombshell that if the Linnaeus doesn’t do as it is told then it will be recalled to Earth, having failed to fulfil its purpose.

[mentallydatingahotcelebrity]

Rreading posts today from various people I learned that Taika Waititi, director of Ragnarok, has no idea why Loki is a tragic character. Loki’s story alone and from his POV is, actually, a tragedy. But to someone who doesn’t really understand the definition of what makes a character, setting, novel, or film a “tragedy” the idea that Loki is a tragic character sounds utterly ridiculous and overdramatic.

So here’s a definition of the tragic character/a tragedy as written by E. B. Greenwood in 1994/95 for the introduction to Anna Karenina for anyone curious as to WHY I call Loki a “tragic character”. I’ve changed some words so that it fits my topic.

“What do I mean by saying that it is, in substance, a tragedy? [...] It has the substance of tragedy in that in it, as Aristotle required, a person neither of superlative goodness nor repellant wickedness (i.e. a character whom we can sympathise with, even love) makes a mistaken choice or set of choices. Aristotle called this hamartia. When this choice leads to a situation from which there is no way out but suffering, we have tragedy. Both Greek and Shakespearean tragedy involve poetic stylisation and elevation and actions out of the ordinary. Loki’s tragedy comes much closer to the type of tragedy described by Tolstoy’s favorite philosopher Schopenhauer in Section 51 of The World as Will and Representation:

Finally, the misfortune can be brought about also by the mere attitude of the persons to one another through their relations. Thus there is no need either of a colossal error, or of an unheard-of accident, or even of a character reaching the bounds of human possibility in wickedness, but characters as they usually are in a moral regard in circumstances that frequently occur, are so situated with regard to one another that their position forces them, knowingly and with their eyes open, to do one another the greatest injury, without any of them being entirely in the wrong. This last kind of tragedy seems to me to be far preferably to the other two; for it shows us the greatest misfortune not as an exception, not as something brought about by rare circumstances or by monstrous characters, but as something that arises easily and spontaneously out of the actions and characters of men as something almost essential to them, and in this way is brought terribly near to us. . . We see the greatest suffering brought about by entanglements whose essence could be assumed even by our own fate, and by actions that perhaps even we might be capable of committing, and so we cannot complain of injustice. Then, shuddering, we feel ourselves already in the midst of hell. In this last kind of tragedy the working out is of the greatest difficulty; for the greatest effect has to be produced in it with the least use of means and occasions for movement, merely by their position and distribution.

When I read all of the above upon purchasing Anna Karenina, I was quite surprised at how fitting it was of Loki’s role and an explanation of why he is a tragic character. Because, in a most ironic turn of events, the god who declares ‘there are no men like him’ is, in fact, utterly and completely like the men he seeks to dominate. He’s relatable, identifiable, lovable; because he’s flawed, and hurting, and desirous of the same emotions all human beings want:

Recognition, adoration, affection, support, protection, love, companionship. 

The reason why I included that excerpt from Schopenhauer is because I think that fits Loki too-- in his universe, the things that happened to him frequently occurred, but they built and built until he snapped beneath the weight of them; something everyone who came to adore Loki recognized and found utterly relatable, to the point of being distressed for Loki. 

He’s not a villain, he never was, he’s just a tragic character. 

And the problem with this is that tragic characters are not absolutely good nor utterly evil, they’re a bit of both and completely relatable from the audience’s point of view. That’s the reason why Marvel couldn’t figure out how to adapt him or develop him, because a tragic character is, always, fated to die.

Hamlet, Anna Karenina, Romeo, Juliet, Loki-- their roles are to bring to the foreground that the typical nature of humans is to destroy themselves for a motive they think in their own minds will help them while meanwhile the reality of it is that guides them toward their eventual end. We are all heroes in our own minds where we tell ourselves how much good we’re doing; but our actions make us deplorable to the people looking on. The Tragic Character role in all forms of writing is to wake up other characters to the realization that they need to change how they act if they want to prevent the same end. 

[Which is what happened in the end of Thor. Thor realized that anger can lead to self-destruction, and Odin learned that not mentioning his love for his sons can lead to their downfall]

The problem is that in order to continue to make Thor and Loki interesting, new and unique storylines would have to be created-- risk would have to be made. Loki would have to keep on being a tragic character and he’d have to die. Which he was going to do in The Dark World. But with Marvel, as with most things in this day and age, Loki’s name goes synonymously with money. He’d been making them money, he generated interest. Look how massive Ragnarok’s box office income [or whatever that’s called?] was on day one alone. 

Yeah, sure, there were people there because their interested had been piqued by the [bad] trailers for the film, and they also came because a large majority of people love Thor-- but who hadn’t been seen living, breathing and walking around for 4 years?

Loki.

People wanted to know what happened to Loki more than Thor-- sucks for Waititi and Hemsworth, but it’s the truth. We’ve been seeing Thor in basically every Avengers film except Captain America: Civil War. We know that he’s alive, how he’s doing, how things are going for him. But no one knew about Loki. Because Loki is the tragic character, the human one in a sea of unhuman, “good” characters (Thor, Odin, Frigga, Sif, Volstagg, Hogun, Fandral, Heimdall), if you will. He’s the one we look to and go “I wonder what he’s thinking” “I wonder how he’s feeling” because as soon as we see it:

“Trust my rage”

“Because I’m the monster parents tell their children about at night?”

“The humans slaughter each other in droves while you idly fret”

We can RELATE to what he’s saying, we GET what he’s saying. Yes, we all think with a grin at one another, Thor really is going on about nothing, wish he’d stop some of our wars. Yes, TRUST RAGE, because when we’re angry the truth comes out ungilt with fancy falsehoods and pretty pretendings. Yes, we all sometimes feel we’ve become what our parents warned us against when we were younger--no wonder it seems as if their love for us has diminished into nothing, they hate what we’ve become.

This is, 100%, a tragic character. People either love them or hate them because they remind us of who we are and what we’re capable of. Murder? Yes. Hatred? Yes. Rage? Yes. Self-doubt? Yes. Fear? Yes. Self-loathing? Yes. The capability to be good or bad or both in turns? Yes.

And the fact that the person who plays this role is someone who studied roles like this (among others) for his higher education? Well, it (quite literally) can’t get any better than that. Not only is Loki a tragic character, but he’s played by an actor who understands the method of performing tragedies, who understands how those characters have to be played out, and who can relate to them at the same time to make that performance dynamite. 

The reason why Ragnarok!Loki is so appalling is because he’s played in the same method as Thor, however not in the role of “Morally Good” character but rather in the role of Touchstone the Jester. He says some clever things amidst his largely joksy lines. But he’s really just there for giggles [also as a foil for the main characters to bounce sage-sounding lines or soliloquies off of], and not much else.

And we, as fans, hate that because that’s not Loki’s role. He isn’t the god of jokes. So I’ve taken to looking at this whole Gagnarok problem as an attempt at erasing the Tragic Character That Is Loki because he’s very difficult to write. It was difficult for Tolstoy to write Anna Karenina in the beginning because of how human the characters were, how easily their actions could very well become his own. There’s a reason it took him some three years to complete that novel: writing Tragic Characters is hard. In the process of creating them, writers have to admit things about themselves that all human beings would rather shove into little dark places in our hearts and ignore.

Or there’s another reason they have to crush his beautiful writing into the garbage chute: 

He’s

a) going to turn up alive and well but just for shits and giggles in A4

or

b) going to turn up alive and well and hatefully backstabbing in A4

I’m voting on the latter instead of the former. I’ll be really pleased, however, if he has a proper Tragic Character ending. As in, he comes back, helps the Avengers out, and then agrees to die anyway to save the “better” characters. Or dies in the process of actually saving one of the “better” characters. Because that crap at the beginning of Infinity War will never please me, I’m sorry. Tom’s acting: lovely. Loki’s role before kicking the bucket: garbage.

Annnnnd I think I’m done for the evening. I hope this made sense-- I’m sick so I’m doped up by the doc to the point of constantly feeling drowsy and half-lucid. If anyone wants to have further conversation on this, reblog the post or message me or ask me.

[theotherpages]

2021 NPM Number 27 - JoJo Rabbit and Rainer Maria Rilke

You can listen to the podcast version of this series on Spotify, ITunes, Anchor, (https://anchor.fm/steve-spanoudis) Look for the podcast titled National Poetry Month at the Other Pages.

Here is the direct link to the audio for this podcast: https://anchor.fm/steve-spanoudis/episodes/20201-NPM-Number-27---JoJo-Rabbit-and-Rainer-Maria-Rilke-e100ihe

Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. Today’s article is by Poet and Contributing Editor Kashiana Singh, and unfortunately, as she is slightly under the weather today, it’s me you’ll be listening to on the podcast, instead of her soothingly thoughtful voice. My apologies. To quote Theo Metro, “It can’t be helped.”

JoJo Rabbit and Rainer Maria Rilke

By Kashiana Singh

There is a reason Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) is considered one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets.

Born in Prague, he published his first book of poems, Leben und Lieber, at age 19. In 1897 he met Lou Andreas-Salomé, the talented and spirited daughter of a Russian army officer, who influenced him deeply. Rainer is best known for such collections as Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien) and Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), but also the semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge). Then, there’s also Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter), published after his passing.

His words are touchstones that other artists, from authors to poets to sculptors to filmmakers - often reference - words that are still relevant today. And could there be a message more relevant than love enabling humanity and love also being about setting free. Jojo Rabbit (https://youtu.be/tL4McUzXfFI), was a movie that was also a poem that touched souls with its poignancy. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

The central character of the movie is a fatherless 10-year-old boy coming of age in WWII. I do think the central character of the movie is also the poem itself “Going to the limits of your longing” (https://onbeing.org/poetry/go-to-the-limits-of-your-longing/)

Go to the limits of your longing

Rainer Maria Rilke

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like a flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

The essence of this poem, and the broader essence of Rilke’s poetry is what the movie has captured with nearly close perfection. Layering on top of that the turbulent times that our collective humanity has gone through over the last year, and that makes Jojo Rabbit and Rilke even more resonant and relevant.

The movie, Rilke’s holistic work, and this poem specifically is a totem, a guide, a spiritual map. It serves this purpose because of how simply, yet how aptly it weaves poetry into the journey of a young boy going through phases of accepting vs resisting emotion.

The film also captures another one of Rilke’s famous line’s that if you love someone, you must set them free. The boy has to learn that to love someone means to allow them their freedom to become truly themselves, rather than confine them to the boxed perception we have of them.

When I first watched Jojo Rabbit, by director Taika Waititi, it reminded me that the most tragic victims of the war, regardless of nationality, were the children. The other most striking part of the movie were the two visual motifs - the butterfly imagery and the mother’s distinctive pair of shoes. The final and personally to me the most lasting impact of course was the quote at the end of the movie -

Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final.

Inspiring and comforting at the same time, at the end of the movie these lines left the audience in tears. They communicated that there is no end – there is more to come, that highs and lows and ebbs and flows are not permanent. There is a Buddhism present in these lines, there is emptiness and fullness, there is birth and death, there are moments of truth.

Rilke’s poetry evokes and gleans from the two deepest emotions that humanity experiences. The exhilarations of love and the experience of loss are delivered to us by Rilke in a palette infused with images, sounds, and textures. Written more than a century ago, they remain relevant and universal both in their form and their content because of how they ground the reader in the simplicity of the message, how they carry the reader into recognizing the overwhelming present emotion as temporary and moving into the next fluid state of universal passage of time.

The limits of your longing is as much prayer as it is a poem. It has an unebbing quality to its writing that illuminates in a lyrically intense way that is trademark Rilke. This poem is from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, published in 1905. Besides everything that has been said about this poem, what I take away as a poet from this specific writing is the juxtaposition – how he uses language and feeling to demonstrate the contrasts - beauty and terror, flame and shadow, limits of longing and no feeling is final.

Back to Jojo Rabbit, there is the juxtaposition there that evolves from the poem to the movie with the theme itself which is a setting of comedy but the core reflecting on life and acceptance. The large screen may be lighthearted, the character maybe a young boy but it is juxtaposed at its heart with poetic essence of life-learning and wisdom.

Whether we listen to his words as a spiritual voice or just a human voice, it is a necessary voice, a relevant call to go to the limits of our longing: with an acceptance of the tension between the beauty and terror of existence that walks hand in hand around us each day.

“Embody me,” says Rilke. Live my memory in that darkness. Be my hands, be my feet, be my look of love to the world. “Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in.”

Thank you for listening – I hope poetry is helping restore kindness in your lives. Keep listening, You can find us on Facebook, tumblr and on our website – The Other Pages. Org

Sharing is caring, so if you enjoyed this episode and want to listen to more please tune in for more throughout the National Poetry Month and share with others too

Once again this is Steve Spanoudis pretending to be Kashiana Singh, thanks to Kashiana for writing today’s article. Her book, Shelling Peanuts and Stringing words is available from Impish Lass press on Amazon and other outlets.

You can find more articles, and more poetry at http://theotherpages.org, or The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr.

[aion-rsa]

Link Tank: The Best Sports Movies on Netflix Right Now

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

A great sports movie can be better than a great sports game. Check out the best sports movies Netflix has to offer right now.

“Good sports movies are tough to make. The most successful have to transcend the drama and excitement inherent in sports themselves; why watch a movie about basketball when you could simply watch a great basketball game? But when done right, sports movies offer more depth than the average game, illuminating not just the sport depicted, but the deeper part of human nature that makes us love watching other people play games.”

Read more at Thrillist.

What We Do in the Shadows‘ cop-centric spinoff, Wellington Paranormal, will be available to stream in the U.S. for the first time ever.

“You’ve seen the movie. You’ve seen the show. But unless you live on the other side of the planet, you probably haven’t seen the spinoff. That’s set to change this summer as Wellington Paranormal, the cop-centric What We Do in the Shadows spinoff created by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, is coming to the CW and HBO Max.”

Read more at Gizmodo.

If you love Sherlock Holmes and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Netflix’s The Irregulars is the new show you should watch.

“With an easy elevator pitch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Sherlock Holmes (especially easy thanks to the literal presence of Sherlock Holmes), The Irregulars comes loaded with procedure. But as with all good magic shows, it comes with some pivotal twists: a few devilish supernatural twists that can never be explained, not even by the cast members themselves.”

Read more at Inverse.

Not all classics were beloved during their times. Check out some brutal reviews of classic 20th century novels from when they were first published.

“In 1998, the Modern Library polled its editorial board to determine the 100 best novels published that century. While these classics are adored with the benefit of time and hindsight, they weren’t universally loved when they were first published. Here are 20 harsh reviews of some of the best novels of the 20th century.”

Read more at Mental Floss.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Honest Trailer’s honestly hilarious review of Disney+’s WandaVision is out, and it contains some harsh truth.

“Around these parts, we greatly enjoyed WandaVision, but that’s not to say the show and its premise didn’t have anything to criticize. So Honest Trailer’s ribbing of WandaVision and the greater MCU comes as a sort of pressure relief valve.”

Read more at The Mary Sue.

Twitter is testing Facebook-like emoji reactions again; the platform is reportedly surveying users about three different reaction sets.

“Twitter appears to be testing Facebook-like reactions again. Nine months after reports surfaced of a defunct experiment featuring emoji retorts, the microblogging site is surveying users about updated sets. Based on screenshots of the in-app poll, people are being asked to choose between three different reaction sets.”

Read more at PCMag.

The post Link Tank: The Best Sports Movies on Netflix Right Now appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3vUgyhf

[lpwarwick]

About halfway through the approximately three-hour-long epic Avengers: Endgame, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) sums up the movie with a quick aside: “The only thing that is permanent in life is impermanence.” At first it seems like a throwaway line, tucked into a comedic ramble about Thor’s ex-girlfriend, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). But no second of a meticulously sculpted cinematic event like Endgame forsakes meaning. On the contrary, a film that should feel overlong and overstuffed rings purposeful, weighted with existential truth even as it flashes before our eyes. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the superheroes of our lives.

Pardon my wistfulness, but the Marvel Cinematic Universe, of which this entry is a kind of capper, spans 11 years and 22 films. When audiences met Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) in the MCU’s first installment, Iron Man (2008), George W. Bush was still president. Our world, and the world that the surviving Avengers inhabit at the start of Endgame, is a radically different place now. Yet humans from time immemorial have feared their own annihilation, scanning the sky and contemplating apocalypse. Thus Endgame plucks a shared and existential nerve: we’ll all be dust one day.

In the preceding chapter, Avengers: Infinity War, archvillain Thanos (Josh Brolin) obtained the universe’s six Infinity Stones and then snapped his fingers, thereby eliminating half of all living creatures on earth. Endgame, set five years later, deals with the fallout of this catastrophe. The superheroes that remain—Stark, Thor, Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans), Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), James Rhodes/War Machine (Don Cheadle), Rocket (Bradley Cooper), Nebula (Karen Gillan), Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), and Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo)—struggle to cope.

Scott Lang/Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), who had been stuck in the Quantum Realm since Ant-Man and The Wasp’s mid-credits scene, returns in Endgame’s first act. As such, Lang is the viewer’s conduit for surveying this blasted new world. In San Francisco, he runs his fingers over tall inscribed slabs that evoke the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, searching for his daughter's name.

Many enlightened people contend that time and death are illusions, and Endgame half-agrees. At any rate, time is indefinite, and playing with the concept elevates Endgame in both narrative complexity and—because this is a Marvel movie—irresistible fun. Though its opening scenes are appropriately funereal, Endgame is one of the funniest movies Marvel Studios has produced, and the most fulfilling. As many a comedian will tell you, great tension can give way to great and gratifying release.

What makes Endgame so enjoyable is, in part, an impish spirit that nods to Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok. The team of original Avengers, tasked with saving the world from its stickiest jam yet, handle their predicament with the gravity it deserves and the high-flying vigor fans crave. Since they first assembled on-screen in 2012, Stark, Rogers, Banner, Thor, Barton, and Romanoff have become more than battle buddies. When they refer to each other as family, it resonates, and not only because of the actors’ crackerjack chemistry. Due to their interconnected journeys over subsequent films, and strong writing that has rendered each character fully fledged, these heroes—for MCU devotees at least—have earned their emotional payoffs.

Endgame is 21 minutes longer than Infinity War but feels shorter and more electrifying. What Infinity War drained from the viewer with its dismal finale, Endgame replenishes. The major characters, and some minor ones as well, move through satisfying arcs. A few twists and turns might catch the viewer off guard; but nonetheless, each culmination reverberates as fated, with the feeling of "Yes, it had to be this way."

Cowriters Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus, together with sibling codirectors Joe and Anthony Russo, obviously know what the Marvel enthusiasts want, but they also nimbly toy with expectations. The Russo brothers in particular, having steered the most prodigious MCU films to date (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, and Infinity War), are responsible for a blockbuster unlike any that has come before. The Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises also contained mammoth ensembles and built extensive universes; however, the number of crucial players in Endgame interacting and/or battling together in one scene, or in a single shot, is unprecedented.

Game of Thrones, now in its eighth and final season on HBO, is perhaps the pop culture juggernaut that's most comparable. As the series plays out its own endgame, its characters, too, wrestle with existential concepts, including the nature of time and the inevitability of death. “Nothing lasts,” declares one character in the last season's first episode. It’s a sentiment echoed in Endgame’s tagline and articulated by a character in the film itself: "Part of the journey is the end.”

Maybe, now more than ever, this is a truism that bears repeating. A culture of perpetual scrolling makes accepting endings more difficult, but endings are inevitable, even in tentpole movies. Of course, the MCU will live on and prosper; Endgame, ironically, all but ensures this. But what’s comforting about Endgame is what's comforting about all films that we hold dear. Movies can last forever. Movies will probably outlive me, you, and everyone we know. But until our own endings, we can always circle back to our favorite films, revisit characters and times long gone, and watch the stories begin again.

[filligan-universe]

TOP 10 Films of 2017

As usual, my personal blurbs are from my Criticker profile. Also as usual, there will always be films from this year that I will see at later dates and fall in love with, but this year has been very kind to me in terms of cinema entertainment and I feel confident in this list.

10. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Always been a fan of McDonagh's writing. Here he lowers the heat on the comedy significantly. I gotta say, the way the film is structured kind of leads you to believe we're on a runaway course to an explosive climax, kind of like in his previous two films, but Three Billboards uncharacteristically and jarringly takes a highway exit just before we get there. Yet, character-wise, these people have gone through their changes. Tough pill to swallow but it works. McDormand and Rockwell are aces.

9. Spider-Man: Homecoming It took Spider-Man coming home to Marvel, but they've finally topped Raimi's Spidey 2. Compelling and understandable villain, fantastic and well-rounded humor, Holland is pitch perfect, RDJ doesn't crowd the show or steal scenes. Shit, this is probably the best film in the MCU. It meshes impressively well with the universe, takes past events and utilizes them in clever ways. The action is well-dosed and varied. Jesus, I'm having trouble coming up with actual criticisms. Just goddamn great.

8. The Shape of Water A very personal-feeling film. It's intimate. A film that's becoming harder to find in wide release these days: a vision brought to life without compromise from a talented artist. The characters are endearing, the score lovely, the camerawork gorgeous, the storytelling engaging. This was a treat. I left the theatre in the glow of satisfaction that only well-wrought stories give us.

7. Call Me by Your Name We're getting close to the point where films with this subject matter are in danger of saying nothing new. I had my doubts through some of this film. It wasn't until about the last two scenes that really cinched this up as cinema worth studying and talking about. This isn't to say the rest of the film isn't engaging, but rather the ending elevates it. Chalamet gives the best performance of the year.

6. Coco Lee Unkrich ought to step in as head of the studio now, because every single Pixar venture he touches is the new gold standard of what they're capable of producing. Coco is gorgeous and heartfelt. The words aren't in me right now, nearly a week after my viewing, to emphasize how this film touches the human heart. I could yammer about the characters, the animation, the music, the talent that's beating inside this film, but it would be an injustice to the truth of it. Just go watch it. 

5. Dunkirk I don't intend to belittle the events portrayed here whatsoever when I say this, but Dunkirk is kind of like riding a rollercoaster than watching a movie. It's something you experience. I hear the complaints about underdeveloped characters, but I feel the lens is intentionally retracted to relate these harrowing events in the massive perspective it requires. Again, Nolan plays with time and it's not always obvious how, but it eventually clicks and feels unique. This is an artist at work.

4. Phantom Thread Feels like a return to form for PTA, and a return to form for him is a splash of new filmmaking and story ideas seamlessly interwoven with each other. He knows exactly the kind of story he's crafted and the exact best way to showcase it; classical in presentation with his usual elegance factor ratcheted up a few dials. The cast, of course, magnificent, but I felt the truest star of the show was Greenwood's score.

3. Baby Driver It's unfair that movies can be this flawlessly orchestrated, but it's also why we love the medium. Wright's elegant direction pumps the film's action scenes with well-earned adrenaline and the quieter moments brim with endearing character moments and humor. I honestly don't have much else I can squeeze into a mini-review other than to say my score for this may continue to rise on retrospection. One of the best of the year, no question.

2. Star Wars: The Last Jedi Rian Johnson is a talented filmmaker and Star Wars benefits from his craftsmanship. Visual storytelling leaps from every frame, daring ideas explore uncharted territories, and the whole cast sells this affecting vision with renewed gusto. Driver and Hamill are especially fantastic. All of this in the most beautiful Star Wars to date. This only takes a few wrong swings, and I know fans are divided and calling it riddled with plot holes (it's not), but this is where Star Wars needs to go.

1. Blade Runner 2049 How. How did Villeneuve craft a film that fits snugly in Scott's 1982 universe while still being an original, thoughtful, aesthetically perfect piece of art? How did he fashion a sequel that will, in the future, be studied alongside its original in film classes? I truly cannot overstate how good this is. Everything about it. Deakins should finally get his Oscar, the entire ensemble is magic, the direction, pace, story, music -- flawless. This is the film to beat this year.

I said that this year has been kind to me at the cinema and while I’m aware that in the top 25 grossing films of 2017, only Dunkirk was an original work while the rest were sequels or reboots. That said, this was a good year for franchises. The corporatization of Hollywood has not yet broken me, though I’m sure it will someday. But I finally got a Star Wars movie I’ve been waiting for since childhood. I got to see Marvel take its films into weird directions with extra emphasis on comedy. Fucking Thor Ragnarok is a straight-up comedy. Homecoming, which was so good as just a film it cracked my top 10, has Tim & Eric level humor in it that still boggles my mind. The best film of last year was a sequel, and it’s living, breathing work of art, and a testament to the fact that we shouldn’t outright deride films just because they’re not original. And still, 70% of my top 10 are original works. Cinema is far from a dead dinosaur.

This said, I’d like to acknowledge some of the other films from 2017 that I had a ball with:

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, dir. James Gunn

Thor: Ragnarok, dir. Taika Waititi

It, dir. Andy Muschietti

The Post, dir. Steven Spielberg

The LEGO Batman Movie, dir. Chris McKay

Paddington 2, dir. Paul King

All the Money in the World, dir. Ridley Scott

Molly’s Game, dir. Aaron Sorkin

The Disaster Artist, dir. James Franco

Murder on the Orient Express, dir. Kenneth Branagh

[aion-rsa]

Thor: Love and Thunder - The Women Who Lifted Mjolnir

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Turns out we're going to see Jane Foster Thor on the big screen, so let's look at all the women who have bludgeoned someone with Mjolnir!

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One of the biggest pieces of news coming out of San Diego Comic Con is that Taika Waititi will be directing Thor: Love and Thunder, which will not only bring back Natalie Portman as Jane Foster (who bowed out after Thor: The Dark World and did some minor cameo stuff in Avengers: Endgame), but it will have her take control of Mjolnir. Following in the footsteps of Vision and Captain America, Jane will be showing everyone that she is indeed worthy.

Jane as Thor has been a pretty big part of Jason Aaron's lengthy Thor run, which only just ended. For a while, Thor Odinson believed himself unworthy to lift Mjolnir and the hammer instead fell into the hands of Jane. As with many instances such as this, the replacement hero lasted for a couple years before the original returned to the role and the status quo went back to normal. Hell, this isn't even Thor's first rodeo on this. We had Eric Masterson back in the 90s, but he didn't have boobs, so people didn't freak out about it as much.

There is precedent when it comes to Mjolnir being wielded by a lady. Here's look at Thor's more feminine history from Marvel Comics.

JANE FOSTER

So when it comes to the more modern version of Jane Foster Thor, you might as well just read Jim Dandy's Jane Foster as Thor Explained piece. I'm going to be minimally redundant on the subject and will instead discuss the original instance of the concept, even if it was non-canon.

One of the earliest What If? issues asked, "What if Jane Foster had found the hammer of Thor?" Chased around by rock aliens, Donald Blake was meant to discover a walking stick, smack it against a rock, and transform into the Mighty Thor with the stick becoming his hammer Mjolnir. Odin's plans are a little out there, but sure, why not. In this reality, Jane fell into the cave where the hammer was. Going through the same motions Blake went through, Jane transformed into a female Thor. Deciding to call herself Thordis, she rescued Blake, beat up the rock people, and became the world's most powerful superheroine.

She had plenty of identical adventures to mainstream Thor and even joined the Avengers (Giant Man took over Wasp's role when it came to undressing Thordis with his eyes), but as it goes, Loki had a big, sinister plot going on. In the end, Donald Blake returned to his Thor form and was given back Mjolnir. Thor shacked up with Sif, but Jane got the consolation prize of marrying Odin.

ROGUE

Rogue's ability to carry Mjolnir didn't seem to come from worthiness, but absorbing Thor himself. During her first appearance where Mystique's gang of evil mutants attacked the Avengers, Rogue not only absorbed Ms. Marvel's powers and life force, but she did the same to Thor, leaving his body nothing more than a husk. Things didn't go so well for Rogue at first, as she accidentally killed her allies and Loki found her easy pickings to manipulate into overthrowing Odin and ruling Asgard.

Rogue saw through Loki's lies purely through witnessing Odin's heartbreak. In her mind, Thor appeared before her, explaining that all this time she was looking to fill the void in her soul and accepting her Thorhood would do just that. He told her, "Thor is not simply a person. Thor is an ideal, an example for others to follow. This is your fate, your true destiny! To be that ideal, to be Thor!"

read more: Who is Black Widow Movie Villain Taskmaster?

Rogue tore apart Loki's forces and picked up where her predecessor left off as the hero of Asgard and Midgard. Coincidentally, the inscription on her hammer was changed to say, "Whosoever holds this hammer, if he – or she – be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor."

WONDER WOMAN

In the 90s, Marvel and DC were personified as two giant, cosmic brothers who would fight for dominance until one universe was destroyed. lt was decided that these universes had to settle which reality would survive through a best of 11 series of one-on-one fights featuring heroes from their worlds. Trillions of lives seriously depended on Robin vs. Jubilee. Yikes.

One of the fights had Thor take on Captain Marvel. That's...ummmm...the DC Captain Marvel with the "SHAZAM" and all that. Thor won due to logic. Captain Marvel got his powers from lightning and Thor was the God of Thunder. Unfortunately, his victory transported Mjolnir elsewhere, where Wonder Woman found it. While musing about the definition of what is considered "worthy," she picked it up and became even more powerful than normal.

read more: Marvel Movies Release Schedule: Complete MCU Timeline

When faced with her Marvel opponent Storm, Wonder Woman decided to make the fight fair by dropping Mjolnir. Storm proceeded to zap her into oblivion, so I can only imagine a bunch of DC Universe civilians giving her the sarcastic thumbs up. "We're all going to be wiped out into oblivion, but you got to hold onto your honor. That's fantastic. We're happy for you. Really."

Later on, as the heroes of both worlds fought Darkseid and Thanos, Thor lost his hammer yet again. Wonder Woman casually handed it to him and it took Thor a second to realize that that shouldn't have been possible.

CRUSADER

The final issue of the long-running second volume of What If? featured a story based on the idea of Galactus and the Beyonder killing each other during Secret Wars, leaving the heroes and villains stranded on Battle World. 25 years later, there's mostly a sense of peace among former enemies and everyone had long settled down. The second generation included the offsprings of Wolverine/Storm, Thor/Enchantress, She-Hulk/Hawkeye, Human Torch/Wasp, Dr. Doom/Enchantress, Titania/Absorbing Man, and Molecule Man/Volcana. It also had Sarah Rogers, otherwise known as Crusader, the daughter of Captain America and Rogue.

How did that conception even happen? I'll leave that to you to figure out.

The heroic offspring worked together to take on the evil Vincent Von Doom, who, for the record, was a complete and utter punk compared to his pop. Crusader was magic'd away, but returned to the stronghold with Mjolnir in hand. Her boyfriend Bravado (Thor's son, Balder Blake) wasn't exactly thrilled that Crusader was worthy when he wasn't. Thor shrugged it off with a smile. If Mjolnir said she was all good, who were they to argue?

read more: The History of Marvel's Eternals Explained

Sarah Rogers was wielding Cap's shield and Mjolnir years before Superman ever did and unlike him, she was legitimately considered worthy. Impressive.

EARTH X THOR

In the alternate future of Earth X, it wouldn't have been all so interesting if the ageless Thor wasn't visually changed up in some way. Loki had tricked Odin into believing that Thor needed another lesson in humility and so Thor was turned into a woman, mainly for him to deal with being ogled by men all the time. Loki thought it was hilarious and joked about how he gave Hercules his consent to make a move on his sister.

Being a woman didn't really have much of an effect on the story, mainly because when it came to all the Asgardian goings on, Thor wasn't even the main hero. Rather, it was Loki, who came to realize that their entire existence was a sham and they needed to fight back. In the Earth X reality, the idea was that nearly everyone was linked to the mutant gene. Inhumans? Mutants. Spider-Man? Mutant. Fantastic Four? Mutants. Hulk? Mutant. The Celestials created a failsafe in the beings they tampered with so that when they evolved into life forms of unlimited power (such as Franklin Richards), they would become susceptible to the beliefs of others.

What I mean by that is that somewhere some aliens got so evolved that their powers were unlimited. They came to Earth and were molded by belief to be gods. Thor, Loki, Odin, Hercules, and so on were nothing but brainwashed aliens all along and didn't even realize it. Naturally, the Lord of Lies was the one to figure out that they were living lies.

read more: Thor 4 Villains We Want to See

It took a while for Thor to accept that Loki was telling the truth after all. She willed herself back into male form and became horrified. Eventually, the two joined forces and decided on what it was they wanted to be. Thor chose to be Donald Blake and exist as a doctor. Loki took over for his brother and transformed himself into the new Thor. But, you know, the kind of Thor that has a penis.

STORM

Back in the day, Chris Claremont and Art Adams did a big two-parter that dealt with the X-Men and New Mutants being lured into Asgard by Loki. It was notable for Loki giving Storm a very Mjolnir-like enchanted hammer called Stormcaster. Upon realizing that she was being manipulated, she gave it up, as well as her status of Goddess of Thunder. It was just a ploy by Loki in the end, but if push came to shove, would Storm have been recognized as worthy to pick up the real deal Mjolnir?

Years later, after the Siege on Asgard, Thor visited Queen Storm in Wakanda. In the aftermath of Siege, he discovered a box with Storm's name on it. Opening up, they found Stormcaster. Storm was drawn to it and upon picking it up, she regained her goddess form and returned to Loki's sway. Thor tried to talk her down and had to get physical. Becoming lucid, Storm grabbed Mjolnir from Thor's hand and used it to smash Stormcaster to bits. She returned to her normal self and the two pondered the meaning of Loki's posthumous intentions.

BLACK WIDOW

The What If? miniseries based on Age of Ultron was really cool outside of the bookends. The first issue is droll and depressing while the last issue is nihilistic and depressing. The series goes with the idea that Wolverine's constant time travel in Age of Ultron proper caused tons of problems across the multiverse. At random points in Marvel history, certain characters would see all the different alternate realities at once, have an aneurysm, and die. Then we'd see how history would be changed by their mysterious deaths.

Thor was in the midst of fighting the Midgard Serpent Jormungand, where they were meant to destroy each other and fulfill Ragnarok. Instead, Thor suddenly started screaming and keeled over. Without Thor to complete the prophecy, Asgardian monsters ran rampant across Earth. Flash forward later where the only team of heroes left was made up of Nick Fury, Black Widow, Silver Sable, Falcon, Shang-Chi, and Microchip. The team flew towards Jormungand and all the other monstrosities in a Quinjet, armed with a lot of stolen Dr. Doom tech. Widow jumped out of the plane and Microchip realized that they were merely a distraction (or as Fury put it, "sacrifice") for the real main event assault.

read more: The 100 Best Marvel What If Moments

Picking up Mjolnir, Black Widow flew right at the serpent. Decades later, Nick Fury told the story, bound to a wheelchair. He was the lone survivor and admired the statues commemorating Black Widow and her fallen Valkyries.

Unfortunately, the fifth issue decided to mash up everything by having Ultrons infest all the worlds brought up in the miniseries and wiping them all out until a handful of alternate reality survivors started their own Exiles knockoff on a dead world. So Goddess Black Widow survived with a couple other characters, but at the cost of four realities being wiped out completely. That's disheartening.

THE THORS OF BATTLEWORLD

For those who haven't read Marvel's massive Secret Wars event from 2015, here's the quick version: the multiverse was imploding upon itself and the only thing stopping total annihilation was the team of Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, and Molecule Man. In the aftermath, all that was left was a planet called Battleworld made up of pieces of alternate universes. Every world that survived the implosion was recreated as a kingdom. Doom ruled as God and the Thors did his bidding as police sheriffs. Each kingdom would have someone deemed worthy enough to wield their own version of Mjolnir or a Mjolnir-like weapon.

read more: Secret Wars: A Look Back at the Tie-Ins

There were several hammer-wielders who were some variation of Thor Odinson, but many others got to shine. This meant a handful of women deemed worthy. I'd be here all day if I gave each one her own profile, so I'm just going to list them off: Jane Foster, Storm, Angela, Dazzler, Valkyrie, Gamora, Katherine Renner, Lila Rhodes, Sif, Susan Storm, Tarene, and Ti Asha Ra.

SQUIRREL GIRL

Squirrel Girl's whole deal is that despite her ridiculous powerset, name, and appearance, she's one of Marvel's heavy hitters. She's the one who made her debut defeating Dr. Doom, after all. In one of her adventures, Doreen accidentally got cloned by a piece of Stark tech. While it was neat for her at first, it soon became apparent that her clone was evil.

The evil Squirrel Girl (named Allene to keep things less confusing) was able to overwhelm the original and went on to defeat pretty much all the Marvel heroes. She then stole a bunch of weapons from them, like an Iron Man gauntlet, Doc Ock arms, Hawkeye's arrows, etc. She couldn't budge Mjolnir, naturally. Doreen tried to stop her once again and was instead teleported to the moon, where she was doomed to suffocate.

Squirrel Girl's BFF squirrel Tippy Toe stole the Iron Man gauntlet and the teleporter, flew to Mjolnir's whereabouts, and teleported the hammer to the moon, next to Doreen's dying body. Moments later, Doreen (who was surprisingly never referred to as "Thoreen") appeared before Allene with a whole bunch of pissed off superheroes joining the fight. Once Allene was dealt with, Doreen gave the weapon back to Jane.

Gavin Jasper writes for Den of Geek and wouldn't mind seeing more of the whole Steve Rogers/Rogue romantic pairing. Read his other articles here and follow him on Twitter @Gavin4L

Read and download the Den of Geek SDCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!

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Gavin Jasper

Jul 22, 2019

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