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This was a riot. I watched this in bed with my spouse, laptop propped up over the blankets and the lights turned off, like a sleepover. I’d like to believe Matt Johnson would forgive me for not renting it off of Apple TV for 20 bucks.

We first watched Nirvanna the Band, the 2017-2018 mockumentary TV series on Viceland, a few summers back when we were visiting long distance internet friends for the first time. I was delighted by its absurdity and its ability to blend reality and fiction; combinations of scripted scenes and candid footage of confused onlookers who don’t realize they are part of a TV show. Matt and Jay’s friendship, with their co-dependency, adolescent humor, and constant pop culture references reminds me--now more than ever--of friends I grew up with.

The movie is an extension of the series, and plays off of the fact that the real Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol have been putting stories about these fictionalized versions of themselves out there for almost 20 years. The movie begins with, and through clever editing continues to interact with, footage from their original 2008 Nirvanna the Band web series. I love metatextual stories, I love leaning on the fourth wall so hard it crumbles, I love blurring that line between reality and fiction.

Also this film was just too funny. My partner and I were howling with laughter throughout the whole movie--the absurdity of tying cables at the top of the CN tower to an electrical box on the street, Matt screaming at a raccoon as he runs through Toronto, the black-and-white flashbacks Jay and Matt keep having that depict them saying much meaner and more exaggerated versions of the things they actually said. ALSO. The realization that the characters had actually traveled back to 2008--Bill Cosby lovingly remarked upon as America’s TV dad on a local newspaper, the original uncensored version of ‘Let’s Get it Started’ by Black Eyed Peas playing loudly on a city tour bus, a crowded theater uproariously laughing at ‘paging Dr. f****t’ from the Hangover to Matt’s seeming confusion and horror…As someone who grew up in the early 2000’s I do fear I am the target demographic for this film.

The more I learn about this movie’s production the funnier certain things are to me. In this interview, for example, it’s mentioned that “Johnson is still tight-lipped about those sequences—partially because they were filmed without permits.” Also said more explicitly in this interview, “Everything you’re watching is happening for real with people who don’t know what’s going on, except for the obvious moments where we’re working with our friends […] And we are just shooting as though we’re shooting a student film, without any sense of permits or permission at all.”

Besides the charm of the guerilla type filmmaking--a breath of fresh air from Hollywood at large--the duo’s friendship is at the heart of this movie. In spite of the goofy Back to the Future plot and over the top stunts, there is a realness under the surface of Matt and Jay’s friendship. The inextricable link between creator and artistic creation feels most concentrated here, in their friendship and what they mean to one another, and how wrapped up the characters are in each other’s lives. Matt Johnson touches upon this in this IndieWire article, saying of the fictional Matt, “How much of it is the real me? 100 percent of the character is the real me, but now I’ve been so socialized that he doesn’t exist the same way, but thank God he can still talk.”

I think it makes a lot of sense at this point in their lives, and after playing these archetypal versions of their younger selves for almost 20 years, to be reflecting on the passage of time, and how the people you love are far more important than fame and success.

“If you’ve got a best friend, you won’t even notice getting older.”

lorem ipsum and all that

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What a breath of fresh air this show was, especially amongst the lackluster products we've been seeing from the MCU these past few years. This project felt like it had so much heart behind it. I had no real expectations going in--I wasn't familiar whatsoever with Wonder Man as a character, nor his superpowers, but I think that only added to the pure delight of seeing what direction this show went in.

The driving force behind this show is the relationship between the main character, aspiring actor Simon Williams, and troubled veteran actor Trevor Slattery, previously known as THE MANDARIN from that one fuckass Iron Man movie. You remember that one??? Honestly, incredible work getting me to care about that guy--I never thought he'd come up again apart from an occasional namedrop, if that. And this 8 episode series got me heavily invested in his age-gap codependent male friendship!!

The main conflict for Simon is his need to hide his super powers; due to an incident years prior, there is in-universe legal precedent barring superpowered individuals from working in the entertainment industry. Further, Trevor's initial connection with Simon is manufactured; Trevor is tasked with monitoring Simon by the FBI, blackmailed with threat of imprisonment for his prior crimes as the Mandarin.

Simon and Trevor's main goal is to get roles in a remake of the in-universe superhero movie "Wonder Man," a film which inspired Simon's passion for acting. Moreover, he shared the experience watching the movie with his late father, giving him an even more poignant connection to the film. I liked how both the film's legacy and Simon's own nostalgia towards it was almost paralyzing for him.

Simon is a solitary young man, but very driven, singleminded and determined...often to his own detriment. Simon reads very neurodivergent to me, and even taking the 'otherness' of his superpowers into consideration I find I can't really untangle him from that interpretation. There's a very poignant scene where Simon's mother describes him in his youth to Trevor, thanking the older man for being a friend to her son. "Truthfully,” she says, “he never really had a friend. Who doesn't ever make a friend?"

Simon's distance from others and the secret of his powers, one he has been keeping close to his chest since childhood, does also seem to me to be a potential queer metaphor. Simon and Trevor's first meeting being at a showing of Midnight Cowboy.

In a similar way to how my personal favorite MCU film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, plays with genre as a “political thriller masquerading as a big superhero movie,” Wonder Man is more a character study with a focus on acting and the world of entertainment than it is a show about superheroes and supervillains. One of the series creators, Andrew Guest, "described the series as a character study about two narcissists who learn to care about another person." Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who played Simon Williams in the show, “acknowledged that there is a meta aspect to the series and said it is self aware, but added that it is also focused on a genuine story about friendship and the journey of an actor.”

I think that's one of the strengths of adapting characters from a well established universe, such as from Marvel or DC comics. You have room to explore with genre, with interpretation—to make something new. This show is going to stick with me for a while, I think.

A short preamble: I received this book as a gift that was part of a "blind" book recommendation from the shop 'Raven Moon Revival.' This is part of their "Blind Date With a Book" series, I believe from the 'YA Horror' genre which is kind of funny. Anyway, it was a very thoughtful gift from my sister!

When reviewing this for Goodreads, I wanted to give the book a 3.5 but was unable to; turns Goodreads doesn't let you give 'half-points'. Anyway! I had a fun time reading this one. It had good moments of tension and suspense; it's getting knocked a few points down because it feels a bit padded out, however. There is a long section in the middle where there is a lot of back and forth and--maybe because I could already tell where things were headed--felt unnecessary. I just think it would have benefitted from some trimming down.

I wonder if a reader with less familiarity with, like, creepypasta tropes, internet horror, and urban (particularly North American) folklore would feel differently about my take, though. Maybe a reader like that would feel fine about the length of the story and was more surprised by the twists it took.

The basic premise of this book is a small town plagued by disappearances and a serial killer who leaves their victims’ bodies dismembered and sewn back together with red thread in the woods. Our main character, high schooler Abby Ward, along with her friends has developed a strict set of rules to keep them safe (don’t go out alone, don’t go out at night, etc.) Even so, her younger sister Hope gets taken, and Abby is determined to get her back. The friends, as well as others in the town, are under the impression that a strange man named Charles Vickers is the culprit. Others in the town believe it to be a supernatural creature, but are often dismissed as superstitious.

As I suspected, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. To use some Marble Hornets/creepypasta terms, Vickers is more of a ‘proxy’ for the real killer, the Stitcher, a supernatural monster. The Stitcher’s origins are very urban legend: having once been the corpse of a miner who died in an accident and was stitched back together by his grieving mother and, using some sort of strange dark magic, resurrected him (a classic Came Back Wrong sort of situation). I say Vickers is a proxy because he is the ancestor of the Stitcher; I guess he’d had at least one child before his death and that instinctual ancestral tie protects Vickers from its violence (up to a point).

I don't often feel this way about teen characters, but I do think the kids in this story acted far more mature and reasonable than their age should dictate... then again, they're all very traumatized and on constant alert, having grown up in a town they believe is haunted by some sort of preternatural serial killer...There's probably something subtextual to be said about the red thread tying the town together and trapping everyone there; this thought popped up for me when the Stitcher was dying, during the sequence where red thread was coming out of the ground all over the community. Particularly when Abby's mother was coughing up the thread, and upon dispelling it seemed to 'come to her senses' (for lack of a better term). Something like, the grief, paranoia, and fear is just as deadly for the town as the monster within it. People turning a blind eye to one another's cries for help (figuratively and literally), abandoning and ostracizing people who have been affected by the tragedies, ultimately isolating themselves further and just making themselves better targets for the Stitcher. Or maybe I'm looking too deeply and it's just a spooky lore thing.

Overall, fun for a spooky time. And also fun to imagine playing out as a film as you read!

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whack ass movie. omg

I love a good heist story. More than that, I love a group of criminal outcasts that become an awful little found family. It’s an artifact left over from my edgy teen sensibilities (my first thought was Team Rocket from the Pokemon anime, but now that I think about it, the main cast of Cowboy Bebop probably fits the bill even better).

This story follows such a group of criminal outcasts, most of which belong to a street gang called the Dregs under teenage criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. My personal favorite character is Inej Ghafa, his ‘spider;’ a spy and informant to Kaz, using her background as a tightrope walker in her family’s traveling circus troupe as a foundation for her sneaking abilities. She is also essentially his righthand man, and they privately grapple with the care they have for each other and how that butts up against the harsh reality of their world. Caring can be a weakness; this shows up in the story’s climax, when they’re double crossed by the merchant who sent them upon this incredible heist in the first place, Jan Van Eck, who takes Inej hostage as leverage against Kaz.

This story is set in the fictional Ketterdam, which I’m told takes inspiration from Dutch Republic-era Amsterdam.” In this story’s world there are people known as Grisha, who can control certain aspects of matter such as healers who can seal wounds and “staunch bleeding at a molecular level”, those who can control fire once it’s been sparked, those who can control currents and tides as well as convert water between solid, liquid, and gaseous states, etc. There is a new drug called Jurda parem that dramatically heightens the power of a Grisha. It is also highly addictive and weakens the user almost immediately, and the withdrawals kill most Grisha unless they are given more of the drug. The conceit of the heist is that the Ketterdam Merchant Council seeks to eradicate or suppress the drug to prevent the potential ‘economic upheaval’ it would cause, and to avoid that Kaz and his team are tasked with breaking into a high-security ice prison in Fjerda (fantasy Scandanavia) to bust out the creator of the drug. Kaz assembles his team: Inej, a Grisha and former soldier named Nina, former Fjerdan drüskelle soldier and Grisha hunter Matthias, gambling addict sharpshooter (and bisexual king) Jesper, and explosives expert and the outcast son of Jan Van Eck himself, Wylan.

Some readers dislike that the characters in this two-book series are so young; I’ve even read that the author herself, when envisioning this duology, wanted the characters to be older. Their being made into ‘kids’ (teens at most) was a concession made to get the book published, as she had been pigeon-holed into the Young Adult genre. To nobody’s surprise, this is a problem many female writers face. Actually, after reading Six of Crows I learned that in an anniversary rerelease of the duology mentions of the character’s ages or allusions to their youth were changed or scrubbed.

I’m of two minds on this decision…my gut reaction was that this was the wrong move; Bardugo did a great job weaving the main cast’s youth into both the story and their personal motivations. Perhaps she did her job too well—without it, there are some aspects of the characters that would fall flat (in my opinion). But then again, she wanted these characters to be young adults in the first place, so this change is a win for the author and her vision. I just prefer the original published version. The character’s tragedies, hardships, and mindsets are made all the more raw with their age.

I think with an ensemble cast like this, we needed to really care about all the characters and their interior workings, and Bardugo does a great job at this. The story is told from a third-person POV that switches to a new character every chapter, and I found that between having their thoughts and seeing their interactions with others, we get a good sense of each of the main cast. The only character I disliked was Matthias, but that’s not because he’s poorly written, I just had a sour taste in my mouth from his relationship with Nina. There’s some complex dynamics going on there with Matthias being raised to literally hunt and kill Grisha, his culture persecuting Grisha while simultaneously exploiting their powers. And due to the perceived betrayal that landed Matthias in jail prior to the start of the story, he shows violent tendencies towards Nina for the majority of this first book. This is in spite of his own attraction and care for her.

I don’t think these choices are inherently bad——fiction is a wonderful place to explore complex, unhealthy dynamics and difficult topics. I think it’s just the knee-jerk reaction to the situation, and the parallels it holds to real-world situations I have observed. I think Matthias is more likable, sympathetic and redeemable than some other characters with similar backgrounds, but he’s kind of a nothingburger to me which makes his flaws much more stark to me. What is that post? Something to the effect that being annoying or tedious in fiction is a greater sin than being a war criminal. And that’s true!