Sinners (2025).

The world of filmmaking seems to be at a transition point.  Each year seems to show more signs that the Los Angeles studio system, which has acted as pretty much the main hub for the creation of cinematic stories (what film producer Lynda Obst once referred to as the "Old Abnormal"), is slowly coming to an end.  Or even if it never amounts to a complete end, there are signs that the traditional production stage economy that used to be the very lifeblood of Hollywood is no longer capable of adapting to the ongoing advance of the digital age.  Instead, they're relying now on a kind of latter day model of old world patronage, where various wealthy Silicon Valley types are now buying up and merging studios in an effort to help them avoid bankruptcy.  It's kind of ironic, in a way.  That's because it's almost as if Tinseltown is retreating back to a strange parody of glory days during it's Golden Age.  They seem to be trying to see if the old Media Mogul Model is what's needed to keep things afloat.  The trouble here is I don't see any sign that most of the current crop of studio owners have any of the interest, foresight, or genuine dedication and creative vision that old timers like Louis B. Mayer, Carl Laemmle, and Darryl F. Zanuck used to have that allowed them to turn MGM, Universal Studios and 20th Century Fox into the pioneering juggernauts they once were.  These days, Hollywood is a shadow of its former shadows, and everything that once defined it as an industry is slowly winding down.

The most notable fallout from this ongoing development is the obvious lack of individual talent on display in the contemporary studio system.  This is has been a slow dawning realization on the part of audiences, as it becomes clear that most of the actual content coming out the Valley these days is confined for the most part to endless tentpole franchise products, and somehow none of them manage to do the legacy media they're depicting any good.  That's because the studio model is running on a paradigm which won't allow for the presence of actual filmmaking talent for the most part anymore.  One gets the sense that if this legacy revival had happened during the mid-90s, when Hollywood was still riding easy in the traces, then the results would have been a bit better.  Those were the days of Lynda Obst's "Old Abnormal".  The "New Abnormal" (as she once referred to the current studio system) seems to be incapable of figuring out even the basic rudimentary elements of churning out a good movie crop.  Then again, it's also possible to notice similar developments happening across a multitude of businesses in the ongoing early half of the 21st century.  We seem to be in an age of what's best described as "Stupid Industrialism".  It's all a version of the "boom-and-bust" entrepreneurship that gave American its Gilded Age back in the 19th century.  The difference is the modern industrialists of our era seem to suffer from a curious malady.  It's as if they couldn't run a business to save their own lives.

You almost get the sense that some of these guys (and they are all men, for the most part) never even learned how to make a simple amount of change at a cash register before.  It's disconcerting to say the least.  That's the kind of careless outlook that causes problems due to lack of foresight and knowledge of basic economics.  I don't think this Country has ever seen such a considerable lack of economic and business illiteracy at any point in its history before.  It's the kind of thing that spells trouble sooner or later, and in the field of the Arts, one of the logical results of such illogical reasoning is the tendency to smother any up and coming creative talent out of sight and out of mind.  It's what makes the emergence of someone like Ryan Coogler all the more remarkable in an industry that is, for all intents and purposes, on it's last legs.  The future breakout director was born in May, 1986, and grew up a product of San Francisco's Bay Area.  While he was born in Oakland, he spent the majority of his childhood and the rest of his high school years in Richmond, California.  In interviews, Coogler presents himself as a soft-spoken yet articulate, and clearly intelligent man, yet one who seems to be ill at ease with the entire ethos of Hollywood's showbusiness celebrity machine.  This might just be to his personal and professional credit.  As he's made clear more than once, even he's surprised to be in the spotlight.

What's remarkable about Coogler's upbringing is how little of it seems to prepare you for the expectation that you were seeing the development of a future cinematic talent.  Coogler admits that films and moviemaking was sort of the furthest thing from his mind as he grew up,  In first high school and then college, his biggest achievements were in the world of sports.  Coogler proved himself a natural athlete on the football field, and so for the longest time, it looked like he might have grown up to be a pretty decent sportsman.  Then while a student at Moraga's St. Mary's College, Coogler and his fellow teammates where signed up for a creative writing course as part of his football scholarship.  It's there the director came under the mentorship of Rosemary Graham.  She seems to have been the one to spark an interest in the Arts for the first time, and at one point Coogler was given the assignment to try his hand at writing a legitimate screenplay.  This was a standard part of the course; just a simple creative exercise that in most cases was meant to fulfill the curriculum requirements, and that's how it remains for most students who take such courses.  However, to both Coogler and Graham's surprise, it seems the assignment he turned in was actually a cut above the rest of the students taking her required curriculum.

To his own surprise, Coogler, discovered that he had a natural talent for scriptwriting.  Graham recognized this and called him into a meeting where she did all she could to encourage him to both recognize and develop his gifts to their full potential.  Coogler listened to her advice, and began to jot down ideas, and draft more screenplays, while at the same time starting to familiarize himself with the mechanics of filmmaking.  On the technical side of things, he became such a good student, that he eventually learned how to manipulate the way the camera frame presents the story to the viewer in a number of creative ways.  More important than this, however, he discovered that Graham was right about his natural talents as a writer.  So he kept at it, and remained a serious student of the craft, to the point where he would end up producing and directing a series of short films.  In time, some of these efforts would land on the film festival circuit.  It was while he was still at film school that one of his teachers pointed out that acclaimed actor Forest Whitaker was sending scouts out to look for up and coming talent, and Coogler's teacher suggested that he contact the Ghost Dog in order to see if maybe he could impress the Hollywood professional enough to gain a foot in the door.  So a meeting was arranged, and Coogler got a chance to pitch a number of creative ideas to direct as his first film. 

One of them was a script called Fruitvale Station, which was based on the real life story of Oscar Grant, and his death at the hands of the Bay Area's Transit Police.  Whitaker could tell that Fruitvale was the one project Coogler was passionate about, and that the script had all the ingredients necessary for a good film.  So with his help, Coogler began production of Fruitvale in July of 2012, and had its premiere January 19th, 2013.  It was during the production of Fruitvale that Coogler would first meet and collaborate with Michael B. Jordon, an actor who would go on to become integral to the director's latest project.  The success of Fruitvale Station was enough to bring Coogler's name and talents to the attention of the Hollywood studio system, as the director soon found himself tapped to helm the big budget tentpole franchises for both a Rocky Legacy sequel, with 2015's Creed, as well as the two Black Panther films for Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe.  While each of these later efforts have brought Coogler's name to a mass awareness, the director has also said that he was anxious to craft a story of his own.  Something that would allow his own voice and talents to have their say in the same way as his debut feature did.  Yet there also seems to have been an awareness that this was something he would have to fight for in a studio system that valued cookie cutter products rather than individual talent.

So what Coogler did was to allow his for-hire-work to buy him enough clout so that he could bankroll his next project, which was meant to be much more personal than his regular studio gigs, and produce it under the banner of his own production company, Proximity Media.  Drawing back from a lifetime of movie watching, book reading, and personal experience listening to Blues music with his uncle, and a fascination with Irish culture, Coogler came up with an idea Inspired by films such as Night of the Living Dead and From Dusk Till Dawn, and novels like Stephen King's Salem's Lot to craft the tale of a group of desperate survivors holed up in an abandoned sawmill, as the try to survive the night with a hoard of ravenous vampires trying to break in and tear the main cast apart.  In addition to the films of Quentin Tarantino and George A. Romero, Coogler has also cited the comedic and surrealistic period dramas of the Coen Brothers, as well as an episode of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone as key influences on his story.  Coogler would slowly assemble all of these elements together into a script which came to have the title of Sinners.  With enough clout on his side, Coogler reached out to the man who helped launch his directing career, and together he and Michael B. Jordon set about to craft the kind of old time B-Movie fright film that used to be such personal favorite crowd pleasers from their childhoods.

The final result was a film that saw its nationwide release in American theaters on April 18th, 2025.  I first heard about Sinners as a bit of word of mouth mentioned online, in passing.  There was a Twitter conversation going on where one of the participants was raving about this brand new Horror flick that left those who saw it eager to talk about it.  What I recall everyone going on about was that it had this climactic ending shoot-out between Michael B. Jordan and the KKK, and that it was one of the most awesome spectacles anyone had seen in a movie theater for quite a while.  Being the complete pure fool I am, I waited and bided my time before finally deciding to sit down and take a look at it myself, and even then a major motivating factor behind that was because I'd just come from watching another fright flick that left me aggravated with boredom, and so I was stuck casting about for anything that would lighten the load.  Since the film I'd just watched was a vampire related tale, I remembered that Coogler had also made his own film tackling this same ancient myth of the Undead.  So I finally sat myself down, and let the story unfold.  What happened next more than lived up to the hype, and the main reason for why that is comes down to the story Coogler has to tell, and what it means in real life.

King Sorrow (2025).

With the release of his first anthology collection, 20th Century Ghosts, in October of 2005, it's been a pretty safe bet to say that novelist Joe Hill has done a pretty admirable job at cementing a name and place for himself; not just within the Horror genre, but also as a more or less permanent fixture of the pop culture landscape.  He's done it through a process that's simple to describe, yet far from easy to pull off.  Part of it comes from having the kind of outsized Imagination that most artists can only dream about.  The other piece of the equation for the artistry comes from the writer's hard won victories in honing his craft.  Open up any one of Hill's books, and you'll be confronted with an author who uses pains-taking care with the letters on the page.  To read his best work is to be confronted with a man who knows that none of his ideas count for much if the words aren't there when he needs them.  It's this artistic humility in the face of his own chosen medium that's part of what makes Hill such a pleasant read.  It's the knowledge that you're being entertained by a man who takes the actual Art of his vocation seriously.  Every book greets us with the same situation.  We meet the artist in his latest endeavor to achieve the greatest possible effect in his craft.  He does this not in the hope of achieving artistic perfection.  That sort of thing will always be out of reach for all the best storytellers out there.  Even Shakespeare could never reach that height.  Instead, each book or short story, or novella is an example of Hill's constant realization that the book is the boss, which means he needs to make sure that he gets as much, if not all, of the right words onto the page as possible.

This is something Hill admits to doing since he was just a young pup growing up listening to and watching his father Stephen King tell stories for a living.  It must say something for the impact that kind of a childhood can leave on an impressionable young mind, if it results in him writing novels like the one under discussion here today.  Hill has spoken of how he was the product of a literary household on numerous occasions.   The author and his fellow siblings, Naomi and Owen King, all grew up being read to by their parents.  It's one of those shared generational past times that families all over the world have resorted to at one time or another.  What marked the practice out as different for the King family is that Hill and his brother and sister found themselves in a remarkable agreement.  After their parents were done reading to them, sooner or a later a time would come when they were expected to turn right around and return the favor.  Once Stephen King or his wife Tabitha got done regaling their children with their favorite stories, either Hill, Owen, or Naomi would then have to choose from their parents favorite books and then see how well they could match Mom, and especially Dad as storytellers in their own right.  This whole process seems to be something that King and Tabitha decided on together. 

If I had to give a reason for why two grown adults would want to be read to by their kids, then the best answer I've got is that it all stemmed from both parents growing up as a pair of evenly matched bookworms, and just naturally wanting to make sure their kids grew up with the same sense of shared enthusiasm that they had for the written word when they were little.  The net result of these efforts seems to have been positive on the whole.  Two of the King family siblings would go on to become storytellers themselves, with Hill seeming to have managed to not just stand on his own two feet, but also to more or less place himself in an interesting sort of position.  Everything I've read from the guy leaves me with the impression that sooner or later, he's the one whose going to take up the slack once his dad is forced to retire from the writing desk for good by time and tide.  In other words, there's a good chance that Joe Hill might very well be the one to continue the legacy of the Stephen King universe.  This is something I first discovered within the pages of N0S4A2, where Hill is clearly seen setting his story within the sheltering confines of his father's own secondary world, the one which contains such pleasant locales as Derry, Maine.  This conviction has grown with each new book.

King Sorrow appears to be no different in that respect.  For the purposes of this review, some of the most crucial behind-the-scenes info Hill provides for readers into where his mind was at with the novel under discussion comes from an interview he gave to Locus Online.  It's there that Hill drops hints that his latest book might have been something like the natural outgrowth of a constant background motif in his previous work: “King Sorrow was my first novel in almost ten years, and, in some ways, it reiterates a set of beliefs that I have about what a story should do, on a much grander scale than I’ve done before. The book cir­cles back to explore ideas from all the earlier stories. Not just Heart-Shaped Box, but in The Fireman, where the world is suffering from a contagion of something called dragonscale, and there are a couple characters who literally breathe fire in that book. It seems like that flows very naturally into where I went with King Sorrow. It’s a big, multi­cast story that takes place over a number of years. So, in that way, it echoes NOS4A2. In Horns, my protagonist, Ig Perrish, has a special relationship with a number of snakes – at one point, he delivers a sermon to a few hundred snakes in a burned-out foundry, and that interest in thinking, conniving reptiles obviously returns in a story about dragons."

At the same time, Hill makes no bones about that fact that a lot of the book came from those aforementioned childhood reading sessions with his parents as a kid, and from one book in particular: “The keystone character of King Sorrow is King Sorrow himself – I always knew that when he came through into our reality, we were going to have some fun. At the risk of upsetting fans of Tolkien, I think Smaug is a much more interest­ing villain than either Saruman or Sauron – that Smaug is really Tolkien’s great villain. My parents took turns reading The Hobbit to my sister and me when I was little, and I remember that scene where Bilbo is invisible in Smaug’s treasure hoard, and Smaug knows he’s there, and the two of them have a conversation where they’re essentially ver­bally fencing with each other, because for dragons, words are just one of their weapons. They play with their conversational partners the way a cat will play with a mouse. I remember, at ten, being utterly entranced by the suspense of that scene, of Smaug playing with Bilbo and waiting for the hobbit to give away his location so that Smaug could bite him in two. I thought, ‘This is as good as suspense can get.’ So probably the seed of King Sorrow was planted 40 years ago (web)".  Let me just add that all thinking The Hobbit is better than Lord of the Rings does is to place Hill in what might be termed one of the acceptable minorities within Fantasy fandom.  Guys like him exist, and their harmless for the most part, so let's ignore them all.

Such is the verdict of pop culture as a whole, so far as I can tell.  What remains to be said is that Hill makes it sound very much as if that initial childhood encounter with Middle Earth is one that's managed to stay with him across the years.  It's just possible that a similar phenomenon happens to a lot of pop culture nerds.  We'll each have that one story, whether a book or film, that we just happen to catch or have read to us at the exact right moment, and it sort of tends to leave an indelible impression on our sense of both life and art.  It was An American Tail by Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg for me.  In Hill's case, it turns out to have been The Hobbit.  What this means in terms of Hill's artistry is interesting.  It implies that Tolkien is one of the constant influences that are always lingering somewhere in the background of the writer's Inspiration.  If this is at all the case, then what remains to be seen going forward is the way Hill interacts with Tolkien in two ways.  The first is to see how his enjoyment of Middle Earth plays out when it is filtered through his own American Gothic lens.  The second aspect is to see how this Tolkien influence interacts with the work of the second major influence in Hill's ongoing repertoire, that being no less than the artistry of the writer's father, Stephen King.  

Iron Lung (2026).

Sometimes it helps to go into a movie blind.  Perhaps there's something to be said for having no more than the bare minimum of background information and context to hang your expectations on, at least when it comes to watching certain types of film.  That was more or less my own experience of the recent sleeper hit Iron Lung.  Directed by Mark Fischbach, known also as the internet personality Markiplier, and created and developed by David Szymanski, Iron Lung functions as a film adaptation of the indie Horror game of the same name.  That was just about the extent of all I knew going into this movie.  I had a few more bits of knowledge, most of which I owed to the review of YouTube critic Ryan Hollinger.  However, aside from that one note of good press, I had very little else to go on.  My own experience with Markiplier, for instance, is very close to that of Hollinger.  He was just one of those names you're bound to run into when looking up clips of various video games online.  That's pretty much all that happened, really.  Fischbach's online name and videos were tossed up by a friendly algorithm, and he remained an on-and-off presence in my search history here and there on occasion.  I can't recall even watching much of his stuff in the lead-up to realizing the film had an honest to goodness theatrical release.  If I'm being brutally honest with myself here, it's probably telling that my initial impression to news that Markiplier, of all people, was making a movie based on a video game, existed somewhere on a limited spectrum, one that ran from muted, to mixed, to nothing at all. 

It was just another one of those bits of passing trivia that you can't help running into sooner or later, because the Web never exists in a vacuum, and stuff like this is bound to make the rounds.  I think the initial coolness I had to the idea was bound up with a lot of personal experience that I'd had with movies at the time.  It's no secret that Hollywood seems to be going through a creative drought period.  There's a lot to complain about with the way Tinseltown has been handling both its new material and its legacy media.  I'd gotten so used to not getting worked up about the latest film announcements, even if it was something I liked, that I more or less automatically assumed the same arrangement with Markiplier's efforts in his big screen debut.  My overall reaction at the time was at least a bit understandable.  It also turns out to have been very unfair to both of the artists involved, and I'll explain why later on in the review proper.  Before we get there, however, I've since learned at least something about the nature of, as well as the context behind the making of this film and its source material.  Giving newcomers at least some background information about the thinking and culture that exist behind Iron Lung can go a long way to explaining both what the movie is trying to achieve, as well as my own critical reactions to it.

In order to do that, we have to say a brief word about the true creator behind Iron Lung, and the artistic milieu his efforts emerged from.  If I knew just the bare minimum about Markiplier before I watched this film, I knew even less about David Szymanski, the video game developer who got this whole project started.  Iron Lung began its life as an indie console title that slowly became something of an overnight sensation in both Gamer and Horror circles.  We'll get further into the thought Szymanski put into the game, and how that all translates to the screen in a minute.  For now, it's enough to state the bare facts.  Dave seems to have been a gaming enthusiast from an early age, and its a passion he shares with his brothers John and Evan, both of whom have created their own well known Horror game title with My Friendly Neighborhood.  In addition to liking video games, David seems to share an equal passion for works of Gothic Fiction, with critics like Hollinger pointing to what appears to be a clear influence of H.P. Lovecraft on the nature of Iron Lung as both a game and film.  There seems to be a bit more to it than that, yet before we dive into the movie's storytelling mechanics, there remains just one final background component to talk about, one that kind of helps establish the context of this movie.

In many ways, it helps to see Iron Lung, whether as a game or film, as the product of a still ongoing process of creation and discovery within the modern Horror genre.  I don't know how many in the audience have been keeping track of this, yet there's a process of creative and artistic experimentation that's been ongoing in field of Things that Go Bump in the Night for some time now.  It seems to have got started with not just the release of The Blair Witch Project, but also it's somewhat innovative use of viral marketing.  It's been cited as the first instance of a successful ARG, or Alternate Reality Game.  While it's a mistake to claim that Blair Witch was a complete trailblazer in any of these storytelling tactics, it was the one to bring a lot of the techniques we now associate with un/fiction into a broader pop-culture awareness.  It was the cultural mainstreaming of these hybrid styles of storytelling performance that allowed a slew later talents to be Inspired by the Folk Horror brainchild of Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick.  It's like the makers of Blair Witch touched a nerve in similar creative types in a way that acted as a form of giving permission, for lack of a better word.  It showed indie filmmakers and artistic talents everywhere that, yes, you can realize the projects and dreams in your head.  No matter how crazy or obtuse they may seem, there's an audience out there waiting for it all.

The result seems to have been one of those creative wellspring whose various elements and products are only now starting to be realized by most viewers and readers as part of a much larger, and still ongoing creative development within the realm of Horror.  Thanks to the success of Blair Witch's ARG approach, there have been countless others that have followed in its wake.  In the process, artists like Kris Straub and Kane Parsons have taken up the mantle set down by Sanchez and Myrick, and expanded it into the realms of the subgenre now known as Analog Horror.  The fact that the format itself seems to be reaching a point of coming full circle with the successful release of The Backrooms might point to the small Renaissance started in the backwoods of Burkittsville as starting to gain some kind of further mainstream traction.  In addition to the various shared breakthrough efforts featured on movie screens or the internet, it seems as if the un/fiction tropes spotlighted by the Blair Witch franchise has also managed to find its way into the realm of the written word.  Starting out with a simple subreddit dedicated to telling scary stories in a style similar to that of Found Footage films, the efforts of a just a bunch of folks chilling together and entertaining one another with who can tell the best twisted tale has since morphed in The NoSleep Podcast, thanks to the efforts of creators Matt Hansen and David Cummings.  Other writers like Craig Groshek have started their own Simply Scary anthologies.

The major consequences of endeavors like these have been the creation of what's often known as Creepypasta storytelling.  All it amounts to is the old practice of Urban Legends transferred to the electronic, digital campfire.  It's where authors like the aforementioned Kris Straub got the idea for "Candle Cove" and the larger Analog Horror series that has spun off from it.  Dave Szymanski's place in this ongoing proliferation comes from the world of video games, and the effect that this underground, New Wave Horror Boom has had on the format.  The trends appears to have reached even into the gaming sphere, as we've seen Analog Horror artists Remy Abode take his Gemini Home Entertainment series and craft an actual game set in the universe of his online ARG.  The developers of an upcoming title known as Giggleland, meanwhile, have resorted to Analog Horror/ARG in the marketing of their product.  Szymanski belongs to this same cadre of indie devs who are busy trying to see how well they can craft games that share an equal amount of art with the usual sort of entertainment that most players still expect from any halfway decent platformer.  In Szymanski's case, that's meant crafting a series of dark secondary worlds beset by various types of terrors, many of which owe their Inspiration to Gothic masters of the Weird such as H.P. Lovecraft and filmmakers like Tobe Hooper.

In terms of overall game aesthetic, David tends to design his titles in an intentional kind of throwback style.  His games tend to harken back to the type of visual design that was most prevalent during the early 90s, with some 80s arcade influences thrown in to the mix.  He's basically a fan of the retro gamer approach to platform design.  You can expect most of his output to at least look like it was designed at or around the time that, say, the original Alone in the Dark was released for Mac and PC.  Iron Lung proved to be David's big breakout title, and as of this writing it still seems to be the game he's most known for.  Before we proceed any further, all that remains to be said by way of introduction is that the original video game incarnation quickly became a major favorite in YouTube's endless supply of Let Play streams, with professional platform players like JackScepticEye recording their playthroughs of Szymanski's major mainstream hit.  This created the kind of feedback loop you might expect, where the more internet personalities showcased them game on their Lets Plays, the more they all just served to boost Iron Lung's popularity, and sooner or later Szymanski found that he had a hit on his hands.

It was the experience of one online player in particular that seems to have started the gears in the back of his head turning, and that lead to a surprising amount of first personal, and later on an even greater deal of shared ambition and collective drive to see how a game like this could be fleshed out.  All that happened was surprisingly simple, at least to start out with.  Markiplier heard about the game like everyone else, and he decided to record his own playthrough, complete with the usual amount of hilarious and comedic actions that he was best known for at the time.  What I don't think any of us expected was for Fischbach to be so taken with Szymanski's quasi-Lovecraftian, yet otherwise very simple platform release to the point where he soon developed the enthusiasm to see if he could turn it all into an actual, legitimate Horror film.  What happened next has become something of a legend in itself.  For the longest time after that initial moment of Inspiration, Markiplier was very much living an underdog story where it was just him and his friends and family chipping in to help make this dream a reality.  When you go back and find out about all the heart and soul the man poured into this project, you tend to feel bad for being so dismissive in the first place.  All that is getting ahead of things, however.  The point is, Markiplier and Szymanski got their film made, and now here are the results.

William Riley and the Fates (1941).

The concept of Fate is recurring theme in the fiction of Stephen King.  It's one of a handful of ideas he keeps circling back to in various ways time and again in his writings.  Perhaps one of the often unspoken truths about storytelling is that all writers have their pet subjects.  An assorted collection of notions that they either just can't let go of, or else its an assortment of ideas that have somehow grabbed ahold of the artist's mind, and never loosen their grip until the last breath is over and done with.  It's something that's happened before with other scribbling fellows out there.  Nathanial Hawthorne and Mark Twain spent their lives preoccupied by the sins of the Nation's past.  For Twain, it was the knowledge of growing up as a member of a slaveholding community, and the mindset that birthed it.  Hawthorne takes those same guilty associations and extends them further back into time, to the early years of America's Founding.  It's there that Hawthorne pinpoints the establishment of Puritanism as the bedrock point for the Nation's troubles.  It's his best candidate for where all of America's original sins had their genesis, and hence the conflicts the Country still has to deal with to this very day.  King is more or less an inheritor of this line of thought from Hawthorne and Twain.  Much like his fellow literary New England Gothic forbearer, King's fiction finds the author searching for any lost pathways that would reveal, and hence allow him to arrive at some kind of understanding for both what makes America tick, and allow him to come to grips with whatever causes its occasional lapse in reason.

For King, Fate is one of those ideas that he keeps coming back to in the course of crafting his secondary worlds.  He keeps working his way back to the concept not because there's anything inherently Inspiring about it.  Instead, it's more that Fate seems to be one of the key elements in his longtime catalogue of personal fears.  It's the notion that none of us ever have full control of our lives, that we might just be nothing more than a collection of cosmic playthings.  This seems to be one of the engines powering some of the best of King's literary nightmares.  The primary examples of the author's exploration of this theme can be found in works like The Shining, Pet Semetary, 112263, Salem's Lot, and It.  The trick with these novels is that he's good at embedding the idea deep within the framework of his narrative, so that it's easy for the notion to escape the reader's notice.  It also doesn't hurt that since these are all examples of King's best efforts, the strength and quality of the writing tends to obscure the author's ongoing concerns with the question of free will, or the lack thereof.  It's only in stories belonging to The Dark Tower series that we find the author willing to let his own ruminations on the topic be spoken aloud by his characters.  The Mid-World series is where you'll find Roland the Gunslinger and others spouting on for pages about how everything is a matter of Fate, or Ka as its labeled in that series.

The irony there being that Ka is actually an ancient Egyptian word for soul.  So if you take the word as it appears in the Tower books in its literal older historic meaning, then it implies that the answer to the artist's conundrums is that it's all a matter or question of character.  That is, it's the choices we make, and how that molds our personalities, and the kind of people we become which really determines all outcomes, rather than anything being foreordained.  I'll get back to this alternate, real life idea of Ka, later on.  For now, it's enough to note that ideas of Fate and Free Will are one of what might be termed as Stephen King's Constant Themes.  If the guy has his Constant Readers, as he likes to call them, then why extend to the same courtesy to his Constant Themes, with the question of Ka being among the top concerns?  If there's any validity to this way of looking at where at least part of King's Inspiration comes from, then it still leaves the enquiring reader's mind with the question of where did this particular thematic obsession even come from in the first place?  I have some ideas on that score, and a lot of it can probably be traced back to the idea of King as an inheritor of themes first laid down by the likes of Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.  At the same time, there might be other avenues worth exploring in terms of where the Gothic scribbler from Maine either gets his ideas from, or else that share a certain amount of thematic overlap with King's ongoing obsessions about whether or not we have Free Will.  Stephen Vincent Benet's story about a bright young man and his run in with Fate one bright day seems to be just the sort of story that fits the category for the type of story King often tends to write.

Knuckles (2024).

I guess I'm surprised as anybody at just how well things turned out.  Based on Hollywood's track record with handling video game franchises, there was little cause for hope they'd be able to do anything creative with Sonic the Hedgehog.  So it came as something of a slow burn shock to realize that, while I'm not dealing with anything like a Citizen Kane of Gamer Films, I was still dealing with a franchise that showed something in the way of general promise.  The way it's worked for the Sonic films appears to have been through a kind of baby steps approach.  The first film is the one that plays it safe the most.  It's very much concerned with world-building and character establishment.  In hindsight, it's pretty clear the whole purpose of the inaugural movie was to ease audiences into accepting the cinematic versions of these long-running characters.  What's also apparent a few years later is just how well of an achievement that first picture really is.  While it will never be as flashy or high stakes as its later two sequels, it did the job it was setup to accomplish.  It managed to carve out the right sort of secondary world in the minds of audiences that would then go on and allow us to accept that this is the sort of world in which the kind of shenanigans typically associated with Sonic and his allies and enemies could all take place.  It was a crucial, yet easy to overlook example of setting parameters at a steady pace, so that the latter films are allowed to take off from there.

The net result is perhaps best described as a textbook example of under-promise/over-deliver, in a manner of speaking.  Again, it helps to bear in mind that a franchise like this isn't going to knock a film like The Godfather off its perch.  Instead, it achieves the much more modest yet authentic goal of proving to both audiences and studios that video game films can be done right with a competent amount of effort and skill thrown in.  One of the highlights of this franchise that often gets highlighted the most is the way it seems to have helped revitalize the long-suffering characterization of  Knuckles the Echidna.  As portrayed in the shared writing credits of Pat Casey, Josh Miller, and John Whittington, and brought to vivid life in a tour-de-force voice performance from Idris Elba, perhaps the most gratifying thing about the films for longtime fans is the way they have managed to give Knuckles a much needed career resurrection after what has proved to be a pretty fallow period of growth and development after a brief moment of initial breakout success.  Debuting as part of the cast ensemble for the third Sega Sonic game, Knuckles literally burst onto the screen in such a way as to basically steal the spotlight from the franchise's main hero.  Before later writers began to struggle with how to portray him, there was this temporary span of time when Knuckles became the new cool kid on the block, this breakout character who was awesome, yet mysterious, and who everyone wanted to hang out with.

In fact, it was Knuckles' public debut that the franchise's developers also used to help usher in the larger mythos of the Sonic games.  It was through him that we learned of now iconic and standard settings such as Angel Island, and concepts like the Master Emerald, the backstory of the Echidna Tribe, and the greater lore behind the Sonic-verse.  For a time, all of this leant the character of Knuckles this air of mystique that made him the most fascinating introduction to the series.  Then along came the TV show scripts which slowly diluted whatever sense of intrigue and gravitas the character might have been able to build upon after his initial debut.  What happened next is a rather long, and somewhat sad story in how a franchise can sometimes defang one of its best characters.  It's a process that was playing out long before the likes of the current Trek and Star Wars reboots, and perhaps goes to prove that it was all nothing that new.  It's just that since Knuckles' de-throning went hand in glove with a number of other issues that began to plague the franchise (both in the main game series, and their other media adaptations) it was just easier to overlook than it is now.  There isn't space enough here to go into all the details of the way Knuckles was treated by game developers and previous showrunners.  For a fuller picture of that whole story, check the links in the saga told by PJ Show as seen here, and also here.

Suffice to say, he provides enough background info to explain why the combined efforts of Ebla and the writers of the second Sonic film came as an honest breath of fresh air for the Red Guy.  All of a sudden, it was possible to take Knuckles seriously as a character once again.  As portrayed by Elba, and the screenwriters, Knuckles has gone from being a joke, to someone who often makes jokes not out of audience expectations, but rather of the other players in the story around him.  The genuinely smart idea that Whittington, Miller, and Casey had was to allow Knuckles to be this displaced figure out of ancient Epic and Myth, and then toss such a larger than life personality in amongst the settings and personalities of a Sci-Fi sitcom.  Yes, he can generate laughter in such a setup, yet it's no longer because he's an idiot.  Instead, this version of Knuckles is a that of a warrior who is forever honor-bound to the code of ethics he was brought up on by the Tribe he was raised in, and the comedy comes not from his being an ignorant fool, but from others never quite knowing what to expect from such an Epic temperament.

There's a lot more that can be discussed about how Knuckles is portrayed in the films, and the sad part now is having to admit we're not here to talk about any of that.  Instead, the topic now has to move on to the less pleasant subject of what was done to a good character once he's misplaced from the center of a TV series named after him.  Like many, my own reaction to the trailer reveal of the Knuckles TV series was one of cautious intrigue.  It put me in mind of a show like The Adventures of Pete and Pete, if you decided to add this fun Fantasy-Sci-Fi element to the mix.  It suggested the show would be a combination slice-of-daily-life storytelling as Knuckles learns to adapt to living on Earth among humans, coupled with hints of a greater adventure lying in store for our hero.  Such a premise does contain at least something in the way of room for plenty other ideas worth exploring.  You could, for instance, use such a show as a launching pad to introduce other characters from the franchise.

For instance, you could have someone like Sticks the Badger show up at one point, and have her reveal that she's tracked an alien menace to planet Earth, and that it's scheduled to land somewhere in and around Green Hills, Montana.  This could be the setup for a fun riff on H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds plot where Knuckles and Sticks learn to bond with each other as outsider loners who find it difficult to accommodate to the customs of Earth because one of them is too strong-willed and independent minded, where as the other struggles with a lifelong history of paranoia and trust issues.  The plot of such an idea could come to a head with Sonic having to talk Sticks into setting aside her own deep-seated fears and distrust of others in order to help save the day.  It would be at this exact point where Knuckles could step in and explain to her that knows what it's like to carry fear and anger around for a long time, and that ultimately this is the greatest enemy that any fighter has to face if they really want to make a difference in the universe.  That at least sounds like an idea audiences could go with.  Instead, of course, we wound up with the Knuckles TV show.  So it's my own dumb choice to try and figure it out here.  Let's not try to waste too much time on a poor job, and get things over with.

Ferngully: The Last Rain Forest (1992).

I think I owe an apology to John Hughes.  Either that or someone out there sure does.  It's probably the fault of someone in the long since defunct arm of of 20th Century Fox's VHS promotions department.  Whoever is responsible for the faux pas, it's thanks to their unthinking efforts that a lot of 80s an 90s kids such as myself first grew up hearing of this film as a Coming Attractions adjunct to the otherwise unblemished awesomeness that is Home Alone.  That's how I remember first learning there was ever such as Ferngully drifting around out there.  Maybe I should back up and explain a bit.  See, back in my day, we didn't have none of this here Streaming Services and DVDS.  No sir, in my day we had nothing but good old analog equipment to go on, and somehow we managed to enjoy it.  If it explains anything, then I guess its that when it comes to entertainment, human beings are more adaptable than we think we are.  As long as its in the service of a good to fairly decent show, then we're willing to overlook any and all technical limitations past a certain point.  That's how it was for us in the X and Y generations, anyway.  

When I was still a kid it meant that sometimes anything you learned about the latest movie releases came from just two sources.  The primary one was the commercials on the family television set.  The second was the preview segments that most videotape cassettes came with from roughly the mid-80s to around 1997.  Those were the glory years of VHS, and while it was smooth sailing for the most, part, sometimes watching those old analog Coming Attraction segments could make for either some interesting to jarring tonal contrasts or combinations.  The way I first learned about the existence of Ferngully is a good case in point.

I never learned about this now somewhat notorious piece of kid's fare from a movie theater.  Instead, as I've hinted above, the way it all came about was through a simple sequence of events.  John Hughes and Christopher Columbus created Home Alone in 1990, and it became an instant pop culture touchstone.  My Mom and Dad came to me raving about it.  I was about Kevin's age back then, so at least I have a sort of excuse (however poor) for having missed out on its initial theatrical impact (okay, I'm a complete idiot, I get it!).  Then the film's first home media release comes in the form of a VHS package I'm sure most of us remember from our childhoods.  I pop the cassette into the VCR (ask your parents), the film starts, I come to understand just what everyone is talking about, and come away with a richer sense of understanding from the experience.  Just before the film began, however, I was treated to a series of promos courtesy of Fox Video.  One of them was a very ironic promo from American Airlines, which declared that they were "proud to be a partner in the video release of Home Alone."  The commercial goes on to say that "American salutes the many families that have made American Airlines something special in the air."  I guess the company must have been not too smart then as now, because if there's one thing Hughes' film doesn't do, its paint a flattering portrait of the airport industry.  You could make a whole nightmare comedy of errors scenario about the McCallisters just trying to get on the plane. 

The other commercial is a second sponsor, Pepsi Cola.  It's dated in many ways, and even teaches a bad lesson to kids if you stop and think about it.  It showcases a pair of friends going on about how you shouldn't let others judge you based on the way you dress or carry yourself, much less what kind of soft drink you enjoy.  Then a girl comes up and asks one of the kids, "You got a Pepsi for me?"  The entire point is not so much thwarted as bulldozed over and forgotten about as one of the kids who was going on about being yourself becomes a total sellout for The Pepsi Generation.  All his friend can do is observe and say, "Who knew?"  Yeah, well I for one know there is a whole world of wrong going on in a commercial which tries to peddle its product under the banner of "Just Be Yourself" in a way which turns a good idea into the worst sort of lie.  There's a hell of a cautionary tale in all of that somewhere.  However, it's the third commercial I'm here to talk about.  It also comes first in chronological order, and I think my 8 year old self knew that something was up with what I was seeing; I just didn't have the vocabulary or conceptual base of knowledge necessary to tell what seemed so strange to me back then

With the passage of time, what makes this slate of commercials so jarring to a modern audience is a combination of just how tone deaf they all are to the content and point of the movie they were meant to lead into, and that's where part of the cognitive dissonance stems from.  I mean two of them are trying to tout their products with a straight face right before a film which spends most of its runtime dismantling the cheap sloganeering of its time period.  So I guess there's an accidental sense of the joke being on the sponsors, and they don't even know it.  What made the Ferngully commercial stand out to me even back then seems to have been the nascent knowledge that I was looking at two stories that didn't have any reason to be lumped together.  One of them is just a simple animated film with strong Disney or Don Bluth overtones in its DNA.  The film its leading into, by contrast, proves to be sophisticated enough to qualify as perhaps the last great Brat Pack film in John Hughes' career.  While it's true the main protagonist is a pre-teen, it's also very clear that Kevin spends the majority of the film's runtime grappling with the same set of ideas that the Breakfast Club struggles with in their own story.  It's just that now its all being seen through the eyes of a little kid.  What's interesting about his iteration of this same setup is that he manages to not let it all drag him down to the same kind of low point like Bender and his newfound friends have to put up with,  Instead, he's more prepared by the end.  You get the sense that this kid will grow up more ready to face the challenges of adulthood.

It's pretty heavy stuff for a Holiday flick, yet it's the primary reason people still remember Home Alone fondly after all these years.  It's because it speaks to universal struggles that most of us have to deal with in coming of age, and realizing that maybe there's no such thing as a true grown up, and that we have to determine how be our truly authentic selves in a way that doesn't get bought and sold by the rat race of life.  Before all that, though, here's a brief clip of Robin Williams as a crazy fruit bat in an unknown Don Bluth knock-off!  So yeah, the cognitive dissonance was strong with this one.  Having the Ferngully commercial come on just before the movie started was enough to create this strange dichotomy in my mind.  On the one hand, it made the film I was watching out to be no different than your standard Mouse House oriented film.  On the other hand, it's clear Hughes was dealing with far more mature themes than any of the people in Fox's marketing division were aware of.  In practical terms, it means I was allowed to watch a disconnect between the studio advertisers and the artists take place in a manner that's kind of informative in a strange way.  It showcases how some people can misread a story as opposed to the more knowing intelligence of the audience.  On a further level, the whole experience was just curious enough to get me thinking about what kind of film Ferngully was in its own right.  I got a chance to answer that question for myself later on in elementary school.

It was during my pre-teen school days that I first got a chance to see the film on its own terms.  My schoolteachers would sometimes trot out a TV hooked up to a VCR to show their young charges (of which I used to be one) during any slow periods when there was a gap in their daily curriculum.  It's how I got a chance to see the movie presented in its own terms.  At the time, I remember not minding it all that much, yet it was difficult to tell just what (if any) sort of an impact it left on me.  I know it must have reminded me a bit of the kind of film's Bluth was famous for.  There were moments when it felt like it was at least trying to reach for that same vibe.  And to be fair, it kept me interested.  However I don't recall it making all that big of an impact on me.  Instead, from what I can remember, the final takeaway is probably best described as one of those middle of the road experiences.  It wasn't great, yet I suppose I was in a generous enough frame of mind to not call it bad.  And to be fair, some bits and pieces of it would emerge on occasion from my memory.  It never happened often; not to the extent of An American Tail, for instance.  That's a movie I still recall watching as child with jaw agape in an awestruck frame of mind that existed somewhere between terror and wonder.  It remains perhaps the key shaping event of my filmgoing life.  I don't recall Ferngully giving me anywhere near the same vibes.  And yet it managed to stick around in my mind, so I decided to go back and see why that is.

Quick Change (1990).

He doesn't need much in the way of an introduction at this point.  Bill Murray is one of those names who've managed to carve out a permanent shelf space in the mind of generations of fans by this point.  While it's true he's mostly remembered for his work on the Ghostbusters franchise, the good news there is that this hasn't managed to erase an awareness of the rest of his work as a bonafide comedy legend.  His story is a familiar up to a point.  Bill got his start, so far as most of us are concerned, when he was just this hungry young actor with a talent for comedy, working out of Los Angeles as part of guerilla theater group known as TVTV, when his efforts there and along with his stint working for the National Lampoon Magazine came to the attention of Lorne Michaels.  Since Murray was a Lampoon veteran by this point, having worked extensively as a performer for the Magazine's Radio Hour show, in addition to cutting his teeth as an improv comic at Chicago's Second City Theater under the mentorship of Del Close, winning a spot for himself amongst the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players was as much about genuine talent getting the eventual recognition it deserved, as it had to do with plain good timing.  It was during his time on Michaels' new variety show for NBC, Saturday Night Live, that Murray would put his talents as a comedian to good use, showcasing his now trademark gift for laconic, and laid back wit, combined with an air of confidence and swagger which has since gone on to be considered iconic by fans everywhere.

It was SNL that first showcased Murray's strengths as an artist to the world, and along with fellow Prime Timers Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, Bill would eventually use the show as the launchpad for what has since become one of the most well-regarded and overall respectable filmographies in the history of cinema.  If there's any complaint to be made there, then it might come from the simple question of how do you categorize someone like him in comparison to peers like Jack Nicholson or Dustin Hoffman?  If I had to take a guess at where his stature lies in the mind of pop culture at the moment, then it's probably safe to assume the guy is still regarded as a legend, or as an example of what's known as comedy gold.  I've got no dispute with that.  All I'm asking myself is what kind of shelf space you would fit him on in a catalogue of names like Leo DiCaprio and Orson Welles.  I'm pretty sure he has to count as being "up there" among the company just mentioned above.  It's just that the nature of pop culture popularity is so precarious that sometimes it sounds like madness to even raise Murray's efforts as an artist up to the same level as the man who gave us Citizen Kane.  At other times, however, it's almost as if Murray is held with a higher regard than men like Welles.  I'm not sure how fair that is, yet I also wouldn't be surprised if it's happened more than once.  From what I can tell, it seems as if Murray's fames is more or less set in stone, with his fortunes and popularity on a steady, undulating tide.

Some days he's eclipsed by other big name talents out there, and then he's back at the forefront holding his own with the greats.  That seems like the best possible assessment so far as his career is concerned.  There's been an equal amount of highs and lows in his filmography, and as time has gone on, most of it seems to have found a way to balance out even enough.  At the top are efforts like the Ghostbusters franchise, with at least two of them being a timeless classic, and a decent enough follow-up.  On the shelf space beneath is where the best of the rest of stored.  It's the slot reserved for the likes of Groundhog Day, Caddyshack, and Stripes, and perhaps maybe the first Zombieland.  The shelf below this one represents his more serious and sober, yet still comedic efforts.  Here is where you find the works he's done for Wes Anderson and the Coen Brothers, such as Rushmore, The Royal Tanenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and The Fantastic Mr. Fox.  All of the films just listed seem to represent a catalogue of his most well known and best regarded efforts.  Beyond this point, everything seems to be in a state of flux.  A picture like Osmosis Jones, for instance, might have its fans, yet it's clear we're dealing with one of the lesser effort in Bill's filmography.  Somewhere in the middle of all this lies a film that stands as something of an anomaly in the actor's career.  It stands as the one film he's ever sat in the director's chair for.  It's a peculiar sort of comedy caper film, and it's known as Quick Change.