setsuled | Entries tagged with stranger things

I stayed up late watching the final two episodes of Stranger Things 4 last night, parts of which I liked very much. I still think it's affected by a philosophical shift and beyond that it has some just good old fashioned bad writing. But the performances were very good as were some of the ideas.

There were a lot of scenes between pairs of characters and my favourite was right at the end, when Hopper is finally reunited with Eleven. David Harbour shows why he's become so beloved and he really sells the line about how he stole Eleven's look. It felt like we finally got Hopper back at that point because the whole Soviet subplot never really gained traction. Trying to tie so many plot threads together, the Duffers established some vague idea of the Demigorgons in the Soviet prison being tied to Vecna but it never really became a solid visceral idea.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Eleven's story may have been the most interesting subplot this season and the Duffers seemed to realise at the end they couldn't make Papa a straightforward heroic character. Still, there's a definite shift from the beginning of the series. Stranger Things' first three seasons were about how monsters are necessary to save the day sometimes. This was a theme that manifested not only in Eleven but in how bully characters like Steve and Billy end up being necessary for the fight against the forces of the Upside Down. Stranger Things 4 retcons Eleven to being just an innocent girl with superpowers and also shifts Billy back into a more purely villainous role. That's the difference made by changes in political influence on American media, I suspect, as narratives moved out of the exciting Walter White/Game of Thrones cutthroat era to the mad scramble for certified moral purity.

Instead of a bully, it's Eddie Munson who sacrifices himself this time--very awkwardly. Eddie's fate was a pretty big blunder on the part of the Duffers as this character, whose charm worked fast and brilliant when he was introduced at the beginning of the season, was let down at the end in every way. It didn't make sense plotwise and it didn't make sense thematically. It wasn't clear why Eddie needed to draw off those bat creatures and the belated attempt to make it look like Eddie was trying to overcome cowardice never caught hold because he never seemed especially cowardly. In fact, as the leader of a group of misfits in high school, he seems downright courageous, which seems like the point the show obviously should have made after he's become a pariah. If he really were a coward, he'd have been trying to distance himself from the Hellfire Club.

I liked Max's storyline but I feel like the Duffers could have pushed it further. I love "Running Up That Hill" but it seems like Max would've been into the whole Hounds of Love album. People used to listen to albums in the '80s, it would've been hard for her to repeat the same song over and over on a cassette tape. Maybe they didn't want to pay more royalties to Kate Bush but, considering how things turned out, I bet she or the label would've let the other songs go cheap, if not totally free.

I thought Will's struggle with his attraction to Mike was handled a little too broadly, especially the moment where he was bawling his eyes out right next to Mike. Did Mike think he was dry heaving or what?

The final battle with Vecna was good but overstuffed with monologues. I liked Eddie playing guitar on the roof and Nancy would've been cool with the shotgun if she'd actually used it at the natural moment instead of waiting for a huge dramatic pause. Also, a headshot was obviously in order.

I kept hoping a romance would start between Nancy and Robin. Maybe next season?

Stranger Things is available on Netflix.

Twitter Sonnet #1597

Disputed hues were left between the greens.
The maiden's name was never really blue.
Deceptive calls were played by many means.
The urgent pins denoted which were true.
The dog was running bills to shame the duck.
Beneath the orphan storm we charged a key.
We made a god with pepper, thyme, and luck.
But lemons lost condemned the liquid tree.
Some pointless bats replaced a swinging club.
Beneath the cherry storm some chickens flew.
A hunting bird resides above the hub.
But feathers fell upon the '80s crew.
Confusing spiders belched a cloud of coal.
The action scenes endorsed the nervous foal.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: The Flippin' Upside Down
Current Music: "Little Drop of Poison" - Tom Waits

I finished watching the first seven episodes of Stranger Things 4 last night. The season started strong but gradually some strange philosophical changes started to take root. This season of Stranger Things is much more moral than previous seasons, more about a sharp contrast between good people and bad people. I guess it's more like a traditional horror movie this way.

There was also a lot of business about people being insecure and lying to their loved ones. Eleven has a whole subplot in the first few episodes in which she lies to Mike about kids bullying her. I kept expecting a callback to the "friends don't lie" line but it never came.

I really liked the new character Eddie Munson in the first few episodes, played by British actor Joseph Quinn but coming off eerily like a young Robert Downey Jr. He's endearingly wise and realistically goofy in the first few episodes then is sadly absent for most of the season. He kind of reminded me of Albert Brooks in Taxi Driver, acting like a normal funny guy instead of like a comedian. His antics aren't especially clever but fit in the context of a normal high school group of friends.

I appreciated the use of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill". But the Big Bad's habit of targeting "haunted" people would've been more effective if at least some of them were really guilty of something instead of just torturing themselves over matters in which they have less guilt than they imagine. In this same vein, Eleven's plot ends up being about how she feels guiltier than she ought to. I suppose the show's creators may have been wary of looking too sympathetic with school shooters but I think a more useful story might have been about how prepubescent kids don't have the maturity to be culpable for even really terrible things. There's a reason kids are treated differently by the law to adults.

I wasn't especially interested in the subplot taking place in the Soviet Union except it had a few hints of counterbalance to the anti-Christian stuff in the plots taking place in the U.S. While a mob is forming to hunt down Eddie for worshiping Satan, the writers might have made a point that banning religion didn't seem to help the Soviet Union a whole lot. Since an abandoned church figures into the Soviet storyline, there was a golden opportunity for it. As it is, we just get a moment where Hopper mentions wanting to believe in a miracle.

I enjoyed the Maniac Mansion vibe to a lot of the season and Vekna is a pretty menacing villain.

Stranger Things is available on Netflix.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: The upside down
Current Music: "American Nights" - The Runaways

I finished the third season of Stranger Things on Sunday. In general, I liked it better than season two and I liked season two. But three's climax is much better, visually and storywise. Though I love how the outcry regarding the kiss between Eleven and Mike at the end of season two seems to have led the Duffer Brothers to having them make out constantly at the beginning of season three. It's so satisfying whenever a creator rebels against the peanut gallery moralising now.

Speaking of the political lens, I was sort of fascinated how Stranger Things 3 at turns reflected or rebuffed this year's morality model. I remember during the Bush era, depictions of torture as an effective means of interrogation were the domain of relatively right wing productions like 24. Now here's Hopper (David Hopper) beating the crap out of Alexei (Alex Utgoff) and Mayor Kline (Cary Elwes) and it proves to be a perfectly sound strategy.

This is part of how Hopper has emerged as an even more solid reproduction of the 80s action hero than he was in the previous two seasons. In his climactic fight against the Soviet assassin (Andrey Ivchenko), it's hard not to think of Harrison Ford when Harbour says, "I'll see you in Hell!"

There's another political shift--it was boring when the Soviets were the villains in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, now they seem relevant again because of Putin's sinister machinations and exploits. Nevermind Putin's mobster regime has no fondness for the Soviet era or ideology, it still works. That one assassin guy is a pretty effective heavy, wherever he's from.

Spoilers ahead, after the next screenshot

I've already said how much I love shopping malls and therefore loved that setting in the new season. It also made for a terrific finale, much better than the anonymous office corridors of season two. Instead we have environments bathed in contrasting neon light and showers of firecracker sparks in the background.

And, like season two, one of the most satisfying pieces of the climax was a conclusion of a bully redeemed or seen sympathetically, in this case Billy, played by Rob Lowe lookalike Dacre Montgomery. He doesn't quite get the complete turnaround Steve (Joe Keery) did in season two, but the fact that he's allowed only the tiniest opportunity to show a shift or another aspect of his personality makes it all the more effective. Even Darth Vader had time to talk after turning on the Emperor. But it's probably for the best that Billy's return to a primal sense of protectiveness isn't disappointed by some articulated explanation.

More than anything, the season left me feeling very satisfied at having gotten a good, well developed story. A lot of people have been talking about all the movie references this past season so I thought I'd conclude with my own ranking of ten of them, in case you wanted some advice on which to watch first:

10. Day of the Dead
9. The Thing from Another World
8. Fast Times at Ridgemont High
7. The Neverending Story
6. Return of the Jedi
5. The Thing
4. Back to the Future
3. The Apartment
2. Children of Paradise (available on The Criterion Channel)
1. The Hidden Fortress (available on The Criterion Channel)

Yes, the top three are all Robin's (Maya Hawke) picks. She really does have great taste. Ironically, none of these movies are on Netflix, at least in the U.S.

Twitter Sonnet #1256

The pieces changed to putty worms at once.
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A spinning Slinky sliced the ragged stairs.
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As ice'll melt the cubes contain the spheres.
A thousand monkeys race inside the sack.
For ev'ry nose a hundred thousand beers.
A standard takes the shape of smithy feats.
Reminders take the form of standard streets.

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Caitlin R. Kiernan fans got a special treat in to-day's new Sirenia Digest--a previously unpublished story called "Chevy Swamp" from 1987, from well before Kiernan had become an established name in weird fiction. In the introduction to this month's Digest, Kiernan talks about how the story reflects her inexperience at that point in her life as a writer and expresses dislike for the story's obvious resemblance to Stephen King's It, which had been published not long before "Chevy Swamp" was written. This might seem a strange thing to complain about to-day when Stranger Things has garnered so much praise for its obvious modelling on It and other fantasy and horror fiction from the 1980s centred on groups of kids. For anyone looking for more stories like that now, "Chevy Swamp" is certain to satisfy, particularly for anyone looking for such a story told from the perspective of a female character.

A first person narrative told by a character named Mary, the story concerns her and her two friends, Arnie and Rusty, and their relationship with the swamp of the title. All of them are around eleven years old and there's a nice description of a biology class project followed by an encounter with a bully named Ellroy. There's some allusion to the psychological causes of bullying behaviour, of cycles of abuse, but the story takes it in a weird direction as Mary and her two friends form a nicely understated, weird love/hate bond with the swamp and a strange creature that may or may not exist within. In a very effective creative decision, Kiernan avoids bringing the creature explicitly into the story--it manifests in dreams, suspicions, and mutilated bodies. This makes the creature menacing and mysterious while also providing a tortuous ambiguity for the protagonists who are compelled to wonder how much responsibility their bear for the creature's behaviour.

The resemblance to It is certainly clear but Kiernan creates characters who are very much her own, particularly Mary, to inhabit this It pastiche world. It's a nice addition to what is becoming a vibrant genre again.

Current Mood: groggy
Current Location: A Chevrolet Bog
Current Music: "Blue in Green" - Miles Davis

Let's just embrace synthesiser with lots of fuzz, let's not call it an 80s nostalgia thing, let's just have it because it's good. That's one of my main thoughts after finishing the first season of Stranger Things yesterday, a show I found to be uneven but with some very good qualities.

Spoilers after the screenshot

It really put me in the mood to watch Gremlins and E.T., among other things. I wish it had hewed a little closer to 80s style, actually. The monster design felt a bit modern, particularly its sounds which seemed to basically be the same velociraptor noises that've been used again and again since the first Jurassic Park movie. The colour tinting and the lighting started to feel more and more 21st century as the show went on, maybe just because I was getting used to the things that were distinctly 80s.

The imdb pages point out lots of anachronisms in their "goofs" pages, some of which I spotted myself, like how none of the Star Wars toys are from the early 80s. But for a lot of these things it's important to keep in mind the limited time and money the creators of the show had. Doing a period NetFlix series is ambitious, in some ways moreso because it's a period a lot of viewers actually experienced so it's harder to get away with things. However, one of the final scenes of the series has the kids playing Dungeons and Dragons again and seems to directly make the point that people should learn to appreciate a story instead of being caught up in the details, which is something I agree with, as much as I enjoy details.

There were some problems with the show I really can't excuse, like its tendency to end dramatic scenes with a jump cut that doesn't explain what happened in the interim. This is done both for action sequences and scenes with important character development. I'm not sure how fast the monster is but there are several shots of the thing just about to grab Will (Noah Schnapp) or Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and we never find out how they evaded the thing when we see them later. Then there are scenes like the first time Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) uses her powers in front of the kids, causing a door to slam shut, and it cuts away without showing us what the boys said to her.

Other times, I felt like the Duffer Brothers and the other writers were intentionally invoking some of the problems typical in 80s kids adventure screenplays in order to show how, as children, we watched these movies and made these problems meaningful in our automatic childhood interpretations. One of the key aspects of the show is in how it divides up the characters--everyone's basically investigating the same thing but no-one's communicating. There are many times in 80s films where it really would be reasonable for the kids to talk to the cops or an adult of some kind but that of course would spoil the basic fun of the thing. Stranger Things takes this and uses it to say something about human nature, how people isolate themselves and divide into factions when it's unnecessary or even counterproductive.

The story of Eleven is an interesting blend of 80s story devices. She's both Lisa from Weird Science and she's E.T. She's the fish out of water female character that makes the young boys feel safe interacting with a girl for once, allowing particularly shy boys to advance towards sexual maturity, and she's the alien who is really just as important to the adult world as the child world, unlike Dungeons and Dragons which the kids are often told just feels important.

Among all the 80s American film references, I thought Eleven floating in a tank while Matthew Modine looked on seemed like it came from Neon Genesis Evangelion and Gendo watching Rei in the LCL tank. Maybe it was really a reference to Luke Skywalker in a bacta tank but Elle's relationship with Modine's character was much more like Rei's relationship with Gendo, though the motives of Modine's character were never as fully developed. Anyway, I thought it was kind of funny, intentional or not, that Eleven looked kind of like Vincent D'Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket when she did her power glower. If only she'd called Modine "Joker".

I like that she's given more of her own story than the 80s fantasy girl tended to get. Her difficulty communicating makes the moments where she doesn't meet social expectations more effectively painful. One thing the makers of the show maybe didn't intend but I thought was interesting was the fact that Eleven and Will are never in the same dimension at the same time. Throughout the show I nursed a fantasy that Will and Eleven were alternate reality versions of each other. I felt pretty sure the show wasn't going that way but I liked thinking about the implications if it would. How would Mike (Finn Wolfhard) handle that? Holy shit, I just looked that name up, his last name is "Wolfhard"? And I thought "Wolf Blitzer" was over the top. Why didn't his parents just go all the way and call him "Dirk" or "Steel" or "Rage"?

Twitter Sonnet #1011

Immerse, eject, repeat the swimming song.
Engage, egregious box of rocket juke.
Elope, elliptic lily pad sarong.
Return, resplendent, thin, and diamond duke.
Eclipses climb to troubled times to wait.
Convening vapours rise and now collude.
A haunted council sets a guileless bait.
In moving woods the horses have accrued.
Awake, alight, in trees from eggs to roots.
Arise, afloat, suspicion's hollow ship.
Align, enlist, elicit arm to boots.
Asleep, assuage, uncertain word to lip.
An eyelid sky defends the tender beech.
A wounded rider's carried to a leech.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Location: 80s woods
Current Music: "Time of Gold Flowing" Please Save My Earth OST - Yoko Kanno

Contemplating the lack of a new Twin Peaks to-night, I finally started watching Stranger Things a few days ago. Two episodes in I'm enjoying it, though I feel like Scottie in Vertigo when he keeps thinking he's spotted Madeleine only for it to just be a woman who looks like her because the massive Twin Peaks influence I see at work in Stranger Things made me jonse for the original even more. But, I realised, that's not fair, Stranger Things draws from a lot of other influences, too, to create its own virtues.

I'm sure all the stylistic echoes from 80s films have been picked over plenty by now--the John Carpenter-ish synthesiser soundtrack, the general ode to 80s kids domestic adventure movies like E.T. and Gremlins, the fact that Natalia Dyer looks like Mia Sara.

I love her outfits, too, and their recollection of a time when women chose clothing that stood in low contrast to their skin.

This compliments the wonderful, shadowy visual style that recollects a time when filmmakers really liked to show darkness in movies, though the lighting on Stranger Things still has the modern care to keep everyone's facial expressions visible most of the time. It's the look that more than anything else made me feel like I wanted to be a kid again. Though the kids on this show are slightly older than me--I was born in 1979, the show takes place in 1983. But I remember how pervasive this type of film was, so much that I remember really looking forward to being twelve years old because so many movies were making it seem like a great time to be alive.

From Twin Peaks, the show takes the concept of a small town reacting to the loss of a child with an emphasis on how marvellous it is, even as it's sad, that an entire town takes notice of and can grieve for the loss of one person. The announcement for an assembly being held at the high school for the missing child, Will, recalls the principal's announcement in the Twin Peaks pilot. The creators of Stranger Things, the Duffer Brothers, had previously worked on Wayward Pines, a show that was unabashedly modelled on Twin Peaks, so I wonder if all the Twin Peaks echoes on Stranger Things were intentional or if the Duffer's heads had just been so in the Twin Peaks thought space for so long. Winona Ryder as Will's mother, Joyce, calling around to find out where Will was also couldn't fail to remind me of Sarah Palmer.

I think this might be the best Winona Ryder performance I've seen. Francis Ford Coppola's version of Dracula is one of my favourite movies but I understood the ruefulness with which he comments, on the DVD commentary, on how Ryder had told him she'd already basically done most of her scenes in Edward Scissorhands. Her portrayal of Joyce in Stranger Things is the most engaged I've seen her be with a role, I get the sense that she's fighting tooth and nail to prove she can do it.

I like the kids, the lead characters on the show. I like how they were cast to recall 80s casting trends. All of them seem to have big lips and excess saliva. They're not exactly like 80s movie kids; they're not as cruel, for one thing. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) being forced to stretch his arms by a couple bullies doesn't have the nervous and discomforting quality of Chunk in Goonies pressured to shake his large belly by his friends. But who would have the creative clout besides David Lynch to do something that extreme now? And should it be done? I'm not sure myself, partly because I remember not liking Goonies, the main reason I haven't watched it since the 80s. I probably ought to revisit it.

I will say that in contemplating the value of the show's nostalgia I got to thinking about the value of nostalgia filmmaking/tv making. I think Stranger Things might rise to being more than a collection of stylistic callbacks eventually but I would like to see some of its choices simply taken as good for themselves, regardless of the reason for they're being there, like the darker visual style.

Current Mood: groggy
Current Location: Hawkins
Current Music: "Don't Make Me Dream About You" - Chris Isaak