Producers in Focus: Weekly Manga Recap

               I have been slow in getting into the veritable cornucopia of podcasts that now fill the internet, but looking back, it seems only fitting that my first would end up being the weekly examinations of the latest in Shonen manga by Chris “Rollo T” Larios and Nick “Y Ruler of Time” Freeman. They may have started small way back in 2011, but they have chugged along continuously since then and are now a staple of the small (but fervent) US manga fandom scene.

               Their format has never really changed since then; each week, they go through the new chapters of all the regular Shonen Jump releases, reading through them and lending their own unique takes and voices to the story and dialogue, and discussing their reactions and thoughts to each one. Occasionally, they start an episode by taking a deep dive at an entire series they either selected beforehand or took from readers as a recommendation. And that's about it- they have the occasional guest, and as of a few years ago they've started to do monthly Q&A sessions that are also fun, but the meat and potatoes of the series has remained really, really basic.

               Why, then, is the show so addicting and fun to listen to? What makes it so compulsively enjoyable?

               In short, that which forms the core of any good podcast; ridiculously good chemistry between the hosts. Chris and Nick have the sort of indescribable, relentlessly funny rapport that can only be generated between two really good friends who know, inside and out, how the other ticks and how they can best respond to them. They regularly go off on wide tangents that have nothing to do with the chapter they are talking about at a given moment, if indeed they have anything to do with manga at all, but still never miss a beat, making every minute of their banter one of the most consistent joys of my life since I started following them.

               Their bizarro sense of humor reached its zenith over the course of the tottering, absurdly terrible final arc of Bleach, where Kudo's story, dialogue, and even character names almost made it seem like he was daring these two to go all out in making their dissections of each chapter as comic as possible. It was, in fact, an episode entitled “Bleach Sucks!” that first drew my attention to the podcast.

               Given how so much of my love for this show centers around just the experience of hearing these two nutters bounce off each other- plus the fact that whole episodes can easily run up to and over two hours, so this is hardly easy listening- it's often hard to pinpoint specific episodes that stand out particularly more than others. Nonetheless, I have give it my best effort; here, in no specific order, are a few special favorites of mine.

December 16th, 2012: Good Ending

               This episode, a deep look at the manga of the title, got me to pick up and read into a series about teenage angst and romance that I otherwise would never have even thought of giving the time of day to. Thank God I did, because this series was way better than it had any right to be, taking a romance genre usually too filled with cliches to make an impression and telling a surprisingly compelling story.

June 6th, 2013: Assassination Classroom

               Here, too, if I hadn't taken the time to listen to Nick and Chris examine a bizarre classroom comedy-drama centered around a powerful octopus-like being raising a room of grade-school kids to be assassins, it never would have occurred to me to get into this fantastically funny story that, much like Good Ending, has no business being as excellent as it is.

May 28^th, 2016: Pokemon Adventures Red & Blue

               My life has been so much more fulfilling since I started getting back into the many Pokemon games, but it took awhile before I learned of the existence of the Pokemon Adventure series, which at its best moments matches and even exceeds the best parts of the original show and movies. Starting with Red & Blue, Chris and Nick have been slowly working through each major arc of the series, with the most recent episode (as of this writing) looking at the Diamond/Pearl/Platinum arc. All of them are worth listening to for anyone who is a Pokefreak like me.

April 29th, 2012: Bakuman Retrospective

               Bakuman, the follow-up series to Death Note from Tsugumi Oba, was the first major Shonen series to end after Chris and Nick had made it a regular part of WMR, making their final retrospective after the conclusion of the series a great sendoff to a special series.

November 12th, 2014: Naruto's Final Chapters

               As special as the ending of Bakuman was, things got real when Naruto, first of the Shonen Big Three that had dominated the manga world for nearly two decades, became the first of the three to wrap up. For all its flaws, Naruto retains a particularly special place in my heart, so of course, I couldn't wait to hear the WMR take on the conclusion of this massive journey.

The Bleach Chronicles

               Each chapter review of Bleach was a shot of pure joy into my veins right up until its end in 2016, so picking out the BEST moments of that is hard, though Nick's take on Juha Bach as voiced by Foghorn J. Leghorn easily stands out as one of the most inspired comedic bits of the decade. Here are just a few major episodes that provide a solid highlight of their takes on the series over the years.

August 29th, 2011: How We'd Fix Bleach

               Just as the title suggests: Nick and Chris take a stab at fixing Bleach after the series had already started to noticeably decline (although, tragically, the worst was still well off in the future).

June 12th, 2013: Your Sword Is A Lie

               In my opinion, this remains one of the best moments of the entire podcast so far; after the “truth about Ichigo's sword, Zangetsu, is revealed, Nick takes a long, but necessary, chunk of the episode to go over, in explicit detail, how this whole, game-changing twist doesn't make a lick of sense.

August 25^th, 2016: Bleach's Final Chapter

               A whole episode devoted to the very final chapter of Bleach, after Kudo was forced to end the series way sooner than he wanted to. What more could you want?

September 2^nd, 2016: Bleach Retrospective

               For all its flaws, I still think back on the early, glory days of Bleach with an intense fondness. As such, it was not so easy for me to see the series end to poorly, but getting the full thoughts of Chris and Nick on the story as a whole helped me process the strange journey the world of Bleach ended up taking.

Previously on Producers in Focus:

Lindsay Ellis

Todd Nathanson

Jacob Chapman

Suede

Daren Jackson

Kyle Kallgren

Films for the Trump Years: Do The Right Thing

**the following article contains some spoilers for Do The Right Thing**

It was almost poetic, the sort of perverted, fateful irony usually reserved for Greek tragedies.  Almost exactly thirty years after the Academy ignored Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing, still argued by many to be his best and most important film, in favor of the whitewashing blandness that is Driving Miss Daisy, it looked like the Academy was set to get this year's apology tour right; Spike won his first-ever competitive Oscar for the screenplay for BlacKkKlansman, and there had been some speculation going into the night that the film could be a sleeper contender for Best Picture. 

Alas, in retrospect, what preceded Spike's win was the ominous sign that this good feeling could not, indeed would not, last; Green Book took the other Screenplay award from the hand of a clearly-disapproving Samuel L. Jackson, and at the end of the night, it took home Best Picture as well.  Green Book ultimately tied with Black Panther at three Oscars apiece, and Bohemian Rhapsody took home the most with four.  It was with good reason that a properly-saucy Spike remarked afterwards to reporters, “Every time someone's driving somebody, I lose.”  

It must needs be remarked that this year's Oscars did include a number of real, positive, groundbreaking firsts, with Spike Lee's win being joined by trophies for Peter Ramsay, Ruth Carter, Hannah Beachler, and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, among others.  However, the relative dominance, especially among the “prestige” awards, of films made by serial abusers, conspiracy-mongerers, and old, white men blatantly disrespecting the wishes of the black subjects they profited off of will inevitably lead to this year going down as another shamefully embarassing chapter in Academy history.  In the age of Trump, defined by rising white nationalism and adjacent-white-nationalism-apologists, and in a post-#MeToo media landscape, there is simply no excuse for this.  #Time was supposed to be #Up for shit like this.  Clearly, it is not.  Not by a long shot.  

And so, given the depressing parallels this creates to 30 years ago, it's worth revisiting the film the Academy once deemed less worthy of recognition than Flattering Your Racist Grandma: The Motion Picture.  

Do The Right Thing is a film about complex, interlocking racial tensions in a small Brooklyn street, played out over the course of a single day.  There is an ongoing heatwave plaguing the city, and as our narrator, the seemingly all-knowing local DJ Love Daddy informs us, the day ahead will be the worst one yet.  We get a sense of the personalities, dynamics, and institutions that exist between residents old and new that define life there.  Mookie (played by Spike Lee himself), the delivery boy for the famous local pizza joint; Sal and his sons, Pino and Vito, the Italian owners of the pizza place and, apparently, the only white family still living and working in the neighborhood after the others have moved out; Mother Sister and Da Mayor, two elderly locals who form something of a moral compass for everyone else; Buggin' Out, a young black man spoiling for a fight with seemingly everyone; Radio Raheem, famous for his massive boombox, whose Love/Hate brass knuckles provide the focus for one of the film's most famous and enduring images; and so, so many more.  

The nucleus of the travesty of justice, understanding, and empathy that ultimately ends the day is Buggin' Out and Sal getting worked up around lunchtime over the fact that only Italian-Americans are presented on Sal's “Wall of Fame.”  In Sal's eyes, it's his restaurant, and he's Italian-American, so he can do what he wants.  Fair point.  In Buggin' Out's eyes, since the restaurant is in an overwhelmingly black neighborhood and propped up by the money spent there day in, day out by black customers, Sal ought to pay tribute to the community that keeps him in business.  Also fair, as well as a frighteningly prescient parallel to how the makers of Green Book gained profit and Oscar gold from the story of Dr. Shirley over the explicit wishes of both its subject and his family.  

But as with all things, two arguments that, on their own, seem fair and that might, in a cooler situation, be able to find their way to a common middle ground, are in this case entering a proverbial tinderbox of social, economic, and racial tension, all exacerbated by that damned, unending, all-pervasive heat.  

Heat is one of the most important parts of the film, both literally and symbolically.  It makes everyone just a little bit angrier, sweatier, stickier, on edge.  And it works here as a damn-near perfect metaphorical stand-in for how racial and ethnic divisions can pervade and surround everything in a society, and how even the most minor of disagreements and the most innocent moments are instantly imbued- or rather, infected- with a hostility and anger that can lead, all too quickly, to escalation.  

Buggin' Out and his anger over the Wall of Fame is one example of this.  Another is the incredibly awkward and tense moment when Mookie's sister, Jade, comes in to Sal's for a slice.  Sal is clearly head-over-heels for Jade; the way he insists on “making her something special” and the few word they exchange sitting in a booth are moments of real tenderness, a level of kindness and humanity the heat can't touch.  But even this is immediately squelched out by both Mookie and Sal's older son, Pino, whose  hostility to even the idea of Sal and Mookie's sister being interested in each other is plain to see on their taught, wary faces.  

Part of what makes this film such an incredible feat of visual and narrative storytelling is how quickly and effectively each character, large and small, are established and made to feel individual and unique.  One of the greatest bugbears of films seeking to deal with race is avoiding the pitfall of generalization, i.e., to not fall victim to exactly that which the film wants to push back against.  Here, each character is shown to us as genuinely human, with virtues and vices co-mingling constantly.  The title almost seems to hint that there is some clear answer- one thing that truly is “the right thing,” or one character or group of characters are the “good guys” in contrast to all else- but the film is too smart for that.  Each character has moments of sympathy, of compassion, of doing a good turn, only to turn around and say or do something aggressive, immature, selfish, or just plain stupid.  What the right thing to do even is depends on the situation and perspective of each person.  Even the title is open to contradicting interpretations.  It works as a gentle plea for humanity in an inhumane world.  It could also be a command, barked out in anger and for decidedly “wrong” reasons.  Like with everything else in the film, whether or not there is a difference between the “right” and “wrong” thing to do is something the viewers are left to ponder over for themselves.  

The lone exception to this masterful shading, at least in my view, is the Korean family that owns the convenience store across the street from Sal's Famous.  We are informed that they are relative newcomers to the neighborhood, and this plus the fact that they have already achieved a level of economic success most longtime residents of the street have never had is more fuel for resentment and mistrust between the Koreans and everyone else, be they black, Hispanic, Italian, what-have-you.  But the 360-degree treatment never quite extends to this family; they are key to a few scenes, but we never see anything from their perspective.  With most of the film devoted to the angers, worries, fears, and insecurities of the African- and Italian-American parts of the cast, the Korean and (to a lesser extent) Hispanic characters sometimes feel like a bit of an afterthought.  That, at least, was my impression, but I will leave it to other viewers, especially viewers of color, to decide whether or not this dilutes the film's power as a meditation on racism.  

Another imbalance within the film I noticed was its treatment of women.  Mother Sister is treated as a wise elder, respected by all in the community, but she is the only woman the men really seem to listen to.  Mookie clearly struggles in being present as a partner for his girlfriend and father for their child, and when he sees Jade and Sal flirting, his immediate reaction is standard, overprotective machismo; he tries to ban his sister from ever going to Sal's again, and takes it upon himself to confront Sal and tell him keep far away from her.  Where, indeed, is Mrs. Sal?  We are never told.  

This, however, I don't see as a flaw in the film, but rather as an accurate reflection of how gender dynamics play an equally forceful role in how discrimination seeps into all sorts of relationships and can extend inequality, racial or otherwise.  It's yet another shade in a film that succeeds to bringing in nearly the whole spectrum of bigotry for consideration and debate.  

All of this builds to the film's devastating climax, a massive confrontation/fistfight/firefight where seemingly every bit of pent-up anger explodes outward, devastating everyone within reach.  In the scram that results between Sal, Mookie, Buggin', Raheem, and the others, the (mostly) white cops start wading in.  People are beaten, harmed, their livelihood destroyed, and one young man black man is picked up by a cop and strangled to death, in the middle of the street, for all to see.   

This devastating moment was controversial and effecting enough when the film first came out in the 80's.  Now, though, in 2019- several years after the video of Eric Garner's death and his final words were seared into our collective conscious- it is even more potent, a tragic reminder that the videos, audio, and stories of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice that seemed, at the time, never-ending, were really only “new” or “revealing” for white people.  For minorities- African, Asian, Muslim, Hispanic, Native, LGBTQ, and more- it was nothing new; just another continuation of a long, long history of random, senseless violence this country has never, ever ceased to inflict on the marginalized. 

Do The Right Thing retains every bit of its power, fury, and force today because of this.  This country- its voters, its politicians, it's business leaders- have continued to refuse to do the right thing, or to even seriously discuss and consider what right things need to be done to allow us to actually begin to heal, in some form, from the past and to truly move on.  As long as the thousand-and-one pointed questions this films throws at the viewer remain unconsidered, untested, and unanswered, none of us will have the ability or right to look Radio Raheem in the eye and say that, yes, in the end, Love will win out over Hate.  

-Noah Franc 

Previously on Films for the Trump Years: 

Part 1- Selma

Part 2- Good Night, and Good Luck

Part 3- 13th

Part 4- Get Out 

Part 5- Chasing Ice/Chasing Coral

Part 6- The Big Short

Part 7- Human Flow

Part 8- Winter's Bone/Moonlight

Part 9- Black Panther

Part 10- Arrested Development

Part 11- Bowling for Columbine

Part 12- [T]error

Part 13- Angels in America

Review: Captain Marvel

Captain Marvel (2019): Written by Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.  Starring: Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Lashana Lynch, Jude Law, Gemma Chan, Lee Pace, Djimon Hounsou, Annette Bening, and Clark Gregg.  Running Time: 124 minutes.  Based on the comics by Stan Lee, Gene Colan, and Roy Thomas. 

Rating: 3/4

            At long last, the women are running the show in a Marvel movie.  The past few years have finally seen some major barriers broken down regarding representation in major tentpole blockbusters, thanks especially to Wonder Woman and Black Panther, though Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse deserves to be considered on that same plane.  Now Marvel has gotten into the game of letting a lady lead the way with Captain Marvel, the big prequel film setting up the character that, we’ve been led to assume, will play a key role in the next Avengers movie. 

            This movie starts in medias res, as “Vers” (real name, we eventually learn, is Carol Danvers) is introduced to us as a soldier of the Kree, being trained by Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) to control her seemingly remarkable powers.  She has total amnesia regarding her past, but it’s pretty clear she’s a human who had a strange run-in with the Kree of some sort.  This only starts being revealed to us after a mission against the Kree’s sworn enemy, the Skrulls, goes awry, and she finds herself captured and under a sort of memory check at the hands of her captors, triggering further flashbacks of who she was before the Kree found her.    

            She breaks out in time to make it to the surface of the Earth, circa the early 90’s, where she soon runs into a digitally-youthized Sam Jackson- the effect is actually quite good, better than I expected- who she enlists in finding out where the surviving Skrulls are hiding and what, exactly, they were after in the first place. 

            As far as the story and narrative are concerned, there is nothing groundbreaking here.  Obviously, not everything is at it seems to be in the beginning, and there are a few twists and turns where some perceived villains are actually good and vice versa.  In the main, then this falls more into the middling-tier of most Marvel films; perfectly well-made and nice to watch, but nothing in the bare narrative structure to make it really stand out from the pack.  If this had not had the distinction of being “The First Female Lead” of the MCU, and simply been about another white dude, it would have ended up rather forgettable, like Ironman 3, Ant-Man, or Doctor Strange. 

            Thankfully, it does have that “first” factor in its favor, and even more beneficially, it’s Brie Larson in the title role, and she is clearly having a blast.  There is a confidence and swagger that she is able to effortlessly project with every smirk, every twist of her head, every glance.  None of it is explained or excused or given a reason for being- it would have been all too easy to connect her strengths as being direct results of the traumatic amnesia she suffered under for 6 years- but the film doesn’t go that route.  Carol is who she is and makes no bones about it, and is all the better for it. 

            Larson has an especially enjoyable chemistry with Jackson, finally getting to have some fun with the Fury role, and Lashana Lynch is damn near hypnotic as a friend from her past who helps her discover the truth about who she was and what, exactly, happened to her.  I could watch a whole set of movies devoted to just these three characters; that’s how strong their scenes are, which contain the film’s beating heart. 

            The lack of a real threat amongst any of the villain characters, real or perceived, does still drag the film down a bit; there is plenty of Prequel Syndrome to be found here.  I also can’t say that there is much in the action to really stick in the mind- again, like with the vast majority of the MCU canon, the action is mostly-serviceable in the moment, but hardly sticks around afterwards, unlike the occasionally dynamic sequences we got in the previous few movies.  No matter.  This was a fun movie and a great experience, and I wholly recommend seeing it in theaters. 

-Noah Franc

How To Make Your Trilogy, Part 1: The Dreamworks Effect

            You might not have realized it yet, but How To Train Your Dragon 3 is out in theaters, like, right now, and it’s good.  It’s really good.  It’s about as perfect an ending to the story and character arcs set up in the first movie, all the way back in 2010, that we could have wished for. 

            In fact, Dreamworks Animation has proven remarkably good over the years at making bizarre premises work.  But in a world where Marvel is still the go-to standard for multiple-film continuities and Pixar is still the guiding standard for animation, I feel the quality of Dreamworks has so far gone tragically overlooked, and with the final HTTYD experience about to leave theaters for good, it might be too late for us to give them their due. 

            Now, this is not to get too ahead of myself and suggest Dreamworks is some Ghibli-level bastion of near-perfect filmmaking, because it isn’t.  When looking at the three dozen films thus far released under the Dreamworks banner, there is very much an uneven mix in terms of quality; I would rank just under half the titles on the scale between “really solid” and “genuinely great.”  The others, though….I mean, Boss Baby wasn’t literally the worst film ever, but, still. 

            Even the franchises have as many lows as they do highs; the first two Shrek movies were genuinely groundbreaking events in American animation that redefined the genre, and Madagascar was…fine, I guess, but those two franchises soon fell off particularly steep cliffs and stayed around well past their sell-by dates.  Still, though, it’s amazing to me when I think about how many great movies there are here that no one seems to be talking about anymore; for every Boss Baby or Over the Hedge, there’s a Prince of Egypt, a Chicken Run, or even the lone Wallace and Gromit feature.  And for the most part, while most of these movies did well enough at the box office, recognition has never went much beyond that; Shrek and Wallace and Gromit remain the only two Dreamworks films to ever nab an Oscar, while Kung Fu Panda and HTTYD have (so far) been completely shut out. 

            And yet, despite this ongoing travesty, the makers of two of the best film trilogies post-LOTR have kept right on going, quietly and competently crafting excellent stories out of material that really, truly, should not be this good.  Jack Black as a fat panda who stumbles into mastering kung fu and a series about dragons with remarkably bizarre designs where the human characters can’t decide if they're Scottish or American are decidedly NOT the sort of foundations most people would look at and say, “Yep, that’s trilogy material!”  Yet here we are; Kung Fu Panda and HTTYD not only rank among the best franchises of the century (so far), I am inclined to argue that they are the best two animated trilogies every produced within the US, period. 

            Why, yes, I would have been happy include Toy Story in that discussion, if Pixar were not so determined to take all the goodwill the third film generated and throw it off a fucking cliff. 

            So how did it happen?  Why did these two series turn out so good, succeed where so many others fail?  I’ll take deeper looks at the films themselves in two later posts, but in broad terms, the connective thread between them is pretty clear; in both cases the studio handed the reigns to a talented, creative team that knew what stories they wanted to tell, and gave them just enough leeway to make those stories with no really disruptive interference from above. 

             Let’s start with Kung Fu Panda; the primary tissue connecting all three movies are the screenwriters, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, who penned all three scripts.  Melissa Cobb and Clare Knight are also credited on all three as, respectively, the producer and head editor.  John Stevenson and Mark Osborne split directing duties for the first movie, with Jennifer Yuh Nelson taking over for the second (the first time a woman of any background solely directed a feature animated film), and then sharing credit on the third movie with Alessandro Carloni. 

            HTTYD, on the other hand, had Dean DeBlois as the central animating force behind its production, as he shares writing AND directing credits on all three films (with Bonnie Arnold producing all three); for the first one, he split the work with Will Davies and Chris Sanders, while he wrote and directed the next two on his own, and has already gone on record with how his own familial struggles shaped the narrative he wanted to build around Hiccup. 

            Both are also enhanced throughout by killer scores; the Kung Fu Panda music comes courtesy of Hans Zimmer.  John Powell contributed to the first two of those films as well, but he clearly reserved his A-Game for HTTYD, providing us with one of the best musical creations of the past decade. 

            Furthermore, it’s clear that none of these were rushed productions; each installment had at least three years between the others.  It would have been all too easy to look at the respective success of the first films and rushed through sequels within a year or two, the animating force behind such decisions usually being a fear that, if you don’t hurry, people will forget all about your last movie and not care about the second one.  That this so clearly dominates a lot of thinking within Hollywood is rather sad, because it belies an ignorance of one of the basic truths of filmmaking; if you make a genuinely good product and stick by it, the audience will come.  And your chances of achieving this are all the higher when you really take your time to make each movie something special, and not just carbon copies of what came before, as so, so many sequels end up being. 

            Both of these franchises have born this out; all three Kung Fu Panda films had budgets in the 130-150 million range, and each pulled in well over half a million in global box office, a solid, if not overwhelming, profit margin.  The budget for HTTYD, I was shocked to find out, has actually decreased with each successive movie, dropping from 165 million for the first movie to under 130 million for The Hidden World.  This, despite how clearly and amazingly the quality of the animation has risen with each new installment.  The first two movies likewise hit or topped half a million; the third is still out, obviously, but it’s well on track to making a comparable amount to the second movie. 

            Clearly, my worries that we still aren’t fully appreciated these movies aside, they stand as clear rebuffs to the idea that sequels have to be rushed to make a profit; there were enough people who could enjoy these films for what they are, and remembered to get excited and get out the door when the next one came around. 

            So let’s take some time, then, to look back at these two trilogies, and appreciate what we’ve got.  And I promise, the next two installments will not take three years apiece to finish. 

            I hope. 

-Noah Franc