Category Archives: Reviews

Open Letter to Stan Lee(‘s Ghost)


Dear Stan,

You are not here and wouldn’t remember me if you were. I’ve interviewed you a few times, and was even in one of your cameos: Iron Man cameo (where Tony Stark mistakes you for Hugh Hefner). Did all of them take that long?

Anyhoo, that’s not my question, and this is not another interview request, though that would be quite a scoop. It’s a superhero pitch. And no need to summon your lawyers, who have probably cryogenically frozen your brain somewhere. It’s not a ripoff of Ant-Man or X-Men. Well, it kinda is.

The pitch is a superhero that can harness and all powers of the human brain. And not like Batman, who was never a regular human, no matter what the dweebs say. Who can afford an electric cave?

Consider, then, Quantum, the first superhero to have utter control of the brain, its billions of neurons, its trillions of synapses, and its infinite combination connections. Quantum is androgynous, raceless, and ideologically poseable to fit your retail needs. Quantum can:

  • Turn off neural pathways that deliver pain. Imagine, Stan, a scene when Quantum is captured and placed in a torture device. No matter what the pain brings, no matter the anguish, it all brings a chilling laugh from Quantum, who can laugh at her own amputation. How NC-17 is that?
  • Engage photographic memory at will. Scientists studied one man with a photographic mind and who memorized the PI calculation to roughly the 30,000th digit. Q can double that at least, leaving Batman’s detective looking like the Encyclopedia Brown on meth.
  • Commandeer dreams. This is perhaps the most exciting power, because it unleashes the subconscious. Imagine: Quantum CANNOT put a crime piece together, for whatever dastardly reason. So he/she decides to dream on the case, to approach it from the brain’s dreamscape perspective during sleep. Dreamscapes are like multiverses: You can apply any narrative you wish. Except we know dreamscapes are real.


Because Quantum works at the subatomic level, the battles can occur within someone’s brain, carried in by nothing more than an asymptomatic cough. Stories can be built around epic battles, all occurring within one skull (or lung, heart, kidney, etc.) All panels, scientifically sound (which should shut up the adults who still believe them infantile rubbish).

The villains rip themselves from the social media headlines. Q vs. Covid. Q vs. Facebook A.I. Q vs. Lone Gunman Syndrome. Q vs. Q. Conspiracy theorists alone provide a built-in diehard circulation base.

It’s even got a tagline. Quantum: His/Her Only Limitation Is Your Imagination.

Anyway, that’s the pitch. Feel free to give me a dream sometime, or accidentally irradiate me, or do whatever lingering spirits do. Because Hollywood needs something resembling originality.

How’s my dad, by the way? Portly guy, salt and pepper hair, has probably punched at least one afterlifer in the face and threatened two with the same.

Now HE’S gonna want an interview.

A Brave New Cosmos

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a flash bang of a film. One might even call it a big bang.

You’re sitting in your dark, cool theater seat — the first you’ve taken since the pandemic — and Bang! The movie explodes in action and exposition, and doesn’t give a damn if you can keep up with the cosmology and quantum physics and action and raw emotion that ripples through the most original and profound film in more than a decade.

Think The Matrix meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as directed by Christopher Nolan.

But even those comparisons are unfair, because Everything acknowledges and bows openly to its cinematic origins. Then it bows to the universe’s origins, which it embraces like Stephen Hawking on crack.

From the multiverse to quantum entanglement, Everything packs a silly kung fu movie into a story that may be as scientifically sound as the Hubble telescope. And still focuses the story into a narrative singularity — accessible, yet still awe inspiring.

The plot is a trifling, disposable matter: Michelle Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang, an aging laundromat owner trying to juggle tiny receipts, big customer complaints and a family that includes a judgmental father and rebellious daughter. After an unintended peek into another dimension, Evelyn learns she must face down an existential intergalactic threat.

It’s pablum. But as Everything points out, insignificant moments are the only things that DON’T exist in reality — particularly in the multiverses we build for ourselves in a world sinking into a black hole of digital chatter. Everything reveals itself as a poignant drama about finding your place in the world only after nearly dazzling us too much with dazzling concepts and computer effects. At 2 hours 19 minutes, the frenzy numbs a bit before it pierces.

Everything looks much bigger than it is. The film, which cost about $25 million, underscores what Hollywood used to be: audacious, loud and opinionated — and hustling a shoestring budget. Maybe that’s why it drew Oscar-caliber talent including Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis, unrecognizable under makeup as an oppressive tax auditor.

It is karate with a pinkie, kung fu with a pocket pup, pyrotechnics with polygons. And it nearly sets the screen ablaze with its brashness.

So as Hollywood crows over the box office haul of a colossus like Top Gun: Maverick, Everything will control its own delightful corner of the universe.

Now THAT’S a reason to have hope for moviemaking. Everywhere, all at once.

My Severed Self


(or The Reintegration of an Innie & Outie to Find The We We Are)

One of the beauties of Severance, like all notable television, is that it works on multiple levels.

You have the Apple show’s conceit: In a not-too-distant future, we will be able to manipulate, separate and even erase unpleasant memories. Severance imagines an America where the work self has no contact with or knowledge of the home self. It ponders what Americans — and corporate America — would do with that chasm. Think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets The Office, as filmed by Stanley Kubrick.

But the show works on just about any parallel it’s mapped onto: workplace politics; sexual politics; politics politics. Consider some of the subtler messaging:

  • Red and Blue political leanings. Note the use of reds in the workplace, which is a corporate wet dream of labor exploitation and capitalism unbridled. Blues dominate the outside world, where men are neutered, women are masculinized and dominant — and both have become comatose in Wokeness.
  • Unionizing. The workplace ”innies”, who know nothing of colleagues beyond their cubicles, team to contact their “outies”, who presumably live a freer and better life. Apple+ must have quietly uncorked the champagne when Amazon lost its union battle with the heroic unionizer Chris Smalls earlier this month.
  • Women’s and civil rights. It’s no mistake than the Eagan family, founders of the shadowy Luman Corporation, has had only one female head of the Board. And Lumen minorities are limited to mid-level management and carnival prizes for busywork.
  • COVID. Department heads know nothing of the other departments: who leads them, what they do, how many there are, nothing. It’s as if they’ve been quarantined.

But its most intriguing dynamic goes deeper still: the politics of consciousness. Could you work a well-paying job if it were literally mindless? Would you literally mind eight hours of amnesia? I think I know a few people who would leap at the chance like a bullfrog on a roasting toadstool.

It all makes for arresting television and self-application. If your innie self and outie self met after years apart through “reintegration” (as the show puts it), what would you tell your work self about life outside the workday? What does your outie know that your innie should?

I never thought about the question until my forced reintegration in 2015, when my paper gave me the axe. Since then — after losing my job as a writer — did I learn that I was actually a writer. I guess sometimes you have to do something for free to know it’s what you love doing.

Which would be one of the first things I’d tell my innie. Here are some others:

We see a projected world, not a reflected one.

Save for intent, faith and science are two sides of one coin.

We don’t deserve this planet, and she knows it.
Human consciousness was an error, and the planet will correct it shortly.
The pandemic taught us what we can live without.
Boredom is underrated. You know who never gets bored? The hungry.
Time machines exist. They’re called memory and hope.
When enraged, count to 10 before you speak: Anger melts in time like butter on a skillet. Technology is a wonderbra: It lifts and separates us.
WE are The Great Filter.
We all gotta shoulder something.