Bright's Reactionary Dystopia

Plus: Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water, This is 40, and more

Have a few kvetches cooking up so dishing out more movies this week (check out the last Kvetching at the Movies).

[WARNING: SPOILERS]

• Bright (2017)

• Happy Feet Two (2011)

• Puss in Boots (2022)

• Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

• Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

• This is 40 (2012)

Bright (2017)

Bright is an unexpected treasure (every review site on the internet hates it — they’re wrong, I’m right). I’m no Will Smith guy but his role as Daryl Ward, a broke-ass honest cop in a truly multicultural dystopian Los Angeles is just so fun.

The aesthetic goes hard. Lord of the Rings meets Training Day. There exists an uneasy caste system after the conclusion of long-ago wars where Man and Elf won and Orc lost. Now orcs live in a degenerate and subjugated urban state, supposed equals of men, but not really. Elves live in wealthy gated Elysiums. True multiculturalism.

Just watch the opening to get a sense of its aesthetic and premise, it’s so good:

Joe Rogan’s on in the family home interviewing an orc. Ward’s pretty white wife complains about the fairy pest outside. Notice how I said white? Feels out of place, but especially here. Human race disappears in this film, dissolved in the harsh and fixed racial and class hierarchies of man, elf and orc. Fairy lives don’t matter today, Ward says before he beats the fairy outside to death.

Yet whilst human race disappears in the film, the tension between races dominates everything. Bright does not tiptoe through it. It smears us in it.

Ward’s partner is Nick Jakoby, the first orc police officer. He is a “diversity hire” who attends “diversity training”. Is this the only dig at Big Diversity in film?

“Everywhere I go why have orcs always gotta be the bad guys?” Wonders Jakoby, who appears to be the only good guy in this multicultural American favela.

“Hey don’t look at me man, Mexicans still get shit for the Alamo,” replies a nearby Latino cop.

“How many Orcs are ballers?”
“Excuse me?”
“You fuckin' heard the detective.”
“How many Orcs play pro basketball?”
“None. They're slow, they're heavy.”
“That's why half the NFL defensive lines are Orkish. It's not racism, it's physics.”

There is not a single black joke in the film. I think the Mexican joke about the Alamo is the only one on human race. The orc jokes just land stone cold.

Yet despite the grim realities of this racially essentialist universe, it’s not the most oppressive feature of this world. No, our cop duo are the only honest pair in endless webs of corruption. The orc gangbangers may be degenerate but the human cops are evil and corrupt. Elves may be rich and aesthetically and physically superior, but that’s double-edged when they too are turned to evil ends. Bright plays with both the virtues of ethnic bonds and segregated living as well as its limits. Jakoby wants nothing more than to be “blooded” (kind of an orc bar mitzvah) and he eventually is after he dies and is resurrected as an orc messiah and saves Ward. But in the end it is the contents of their characters that counts and which overcome the texture of their skins.

Bright has horrible ratings and seems to only attract loathing, but I love it.

Orc Lives Matter

Happy Feet Two (2011)

Love the franchise, but I was struck by how beautiful this scene with the krill was. I was moved by how far they pushed the idea of a krill reimagining himself as an apex predator. Freeing the krill from the hive and the deterministic bonds of its species, imbuing it with agency, allowing it to dream — it was beautifully brought to the screen.

How bound are we to the deterministic bonds of our genetic dispositions?

Puss in Boots (2022)

Puss in Boots is about the domestication of man (I might be obsessed but it’s true!). Puss is at an end of a vital young life (lives) of adventure — a commitment-phobe (he stood Kitty up at the altar) whose time has run out. He first retires into the literal domestication of domesticated cat life — it doesn’t work. His wish is for more lives — a reliving of his many youths. This manifests explicitly in the cave of lost souls. But he does ultimately domesticate — he finally settles down with Kitty. Puss finds his place when he commits to his woman. He becomes a man when Kitty gets her wish and tames the wild Puss.

Jack Horner represents the grotesquery of unending bachelorhood, the derangement of endless adolescent indulgence. A literal bloated overgrown evil child.

Baby bear is literally at the end of a chain to Goldie. He rebels. He has not yet been broken. But the older bear (“too soft”) is more accustomed to living under the matriarchy of the bear clan. It’s too late for him.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

What an incredibly pessimistic take on US power, especially for all the audience hurrah. Old men, old planes, old tech, old flames, old elites, good old days. Fake enemies, fake noses, fake tech.

Our hero (Tom Cruise) is a fatherless bachelor still picking up single mums, jumping out of windows to evade their kids — the American Dream. At least Jennifer Connelly is still smoking hot at 52.

Ruling elites are literally unable to speak from decrepitude yet still cling onto power. The last vestiges of US power: nostalgia for the good old days before unmanned flight and rivals destroy everything.

The filmmakers need to beef up US fake enemies for it to make sense. Unnamed Iran is not a decrepit rival unable to retaliate against the assassination of its general, it’s a tech miracle. All nostalgia for the easy days of Bosnia, Iraq 1 and 2.

Good dog fight scenes, great beach sports scene, a redemptive arc, a big hurrah happy ending.

But a world of missing and pseudo fathers. The best off is a single mum heiress who buys and runs a bar, affords a Porsche, a yacht and a plane. Fake eternal youth of broken lives, running on inherited wealth and know-how.

Also wrapped up in the film is the latest Hollywood self-conception of American culture. Very this is how Gen Z do things, and Tom Cruise and the old guard humour them. But actually the dying Boomers are in complete control and the only ones even banging.

SAD!

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

Really enjoyed the new Avatar. More than the first. Less FernGully and more just indulgent, gorgeous world building. Different Na’vi races evolving to local conditions? Extremely based! Can’t wait to meet the fremen Na’vi of the desert and the small, suspicious mountain Na’vi (shame about the eradicated pigmy Na’vi).

It takes its time and revels in the details of its new water peoples and ecosystem. The opposite of the ADHD riddled action sequences of superhero films.

Surprised they got away with explicitly mimicking Pacific Islander culture and bodies (I guess Peter Jackson got away with casting Islanders as Uruk-hai). Flying close to the wind with racial evolution: each Na’vi race is slightly different, adopting to their habitats. The water Na’vi have thicker arms and tails, the better to swim with. Funny how intuitive it is to think in this way but prohibited to apply it to humans.

Love the nod to Comanche lore in the Na’vi adoption of technology — guns and radio and tactics — and raids on the peripheries of human expansion. Feels real.

This is 40 (2012)

Pete: This sounds horrible, but do you ever wonder what it would be like if you and your wife were separated by something bigger? Like death. Like her death.

Barry: I have given it a fair amount of thought.

Pete: Not in a painful way, but like a gentle, floating off...

Barry: Its gotta be peaceful. I mean, this is the mother of your children.

Pete: And then the new wife would be great.

Barry: God, I can't wait to meet my second wife. I hope she likes me better than this one.

Wife and I were crying with laughter watching this and I am certain she wants to kill me. Only Fleishman is in Trouble lives up to This is 40 in its portrayal of marriage. Not pointing to any scenes, but have they been secretly recording our lives? Down to the cycling, toilet humour and secret cupcakes. The layering of financial and parental and marital and health issues. I find it hard to write about this movie because it falls in the bucket of “telling on yourself” a little too much, but just assume none of it is farfetched.