The best series not starring Jessica Chastain or Brit Marling
that I saw this year was "The Rings of Power," right before
I quit amazon prime. This is a surprise; I find Peter
Jackson's _Lord of the Ring_ tedious save for two cavalry
charges and the Mirando Otto handmaiden character. I didn't
even see the Hobbit films. But Mofydd Clark is stunning as
the young Galadriel -- a headstrong warrior hunting for the
evil Sauron against everyone's advice. She is a redoubtable
swordsman, horse-rider, and tactical genius who wins every
battle. But her limited people-skills and strategic tunnel-
vision also cost her the war. Through all her triumph and
heartbreak, in motion and in stillness, Clark is never less
than mesmerizing. Soulful and totally immersed in this
prickly character, she never comes off as just showing off
her flawless actorly techniques. Some day she will surpass
Cate Blanchett, who plays Galadriel in LotR. Clark's costars
Nazanin Boniadi and Ismael Cruz Cordova are realy good as
well. This is the way to do color-blind casting -- make
sure your actors are first-rate and have well-written
characters, especially if you make major tweeks from the
original. (Katee Sackhoff makes "Starbuck" her own in
"Battlestar Galactica," while Sharon Duncan-Brewster's Liet
Kynes is as quarter-baked as most things in _Dune.)

A major plot point is the subversion of the "poor helpless
folks looking for a king/emperor-substitute to lead them"
trope pervading LoTR and popular culture. The Western
democratic systems are intended to resist personality cults
which has given rise to dictatorship since Julius Caesar.
Sadly, the media is hell-bent on an Imperial Restoration.
The "Game of Thrones" prequel, "Succession," _Aquaman_,
_Black Panther_, _Woman King_, Trump, Obama... they are the
same story. A reported $500 million piece of popular culture
heavyweight comes along, striking a blow against mindless
cults with its major plot twist, and what do the TV critics
say? They mostly laugh at it -- perhaps too busy playing
kingmakers, court jesters, consummate insiders, to bother
with democracy.

---------------------------------------------------------

Prince-Bythwood's _The Old Guard_ is not about Napoleon's
famed 1st and 2nd Chasseurs and Grenadier Regiments.
Instead, Charlize Theron and a race- and gender-certified
cast are Immortals who shoot, maim, and slaughter their
way through 125 mind-numbing, nihilistic minutes. I think
they murder more people (faceless, dehumanized souls)
than all the _Rambo_ movies combined. Possibly more folks
die here than at the hands of Boney's Old Guard Division.
Is there really a woke market for extreme digital violence?
_The Wheel of Time_, the other amazon fantasy series, is
similarly graphic. (I didn't make it past the first
episode.) Theron is authentic as ever, but the film fails
to hide its emptiness, its utter bankrupcy of ideas, behind
its excesses.

Watching this I am I am reminded of Brit Marling's brilliant
article "I don't want to be the strong female lead." I
also now appreciate Cate Shortland's decision not to make
her _Black Widow_ too dark (via the children-trafficking
angle, for example), and _355_ for its character focus.
(One critic rates _355_ one of 2022's-worst film for being
not "real," or brutal, enough.) The director Gina
Prince-Bythewood has impressed with _Beyond the Lights_,
but in retrospect perhaps that film owes its artistry
more to Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Nate Parker.

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Speaking of Gugu Mbatha-Raw -- she is incandescent in
_Beyond the Lights_. Innocent, corrupted, graceful,
vulgar all at once, it is a star-making role; I can
never understand why she is not more recognized. She
would have been a great Grace in the adaptation of the
Margaret Atwood novel _Alias Grace_. So would Lou de
Laage, so many-faceted in _The Mad Women's Ball_. Or
Wei Tang.

There are so many good things in that miniseries. The
period Toronto details are fascinating; the extensive
use of Atwood's brilliant prose helps you grow back
all the neurons you lost from watching _Vita and
Virginia_. But the casting is questionable, especially
with Sarah Gadon as the lead. The novel ponders
whether Grace (based on a real person) has truly
murdered her employer and his housekeeper. But Gadon's
flat affect leaves no doubt that she would have been
a sociopath/serial killer sooner rather than later.
Gadon is inexplicably anointed an Indie Film Icon,
despite (sorry to be mean here) an ability somewhere
between that of Saoirse Ronan, who has three facial
expressions/combinations, and Sarah Polley, who can
manage one and a half (and that's probably being
charitable). Kristin Stewart and Alicia Vikander
are in that mix too, but Sarah Polley would always
be the gold standard of ridiculously overrated
ingenues. (Rebecca Liddiard is fascinating as Mary,
though.)

Gadon's aggressive blandness and oppressive sameness
across the episodes is the reason I haven't finished
watching "Alias Grace," but I will. Like the book,
the series highlights the prejudice faced by first
generation immigrants, hired as servants or worse
after harrowing journeys across the sea. I obviously
don't want to claim that poor Irish immigrants' plight
is remotely as vicious as slaves from Africa, or to
erase the distinction between different cultures*,
but bringing a "Hamilton" effect and lending a measure
of empathy and mutual understanding to the "wretched
refuse of other teeming shores" would have been
great.

*Of course it is somehow deemed OK to erase the
differences among "Asian" races and their histories
when assigning villain and victim roles. Growing up
in Hong Kong the #1 interracial marriage taboo was
between Japanese and Chinese; it was guaranteed to
tear families apart. (Cue _2046_.) Japan invaded
Hong Kong, and the oppressive occupation led to
starvation and mass exodus. It did far worse things
in China, like bio-weopon research on prisoners,
massacre of up to hundreds of thousands in Nanking,
among other war-crimes. Yet it is somehow OK to
erase these distinctions in the interest of drafting
"Asians" into "people of color." To put it bluntly, --
the self-styled progressives can be astonishingly
tone-deaf, even racist.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

In fact I haven't seen _The Woman King_. The title is too much of a turn-off, and _The Old Guard_ doesn't help. But it is supposed to have a more nuanced storyline than _Black Panther_ and _Aquaman_ (which are exactly the same
film, except for better wardrobe in the former). I wouldn't dream of watching _Aquaman_ if I weren't stuck in a hotel that night -- it manages to make even Amber Heard totally hideous.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)