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New Escapist Column! On How “Avatar: The Way of Water” is an Archetypal James Cameron Movie…

Posted on December 16, 2022 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the looming release of Avatar: The Way of Water, it seemed like a good time to take a look at Cameron’s aquatic, which might be his most personal and intimate movie ever.

Cameron’s filmography is interesting and varied, working in a number of genres and registers across his career. However, he has a set of familiar preoccupations: water, industrialisation, militarism, environmentalist, parenthood, feminism and so on. However, it’s fascinating that one of the most consistent threads across Cameron’s filmography is an evolving idea of family. Cameron’s epics are often stories of families pulling themselves together in the face of crisis. The Way of Water is no different.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: aliens, aquatic, avatar, avatar: the way of water, family, fatherhood, filmography, found family, james cameron, Movies, the terminator, themes, True Lies | Leave a comment »

Escapist Column! “Titans” as a Meditation on Found Family…

Posted on September 27, 2019 by Darren

It’s another In the Frame column at Escapist Magazine.

This time taking a look at Titans, the new live action adaptation of Teen Titans that formed one of the cornerstones of Warner Brothers’ DC streaming service. The series focuses on a bunch of teenage sidekicks who find themselves forced to work together for the greater good, particularly focused on Dick Grayson who was the former Robin. The series explores themes of trauma and found family, but is particularly interesting for its rejection of conventional (or even conventionally coded) family units.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: dc, found family, series, Television, Titans | 1 Comment »

Non-Review Review: Instant Family

Posted on January 23, 2019 by Darren

The biggest issue with Instant Family is one of identity.

Is Instant Family best approached as a broad feel-good comedy that deals too glibly with serious and deeply affecting issues, or is it an earnest drama that too eagerly punctuates its heart-tugging beats with gags that play loudly the gallery? Instant Family never quite seems to work this out, bouncing quickly from one extreme to another without any sense of internal cohesion. Instant Family often seems unsure of the tone that it wants to hit, which means that it can never maintain a consistent tone for more than a scene or so.

Kids also make great human shields.

To be fair to Instant Family, it is possible to deftly balance the demands of comedy and drama. There are countless great films that balance on a knife-edge between the two extremes, most notably the work of directors like Woody Allen or the Coen Brothers. While there is obviously some debate about how skillfully they pull off this balance, it is also a key ingredient in contemporary Oscar contenders like Vice or Green Book. It is entirely possible for a film to make the audience both laugh out loud and cry softly at the same time. Pixar is very good at this.

The issue with Instant Family is one of speed and extremes, how much ground it tries to cover in navigating the space between funny and moving, and how quickly it tries to cross that space.

Family matters.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: family, Foster, found family, instant family, Movie, non-review review, review | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: Voyager – Child’s Play (Review)

Posted on May 31, 2018 by Darren

Interesting, isn’t it?

What?

With all their technology, their opportunity to explore the galaxy, the thing they want most is to get home.

A Trek away from the Stars.

Child’s Play is a fascinating episode of Star Trek: Voyager, in that it might be seen as a firm rejection of some of the show’s core conservatism.

Voyager has always been the most conservative of the Star Trek franchise, the series most likely to panic about gang violence for two whole seasons starting in Caretaker or to rail against immigration in Displaced or to voice its anxieties about refugees in Day of Honour. More than that, what are episodes like Remember or Distant Origin or Living Witness or Memorial but expressions of literal anxieties about the erosion of the certainty of history to postmodernism and moral relativism? At its core, Voyager is a series about nostalgia, about the yearning to recapture what once was, how the only journey is the journey home.

“Everything the light touches is your kingdom…”

Child’s Play is interesting as a firm rejection of the idea of the traditional family unit in favour of a more modern (and less rigidly defined) idea of a “found family.” It is a story about how a child’s best interests do not always lie with their biological parents, and about how some of the strongest and most loving bonds in a young person’s life can be forged by chance rather than biology. Child’s Play is essentially an ode to the kind of complicated family dynamics that were entering the mainstream at the turn of the millennium, a staunch defense of a liberal and inclusive definition of family.

More than that, the episode also seems to be making several very pointed jabs at Voyager‘s traditionally conservative outlook.