Guilt | the m0vie blog

New Escapist Column! On “TÁR” as a Gothic Ghost Story About Cancel Culture…

Posted on January 25, 2023 by Darren

We’re launching a new column at The Escapist, called Out of Focus. It will publish every second Wednesday, and the plan is to use it to look at some film and television that would maybe fall outside the remit of In the Frame, more marginal titles or objects of cult interest. This week, we took a look at Todd Field’s TÁR.

TÁR is an interesting film, and one that embraces an unsettling ambiguity in its exploration of its subject, classical conductor Lydia Tár. Field constructs a fascinating study of a woman literally and metaphorically haunted by the sins of her past, a movie that is very modern in its language but classical in its themes and tones. Tár is a gothic horror story for the digital age, a ghost story about cancel culture, and a nightmare about how conscience is often just the voices of the past refusing to be silenced.

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

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: accountability culture, ambiguity, cancel culture, compassion, Darkness, empathy, ghosts, gothic horror, Guilt, haunted, listen, out of focus, Shame, tár, todd field | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On How “WandaVision” Lags Behind “Legion” and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”….

Posted on March 5, 2021 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. Today marked the release of the WandaVision finale, so it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at the season as a whole, and where it stands in terms of the modern television landscape.

One of the most striking aspects of the first half of WandaVision‘s first season was the skill and fidelity that the show demonstrated in recreating classic television sitcoms. The show’s basic conceit found the characters journeying through television’s history and hurdling towards the present. Unfortunately, WandaVision stumbled when it hit the present, particularly when compared to two relatively recent shows tackling similar themes and working in similar genres blending fantasy and reality as meditations on trauma and mental health problems: Legion and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

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

Filed under: Television | Tagged: crazy ex-girlfriend, escapist, Guilt, in the frame, legion, Marvel Cinematic Universe, mcu, Mental Health, power, responsibility, Television, violence, wanda maximoff, wandavision | Leave a comment »

183. Koe no katachi (A Silent Voice) – This Just In/Ani-May 2020 (—)

Posted on May 23, 2020 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney and with special guest Graham Day, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every Saturday at 6pm GMT.

This year, we are proud to continue the tradition of Anime May, a fortnight looking at two of the animated Japanese films on the list. This year, we watched a double feature of Hayao Miyazaki’s Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta and Hauru no ugoku shiro. We’ll also be covering a bonus on a recent entry on the list next week, Naoko Yamada’s Koe no katachi.

This week, the third and final installment of this year’s Ani-May, Koe no katachi.

Teenager Shoya Ishida finds himself haunted by guilt over his merciless bullying of his deaf classmate Shoko Nishimiya six years earlier. Coming back from a suicide attempt, Shoyo makes an awkward attempt to reconnect and reconcile with Shoko, but are either of them prepared for the strong emotions that this reunion will provoke and the consequences that it will have for their friends and their families?

At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: This Just In | Tagged: a silent voice, animated, bullying, culture, graham day, Guilt, japan, kyoto animation, mono no aware, podcast, regret, Shame, suicide | Leave a comment »

New Podcast! The X-Cast – Season 3, Episode 16 (“Apocrypha”)

Posted on September 21, 2018 by Darren

I’m back on The X-Cast this week, to cover the second-part of the late third-season mythology two-parter Apocrypha.

Picking up where Piper Maru left off, this conclusion finds Mulder and Scully continuing their separate investigations. Mulder is chasing down the missing tape from Anasazi, The Blessing Way and Paper Clip while Scully is dealing with the fallout from the assassination attempt on Assistant Director Walter Skinner that brings her face-to-face with the man who killed her sister. Justice, legacy and guilt are all major preoccupations, tying into the broader themes of the season as a whole.

Once again, a pleasure to substitute in for Tony Black as host of The X-Cast for an episode, and absolutely thrilled to be joined by the great Christopher Irish from The X-Files Lexicon.

The truth is in here. You can listen to the episode here, or click the link below.

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Filed under: Podcasts!, The X-Files | Tagged: apocrypha, christopher irish, conspiracy, Guilt, justic, legacy, mythology, the x-cast, the x-files, the x-files lexicon | Leave a comment »

Luke Cage – If It Ain’t Rough, It Ain’t Right (Review)

Posted on July 2, 2018 by Darren

The past stays with us.

Part of what is interesting about the second season of Luke Cage is the manner in which it engages with, and builds from, what came before. Continuity is a long-standing fixture of superhero narratives, most obviously in the four-colour source material. Fictional characters accrue a history, as individual issues and appearances add up to create a complex set of interlocking details that define and shape the character. It is in some ways comparable to how individual histories help to forge identities and determine who we are.

Of course, it should be noted that superhero movies and television shows have carried over some of this continuity from the comic books. Although cinema’s first “shared universe” was arguably constructed between the Universal monster movies of the thirties, the modern popularity of the term is driven by the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, an elaborate physical construct that ties together everything from Avengers: Infinity War to Daredevil to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to Spider-Man: Homecoming.

The idea is that, in theory, events from one end of this universe might ripple over to another. After all, Misty can drop a casual reference to “the Incident” into an interrogation in Straighten It Out, a nod to the events of The Avengers which can be used to justify the proliferation of advanced technology within this shared universe. Overlap can happen in the strangest places, such as a character mentioned by Misty in For Pete’s Sake turning up a week or so later in an episode of Cloak & Dagger.

At the same time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has struggled to build a truly interconnected universe, in part due to the commercial of realities of film and television production. As a result, Robert Downey Junior is highly unlikely to pop by Hell’s Kitchen for an homage to Born Again, while the Hulk can only be explicitly referenced as “the big green dude” in AKA It’s Called Whiskey or “the green monster” in All Souled Out. The characters from The Defenders are highly unlikely to ever have to worry about Thanos’ finger snap, after all.

This strange dissonance and discontinuity that exists between the various facets of the live action Marvel Cinematic Universe is part of what makes the strong continuity connections between the first and second seasons of Luke Cage so compelling, the sense of a tightly woven narrative that is expanding in a logical way from earlier events, where characters’ current behaviours are largely shaped and defined by what the audience has already seen. It’s a very effective use of continuity, particularly for a comic book television series.

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Anger, bushmaster, continuity, fire, Guilt, history, luke cage, mariah stokes, past, poison, shades, Shame | 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.

“I want to be out there…”

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: abuse, borg, conservatism, family, found family, Guilt, home, icheb, love, nostalgia, parents, seven of nine, Shame, star trek, star trek: voyager | 12 Comments »

Star Trek: Voyager – Memorial (Review)

Posted on May 14, 2018 by Darren

Memorial is a great example of Star Trek: Voyager doing a generic Star Trek story.

The episode has a very basic premise that allows for the construction of a science-fiction allegory, the kind of storytelling associated with the franchise dating back to early adventures like The Devil in the Dark or Errand of Mercy. Despite its unique premise and set-up, Voyager had largely embraced the archetypal mode of Star Trek storytelling in its third season. A lot of Voyager episodes feel very broad and very generic, and could easily be adapted for another series – whether inside or outside the franchise.

The real devil in the dark.
Spoiler: It’s us.

There any number of episodes that are not rooted in the specific premise of Voyager, that could easily have been reworked or reinvented for another crew at another point. The Chute was a harrowing story about the horrors of mass incarceration and its capacity to turn people into animals. Nemesis was a meditation on killology, in the way that militaries turn soldiers into killing machines. Scientific Method was a treatise on the horrors of animal testing. Random Thoughts was paranoia about “political correctness gone mad” translated into forty minutes of television.

Memorial belongs to a very specific subset of these episodes, something of a bridge between the more generic Star Trek storytelling to which Voyager aspires and a slightly more specific area of thematic interest. Voyager is a series very much engaged with the idea of memory and history, perhaps befitting the Star Trek series that straddles the twentieth and twenty-first century. Episodes like Remember, Distant Origin and Living Witness are all archetypal Star Trek stories, but they are built around ideas of particular interest to Voyager.

The past never remains buried.

As the title implies, Memorial belongs to that very specific subset of episodes. It is easy to imagine a version of Memorial starring James Tiberius Kirk, Jean-Luc Picard, Benjamin Lafayette Sisko or Jonathan Beckett Archer. It is a generic Star Trek episode that could work with any crew, perhaps meaning something slightly different in each context. (On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it would be an “O’Brien must suffer!” episode. In fact, Hard Time is quite close.) However, it is an episode that engages overtly with ideas that are of great interest to Voyager.

Memorial is about the importance of memory and history, even in a world where time seems to have lost all meaning.

Standing watch over history.

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: culture, education, Guilt, history, holocaust, memorial, memory, oppression, Shame, Slavery, star trek, star trek: voyager, trauma, vietnam, violence, war | 21 Comments »

Star Trek: Voyager – Survival Instinct (Review)

Posted on January 19, 2018 by Darren

Survival Instinct marks the beginning and the end of Ronald D. Moore’s involvement with Star Trek: Voyager.

Moore had been one of the most influential writers on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Moore had famously been drafted into the Star Trek franchise with no outside experience; The Bonding was based upon a speculative script that he wrote, and he had been invited to join the staff when The Defector proved that he was not a one-script wonder. Moore had inspired producer Michael Piller to open the franchise to speculative scripts, a decision which led to the recruitment of writers like Bryan Fuller and Rene Echevarria.

Drone warfare.

Moore had consistently pushed the envelope in terms of what Star Trek could be. Several of Moore’s scripts feel like trailblazers, expanding the storytelling language of an established science-fiction franchise; the Klingon-centric script for Sins of the Father, the quieter character drama of Family, the epic scale of Redemption, Part I and Redemption, Part II. Paired with Ira Steven Behr on Deep Space Nine, Moore really pushed the boundaries of what Star Trek could be; Soldiers of the Empire looked at life on a Klingon ship, In the Pale Moonlight stretched (and maybe broke) Star Trek morality.

All of the other writers on Deep Space Nine chose to bow out gracefully with What You Leave Behind, to part ways with the franchise having provided their own unique take on the Star Trek mythos. However, Moore was convinced to migrate across from Deep Space Nine to Voyager. There are any number of reasons why Moore might have chosen to stay when writers like Behr and Echevarria chose to take their exit; Moore was the longest continuous-serving writer on the Star Trek franchise to that point. In terms of second-generation Star Trek, only Rick Berman could have claimed to have a deeper impression.

Armed and dangerous.

Moore arrived on the sixth season of Voyager and immediately looked to make his mark. Like Brannon Braga, Moore had always been an extremely productive Star Trek writer. He was typically credited on six or seven scripts in a season of The Next Generation and Voyager, while also scripting Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek: First Contact. Although not credited on the script, Moore was actively involved in the back-and-forth over the script to Equinox, Part II. He scripted the second episode, Survival Instinct. He was working on the story to third, Barge of the Dead.

And then the unthinkable happened. Like so much of Voyager, Moore’s arrival proved to be something of a false dawn. In early July 1999, Ronald D. Moore left Star Trek. This was within a month of the broadcast of What You Leave Behind, and nearly three months before the premier of the sixth season of Voyager. Even before Moore and Braga elaborated upon the particulars of what had happened, it was clear that something had gone disastrously wrong.

What We Left Behind.

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: berman, borg, braga, decline, Guilt, ron d. moore, ronald d. moore, ronald moore, seven of nine, star trek, star trek: voyager, survival instinct, trauma, voyager | 14 Comments »

Star Trek: Voyager – Nothing Human (Review)

Posted on July 14, 2017 by Darren

Nothing Human is very much an example of Star Trek: Voyager doing archetypal Star Trek, those abstract morality plays with elaborate prosthetics that offer commentary on contemporary conundrums.

Nothing Human is essentially a story about scientific ethics, about the question of what to do with information that was gathered through amoral means. Is knowledge tainted by the mechanisms through which it was acquired? Is the use of that research an endorsement of the means through which it was conducted? At the very least, does employing such information erode the user’s moral high ground? Does the use of such data make them a hypocrite, demonstrating a willingness to reap the benefits of such monstrous work, but without getting their hands dirty?

Something inhuman.

These are tough questions, with obvious applications in the modern world. These are the sorts of abstract ethical queries that are well-suited to a Star Trek episode, and there is something very endearing in the way that Nothing Human often comes down to two characters debating scientific ethics in a room together. To be fair, Nothing Human is a little too cluttered and clumsy to be as effective as it might otherwise be, its conclusions a little too neat, its developments just a little bit too tidy.

However, Nothing Human is a great example of the way in which Voyager tried to offer a version of Star Trek reflecting the popular perception of it. Nothing Human is a little clumsy in places, but it is an episode that is very much in line with what casual viewers expect from Star Trek in the abstract.

A Cardie-carrying monster.

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: crell moset, ethics, Guilt, janeway, Jeri Taylor, knowledge, nazis, operation paperclip, second world war, situational ethics, space race, star trek, star trek: voyager | 9 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Things Past (Review)

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Darren

At a time when Star Trek: Voyager was working very hard to disentangle itself from its own past, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine committed to exploring its own.

Things Past hits on one the big recurring themes of the series in general and fifth season in particular. Deep Space Nine has always been a show about memory and history, the relationship between past, present and future that is seldom as clear-cut as one might like it to be. Across the show’s run, characters are constantly exploring and re-evaluating their own histories. This has always been the case, dating back to Sisko working through his trauma with the Prophets in Emissary, Kira facing her past in Past Prologue and Odo doing the same in A Man Alone.

“You know, my subconscious can be pretty heavy handed.”

At this point, Deep Space Nine has been on the air for over four years. Many other shows would already have moved on from their foundational premises. Voyager has already completely forgotten what it originally promised, and it is less than half way through its third season. However, the fifth season finds Deep Space Nine engaging repeatedly and enthusiastically with a history that stems back to before the events of the first episode. The characters on Deep Space Nine are shaped and informed by events that occurred long before fate or chance brought them together.

Some of these episodes work better than others, but the fifth season is still fascinated with the characters’ lives long before the series began. Let He Who Is Without Sin… attempted to build a story like this around Worf, playing almost as a parody of this kind of storytelling. Doctor Bashir, I Presume walks a very fine line between when it comes to exploring Bashir’s secret history. Empok Nor returns to the question of whether O’Brien is an engineer or a soldier in a much pulpier and trashier vein than earlier episodes like Hippocratic Oath.

The hole in things…

Unsurprisingly, the best examples of these sorts of stories tend to focus on the characters who were actually around Terok Nor during the Occupation. The Darkness and the Light and Ties of Blood and Water, the two episodes focusing on Kira, are among the strongest of the season. They also have some pretty great titles, although neither is quite Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night. However, it is Things Past that marks the fifth season’s first trip back to the Cardassian Occupation, telling the story from Odo’s perspective.

It is an episode that really pushes Odo, to the point where it seems like the changeling might snap. “Nobody ever had to teach me the justice trick,” Odo monologued in Necessary Evil, way back in the second season. “That’s something I’ve always known.” Over the course of Things Past, Odo must eventually admit that this is not the case.