This will not be a detailed review of Spy x Family: Code:
White. Imagine mashing Mr. and Mrs. Smith with Spy Kids. The
father, Loid, is actually Agent Twilight. The mother, Yor, is actually the
assassin Thorn Princess. Neither knows the other’s true identity. They go by the
family name Forger. Anya is their pretend daughter, who was actually an orphan.
But Anya is secretly a telepath, so she knows her parents’ true identities.
The story starts out in a fairly credible manner. Anya needs
to make a dessert as a school assignment. Loid has inside information that the
principal likes what looks like a meringue, so they go on a trip to a restaurant
in the town the principal was from.
Then everything turns into kooky fun. Anya accidentally swallows
a chocolate that contains something crucial for Cold War-esque tensions, and it’s
off we go. It alternates between serious and childish scenes, but there is
never a dull moment.
The background seems to be an alternate Europe, with much of
the plot taking place in what looks like an alternate Switzerland. The story is
pre-cell phone: There is even an old-style rotary phone in one scene.
Spy x Family: Code: White (the x is silent) is rated PG-13 for violence
and occasional foul language. There is also an extended “poop god” dream that
would be unimaginable in an American-made film, but is run-of-the-mill in
Japan.
I recently saw the 1984 version of Dune in a movie
theater. It was thrilling to see on a big screen Princess Irulan introduce the
story, House Atreides emerge onto Arrakis, blue-eyed Paul Atreides speak in a
declamatory voice, and of course, the worm riding.
The main difference in terms of characters from the more
recent movies is that 1984 Paul Atreides is clearly a hero. It is easy to
sympathize with him as he struggles to free people and fulfill his destiny. The
2021-2024 Paul is more of an anti-hero.
In terms of plot, the main difference is the weirding way.
In the 1984 Dune, this is a form of marital arts, but they also have weirding
modules. Paul and others can shout into a weirding module, and a pulse of force
emerges. This was almost inevitable after other science fiction space movies had
ray and beam weapons. And it was shown as crucial in going up against armies
with automatic weapons. The 2021-2024 Dune has the weirding way remain a
form of martial arts, which is closer to the novel.
So without casting aspersion against the new version, I still
have great affection for the 1984 movie. One needs to see the expanded version
shown on TV to see the widow of Jamis, and also the wacko source of the water
of life.
Instead of showing a typical trailer, here is funny story by
Patrick Stewart, who played Gurney.
I don’t remember who came up with the idea of two-sentence
movie summaries that are both accurate and sardonic. Here is my take on this
concept.
The Last Samurai: An American soldier decides Japan
is more spiritual than America. So he joins a rebellion against the emperor.
The Wizard of Oz: Trying to get home from Oz, Dorothy
almost dies on a mission to steal a witch’s broom. Then she finds out she only
had to click her heels.
Aliens: A platoon of Colonial Marines gets wiped out
fighting the monstrous aliens. Ripley emerges triumphant by using a forklift.
Saving Private Ryan: A small group of soldiers goes
behind enemy lines in World War II to retrieve Ryan, whose brothers have all
been killed in the war. He decides not to go with them.
Titanic: A couple falls in love on the RMS Titanic.
The ship sinks.
Pride and Prejudice (1995): Lizzy must decide who is
truly guilty of pride and prejudice as she contemplates the seemingly
hardhearted Mr. Darcy. When she sees him wet after a swim, she takes off.
Shane: The gunslinger Shane hangs up his guns to live
a peaceful life with a family, including a little boy. He shoots a couple men
to death in front of the boy.
The Lord of the Rings: Frodo must destroy the great
ring of power to save Middle Earth. He claims the ring for himself, but his
finger is bitten off, so happy ending.
Romeo and Juliet (1968): Although their families are
literally feuding with each other, Romeo and Juliet decide to marry for love.
They both die.
Freud’s Last Session.
Directed by Matt Brown. Written by Matt Brown and Mark St. Germain. Starring
Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Goode, Jodi Balfour. Rated PG-13 for language, sexual
material, bloody/violent flashbacks, smoking. Runtime 2 hr. 2 min.
Freud’s Last Session is a
fictional account: What if C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud met each other on the
eve of World War II? This would be just weeks before Freud’s death, and after
he was awarded the prestigious Goethe Prize for intellectual achievement. And
this was before Lewis’ radio lectures on Christianity during the war, which
became the basis for his famed apologetic work Mere Christianity.
Those who are looking for a
shootout between the atheist and the Christian will be disappointed. Freud
(Anthony Hopkins) does most of the talking. Lewis (Matthew Goode) mostly
listens. And thereby hangs an interpretation of the title.
Freud unloads on Lewis tirades not
just against Christianity, but often on his personal life. He strides around,
gesturing with his arms, dogmatic and arrogant. Lewis listens cooly, sometimes
sharing about his personal life when relevant, and giving mild rejoinders. In
the third act, Freud occupies the famous couch in his office, while Lewis sits
at the desk. Yes, this is Freud’s last session, with Freud as the patient.
The movie is disjointed, with a
rejoinder from either man sometimes much later than the question, and with
vivid flashbacks interrupting seemingly at random. So the following is a
stitching together of scenes that may not have been shown consecutively.
Lewis shares that after his mother
died, his father did not know how to deal with Lewis and his brother, so he
sent them off to boarding school. Freud concludes that the distant father led
Lewis to his superstitious longing for God. Lewis responds that actually, he
reconciled with his father. He then points out that Freud hates his father, so
perhaps that is why he rejects God. Freud dismisses that with a wave of his
hand.
Towards the start of the movie,
Freud criticizes Lewis for being late, seeing that as a flaw. However, Lewis
was late because of trains shipping children away from London to the safety of
the countryside. The compassion shows plainly on Lewis’ face as he sees the
children, and later when they both hear on the radio that twenty thousand are
dead in Poland. Freud shows no such reaction. But Freud is concerned about
those close to him—a daughter and grandson who died. He shows Lewis a
photograph of them. Freud asks about their deaths and his own pain and
suffering. Why does God allow it? And frankly, that is the question that most
non-intellectuals feel is most important about God.
At first Lewis says, “I don’t know,”
and Freud thinks he has a victory. But then it becomes apparent that Lewis was
talking about the particular suffering his family has gone through. Lewis goes
on to say that if pleasure is God’s whisper, then pain is God’s megaphone.
Freud constantly says Christianity
is just superstition, an "insidious lie," and at the start he says he is surprised an intelligent
man like Lewis believes in it. Later, we briefly see a flashback to Lewis’
writing group the Inklings, and we are shown an achingly short glimpse of a
page of Tolkien’s work. Tolkien witnesses to the then-atheist Lewis, saying the
Gospel is different from the world’s mythologies. He challenges Lewis to study
this. We then see Lewis doing so, going back to the original Greek of the New
Testament.
Fans of both Freud and Lewis will
be disappointed at some truncated versions of their arguments. Lewis says that
all the religions that Freud denounces teach about doing what is right and not doing
what is wrong. It leaves out Lewis’ argument that one can only know what is
wrong from a sense of right, can only know what is bent from knowing what is
straight, and that knowledge is what God puts in everyone. Freud gives a brief
mention of his belief in the stages of sexual development, but it is so garbled
by his oral cancer, it is hard to understand.
Freud is portrayed as getting the
better of Lewis over fear of death. During an air raid alarm that turns out to
be false, they go to a church basement for shelter. Freud not only shows no
gratitude, he is rude to the clergyman. But Lewis has a bad moment, which he
says was a flashback to The Great War. Freud needles him about that moment,
saying he showed no joy about meeting his God, and therefore Lewis had a lack
of faith. Lewis looks stunned for seconds, and he has no reply. Later, on the
train home, Lewis looks afraid again at distant lights that either remind him
of war or show the preparations for war.
Overall, Freud’s Last Session
has an unsavory air. Freud’s daughter Anna, considered the founder of child
psychoanalysis, is accused by more than one person of having attachment
disorder towards her father. This is shown in a series of flashbacks that turn
out to be beyond creepy. And the movie implies she had a lesbian relationship (which is shown briefly in a hallucination),
for which there is no evidence and which Anna always denied.
A lengthy flashback show the pact
between Lewis and a friend during The Great War, which Lewis did write about.
They both had single parents. If the friend were killed, Lewis was to take care
of his mother for the rest of her life, and if Lewis were killed, the friend
would take care of Lewis’ father for the rest of his life. The friend is
killed. In the most horrific scene of the flashback, hunks of shrapnel are
pulled out of Lewis’s leg without anesthetic. But when one puts together a few
scenes in the movie, it clearly portrays Lewis as having a sexual relationship
with his friend’s mother. There is no evidence for this.
So because of these and other
scenes, I cannot recommend Freud’s Last Session. Is this a biased
review? Perhaps. But were we all meant to interpret the movie the same way?
Unlikely.
Through the
Storm.John Ringo and Lydia Sherrer
(Baen Books 9781982192990, $28.00, hc. 352pp) November 2023. Cover by Kurt
Miller.
John Ringo is the author of a number of military science fiction series,
including the Black Tide Rising zombie series. Lydia Sherrer is the
author of the Lily Singer cozy fantasy series. Together, they wrote an
augmented reality story where the characters fight monsters while experiencing
teenage angst.
Lynn Raven is the best player in TransDimensional Hunter, a game watched
by billions throughout the world. Since it is augmented reality, not virtual,
she can run into a tree if she’s not careful. She and her four fellow students
on her team use their goggles to see monstrous snakes, spiders, flying tengu,
and other grotesque creatures coming at them. They use guns as their ranged
weapons, but also enjoy using their swords to dispatch the monsters into
showers of sparks.
Although Lynn spends hours at a time in augmented slaughter, the teenage
angst spurs some of the crucial plot points. Lynn’s nemesis at school is a rich
girl who calls her a “fat cow.” Lynn’s best friend in middle school went over
to the rich girl’s side, just because. But Lynn’s biggest external enemy are
the paparazzi, which use unregistered aerial drones. They follow her around,
recording whatever she says and does. She suffers immense anxiety over them, as
any teenager would. But her low self-image due to body issues magnifies it all.
If they continue to harass her, her gaming skills will suffer.
But more angst comes Lynn’s way when her former best friend, Kayla,
suddenly says she wants to be friends again. Kayla realized she has
not been able to live her own life, just obeying the rich girl and dressing the
way she is told. She misses Lynn. Obviously, Lynn has trust issues. And Kayla’s
stepdad owns a PR firm. If Lynn will sign with them, Lynn can livestream camera
feeds from her battles, and do interviews. The paparazzi drones will go away. Lynn
has to figure out if this possible solution is worth trusting Kayla. These
bullying and trust issues deepen these characters into real teenagers.
When it becomes obvious Lynn’s team needs a new captain, Lynn accepts a
guy from the rich girl’s team. Lynn cannot fully trust him, but they both have
the goal of becoming the champion team at the finals. Readers can immediately
see he’s a skeezy guy. He takes advantage of Lynn’s innocence and her
insecurity over her body, tells her how beautiful she is, kisses her, and tries
to go too far. We may be disappointed by Lynn’s naivete, but for all her
ability to kill monsters, she is a shy teenager. Fortunately, she knows how to
use her knee where it counts.
Then in the setup for the climactic scene, Lynn invites teams from around
the world to help her take down a “boss” in the game. She has to get past her
anxieties to address a hundred gamers. But she uses her motto of “Fake it till
you make it.” Only by fighting through this last struggle of teenage angst can
she lay out her battle plan and hector the teams into obeying during the
battle.
Overall, Through the Storm does not have young people doing their
own thing with no adult input. Lynn’s mother is very supportive of her. But
when Lynn gets an F on an English assignment, that makes for a serious talk. Also,
when the skeezy captain insists on calling the team members by their last
names, we can figure out their ethnicities. This is s a simple approach that
does not apply virtue signaling to the novel’s diversity.
The story also has more sophisticated content than slashing monsters and
teen angst. As a public figure, even private conversations Lynn has can be
distorted into public statements. Lynn is not political, but she is cautioned
against saying anything controversial to a friend, because that could be
recorded by a paparazzi to make money by publicizing her “statement.”
This novel is a sequel to Into the Real, in which Lynn’s online
persona was Larry, an older male military veteran. Although Lynn references her
Larry persona, this novel stands well on its own. Somewhat jarring are a few
scenes that let us know that TransDimensional Hunter is more real than Lynn
knows. Chapter 1 is that sort of scene, so it is best to skip it until
finishing the story. But Through the Storm is great both for those who
want gamer scenes and to see a teenager work through her issues. So yes, this
is a YA novel, despite the cover. Although, there was one girl in my high
school who looked like that.
I live in the Seattle area, and I was surprised that most of
the people I told that there would be an eclipse today didn’t know about it. I
used my NASA-approved dark plastic lenses to watch. It started out looking like
a chunk had been taken out of the sun. At the maximum, 95% of the sun was
covered. I definitely felt the wind pick up, since the decrease of heat in our area
of the atmosphere caused unequal air pressures.
I tried a few times to get a picture, but my phone would just
show a bright blur of light—that’s how bright the sun is, even during a partial
eclipse. I finally got a picture. But it looked impossible. The eclipse was
reversed! How could that happen?
I first thought the phone had somehow picked up a reflection
of the dark lenses I was using. But the camera was aimed away from me, at the
sun.
I finally realized it was some internal reflection inside
the camera, caused by the brightness of the sun. The blur in the upper right is
the real eclipse. The image in the lower left is the internal reflection.
But that was my fun in the partially-eclipsed sun.
