The fight for diverse and conscious voices

I saw this in a theater, which the film rewards. Lots of action, CGI, and big fights. Despite good performances from all of the cast, and a stand-out intro film for Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova, I felt like I didn't get what I came for. Still, 3.5/5 for a decent script, an ability to heft a lot of information without dumping it, and a welcome back to the MCU.

But it's not really a Black Widow film. Instead, it's Black Widow's backstory, plus introducing a bunch of new characters, plus setting up and paying off a family dynamic, plus tying up some loose ends, plus giving us enough of the upcoming new Black Widow to appreciate her and all those things are good. But they're not quintessential Black Widow.

The movie also suffers from long delays and I don't just mean COVID, though having this out a couple years ago within the then-rhythm of Marvel releases might have helped. This movie is set right after Winter Soldier and before Civil War and it should have been made and released then. As such, it would have been part of the evolution of this character, who was so good in Winter Soldier. Instead, we're looking at it as a flashback, knowing how the character evolved and ended. Trying to put myself in the mindset of that version of the character kept me from immersing as I would have had the film been released in 2015.

Given that we can't rewrite history, this film does what it can to get you into the right period. The introductory scenes are some of the best Marvel has done, covering a ton of ground without info-dumping or slowing things down. Set to a slowed-down cover of Nirvana's "Teen Spirit", we get a grounding in Natasha's and Yelena's childhood. Then we get to (their) present day, where the film's main action happens.

There's a lot of action - I credit Marvel for not stinting on that, given that the two main characters are women. I think some of it could have been shortened to give greater effect, but if you like the way Marvel does fight scenes you're going to love this movie.

From here out, it's spoilers...
( You've been warned )

In the end I think I'm still harboring resentment at the MCU for killing off this character. There won't ever be a Black Widow 2, which means we won't get more of the stories I crave. Yes, this film does explain why Budapest kept appearing in other films' dialog but in the end she's dead so who cares? Maybe Pugh will redeem things - she has a lot of potential and based on what she did here I'm looking forward to seeing more of her take on the role.

Cuddle Weather is a romantic comedy with a bitter subtext and a non-American point of view. It is the story of two Filipino sex workers who have very different outlooks, experiences, and desired outcomes. The question is can they make it work. (4/5 stars for two very good performances and tight-focused storytelling)

The film was funded by the Film Development Council of the Philippines and most of the dialog is in Tagalog. The characters speak Taglish from time to time and there's a bit of English as well. I can't tell if this is authentic or something done for the film but since I rely on subtitles for pretty much all my watching these days I didn't notice much difference.

Sue Ramirez plays Adela, an older experienced sex worker who is nearing her goal of getting out of the life. She's still supporting her family, while keeping them at arm's length from her work. Adela's bitterness isn't just the one-dimensional "my family rejects me"; rather, she's complex and nuanced and we get to feel for and sympathize with her bitterness.

RK Bagatsing plays Ram, a younger kid new to sex work. He has just come off being scammed out of a job and his savings and can't return to his family in disgrace as they are expecting him to send money home. He's a bit naïve but that's not his only trait. Again, a complex character who has the newness trait mixed with his own seriousness and drives.

The two meet, find convenience, and... well, it's a romcom. You kind of know where it's going. It just happens to be a romcom set in the Filipino sex industry. In addition to the two strong lead performances, I particularly like that the film treats its subject industry well. There's neither glorification nor vilification of sex work here. It just is - a fact of life. People treat prostitutes badly sometimes and some people are hypocritical about sex work. Other people don't, or less so.

Romcoms don't need suspense, really, and they don't need propped-up one-dimensional villains. This film avoids both and benefits from that as it lets the story stay tight on the characters, lets the characters be multi-dimensional, lets their tension be developed, lets them play out their differing goals, and eventually gives us a satisfying resolution. Great credit to Rod Marmol who is both writer and director here.

Another Marvel series, another disappointment. This series really felt like it had the potential to be a proper sequel to Captain America: The Winter Soldier but instead we got a muddled mess that doesn't seem to know what stories it's trying to tell, is held back by an apparent need to set up/tie in other things that will come later, and that wastes two of the finest actors in action today (Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan). (1/5 or maybe 2/5 stars).

To be clear, I do mean actors. Both men have dynamic screen presence, wide emotional range, and good dialog delivery. But they need better material to work with than this series gave them.

The series nominally tells the story of Falcon/Sam Wilson becoming Captain America/Sam Wilson. It does so in a story universe that has to contend with 21st-century systemic racism amd also is the first attempt by Marvel to grapple with the effects of the snap/blip. The series' putative enemies - the Flag Smashers - are some unfortunate mishmash of straight-up terrorist, sympathetic defenders of the downtrodden, and weirdly unsympathetic individuals.

We also have to contend with Bad Cap/John Walker/US Agent, who this series makes far more likable than his comic-book version. Apparently he's going to be around later so instead of a resolution to his arc we just get him popping in and out. And a major appearance by old villain Baron Zemo, and Wakanda makes its return in the form of Ayo, and hey there's Sharon Carter because Reasons and we need to set up her future series too.
( spoilers start here )
I like both these characters and I'm really unhappy about how badly this failed to be the story it could have been.

Marvel's first foray into serialized television is awkward, poorly plotted, and seems to have no idea how to manage any of its characters. I waver between two and three stars for this. If it wasn't the only game of this sort playing right now I'd say skip it. If you're a fan you've probably watched it already so it doesn't matter. I can't do this without spoilers so consider not reading this or a thousand other commentaries until you've watched.

The series follows Wanda, and the surprisingly not-dead Vision, through a nine-episode story of what should be mystery. Why is he not dead? Where are they? Why sitcoms? Who is actually doing this? One of the series' main failings is that the writers seem to have no idea how to manage a mystery. We get answers in no sensible order, important points turn out to be letdowns or just dropped, reveals that aren't revealing anything, and when it's done we don't know answers to several important questions.

The series draws bits from several comic arcs, and inspiration from classic television sitcoms over several decades. Unfortunately, this pastiche doesn't lead to either a coherent storyline or feel. Marvel went to significant expense for this series, including reproducing cameras and lighting - and filming in front of a live studio audience sworn to secrecy - for the the past-era episodes. I don't think they got their money's worth.

In addition to Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany's Vision, the series brings back Kat Dennings' Darcy Lewis and Randall Park's FBI Agent Jimmy Woo. All four do a good job of filling out the characters we sort of know and giving us more about where they are now. Newcomers Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau and Kathryn Hahn as nosy neighbor Agnes are also great.

I can't recap the entire series so I'm going to gloss most of it and focus on the ending, which ought to have been the payoff for the whole thing and instead is just one problem after another.

We start off in the black-and-white era, with two sitcoms filmed in b&w that establish Wanda and Vision living in this weird version of sitcom life. The episodes border on creepy at times and seem to be foreshadowing something.

Eventually, we get an outside view of this, provided mostly by Monica, Darcy, and Jimmy where we learn that the town W&V live in is under some kind of bubble that will come to be called "the hex". Apparently nothing goes in or out which leads me to wonder where they get electricity or food, but handwave magic. Darcy also discovers that WandaVision is a pseudo television show being broadcast and Darcy becomes our (the audience's) stand-in, watching the show with us and asking out loud the questions we have been asking.

Probably my single biggest problem with WV is that they go to some lengths to show us that Wanda has engaged in a mass kidnapping and ongoing torture of dozens or hundreds of people. All the "residents" of their town are actual people who are under forced mind control by Wanda. We get hints that things aren't all hunky-dory and then Vision releases one of them and all he can do is scream and plead. We get plenty of evidence that this isn't an isolated case - these people are suffering and other people are suffering. Children locked in their rooms unable to sleep or use the bathroom - it's horrifying stuff.

But it's played entirely without consequence. At the end, Wanda just flies off with no one saying a word. Worse, they make Monica an apologist for her, which is a major part of why I hate the ending. More below.

My second-biggest problem is that they just don't seem to know how to plot a series. In the penultimate episode we learn that it was "Agnes all along". Agnes is Agatha Harkness, you see, a traditional ... nemesis of Wanda's from the comics. (it's complicated; sometimes they fight, sometimes she's a mentor, sometimes it's not clear.)

OK, so what EXACTLY did Agnes/Agatha do? Did she mind-control Wanda into setting up this fake reality and torturing all these people? Um, probably not? (we don't get enough information in the series to be sure.) Did she use Wanda's grief to force/trick Wanda into doing things? Again, probably not. It seems like Agnes murdered a dog and forced a random townsperson to play a fake version of Wanda's dead brother. Her goal is to steal Wanda's magic, which mostly happens by having Wanda throw magic light at her. All the lead up to that was... set up?

So let's talk about set-up. In what should be the climax, Agatha proclaims that Wanda uses chaos magic and she's the Scarlet Witch. ... That thump you heard was was the entire 'reveal' falling flat. There are two kinds of people watching this - MCU/comics fans who've known these two facts for six or more years, or newcomers for whom the phrases "chaos magic" and "Scarlet Witch" are meaningless because the show does zero to tell you what they are or why they're important. So what should be a dramatic reveal is neither dramatic nor revelatory.

And about that dead brother bit - what a giant waste. Getting the actor who played Pietro in the Fox films, and Darcy exclaiming "She re-cast her brother?!" were brilliant moves. These moves played on the common television trope of characters being re-cast in media res without even a nod to the audience, and also to the reality that Disney/Marvel now owns the rights to things like the X-Men and mutants. This could have been a great gateway, but in the end it's reduced to a stupid dick joke. Yes, literally.

More problems:
1. The writers don't seem to care about Chekhov's gun. Things are introduced early on in the series and then just dropped. For example, early on a townswoman named Dotty appears as a major figure. She seems to be controlling things and is a focal point for us realizing that things aren't at all right. Then she just disappears. Literally she doesn't appear in 5/9 episodes.

Early on, Jimmy Woo tells us that he's interested in this town because there's someone important to the FBI there. A witness is "set up" in Westview and it's this witness vanishing that gets the FBI involved. Do we find out who this witness is? Why they're important? Nope and nope. Topic dropped. Jimmy and Darcy make a big deal of tracing out who all the townspeople are by comparing who shows up in the broadcast of WandaVision with their knowledge of town residents. This all feels like it should be leading up to something important, but no.

2. The writers do not seem to know how to motivate characters. Episode 4 "We Interrupt This Program" is the best of the series. We get Monica's story through her eyes. In under five minutes we know who she is and a lot about why she's doing what she's doing. And then they seem to forget what they taught us about her, leading up to a really bad moment in the series finale.

Other characters' motivations are vague at best. Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg) - the director of SWORD - suffers from what Film Crit Hulk rightly calls "Sudden Asshole Syndrome". Literally, he's an asshole out of the blue for no reason, leading to a really bad bit in the finale. We could have easily set this up but the writers either didn't care or didn't bother, or it got cut.

Even Vision gets this mistreatment. He spends much of Episode 7 figuring out that the reality is fake, but in the finale he just declares "this is our home" which he should know is untrue.

3. The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. There are so many things here that make no sense, even admitting all the whackiness of the universe and set-up. Just a few:

- Why does nobody care that Wanda has effectively tried, convicted, and imprisoned Agatha? I mean, maybe they can't stop her but I have to believe she's at least wanted for questioning. But no, nobody seems to care. La de da.

- What happened to White Vision? The "Ship of Theseus" sequence is probably my favorite of the entire series. It's so very true both to these characters and to how comics deal with hero-hero fights. Then White Vision takes off and it's "bye". Nobody seems to care? Nobody asks about it?

- Who actually started this thing? At one point Wanda says, effectively, "I can't remember how this all started." That feels like a rather important bit.

Frustratingly, every one of these things could have been handled with a 30 second scene, or a few lines of dialog. But apparently the writers don't care and think we don't either.

OK, last I want to talk about the finale because I really hate it. The biggest problem, as noted, is letting Wanda off the hook entirely for what she did. She's powerful enough that nobody could have stopped her, sure, but someone should have said something. Instead, we get Monica saying she "understands" what Wanda did. That this is a Black woman excusing a white woman's crimes is a bit on point for me, but all along we've had Monica sympathizing with Wanda and not understanding why. Yes, Monica lost her mother. Yes, Monica would have brought her mom back if she could. I get that. But we're not excusing re-creating Vision here and mostly mind-controlling him. We're talking about the crimes against the townspeople. I see no reason for anyone, let alone Monica, to be understanding of that. And making Hayward a Very Bad Person who is opposed to Wanda is also not an excuse.

The finale really mistreats Darcy. She gets one terrible line in one scene. She is the audience stand-in and should have gotten better. Oh, and we went to a lot of effort to explain how getting pulled through the hex barrier can change people, then we set up a tense scene of that happening to Darcy, and then... nothing. All fine, I guess. No need to worry.

At the climax of the prolonged episode battle, Hayward empties his gun at Wanda and Vision's children. I'm just going to let you think about that for a minute. Why? What possible motivation is there for this person to shoot at children even once? But to make things worse, the children are saved by Monica. She literally puts her body in the way of the bullets. Turns out she's OK, but could she have known that? And why is she potentially sacrificing her life to save what she knows are artificial magical constructs?

Also, apparently nobody thought it would be problematic to have a white cop empty his gun at white children and have a Black woman make a sacrifice play to save them. I have no words for how much that angers me.

The ending, like the series, had some good moments. The last interaction between Wanda and Vision is four minutes of the best part of this series. It is intimate and explanatory. It's appropriate and heartbreaking even on re-watch. I just wanted more like this and the series doesn't deliver that.

Here I mean "Ava the 2020 assassin movie" - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8784956/ - and not the other movies of the same name. (2/5 stars, watch it only if you really like this genre)

Ava has two big Names fronting it - Jessica Chastain in the titular role and John Malkovich as her handler/mentor. There are also other Names in the second row - Colin Farrell as her main antagonist, Geena Davis as her mother, and Joan Chen as ... well, it would be a bit of a spoiler to say.

Unfortunately, the plot is mostly bog-standard. Chastain's Ava (notably, nobody gets more than one name in this film) is a high-skills/high-priced assassin and things Go Wrong so she has to fight her own organization to survive. There's some shooting and a whole lot of nasty brutal hand-to-hand combat. It's not pleasant to watch.

Where the film might have differentiated itself was in the character stories. Ava and her sister, played by Jess Weixler, are in a love triangle over the same man. Ava is an abuse survivor and recovering alcoholic who fled her terrible family situation into the army and from there into black ops. This film foregrounds the family and, again, it's not pleasant to watch. By the end you clearly understand what has driven Ava to become the person you don't want your kids around but also, I don't want to be around her either. I root for her to win only because Farrell's Simon (one name only, Vasily) is just a worse human being.

I give the film credit for centering female gaze, and for everyone putting in good, if very gritty, performances. But somehow this fails to catch me the way Atomic Blonde did.

If you haven't heard, you should have. Anya Taylor-Joy brings to life Beth Harmon, a child prodigy who learns chess at a very young age and shows immediate aptitude that quickly grows to "prodigy" level. As a seven-episode series from Netflix, The Queen's Gambit has more room to adapt its novel source than a typical movie and rarely feels like it's dragging things out the way a standard-season series might. (4/5 stars for good performances and interesting scripting)

I'll try to avoid big spoilers but if you want to stop here I'll just say "watch this".

We begin with very young Beth's tragic orphaning and placement into a strict and backward-looking religious girl's orphanage. The time is the late 1950s. Then we follow Beth through her discovery of chess and the next decade-plus of her life. The story is told largely through chess as that's her obsession and her way of interacting with the world. At one point, it's driven home particularly poignantly when she's alone with someone and they don't know what to say - it's the height of awkward - and he says "let's play chess". Suddenly, everything is focused and the people know what to do again.

The story is not always easy, particularly where it touches on themes of alcoholism and addiction. At other times, it seems to avoid even mentioning some of the most charged issues of the late 20th century. For example, young Beth quickly makes friends with an older Black orphan girl who seems pretty well aware of the racial divides and racism of America at that time, but the topic never really gets discussed. We pass over the assassinations of the Kennedys and Dr King, and the Vietnam War never gets mentioned despite featuring men who were of draftable age.

Similarly, there is some very light discussion of the attention Beth gets because she's an attractive girl/young woman in a field overdominated by men. But women's liberation, sexism, the pill, and patriarchy aren't mentioned either.

It's hard to imagine how a young woman could come of age - even in mostly rural Kentucky - in the 60s with absolutely no influence from any of these things. The story seems to take place in an odd bubble, shielded from the rest of the world. Perhaps that's intended as a metaphor for chess itself. Beth's story is inward-focused on her personal challenges and her relationships with the people around her.

That said, the series succeeds at two important things, I think largely on the intensity of Taylor-Joy's performance. We care about Beth, and we get excited about chess. This leads us to a finale that is worth the ride to get there. All the threads are brought together and I found the payoff satisfying. There's no artificial villain to muck things up - it's just Beth against herself, Beth against her chess opponents, Beth against/with the people she relates to.

9 is a post-apocalyptic puppet animation story. If that seems weird to you, it is. The movie is about puppets imbued by their creator with a mysterious spark of life and what they do with that spark (3.5/5 for competent storytelling, if a bit simplistic).

These beings live in the bombed-out ruins of a world where men built machines that turned on them and they wiped each other out, mostly. Each puppet character is known only by the single digit painted onto it by the creator. The titular "9" is the last to awake and we follow it (him? I'll use the pronouns of the voice actor) on a journey of self-discovery and adventure with others like himself.

They encounter the last remnants of the terrible Machine, and learn about themselves. Like all good puppet movies, the non-humans are actually very human and serve to tell us stories about humanity. There are good and bad people, wise and foolish people, curious and ignorant people. They're just shaped like puppets and voiced by people you've probably heard of, such as Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, and Elijah Wood.

I'm not normally a fan of post-apocalyptica. Once humans are dead, or doomed, reading stories about it fails to interest me. This isn't really that kind of story, though. It's a story about humanity and that's worth seeing.

A word of caution for parents: although this is a puppet movie told simply enough for young minds to understand there are some shock/startle images and it has a PG-13 rating. I wouldn't show this to younger kids who are susceptible to frights.

The Netflix adaption of the comic is, I'm told, less dark than its original - which I have not read. Taken on its own, then, this is a really unusual buddy/mentor movie with an SFnal twist and a great cast. (4/5 stars mostly for the lame villain)

The core of the story is Andy, played by Charlize Theron. Andy is the leader of a small band of immortal warriors, working in present day as mercenaries. Andy is the oldest of the team, and the most tired and cynical. She's seen everyone she loved taken from her, and despite the team's attempts to make the world a better place she's increasingly convinced that it's all futile.

In the world of this story, immortals just happen. Nobody knows why - one day you should be dead but instead you wake up. And can't die... until one day your body stops repairing itself and that's it. The lack of explanation or understanding leads to a sense of futility and fatality. Like, none of us asked to be born and none of us know when we'll die - just one day it'll happen. The Old Guard are that stretched out over centuries.

The action of the story centers around the "birth" of a new immortal, a young Marine in Afghanistan who should have died but doesn't. Andy and her team need to get to this woman before the villain, Merrick (played by Harry Melling), does. Merrick is a biotech genius megalomaniac who wants to discover the immortals' secret for his own commercial profit. As noted, this is the weakest part of the film. Merrick is exactly a comic-book villain and he exists solely to give us someone unambiguous to hate so we can watch as Andy kicks his ass.

The young immortal is Nile, played by KiKi Layne. Nile knows nothing of herself now, and nothing of this team. Andy is forced to crack open the built-up shell of cynicism and detachment to take in, care for, and help train this newcomer. Integrating a new person into a centuries-old team is not easy and nothing about the circumstances makes it easier. Andy's reluctant acceptance of her role as the old mentor, playing against Nile's young energetic transformation from her old life to her new, is solid. The film wants to keep things moving - it's an action flick after all - so we don't get as much screen time for these two as I would have liked. They're both authentic and they both captured my heart in different ways.

It's also worth noting that this film is queer AF. Andy is at least bi, and we learn the love of her life was another woman. The major on-screen romance is between two men of the team - Joe and Nicky (Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli, both well-known in Europe but not much in America). The two portray men who are still passionately in love with each other despite being together for so long. It's refreshing because we don't normally get gay love stories in our SF action films nor love stories that aren't about or with the main character. Just as with the Andy/Nile mentor/mentee relationship, this one gets less screen time than I would have liked but the script and the acting sell it authentically.

Also worth mentioning is Chiwetel Ejiofor's Copley, a super-spook who has been tracking the team in the present and uncovering its past. The way he and Andy interact is both surprising and satisfying. Andy is still the hub of the movie, and Copley is a fine spoke.

An acquaintance had a coupon for a free "week" from Purple Carrot (https://www.purplecarrot.com/). I tried it after reading their terms and understanding that I could cancel at any point and not be charged. So I set up the account, and the coupon credit was applied immediately. This gave me a cash balance equivalent to three "meals" - ingredients for a dinner entree for two people. I'll cut-tag the narrative in case you don't want your friends page blown up with my saga.
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Overall an interesting experiene and a free way to learn that this is for Not Me. Honestly I'm still not sure who they are for - do you know anyone who uses a service like this?

I recently saw Her and I want to talk about it and Altered Carbon at the same time because there are interesting similarities. I'm going to avoid spoilers here but feel free to comment as you like.

In "Her", writer/director Spike Jonze gives us an interesting premise: what if you had an AI (they call it an operating system) that was theoretically designed to meet your every (personal) need. Wouldn't it be better if it was intelligent to understand your needs better? And if it was intelligent, what might happen?

I shied away from this film for a while because I was afraid that it was going to go in the "robot slave" camp, of which Hollywood has produced too many. It does not, even a little. "Her" is a film I rank with Lost in Translation as a unique exploration of humanity and human relationships. I expect it will bear re-watching. 4.5/5 stars, down from 5 because I was reminded of the ending I disliked.

The casting is also brilliant. Joaquin Phoenix is our protagonist, a lonely man who struggles to keep relationships and unexpectedly develops one with this AI. Phoenix is awkward without being embarrassing or buffoonish. He's good at what he does, and people aren't his strong suit. The AI is voiced by Scarlett Johansson. This is a great choice because she is someone visually well-known so it's easy to imagine her speaking these lines and she's conventionally very attractive so I immediately see how Theodore (Phoenix's character) can visualize her as an attractive woman even though her on-screen presence is limited to an audio device. The choice never to visualize Samantha - the name given to Johansson's AI - is particularly good. If you are at all a fan of radio plays/podcasts you know how well sound can be used to convey even subtle things. I can't think of another Hollywood film where that has been done so well.

This set-up works especially well when Samantha begins to develop a real personality and to drive things. She has desires; she's petulant. She's not just there to please Theodore in a trivial sense. She pleases him by being a 'real' person really interested in him, his life, his activities. She misses him when he's away, just as he misses being away from her. The movie posits this as a relationship with an AI but it's a lot like I imagine a relationship might be between people who are separated by necessary distance. Imagine Samantha and Theodore as people on opposite sides of an uncrossable war zone and you'd get a very similar story, at least at first. This brings us to the question of what it means to be human. We know Samantha is computer code, but she relates as a human.

Now let me jump to Altered Carbon. I promised to write this up but never did, so a bit of background first. I really liked the novel and its premise. Season 1 of the show took a lot from that source material and did wonderful things with it, if you don't mind on-screen graphic violence. Also, nudity. The core premise is that on traveling to other worlds humans discover an apparently long-gone alien species that had developed technology to encode a mind into an implanted device, as well as allow the encoded minds to be cast between these devices, at supra-light speeds. These devices - stacks - become the real representation of a person and the physical body becomes just a sleeve. Organic damage can still be repaired; destruction of the stack becomes "real death". Imprisonment means putting your stack "on ice" for a period of time; your sleeve gets rented out to pay your debts.

Rich people can pay to have their stacks backed up and their bodies cloned, effectively becoming immortal. The class of meths (from Methuselah) are this reality's 1% with all the vices and deviances you'd expect. The series protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, is the last Envoy, one of a class of highly trained rebels whose rebellion was crushed long ago. A meth brings Kovacs back and in exchange for Kovacs' services, this meth arranges to have Kovacs' record expunged and his crimes pardoned. In Season One Joel Kinnaman, who you might remember from Suicide Squad (Rick Flag), plays Kovacs' sleeve.

He's very good and he's surrounded by a great cast, including Dichen Lachman as Reileen Kawahara, the stunning Martha Higareda as Detective Kristin Ortega, and Renée Elise Goldsberry as Quellcrist Falconer, the woman who founded the resistance movement that comes to be called Quellists, and who trained the Envoys. In Season 2 the sleeve is played by Anthony Mackie, who is just awesome, Goldsberry reprises her role, and Higareda is replaced by Simone Missick as Trepp, a bounty hunter with a heart. I loved Missick's work on Luke Cage and she's every bit as good here.

The writing is quite good, with Season 2 picking up themes and ideas from Season One but not being a strict repetition. Again, Kovacs is hired by a meth and again things go wrong but in ways that fill in much backstory and allow characters to develop. Also, the ending of S2 is just *chef's kiss* perfect in that I totally didn't see it coming but as soon as it revealed I was like "oh, of COURSE they could do that" because it lined up very neatly with the things that had come before.

Altered Carbon also features intelligent AIs, like "Her" does. Most of these AIs are created to serve people for specific things. There's a class of AIs that manages human-centric facilities like hotels and nightclubs, another class that serves archaeologists on dig sites, and presumably more. There's a subtle class system in place in that even the lower-class humans don't seem to treat the AIs as equals and the AIs associate mostly with each other. They're long-lived and tend not to get attached to humans, who do still have comparatively short lifespans. Chris Conner plays Poe, a hotel AI with a quirky Edgar Allen Poe fetish, who gets attached to Kovacs and ends up playing pivotal parts in both S1 and S2. Poe and some of the other AIs form friendships with humans, and it's left open (so far at least) how far the emotional relationships might go. Clearly Poe has emotional attachments to a couple people as the seasons unfurl, and it's also clear that the AIs have emotional relationships to each other.

Where "Her" zooms in close on the relationship of one (human) person to one AI (person) and asks us to see them both as people growing to love each other, Altered Carbon also asks us to imagine what it's like to relate to one person who has multiple bodies over time. There's a brilliantly painful scene in S1 during which a relative whose sleeve died is "spun up" to join the family for holidays but since the family is not well-off they have to use whatever sleeve is available. Still, that's "Grandma" even though she looks like a thug now and the family behave as if this was normal. It's a little creepy and yet so very effective.

There you go - two pieces of fiction that dive way into the notion of what it means to be human/to be a person, each excellent though very different.