Happy 2022! I am so excited to be presenting my third list for my top ten films of the past year and I would like to note that this is just a list of my personal favorites. It is not necessarily a list of the absolute best movies of 2021 (I still haven’t even seen Licorice Pizza or Last Night in Soho !); it is just a list of what I found to be most entertaining and inspiring from what I was able to see. Feel free to tell me all about how you thought Ghostbusters: Afterlife was the actual best movie of 2021. Though you’d be wrong. It was Clifford: The Big Red Dog . 10. The Catrix Matrix: Resurrections (Spoilers) A lot of people really didn’t like this movie, and that’s okay. I enjoyed it. I loved seeing it on a big screen instead of HBOMax because I felt surrounded by the sounds and mesmerizing special effects that define the Matrix series. This film was also special as the first-ever Matrix film led by a transitioned Wachowski sister, as the first three were created by Lana and Lily Wachowski before their transitions. It may be a coincidence, but to me, this film felt more female-centered than the first three. While Neo is still the main hero of the franchise, once he is restored by the red pill, Resurrections focuses on how to restore Trinity, how to empower her character and features a fleet of awesome, kick-ass female fighters. (And I’m always a sucker for Neil Patrick Harris playing a villainous role.) 9. Quo Vadis, Aida? With a 100% Certified Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, Quo Vadis, Aida? is a moving and gutwrenching Bosnian story of the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995. Aida is a translator working for the United Nations in a small town, Srebrenica. When the Serbian army invades, her family is among the thousands of people who stand outside the gates of a United Nations camp seeking shelter. Aida struggles to save her family while also neutrally translating the UN’s negotiations, and the orders of the Serbian army, to Srebrencian civilians. The story is fictional, but the genocide is based on actual historical events. Aida’s character is inspired by the life story of Hasan Nuhanovic, a Bosnian survivor of the Srebrenica genocide and UN translator. Nuhanovic was forced to translate the orders sending his family away, losing his mother, father, and brother to the Srebrenica massacre. 8. Spider-Man: No Way Home (Spoilers) While I have watched several MCU movies and understand the fundamentals of the universe, I am not the super fan who has seen every film and knows every easter egg by heart. (I think loving history and studying true stories prevents me from getting fully into superhero sci-fi stuff). But even without knowing all of the details, I was very entertained by this film! To the chagrin of my die-hard MCU friends, my favorite Peter Parker is Andrew Garfield, so I was over the moon to see his return! Even my biggest MCU fan friends have admitted that they would love to see Garfield return in the future; maybe in a spin-off. 7. The Novice When I first heard that The Novice is more intense than Whiplash , I didn’t quite believe it. But not even halfway through, I could understand why. Whiplash and Black Swan are about ruthless teachers working students to the bone; telling them when to keep going, when to push themselves, and when to stop. In The Novice , there is no abusive teacher; it is just Alex pushing herself harder and harder without anyone else pressuring her to do so, and no one can tell her to stop. So when Alex joins the rowing team as a college freshman, she doesn’t let anything stop her, especially herself, from overworking (and as someone who voluntarily worked three jobs last summer, I can kind of understand). (Spoilers) The lingering question I have with The Novice is why Alex was so set on being the best, specifically at rowing. When she sees the sign-up sheet, she is determined to be the best rower, and the film doesn’t allude to any previous connection to the sport. In Whiplash and Black Swan , Andrew and Nina are ruled by jazz music and ballet long before their terrifying teachers are introduced. We do learn that in high school, Alex was very competitive with school grades, and wanted to prove to herself and a classmate she could succeed. When a challenge arises, she is the first to face it head-on. As a college freshman, she majors in her worst subject to take on the extra challenge. I don’t find it entirely believable that she would go to the extremes of self-harm over not being the best at a sport she started out of the blue, unless that is the horrific point of the film, and it’s not meant to be understandable. The Novice may be implying that no matter what the sign-up sheet or general interest meeting sign had been posted for that day, whether it be rowing, drumming, dancing, or crochet, she would have still signed up with utmost determination and gone through the same agonizing process to be the best at it, because that is who she is. 6. Don’t Look Up I think this movie should have come with a trigger warning at the start, so here is a very unscientific survey to start with, if you are debating watching it. Have you ever: Told others COVID-19 is a hoax Believed climate change isn’t real Reposted on social media doubts on vaccine safety Refused to wear a mask in public spaces If yes, watch this film. If not, do not watch this film, unless you feel prepared for an apocalyptic film on an incoming asteroid with themes that will hit very close to home. Easily replace “asteroid” with “covid” (or “climate change”) in this modern-day movie, and you have a very disturbing allegory that I was not ready for when casually deciding to watch something on Netflix at 2 am. It does not seem like a coincidence that one scientist is played by Leonardo DiCaprio, a strong advocate for climate change. He has set up foundations to protect biodiversity, attended the United Nations Climate Conference, and created films bringing attention to climate change. ( Before the Flood is a life-changing watch). This story is like if the CDC went on TV and directly told people today a virus is about to wipe out the planet, and no one believed them until they got sick themselves. If you are prepared for that, Don’t Look Up is well-done. However, viewing it as an allegory for climate change and global warming rather than the pandemic may make it easier to take in. If a film like this feels a little too soon to watch with everything going on today, maybe check out something educational but more wholesome on Netflix that came out of the pandemic, like season 6 of Queer Eye . 5. Benedetta Based on a true story of a seventeenth-century small village in Northern Italy, Benedetta, retells the life of Benedetta Carlini, a Catholic with saintly visions of Jesus Christ and Mary as a child, and later a nun and abbess. She believed she was the wife of Jesus, and claimed to have been visited by him in 1619. The movie has audiences questioning whether she has religious experiences or is part of an act. The film also focuses on the sins of female bodies and the forbidden exposure of sexuality. To the dismay of Catholic groups today who protested the film’s release , Dutch director (and atheist) Paul Verhoeven fully displays women in this satire. He contrasts with Benedetta’s statement, “Your worst enemy is your body,” by criticizing the Church’s control of female bodies and pointing out that even the most powerful nuns still answer to men higher up in the Church’s hierarchy. 4. Two Distant Strangers Trigger Warning: BIPOC trauma, violence, racism, police brutality This short initially came out at the end of 2020, but it wasn’t released for streaming until April 2021. It combines the stories of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd with a time loop, much more significant to the message of the story than in Groundhog Day or Russian Doll . The short is about Carter, a young Black man in New York City, who wakes up in a young Black woman’s apartment after a date and heads home to take care of his dog. Each time he wakes up and tries to go to his apartment, he is confronted and killed by the same white police officer. In montages of the time loop, the film puts Carter in the various real-life scenarios of real Black Americans who were killed and put at the forefront by the Black Lives Matter movement (ex: being suffocated on the street similar to George Floyd, or having the date’s apartment broken into like Breonna Taylor’s if he doesn’t go outside). Whether he’s simply smoking a cigarette, walking down the street, staying at home, or standing in place doing absolutely nothing, he is killed by the same officer. The end credits are powerful, and I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen the film yet. If you feel that this would be too traumatic to watch ( as some have criticized the film for ), please take care of yourself and skip this short. 3. Maid I am bending the rules a little here; this is a limited series, not a movie. But I was so hooked on this story and these characters, I watched these ten, hour-long episodes, in two sittings. It moved me so much; my list wouldn’t be complete without it. Maid is based on a true story, inspired by Stephanie Land’s 2019 memoir. Alex, a young single mother, escapes an abusive relationship to start a better life for herself and her two-year-old daughter, Maddy. Starting out with only $18, Alex leaves her abusive partner, obtains a job with a house cleaning service, and overcomes homelessness to provide for Maddy. Alex is played by Margaret Qualley. Alex’s mother, Paula, is a self-proclaimed artist with an undiagnosed bipolar or schizophrenia disorder. Paula is played by Qualley’s real-life mother, Andie MacDowell (known for Groundhog’s Day). Their mother-daughter dynamic isn’t the center of the plot, but it adds to the overall themes of strenuous family relationships. It also has extra pull when played by a real-life mother-daughter duo. Based on a person’s real-life experiences, the series contains very accurate portrayals of homelessness, privilege, poverty, broken welfare programs, and the psychological scenarios of domestic abuse survivors repeatedly going back to their abusers hoping they had changed. The DV shelter in the show mentions the real statistic: that on average, survivors will go back 6-7 times to their abuser before leaving for good. This is usually due to fear, love for the abuser, psychological control, or having nowhere else to go. I found Land’s story very inspiring, and the themes hit close to home. There is one particular quote that spoke to me: “Our space is a home because we love each other in it.” One of the things I have questioned over the past few years is how to define what makes a “home.” According to my GPS and Amazon deliveries, it’s where I return to at the end of the day most often. Maybe home is where my belongings are. Some say it’s where you feel safest and supported, but I didn’t have a home for 17 years if that’s the case, and I was never homeless. When frequently moving my belongings to different places I had no prior connection to, I questioned what it meant to call a home a “home,” rather than just a house, an apartment, or the place I sleep at night. This quote from Maid spoke to me because I have found that I start to consider a space a “home” when I begin to associate being between its walls with being surrounded by people who love and support me. 2. A Quiet Place Part II This movie was a very close second to my top pick. The first week this movie came out, I saw it three times at Story Screen and rewatched the first film. My friends will think I’m biased for this movie because I have a big story now that I saw a film with Woody Harrelson, but genuinely, I love this movie. I love Emily Blunt’s silently open-mouthed pained face when a baby cries, the suspense of depleting oxygen tanks, and the fear when a cellphone’s ring breaks complete silence. As someone who has studied Deaf culture and is proficient in ASL, I appreciate the representation of a Deaf female superhero leading this thriller and the use of sign language throughout the film. I also love how extra creepy and unique it is for us Hudson Valley locals to watch an apocalypse movie filmed around Dutchess and Ulster County (including where I live, attend school, and where my dad worked as a Metro-North conductor). While I’m nervous that John Krasinski will not be directing the third installment, I cannot wait to see what these characters will conquer next in 2023, or how close to home the next filming locations will be. Honorable Mentions: CODA, C’mon C’mon, In the Heights, Lamb, Pig, Minari, The Beta Test, The Guilty, The Lost Daughter, The Suicide Squad, The Unforgivable, @Zola 1 . Bo Burnham: Inside Over the past few years, my appreciation for Bo Burnham has greatly increased. Not first from his specials on Netflix (while they are entertaining), but from his first film, Eighth Grade in 2018, and then his role in Promising Young Woman in 2020. In 2021, after years of convincing from my partner on Bo’s talent, Inside sold me. As I mention every year, my all-time favorite films are the ones that have a little bit of everything. We felt a broad spectrum of emotions in 2020, and Bo captured them alone, trapped in his house, during the lockdown. Drawing inspiration from an emotional rollercoaster of a year, Inside features a range of genres, as a film and musical. One scene will resemble stand-up, and the next will haunt you. Some lighthearted skits turned 2020’s lemons into lemonade; he teases the arduous process of trying to Facetime older parents and mocks the superficiality of white girls on Instagram. Some songs congratulate Jeff Bezos on his obscene wealth, or feature Bo humorously and genuinely checking his privilege as a white heterosexual male talking about the world’s problems. Other scenes take darker, sardonic turns, especially in the second half of the special. Bo’s mental health state dwindles as the lockdown continues. He questions audiences why they laugh or cheer when a comedian is in pain. Bo Burnham: Inside makes you laugh, scream, cry, cheer, and feel at peace. Like all of my favorite movies, Inside has, “a little bit of everything all of the time.” Sophia Acquisto A Beacon resident since 2001, Sophia is pursuing a Master’s degree in Education at SUNY New Paltz.

Mike Burdge and Robby Anderson embark on a new filmography retrospective: the films of Story Screen's sweet, sweet boy, Denis Villeneuve. Up first, the director's first two films: August 32nd on Earth and Maelstrom . Listen on....

Finch , the Tom Hanks led, post-apocalyptic, robot movie from the director of your favorite episode of Game of Thrones isn’t really a movie you’d expect to subvert the expectations of a viewer - most notably because it’s not based on any pre-established IP or lore - but twist and turn it does. While it’s not the wildest incarnation of this specific plot point in this specific genre, the film has a few very strong parts, (that ultimately make ignoring the lesser moments quite easy) leaving us with a modern fairy tale about trust and humanity, packaged up like a Mad Max side story that your parents would be way more into. All of this comes together quite nicely in Finch , and the film ends up giving us an exciting, funny, and sweet ride. Directed by Miguel Sapochnik, and written by an odd pairing of a producer and a production assistant with very little other writing credits, Finch tells the tale of an aging man (the titular Finch Weinberg) in a world ravaged by a solar flare that left seemingly all of the world’s surface uninhabitable to humans, animals, and even vegetation. Finch, a robotics engineer, fills his days building little Robo-pals that help him traverse the area surrounding his compound in search of food, supplies, and the occasional can of dog chow for his roommate, Goodyear, an Irish Terrier mix. When a wicked amount of sandstorms converge on the horizon, with everything Finch has built-in their path, he hatches a plan to build a more mobile robot that can assist him and his pooch in escaping the area in time and getting to San Francisco to search for more opportunities. Another snag, however: Finch’s exposure to the radiation now covering the globe has left him dying, with no sure amount of time left, and he has encoded one very specific law into this new robot’s programming (on top of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, of course): protect Goodyear after Finch is gone. This leads us into the bulk of the film, which involves our trio of scamps road-trippin' it across the hellish landscape of an Earth long gone, bumping into dangers, exploring the unknown, and digging into yours truly’s very favorite thing to be in a movie: Daddy Issues! Right off the bat, this movie looks incredible, right up there with the likes of other sandy apocalypse movies in scope and detail. It’s a spoil of imagery, evenly backed up by an enormous amount of heart in its characters and themes. Much like its main character, this movie does not think too well of humanity, and in the real world that currently seems hellbent on destroying itself no matter what anybody says, these moments of hopelessness hit even harder. Sapochnik is a tried and true visual storyteller, having directed some of the most important episodes of many television series over the past 10 years, and his last film, the eternally doomed Repo Men , is a very cool-looking film with not a whole lot else going for it. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was kinda rooting for the guy on his first feature in over a decade, and I’m happy to report: ya boi did a radical job. The film’s score by Gustavo Santaolalla, of The Last of Us and Brokeback Mountain fame, is ridiculously striking, even if it is severely underused for understandable reasons. No review of Finch (I’m looking at you, dozens of film critics who have failed the world) would be complete without talking about everybody’s favorite film from 2015: Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie . Just like you, my dear, sweet, kind reader, I was so ready to become Chappie’s boyfriend as the days grew shorter to its release upon our world. Alas, much like the way snakes must wriggle off their skin in order to grow and mature into serpents, Chappie sucked big time. That movie thinks it’s really funny and clever (it’s not), and it also suggests that the South African rap-rave group, Die Antwoord, are nice people (they are not). All of this is to say that while a dystopian tale about a hunky robot with a funny voice and a heart of gold didn’t work out as planned 6 years ago, society has become a goldfish, and Finch is just another time to take a crack at it. And for my money, it succeeds. Tom Hanks is no stranger to pulling off a dramatic story practically on his own, having obviously done this very thing in Cast Away , and ol’ reliable is just as charming and locked in as ever. Hanks offers fragility to so many of his roles, it’s one of the most endearing tools in his kit as an actor. We, as a species, love Tom Hanks, and placing him in roles of underdogs or characters burdened with defeat is always a great way to really bring that twinkle in his eye out. But he’s not fully alone this time around, replacing the bloodstained, hay-haired volleyball from Cast Away with Jeff, the robot he’s built to protect his dog after he’s gone, portrayed here both in voice and motion capture by the guardian of nightmares, Caleb Landry Jones. Landry Jones is a wonder as Jeff, slowly evolving the character vocally, physically, and emotionally throughout the course of the film. He practically single-handedly hammers home the theme of what it means to be human, a very obvious choice for a film about a learning robot. This all ties into the subversion I had mentioned at the top of this review. While Finch is an original story in a technical sense, we’ve seen this type of movie dozens of times before, whether it be with robots, animals, or just plain ol’ outcasts of society: the arc of a character that learns of the world’s beauty and horrors, but chooses to embrace and believe in the former, while cautiously respecting the latter, through trial and error events. Without going into specifics, there are moments in this film where you think you know what it’s building up to (and honestly in some moments you’ll be correct) when the film simply slows down to a halt and ponders on the reasoning why. For a PG-13 movie with a robot that we’re shown is incredibly strong and tasked with protection, but also has the understanding of a child, there’s not a lot of outright violence, something that I was expecting to come up at some point, and I don’t think it was a miscalculation on my part. We’re given several moments to show just how strong Jeff is, and even more moments of Finch explaining to him how dangerous the people out in the world are. By avoiding these tropes, the film relishes the sweetness and humanity of all three of its main characters. Yes, even the canine. Ultimately, all of these survivors have a thing or two to learn about trust and what it means to be human in the sense that being human is a thing to strive for, and honestly, the movie is quite firmly against that mantra as well, in its closing moments. Finch is that special type of movie you see when it’s first released that you can’t help but think how well this bad boy is going to age as a genre cult gem. It’s got all the fixings, most especially, its genre trappings and radically awesome visual effects, but no one saw the thing. While it doesn’t blow the door down on the lovable-future-robots genre, it’s a welcome addition to that classification, and Landry Jones’ Andy Serkis-level mo-cap and voice performance is more than enough reason to toss it on. Mike Burdge Editor-in-Chief Founder of and programmer for Story Screen. Lover of stories and pizza in the dark. When he isn't watching movies, you can find him reading things about people watching movies. He currently resides in Poughkeepsie, NY, and most assuredly is going through a French Connection phase.

Mike Burdge decks the halls with guest, Yarko Dobriansky, on this very Merry episode of Overdrinkers covering (arguably) the greatest Christmas comedy of all time, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Listen on....

Bernadette Gorman-White and Mike Burdge return to the filmography of Edgar Wright, catching up on the director's latest two films to drop in 2021: the musical documentary, The Sparks Brothers , and the throwback mystery-horror, Last Night in Soho . Listen on....

Robby Anderson chats about one of the biggest and most anticipated movies of the year (of all time?), Spider-Man: No Way Home , with guest Diana DiMuro. Listen on....

Bernadette Gorman-White chats with Diana DiMuro about the undeniable comedy series from Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, PEN15 . Listen on....

On this insanely fresh ep, Robby and Mike discuss the back-to-back outliers of John Carpenter's early 80s career: the critically undervalued Christine , and Robby's new favorite "that vibe" movie, Starman . Listen on....

Host Mike Burdge is joined by Reeya Banerjee to once again slurp those martinis and chat about ya boi, Double-O Seven, this time specifically talking about the 5 films in Daniel Craig's run: Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die . Listen on....

When I first heard that Chloé Zhao had been chosen to direct the MCU adaptation of The Eternals , Jack Kirby’s final major creation for the company that owed so much of its success to his inexhaustible creativity, I was thrilled, and honestly somewhat amused. Zhao — by any measure one of the finest American directors of her generation — and the measured, nuanced qualities of her films like The Rider and the Oscar-winning Nomadland are, to put it mildly, the diametric aesthetic opposite of Jack Kirby and his decades-worth of volatile, primary-colored, galvanic graphic settings of almost continuous crisis, often viewed from camera angles tilted to emphasize vertiginous diagonals, feverishly delivered across tens of thousands of pages packed with an increasing overuse of exclamation points. Where Zhao favors distance, quiet interaction, and both real-time and real-life informing her understated narratives, Kirby is literally unreal, over the top, out of this world, his panels bursting with supercharged action barely contained in the modest three-row page layouts that define the majority of his output (though he also loved creating mural-like, detail-rich two-page spreads, particularly from the 70’s onward). Low-key vs. Loki — it was as though an Avengers installment was greenlit to be directed by John Cassavetes (or, to take a more apt, living example, and one who shares Zhao’s enthusiasm for utilizing nonfictional elements in his films, The Florida Project ’s Sean Baker). Although she is a self-professed MCU fan who insisted to Variety that “Jack Kirby and his imagination, his incredible work, is really the foundation of” her film, how would Zhao’s neo-neo-realism find a way to truly do justice to that baroque, berserk, mythopoeic eruption from the multiverse known as late Kirby, published by Marvel Comics for 17 issues and one annual in the late ’70s as The Eternals ? Therein lies one perplexity — and also a few under-acknowledged resonances — of the film The Eternals . Marvel and its universe(s), amounting to nothing less the dominant mythology of our commodified era, has processed this revision of a revisionist mythology for mass consumption, triangulating and transforming both of these artists’ sensibilities into one more well-oiled global commodity, resulting in a product that is neither one thing nor the other. This is the uneasy point over which, initial box office receipts notwithstanding, the dissatisfaction with the film pivots, with critics lamenting that this MCU entry is somehow not a personal work like Zhao’s previous films, and fans decrying it as slow, long and convoluted in contrast with previous Marvel films (a broader category than what’s referred to as the “MCU”). Lost, somehow fittingly, in this binary distemper is Kirby and his original vision of The Eternals, at once forgotten and altered for this film in a manner which largely defangs and considerably diminishes the implications of his late Marvel work; largely, though not entirely. This is not meant to be a review of The Eternals , a film I’m still wrestling with, something which has been a dependable indicator for me in the past of an underlying strength or otherwise hidden quality in an artwork I’m not recognizing or fully appreciating. This piece began life simply as a meditation on the distance traveled between Kirby’s colossal, unhinged original (with a detour into Neil Gaiman and John Romita Jr.’s memorable 2006 Eternals mini-series, from which the film also draws, not always profitably) and Zhao’s $180 million-budgeted adaptation. For all its flaws, there is a definite if erratic poise and grace that distinguishes The Eternals from every other MCU entry to date, but it remains yoked to the MCU as a brand, a genre, a practice, practically a metaphysic: forces beams coming out of everywhere, worried look, punchline. Zhao can bring all the analog, in-camera, tastefully restrained cinematic ideas she wants — and she does — yet there’s no escaping the assembly line nature of the enterprise she signed on for. But is it overreach or something else entirely when she kicks her Eternals off with the scrolling title “In the beginning…”? “An age passes with Jack Kirby...I can’t call it the Marvel Age of Comics, because I don’t believe in rewarding thievery. I call it the Jack Kirby Age of Comics...it was Jack Kirby who defined the style and method of every comics artist who followed him. There is before Kirby, and after Kirby. One age does not resemble the other. The King is dead. There is no successor to that title... the Jack Kirby Age of Comics is coming to an end. It’s gone supernova and burned itself out and begun its slow, steady collapse into a black hole. We couldn’t feed off the genius of Jack Kirby forever. The King is dead, and he has no successor. We will never see his like again. No single artist will replace him. No art form can expect to be gifted with more than one talent as brilliant as his. The rest of us, we will build upon what he gave us.” — Excerpt from a keynote speech by Frank Miller, June 1994, four months after Jack Kirby’s death It’s impossible to overestimate the staggering influence and tireless, startling invention of the man crowned the undisputed “King of Comics,” Jack Kirby, both in the culture at large well beyond comics and, most especially, for Marvel both as an idea and an institution. Born and raised in the Jewish tenements of the Lower East Side just over a century ago, Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) quickly demonstrated exceptional skill as an artist, notably in the still-new comic strip format, whose first collection into anthologized book form with 1934’s Famous Funnies #1 bequeathed to the world the comic book, a form which continues to be developed even in a notionally post-print digital era nearly a century later. From the very beginning, Kirby was there and would exert a towering influence for over a half-century, often most fruitfully as a collaborator. He and his longtime artistic and business partner Joe Simon created Captain America for Marvel’s corporate predecessor Timely Comics in 1941 — he’s seen sporting his familiar “winghead” -ed red, white and blue uniform and star-and-striped shield while knocking out Hitler on the cover of Captain America #1 , published on the eve of the US entry into World War II. Simon and Kirby, as they were referred to then and now, went on to pioneer a wide range of other genres for the nascent comic book industry, notably a popular line of romance comics, a concept created whole cloth by the duo, as well as what can only be called psychological comics in the surreal series The Strange World of Your Dreams , a title one could imagine Freud reading with pleasure. They would go on to lampoon Captain America in the post-McCarthy mid-’50s with their Fighting American, as Timely’s successor Atlas Comics contemporaneously made Cap a wearisome anti-Communist foe. In the interim, Kirby would involve himself in many separate projects throughout the ’50s, including the extraordinary sci-fi newspaper strip Sky Masters , inked by the legendary E.C. Comics artist Wally Wood, who shared Kirby’s ardor for both cosmic scenarios and busy, dial-filled spacecraft interiors. Kirby also created Challengers of the Unknown for DC Comics, another group of interstellar heroes whose adventures would influence the creation of yet another supergroup a few years later after Kirby returned to the then-named Marvel Comics in the late-50’s. Initially drawing disposable monster tales written by longtime Marvel editor Stan Lee like “Fin Fang Foom,” Kirby and Marvel struggled within an industry eking by in a condition of near-fatal doldrums. Comics publishers were still reeling from the pernicious influence of Frederic Wertham’s anti-E.C. Comics screed Seduction of the Innocent , a scandalous 50’s bestseller which led to congressional hearings on the comics industry and, ultimately, to that industry’s own lamentable self-policing agency The Comics Code Authority, limiting the possibilities and direction of comic books for many years. Noticing the success of DC’s Justice League of America , Lee and Kirby decided in 1961 to create a new group of superheroes, four would-be astronauts altered by cosmic rays during a failed rocket launch who went on to become the premier Marvel Silver-Age group/comic and Lee and Kirby’s enduring triumph as collaborators: The Fantastic Four. On this title and throughout his seemingly limitless work for Marvel for the rest of the decade, Kirby went to infinity and beyond, with increasingly abstract approaches to space, time and the human figure itself, while bringing insight and compassion to his characters’ capricious motivations. But the seemingly limitless self-promotion of Lee and what was effectively his family business (Marvel’s then-owner and publisher Martin Goodman was Lee’s cousin by marriage) tended to overwhelm Kirby’s essential contributions, and not just via his outlandish, vernacular Op Art graphics but his now-undeniable contributions as a plot creator and writer. 1 After Kirby moved to the West Coast, formally cutting his ties with the well-promoted “Marvel Bullpen” (in actuality, a group of tiny offices in midtown Manhattan) and working with increasing independence, Marvel remained unresponsive to his much-deserved demands for greater recognition and compensation. When offered a take-it-or-leave-it contract little different from ones he had signed before, Kirby took his marbles and ideas away from Marvel’s so-called “House of Ideas” — a house which had been built in no small measure due to his indefatigable ingenuity — over to DC Comics where he would create his “Fourth World” saga, beginning with the first of many series for which he not only drew but also wrote and edited, The New Gods . The Fourth World books are undoubtedly Kirby’s magnum opus, but they also mark the beginning of a certain hermeticism in his work that would only escalate over the course of his final decades in comics. At Marvel in the ’60s, Kirby’s pencils were inked by artists whose varied skills tempered not only the power but also the increasing grotesque qualities of Kirby’s mature work — one aspect of Kirby’s 70’s work for DC is how much that grotesquerie is unleashed. In his early penciling (and sometimes self-inking), Kirby’s characters had gracefully rendered facial features, anatomically correct hands and feet and evinced a comparative realism, relative to his peers. Come 1970, his concepts have been boiled down to electric, impressionistic but somewhat repetitive shorthand symbolisms of the human figure, cityscapes, even the universe. Although Vince Colletta, Kirby’s popular inker on Marvel’s Thor (whose thin-lined delineation also concealed massive erasures of Kirby’s original pencils), followed him to DC and New Gods , increasingly Kirby’s art was inked by the West-Coast based Mike Royer. Over the course of time, certainly, by the time both ended up on The Eternals , Royer could be argued to have become Kirby’s definitive inker 2, but early on, he traced Kirby’s pencils to a faithful fault, with a leaden imitativeness that bordered on obsequiousness and one which unappealingly reinforced the more grotesque abstractions in Kirby’s pencils, his inks teeming with murky, hard blacks and unvaried line widths. Still, the graphic impact of Kirby’s imagination so unleashed by such creative freedom is incontestable, and there are countless instances in the 70’s DC books of delirious potency and galactic magnitude. But then, there is the question of Jack Kirby, writer. In a consideration of Kirby’s late Marvel creations published in The Jack Kirby Collector #24 , Mike Gartland and John Morrow observe, with no small understatement: “To state that Jack's writing (dialogue) was an acquired taste is not insulting…” In truth, and in similar contrast to his past work as an artist in the decades leading up the Fourth World saga, what was nimble and perceptive (again, relative to his peers) in his early comics writing hardened into an awkward, declamatory style bordering on hectoring — a primitive, clumsy, Art Brut poetry, assertive and cornball, glutted with all those exclamation points. Lee may have coasted long and disingenuously on Kirby’s ideas, and the results could tend towards a certain faux-Shakespearean pomposity, but his Marvel scripts gave Kirby’s concepts shape, ballast and substance. Though Kirby would occasionally rise to the occasion of his imaginative brilliance (fans rightly consider 1972’s New Gods #7 , “The Pact,” his finest script and the best single issue of the Fourth World saga, and there are some merciless tales brought to brutally vivid life in his aborted In the Days of the Mob project which would have been DC’s first foray into magazine-sized publications), so much of it was drowned in esoteric, relentless captions and acres of tin-eared dialogue. Fans must have agreed; while the figures remain disputed, the Fourth World books and other creations for DC (with the exception of the long-running, Planet of the Apes -swiped Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth ) never met the sales levels hoped for by DC brass. They soon tried to impose their own writers and editors on Kirby, moves he resisted until he finally accepted his sometimes (and eventually permanent) nemesis Lee’s wooing and signed a three-year contract to return to Marvel in 1975. Fans were promised a brand new “New Gods” saga that eventually came to be called The Eternals — issue #1 has Ikaris in civilian garb gesturing towards an Incan statue and exclaiming: “Look to the stars! The gods are COMING BACK! ” I was vaguely aware of all of this when I started collecting comics as a kid in the late 70’s, just as Kirby’s brief return to Marvel was coming to an end. I remember feeling proud to own all ten issues of Kirby’s Machine Man , about a robot with human feelings that was itself an offshoot for Kirby’s curious, unlikely Marvel adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey , which similarly also only resulted in ten issues. Repeating the lack of commercial success realized at DC, few of Kirby’s 70’s work for Marvel lasted more than a dozen issues — indeed, one of the only ones that did was The Eternals . For whatever reason, I never read the comics at the time — perhaps a disinterest in mythology generally when I was younger and the theme swiped from Erich von Däniken’s pop-science bestseller Chariots of the Gods? , which proposed that the Incas and other indigenous peoples had extraterrestrial help building their remarkable cities, temples and graven sculptures, didn’t move me. But there was also the matter of Kirby himself. With a return to his co-creations, Captain America and Black Panther, that were similarly buried in endless exposition and goofy, if visionary ideas (I own a t-shirt emblazoned with the cover for Kirby’s Black Panther #2 from 1977, showing the Wakandan king battling “The Six Million Year Man”), I would read Kirby’s own impassioned, eccentric editorials in his final Marvel books with the affection one might have for a beloved, slightly daft grandfather, but also with a certain resistance to their hokeyness. In any case, I had to wait over forty years until writing this piece to finally read The Eternals ’ seventeen issues and annual — truth told, I’m sorry I waited this long. Although it takes a few issues to achieve its tone and footing, there are passages in Kirby’s Eternals that rank with his best, most expansively imagined books. It’s a shame it was shut down before it could fully achieve its conceptual promise, one little advanced by the film — with some very notable exceptions. “Superheroes are, essentially by definition, idiotic confections intended for children, and the fact that I can’t escape them as an adult so far this millennium makes my blood boil. I did my time as a kid loving X-Men and Spider-Man and The Avengers and Jack Kirby specials (and E.C. reprints and even Warren mags like Creepy and Eerie ), and heaven knows I do not begrudge the American early-adolescent his or her time in the shade with comic books, or their afternoons in matinees watching Batman or Iron Man or whatever. But it’s gotten to the point that superheroes comprise the substantial percentage of movie options we have now, in one form or another, and to avoid them as a grown-up you’d have to avoid cinema. What’s more, adults are flocking, adult reviewers are treating the movies seriously, the filmmakers themselves apparently believe they’re making coherent and profound statements.” —Michael Atkinson, “Throwing Down,” from his long-defunct blog Zero for Conduct , 7/8/2008 One of my biggest issues with the MCU generally is that it’s too much Lee and not enough Kirby. The wisecracking banter, interpersonal bickering and emotional turbulence — the soap-operatic elements Lee introduced into the staid world of superheroes — are all in evidence but, brilliant as its digital effects often are, little of the awe-struck existential wonder or sheer interdimensional audacity of Kirby’s artwork and concepts. And when so much screen time is taken up by, say, the collection of six Infinity Stones, the overriding concern isn’t art or catharsis: it’s math. But we’ll get to Thanos in a moment. There is a part of me that will always say “Amen” to former Village Voice film critic Atkinson’s screed excerpted above, and, with just the first Iron Man film to go by, he hardly knew what he was in for, MCU-wise. But I also wonder if the familiarity with the comics and characters of the Marvel Universe (in this respect, I include the 20th Century Fox X-Men and Fantastic Four films not considered a part of that otherwise self-contained Cinematic Universe) also helped smooth acceptance and an understanding of those characters’ own convoluted backstories on a mass-cultural level more readily than some Marvel fans are prepared to do for The Eternals . Zhao, along with her fellow writers Patrick Burleigh and the brothers Ryan and Kaz Firpo (the latter two are also credited with the “screen story”), clearly went long and deep into various Eternals comics and not just the issues created by Kirby and Gaiman/JR Jr. — the character of Phastos, for example, portrayed by Brian Tyree Henry in the film, was first introduced almost a decade after Kirby’s initial run in a mini-series written by Peter B. Gillis and drawn by Marvel stalwart Sal Buscema I haven’t read. I further wonder if the writers’ collective familiarity with this alternate Marvel universe, a familiarity largely unshared by even diehard Marvel fans, encouraged them to make too many changes that simply don’t translate in the transition from Kirby’s original to Zhao’s film. Tinkering with myths, even changing characters’ race, gender, and sexual orientation, are certainly not what I’m intending to critique here — similar tinkering, after all, gave us Kirby’s Ikaris, Sersi, Makkari, etc. But moving so far from the original work’s more-than-sturdy base concepts results in narrative arcs that strain credulity and no longer carry the potency of the original. Spoiler alerts abound from this point forward. One unfortunate change Zhao and her writers made to the Kirby Eternals is concealing and ultimately altering the nature of the various species who make up the story. In the film, the Eternals are a hard-to-kill race of super beings who, we find out much later, were created by the apparently almighty Celestials, protecting humanity and other species by destroying the Deviants, referred to by the prime Celestial Arishem as, “my mistakes.” In the beginning, a.k.a. The Eternals #1 , Kirby makes it clear: The Eternals, The Deviants, and humanity itself are all the Earth-born, directly-connected creations of the Celestials, the multiple results of never-explained experiments on early ape-like creatures (an idea not far removed from 2001: A Space Odyssey , which the film echoes in, to take one example, The Eternals’ Monolith-shaped interplanetary vehicle, the Domo). In the comics, the Eternals could not be killed and lived on Earth atop the mountain Olympia inaccessible to humans, where the film makes them denizens of the planet Olympia which we never see (for good (read: bad) reason) in the film. Far from being the screeching, dragon-like bundles of CGI-ed sinews besieging our heroes in the film, the Kirby Deviants were chaos incarnate, instability rendered as a sentient species, and his misshapen creations are all imaginatively realized. The Deviants had previously enslaved humanity and ruled over ancient Lemuria, before it fell into the sea like Atlantis (or, for that matter, Icarus). Their hidden undersea kingdom produced even more monstrous creatures known as mutates and, led by their oddly noble warlord Kro, the Deviants planned an attack on the unsuspecting Earth as the Celestials began to appear on Earth again after centuries of absence. Kirby’s Celestials, moreover, remained silent, their ultimate purpose unknown. This inscrutability, coupled with names redolent of the Old Testament, draws upon Kirby’s own Judaism and the conviction in Jewish mystic traditions of the unknowability of God. As in the film, only the Eternal Ajak can communicate with them and, for someone who threw in everything including the kitchen sink into his stories, it’s telling that Kirby left these encounters mostly off-camera, further reinforcing their untranslatability. In the film, conversely, Ajak plaintively pleads for humanity and the Eternals while standing in the enormous palm of Arishem’s British-accented immensity. Kirby’s Ajak was a male dressed in Incan headdress raiment — in the film, Ajak is rendered as a matriarchal Prime Eternal, portrayed by Salma Hayek. In Kirby’s work, the Prime Eternal is the red-tressed Zuras, his Eternalization of Zeus, a character entirely missing from the film. There are compelling narrative rationales for making this relationship between species less direct. In the film, the Deviants also challenge humanity and Celestiality, while the parasitic development of Kro, hissing with contempt that both he and the Eternals are “Arishem’s children,” gives rise to the possibility of new narrative directions for the Deviants which could be further explored. But the eventual reveal that the Eternals are not Olympian gods after all but mere recloned robots with repeatedly erased memories goes a long way towards precluding identification with them and also lamentably imparts both the species and the film with the shopworn flavor of the later seasons of Westworld . It’s resourceful to turn the Eternals’ absence to date from the MCU and from human affairs into a quickly dispatched plot device, as the Eternals have forsworn not to interfere in human affairs, while such horrors as the conquistadors’ pillage of Mesoamerica in the 16th century and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima result in horrified misgivings by some of the Eternals. Druig, tartly portrayed in the film by Barry Keoghan and generally treated as Ikaris’ villainous cousin by Kirby and Gaiman, refers to the downfall of the Incas in the 1500s as “genocide.” 3 When Hayek’s Ajak briefly recounts the dire conclusion to Avengers: Infinity War , tying in the film ever so obliquely to Thanos and his deeds, the implications are many, extending well beyond the MCU. Kirby’s 70’s work for Marvel, including his work on established characters, were all deliberately unconnected from the continuity of the line’s other books. Gartland and Morrow suggest that “what Jack wanted, to put it frankly, was to be left alone to write and edit his own stories, and have no collaborators (in the storytelling sense) or tie-ins with other titles done by other people. (This shows how strongly Jack was determined to never again fall victim to losing credit for his concepts or creations—the hundreds of characters and/or ideas he gave Marvel in the '60s and was sometimes acknowledged for.)” Kirby’s Eternals were, in this respect, the ultimate outsiders at Marvel, with appearances by agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and, most absurdly of all, by a “cosmic-powered Hulk” robot offered up by Kirby under duress from the demands of the increasingly corporate Marvel management. I’m already awaiting the shock from audiences of the planned film of Kirby’s New Gods when they notice the uncanny resemblance between that film’s villain Darkseid and Marvel’s Thanos, the latter a character stolen almost entirely from Kirby by his creator, Jim Starlin (Marvel editor Roy Thomas allegedly encouraged him, saying, “If you’re going to steal, steal from the best”). That Thanos, i.e. warmed-over Kirby, is the remotest of MCU hooks for The Eternals adaptation of a comic that resolutely strove to stand apart is the most cutting of ironies for a Kirby fan. As suggested earlier, the film swings like a pendulum between Zhao’s careful pacing, reserved tone and available-light natural splendor in long shot and close up, and the MCU’s trademark chortle-and-boom. I dream of a cut that dispenses entirely with the witless jokey asides that let the air out of the film far too often —that, sadly, includes most of the talented Kumail Nanjiani’s reportedly self-written gags as the multi-generational Bollywood star Kingo. It’s apparently inconceivable that a race of millennia-old super-beings can’t help but indulge in asinine banter like rejects from a Kevin Smith film. Zhao’s rectitude falling short of Kirby’s explosive multi directionality is most fully embodied in Gemma Chan’s reserved Sersi, conceived by Kirby and Gaiman as a very different, prankish life of the party. This is not a woman you could imagine turning anyone into pigs, continuing a pervasive trend in the film of severing the characters from the mythological origins Kirby attempted a new twist on while also directly referencing. Chan’s performance is all simmer and, while sensitive and intelligent, somewhat undercooked for the proceedings. You can’t say that about Richard Madden’s impassioned performance as Ikaris, all Scottish-brogued, broad-shouldered charisma. Angelina Jolie’s warrior Thena (whose implied past dalliance with Kro was one of several intriguing twists never fully explored in the Kirby books) splits the difference in her own charismatic performance, calm and rage-maddened in equal measure. Going “meta” on ancient source material is, of course, the high-modernist aesthetic imperative par excellence , with both Kirby’s Eternals and Joyce’s Ulysses sharing surprising affinities that extend beyond their mutual Greek mythological origins. But like the first line from Genesis at the film’s opening — or not long after that, its use of the dramatic Pink Floyd instrumental from Dark Side of the Moon "On the Run" leading into “Time” — the re-use of iconic material often evaporates from The Eternals . But there are also certain provocative undercurrents throughout that exert their own gravitational pull. “Our Lord and Maker made a mess of things, sir. A fine mess.” — Theo Angelopoulos and Tonino Guerra, Ulysses’ Gaze “I accept you, but I don't accept the choice that you've made.” “It's not a choice, Jill. God made me this way.” “Then I reject God.” — Mr. Show I confess I didn’t buy the virtuous Ikaris’ homicidal turning on Ajak in deference to Arishem’s will in the film. In the comics The Eternals respect and don’t question their servitude (with the notable exception of the devious, malevolent Druig, vastly different from his critical but benevolent disposition in the film). Given the depth of his love for Sersi and otherwise dedicated protection of humanity, he seems an unlikely ultra-orthodox defender of the Celestials own creation myth. But The Eternals emerges in an era of inexplicable fundamentalisms upsetting the course of so much in the world — if anything, such zeal is overfamiliar if not the kind of behavior we hope from our heroes. And the disappointment with the film generally seems to reflect the post-pandemic frustrations that currently rattle the nation and the world, infrastructure bills and climate accords that don’t go far enough, the politicization of COVID and vaccinations, deepening divides no amount of dopey badinage will ever heal. For good and ill, The Eternals is very much a movie of its time. The shifts in gender, ability, and other foundations of identity in the film are certain to infuriate a certain reactionary mindset — but, again, Kirby created The Eternals as a revised look at Greek and other mythologies. That process is productively expanded by the film while also serving as an implicit critique of Kirby’s white, heteronormative heroic conceptions. It redounds to the film and the MCU to enlarge Kirby’s mythological retconning as it does. And it truly is Zhao’s film — those quieter moments convey a warmth, patience and charm that makes The Eternals truly feel like no other recent big-budgeted film I can think of, and which not all its fatuous digressions can eradicate. But those moments are fleeting, vaporous, subject to incessant force beams and japes. The only way it could completely succeed is by not being an MCU film: namely, be what it’s not. Katie Rife’s lament for The AV Club — “Why does Marvel keep hiring world-class directors if it won’t trust them?” — can be answered, sort of like the plot to Avengers: Infinity War , with more math. Nine figures worth. I’m reminded of the famous heroin-chic Latin phrase of dubious provenance tattooed on Jolie’s lower abdomen: “Quod me nutrit, me destruit” (“What nourishes me, destroys me”). The symbiosis between Kirby and his writing, Kirby and Marvel, Zhao and Kirby, Zhao and the MCU and all amongst each other constitutes a pulsating, Gordian knot at the heart of The Eternals , one that will not be unraveled, but, perhaps in time, may be the reason audiences come to ultimately treasure the film, or appreciate it precisely for its difference from everything else around it — even from itself. All quite fascinating, but you could be forgiven for understanding why Marvel wouldn’t view two and a half hours of poorly received contradiction as sequel fodder. However, the film does contain one new, truly original aspect, the main one I still wrestle with. By jettisoning the Prime Eternal Zuras in favor of a female Ajak, Zhao and her writers also discard the vengeful, murderous, rapist lore surrounding Zeus (if not the problematic remainder of Greek mythology). But have they actually relocated him in the person of Arishem? The Prime Celestial is not the enigmatic being of unfathomable motivation as in the Kirby books, but a vengeful lord who denounces betrayal and whose judgment is promised, though unlikely to be delivered exactly as the writers originally intended. Creating a race of robots to do his bidding and corral his “mistake” is a bleak, mordant conception of God, all too evocative an era notable for its deficit of hope — what does it say about The Eternals or ourselves when confronted with a concept of original sin that resides not in ourselves or other beings, but in God? 1. Anyone who doubts Kirby’s inestimable contributions to practically every single Marvel story he penciled should pick up any issue of one of the best comics zines ever published, the remarkable Jack Kirby Collector , published by TwoMorrows Press. Every tabloid-sized issue reproduces dozens of pages from Kirby’s original pencils, complete with clear instructions in the captions usually for Lee of what’s happening in each panel and the emotions where not actual dialogue the characters are articulating. In cinematic terms, Lee may have been the superior dialogue man of the two, but during this Marvel Era of comics, the undeniable auteur is Jack Kirby. 2 . Marvel partisans and the occasional Hudson Valley-based comics fan might insist that honor should go to Kirby’s longtime FF inker, the lifelong Saugerties resident Joe Sinnott, who passed away last year at 93. Sinnott’s distinctive illustrative flourish also made him the definitive Silver-Age Marvel inker. 3. The New Yorker ’s Richard Brody, in his dismissive review of the film, notes that “genocide” is a term that was first coined in 1942 by the historian Raphaël Lemkin. James Keepnews James is a musician, writer, and multimedia artist. James’ writing has appeared in Chronogram, Pacific Sun Magazine, New Haven Advocate, and other publications. You can check out his previous pieces for Story Screen: “There’s Nothing Out There!” — George A. Romero’s 'Lost' PSA-For-Hire "The Amusement Park," “’Have a Nice Apocalypse’ —The Resolute Irresolution of Southland Tales,” and “Archives and Morals: Jean-Luc Godard and the Boundless Provocations of The Image Book.”

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