Remember when you’d walk into a local music, book, or video store and there’d be an adorable section where the employees would recommend what they were interested in that month?
Welcome to our little version of it, called Remap Recommends.
At the end of every month, we have an edition of Remap Recommends focused on video games. But in the middle of the month, we'll have an edition focused on...everything else. It's a chance for the staff at Remap to let you know what they've been reading, listening to, or watching.
Patrick Recommends: Daredevil (Season Three)
I was all in on Netflix's corner of the Marvel universe for a few years there, deeply into Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, that whole crew. (No, I did not watch Iron Fist!) Somewhere along the line, probably when The Defenders came and went, I fell off. Do I need to watch The Punisher? After all the Elektra stuff, do I really want to watch another season of Daredevil? The answer became no, no, no.
I podcast about television shows with my buddy David Chen, who never even got on the Daredevil train to begin with. I agreed to watch a few episodes of the third season in advance of Daredevil: Born Again, which turned into watching a few more episodes of watching the third season in advance of Daredevil: Born Again, which turned into watching the entire third season in advance of Daredevil: Born Again because the third season of Daredevil is fucking awesome, everyone.
Brutal. Cathartic. Inspiring. Tragic. "Matt Murdock struggles with his identity as Daredevil and the role violence plays in his work" is not exactly new territory for the character, but the third season deftly mingles this question with Matt's faith—a deeply unique character trait that I hope continues in Born Again, even though it drops Matt into a world of literal gods—with being pushed to the brink by Kingpin.
It's great. It's long. It's makes you retroactively upset that Marvel abandoned all of this. (And made that decision with Born Again.) The only question is whether or not I need to go back and watch The Punisher? Even if you're watching Born Again, make time for this.
Rob Recommends: Conclave
Twenty minutes into Conclave, having spent the entire opening of the film in a couple sparse rooms with middle-aged men speaking to each other in wary undertones, my wife turned to me and said, "I am so fucking happy." I felt similarly elated: here was a taut, superbly acted bureaucratic thriller. A self-contained story where you had a sense of the characters and the stakes almost from the moment they were introduced, and then watched them crashing into each other and sending the story through one sharp turn after another.
As deeply Catholic as the story might be, Conclave is also a film that recognizes the ways in which the Church is one of the world's oldest and largest corporations. The cardinals and bishops that arrive to elect a new Pope are men with their own power bases, serving different markets, with different visions for the future of the Church and different interpretations of its past. The stakes are high: efforts toward improvement and reform are incremental and fragile, insular sectarianism and reaction are always ready to sweep aside centuries of progress. And at the center of all this is Ralph Fiennes' doubting Thomas of a Vatican power broker, knowing he can tip the scale between those forces but not without sacrificing his integrity and loyalty to the position entrusted to him. A movie about faith and the crises of liberalism, Conclave is the most I've enjoyed a movie in years.
Cado Recommends: Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX Beginning
Let's get the first thing out of the way: are you an OG Gundam fan? Then you should absolutely go see this movie in theaters (if you haven’t already). As a novice Gundam enjoyer, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I heard that Hideaki Anno, creator of Evangelion, was attached to a new Gundam series. Evangelion borrows heavily from the original Gundam so it was certainly interesting to see his name pop up when Gquuuuuux (pronounced “gh-quhcks” I think?) was announced.
Then, details for the series and its accompanying intro movie started to come out, and I started to get a picture of what Anno might be cooking: it was set in the UC timeline (Universal Century, essentially the mainline “canon” for the Gundam universe), but was it an alternate history?
In recent years, Anno has made a series of movies with the Shin moniker, a Japanese word that can mean many things, including “new.” In them, the acclaimed anime director revisited popular long running series like Godzilla with his own takes on them, revisiting the franchises of his youth with a modern lens. They were remakes in the sense that Final Fantasy VII: Remake was a remake: while some of the familiar beats and themes followed through, the plots of the movies were shifted to accommodate a new beginning to well established stories.
So, was Gquuuuuux Anno’s version of doing Shin Gundam? In a way it is, but it also managed to be much more than what the name Shin Gundam might’ve invoked in my mind. The opening 30 minutes had me hooting and hollering (internally), and was such a delight to experience first hand in a theater I can’t bring myself to spoil it. It’s a Gundam reimagining from a person who has very obviously spent the better part of his life rotating the original in his mind, examining all the angles. And while it may not hit as hard for people who haven’t seen the original series, it is still compelling enough and doesn’t overshadow the world that it sets up that the rest of the series will continue to explore.
Do you like big robots being used both as tools of control in tense geopolitical situations and in secret underground fighting rings? Do you want a story about the way a state tilts towards fascism while also getting not one but two extremely queer-coded relationships? Well, then you should run back in time (I think the last week was the final week of its theatrical run) to catch Gquuuuuux in theaters, or whenever it comes home.