Emma Scott's Blog, page 4
July 13, 2015
Shout it from the rooftops!
Once, when I was in college, I had a date with a young gent and we tossed back a few too many cocktails before deciding to see Saving Private Ryan in the movie theatre. We got there late and had to sit about three rows back from the front. And then the invasion began.If you recall this movie, the first ten minutes or so is the storming of the beach at Normandy. I had to watch it with one eye closed, sort of unable to process it all. Maybe that was the booze, but I think it was more the reality of it. I remember thinking, "Thanks a lot, Spielberg. If I wanted to fight in WWII I would hop in my time machine and go." I felt like I had been right there, in the thick of it.
What, pray-tell, has this to do with The Man I Love? Because that's sort of how I felt reading this book. Like I was right there, right in it, too close for comfort sometimes. In fact the sweetness of the first 30% I read with a vague sense of unease twisting in my gut. I was anxious the entire time because I knew this sweet, soul-deep love story was going to get blown to bits and I was going to be splattered with the blood and guts of it.
There's a word, "interiority". There is a regular definition for it, but the literary one is Interiority is defined as a character's thoughts, feelings, and reactions to the situation. It's a flashier word for "show" (as in show, don't tell) but it's a little more than that. The ability of an author to do this is what connects a reader to the characters, and if it's done in the jaw-droppingly masterful way that this author does it, instead of watching or reading the text, you're living in it, absorbing it, you're RIGHT THERE. This novel is a textbook definition of interiority done right. Despite the--sometimes--pages of almost unbroken exposition, Erik's interiority never wavers. We're right there with him, intimately so. Every joy, heartache, pain, loss, grief. You live it right a long with him. His story comes to life, and there's a LOT of story.
I don't do recap reviews; as a writer myself, I like to focus on mechanics and the HOW of the writing. How did she do it? Why? So this probably doesn't read as a typical review but it's the only way I know to describe and process artistry such as this. Suffice it to say, this author had a story to tell and she told it. She gripped it tight, twisted, and wrung it dry, and was unapologetic about all of it.
For instance, insta-love. It's a generally hated term in the romance world and something most authors tend to avoid, incurring the insta-wrath of readers if done poorly. And rightly so, as it usually comes off as a cliche. Here the author is unapologetic, having her characters even come out and say it, "It's only been a week." And it worked. Why? Two reasons: The first being once you've mastered all the rules you're free to break them. So she did and fuck it, it was glorious. Secondly, there are those who recognize the longevity of a soul, its agelessness while bodies wither and die. If one is a believer in the idea of soul mates then one must write honestly about how two soul mates would react upon being confronted with one another again.
She said it with her eyes, he heard it clearly in his head, and it wasn’t hello. It was, “Well, here you are.”
Here I am, he thought.
And that's how it's done.
"Insta-love" is cheesy and stupid when two characters meet and fall in love in order to speed the plot along or for the convenience of the author. Insta-love, when it's the core principle in the novel itself, when it's soul mates reconnecting, is as integral to it as a beating heart is to a body. There is a difference and this is it.
Now there were two parts that threw me out a bit, though neither was unable to the shake the book from a 5 star perch. But...(view spoiler)
And (view spoiler)
Those nits aside, I thought this book was astounding. I was RIGHT THERE the whole time and it wasn't always easy. This is not the book you reach for when you want some fluffy escapism, nor is it even the book you want when you're feeling angsty for some good drama. This is the book you read when you want to jump heads and live another life or when you want to submerge yourself into another reality, blood, guts and all. It's the first 10 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, the chaotic battle for survival against impossible odds, and you are--say it with me now--RIGHT THERE.
As for me, this is the book I will only read once, though I may return to certain parts for the phrasing. And I will read the sequel, though I'm going to need to buffer myself with other books of fluffy escapism first. Then, when I have amassed the mental fortitude to journey into Daisy's mind, I'll read the second which I bought the instant I finished reading the sample.
Insta-one-click, of this author. Insta-love for the win!
ES
On Goodreads here: Review of The Man I Love by Suann Laqueur
July 3, 2015
RUSH review
Such an honor to even get a blurb from this lady and here she goes with an entire review. <3
AESTAS BOOK BLOG REVIEW
AESTAS BOOK BLOG REVIEW
June 16, 2015
Interview on Writing, books, and my horrible disgusting mess of a process
Little excerpt:
Your works are of contemporary romance and new adult genres. What draws you to these genres?I am in love with the idea of following a couple as they fall in love. And—bonus—I love writing the sex that goes with these manifestations of emotion. It’s the hardest thing to plot—the falling in love bit— because you have to layer it, and structure it believably, and hopefully tap into some universal feelings while maintaining a bit of fantasy. The conversations and physical reactions have to build, and it’s very difficult to get that right. I don’t know that I ever have. Maybe no one has but for Shakespeare. And then the fun part is writing the sex scenes, because my scenes are always steeped in the emotion first. I think when the characters really care about each other, you can turn the heat up more and it makes the entire experience much more fulfilling.
For the rest of the interview, go here...Plethoric Thoughts, a blog you should be following, says I
May 31, 2015
30 Days to the release of RUSH!
Here's an excerpt:
“I’m sorry, Charlotte,” I said, shame twisting my gut until I thought I’d be sick. “I don’t know how to talk to people anymore.”Her voice sounded muffled, as if she were wiping her nose. “Yeah, I noticed. You’re like a walking internet comment, just spewing whatever pops off the top of your head. You can’t do that with people in real life.”“Real life,” I snorted. “Is that what I have? Never mind. I’m sorry. For what I said, for ruining breakfast, for making a mess of the damn milk…”“It’s okay,” she said in a small voice.“No, it’s not okay,” I said. “Not one bit of it is okay.”“You’re right, it’s not,” she said. “But you didn’t know. And most people feel the same way. My family and friends…they don’t get what’s holding me back.”“What is holding you back?” I asked quietly.“It hurts,” she said simply. “To dig deep for it, to play with my heart and not just my hands? I won’t get up on stage and just play. I can’t fake it, like an actor performing with a script in her hand. It’s not right. I don’t know why I’m like this but I just am and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t give me a hard time, okay?”I nodded, wishing mightily I could suck back every stupid word I’d spoken. “Okay.”I climbed carefully out of my seat and oriented myself to the stairs, then let go of the chair, like an astronaut pushing off into the void.“Noah?”I stopped. “Yeah?”“You’re not done.”I froze. “What?”“You said that you were done. But you’re not. It may feel like it, but it’s not true.”I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. Was she really saying this to me? After all my blundering, tactless arrogance, she was trying to make me feel better? The depth of her kindness and generosity astounded me, but she was wrong. I was done. I’d had the perfect life and it had been ripped away forever.
“I’m sorry, Charlotte,” I said, shame twisting my gut until I thought I’d be sick. “I don’t know how to talk to people anymore.”Her voice sounded muffled, as if she were wiping her nose. “Yeah, I noticed. You’re like a walking internet comment, just spewing whatever pops off the top of your head. You can’t do that with people in real life.”“Real life,” I snorted. “Is that what I have? Never mind. I’m sorry. For what I said, for ruining breakfast, for making a mess of the damn milk…”“It’s okay,” she said in a small voice.“No, it’s not okay,” I said. “Not one bit of it is okay.”“You’re right, it’s not,” she said. “But you didn’t know. And most people feel the same way. My family and friends…they don’t get what’s holding me back.”“What is holding you back?” I asked quietly.“It hurts,” she said simply. “To dig deep for it, to play with my heart and not just my hands? I won’t get up on stage and just play. I can’t fake it, like an actor performing with a script in her hand. It’s not right. I don’t know why I’m like this but I just am and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t give me a hard time, okay?”I nodded, wishing mightily I could suck back every stupid word I’d spoken. “Okay.”I climbed carefully out of my seat and oriented myself to the stairs, then let go of the chair, like an astronaut pushing off into the void.“Noah?”I stopped. “Yeah?”“You’re not done.”I froze. “What?”“You said that you were done. But you’re not. It may feel like it, but it’s not true.”I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. Was she really saying this to me? After all my blundering, tactless arrogance, she was trying to make me feel better? The depth of her kindness and generosity astounded me, but she was wrong. I was done. I’d had the perfect life and it had been ripped away forever.
May 15, 2015
April 18, 2015
On Marvel's Daredevil...This is Great Storytelling
I'm a comic geek. Not huge; I haven't mentally categorized every Marvel comic book with encyclopedic skill, but enough so that when I'd heard Netflix was going to make its own Daredevil series--I was pretty excited. I was even more excited, in a purely--ahem--aesthetic level, to learn that Charlie Cox would play the super hero. (Owen Slater of Boardwalk Empire fame, and departed too soon--but then, didn't they all?)
In brief, for the uninitiated: Daredevil is about a man named Matt Murdock, a Hell's Kitchen native and son of a B-list boxer--a man who took more punches than he gave. At the age of nine, Matt saves an old man from being hit by a truck carrying barrels of radioactive chemicals. A good dollop of these chemicals hits little Matt in the eyes, rendering him blind, but also heightening his other senses to stratospheric levels. A kung fu master (and fellow blind man) teaches Matt to fight and use his abilities, which Matt then puts into service by beating up bad guys in his beloved Hell's Kitchen at night, while working as a defense attorney with his college pal, Foggy Nelson, by day.
I didn't have many expectations, though Netflix seemed to be on a roll with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, so I prepared for some good ole Marvel-comic-book-snappy-Guardians-of-the-Galaxy-style smart-alecky pop-violence (where people get beat up but you don't see any real blood). Or, more likely, a reboot of sorts of the terrible Ben Affleck movie (not terrible because of Affleck, but terrible in the same way the Clooney Batman movie was terrible--its cartoonish approach and vision.)
I was wrong on all counts--Netflix got it 100% right.
Daredevil is, in my opinion, a masterpiece of storytelling. The show-runners stripped away all the gimmicky b.s. that can infect even the best franchises, and left us with the nitty gritty. More Batman Begins than Batman and Robin, to say the least, but even more raw and bare than BB. Matt Murdock is not trying to save the world, or even all of New York City. He's out to clean up one neighborhood, Hell's Kitchen. He has incredibly heightened senses but instead of some cartoonish display of sonar, we are treated to small doses of him listening to heart beats, or intakes of breath, or the sound of an enemy's weapon scraping against the concrete. We never see what Matt "sees" but once, when he's recounting how all of his senses work together to form a whole he describes it thusly: "A world on fire" and if that doesn't give you shivers...
Matt wears all black, but no super hero costume--not right away--and so gets the shit kicked out of him as much as he delivers. He's human. He bleeds. A lot. But he keeps fighting. As his dad taught him, it's not about getting knocked down, it's how you get back up that counts. And the fights themselves are miniature masterpieces of hand-to-hand combat not seen too often in this day and age of guns, lasers, and magical hammers.
Often using extended tracking shots, and shot in dim, dark lighting, the fight scenes are brutal, raw and real, with lots of broken bones. No one defies gravity or flies across rooms. The fighters make mistakes, they breathe heavily, they take pauses to muster their strength for round two without every breaking the kinetic spell of the dance. It's a joy to watch insomuch as guys beating the snot out of each other is a "joy" but I appreciate them for the effort and choreography that are put into each one. We're not seeing variations on the same punch-kick-punch. We're also getting a visceral sense of how painful and exhausting it is for Matt to fight crime this way. He abhors killing (and doesn't do it). He hates guns. He believes in justice. His night-time hunts against child traffickers and arms dealers are that much more intense, with more going on, than a bunch of people shooting at one another and our hero barreling through them in a suped-up hot rod. There's more at stake, for while Matt has superhuman abilities, you never forget that he is, essentially, a blind guy throwing himself at hordes of organized criminals that have infected his beloved neighborhood.
Character-Driven
The casting of every character is another reason Daredevil rises above the fiction to create real humans living their stories. They are wonderfully cast, seemingly with an eye toward interesting faces that might have been pulled straight out of a comic book artist's imagination. Wesley (Toby Leonard Moore) is Fisk's first in command, and is a paragon of cool, smarmy efficiency behind his elegant glasses. Vondie Curtis-Hall plays a seen-it-all reporter who wears his weariness for fighting the good fight against impossible odds in every craggy nook of his face. Rosario Dawson is a nurse/love interest to Matt, and plays her internal conflicts so beautifully, you can practically read her every thought. And these are the minor characters.
The leads are just as good.
Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) is the brave--but smart and rightfully cautious--third party in the Nelson/Murdock law firm, who seeks justice too, but is refreshingly free of the smart-ass, "spitfire" heroine trope. Her courage is real, but so is her fear and vulnerability.
Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) is the perfect doofus/comic relief sidekick--or so you think--until the episodes unfold a real depth of character that goes well beyond one-liners. Episode Ten, in which we flashback to Matt and Foggy's college years is nigh perfect. Intercut with Foggy learning Matt's vigilante identity, it is a masterpiece of revelations. It shows the founding of Matt and Foggy's camaraderie and friendship while simultaneously--and heartbreakingly--tearing it down as Foggy feels betrayed by Matt's double-life. Not since the Richard Harrow/Jimmy Darmody of Boardwalk Empire have I seen this level of true male friendship: deep and real and unabashedly emotional.
Kingpin is the Daredevil villain (though we don't hear that name right away in the same way no one calls Matt "Daredevil" straight out the gate). His real name is Wilson Fisk, a huge, bald, towering monster of a man who is also...not entirely a monster. Daredevil is too smart a show to render Fisk a stereotype of badness. We see him alone, lonely; we see his flashbacks as a chubby child with an abusive father. We hear his ideas for cleaning up Hell's Kitchen, for though he kills the innocent to get what he wants, his intentions are not that different from Matt's. And Vincent D'Onofrio is the actor who pulls this off brilliantly, making Fisk simultaneously scary as hell, but also a guy you empathize with, on some level. D'Onofrio, probably best known for Full Metal Jacket, is one of those crazy-good actors who don't do things the way you think they're going to do them. Fisk is a mess of insecurity, violence and growling intimidation, in short: a real person doing bad things for what he thinks are the right reasons.
And Matt Murdock himself, Charlie Cox, with his low, velvety smooth voice and calm-on-the-surface demeanor is a thrill to watch and root for. He's tortured but not so much that we're bombarded with tortured angst every other minute. He's charming, sweet, noble...and also ready to pummel the hell out of the bad guys for ruining his neighborhood. His conflict, contained as it is, comes out in conversations with his priest, with Claire (Rosario Dawson's nurse), or in the violence of his street fights. But when he's in his normal clothes in the light of day, working in his start-up law firm, he comes across as an affable good guy--a blind man who conceals his unbelievable talents behind an honest humility and complete lack of superhero ego. He's just a guy trying to do a job, and that sensibility drives the show in every aspect. Defines it. Strips it of pretense and takes risks by letting the characters drive what would seem, on the surface, an action show.
And the result is truly breathtaking.
In brief, for the uninitiated: Daredevil is about a man named Matt Murdock, a Hell's Kitchen native and son of a B-list boxer--a man who took more punches than he gave. At the age of nine, Matt saves an old man from being hit by a truck carrying barrels of radioactive chemicals. A good dollop of these chemicals hits little Matt in the eyes, rendering him blind, but also heightening his other senses to stratospheric levels. A kung fu master (and fellow blind man) teaches Matt to fight and use his abilities, which Matt then puts into service by beating up bad guys in his beloved Hell's Kitchen at night, while working as a defense attorney with his college pal, Foggy Nelson, by day.
I didn't have many expectations, though Netflix seemed to be on a roll with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, so I prepared for some good ole Marvel-comic-book-snappy-Guardians-of-the-Galaxy-style smart-alecky pop-violence (where people get beat up but you don't see any real blood). Or, more likely, a reboot of sorts of the terrible Ben Affleck movie (not terrible because of Affleck, but terrible in the same way the Clooney Batman movie was terrible--its cartoonish approach and vision.)
I was wrong on all counts--Netflix got it 100% right.
Daredevil is, in my opinion, a masterpiece of storytelling. The show-runners stripped away all the gimmicky b.s. that can infect even the best franchises, and left us with the nitty gritty. More Batman Begins than Batman and Robin, to say the least, but even more raw and bare than BB. Matt Murdock is not trying to save the world, or even all of New York City. He's out to clean up one neighborhood, Hell's Kitchen. He has incredibly heightened senses but instead of some cartoonish display of sonar, we are treated to small doses of him listening to heart beats, or intakes of breath, or the sound of an enemy's weapon scraping against the concrete. We never see what Matt "sees" but once, when he's recounting how all of his senses work together to form a whole he describes it thusly: "A world on fire" and if that doesn't give you shivers...
Matt wears all black, but no super hero costume--not right away--and so gets the shit kicked out of him as much as he delivers. He's human. He bleeds. A lot. But he keeps fighting. As his dad taught him, it's not about getting knocked down, it's how you get back up that counts. And the fights themselves are miniature masterpieces of hand-to-hand combat not seen too often in this day and age of guns, lasers, and magical hammers.
Often using extended tracking shots, and shot in dim, dark lighting, the fight scenes are brutal, raw and real, with lots of broken bones. No one defies gravity or flies across rooms. The fighters make mistakes, they breathe heavily, they take pauses to muster their strength for round two without every breaking the kinetic spell of the dance. It's a joy to watch insomuch as guys beating the snot out of each other is a "joy" but I appreciate them for the effort and choreography that are put into each one. We're not seeing variations on the same punch-kick-punch. We're also getting a visceral sense of how painful and exhausting it is for Matt to fight crime this way. He abhors killing (and doesn't do it). He hates guns. He believes in justice. His night-time hunts against child traffickers and arms dealers are that much more intense, with more going on, than a bunch of people shooting at one another and our hero barreling through them in a suped-up hot rod. There's more at stake, for while Matt has superhuman abilities, you never forget that he is, essentially, a blind guy throwing himself at hordes of organized criminals that have infected his beloved neighborhood.
Character-Driven
The casting of every character is another reason Daredevil rises above the fiction to create real humans living their stories. They are wonderfully cast, seemingly with an eye toward interesting faces that might have been pulled straight out of a comic book artist's imagination. Wesley (Toby Leonard Moore) is Fisk's first in command, and is a paragon of cool, smarmy efficiency behind his elegant glasses. Vondie Curtis-Hall plays a seen-it-all reporter who wears his weariness for fighting the good fight against impossible odds in every craggy nook of his face. Rosario Dawson is a nurse/love interest to Matt, and plays her internal conflicts so beautifully, you can practically read her every thought. And these are the minor characters.
The leads are just as good.
Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) is the brave--but smart and rightfully cautious--third party in the Nelson/Murdock law firm, who seeks justice too, but is refreshingly free of the smart-ass, "spitfire" heroine trope. Her courage is real, but so is her fear and vulnerability.
Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) is the perfect doofus/comic relief sidekick--or so you think--until the episodes unfold a real depth of character that goes well beyond one-liners. Episode Ten, in which we flashback to Matt and Foggy's college years is nigh perfect. Intercut with Foggy learning Matt's vigilante identity, it is a masterpiece of revelations. It shows the founding of Matt and Foggy's camaraderie and friendship while simultaneously--and heartbreakingly--tearing it down as Foggy feels betrayed by Matt's double-life. Not since the Richard Harrow/Jimmy Darmody of Boardwalk Empire have I seen this level of true male friendship: deep and real and unabashedly emotional.
Kingpin is the Daredevil villain (though we don't hear that name right away in the same way no one calls Matt "Daredevil" straight out the gate). His real name is Wilson Fisk, a huge, bald, towering monster of a man who is also...not entirely a monster. Daredevil is too smart a show to render Fisk a stereotype of badness. We see him alone, lonely; we see his flashbacks as a chubby child with an abusive father. We hear his ideas for cleaning up Hell's Kitchen, for though he kills the innocent to get what he wants, his intentions are not that different from Matt's. And Vincent D'Onofrio is the actor who pulls this off brilliantly, making Fisk simultaneously scary as hell, but also a guy you empathize with, on some level. D'Onofrio, probably best known for Full Metal Jacket, is one of those crazy-good actors who don't do things the way you think they're going to do them. Fisk is a mess of insecurity, violence and growling intimidation, in short: a real person doing bad things for what he thinks are the right reasons.
And Matt Murdock himself, Charlie Cox, with his low, velvety smooth voice and calm-on-the-surface demeanor is a thrill to watch and root for. He's tortured but not so much that we're bombarded with tortured angst every other minute. He's charming, sweet, noble...and also ready to pummel the hell out of the bad guys for ruining his neighborhood. His conflict, contained as it is, comes out in conversations with his priest, with Claire (Rosario Dawson's nurse), or in the violence of his street fights. But when he's in his normal clothes in the light of day, working in his start-up law firm, he comes across as an affable good guy--a blind man who conceals his unbelievable talents behind an honest humility and complete lack of superhero ego. He's just a guy trying to do a job, and that sensibility drives the show in every aspect. Defines it. Strips it of pretense and takes risks by letting the characters drive what would seem, on the surface, an action show.
And the result is truly breathtaking.
On Marvel's Daredevil...This is Great Storytelling, Part I
I'm a comic geek. Not huge; I haven't mentally categorized every Marvel comic book with encyclopedic skill, but enough so that when I'd heard Netflix was going to make its own Daredevil series--I was pretty excited. I was even more excited, in a purely--ahem--aesthetic level, to learn that Charlie Cox would play the super hero. (Owen Slater of Boardwalk Empire fame, and departed too soon--but then, didn't they all?)
In brief, for the uninitiated: Daredevil is about a man named Matt Murdock, a Hell's Kitchen native and son of a B-list boxer--a man who took more punches than he gave. At the age of nine, Matt saves an old man from being hit by a truck carrying barrels of radioactive chemicals. A good dollop of these chemicals hits little Matt in the eyes, rendering him blind, but also heightening his other senses to stratospheric levels. A kung fu master (and fellow blind man) teaches Matt to fight and use his abilities, which Matt then puts into service by beating up bad guys in his beloved Hell's Kitchen at night, while working as a defense attorney with his college pal, Foggy Nelson, by day.
I didn't have many expectations, though Netflix seemed to be on a roll with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, so I prepared for some good ole Marvel-comic-book-snappy-Guardians-of-the-Galaxy-style smart-alecky pop-violence (where people get beat up but you don't see any real blood). Or, more likely, a reboot of sorts of the terrible Ben Affleck movie (not terrible because of Affleck, but terrible in the same way the Clooney Batman movie was terrible--its cartoonish approach and vision.)
I was wrong on all counts--Netflix got it 100% right.
Daredevil is, in my opinion, a masterpiece of storytelling. The show-runners stripped away all the gimmicky b.s. that can infect even the best franchises, and left us with the nitty gritty. More Batman Begins than Batman and Robin, to say the least, but even more raw and bare than BB. Matt Murdock is not trying to save the world, or even all of New York City. He's out to clean up one neighborhood, Hell's Kitchen. He has incredibly heightened senses but instead of some cartoonish display of sonar, we are treated to small doses of him listening to heart beats, or intakes of breath, or the sound of an enemy's weapon scraping against the concrete. We never see what Matt "sees" but once, when he's recounting how all of his senses work together to form a whole he describes it thusly: "A world on fire" and if that doesn't give you shivers...
Matt wears all black, but no super hero costume--not right away--and so gets the shit kicked out of him as much as he delivers. He's human. He bleeds. A lot. But he keeps fighting. As his dad taught him, it's not about getting knocked down, it's how you get back up that counts. And the fights themselves are miniature masterpieces of hand-to-hand combat not seen too often in this day and age of guns, lasers, and magical hammers.
Often using extended tracking shots, and shot in dim, dark lighting, the fight scenes are brutal, raw and real, with lots of broken bones. No one defies gravity or flies across rooms. The fighters make mistakes, they breathe heavily, they take pauses to muster their strength for round two without every breaking the kinetic spell of the dance. It's a joy to watch insomuch as guys beating the snot out of each other is a "joy" but I appreciate them for the effort and choreography that are put into each one. We're not seeing variations on the same punch-kick-punch. We're also getting a visceral sense of how painful and exhausting it is for Matt to fight crime this way. He abhors killing (and doesn't do it). He hates guns. He believes in justice. His night-time hunts against child traffickers and arms dealers are that much more intense, with more going on, than a bunch of people shooting at one another and our hero barreling through them in a suped-up hot rod. There's more at stake, for while Matt has superhuman abilities, you never forget that he is, essentially, a blind guy throwing himself at hordes of organized criminals that have infected his beloved neighborhood.
Character-Driven
The casting of every character is another reason Daredevil rises above the fiction to create real humans living their stories. They are wonderfully cast, seemingly with an eye toward interesting faces that might have been pulled straight out of a comic book artist's imagination. Wesley (Toby Leonard Moore) is Fisk's first in command, and is a paragon of cool, smarmy efficiency behind his elegant glasses. Vondie Curtis-Hall plays a seen-it-all reporter who wears his weariness for fighting the good fight against impossible odds in every craggy nook of his face. Rosario Dawson is a nurse/love interest to Matt, and plays her internal conflicts so beautifully, you can practically read her every thought. And these are the minor characters.
The leads are just as good.
Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) is the brave--but smart and rightfully cautious--third party in the Nelson/Murdock law firm, who seeks justice too, but is refreshingly free of the smart-ass, "spitfire" heroine trope. Her courage is real, but so is her fear and vulnerability.
Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) is the perfect doofus/comic relief sidekick--or so you think--until the episodes unfold a real depth of character that goes well beyond one-liners. Episode Ten, in which we flashback to Matt and Foggy's college years is nigh perfect. Intercut with Foggy learning Matt's vigilante identity, it is a masterpiece of revelations. It shows the founding of Matt and Foggy's camaraderie and friendship while simultaneously--and heartbreakingly--tearing it down as Foggy feels betrayed by Matt's double-life. Not since the Richard Harrow/Jimmy Darmody of Boardwalk Empire have I seen this level of true male friendship: deep and real and unabashedly emotional.
Kingpin is the Daredevil villain (though we don't hear that name right away in the same way no one calls Matt "Daredevil" straight out the gate). His real name is Wilson Fisk, a huge, bald, towering monster of a man who is also...not entirely a monster. Daredevil is too smart a show to render Fisk a stereotype of badness. We see him alone, lonely; we see his flashbacks as a chubby child with an abusive father. We hear his ideas for cleaning up Hell's Kitchen, for though he kills the innocent to get what he wants, his intentions are not that different from Matt's. And Vincent D'Onofrio is the actor who pulls this off brilliantly, making Fisk simultaneously scary as hell, but also a guy you empathize with, on some level. D'Onofrio, probably best known for Full Metal Jacket, is one of those crazy-good actors who don't do things the way you think they're going to do them. Fisk is a mess of insecurity, violence and growling intimidation, in short: a real person doing bad things for what he thinks are the right reasons.
And Matt Murdock himself, Charlie Cox, with his low, velvety smooth voice and calm-on-the-surface demeanor is a thrill to watch and root for. He's tortured but not so much that we're bombarded with tortured angst every other minute. He's charming, sweet, noble...and also ready to pummel the hell out of the bad guys for ruining his neighborhood. His conflict, contained as it is, comes out in conversations with his priest, with Claire (Rosario Dawson's nurse), or in the violence of his street fights. But when he's in his normal clothes in the light of day, working in his start-up law firm, he comes across as an affable good guy--a blind man who conceals his unbelievable talents behind an honest humility and complete lack of superhero ego. He's just a guy trying to do a job, and that sensibility drives the show in every aspect. Defines it. Strips it of pretense and takes risks by letting the characters drive what would seem, on the surface, an action show.
And the result is truly breathtaking.
Next up, how the writing does what few superhero shows have done, and what makes Daredevil a standout show in almost every sense of the word.
In brief, for the uninitiated: Daredevil is about a man named Matt Murdock, a Hell's Kitchen native and son of a B-list boxer--a man who took more punches than he gave. At the age of nine, Matt saves an old man from being hit by a truck carrying barrels of radioactive chemicals. A good dollop of these chemicals hits little Matt in the eyes, rendering him blind, but also heightening his other senses to stratospheric levels. A kung fu master (and fellow blind man) teaches Matt to fight and use his abilities, which Matt then puts into service by beating up bad guys in his beloved Hell's Kitchen at night, while working as a defense attorney with his college pal, Foggy Nelson, by day.
I didn't have many expectations, though Netflix seemed to be on a roll with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, so I prepared for some good ole Marvel-comic-book-snappy-Guardians-of-the-Galaxy-style smart-alecky pop-violence (where people get beat up but you don't see any real blood). Or, more likely, a reboot of sorts of the terrible Ben Affleck movie (not terrible because of Affleck, but terrible in the same way the Clooney Batman movie was terrible--its cartoonish approach and vision.)
I was wrong on all counts--Netflix got it 100% right.
Daredevil is, in my opinion, a masterpiece of storytelling. The show-runners stripped away all the gimmicky b.s. that can infect even the best franchises, and left us with the nitty gritty. More Batman Begins than Batman and Robin, to say the least, but even more raw and bare than BB. Matt Murdock is not trying to save the world, or even all of New York City. He's out to clean up one neighborhood, Hell's Kitchen. He has incredibly heightened senses but instead of some cartoonish display of sonar, we are treated to small doses of him listening to heart beats, or intakes of breath, or the sound of an enemy's weapon scraping against the concrete. We never see what Matt "sees" but once, when he's recounting how all of his senses work together to form a whole he describes it thusly: "A world on fire" and if that doesn't give you shivers...
Matt wears all black, but no super hero costume--not right away--and so gets the shit kicked out of him as much as he delivers. He's human. He bleeds. A lot. But he keeps fighting. As his dad taught him, it's not about getting knocked down, it's how you get back up that counts. And the fights themselves are miniature masterpieces of hand-to-hand combat not seen too often in this day and age of guns, lasers, and magical hammers.
Often using extended tracking shots, and shot in dim, dark lighting, the fight scenes are brutal, raw and real, with lots of broken bones. No one defies gravity or flies across rooms. The fighters make mistakes, they breathe heavily, they take pauses to muster their strength for round two without every breaking the kinetic spell of the dance. It's a joy to watch insomuch as guys beating the snot out of each other is a "joy" but I appreciate them for the effort and choreography that are put into each one. We're not seeing variations on the same punch-kick-punch. We're also getting a visceral sense of how painful and exhausting it is for Matt to fight crime this way. He abhors killing (and doesn't do it). He hates guns. He believes in justice. His night-time hunts against child traffickers and arms dealers are that much more intense, with more going on, than a bunch of people shooting at one another and our hero barreling through them in a suped-up hot rod. There's more at stake, for while Matt has superhuman abilities, you never forget that he is, essentially, a blind guy throwing himself at hordes of organized criminals that have infected his beloved neighborhood.
Character-Driven
The casting of every character is another reason Daredevil rises above the fiction to create real humans living their stories. They are wonderfully cast, seemingly with an eye toward interesting faces that might have been pulled straight out of a comic book artist's imagination. Wesley (Toby Leonard Moore) is Fisk's first in command, and is a paragon of cool, smarmy efficiency behind his elegant glasses. Vondie Curtis-Hall plays a seen-it-all reporter who wears his weariness for fighting the good fight against impossible odds in every craggy nook of his face. Rosario Dawson is a nurse/love interest to Matt, and plays her internal conflicts so beautifully, you can practically read her every thought. And these are the minor characters.
The leads are just as good.
Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) is the brave--but smart and rightfully cautious--third party in the Nelson/Murdock law firm, who seeks justice too, but is refreshingly free of the smart-ass, "spitfire" heroine trope. Her courage is real, but so is her fear and vulnerability.
Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) is the perfect doofus/comic relief sidekick--or so you think--until the episodes unfold a real depth of character that goes well beyond one-liners. Episode Ten, in which we flashback to Matt and Foggy's college years is nigh perfect. Intercut with Foggy learning Matt's vigilante identity, it is a masterpiece of revelations. It shows the founding of Matt and Foggy's camaraderie and friendship while simultaneously--and heartbreakingly--tearing it down as Foggy feels betrayed by Matt's double-life. Not since the Richard Harrow/Jimmy Darmody of Boardwalk Empire have I seen this level of true male friendship: deep and real and unabashedly emotional.
Kingpin is the Daredevil villain (though we don't hear that name right away in the same way no one calls Matt "Daredevil" straight out the gate). His real name is Wilson Fisk, a huge, bald, towering monster of a man who is also...not entirely a monster. Daredevil is too smart a show to render Fisk a stereotype of badness. We see him alone, lonely; we see his flashbacks as a chubby child with an abusive father. We hear his ideas for cleaning up Hell's Kitchen, for though he kills the innocent to get what he wants, his intentions are not that different from Matt's. And Vincent D'Onofrio is the actor who pulls this off brilliantly, making Fisk simultaneously scary as hell, but also a guy you empathize with, on some level. D'Onofrio, probably best known for Full Metal Jacket, is one of those crazy-good actors who don't do things the way you think they're going to do them. Fisk is a mess of insecurity, violence and growling intimidation, in short: a real person doing bad things for what he thinks are the right reasons.
And Matt Murdock himself, Charlie Cox, with his low, velvety smooth voice and calm-on-the-surface demeanor is a thrill to watch and root for. He's tortured but not so much that we're bombarded with tortured angst every other minute. He's charming, sweet, noble...and also ready to pummel the hell out of the bad guys for ruining his neighborhood. His conflict, contained as it is, comes out in conversations with his priest, with Claire (Rosario Dawson's nurse), or in the violence of his street fights. But when he's in his normal clothes in the light of day, working in his start-up law firm, he comes across as an affable good guy--a blind man who conceals his unbelievable talents behind an honest humility and complete lack of superhero ego. He's just a guy trying to do a job, and that sensibility drives the show in every aspect. Defines it. Strips it of pretense and takes risks by letting the characters drive what would seem, on the surface, an action show.
And the result is truly breathtaking.
Next up, how the writing does what few superhero shows have done, and what makes Daredevil a standout show in almost every sense of the word.
April 8, 2015
Unbreakable, excerpt...
“Help us! Help him!” I screamed again, and could have wept with relief as officers started my way. “You’re going to be okay,” I told Cory. “You’re going to be just fine.” Cory’s response was to slump against me heavily, his head lolling to the side. His breath had quieted to the barest whisper. “No! Cory, wake up!” No response. His eyes were open halfway, glazed with pain, and his mouth worked silently as he struggled weakly to draw breath. Then I found myself in a sea of legs as S.W.A.T. and medical personnel surrounded us. They took Cory from my clutching arms and bent over him, working frantically. An officer knelt beside me and asked me questions but I hardly heard him. I just watched, horror twisting my heart, as an EMT opened Cory’s shirt and jabbed something into his chest. Blood spurted and Cory gasped, jolting upright, and then sinking back down, his breath deeper now. “Alex…” I shoved my way through and took his hand in my bloody ones, trying not to stare at the instrument—that looked like a pen casing—jutting from his right pectoral. “I’m here. I’m right here.” He smiled faintly and then winced in a soundless scream as they lifted him onto to a gurney. They raised the head so that he was partially upright, while another EMT bent him forward to staunch the wound in his back. Then we were moving. I jogged alongside into the morning sunshine for the first time in four days, and then into an ambulance. It seemed the blood would never stop flowing. Blood from behind Cory, blood leaking around the tube in his chest. They put an oxygen mask over his mouth and that became stained red as he coughed. I clutched his hand tightly, so tightly. “Please don’t go,” I whispered. “Please stay with me. Cory, please. Stay…”He wheezed for breath. It sounded so labored and thick with blood. His dull gaze landed on our entwined hands and his lips curved up ever so slightly, a weak version of his crooked grin. He held on. Weakly, struggling, in agony, he held on, drawing upon the great reservoirs of love and bravery I knew he possessed. He held on for his little girl. For his father.
And I liked to think that maybe, if only a little, he held on because I refused to let him go.
And I liked to think that maybe, if only a little, he held on because I refused to let him go.
