1. It’s Bastille Day, commemorating that great day in the cause of liberty when an urban mob stormed a mostly-empty prison that was already slated for demolition, freed a handful of criminals and lunatics, then burned it to the ground. Sure, why not?

2. Speaking of which, Ridley Scott is apparently coming out with a biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte starring the Joker in the title role (fair enough). Napoleon’s an interesting, contradictory character with a lot to admire and a lot to condemn, from my own limited overview of his career. But the guy who did Kingdom of Heaven (quoth a commentary I heard from a group of Medieval historians: “There are a surprising number of modern nihilists in 12th century outremer“) tackling the French Revolution does not inspire confidence.

3. Looking over his filmography, Scott strikes me as the Richard Burton of directors: when he’s good, he’s very, very good, (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, etc.) but when he’s bad, he’s horrid (1492, Hannibal, Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood, Prometheus, Exodus: Gods and Kings, etc.), but horrid in a sophisticated, spectacular way that leaves the result technically impressive even as it consumes itself and everything around it.

4. I re-watched Puss in Boots: The Last Wish this past week (along with another film which I’ll probably do a full post on). That really is one of the miracle pictures of the ‘how the heck did this turn out so good?’ variety. About ninety-minutes long (not counting the credits) and you have four separate groups of characters, three of whom are after the macguffin while one has his own agenda, satisfying arcs for almost all the characters, and the ones who don’t really have arcs have story-based reasons for not having them. Plus it balances at least two or three very different tones beautifully, going from comedy to sentiment to horror and back again without any of them getting in the way of the others. At one point there’s this hilariously irreverent battle where people are exploding into confetti, then right in the middle of it the Wolf shows up, everything goes quiet, and we take a hard-left into horror, with the hero experiencing a full-blown panic attack that is played completely straight. You wouldn’t think this would work, but it really does.

5. One reason is that, while the film jumps between tones, the characters are very consistent. Jack Horner is hilariously horrible, and his crimes are pretty much always played for laughs as being so over-the-top as to be funny. The Wolf, on the other hand, is never played for laughs. I think he has one, maybe two jokes in the whole thing, and they only serve to underline his menace. And Puss himself reacts to them in an appropriate way: Horner gets slapstick, high-adventure action, the Wolf prompts full-on panic.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein did something similar, where with a few exceptions, the monsters were all played completely straight as real threats. Contrast this with, say, Force Awakens, where Oscar Isaacs cracks jokes in the face of emo-Vader mere seconds after watching him murder an unarmed man. Part of the trick, as indicated, seems to be to compartmentalize the humor and the drama among the supporting characters, so that the audience knows, “Character A shows up, this is going to be fun. Character B shows up, we need to be worried.”

6. Come to think of it, that might be one of the reasons the Wolf has made such an impact: in addition to his great design, voice acting, dialogue, and thematic heft, when was the last time you saw a villain in a kids’ movie who is purely menacing and never made the butt of a joke, while still being impactful? I might be missing something (it’s not like I’ve made an exhaustive survey), but I think you might have to go back to Pixar’s heyday, with Hopper in A Bug’s Life, or even back to the Disney Renaissance. Not that you can’t have great and impressive villains who get played for laughs at times (thinking Syndrome in The Incredibles or Lord Shen in Kung Fu Panda 2, sticking to recent ones), but it’s definitely rare to see in an animated film these days.

Back in Disney’s heyday, of course, you had characters like the evil Queen, Lady Tremain, Maleficent, Monstro, Shere Khan, and so on, as well as more humorous bad guys like Cruella de Ville, Captain Hook, and the Queen of Hearts. It’s all in how you do it, but it’s definitely refreshing to get an antagonist this impressive who is also played completely straight.

7. Incidentally, I think one of the reasons modern fiction is often extremely bad at tone is that writers and filmmakers are consciously trying to ‘play to the audience’. They are not trying to construct a consistent story to create a certain effect, but trying to prompt responses from the reader / viewer (e.g. the guy in Godzilla vs. Kong making a self-aware quip upon someone being killed by a giant robot right in front of him). This isn’t just in terms of tone, either; going back to Star Wars, one of the most egregious examples of this is Rian Johnson’s writing in The Last Jedi, where, for instance, he makes the big, dramatic revelation that Rey’s parents “were nobody”. That’s an upset to the audience who have been running their fan theories for two years, but it makes no sense for the character, because the important point to her would not be that her parents be someone the audience has heard of, or even someone important in the world of the story. Her parents, whoever they were, would not be ‘nobody’ to Rey.

In short, you have to distinguish between the experience of the audience and the experience of the characters.