Arleen Sorkin, the Voice of Harley Quinn

Just a quick one this week to pay tribute to Arleen Sorkin, the actress who originated the role of Harley Quinn on a variety of DCAU shows. I didn't know much about Sorkin, but like a lot of fans I loved the Harley Quinn character and was excited to see her show up in the comics. 

She also became a queer icon, thanks to her team-ups and implied (later confirmed) relationship with Poison Ivy. That episode, Harley and Ivy, had her breaking up briefly with the Joker to become a criminal mastermind in her own right, and is held up as one of the classics from the show. It would also form the basis for a spin-off that never materialized, and for the Harley Quinn TV show on Max (originally DC Universe).

The character also got a new lease on life when Margot Robbie played her in the first Suicide Squad film, and came back for Birds of Prey and the second Suicide Squad movie. There have also been a bunch of almost-versions and not-quite versions in other DC/Batman-related shows over the years, so it's fair to say that Sorkin's character was something of a hit. Not bad going at all, but par for the course of a show that also gave us Kevin Conroy, probably the best Batman of my generation.

Reading Sorkin's Wikipedia entry, it turns out she was a co-host of America's Funniest People with Dave Coulier, so I must have seen her on that, though admittedly my memories of that show are hazy at best.

In any case, while Sorkin may not have been a household name in her own right, it must have been nice to see the character she originated hit such a chord with viewers, to the point that she's probably one of the most recognizable DC characters outside the Big Three of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. 

She may have retired from playing the character after 2011, but it's still sad to see her go so young, especially so soon after Conroy's passing. But we'll always have Harley... especially my particular favorite episode, Harley's Holiday.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Marvel's Diminishing Returns

I just caught Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 last night on Disney Plus. It's my third MCU movie this year, after Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but not including Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (and as a quick aside, why does every sequel have to have a sub-title these days? What's wrong with 2, or even II?). I've seen all of the MCU films at least once, and have kept up with them pretty assiduously since the pandemic and the simultaneous releases on streaming. I've also kept up pretty closely with all the tie-in TV shows, from WandaVision on down to Secret Invasion.

I can't help feeling, though, that maybe the world needs a bit of a break from all of this. The irony is that Guardians 3 was probably my favorite of that specific sub-series, and certainly the best MCU movie in a while, at least since Spider-Man: No Way Home.

The thing is that the MCU has been drifting a bit since Endgame. There's been a lot of retrenching from the events of that movie, particularly Thor and Spider-Man. There's also been some recovery from real-world events, like Chadwick Boseman's untimely death, which threw a spanner in the works for the Black Panther sequel. Some of the TV shows and movies have also hinted at the next Big Bad to come, which is meant to be Kang.

However, very little of this has been as exciting as the first three phases. First of all, it's hard to muster much enthusiasm for Kang after Thanos. There's a bit of a cliche about the way all Marvel villains are sympathetic in the same way, and if you pick apart Thanos's motives then they don't really hold up, but it's hard to argue that a guy who's so powerful and cruel that he just wipes out half the universe with a snap of his fingers is boring. 

Not so for Kang. His motivations haven't really come through, beyond the fact that he wants to rule the multiverse/timeline/whatever. There are some Kangs who are good, and most who are bad, and at least one Kang that we've seen is a later version of the one that the Avengers are set to fight in Secret Wars, which is scheduled for 2027.

The other problem's the characters they've hung these movies around. Only two of the seven movies in Phase 4 have been around real deep cuts/previously unseen characters: Shang-Chi and the Eternals. Black Widow felt like an afterthought given her death in Endgame, though, and Thor: Love and Thunder missed out on a lot of what made Ragnarok charming, while also burning another actress (Natalie Portman) and character (Jane) that the series didn't really do right by. As for Black Panther, because I had a particularly bad run-in with anti-vax ideology during the pandemic, I can't separate Shuri from Leticia Wright, so I was pretty uncomfortable with that.

I also thought Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness gave us none of the crazy psychedelia promised by the first Dr Strange movie, and also walked back some of the character work that the Scarlet Witch went through in WandaVision (as far as I could tell; it all came through a bit garbled). Eternals was just kinda boring. I liked Shang-Chi, but appearances by Wong and the Abomination aside, it didn't do much to show that it was part of the shared universe.

The worst of the lot, though, wasn't a movie at all. It was Secret Invasion, which was billed as Nick Fury's triumphant return but, like so many of the post-Endgame movies, showed that the creators had no idea what to do with the characters or plot lines. It could have been the spiritual successor to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but it just ended up killing off Cobie Smulders and Ben Mendelsohn's characters, who'd otherwise been classing the joint up. I hope to see more of Olivia Colman, but will the creators know what to do with her?

So what did I like about Guardians 3? It felt like the first movie in a while that made us care about the characters and their relationships to one another. By making it all about Rocket's origin and his link to the villain, the High Evolutionary, it gave us some nice glimpses into his motivation for sticking with the Guardians. It also got to give all of the characters scenes with each other, showing how they've changed over the course of the MCU. Most importantly, it made for a nice stopping point, as we said goodbye to a couple of actors (Dave Bautista and Zoe Saldaña) and characters (Peter Quill, though he'll probably be back). It ends (spoilers) with a new team, but it also feels like a fitting goodbye, which rang true for me, even though the Guardians movies were never my favorites.

I know that Disney has announced it will be scaling back new Marvel and Star Wars movies and shows for the time being, but part of me wishes they'd just stopped altogether for a couple of years (on the Marvel stuff; Star Wars can be another discussion when I've watched Ahsoka). Leaving the pandemic aside, they could have taken some time to figure out what the next big arc should be, who should be involved, and most crucially, how to involve the X-Men and Spider-Man characters in future. BTW I still think it would have been neat if Endgame could have worked the X-Men into the MCU, via multiversal shenanigans.

Maybe we'd have missed out on genuinely good shows like WandaVision, Loki and Hawkeye, but maybe that would have been worth it if the films themselves had been executed better. Instead of burning off good actors and beloved characters, we could have gotten the version of Secret Invasion that lived up to the hype while also giving us a proper send-off for Samuel L Jackson and Nick Fury.

It might all be academic. The WGA/SAG-Aftra strike is ongoing, so there's little work being done anyway, and very few of the coming movies seem that interesting, though I'm intrigued to see what The Marvels will be like. But overall, it all feels very far from the sense of fun that I got from Iron Man, way back in 2008, and that post-credits scene where Nick Fury shows up to tease the Avengers project. The difference is that there weren't the same expectations back then, whereas now everything Marvel has to be the biggest event.

I just don't think they're going to maintain that momentum.

Strange New Worlds Season 2: Too Much Nostalgia?

I was kinda surprised to see I hadn't given my thoughts on the first season of Strange New Worlds, but better late than never, I guess. Of course there are spoilers here, for both seasons, so if you've watched them come check it out after the jump:

Thoughts on Apple Apps

I've got a number of things I wanted to write about, but I'm not quite done reading or watching them all, so I thought instead I'd talk about something that's been on my mind a lot recently: Apple's various services.

If you have an iPhone, or are generally plugged into the Apple ecosystem, you've probably gotten alerts about free trials for certain services. They also do a pretty good job of tying these trials to specific devices that you've just acquired: when I got my Apple TV a couple of years ago, I also got a free 12-month trial of Apple TV Plus, which meant I could watch Ted Lasso like basically everyone else during the pandemic.

So for this post I'll summarize a few of these services and what I've discovered by using them. Some of it's good, some of it's bad, but it should all give a good idea of what Apple's focusing on these days, given that the phone/hardware market is probably not going to be enough to sustain it in the long term.

Apple TV Plus

As mentioned, I picked this up a couple of years ago when I got my Apple TV. I hadn't been desperate to sign up for Apple TV Plus, because its opening slate of shows didn't exactly light the world on fire. But then Ted Lasso became everyone's favorite show during the pandemic, and it became a favorite of mine too. 

I actually cancelled my subscription after finishing season 2 of Ted Lasso, but renewed it for season 3, and then kept it because I wanted to finish a couple of other shows. I liked the first season of Little America, and of course I love Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon, its creators, so that's on the list, along with Foundation and For All Mankind (which apparently got good). I'm also interested in Slow Horses, since I read one of the books in that series in 2021, but the main thing I'm watching right now is the Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman travel shows, starting with Long Way Round.

It does seem like Apple has some decent shows on there now, and it doesn't seem to be wielding the cancellation hammer like Netflix or Max, so that's nice. It's also interesting how the feed can pull in content from other apps, if you let it, though my experience was that it was super buggy with HBO Max (but then, that had so many bugs they could have called it Starship Troopers).

I don't know how long the trial period Apple offers is currently, but it's worth a look. It's also pretty cheap compared to all the other streamers, so that's another point in its favor.

Apple Fitness Plus

This was a bit of a misfire, in my opinion. I got a few months of it when I replaced my Apple Watch, and gave it a few tries, but ended up cancelling the trial early. There are some extremely clever aspects, like how it syncs your Apple TV to your Apple Watch, so that you can see your calories burned and your heart rate onscreen. It also has a bunch of different types of workouts, from yoga to HIIT to whatever, so you're not locked into one type of exercise.

That said, a lot of those workout types weren't very convenient for me, since I live on the top floor of a condo building and I don't have loads of space or equipment. I had to keep all my HIIT workouts to the low-impact versions (usually demonstrated on the side by a second trainer), so that I wouldn't annoy my neighbors or burst through their ceiling one quiet Sunday morning. Some workouts looked like they required a treadmill, which is cool, but I'm not taking my iPad to the gym, where it can get lost or stolen or broken. I'd like to have kept it, but I just couldn't use the damn thing to its full potential.

Apple Arcade

I got this one with my new iPhone a couple of years ago, and promptly loaded its constituent games on my iPad. I've also since signed up for it for a month or two at a time, to enjoy certain specific games (Kingdom Rush Frontiers and Kingdom Rush Vengeance, primarily). There are some fun exclusives, but the draw with those two Kingdom Rush games is that all the heroes and towers are unlocked, so you're not making in-app purchases.

Another game I spent a good amount of time on was the updated Oregon Trail. The Apple Arcade version looks great and its soundtrack sounds like a lost mid-2000s folk rock album, plus it has updated educational material about the Native tribes you'd have interacted with, as well as about race relations, gender relations and more. Maybe the only problem is that it's too addictive.

Now that I have a new iPad, with a little more horsepower, I want to check out Apple Arcade again sometime. It's also $5 a month, which feels like a ridiculously cheap price to get so many games.

Apple News

Not sure why I got offered a free trial to this one, but when I got the alert I decided to check it out, since it promises unlimited access to a bunch of news outlets that otherwise have paywalls or article limits.

It should be good, since I can check out the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal (on those rare occasions when I want to read it) and more. But it's really not. Of all the apps I'm writing about here, this is the worst, because of the lack of searchability and the fact that it doesn't integrate with other apps where you might find news.

To give you an example, I saw a New Yorker headline on my Facebook news feed. I tried to click on it, but I was at my article limit for the month or something. I went looking for it on Apple News, but News doesn't have a search function, so after sifting through a few issues' tables of contents, I realized I didn't know what issue it would have been in, so I had to search for it on Safari. When I found it there, I still couldn't read it because of the article limit. You'd think that two Apple apps could integrate, but you'd be wrong.

The original idea, of revenue-sharing with news outlets and aggregating news based on your interests, is good, but the execution is terrible. Avoid.

Apple Music and Apple Music Classical

From the worst to the best. I got a 6-month trial of Apple Music when I bought my Beats Fit Pro earbuds, and it immediately became my go-to music app, supplanting both Spotify and YouTube (for the most part). Unlike News, Music has a great search function, and unlike Spotify, it has pretty much every musical act I could want. I haven't spent a lot of time with its podcasts (nor did I listen to Spotify's), and its curated playlists are okay, so I can't speak to those, but I love the completeness of each artist's discography.

Another reason to get this app is that, if you like classical music, their Apple Music Classical companion app is included, though it's a separate app that you have to download, and it's designed for iPhone, so it looks weird on my iPad and doesn't exist on desktop. That said, it fixes the one glaring gap with the original Music app, which is that classical music discovery was pretty bad. This, on the other hand, lets you search by composer, genre, century, musician, etc. For the last few weeks I've been going through all the George Gershwin compositions, many of which are available in multiple recordings, and it's been fun to see how they all stack up against one another.

The other thing I like about Apple Music (the original) is that because it's natively on my laptop, tablet and phone, I can just listen to it whenever I want. That's particularly handy in the car, since I can connect my phone via bluetooth and play whatever I want when I'm driving, as long as I have signal. And unlike Spotify's free tier, Apple Music isn't ad-supported and it doesn't force you to listen to albums or playlists on randomly generated playlists. I've been a bit sad to leave behind my Spotify playlists, but I've had so much other music to listen to that I haven't had time to go back and recreate them in Apple Music.

This one is well worth the $10 a month, especially with its Classical companion. Which makes sense, since music was a key part of Apple's resurgence 20 years ago with the iPod and iTunes. They may not get all their services right, but it's good to see that this one is done so well.