analysis

Master of The Love Letter

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Let’s take a break from my discussions of software and Project Management to talk about the 2026 Masters of the Universe film and why it has artistic legitimacy. There, that’s not what you expected, was it?

So the film had it’s challenges. It had sort of OK reviews. It didn’t seem to quite make the money it needs. It had Jared Leto, which is inadvisable on all occasions. But also I had friends who saw it and quite enjoyed it. What’s my take?

The film is actually quite enjoyable. It’s breezy, it looks good (though some CGI seems to have been added quickly), the cast is absolutely on, it’s very colorful and fun. Honestly it was a popcorn movie without the sense of getting tossed into a huge extended universe, even if some elements hint at such ambition.

What really stood out to me was how it was an absolutely love letter to the original series – one I am ironically familiar with due to cultural impact and remakes as the original came after my time. It looks cartoony. It’s loaded with sincere weirdness. Skeletor is overdramatic, a theater kid with dark occult power. It even has a kind of early 80’s vibe to the music and the credits. There’s no way this could be made without people who cared and did their research.

It’s also filled with plenty of extrapolations and little details. The goofy names of the heroic Masters are not their actually names – they’re what a young Prince Adam nicknamed them (before he got stranded on Earth). Refugee Adam, stuck on earth, grows up to be an HR professional – leveraging his genial and kind nature. There are deep cut highly obscure characters – you may not care about someone called Goat-Man but he looks like a badass Gwar extra.

The movie is first and foremost a love letter to the original – and I think that’s where it has artistic legitimacy.

The movie takes a toy marketing commercial with a plot and brings it to life. It has a feel of someone playing with their action figures, with wild action and silly and fun twists. It doesn’t shy away from any of the strangeness it embraces it. Wrapping the plot around a young Adam, who remembers this fantastical world but seems crazy for telling people about it adds a kind of longing to the whole affair.

Did it need to go to theaters? No. Did it need to be an attempt to launch more films? No. Did it need Jared Leto? No, he’s a creep. I think it could have been done for streaming services and be done with it.

But watching it, feeling that love and affection, feeling that sincerity? There was something artistically worthy here. Even if it’s based on a “toyetic cartoon” there was something there.

I think now I have to consider the “Love Letter” it’s own meta-genre. And I may need to rethinking other shows and films and books.

Steven Savage

Fackham Hall: Learn From The Stupid

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

So I recently saw Fackham Hall. It’s a movie that was advertised as sort of “Naked Gun But For Stuffy British Stuff.” I am pleased to report I enjoyed it, it was also very stupid, and there’s actually something to learn from it. Enough that I want to share.

So first of all, if you wonder “will I like it,” I’d say that Fackham Hall is actually in the vein of the 2025 Deathstalker film that was an homage to old direct-to video fantasy. There is an intended audience, and if you are in that audience, you will enjoy it. If you are not, don’t bother. This is a film for people who’ve watched a lot of Stuffy British Stuff and have a sense of humor about it.

Now when it comes to a comedy the question is are the jokes any good? Fackham Hall has a lot of jokes in it, of extremely varied quality, but you won’t be lacking jokes. Not all of them are good, I’d say that the overall humor is “OK,” there’s plenty of laughs. There’s an over-reliance on crudity for the most part that I found offputting, but there are plenty of actually good jokes.

Two things stand out from the humor. The first is that there are jokes where the setup is actually part of the humor, where you realize how far the movie went for a joke or a sudden case where one thing suddenly becomes funny due to one tiny action. The second is there are a few scenes that authentically stand out, most notable an extended dialogue joke in the vein of “Who’s on first” that had me in tears. There is effort here, albeit it makes some of the low-effort jokes more obvious.

Fackham Hall does have two larger lessons, a minor one and a major one I want to explore. These are enough that they provide lessons for other comedies.

The minor lesson is that Fackham Hall actually has a plot that drives the story forward, if erratically. The Davenport family risks losing their beloved estate unless their daughter marries the cousin due to inherit it – and the disruption of a roguish young visitor and an eventual murder add chaos to the countdown. Some characters have their own concerns and sidestories. There’s enough here to power a general movie, and that gives the film plenty of energy, even if the actual plot could have been used more in the jokes.

The major lesson is the cast and the acting. For all it’s silliness the cast acts as seriously as if they were in a dramatic film. It’s not deadpan, it’s a talented lot of actors acting as if this is a film of drama and danger and intrigue and love. Watching people do the stupidest things with great sincerity and gravitas takes the film farther and makes even lame jokes actually funnier.

Thomasin McKenzie and Ben Radcliffe take on the role of inevitable lovers, and show actual chemistry and charm together. Emma Laird, who’s character’s marriage shenanigans drive the early part of the film has a scene of emotional breakdown where she is crying and screaming while also upending the common tropes of said scene. Tim McMullan plays Cyril, the family butler with absolute seriousness while also being the butt of a movie-long joke he leans into and keeps going.

The absolute standout is Damian Lewis as the Davenport family patriarch, Humphrey. Lewis invests this somewhat befuddled and inbred character with charm and sensitivity, making him actually likeable. There’s even a scene where he expresses his fatherly love to one of his daughters that is touching. Jokes be damned, Lewis was acting and nothing stopped him, not even the script.

What made Fackham Hall work was – ironically – what makes a good movie. Give it a plot and get actors who will act. It can even elevate some poor jokes or missed opportunities. I enjoyed this enough that I actually got curious to see the actors in other works, especially Mr. Lewis.

It’s not every day you can take lessons in comedy from a film that includes J.R.R. Tolkien farting, but here you go. My kudos to the cast.

Steven Savage

It All Falls Apart In The End

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

We’ve all experienced a time when things fall apart. Ancient software gives up the ghost after a harmless update. A roadway collapses despite people knowing it needed work. Larger disasters, such as the pandemic, confound us as things are just falling apart.

Why is it that the infrastructure of our lives goes to hell, even when we know it’s coming? Even when we made some effort to fix them?

I have a theory because of my work in IT, my interest in infrastructure, and my career in planning. Simply, we kick problems down the road until they accumulate, and many happen all at once.

Allow me to explain.

Imagine there’s a problem – a decaying road, an aging piece of software, an outdated government policy. The best idea would be to fix it, and maybe even make it better (aka “ruggedization). That is the best thing to do- but we don’t.

What we do is we partially fix things and kick a lot of the work down the road. We patch that concrete, we tweak the database connector, we throw in a new form and that’s it. The heavy lifting, the replacement, the reorg or whatever can come later.

Of course, when it’s time to do the real work, we kick it down the road a little more. No one wants to vote for that tax increase, no one wants to tell the boss how much that new software will cost. A half-baked attempt is made, and then we wait.

Because we’re not really fixing a problem, breakdowns come faster and faster. Software crashes more and more. Delivery lines snarl and fail yearly instead of every year or two. But we keep delaying a fix.

But it gets worse, because if you’re trying to avoid fixing one problem, you’re probably avoiding others. All those problems you don’t return, and they keep coming faster as well. Eventually, a lot goes wrong at once, and everything goes to hell.

In short, if you keep delaying addressing problems – be it software or infrastructure – the problems keep coming back all the faster until things break.

You’re probably nodding at this. We’ve all worked on that project or dealt that government official or were in that building we suddenly had to leave.  

A lot of what’s wrong in the word is the bill coming due – social meltdown, economic difference, bad infrastructure, the climate. We’re going to need to buckle down and fix things if we want a decent future.

Steven Savage