KWIF=Kent's Week(ish) in Film.
This Week:
Mickey 17 (2025, d. Bong Joon Ho - in theatre)
Bravestarr: The Legend (1988, d. Tom Tataranowicz - YouTube)
Red Rooms (2023, d. Pascal Plante - Crave)
Problemista (2023, d. Julio Torres - Crave)
Wicked Little Letters (2023, d. Thea Sharrock - Crave)
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Mickey 17 is a satirical sci-fi romp from the fantastic Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho. His vision for the film is one that is delightfully odd, replete with director Bong's usual nuanced touches and social commentary, but this is the first of his films that I've seen where he seems like he's wrestling with the construction of the narrative.
The plot finds Robert Pattinson's Mickey on the run from particularly sadistic loan sharks after his macron business failed, and his only hope of outrunning his fate is to get on board one of the long-distant colonizing space ships (as is noted, the environment of Earth is becoming increasingly uninhabitable and so competition for spots on these ships is fierce). Mickey's got no particular special skills, knowledge, or influence so his only option is to take on the designation of "Expendable". As such, Mickey's physiology, personality and memories are downloaded and should Mickey die in the process of doing his jobs (all jobs which are all but guaranteed to kill him, such as being the guinea pig for catching the virii on their new planet, and for testing vaccines to inoculate against them).
There is a tremendous exposition dump in the first act of the film that would feel interminably long if it weren't so entertaining. A lesson we've learned from, like, time loop movies, is dying over and over again can make good comedy fodder. It also squares us up for the politics of the era (not too dissimilar from our own) and that the spaceship Mickey is aboard is led by failed presidential candidate, and definite center of a cult-of-personality, Kenneth Marshall. As played by Mark Ruffalo, Marshall is like a mix of Trump, Musk and televangelist Jim Bakker (with Toni Collette being his sauce-obsessed, intellectually superior co-conspirator, ala Tammy Faye). Marshall is an absolute clown of a human being, an absurd egocentric who has failed upward with the support a gullible populace. He's uncomfortably comedic, and just as reprehensible. Ruffalo puts on a good show.
When we first meet Mickey, he's the 17th version. He has fallen in an ice cave and left for dead. But the native potato bugs rescue him. Being a man made of soup, he just thinks his meat is bad, and the potato bugs rejected him. Returning to the ship, he comes to find that his replacement, Eighteen, has already been made, and the woman who's always by his side, Nasha (Naomi Ackie) is already cozied up with him. Eighteen is a much brasher, no-nonsense version of Mickey, while Seventeen is much more timid and reserved. The two of them, through a series of increasingly odd events, spark a revolution aboard their ship, but first spark outrage being Multiples, an affront against God and all that's good apparently (as a soul can't be shared between two bodies, or so they say).
Following the massive international and award-winning success of
Parasite in 2019, Bong Joon Ho got a budgetary upgrade for his follow-up,
Mickey 17. The film's price tag at nearly $120 million is well over double his next most expensive film (
Okja, for the record) and triple that of Snowpiercer which played like a blockbuster, but was made pretty modestly. In
Mickey 17, it's all up there on the screen, though. The sets are plentiful, and feel all of a whole, creating a world aboard a spaceship that is tangible and lived-in. The alien planet that is the destination is a desolate and frigid place populated by a race of gigantic potato bugs, and, yeah, it's all well-realized too. Could Director Bong have made this on a slimmer budget? Absolutely, but it wouldn't look nearly as good.
Pattinson and Ackie are great together, and I loved how Pattinson seemingly channelled Joe Pesci from Home Alone for Seventeen but Joe Pesci from Casino for Eighteen. I enjoyed watching the movie, quite a bit, it is so fun and weird, but I didn't come out loving it as I had hoped. Nothing sticks out as particularly bad, or egregious, but it doesn't quite all gel together smoothly. There's not really a clear message to the picture, as it seems to be working through a multitude of societal critiques. I think were this a film from the 1980s and I'd just seen it for the first time, I would be just agog, absolutely blown away by it, so maybe I just need to give it a little time. In the end, even if it is more of a lark than another Oscars-worthy movie from Director Bong, it's still an entertaining picture that should be worth a revisit.
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The 1980's were the golden age of action figures. G.I. Joe, Masters of the Universe, Star Wars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers were the top tier "boys toys" lines of the era, bolstered by syndicated cartoon series or big franchise movies. These major properties still live today not just out of nostalgia, but a rich sense of world building that keeps sparking the imagination of young and old alike.
The pervasiveness of these toy lines was in part due to the loosening of restrictions around advertising to children, and so the accompanying weekly (or daily, in some cases) cartoon became a necessity when launching any new toy line. It was no guarantee to success, however, and each also-ran toyline has its own unique story to tell (see the excellent pop-culture histories on the Secret Galaxy youtube channel).
Filmation, makers of the fine He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and She-Ra: Princess of Power cartoons wanted to find success with their own ideas, not just producing cartoons based another company's intellectual property. Long story short (again, watch Secret Galaxy's recent retrospective), Filmation brought Bravestarr, a mash up of nearly everything popular in the 80's -- sci-fi, westerns, magic, and superheroes (it only needed dinosaurs) -- to Mattel, and the toy company ran with it... but too fast for Filmation. The plan was for Bravestarr's origin story to debut in theatres in the summer of 1987 along with the toys, followed by the ongoing series in the fall to bolster continued sales of the toys, but Mattel jumped the gun, excited to get the toys on shelves for Christmas 1986...where they died on the vine.
The cartoon series debuted on time, in the fall of '87, but the movie was delayed, and released in 1988 with little to no fanfare, the toy line already languishing on shelves and Mattel having moved on. Filmation as a studio was sunk and Bravestarr: The Legend was all but forgotten (in fact it was only upon watching Secret Galaxy's recent video that I even learned there was a Bravestarr movie).
Did it deserve its fate? The toys have become a bit of a cult classic, certain toys reaching pretty astronomical prices in the nostalgia-laden aftermarket, but unlike the big names of the 80's, there's been no revival for Bravestarr (maybe in part because licensing is a bit of a clusterfudge). But having caught the feature (it's on youtube), I have to say...I would have freaking loved this as a kid, and I quite like it now.
There aren't a lot of toy lines or multimedia properties, even to this day, with a person of colour as the lead, and most lines feature no Indigenous characters at all. Bravestarr is a series built around a futuristic society where a Native American is the titular hero. "The Legend" is Bravestarr's origin story, and it starts with the history of Bravestarr's people, a civilization of Native Americans with very advanced technology and magics, being assaulted by Stampede, a power-mad invading force that wants to take the civilization's power for its own. I don't know if the allegory of colonial genocide was the intention, or if they just kind of stumbled into it, but it's there.
Bravestarr's people escape to the stars as the planet is literally destroyed by Stampede's greedy thirst for power (again with the allegory), and only settle again when a new colony on the planet "New Texas" is formed as a result of the "gold rush" like atmosphere for the precious fuel jewel Kerium. But the planet is already besieged by Stampede and his proxy, Tex Hex. So the mayor of New Texas sends for help, which comes in the form of Bravestarr, the newly recruited galactic marshall, joined by J.B. the tough woman judge (and love interest) appointed to the planetary county. He's there to clean things up, but he fails...at first.
It takes Bravestarr reconnecting with his roots, granting him great powers (strength of the bear, speed of the puma, eyes of the hawk, and ears of the wolf, all very nicely visualized in the show), and joining forces with the indigenous Prairie People of the planet that he is properly able to take on the evil forces New Texas faces.
In total, "The Legend" is an unevenly told story, waffling in and out of exposition, at one point running through a montage of, I presume, all the action figures available to buy. It makes use of the same well-trod 80's mold of good-vs-evil toy cartoons, and of the equally well-trod origin story formulae (that would get a workout for a good long while to come). But at the same time, the combination of influences and genres does make for a unique scenario that is quite enticing, and the animation is, often, quite stellar. Filmation's cartoons of the 80s were always a cut above. They were know to reuse animation to cut costs, but their beautiful background paintings and live-model character references always made their work stand out. Here, it's animation meant for cinematic release, so it's at another level to what we're used to seeing out of the studio's TV output. Anime influences can be felt in the work, and the visualization of Stampede is an homage to the classic Disney moment in Fantasia, "The Night on Bald Mountain". It's all really a cut above.
The story ebbs and flows, showing signs that the Filmation team isn't fully comfortable working in feature length storytelling, but for the most part it's a satisfying watch (in spite of a frequently grating synthesized orchestra score). What gives me pause is the general conceit of using non-descript Native American culture as backdrop for a sci-fi-superhero-western meant to sell toys, a literal commodification of the culture. It would feel less...icky... if there were more Native Americans directly involved with the whole production. Bravestarr is voiced by a white man (Pat Fraley) for cripes sake! Representation matters, not just for what we seen on screen, but who is telling the stories behind the scenes. From my limited caucasian perspective, it seems like none of Bravestarr is meant as offensive, but it's also not doing the good work either. I would love for a First Nations or Native American creative team to revive this property with authenticity. I can imagine a Sterlin Harjo production would be pretty phenomenal. Maybe it's possible if the Masters of the Universe movie does well next year, creating a surge of toy property movies.
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Red Rooms (or
Les chambres rouge in its native Quebecois tongue) opens on the face of a attractive woman sleeping. Her surroundings are grey, and she is somewhat bundled up. The colour saturation is almost non-existent, intoning the chill of her surroundings. After waking she bundles up her blanket and makeshift pillow, and determinedly walks down the street. Her full-length wool coat is tailored perfectly, she looks far too beautiful and put together to be unhoused...but we don't know. We next see her entering a building, being scanned, having her possessions checked at security, and once through she finds her destination...a smallish courtroom where she sits in the back of three aisles.
We learn that a case is just beginning in this courtroom, with the prosecution and defence delivering their opening arguements. The case involves the kidnapping, assault, mutilation of three teenage girls, and the prosecution alerts the jury to the fact that there is video footage of two of the three murders that were filmed and sold on the dark web. It's a grisly story, and as the lawyers deliver their speeches, the camera floats around the courtroom, sometimes fixating on the attorney speaking, or the one who is not, or the accused sitting in a plexiglass box looking bored, or on the woman we met in the opening frame of the film.
This is Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariepy), she is ostensibly the film's protagonist, but for much of the film she is basically unknowable. Kelly-Anne is, we learn, not homeless, she just camps out each evening nearby the courthouse in order to keep her seat in the small viewers galley. She is a model, she is also an avid (and successful) online poker player, and she is very web/computer savvy (she hacked her off-the-shelf AI assistant and operates it off a private server).
Kelly-Anne, we see, fixates on the mother of one of the victims in court, more than she even leers at the accused, and she seems slightly paranoid when the crown's cybersecurity expert looks at her too long. We just never understand why. She is caught by press coming out of the courtroom, but she doesn't seem interested in speaking to them, unlike the other young woman, Clementine (Laurie Babin) who ventured in from Northern Quebec to watch the trial with an unhealthy fixation on the man on trial.
Clementine thinks she's found a kindred spirit in Kelly-Anne, but the model/hacker gives nothing away. She never confirms which side she's on, just that it seems very important to her to be in attendance at the trial.
The score to Red Rooms is exceptionally minimal, to the point that the soundtrack of the film, anytime we're in Kelly-Anne's high-rise apartment, is simply the whistling of the wind as it scrapes the side of the building. The possibilities of what Kelly-Anne's interest in the film are plenty... like, was she an early survivor of the accused, or is she like Clem just obsessed with him, or is she a true crime junkie, or was she an accomplice or somehow involved, or even the murderer. Whenever Gariepy supremely reserved performance threatens to tell on her, she does something else -- sometimes overt, sometimes nuanced -- that completely undermines prior assumptions. Her behaviour gets pretty whackadoo late in the film, and it's not entirely certain if it's performance, and if so, for whom.
Red Rooms quietly made some 2024 top ten lists of critics I follow, and from the capsule reviews I was expecting something more... conventionally thrilling, and was so happy to find that it got my heart racing because this curiosity that is Kelly-Anne is such an unknown quantity.
This is, as I like to say, a deliberately paced film, and definitely not for the impatient. It makes you squirm because of subject matter, and the time it spends contemplating it, and the time spent with these people who are perhaps too interested in it. It is an unsettling film despite having no overtly grotesque visuals, just the insinuation of them, of knowing they exist, and sometimes hearing vague audio and seeing peoples' reactions to them. If it is a film commenting on anything, it is our society's fascination with murders and murderers, and how often, in the process of examining this fascination, victims and their stories are forgotten.
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Julio Torres as a comedian, performer, writer, and artist is a very distinct voice. It's not just that he was born and raised in El Salvador, nor that he is a queer performer, although both are very much a part of his presence, whether on stage or screen. No, what makes Torres so distinct is he is an unapologetic weirdo whose sense of humour can best be described as obliquely surreal. His comedy special,
My Favourite Shapes, in which he sits in the center of a conveyor belt that enters and exits off stage behind him, and dispenses oddball toys and abstractly shaped objects which he then discusses as he presents them to the audience by way of a projector...well, it's one of the most unique comedy routines I've seen in a long time. It was bizarre, strangely frivolous and yet seemed deeply personal and spoke much to Torres' voice and how he sees the world. He's also the creator of
Los Espookys, the hilarious Spanish language HBO show about Mexican hipsters who put their homegrown special effects makeup to work via a haunting-for-hire enterprise, and as a writer on SNL he wrote one of my all-time favourite sketches, "
Wells for boys".
Problemista is Torres' first directorial effort which at once seems both personal and yet distant from connecting to real emotions. It can be a challenge for creators who excel in the surreal to ground their work with the relatable. They are capable in inviting you into their unique point of view, but have a much harder time with helping you understand them.
In Problemista, Torres plays Alejandro, a sensitive young man who finds himself in New York with the desire to work as a toy designer for Hasbro, but instead winds up, through happenstance, being the personal assistant to an artist's widow, Elizabeth, played by Tilda Swinton. What a get for a debut feature.
Alejandro, facing deportation, is left dangling on the end of a thread as Elizabeth yo-yos him around. He's desperate enough to work for this woman who is, at best, unhinged, at worse severely mentally unwell. She is loud and irrational and seems to get her way primarily because people will do what she wants just to get away from her (or get her away from them). She seems to live in another reality and definitely not interested in being part of the polite society we'll talk about in our next film.
Swinton delivers a tour-de-force performance, sweeping into every scene as Elizabeth, sucking all the air out of the room, and then telling everyone around her it's not enough and that they need to give her more. I've worked for a woman like this some time ago. She was a person who lived in a world that only rotated around them, and considered other people infrequently, if at all, unless they could serve her agenda in some way. Elizabeth is a tad more extreme than this ex-boss of mine, but not by much. People like Elizabeth exist, and I've seen them. They're awful.
Torres' demure performance as Alejandro, complete with an affected shuffle-step walk, and a shrinking inside himself physicality, is one meant to be dominated by Swinton, and pretty much anyone else he encounters. But unlike The Devil Wears Prada, where an assistant discovers their absolutely horrible boss is human human afterall, there's no such discovery for Alejandro. In fact, he seems to see Elizabeth in a light nobody else does, he seems to understand her and her motivations and her objectives, somehow...and he actually learns from her how to be more confident and assertive.
It's not a hard film to like, but it's a difficult film to love, because Alejandro's demureness is so easily overshadowed. It's a fine line between playing a shrinking violet character and disappearing as a screen presence. Torres keeps the film, and Alejandro's life just weird enough to remain interesting. I was expecting this to be a much weirder film. The opening moments, taking us through young Alejandro's toy obsessed childhood with his artist/designer mother, is visually very vibrant and odd, but it's fleeting. Torres' New York (probably for budgetary reasons) isn't nearly as surreal. There are only glimmers of Torres' inventiveness, like his toy pitches to Hasbro, his visualization of the rigged system of American immigration, and a decidedly uncomfortable personification of Craigslist.
I was hoping Torres would explode out of the gate as our next Michel Gondry, but it looks like we're just going to have to be patient.
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My grandmother - my mom's mom - was a woman of propriety. Things had to be a certain way, like the way a table was set, or a bed was made, or a home was kept. We had to behave and speak a certain way in being part of a polite society. Many subjects were not to be discussed, and most definitely certain words were not to be said. I recall having my filthy mouth washed out with soap once or twice (the lesson being "don't swear around Grandma").
I considered this propriety to be a generational thing, but upon contemplating the message of Wicked Little Letters, it is much more the product of sexism and abuse. It's not generational, it's cultural. The expectation of women as subservient, of taking care of cooking and cleaning and otherwise staying out of the way. In this type of culture, women are barely permitted freedom of thought or expression, they certainly aren't permitted education or agency. There are seemingly more of these cultures around the world today than aren't.
Set in the southern coastal English town of Littlehampton post-World War I, Wicked Little Letters, is the true-ish story of decorum being scandalously broken by way of a series of wicked, nasty, filthy letters delivered to one Miss Edith Swan (Olivia Coleman, Secret Invasion), at this point a spinster still living at home in her mid-50's, still under the thumb of her controlling father (Timothy Spall, Chicken Run).
The most likely culprit is their next door neighbour Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley, Men), a widow and single mom, and also an Irish immigrant and a real liberated woman, whose no-holds-barred, profane way of speaking bemuse and shock in equal measure. As Rose states, though, she has no reservations about expressing herself, so why would she resort to writing anonymous letters to say what she would already say out loud?
The scandal hits national level, and Rose is an easy scapegoat. The film is very clear about the hypocrisy of this mass propriety, as the men expect women to behave a certain way, to be unsullied by any awareness of lewd or profane words or acts, and yet in closed quarters the men talk this way about such things with jovial frivolity, as "Woman Police Constable" Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan, We Are Lady Parts) witnesses. She is torn between "knowing her place" as the town's first woman officer, and actually serving justice, when her male counterpart is an idiot and her superior is lazy. ACAB, man.
It's difficult to talk about the film without revealing the writer of the letters, so we'll discuss more some of the subject matter after the Spoilers cut, but just to say that it's not actually a mystery that the film holds close to its chest and it reveals the answer to the audience (but not the characters in story) about the midway point.
Coleman and Buckley are both phenomenal actresses, and they're both excellent here. I don't think I've ever seen Coleman deliver a bad performance, and she is has a lot to do here, as Edith is torn between the expectations of her from her father, her lapsed friendship with Rose, and the notoriety that she's received as a result of being a victim of the letters. Demeanour shifts are frequent, and Coleman has mastered her control of nuanced facial expressions. I don't know if I've seen Buckley in a role like this before, where she's sort of comic relief, but also an emotional lynchpin. She has a zeal, a liveliness, and an untamed natuer that flies in the face of the stiff-upper-lip/well-I-never crowd that is so delightfully appealing. She is the antidote to the buckled-down, boring existence of Littehampton.
The film utilizes colour-blind casting which is in equal measure admirable and distracting since nothing is ever mentioned about anyone's race or background. I know I was expecting the elder Swan, when ranting about his neighbour Rose, to bring up her Black boyfriend in a derogatory way, but he never does. The film holds squarely in its lane in examining sexism. Even its critique of the police, and their structures winds up rather toothless in the end. It's a film that says much, and rewardingly, but had the potential to say even more.
[Toastypost]
**SPOILERS**
It's really to no one's surprise when we find out that the writer of the letters to Edith Swan is none other than Edith herself. The letters seemed to be spurred by befriending Rose, and revealing in her liberation, but then having that friendship quashed by her father. So she, in secrets, begins to liberate herself by way of writing the most foulest things she can think of. That those thoughts are directed at herself is a product of a caged woman loathing her inability to escape the cage, and it's telling that when the letters extend beyond her, that they are directed at the other women of the town, she's admonishing them all for their upholding of the systems that keep them down. It's equally telling that she never writes a letter to the person she fears the most, her father. Edith's greatest sin is not writing the letters, but letting Rose take the fall. In her admiration (and emulation) of Rose, she also cant escape her patriarchal thinking, that Rose's liberties as a woman are somehow criminal and deserve to be punished and reigned in. Afterall, why should Rose be allowed to curse and cavort so freely when Edith cannot?
It is a bittersweet ending when Edith is found out and sentenced and carted off to jail. She is a victim herself, afterall, and yet, being sent to prison allows her freedom from her father for the first time in her life. The downside is it is still jail, though, and whose to say she won't encounter a whole institution of men (and women) looking to subjugate her just like her Father?
I think back to my Grandmother, and it's distinctly possible she had a father who was somewhat like Edith's father, who demanded a certain discipline and propriety, and that her mother would have upheld such structures in the household [edit. not exactly a true assumption on my part, but generational trauma resonates in expectations and behavioural norms]. I know my Grandmother had husbands who were maybe less forcefully demanding, but expectant of such norms. My Grandmother also worked, she had a number of jobs throughout her life which began out of necessity, having fled an abusive relationship with two small children. Despite marrying again (and again) she retained a definite drive and work ethic, perhaps a desire to stand on her own two feet, to not need to rely upon a man financially. In her own ways, she broke free of the patriarchy despite being unable to let go of its legacy of teachings. She was a remarkable woman who led an impressively active life well into her late 80's before dementia robbed her of her resources, and I miss her.
