3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Warfare

2025, Alex Garland, Ray Mendoza (Civil War & directorial debut) -- Amazon

As Kent said, the most impactful and very intentional thing about this movie is the cry of, "WHY?!?!" But before we get to that...

Warfare is actually what I would normally call a "small movie", i.e. a very condensed plot focused on a single event during the Iraq War in the early 2000s. A group of SEALs is tasked with providing "overwatch" for a joint operation with the Marines. This involves taking over a two-story house, which is occupied, and setting themselves up to monitor activities at a nearby market square. It is never clear as to why that house, nor whether any of the other houses in the neighbourhood are also occupied. Its not important to the movie, but you have to assume... yes? But no matter, they come in, strong-arm all the civilians together, setup defenses and radio in. And wait. And watch.

These are a bunch of young guys, likely not having seen any action before, all fresh faced, unwounded. They all have their assigned duties and work together like a well-oiled machine. I know its a cliche, and I am prone to using idioms, but the way the movie presents the team working together is very machine like -- lots of well-rehearsed activities supported by almost indecipherable radio jargon. They work well together, and support each other.

And then, almost immediately, someone throws a wrench into the machine, or more precisely, a grenade. The people they have been observing are also observing them, and begin a coordinated attack. They call it in, ask for support, as danger is very real and imminent, and things just go from bad to worse. The grenade injured their sniper, mildly but enough to request his evac. The Bradley tank that shows up to pick him up positions itself right over an IED and ... BOOM. The soldiers go from commands and coordinated actions to screaming panic, blood and chaos.

When it is over, and all the surviving soldiers are away in Bradleys, the locals emerge, both the home owners and the adversaries. They have driven away the Americans. They have hurt the Americans, who have come, accomplished little, to nothing, and they have run away. And one of the home occupants looks around at the devastation, the wreckage left after countless bullets, IEDs, tank rounds, and explosives, and the cry is uttered. Its not hard to understand this small action was a metaphor for the war.

The movie ends with the "usual" credit rolls, where we see the real soldiers compared to the actors that played them. Except all but one of the soldiers have their faces blurred. A comment on a lack of support from the very real soldiers they portrayed? The detritus of making an "anti-war" movie? There are no easy answers to that but this movie wasn't anymore anti-anything than a flag-waver. But for that one utterance, and the loud cries from wounded soldiers, this was an exciting, nerve-wracking portrayal of combat actions with tight performances, well-crafted scenes and an incredible sound landscape.

The movie stars a handful of recognizable faces including: Will Poulter (The Bear), D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Reservation Dogs), Cosmo Jarvis (Shōgun), and Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things), well, and many more who are nigh unrecognizable under the grime, sand and gear of war.

I Saw This!! What I have been watching - 2025 edition (Part C)

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our [retired?] feature wherein Kent(!) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me (usually Toast, but Kent this time) spending too much time in front of the TV and not writing about it. Bad Kent! Bad! But it's in part because Kent is tired and busy can't review everything.

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Murderbot Season 1 - 2025, AppleTV (10/10 episodes watched)
created by Paul and Chris Weitz

We went most of the year without AppleTV this year and so Murderbot sat on an idle list of *maybe* titles titles to watch. 

A friend of mine was very, very highly anticipating Murderbot's debut on AppleTV. She had read the book(s?) and absolutely loved them. I didn't have the heart then to tell her that loving a book is all but guaranteed to lead do disappointment with the adaptation. Sure enough, after it started airing (???what do we call it when a show is released week to week on a streaming service...it's not going over airwaves anymore...) I didn't hear anything more from her about it. 

It was a show that certainly in my regular TV reviewing circle of reading didn't come up a heck of a lot, so my excitement for it was low... also I knew nothing about it, and based on title alone I conjured up all sorts of '90's Image Comics-style "extreme" sci-fi for manchildren ideas of what it could be about. I was not excited in the least.

When we finally reacquired AppleTV, I added Murderbot to my "to watch" list, but there were other shows (The Studio, Slow Horses, Down Cemetary Road, Stick, Platonic) that I intended to watch first... and then I noticed that Murderbot was not a drama, but a sci-fi comedy, with only half hour episodes, and suddenly it shot to the top of my list. It was like my expectations of having wade through 10 hours of meathead sci-fi suddenly came at a limited-time-only discount of 4 1/2 hours of mid-budget science fiction comedy. I was all in on a binge.

The show is set in a distant future in a galaxy where the government is primarily run by mega-corporations (if it were licensed by Disney/Fox they could have set this in the Weyland-Yutani of the Alien universe). An independent socialist commune has petitioned the people in charge to do research work on a remote planet, and in being granted access, they've been given a Security Unit (SecUnit) to protect them against their objections (these future hippies see SecUnits as a form of slavery). What they don't know is their SecUnit has overridden its security protocols and has achieved full sentience and named itself Murderbot (not because it has murdered so many, but it just kind of fantasizes about it).

Murderbot is our point of view character in the series. Played by Alexander Skarsgård, Murderbot is our narrator in this real. He is often narrating directly to the audience, and sometimes we as the audience are just privy to his inner thoughts. Murderbot is familiar enough with the nature of humans to know to disguise his sentience from them, so he plays the role of SecUnit to his new charges, but with spite and insolence in his fluid-pumping veins. He would rather just be watching his favourite sci-fi soap opera (which is what he's often doing when he's supposed to be on task). He's always spying on what they're up to and he's, well, disgusted by every ounce of them.

And yet he can't help but protect them as danger arises (for if he doesn't, he's bound to be seen as defective and turned to scrap). In his efforts to serve this absurd group of characters he invariably performs too far afield from the norms of his standard functions, and they pick up on it. But instead of finding vicious humans ready to turn on him, he finds a group of people mostly willing to accept him as one of them. Except he's not one of them, and he doesn't particularly desire to be one of them. He just desires to be free, to be himself, to do as he pleases in the confines of the society he exists in.

Murderbot is quite a funny show, largely centred around Murderbot's distaste for the people he's with, but also the absurdity of the people he's with (which includes a newly formed throuple that is never not awkward, and the senior member of the crew who treats Murderbot kindly even before he's revealed as a sentient). But Murderbot's greatest strength is in its representation of neurodivergence. Murderbot is almost entirely autism-coded (outside of the origins of and physiology as a SecUnit of course), and the level of which his autism is explored, how he engaged and disengages with others, how he can't make eye contact and disassociates when conversations get boring, and how he masks himself...presenting in a way that is expected of him rather than how he actually desires to be. I can't recall ever seeing an autistic character presented with this level of detail and care, certainly not as the protagonist of a series, not without making their autism a superpower, anyway.  Here, Murderbot's neurodivergence is in no way a superpower, despite Murderbot being superpowerful.

David Dastmalchian's member of the crew has cybernetic enhancements, and he clashes with Murderbot a lot. His character is also spectrum-coded, and it's the genius of the story (not sure if it's something the Weitz brothers have crafted or if it is in the source material) but it really shows that being on the spectrum is not the same for everyone. There are varying ways that neurodivergence presents itself in this series, and it's amazing how adeptly it presents it in the form of a sci-fi comedy.  I definitely was not expecting that.

I was talking with my friend again recently about the show, the one who had anticipated its debut. She found it disappointing, and relayed how fan reaction to the show was pretty muted because it wasn't like the book exactly (which I'm told is fully first person narrative). But she also hadn't picked up on the autism coding of the character, and that really made me wonder whether that was in the source material, and how many people just didn't pick up on that. To me it's the center of the show, the story is about a neurodivergent character being able to come out, to stop masking, to be who they are and find acceptance and life outside of expectations. Perhaps my being a member of a neurodivergent household has me hyperaware of this aspect but it's something the show should be lauded for.

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Stranger Things 5 - 2025, Netflix (7/8 episodes watched)
created by the Duffer Brother
ST 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Stranger Things debuted in 2016, the second series in 2017, and the third in 2019. And then three years until Stranger Things 4, and now, another three years later, the final series, released in three parts.

I was tremendously excited for the drop of each preceding series on Netflix, anticipating the start of a binge watch day and date of its release. Even as series four came under criticism for bloated, overlong episodes, I found myself mostly entertained, mostly excited, mostly happy to be within the realm of Stranger Things again.

This time has felt very, very different. After the end of series four I felt mostly satiated, even as there were cliffhangers and dangling threads, it was the first time I felt done and not in immediate want of more (perhaps it was the bloated runtimes, it was too big of a meal?). Rather than set an alarm for the drop of series five, I let the show just linger in my Netflix queue. The streamer would loudly proclaim to me every time I would open it up that STRANGER THINGS 5 IS HERE! Yeah Netflix, I know... I'll get to it.

Seriously, where's the apathy coming from? This I don't know.

But upon entering the world of Hawkins and the Upside Down again, I was hoping to be whisked away like I had been four times before, just fully transported into an 80's-inspired horror-scifi-fantasy realm, but I wasn't, at least not to the same effect.

When that still exceptional open theme kicks in and the "camera" tracks around the font of the Stranger Things logo, I remember the tingling sensation I got the first time I saw it, I remember the goosebumps and arm hairs standing on end, I remember how exhilarated I was by it. I remember it, but I don't feel it anymore.

We get into the world of Hawkins and I see Mike and Will and Lucas and Dustin and Eleven and Max and... these children are now adults. They've aged 10 years since we first saw them, and yet in story time, they've aged maybe 4 or 5 years, and there's a huge discrepancy there, huge hurdles to get over in one's mind. Not to mention the fact that we've seen some of these young performers now expand well beyond their roles in this series, and they're not quite the same kids that we'd last left. But is just it that they have  physically grown, or do they not actually feel like high school seniors? Do they now seem like adults play acting as kids? Is it a Pen15 situation?

Beyond that, we're back to the big bad Vecna being the big bad once again. Our heroes defeated him already and now they have to do it again? I'm not a big D&D player, so I don't know how often one faces the same main adversary back-to-back, but it doesn't quite seem like an escalation. Vecna's plan is now world-ending, so I guess the stakes have been raised. We actually do get an escalation, but it's only in the finale that the escalation is learned by our heroes and we see the heart of the matter. It's way too late a reveal, and should have been presented in the first or second episode of the season.

If the plot is maybe not holding up its end of the bargain, the character work has stepped up to become the centerpiece of the show this season. There's tensions and unions within friendships and relationship, there's traumas to unpack and revelations to make, and these are the best moments in the series. Will Byers, who has experienced so much trauma, and felt very much like the fifth wheel of the series is given the spotlight this season, and his coming out moment, while grinding the momentum of the plot to a halt, is really a beautiful thing, as is Robin gay-mentoring him. Likewise Dustin and Steve persist at being the best duo in the show for years, acting like a bickering married couple who eventually find their love for each other again. And then there's Nancy and Jonathan who... well, lets just say the show finally gets that relationship right by the end.

Stranger Things has, each season, seen fit to expand its cast and to uplift members of its cast who maybe haven't had the time to shine before. This season digs into to the youngest member of the Wheeler clan, Nancy and Mike's younger sister Holly, and her classmates (especially Dipshit/Delightful Derek), and even giving mother Wheeler Karen some big moments.  This season highlights what an ensemble the show has become, and there are whole scenes with a dozen or more cast members, and frankly that's pretty heartwarming occasion seeing all these people in a room together. The show remembers the big players and the small players, and, really, it seems the only character it hasn't done justice to is Barb... unless Barb is the deus ex machina of the final episode...[spoiler...she's not].

When I watch Stranger Things now, I feel a sense of comfort being there, but I'm not excited by it like I once was. Series five looks big and epic and expensive (Frank Darabont directing a lot of the season bringing his extensive Stephen King adaptation experience to it) and it certainly holds my interest plus it had a couple surprises up its sleeve, but watching it felt a lot like going through the motions. A lot of scenes felt overlong for the message they were trying to get across, and often the messages are repeated too many times (I exclaimed out loud "we get it" at least twice this season). As I've been waiting between mini-drops for the next episodes, I've kind of forgotten what's happened in the preceding.

If Stranger Things had run its course over the span of five or six years instead of nine or ten, it would feel very different than it does now. With the permission of time that Netflix has granted their cash cow, series four and five have gotten indulgent, glossy and it's lost the scrappy feel it had when it started (see also franchise bloat like the Mission:Impossible or Fast & Furious series). Had it plowed through like old style TV would have 2 decades ago, it would be an epic five seasons of 40-minute episodes that would be highly enticing rewatching. As it stands, after finishing the final episode, I have no immediate plans to return.

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Only Murders in the Building Season 5 (10/10 episodes watched)
created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman

Unlike Stranger Things, Only Murders... is a series that has released one season per year, year over year, with episodes consistent in length at under a half hour, and little self indulgent bloat from its creatives. But, despite what I said above for Stranger Things, that doesn't on its own make for a coherent ongoing narrative or a satisfying overall series. But then, that's not really what Only Murders... is going for.

It is a series that really didn't need to exist beyond its first season, and the more it goes on, the more it exists anything approximating reality, instead existing within its own pocket dimension. The joke is now, each season, somehow death comes to the Arconia, that gorgeous city block of condos that feels like its own world within New York City.

The part of the conceit of the show that has never worked continues to burden the show, with Mabel, Charles and Oliver having a true crime podcast that the show runners clearly have little to no experience with and/or don't care about the characters having a believable show. I mean, the trio effectively interfere with police investigations and illegally mess with crime scenes and in theory admit to it on their show. They should have been fined and/or arrested and/or shut down years ago (of course, the best recurring character on the show is their exasperated detective acquaintance Detective Williams played by Da'Vine Joy Randolph who seems to shield them from any scrutiny beyond her own).

This season the crew investigate the murder of their beloved concierge Lester, only to discover that this season's big guest stars (Renee Zellweger, Christoph Waltz, and Logan Lerman), a trio of billionaires, are involved somehow, and then the other guest stars (Bobby Cannavale, Tea Leone, and Dianne Wiest) are perhaps involved in some sort of mafioso and a hidden casino.

The formulae remains the same, each episode the trio try to pin the deed on someone and we get their story so as to eliminate them as a suspect, wash and repeat. In the background this season is Oliver's potential moving away to be with new bride Loretta (Meryl Streep) and the billionaires buying out the building and evacuating them all. Frankly, unlike Stranger Things the character-focussed aspects of the show feel shoehorned in quite frequently and conflict between them never feels natural. It's at its best when it has a good, twisty mystery, big guest stars, and Steve Martin and Martin Short get to be goofballs and  Selena Gomez gets to be sarcastic. This season's highlight was Tea Leoni's quintet of meathead sons and how they seem to operate as a single disfunctional, dimwitted unit.

It's never been a particularly sharp series, and it just gets more blunted with each season. This season's jabs at billionaires (in the impending eat the rich culture war) are total weak lil love taps, plus the plight the characters face in this season seems like problems of the privileged, and the introduction of a robot doorman never fully manifested into any meaningful contemplation of AI replacing blue collar workers, not much original comedy. The mystery of the season was all over the place, and frankly not all that engrossing, and yet, all that said, it's hard not to be charmed by all the talent and charisma on screen.  I'll be back for season six.

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Some other things I watched late last year but didn't complete or don't have a whole heck of a lot to say about:

Eyes of Wakanda (Disney+, 3/4 episodes watched) is meant to expand upon the world of Wakanda from the two Black Panther movies. Each episode is set in a different time period, and there's no connective tissues between them. They're not bad, per se, but their 20-ish minute run times give them little opportunity to meaningfully develop characters, relationships, and a story necessitating a big action setpieces. The big "wow" of this all for the Marvel nerds is the third episode which brings in Iron Fist lore without needing any familiarity with the abysmal Netflix series. A hearty "it's fine, but forgettable".

 

I really enjoyed getting to know Canadian-by-way-of-UK comedian Mae Martin on the Canadian version of Amazon's Last One Laughing, and then the fifteenth season of Taskmaster, and then their Netflix comedy special SAP and even a few episodes of The Handsome Podcast they co-host with comedians Tig Notaro and Fortune Feimster. I didn't manage to get to their Channel 4 series Feel Good, which they created, but I was very intrigued that they were branching out into thriller territory with Wayward (2025, Netflix, 2/8 episodes watched). In Wayward Martin plays a non-binary masculine cop who moves back to a small-but-progressive community where his wife (Sarah Gadon) grew up. The town seems to be under the sway of Toni Collette, who has run a local correctional facility for wayward teens for decades. Things are weird. There's a definitely unsettling vibe to the whole proceedings, but the show kind of lost me from the get-go when an errant Toronto teen was shipped across the border to this facility. I really shouldn't hold that against it, but it severely broke my investment in the story (and the second episode in which the teen's friend makes a pilgrimage to rescue her once again calls attention to it). Martin is a fascinating presence with a very distinct energy, and I'm not sure if the role fits that energy or not, but I'm having a hard time getting myself back to the series to find out. I think I was also expecting something leaning harder into horror than it does, as it's so close to being there.

Though completely unaffiliated, It's Florida, Man (Season 1 - HBO, 6/6 episodes watched) seems to be the heir apparent to the hilariously consumable Drunk History, but instead of drunk comedians trying to recount historical events which are simultaneously re-enacted by actors and comedians, here it's ripped-from-the-Florida-headlines stories, told by the people involved, re-enacted by actors and comedians. It's not quite as funny as Drunk History but it's far more absurd. It's a rubbernecker of a TV show, one that at once tries to sympathize with the participants telling their stories, but also can't help but wildly exaggerate (sometimes not so wildly) their personas for comedic effect that sometimes can feel a touch mean spirited. Because of Florida's Sunshine Laws, criminal arrests are made a matter of public record (unlike most places) and this is the reason why "Florida Man" stories are so prevalent. A show like this seems inevitable...it's a comedy show, highlighting the absurd stories of the state, but also, like, fits into true crime. It's frivolous and fun, with sometimes a weird bit of insight and/or humanizing of the weirdos it spotlights.

2025 in film: Kent's Five Faves (plus two old ones)

I'm not a professional film reviewer. If you're here, reading this, you're keenly aware of that fact. I don't have any responsibility to anyone but myself to review and/or critique films. I do it because my brain doesn't work well at storing information, so if I want to remember what I thought of a film, or how it affected me, or trigger the memory of the film, I need to have it written down somewhere. If anyone outside of me wants to read it, or likes to read it, well, that's kind of nice.

Since I'm not a professional film reviewer, I don't see a lot of films. I mean I think I watch more films than the average person does, but I'm not in the theatre multiple times a week watching screenings of soon-to-be-released or newly-released movies. I'd like to, but I have a day job. If I get to the theatre to watch a film, it's because something drew me there, whether it's writer, director, star, theme, genre, property, word-of-mouth...and also I'm not the most adventurous film goer, so I only branch outside of my comfort zone a little bit.  Like, I've heard about the films of Jafar Panahi for years, but I've yet to see one, despite 2025's It Was Just An Accident being highly praised from the get go, and making many, many, many top ten lists. I'd like to see it, sometime, but there's no telling once we get outside of this review and awards season whether I will (once the conversation dies down, so does my interest).

I don't recall having done a "best of" list on this site before, primarily because I have never seen enough of a year's films to ever feel legitimate in saying "these are the year's best films".  Friend and reader Shawn asked me about a month back what my favourite film of the year was, and I didn't have an answer for him. I've been pondering it ever since. This is the result of that pondering.

This is not a "best of 2025" list. These are just the films that came out in 2025 that I have seen that excited me the most or had me thinking the most about them afterwards (it looks like it might be alphabetical order, but it's not). 

1. Bugonia - I can't even explain why this made the top of my list. It's a weird film that plays with all expectations and feels like a forgotten 70's sci-fi thriller mixed with experimental cinema that also doubles as an environmental crisis warning and anticapitalism screed. It feels old and very now.
2. Materialists - or how I learned to stop worrying and love Dakota Johnson. Probably making no one else's top ten list but mine... this one could have been something so superficial and yet it wormed its way deep into my brain.
3. Sinners - an incredible cast delivers incredible performances in a film from an incredible director with music by an incredible composer. Just a rich text that blends action, horror, music and historical critique at once. Plus it has the single best scene in cinema this year.
4. Superman - The new movie that I've rewatched the most this year because I can't believe there's a Superman movie that feels like the Superman I've been reading in comics for forever. Vying for top spot of my favourite superhero movies ever.
5. Splitsville - The surprise of the year for me, and ... another Dakota Johnson movie? It's no secret that comedies in cinema are scarce these days, and if they do pop up they're usually of the action-comedy variety (re: Anaconda) but here we have just a straight up comedy for adults that isn't centred on making the audience uncomfortable. What a ribald gift of a film.

Nearly made it (this is in alphabetical order): Frankenstein (pretty), Honey Don't! (I suspect I'm its only defender), One of Them Days (funny), One Battle After Another (theres...a lot going on), Train Dreams (mundanely dreamy), Wake Up Dead Man (Josh O'Connor is everything), Weapons (goddamn fun)

70% of the films I watched last year were not released in 2025, and less than 15% of what I watched last year were re-watches (mostly Coen Brothers movies). Of all the new-to-me older films I watched, two took up more of my brain space than any others: 

1. Purple Rain - Prince's origin story told in the guise of fiction. A bizarre movie that is either a full-on calamity or a masterpiece. Why not both?
2. The Swimmer - Burt Lancaster's story of a seemingly effervescent charmer who decides to pool-hop his way home slowly reveals he's in full-on crisis. Has a day gone by that I haven't thought about this film since seeing it? Well, yes, but not many.

KWIF: No Other Choice (+3)

KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. January's here. It's real movie time. 

This Week: 
No Other Choice (2025, d. Park Chan-wook - in theatre)
Train Dreams (2025, d. Clint Bentley  - netflix)
F1 (aka F1: The Movie - 2025, d. Joseph Kosinski - appletv)
The Young Magician ("Tales for All #4") (1987, d.  - crave)

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With No Other Choice, director Park Chan-wook is in full control of his craft as he presents a viewing experience that is so emotionally twisting that for pretty much the entire runtime (just shy of 140 minutes) the audience is proactively and continuously meant to ponder their allegiance to and affinity for the film's protagonist. 

Adapting Donald Westlake's 1997 novel "The Ax" with co-writers Don McKellar (with whom Park worked with on HBO's *The Sympathizer*), Jahye Lee (with whom Park worked on Netflix's *Uprising*) and Lee Kyung-mi, No Other Choice is a tale of corporate downsizing and the satirically desperate extremes people will push themselves to in order to perpetuate their status in the toxic and uncaring reality of capitalism.

Lee Byung-hun stars as Man-su, who, as the film opens, manages a specialty paper factory. The factory has just come under new American ownership and he's been told that staff needs to be cut by twenty percent. He's preparing to rally and fight for the men he's been working with for years, only to find that he is among the twenty percent. He has invested a tremendous deal into his role, sacrificing time with his wife (who also give up her career), his stepson and his daughter to educate himself to be a leader in his field. But finding work in the field of paper, when demand is down, automation is up, mergers shrink the number of available employers, and competition from similarly out of work people is fierce, it all means Man-su is lost and, from his vantage point, out of options. 

His beautiful house, his upscale cars, his dance lessons, his Netflix...even his dogs are all on the list of potential cuts if he can't find work before his severance package runs dry. His loving wife Miri (Son Ye-jin) is ready to make sacrifices but Man-su is not. After 18 months of desperate hunting, Man-su lands on the idea of killing the man in really the only position he is suitable for, but stops himself... and not because he cannot bring himself to murder another man, but because he can't guarantee that there aren't more qualified men who would get the available position before he does.

Thus ensues a pitch-black comedy of errors that runs concurrently with a grim, distressing existential journey where Man-su's whole sense of self and where he fits in his own life falls out of step with his ambition and self-determined necessity. It's a masterful exercise in defying expectations and audience manipulation. The Man-su we meet at the start of this journey is a very different man than the one we see at the end, as is Miri who is about as devoted a wife as we ever see in secular, modern stories without ever undercutting her agency or intelligence.

But for spoilers, this is a film I would really like to deep dive into writing about, because it is rich and complicated in theme and subtext, a lot of which is masked by its wicked sense of humour and the nastier, distasteful side of humanity it takes us through. It's a long movie, but we're always allied with Man-su on his journey even when we've stopped sympathizing with him (it's a film that warps the audience greatly in that "he really shouldn't get away with this, but we want him to get away with this" fashion).

Director Park's visual acumen is incontestable, with his cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung, this is as good as any of his films have looked, and they pretty much all look fantastic. Here, he stays on the warm side of the spectrum, even as our affinity for Man-su cools. The director wants us to know that no matter what twisted extremes Man-su has gone to, the film is still showing him in a favourable light (if not always positive). The film never wants us to fully disengage from Man-su. The refrain of "no other choice" goes from a laughable excuse for corporate greed to the aching plight of a desperate man to the words of a selfish and myopic person. The title of the film itself has its own journey.

I honestly cannot tell you if I liked this film, or if I enjoyed it. I am impressed by it. I was fully engaged with it, and in unpacking it, even just this little bit, I see much more of its depth that I was too emotionally distracted to fully take in during my first viewing. I have a feeling it will play much better upon rewatch.

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Without specifically spoiling the end of No Other Choice, it's final images are sights inside a fully automated paper factory, which juxtapose sharply against the busy, populated factory we see at the start of the film. In the last images we see, we are taken to a forest where we observe as a logging crane (excuse my lack of knowledge of the technical term) as it picks up a felled tree and relieves it of its branches in seconds. The scale of the machinery, its power and efficiency, and its dominance over nature was a surprisingly visceral visual, one I was surprised to have such an uncomfortable reaction to. Much like the factory scene that precedes it, there is not another person in sight and the message of consumerism and capitalism and its increasing disconnect from humanity is a potent one.

Train Dreams is the life story of a logger, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) working on clearing the way for railways in the summer months. At the film's start, logging is a fully manual profession, one man on either side of a massive hand saw cranking back and forth through a tree, their sweat moistening the ground beneath them. On a felled tree, men take their axes and hack away at the branches in just as demanding a physical effort. And then they need to section the tree. It's a labor intensive process that pays four dollars a day (minus expenses). It's extremely physical and dangerous work, but the need to expand the rails, and then the demand for paper during the second world war was great, so the job was dependable and the work steady. Robert would toil summer months, missing his beloved wife and later his young daughter and their remote cabin by a creek, but the money was good enough to keep them stable through the winter. Options, otherwise, were limited, as Robert would find out.

The film, through narration by Will Patton, is largely gentle and meditative, but personal and investing. It takes us through Robert's life, from his earliest memories as an orphan shipped out on a train, to his final year, without being at all pedantic about it. The narration helps step us back and forth through his life, with brief capsules of interest, some relevant to the moment on screen, some not. Robert's journey could have just been centered around tragedy - his earliest days on the logging crew he was confronted with the horrors of anti-Asian racism, as a Shanghai-born crewman is grabbed suddenly by a trio of men who drag him kicking and screaming before tossing him off a train bridge. Robert's brief motion to intervene is fruitless and he can do little but stand by, and then return to work with a seemingly disaffected crew. Robert is haunted by the man for the remains of his days... not perpetually, but the spectre never leaves him. The ghosts, in a manner of speaking, begin to pile up. 

Tragedy would befall Robert, and he would not return to logging for some time. His grief and misery would take a long time for him to come to terms with. When he returns to the work he did for so long, he's met with the future. A steam-driven truck roams the terrain, and the crew is stocked with chainsaws which Robert finds foreign and difficult to manage. The young crew treat him like a relic, but he wonders if he was the same in his younger years. Time marches on.

We spend most of Train Dreams in nature in various forms. There's not a lot of what you might call civilization in Robert's story because it seems like he avoided it. In Edgerton's portrayal, he's not the stoic, silent type, and he's not the cordial over-sharer, he's unremarkably average and he's so aware of the fact that nothing that happens in his life makes him any more special than anyone else. He's not a deep thinker, but he does contemplate existence, and meaning. His elder colleague in his early years (a remarkable William H. Macy) imparts on him the idea of nature and humanity's connection to nature and how our interference in nature has unknown consequences, ripple effects. Our understanding of the connectivity is still so very primitive, we evolved bipeds with our big brains think nature something to dominate, to control, to use and abuse without giving back. Robert fears nature also takes, and it's taken from him.

The end of Robert's journey takes him to civilization, and when we encounter a big city it's a shock to the system. It's the 1950s already (otherwise we have few guideposts as to the actual time periods within the film), there are cars and televisions and everything seems electric. Robert is a man out of time who just stepped into the future, but he's curious rather than frightened by it all. 

Reflecting upon capitalism and its effect on our conceptualization of standard of living is the centerpiece of No Other Choice, in Train Dreams it's more the byproduct of the story being told, but there's a curious sympatico between the two films. Robert does not want to be logging, but there are no other real choices for him. Similarly, the ending of No Other Choice informs the theme of Train Dreams unexpectedly. Where No Other Choice's ending visualization of logging specifically points to the lack of people involved in the largely mechanized process, Train Dreams makes us consider whether we should be logging at all, at least on the industrial scale we do.  No Other Choice bemoans the loss of jobs, while Train Dreams contemplates the impact of a whole many other kinds of losses.
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Earlier this year Toasty reviewed Joseph Kosinski's 2017 wildfire fighters biopic Only the Brave, with some commentary around whether he was going to be a Kosinski completist or not.  Spoiler, despite being somewhat affected by the film, he's opted out.

Kosinski's Tron: Legacy and Oblivion were visually captivating projects that boldly announced an exciting new director, one who is very design-centric and has an aptitude with kinetic movement and special effects. But, after Oblivion's less than stellar performance, Kosinski seemed to either abandon sci-fi, or he never wanted to be working in that genre in the first place. From Toasty's description it doesn't sound like there was much opportunity for design or kinetic action in Only the Brave, and his pandemic film, Spiderhead, didn't offer anything near to the scale of Tron or Oblivion.

He worked with Tom Cruise in Oblivion, and if Cruise likes you and works with you well enough on his terms, you become one of his guys. So he was tapped for Top Gun:Maverick, which, despite being held back by Cruise for two years until the pandemic lockdown was lifted, was a massive success, one of the highest earning films of the year. Largely because of Kosinski's camerawork on the flying scenes, he was widely praised as a key part of the film's success.  The status that Tron and Oblivion should have given him was now bestowed upon him. He's a premiere filmmaker. But before he's handed the reins to anything completely, he had to prove himself, thus F1, to show that it wasn't just the name brand of Top Gun and the starpower of Tom Cruise, that he brought something to the table as well. 

For the record, I love Tron:Legacy. It is one of my comfort films. There are a lot of elements to it that I love, but Kosinski's visual adeptness is a key part. I really disliked Top Gun: Maverick, but didn't blame Kosinski for its script, which was all about inflating Tom Cruise's ego, and appealing to boomer dads and grandads by having an old guy strut into a room, ignore everyone else's opinions and abilities, and let the praise heap upon him as the smartest, most talented, wisest and most skilled person alive.  It was a wish fulfillment power trip for an aging generation and it suuuucked. I guess the flying sequences were good, but they didn't do enough to pull me out of the ego boost/pander porn that was the film's story.

From the trailers for F1, it looked to be pretty much the exact same plot. Brad Pitt plays an aging driver who is brought in to help a struggling F1 team, only to steamroll everyone without consequence because he's the smartest, most talented, wisest and most skilled driver alive. Same plot, but race cars not planes, and race courses not military strikes. Why would I watch this? I really do not care for racing as a sport, and those Maverick vibes are very off putting.

When I loaded AppleTV, well, call it a moment of weakness. I saw it's 2h35 min runtime and nearly spat out my kombucha. I said I would give it 20 minutes and dip out. Then I watched the whole thing sitting on the edge of the couch, never bored, never intentionally doing a time check to see how long until it was over.

There are a few differences here between Maverick and F1, the first being Brad Pitt is not Tom Cruise. Without getting into Pitt's abusive alcoholic private life, the man has remained a pretty terrific actor, capable of letting go of ego and disappearing into a role. Tom Cruise, for the past decade (or more), just seems to be playing Tom Cruise, and the ego is inescapable. Pitt does not need his characters to be humanity's apex, so when he steps into a role like Sonny Hayes, an aging phenom who the script needs to walk into a room and take charge despite being the "new guy", well, Pitt doesn't play him with bully and bluster, but rather a sort of glib zen-ness. 

Sonny hasn't driven F1 in 30 years. In the meantime he's been a driver-for-hire across various motorsports. This movie postulates that anyone can just step into an F1 car and race and drive it without extensive time behind the wheel and qualifying trials, but we let it go, because the gist is Sonny is just that good at feeling things out. All the sensors and cameras and algorithms just can't tell you what gut instinct can.

But in Pitt's hands Sonny isn't perfect, he isn't flawless, he isn't so good his skills can defy all logic...just most logic. He makes mistakes that hurt others and hurt himself. Yet, it is a script that does pop in and out of making him magical sexagenarian but it's only eye rolling juuuust a little bit.

The film's plot is colour by numbers, there's pretty much no surprises in what happens here, and yet, Kosinski is not precious with it. He built a story that services the action in a way that builds tension for the characters, their relationships, the team and the race their in all at once. The stakes are presented, they're evident, and they just help lubricate the whole thing to move it forward without any resistance.  Hans Zimmer's score is symbiotically propulsive and, not unexpectedly, bombastic in Zimmer fashion, but he never gets cloying in his score around the drama, which I think may save the film.

It's all about the racing, and Kosinski levels up not just what he accomplished with the flying sequences in Maverick but also takes car racing cinematography to another level. It's maybe not quite as zany as Speed Racer, but there's a visceral and tangible nature to it that is undeniable. It made me a bit sad I didn't see this in theatres. As I said, I don't care about cars or racing, and the racing sequences in this are thrilling. Turns out, car races are fun when they edit down 60+ laps of a race to a 10-minute action sequence.

In some respects, both Top Gun:Maverick and F1 are like extensions of Tron:Legacy and Oblivion. Legacy had various racing and flying (and competition) sequences, while Oblivion had some great flying sequences. The former two and the latter two are otherwise quite unalike styilistically, but the DNA of propulsive filmmaking is there.  I half expect Kosinski's next project to be a Waterworld legasequel just to bring it all back around.

I think Kosinski is an exceptional technical director, another guy who can produce big screen-worthy, widely appealing productions. The aesthetic flavour that initially drew me to him is not a constant in his work, but it's clear he is very skilled at providing wow-inducing action sequences. I think the disappointment both Toast and I are feeling is we thought Kosinski would be one of us, a guy who liked nerdy shit and would be capable of getting big budgets and big names to make them. Instead he's like the nerdy teenager who started hitting the gym during the summer and now hangs around more with the meatheads and tries to hide his geekier tendencies.

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The fourth entry in Quebec producer Rock Demers' "Tales for all" is the highly bizarre Poland-Canada co-production of The Young Magician ("Cudowne dziecko" in Polish).  I mean, so far all of the "Tales for all" have had some aspect of "highly bizarre" to them (and The Peanut Butter Solution is straight up bonkers), but they all have an internal logic to them, no matter how weird they get.

Writer-director Waldermar Dziki was clearly inspired by American kids adventure cinema of the mid-1980s as this feels like a funhouse mirror reflection of its glossier across-the-sea counterparts. 13-year-old Peter (Rusty Jedwab) is having a challenging time...he's quit the hockey team because the captain won't play him, the girl he likes seems to like the hockey captain better than him, and, well, his parents take him to a magic show where he's pulled up on stage to help out with a trick (he "helps" by doing nothing).

After the magic show Peter becomes convinced that he should have telekinetic powers, so he keeps practicing until, eventually, he develops telekinetic powers. Only thing is, his telekinesis tends to make things go haywire. Being a teenager, he of course uses his newly developed superpower to show off, and then it gets him in trouble and then the military comes and takes him away for testing. They can't figure out at all how his powers manifested, so they want to drill into his head. Peter escapes and meets Alexander (Edward Garson), a young orphan cello prodigy who shows Peter the way to harness his power: practice.

Peter gets absolutely no practice in before they're off on another adventure, and then contacted by the police to help deal with a deadly canister of highly volatile material. Yup, let's get the kid with uncontrollable telekinesis who makes things explode all the time try to move the canister of highly explosive stuff. Genius. Turns out, it was genius. Peter removes it safe and suddenly the military doesn't want him anymore and he's a town hero. He helps Alexander get a philharmonic gig, the end.

What?

Yeah. This movie feels like it was made by taking a pile of note cards with plot points and character markers on them, shuffling them, cutting the deck in half and then tossing the deck in the air so that they land in a random order. Nothing about this story makes logical sense, beyond Peter being a teenager and using his power to do petty things. 

This is a dumb movie that introduces its secondary lead (Alexander) at the end of the second act. It probably had three times the budget of any of the previous "Tales for all" productions. I mean, there are so many helicopers in this film, and not always the same helicoper, and not stock footage.

It's clear this was made in Poland (even before seeing the credits, where most of the participants outside of the Canadian leads have Polish last names) but pretends to be Canada despite not looking Canadian at all.  There's no Polish audio track and I spent the first 20 minutes switching between the English and French dubs trying to see if either would synch up, and at times the English would mimic the movements of a character's mouth, but I suspect that there's not a version of this film with the original on-set dialogue. 

 

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Great Flood

2025, Byung-woo Kim (Reborn) -- Netflix

South Korea has the world's lowest birth rate, caused primarily by a change in focus from marriage & family to careers & personal growth. Support for women doing both is almost non-existent, and that combined with traditional value systems is forcing more women to delay having children. These are stats drawn from a brief scan of the topic, which of course is expected to be biased in one way or another. But of course, there is always a kernel of truth to it, and pop culture will reflect what society is thinking. Eye-Eee, movies reflect what is going on in the culture.

This movie displays as a disaster movie, the ending of the world as an asteroid strikes Antarctica and almost instantly melts the ice shield, raising the ocean levels within hours, tsunamis ending human life as we know it. There is a toss away comment about the world governments knowing, but doing nothing as there was nothing to be done. Our main character, Koo An Na (Kim Da-mi, The Witch: Pt 1 - The Subversion), lives in a cramped apartment complex, a widowed mother of a single child, and as the flood happens, she is racing to get the boy to the tower roof. A government agent appears, there to assist her, as her job is important and a helicopter awaits them on the roof. Challenges abound, from panicking people to has explosions to the crashing tsunami.

And then she dies.

And then it starts over again.

From here on in, spoilers abound.

And no, not a time loop movie, but it does bear resemblance to the genre. Of course, we know something hinky is going on here, but we don't know what, but the movie has very decisively slipped away from the disaster to the ... iterations. Yes, more than one, MANY more than one. And along the way we get insights into An Na's job and her ... son, and her life choices. By the time we are deep in the repetitive flow of An Na trying to, unsuccessfully, reach the top of the apartment tower, we know we must be in a simulation, because how else could the same disastrous events keep happening and happening over and over again. But things are changing, such as discovering the boy is ... not a boy. He is an... artificial life form? An Na was part of a government program working on the emotional construct housed in a jar grown body. The entire movie focuses on the emotional component, and to that, on the relationship between a mother and her son. As iterations pass, the boy in the simulation has become aware he is not real but still throws a very child like tantrum, running from his "mother". And she has become desperate to find him, again and again, so they can reach the top of the tower and "escape".

This is where the movie lost its integrity, as it wants to be a speculative scifi movie about the idea humanity's last hope hinging on whether a mother will abandon all sense of self for the safety of her son, but it loses its own threads in the scifi behind it. If this is all a simulation, why does it matter if their is an artificial boy becoming self aware? I mean, he's not a construct but just a factor in the simulation. I get it is meant to further the goal of making the perfect, self-sacrificing mother, to be mythical mother to a new next-evolutionary-step artificial human race, to come back and re-colonize an abandoned, watery Earth, but then why even have the plot point of the boy becoming aware? If the idea is to enforce that an Artificial Mommy will protect her Artificial Son, then the only important part is the Simulated Mother. Also, once she knows its all a simulation, and is making all her choices based on that knowledge (Hell, she has 21,314 printed on her tshirt, showing how long they've been at it) of being simulated, doesn't that taint the results? 

Like other lofty scifi movies, they often lose themselves in their agenda and end up shoe-horning in the speculative elements to just let the desired point come through. The whole movie seems to be screaming out loud, "The human race will just end unless women remember that being a mother is the most important job on the planet !!!" ? Everything else is just tacked on for disaster-y, scifi-y and emotional-ly brownie points.

Oh yes, as for the "disaster movie", the parts we do get, the expanded locked room, in that the movie takes entirely in the stair wells and the cramped apartments and the watery depths of a drowning world, it was incredibly... visceral? A Korean movie about an apartment tower cannot help but comment on the cultural construct of villages transposed to apartments.

While watching this movie, part of my brain harkened back to Hollywood-ish takes on the idea of artificial life forms vs motherhood, in Mother/Android and I Am Mother, both of which went the other direction, in that they have a plot point ("motherhood is good!") but were dazzled by their own scifi. Their "agendas" are less at play, but they are all in the same place, a focus on the power of motherhood.

I Saw This (!!): Hallmarkies Interruptitis

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our [semi-retired] feature wherein Kent(!) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.

As mentioned in the "2000th Post (Spectacular)" my "3 Short Paragraphs" (never short) have overtaken the "projects" but primarily because I get a stub-post in such format placed, and eventually fill in the rest of the details. But in this instance, while I have had all the stubs in place (here, look behind the curtain) I doubt I am going to remember enough (because I saturated my brain with Xmas Movies and Hallmarkies) to write... all... three... oh wow, that sounds lame saying it out loud. Anywayz, excuses aside, I am going to resurrect the format for at least this post. And steal whatever I had in the stubs.

Kind of weird to say you are stealing from your own writing.... or is it that you are stealing from me, your other voice?

Amusingly, to me only of course, I believe this was the last time I used the format, which includes a film that is the first in a pair I write up in THIS post.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, 2025, Rian Johnson (Looper) -- Netflix

It irritates me to no end that I thoroughly, almost painfully, enjoyed every moment of this movie, but so little stayed with me. But for key scenes.

Knives Out introduced Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, Logan Lucky), a flamboyant celebrity detective. I wasn't overly impressed by the movie at the time, but in times since, it has both grown in admiration in my mind's eye and in rewatches. Sometimes solid, very solid, production & performances is all you need to be impressed. And again, Johnson delivers.

Set in a small town in upstate NY, Blanc is brought in unravel a locked room murder mystery (literally, by the book) of an infamous local priest, one Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin, The Goonies). His deacon, Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor, The Crown), has been accused of murdering him but not even the local police believe he did it, enough so that they allow Jud to follow around Blanc, gathering clues & information from Wicks core group of "followers".

Wicks was a horrible HORRIBLE man, but a man reflecting what we see now, every day, down south. Johnson ignores what is going on around him in America (not really, more he ignores the danger of speaking plainly and with conviction) and it is obvious what he thinks of the current political rabble. This is a movie which speaks openly and loudly about faith and decency, Good and Evil. Blanc is more vocally an atheist, but also very respectful of the people he is working with. Jud is a Man of God, a proper good man who believes in what he is doing and WHY he is doing it.

The movie had some chef's-kiss moments of film making, things like light & colour playing out in a cathedral more appropriate to Europe than NY state, where dialogue and sunshine reflect each other. Like a shifting of tone and mood, mid spoken sentence, when a priest shoves aside the murder mystery he is wrapped up in to tend to one of his flock, a woman in pain, who needs his shoulder, his voice. This is the kind of movie watching I want to do more of, which is made easier by a genre I am attracted to and performances I just chew on.

Kent's.

Tron: Ares, 2025,  Joachim Rønning (Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) -- download

People dislike Jared Leto as much as Jared Leto loves his (currently) luscious long hair, and probably himself. It only takes a little bit of research to find numerous examples of him as a sex pervert / douche or him as a toxic method actor who annoys everyone he works with. But he does decently with the roles given him even if many of them just add to Dislike Bucket (i.e. Morbius and his Joker).

After the mediocre draw of the last legasequel (which was 15 years ago!!) I was surprised this was being made, but not all that surprised that it distanced itself from the previous, and I was mildly disappointed they dumped the whole Sam Flynn and Quorra storyline.

Ares is a program made by Dillinger Systems, an ENCOM competitor company. He is a security program (i.e. soldier) and is part of an experiment to bring programs from "the grid" to the Real World. The movie uses the lovely visuals of a 3D printer on a massive scale, and envisions programs being used to create soldiers, support vehicles and weapons for the military industrial complex. Problem is, no one has been able to recreate the indefinite "solid state" of Quorra -- all "printed" programs fall apart after 29 minutes. That is, until Eve Kim, current CEO of ENCOM discovers that "permenance code" on her dead sister's computer in Alaska, which turns out to actually be Kevin Flynn's computer.  The movie is a race for Dillinger to get that code, with the added hiccup that his primary security program Ares has gone rogue, because after countless failed iterations, he has become not only sentient, but bearing morals.

Its a visually stunning movie and along with the soaring soundtrack by NIN, its quite thrilling but probably meant to be seen on a  very very big screen. I was only mildly enthralled despite being objectively thrilled by what I was seeing -- probably because of the lackluster story. 

Another thing caught my attention, in that much of the cast were the odd-ducks from other movies/series. Of course, we have Ares (Jared Leto, Blade Runner 2049), and then there's ENCOM CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee, Russian Doll), Dillinger's CEO Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters, Monster), and Kim's assistant Seth Flores (Arturo Castro, Road House). I am not entirely sure where my brain was going, considering other casting choices (e.g. Jodie Turner-Smith, Gillian Anderson) but the others seemed... interesting cast choices.

Kent's. And yes, I should have posted something during my recent-ish rewatch of the second.

Troll 2, 2025, Raur Uthaug (The Wave) -- Netflix

In hindsight, I was not convinced I really enjoyed the first one, Troll. Sure, I remember enjoying the over-the-top American action click approach (I called it "Michael Bay Norway Method" totally missing calling it  the "Michael Fjord Method") but I seem to feel I should have been more... annoyed with it? Maybe its just my perpetually cranky state of late, but this one... well, the sequel annoyed me in the way the most recent Godzilla vs Kong movie did -- of note, I recently rewatched that and yes, I softened on my dislike for it.

Anywayz, I think I literally nodded off three times during this one, so write-up may be spotty.

Good thing we lifted & dropped it into this collection, where all is forgiven.

So, in the first one, they killed the troll they woke up by using giant ultraviolet lights despite the ecologist main character Nora Tideman's (Ine Marie Wilmann, Furia) cries of, "Its not evil, its just following its nature!!" This movie follows up with her being introduced to a SECOND troll, one the government did not tell her about. They accidentally wake it up so it can, insert comedic element, walk through the newly re-built house of a random rural farmer on its way to purposely stomp on Oslo. Meanwhile Nora had her own secret, in that hidden in a deep abandoned mine shaft, she had discovered a "child" troll which she has made some sort of connection with. She tries to get Baby Troll, who is also kaiju sized, to convince Angry Troll to not stomp Oslo but all that does is get Baby Troll murdered. All that is left is the military intervention, once again in grand Michael Fjord style.

In said style, the American style of overbearing military types, bleeding heart liberals and stupid people making stupid choices, they end up choosing the most ludicrous, annoying, but dramatic (!!!) way to end the Angry Troll -- by sacrificing a lovable supporting character, even when there were so many other ways they could have handled it, such as, "You know you can try original plan again; there is nothing stopping you from TRYING AGAIN LATER !" Anyhoo, was... fun?

Deathstalker, 2025, Steven Kostanski (Psycho Goreman) -- download

Oh my. They did it, they actually re-made a terrrrrrible fantasy action movie from the 80s, one of those Conan rip-off's about a bare chested barbarian warrior doing fetch-quests for a witch, and starred the most ludicrous sword in all the terrible sword & sorcery movies made at the time. But, of course as a child of the D&D playing metal-music listening era, I saw this movie and probably... liked it at the time? Maybe not so much, as I have never felt the urge to rewatch. But other such now grown children must have had fonder memories as it was remade. And no, its not a requel, its pretty much the a full remake, but with ... 21st century sensibilities?

Deathstalker (Daniel Bernhardt, John Wick) is an ex-knight from a country losing a war against an evil sorceror named Necronemnon and his magical red armoured soldiers called Dreadites. We find him picking the carcasss of his own ex-army when he is attacked by Dreadites, but he makes quick work of them. The fallen prince is amazed at his survival and expects Deathstalker to help him; instead the man just picks him of valuables including a strange disk/medallion.

The rest of the movie has Deathstalker, who does have a real name but few call him by it, mainly people from his old life, trying to get rid of the magic medallion which, when the plot remembers, will return to him automatically if tossed away. He consults a witch, ends up in a cave where bandits have died but left behind a tiny imp-like minor wizard, with a complicated name but who Deathstalker calls "Doodad". Doodad (voiced by Patton Oswalt, The Sandman) knows that the medallion is coveted by Necro-dude, but thinks Deathstalker should try and return it to the remaining member of the royal family. Meh whatever, is DS's point of view.

Its a silly, over the top, badly acted, badly scripted movie with badly done (OK, decently done) practical effects but amusing because its very very self aware. It knows what nostalgia its drawing upon and the tone & style is akin to the source, which is not neccessarily a good thing but... appropriate? It was very popular with the D&D playing celebrity crew, so I guess it knows its primary audience.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, 2016, Michael Bay (Transformers) -- Netflix

Was in the mood for a soldiers movie; didn't recall it was a bay-splosion movie until the credits rolled. But should have guessed, while watching, due a good amount of a) American flags and b) bay-splosions. The funny thing is that its not much of an American rah-rah, given that the government did not provide any support to this compound, and its staff, when shit hit the fan in Libya.

So, "true story" movie. In 2012, an American CIA compound in Benghazi, something not publicly disclosed, was attacked by Libyan forces, just after they destroyed another American compound where an Ambassador was staying. This was all part of the chaos going on in the region after the 2011 Libyan civil war and interventions by NATO forces. The US did not officially have any CIA presence there, but a handful of contracted soldiers were assigned to the compound as protection. After the walled home where Ambassador Christopher Stevens was staying, with minimal protection as he was generally seen as a "friend of Libya", was burned out, the attacking forces moved onto the supposedly secret CIA compound - they lost the ambassador. The American soldiers defended the place until Libyan government forces showed at dawn and escorted the survivors to the airport.

This is rough & tough men being all tough and rough. Given that each is working a job, not fighting a war, there is lots of regret and emotional turmoil bandied about. Still, as in all Bay films, the actioned is well done and the characters are admirable.

Neighborhood Watch, 2025, Duncan Skiles (The Clovehitch Killer) -- download

Small movie with a deceptive title and accompanying trailer -- it is not about a neighbourhood watch at all, just a small movie about Simon, a young man recently released from a hospital, but still suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and Ed, his asshole neighbor, a retired campus security superintendent. Simon sees a girl get slapped around and then abducted by a man in a white van. But does he? The police don't believe him, or if they do, they don't care. So, Simon goes to Ed.

Ed decides to help Simon, but more because it plays on his ego to do some real detecting. He may be retired but he cannot help but hang around the college he once worked at, looking for criminals, and the security staff left behind hate him. Like, loathe him. He's alone, lonely, refusing to acknowledge he has any number of over-50 health issues and is losing money to online poker sites. So, Simon and his assumed-hallucination is at the very least, a distraction. Meanwhile, Simon is taking this very very VERY seriously needing to prove the voice in his head (his dead father) wrong. They begin asking around about the girl, the van, the guy.

Things don't go well, eventually leading to violence and deaths, with the cops chasing them as much as seeking out any bad guys. Since the police didn't believe him, Simon is the only one seen as a Bad Guy. But despite these odds, he pursues what he thinks he has to do. And Ed finally sees something admirable in the fucked up kid. As you know, I like small performances, focused and narrow on what is happening as much as the characters themselves.

That is a great poster.

KWIF: Frankenstein (+3)

 KWIF(tanct)=Kent's Week in Film (that are not Christmas themed).

This Week:
Frankenstein (2025, d. Guillermo del Toro - netflix)
Good Fortune (2025, d. Aziz Ansari - rental)
One Of Them Days (2025, d. Lawrence Lamont - crave)
The Peanut Butter Solution  (1985, d.Michael Rubbo - blu-ray)

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When you've been subsisting on a diet of fast food and takeout like I have this past month, your taste buds kind of get used to the overly sweet or too salty, and they forget what a hearty, homecooked meal is like. My consumption of Hallmarkies in December has been the bloat inducing Uber Eats of entertainment consumption, skewing my perceptions of what is good and what is good for you. Watching any non-Hallmarkie, non-direct-to-streaming film has reminded me of the comfort of time, attention and care put into a production, like a good homecooked meal.  Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein in turn is like going to a Michelin-starred restaurant and having a fancy, expensive production of a meal put before you. It may or may not be to your tastes, but the devotion and dedication to thought and nuance is present, the artistry and mastery of form commands attention and respect.

Frankenstein is a slap in the face, a wake up call from the drudgery of holiday movie consumption (much in the way that Robert Eggers' Nosferatu was this time last year). There is a scene early on in Frankenstein that lasts maybe 90 seconds, wherein Christoph Waltz's Heinrich Harlander approaches Oscar Isaac's Victor Frankenstein at his home and appeals to him to allow him to be his benefactor in his research of resurrecting dead flesh. In this scene we see Frankenstein's apartment, rich with equipment and drawings and shelves and stacks of books and furniture that is well worn but also well crafted. It tells us of a man who comes from means but the means are wanting, but it also tells us of the erudite nature of the man, as well as his lack of care. The set is mind-blowing, impossible to take it all in within the short span of time it is on screen, but it's so evident that every damn detail has been thought through.

When you've gotten used to set decorated with all the care of Christmas vomiting on the walls and windows and everywhere else, this kind of thing is mind blowing. And pretty much every scene, every setting in this film is riddled with such consideration and exacting, precise detail. The assembly montage of Frankenstein's lab in a castle in the Scottish Highlands is riveting because of design and attention to nuance.

del Toro has always had this desire to enrich his worlds like he does here in Frankenstein, and generally accomplishes it but on a more restricted budget. This feels like del Toro let loose, all his pent-up creative energy exploding out of him, like a supernova.  It's a brilliant flash to observe, but eventually it ends.

I will admit, I do not know Mary Shelly's story "The Modern Prometheus" very well (nor the story of Prometheus, frankly), so it's hard for me to say where del Toro's adaptation deviates.

Here it is structure with a framing sequence set in the arctic in the late 1800s as a ship of Danes (? It's captain is played by Lars Mikkelson) is trapped in the ice on their voyage to discover the North Pole. They spy an explosion in the distance and race to find a man on the ice, brutalized, and a monster of a man demanding his return.

One action sequences later, the men on the boat have a reprieve as the monster has apparently drowned. The rescued man is Victor, and he tells the captain his tale of hubris and ego, starting with his overbearing, coldly distant father, and how the death of his mother in childbirth had driven him to see a cure to mortality.  The tale weaves through Frankenstein's early research and experimentation and and his relationships with Harlander and Harlander's neice Lady Elizabeth (Mia Goth) who is to wed Victor's younger brother William. The creation of his creature (Jacob Elordi in an exceptional physical performance) was supposed to be his triumph, but the creature's rebirth only led to disappointment. Victor is his father's son, and the creature is treated as such. All Victor sees is his failure in science, not a being in need of care and guidance. He sees a monster, a reflection of his overconfidence and desire to explore the unknown, and he decides to end it.

The creature interrupts Victor's story and begins to relay his own tale, the tale of what happened after Victor destroyed his lab and the castle with it, failing to eradicate the creature, instead leaving it to survive on its own it the wild. There it is just another animal moving through the trees, a target for the gun of hunters and men fearful of the unknown. The creature takes hostel in the barn of a family home, but remains hidden. He learns, as does his landlord's child, from the kindly, blind grandfather. When the family leave the old man on his own, the creature presents himself to the blind man and finds the friend, teacher, mentor and father figure Victor should have been.

Frankenstein is a tragedy, and in this telling, it's the tragedy of the perpetuating cycles of fathers and sons...mostly. The shame of del Toro's adaptation is his inability to fully escape the source material and fully embrace a specific narrative theme. As such, aspects of the tale seem extraneous or unnecessary or outside of the narrative context. The first half of the film- Victor's tale- is gorgeous, loaded with the richness of manufactured details, while the second is much more spare, using the natural landscape as much of its backdrop, showing the creature connecting with wildlife in a much more spiritual, grounded way. These are intentional decision, but the intensity of the eye-popping set and costume design becomes sorely missed in the creature's tale and has the unintentional effect of making it feel lesser than, even though it's not, really. Victor's tale provides the blood, but the creature's tale is the heart that pumps it.

Like Toasty, I was enraptured throughout the entire film. My cinematic taste buds were delighted by this well-crafted, robustly flavoured meal that's perhaps a little too familiar while also being a bold and challenging take in a comforting way. It's not perfection, by any means, but it's a film del Toro has been wanting to make for decades and in finally making it you can see all that refined artistry he's honed in the years since in this presentation, as well as feel his passion for the material. There is a sense of love and passion underpinning this Frankenstein I'm not sure I've seen in any other adaptation or iteration.

The only thing about doing an adaptation like this, or Dracula/Nosferatu or any other familiar tale (Shakespeare or Arthurian mythology) is there will never be a definitive version. There will always be another coming along with yet another take (Luc Besson's Dracula is impending as is Maggie Gyllenhaal's Bride of Frankenstein riff The Bride). So enjoy the meal, savour it, but you'll eventually need to eat again, each subsequent meal diluting the exceptional experience. You can always go back and have that fine dining experience again, but is it ever quite as good as the first time?

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The 1980s were rife with films like Good Fortune, comedies with fantastical elements but also a bit of social commentary. They ebbed in the 1990s and have all but faded away since. I was excited for this new foray into an old-style comedy, but life got in the way of getting to it in theatre.

The film starts with Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), a low-status Los Angeles-centric angel with small wings whose sole responsibility is to stop people who are texting and driving from getting into accidents. Gabriel has dreams of bigger things (bigger wings), of really making a difference, of It's A Wonderful Life-ing someone.

He saves Arj (Aziz Ansari) from a texting and driving accident, and takes a particular interest in him. He watches Arj's life as an underemployed documentary editor who's barely scraping by in the gig economy doing food delivery, small tasks and working pickup shifts at a hardware chain. Arj sleeps in his car and can't seem to get out of the cycle he's in. After working a garage clean up gig for venture capitalist Jeff (Seth Rogen), he winds up being Jeff's assistant, and going on a date with Elena from the hardware store. But a small moment of desperation leads to Jeff firing him. Despair has crept in, and Gabriel presents himself to Arj in hopes of turning his spirits around, of making a difference.

It seems Gabriel understanding of how to change someone's outlook on life is based on oversimplified tales from movies. He thinks that if he switches Arj's life with Jeff's that he can show Arj that money won't change what's really important. Except it does, and Arj doesn't want to let go of the new life-without-struggles that he has. Gabriel accidentally raises Jeff's awareness to the switch, and suddenly Arj feels the pressure and guilt of taking someone else's life, so he asks for a week to enjoy it, and Jeff think's he can do fine with struggling like he has never had to in his life...for one week.

But Gabriel's actions are off book, and his superior, Martha (Sandra Oh) suspends him, taking his wings and making him mortal. Jeff's only means of regaining his heavenly status is to get Arj to actually desire return to his old life. In the meantime, both Jeff and Gabriel are forced to live a different class of existence than what they're used to.

Given the times we are in, I get it if some people don't find Good Fortune incisive enough or anti-capitalist enough or vicious enough, but I think the broader strokes are there if not always the finer ones (this is after all a film made by and starring millionaires, so there is bound to be some disconnect) and, for the intention - that of making a fantastical comedy - it largely succeeds.  

Few comedians succeed without struggling first, without having to pay their dues getting crap gigs for a meagre payout that barely floats them to the next one. Despite his early success at a younger age, Ansari still had to do this too. Ansari's stage persona has always had an affable nature that remained even as he grew in comedic stature, and his comedy has often had a streak of both starfucking and self-awareness, which makes him well suited to the role he cast himself in, as a guy with struggles who suddenly finds himself rich.  Arj's journey doesn't fully seem personal, but it does feel like a man trying to speak to something... and that something is class divides which may be something he's really struggling with (it's not fully evident in Arj's character, but is more evident in Rogen's Jeff).

 Reeves is a twitchy delight in this playing a bit of a dimwit angel, and it's such a perfect lane for him. The same awkward wooden boy qualities that make him a pretty terrible dramatic actor work so well for him as a comedic one when the role is shaped for him, and Ansari uses him perfectly. 

It's almost hard to remember when Rogen was just the stoner with the funny laugh, he's become such a titan of the industry at this point (I've lost track of how many movies and TV shows he's appeared in this year, not to mention how many he's directed and/or produced), but again, that side of him, that "him?" question that seems to come up needing him to prove himself in pretty much every role, makes him pretty much perfect to play a riches-to-rags story believably.

And, I mean, how does one not just get swoony over Kiki Palmer every time she's on screen. She's not used to her maximum potential here, not by a longshot (we'll get to that shortly), but when it comes to dream girl love interest casting it's seems obvious. 

Ansari had a bold shift from stand-up and sitcom star to a heralded figure in the Golden Age of Television with Master of None. His arty shifts into pseudo-French new wave and other subgenre exercises throughout the series were certainly showing a creative taking advantage of his opportunities and taking risks. I'm not sure there's a lot of that visual acuity here, though the references to Wim Wenders Wings of Desire were certainly not lost on me.

This isn't a rebel yell, this isn't a riot starter, it isn't a call to action... it's entertainment (I don't think we should be really looking to one percenters to start these movements). It's not trivial entertainment, but it's also not tossing bricks either. It's a witty protest sign at a rally, and that's okay. It's just nice to see a film like this again.

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Where Good Fortune tried to hit a message home about class discrepancies and how hard it is to survive in the modern economy, it only gets part of the way there in really exemplifying the struggle. One Of Them Days takes it the rest of the way, and is crazy entertaining to boot.

Kiki Palmer is in full command of the screen for the bulk of this film, grabbing you by the hair and dragging you along for her ride. The preternaturally charming, funny and endearing Palmer plays Dreux, an L.A. waitress struggling to make ends meet. She's just finished her early shift at the franchise diner and just wants to get some rest before her big interview at 4pm to hopefully become a franchise manager at her restaurant. She has the experience, the knowledge and the attitude needed, maybe just not the confidence.

Her best friend and roommate Alyssa (SZA) is her support, her crutch holding her up and pushing her forward. Alyssa is a bit of a free spirit with no committed profession, except being an artist but undervaluing her work. Alyssa also has a dirtbag boyfriend Keshawn who has been crashing rent free for months, but Alyssa is kind of powerless to resist him for...ahem...reasons. Dreux's rest is interrupted when her landlord informs her he never received the rent, and that she'll be out on the street by 6pm if he doesn't get it. Dreux gave it to Alyssa who gave it to Keshawn who suddenly disappeared (with all his sneakers).

And so the countdown is on. Dreux and Alyssa need to find Keshawn, and survive a crazy obstacle course of an afternoon in order to avoid being put out on the street. It seems at once both a trivial and Herculean task, but the tremendously sharp and witty script by Syreeta Singleton sets up the obstacles and set pieces and players all like dominoes and Keshawn's darting out the apartment is the first one to fall.

To talk about the events of the film is to spoil the process of discovery, but it's an effective script in highlighting just how the capitalistic systems set up in America are precisely there to keep the disadvantaged at a disadvantage and how these systems pits community against itself as people tried to crawl over each other to get whatever leg up they can get... all without ever being preachy about it. Even when it's shouted out by Katt Williams' Shameeka, a local character hanging outside of the payday loan place warning people about the evil and deceit inside, it's a comedic tour de force more than hitting you over the head with a message.

One Of Them Days is a superb example of the "one crazy day/night" movie, showing that strong characters with a specific point of view can take a well-worn genre and breathe new life into it. Palmer connects with everyone she meets on screen, even when it gets awkward, there's real chemistry there. She makes everything work to the point that it's hard to think of a single scene that doesn't.  While this is Palmer's star vehicle, for sure (and she shines so vibrantly), this is SZA's coming out party as an actress and she makes it seem effortless.  Palmer has chemistry with everyone, sure, but you need to believe that her and SZA have been best friends forever, and they sell it almost immediately and that sense of connection never wavers (their friendship is also the backbone of this film, so it needed to be rock solid, and it's diamond-strong).

Watching two people in such a desperate situation shouldn't be this much fun, but it is.

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The Peanut Butter Solution (aka Operation Beurre de Penottes) is the second film in producer Rock Demers "Tales for All" series and one of my favourite childhood treasures that's still every bit as weird and wonderful today to experience as it was when I was a child.  Ok, maybe it doesn't scare me as much as when I was 10, but this was mandatory viewing every time it was on the CBC when I was a kid.

As children, we often are attracted to what scares us, and that's kind of the crux of The Peanut Butter Solution. Just as I was drawn to watching this creepy, weird movie over and over again as a child, Michael (Matthew Mackay) is drawn to the smoldering remains of a burned down Montreal abandoned house where unhoused people used to hole up and may have died in the fire. Micheal and his best friend Connie (the delightful Siluck Saysanasy) go to investigate the house and in the process Michael sees something that scares him unconscious. Connie drags him home in a shopping cart. The next morning when Michael wakes up, his hair has fallen out as a result of the trauma of the scare, but he can't remember what scared him.

But having no hair is just as traumatic as the scare was, and he refuses to go to school. After his dad and sister acquire a wig for him, he tries it out and for a few days feels normal, until a soccer bully yanks it off his head (the shot of the glue going all stringy always upset me and grossed me out when I was little), and all the school kids chase him home, teasing him (where were the soccer coaches/ref/any adult at all?). The traumas never stop with this kid.

He's visited at night by the ghosts of the two unhoused individuals who died in the fire. Michael had paid a kindness to them once, and so they were paying him back, giving him the formulae for a hair-growth solution. Michael fudges the mixture with too much peanut butter and suddenly not only is his hair back but it's growing by meters throughout the day Connie sits behind him in class constantly trimming but it's so distracting Michael gets expelled. The next day, his hair dragging on the ground, he packs off and heads out to school in a wind storm screaming about how he just wants to learn and be normal. Its when he hides and tries to shelter from the wind storm that he's found by The Signor (Michel Maillot), his peculiar art teacher who got fired for being too severe.

The Signor kidnaps Michael, and then a dozen other kids. He sets up a sweatshop where Michael is chemically sedated with special yogurt and the other kids take trimmings of his hair and make magical paint brushes. When the Signor paints with them he creates paintings so realistic you can literally walk into them.

I don't know how long the Signor thought he could keep this whole operation going for it, but a couple of pre-teens (Connie and Michael's sister) sniff him out and bust his creepy operation.

I'm not sure how many of the "Tales for All" were shot in English, but I'm guessing there will be more in the series down the line and that Demers wasn't devoted to solely making French Canadian products.  I don't mind the English production, and for the most part the child actors here are pretty good (Alison Podbrey as Suzie, Michael's sister is exceptional) but the little bit of distance that translated subtitles provides tends to smooth over any shakiness.

This movie is such wonderful nonsense, the dream logic of it all is what makes it so magical, and so unsettling. Any story that deals with mass kidnapping is inherently upsetting, but this is a film that dives in the deep end of the trauma pool and can't figure out how to get out. The film begins with Michael missing his mother who has gone to Australia to deal with her recently deceased father's estate. Just being of an age and needing one's parent (when his dad, played by Michael Hogan despite being full of love isn't up to the job of comforting him) and not having it is its own trauma.

The story does give Michael resolution to two of his many, many traumas, but they are most assuredly going to haunt him for some time. I would love a Doctor Sleep-like follow-up to this.