Time to pollute the 31 Days post stream by tagging a series of Xmas movies! I joked about doing 31 Days of Xmas and Kent suggested we tag-team on it. That way, we can do other things, such as, well maybe, Xmas shopping? Will it be generic Xmas movies? All Hallmark-style Xmas romcoms? Any movie that is Xmas Adjacent? YES !!
See This Post for all the details. Consider this an early riser, not yet in the Spirit of Things. A taster. An apéritif.
Noelle was originally supposed to be released in the theatres this Xmas season, but ended up as a Disney+ exclusive. I suppose that is what will happen in the future, when something just doesn't gell together enough to be a proper mainstream release, "To the streaming service with you!!" Higher or lower profile than Straight to X ?
But it had Anna Kendrick in it, so I was in. And to be quite frank, if it didn't have her in it, I wouldn't have survived. Oh, sure there were quips a-plenty and it had a charming quirky sensibility about it, but it kept on sliding the scale from Generic Disney Xmas Movie all the way over to Star Wars Holiday Special, and then back again.
So, Kendrick is Noelle. Bill Hader is Nick. They are Santa Claus's kids. They live at the North Pole. Nick is destined to wear the suit after his father. Noelle is just oozing the Xmas Spirit with her fold-out cards and Sexy Santa's Helper outfits -- yes, even the Laplander inspired outfit. I may be biased.
But then Santa dies. Fuck; childhood trauma anyone? No death scene, but still, the line, "It's been 5 months since Santa passed away." So, Nick has to now wear the suit. He's been learning the job all his life but it just hasn't taken. At Noelle's suggestion, he runs off to have a few days in the sun to relax, and doesn't come back. Insert panic at the North Pole.
P.S. Puffins!! Only because penguins are not geographically accurate.
Noelle runs off after him dragging the militaristic reindeer and one cranky nanny elf played by Shirley MacLaine in her best "stretched ladies from Brazil" look. They end up in Phoenix, Arizona crashed landing at a resort, where Noelle starts off doing her best Fish Out of Water trope. Which ends up being the rest of the movie, until she realizes that Girls Can Be Santa Too.
This movie was really rather terrible, but there were so many quips and one-liners and Anna Kendrick-sons that I found myself regularly chuckling. There was a bit of channeling of that Will Farrell Elf movie, which I have not seen (and will not) but have seen enough clips to recognize the homage. My fav bit is the crazy lady hiding out in the cooler; Phoenix must have a high tolerance for cray cray.
Hey gang (all 12 of you), if you were paying attention to this post, I've got it in my head to start writing reviews of Hallmark Channel original movies. They've been cranking these things out heavily for the past 20 years or so, and each year it seems like they only step up production (but not production values).
Other networks and streaming services have also gotten into the game, and I'll probably have a look at those too. I know there are Canadian originals out there (not certain who is producing them, I haven't researched that yet) and Netflix is definitely in the game, as is Oprah on her OWN network. They're all of a type, which is cheaply made, quickly filmed, and relatively benign in the the sexuality department (in Hallmark's case, most of these films end in a single kiss that seems to signify resignation more than infatuation).
Toast and I are starting the Xmas Advent Calendar this weekend, which is 24 Christmas movies (or TV shows/specials) counting down to Christmas. These aren't exclusively Hallmark-type films, and I still don't know whether Toast is even into these cheeseball things, but there will be some in the mix. I can't help it, I watch them, almost uncontrollably.
These films are, by and large, terrible. They're awful, often faux-sentimental and treacly, churned out to such a degree that there's a spit shine, but no real polish on those boots. They're about as genuine as the snow they use (which is usually meters of cotton batting rolled out everywhere). And while the Christmas ones are by far the most popular of these offerings (even if they're not very realistic, they do effectively start evoking the flavour of the season) they produce these things year round. There's New Years ones, Valentines, 4th of July one, and ones that center around generic Winter, Spring (maybe even Easter-specific), Summer, and Autumn. There's no shortage of them, and they're on all the damn time (they even started having "Christmas In July" marathons).
But in all that awfulness is a formula, a familiar rhythm, and a whole slew of tropes they always return to. After watching a few of these things the formula reveals itself, and even if you don't connect with the characters or the story, you start to invest in that formula and revel in the minute little diversions from film to film. They become quite fun in their own, peculiar way. In the same way we sometimes fall in love with awful genre movies or cheesy syndicated TV shows (*cough*Toast*cough*), we can actually love these things. Every now and again one of them comes together that's actually enjoyable in its own right, and not just something you're watching (and drinking to) ironically.
We love our genre programming here at "Toast and Kent Sometimes Disagree" and I think of these as definitely genre programming, just they're they're own genre, they're the Hallmark genre. And so it won't just be for the XMas Advent Calendar, but going forward, as much as I feel like writing about them.
In order to write about them, though, I need structure. I can't approach these things with cerebral intentions, because they're not cerebral movies. They're designed to not make you think. The stakes are always so low (or so absurd) that there's never even the question "what would I do in that situation"? They're dull, often ridiculous fantasies, played so earnestly, you can't talk about them like they're real films. So structure is needed to compare and contrast. Each entry in "A Toast to Hallmarkent" will be sectioned as follows:
The Draw: or, "why did I watch this?" What was it about this particular Hallmark/HMknockoff that made me want to watch the film. For me it's going to be mostly "ooh, X actor or Y actress is in it", such as the upcoming Hallmark movies starring Elizabeth Mitchell (from Lost) or Kristin Chenoweth (from awesomeness). Often these will be because of how the write-up seems to break the mold of the Hallmark template (but usually they fall right back into the mold). Sometimes it may just be curiosity or recommendation or because of the Deck The Hallmark podcast.
The Formulae: in which we provide a description of the movie via its formulaicness. There's a few variants of the same formulae at play in these things, we'll tell you all about the film via the formulae.
Unformulae: This is where the film breaks the formula, where it surprises and where it sets itself apart from its kin.
True Calling?: or, does the title represent the film? Like, At.All? So often these films have really generic, forgettable titles that often are bad puns or twist of phrases that don't have anything to do with the film. Maybe here we will present a better title?
The Rewind: Almost every one of these has that "must see it again" moment, a moment where you hit rewind on the PVR and maybe even pause the scene to reveal something bizarre or gross or just goofy...this can just be a screencap maybe. Like this horrifying image from Angel of Christmas (2015).
The Regulars: where we point out those familiar Hallmark faces and where we may have seen them before. You can read IMDB on your own for more in-depth info, but we may develop favourite supporting actors and whatnot in this section (or not)
How does it Hallmark? Here we will ask how does it fare as a Hallmark movie? Better, worse, average, that sort of thing. Probably even more pressing a question for the Hallmark clones. I may have to go back and do The Princess Switch which Netflix dropped last year. It's better than most every Hallmark movies but it's definitely in the genre.
How does it movie? And here we will ask how it fares a real movie? In almost every instance it's going to be hot garbage compared to real cinematic offerings, but every now and again we may find a gem that was sold as part of the Hallmark genre but is actually a real, honest to gosh movie. Like, this year Netflix lumped Let It Snow in with their knockoff fare, but it's a real, great movie. The Princess Switch while being better than most Hallmark movies, is still "of the genre" and is too cheap-like to stack up against real films.
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Is there anything else you think we should cover? Like how drunk was I when watching this? Or any new tropes to add to the Hallmark drinking game?
I hope you have fun with these reviews (and I hope Toast will contribute a few). Should be a breezy, boozy good time.
The retiring assassin, a trope that attracts me, and not for any reasons you should call the mental health authorities (if you know me well, there are already PLENTY of reasons to do that) but because I like that they always present as a moral-adjacent individual who knew they were an outlier but found something they were good at. I would like that, well not that particular skill set, but I would like to find out that thing that I am good at, and make some people pay money at it & find my place in the world. And retire in a warm climate.
Will Smith is Henry Brogan, with 70-odd kills under his belt, who is having trouble looking at himself in the mirror. Unlike most assassin organizations (unlike, say, the one in Polar), this one seems to be letting him retire. That is, until he is framed (aren't they always) for an unsanctioned kill. And off he goes, with Mary Elizabeth Winstead dragged along behind (because she was surveilling him, and now has to go) to find out who and why. While hiding out in Columbia with best-bud, already retired frat brother Baron (Benedict Wong; Doctor Strange) he bumps into the real reason for the movie -- himself. Or rather, a younger, faster cloned version of himself.
It wasn't until the end and the credits came up, that I saw (and remembered) that this was an Ang Lee movie, which explained why I kept on thinking, "this isn't half bad, in fact many things are quite good." The performances are top notch and the action set pieces are high quality, not John Wick (the new benchmark; sorry Jason Bourne) but very well done. And Brogan stands separate from his retiring assassin brethren in that he is actually personable, very self aware, and also very aware he is much older than Winstead, so he doesn't hit on her. The whole de-aging CGI stuff is weird and mostly works, but I kept on seeing The Fresh Prince of Bel Air with a gun, which took me out of the reverie.
[10 for 10... that's 10 consumables which we give ourselves 10 minutes
apiece to write about. Part of our problem is we don't often have the
spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie
or TV show we watch. How about a 10-minute non-review full of
half-remembered scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable? ]
In this edition:
1. Creed II - 2018, d. Steven Caple Jr. - Crave
2. Under the Silver Lake - 2019, d. David Robert Mitchell - Amazon Prime
3. The Perfect Date - 2019, d. Chris Nelson - netflix
4. Christopher Robin - 2018, d. Marc Forster - Crave
5. Tell Me Who I Am - 2019, d. Ed Perkins - netflix
6. Hellboy - 2019, d. Neil Marshall - Amazon Prime
7. Jojo Rabbit - 2019, d. Taika Waititi - In Theatre
8. Frozen II - 2019, d. Jennifer Lee, Chris Buck - In Theatre
9. Happy Death Day 2 U - 2019, d. Christopher Landon - Crave
10. Let It Snow - 2019, d. Luke Snellin - netflix
Maybe if I didn't spend 2 1/2 hours writing about the Mandalorian I would have had more time to go into deeper thoughts about some of these...alas here I am...and here we go....
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I just expressed (finally) how much I love Creed, and while Creed II is definitely missing some of what Ryan Coogler brought to it, namely the intense and incredibly accomplished tracking shots of the fight in the ring it's still a radically fun and engaging time. Knowing that Stallonehad his hand in the script, and that it was dealing with the villain from Rocky IV (that being Dolph Lundgren's Ivan Drago), I was a little worried this would be overly-Rocky focussed but, turns out those mild fears were unfounded, mainly because I forgot that Drago killed Adonis Creed's dad. The history doesn't end there, Drago's loss wound up being detrimental to his status in Russia, and he's been in low, impoverished status since. Meanwhile Donny is the top boxer in his class without any real challenge, so taking on the oversized, junior Drago is an exercise in humility. Plus Donny has his first kid on the way and he and Bianca are worried her hereditary hearing loss will affect their child. Mainly it's super fun to catch up with everyone. Donny, like in the last movie, lets his ego get the best of him, but he learns from it. There's a bullshit moment of tension between Rocky and Donny, but other than that it's a solid sequel. It feels likethe Creed series is going the same trajectory as the Rocky run, however, getting a little bigger, and a little more absurd with each outing. I'm hoping the next film lets Donny's story be his own, and not so tied to Apollo or Rocky's past.
[10:19]
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I also recently expressed my love for It Follows, David Robert Mitchell's expertly crafted modern horror. I was curious about what his follow-up was, as it had been a few years, and was pleased to find Under the Silver Lake on Amazon Prime. I had heard a few mixed reviews of this, sleepy, weird neo-noir, but still thought Mitchell had earned my interest with his previous effort. Andrew Garfield stars as a bit of a shiftless layabout living in LA, his writing career having gone nowhere, and eviction always looming overhead. He sparks up a mutual attraction with a neighbor, only for her to disappear soon after. His understimulated thought processes go into overdrive and he goes on the hunt for the truth behind her disappearance. Curious mysteries, hidden messages, coded songs, all these buried meanings lead him to an even bigger, weirder mystery at the heart of LA. Mitchell is channeling David Lynch and the Coen Brothers with whimsey, weirdness, and absurd noir melodrama, peppering in heavy violence among curious slapstick. It's certainly not an uninteresting movie, but it is a challenge if you're one who needs to know where exactly something is going, especially if that something needs to be grounded in anything approximating reality. If I were 20 years younger, I would absolutely love this movie. As it is, it's not derivative, but it's not cogent enough for my current tastes. There'd be a cult film here if we weren't so bombarded with content these days. I fear it's likely to be more forgotten than found.
[21:32]
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I've missed out on a few of Noah Centineo's Netflix teen rom coms to date, but having watched The Perfect Date, I'm kind of seeing what the fuss is about. Centineo seems unassuming at first, but he quickly reveals himself to be a Ruffalo-esque charm machine in this film. He sports the appearance of an insufferable douchecanoe, but he has soft eyes, a kind smile and a gentle spirit in his performance here of a guy trying to make money for college (since his writer dad has been relatively unemployed since his mom walked out on them). His method for making money? Hiring himself out as a stand-in (the film was originally titled "The Stand-In", and much more appropriate title) for other teens who need a fake boyfriend or +1 for whatever reason. It's kind of a modernization of the 80's teen classic Can't Buy Me Love in a way, but mostly in premise. Centineo's first date is with the stand-offish, sarcastic Laura Marano (playing a character that can only be called a Lizzie Caplan-type), and they spark up a no-nonsense friendship. We can see where this is going already, and it follows the sort of rhythms you would expect, and yet it's no less sweet or enjoyable a journey. There's not a lot of meat on these bones but a charming cast pretty much makes it worth the time. Centineo should actually make a fine Prince Adam/He-Man should that film actually get made (I hear it's a netflix project now... turn it into an Eternia romcom and maybe they have something).
[29:42]
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Who is Christopher Robin for? I mean, I'm all for any film starring Ewan McGregor and Hayley Atwell, but this is supposed to be a kids film, and it's really, really maudlin. I think we're supposed to understand that McGregor has PTSD from his time in WWII, but it's never explicit, and the funk he's in is cured by revisiting his childhood friends, which are actualized beings and not just a part of his imagination. This movie is weird. It's desperately trying to be Paddington but in doing so it does that thing that 80's superhero, animation, and toy movies did when they went live action, which was not believing enough in the power of the fantasy world, and having to ground things in the boring old real world. This film did get a few laughs and more than a few tears out of me, but I'm soft like a Pooh-bear like that. It just takes a swelling score and the eyes start watering up. It's hard to dislike Christopher Robin, it's a sweet movie, truly, but it offers little to rave about. Where the Paddington films are a fun roller-coaster ride, this one's more like a country drive on a gravel road. It's just nice. It's not quite a nostalgia trip meant for parents, and it's not exuberant kiddie fare. It falls closer to Where The Wild Things Are than Despicable Me, that's for sure. I suppose it's a film for the kids in SNL's "Wells For Boys" commercial.
[39:18]
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It seems like half the documentary films out there are of the "true crime" persuasion, and even films that aren't necessarily conventional "true crime" (ie. murder/kidnapping mysteries) seem to play out in the same sort of narrative fashion and with the same kind of editing and production. Tell Me Who I Am does fall into this same documentary narrative trap, but its story is so compelling and its resolution so emotional one can't really find fault with the style of storytelling it chose. This is a tale told by the main players in its story, Marcus and Alex Lewis, identical twin brothers, leading parallel lives until around the age of 18 when Alex has a bad accident and loses his memory. The only thing he knows for sure is Marcus is his brother (he doesn't even know his own name). Alex depends on Marcus for everything, rapidly guiding him through infancy, childhood, and his teenage years as Alex has to relearn pretty much everything. It's 15 years before Alex learns that Marcus has been editing his history lesson of their lives, things he only discovers following the death of their mother and cleaning up their parents estate. What Marcus learns drives a wedge between the brothers, and in spite of working together and maintaining their family, there's been a wedge between them for some time. The first act of the film presents us with Alex's view of the events, the second Marcus' view also furthers the narrative, while the third act is a very potent confrontation on screen, in front of the cameras, wherein Marcus finally reveals the extent of the abuse they suffered as children. It's through this resolution that they both finally understand eachother's sides of the story. Alex's life feels incomplete, dishonest, knowing that he doesn't have the memories that his brother does, and what his brother gave him is a redacted version of their past he feels keeps them distant. Marcus, meanwhile, carries the burden of trying to give his brother a better life than they actually had by keeping the knowledge of what they went through to himself. It was, he thought, the most precious gift he could give him, but living with that wedge between them and burying the truth was causing them both to suffer. Marcus' on camera confession is painful, powerful and beyond brave. In addressing the camera, he's addressing not only his brother but the audience he knows is looking on, and to reveal something so painful, not to just one person, but millions upon millions is a dramatic leap on his part. It's a tale that's both fascinating and upsetting but it's also inspiring, with Marcus and Alex showing that trauma doesn't need to define someone, and that speaking out against abuse is meaningful and powerful.
[54:37]
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This poster is far better than anything in the film
I don't remember the last time I turned off a film and didn't return to it. I was warned about Hellboy, warned that it wasn't worth my time, and it turns out all those people who warned me were absolutely right. I liked Guillermo Del Toro's first Hellboy entry, the second one left me wanting. This one feels like a direct-to-youtube cosplay abomination. I can't think of a better replacement for Ron Perlman as Hellboy than David Harbor, and yet the make-up and wardrobe they give Harbor is ghastly. It looks ill-fitting, with a disgusting-looking weave of hair on his head and arms and back. He's wickedly unappealing to look at, something you want to see only in flashes and quickly dead, not the lead of a 2 hour movie. The tone of the film feels off entirely. It's meant to be pithy and light, but it moves far too quickly from moment one to ever settle into it. The first 20 minutes bombard the audience with back story for both the villain and Hellboy, and neither are given time to breathe or rest to gain any weight within the film. It's a constant sprint to the next thing, then the next thing, then the next thing. It's exhausting. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't shot so poorly, or if the effect didn't look like video game cut scenes. It's not a film of bad ideas, just bad execution. One misstep after another after another. It shouldn't be unwatchable, but it kind of is. I really didn't like the 45 minutes I spent in Neil Marshall's vision of Hellboy, not one bit. And I tried, I tried to look for something I liked, and I couldn't. There was a sliver of salvation in Harbor, but under all that grotesque latex and paint it was too much to wade through to stay with it. I'm not going back.
[1:03:31]
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Jojo Rabbit is the kind of movie I should have more thoughts on, but I don't really. I've listened to quite a few podcasts and read quite a few reviews and, for the most part, I don't really have any contention with anything anyone is saying about this film. Sweet and charming? Sure? Ill-advised and manipulative? Maybe. Sloppy and redundant? Fine. Heartwarming and heartbreaking? Yeah. It's those things. Any film that deigns to make comedy out of Nazis has its work cut out for them, but Waititi seemingly laughs in the face of challenges such as these. Waititi doesn't generally delve into wistfulness and whimsy like he does here, it's pretty cute by a mile, and it's very cheeky at times. It's not trying to be clever about anything, it seems like he's mostly having a good time with a youthful story of love, loss and making Nazis look foolish. Those foolish Nazis include Sam Rockwell, Alfie Allen, Rebel Wilson and Stephen Merchant. Rockwell is in some of his best form here, playing a mid-ranking apathetic Nazi clearly in a romantic relationship with Allen. His barely-there belief in the cause doesn't make him sympathetic or any less complicit, it does make him funny. Of course, Waititi also plays Adolph Hitler in this film... or, rather what a 10-year-old boy drenched in propaganda thinks he is. And in that portrayal he's a total buffoon. If there's a point to the film, beyond just it's touching drama, it's that Nazis suck, and they're pretty dumb too. It's not the most profound message, but it does bear repeating.
[1:13:22]
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What did I think of the original Frozen? Enh, it's fine. I think I cooled on it after being repeatedly subjected to the film and its soundtrack by my daughter who thankfully moved on from it into Star Wars and superheroes long before other girls her age did. I count myself lucky that I've not really had to watch the film in about 5 years. So going to Frozen 2, I kind of knew how I would feel about it, which was a kind of apathy mixed with mild curiosity. The earliest trailer kind of poised Elsa as a superhero in this Nordic land that's fantastical in very restrained ways. I was into it. But subsequent trailers put the focus back on goofy hi-jinks of Olaf and songs that sound like typical songs from these things, and I was left only with fleeting optimism that something awesome would be happening. Hot Take: nothing all that awesome really happens. Frozen 2 has its moments of beautiful animation, but compared to the tranquility and beauty of How To Train Your Dragon 3 this is the dog's breakfast regurgitated. The songs are forgettable, but there's one that sounds suspiciously like it's trying to be a Peter Cetera song, and I was into it. They even animated it like an early 80's music video with odd split screens and cheesy effects. But it didn't fit the movie very well, and even at this point I'm wondering who that's for? It's an aged out reference for most parents of today. Beyond that, the story really features no antagonist, other than the unknown. If there is a villain, its the sins of ancestry. There's elemental forces at play that Elsa has unlocked and she needs to discover the mystery behind it, in order to save their home, the forest and stuff. But it's a weird adventure that keeps splitting people apart. There's a lot of sort-of funny missed opportunities as Kristoff keeps missing his opportunity to propose, that leads to an absolutely novice screenwriting misunderstanding. The film threatens to permanently eliminate Elsa, Olaf and their town of Arendell, but it chickens out of any of them for a feel-good ending. It introduces a whole new cast of supporting characters but does next to nothing with them. Its grand adventure is wildly anticlimactic. This just isn't great. It's not terrible...a film doesn't *have* to have an antagonist, but it generally helps. Here they're fighting against unknown future and make right their ancestral past, and while maybe they're important steps in Ana and Elsa's history and character growth, it does not make for a very exciting movie. This should have been a direct to Disney+ thing.
[1:28:21]
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Oh man, I loved Happy Death Day, and I was sooooper excited for Happy Death Day 2U to finally make it to whatever streaming or subscription service it would first wind up on (I only got to HDD this summer so the sequel was already out of theatres by that point). With anticipation high, and excitement a bit feverish, I tore into it the first opportunity I could, and ... it's ok. Jessica Rothe is still amazing as Tree in the film, but it lost a lot of its internal logic in this second outing. Here, we find out the source of what caused Tree to reboot her day over and over again, when side character Ryan (Phi Vu) from the first film starts living a time loop at the beginning of this one, because he and some friends are working on a comic-book-science experiment attempting to slow time (but causing time to loop instead). A malfunction of this machine kicks Tree into an alternate dimension where she's time looping again and things are just a little bit different. The good: the film takes its time to invest in Tree's emotional state, further developing her character. The bad: so many gaps in logic, like how Tree wastes so much time killing herself over an over again to accelerate the reboot and hopefully get closer to a solution, even though the kills, and method of kills, seems to be doing her some real harm. I get it's supposed to be slapstick, but slapstick doesn't play well when backed by real consequences. I think the film missed an opportunity to stick with Ryan rebooting his day over and over and needing Tree as mentor to take him through it. Where the first film was a winking dark comedy with slasher elements, this one is almost a straight up comedy with doses of sci-fi, and only the minutest aspect of the slasher horror film Blumhouse keeps trying to sell them as. It's enjoyable but messy, and not up to the quality of its predecessor.
[Toast's take: we almost agree!]
[1:37:30]
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Over the past couple years, other networks and streamers have noticed the popularity of the Hallmark Channel's "Countdown to Christmas" festivities where they dole out dozens of brand new, cheaply and quickly made romance/romantic comedy movies centered around Christmas, and in response there are new alternative Hallmark-style movies in the offing. Netflix entered the game timidly last year with a couple entries, but this year they seemed to have stepped it up even more. Let It Snow was released in between a couple of these Netflix-ified holiday rom coms, but it's not at all like that. This is a legit high-school rom com starring a high-calibre cast of young, good looking actors in an ensemble film that is more a younger, updated Love Actually than your average cheesy, corny Hallmark fare. The other thing about it is, it's a damn good movie. It's not a good movie stacked up against other Hallmark types, it's a straight up damn good movie, sitting easily on the best of genre list other landmark high school romantic comedies like Sixteen Candles, Some Kind of Wonderful, Easy A and even the non romcom fun high school flicks like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Mean Girls, or Superbad (and recent entrants Ladybird and Booksmart). I enjoyed this immensely. Every storyline was fantastic, I was fully invested, in each of them. I think maybe Jacob Batalon (Ned from the recent Spider-Man franchise) had the lowest stakes (throwing a good party, getting noticed as a DJ) but in the end even he gets something valuable out of it all. This is a good-spirited film, with real, honest-to-God comedy, and charming leads with actual chemistry like Shameik Moore (Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse), Kiernan Shipka (Sabrina The Teenage Witch) and Isabela Moner (Dora The Explorer). Joan Cusak is sort of the spirit guide of the film and, having just seen her relegated to a tedious side character in Hallmark's not-great-but-not-the-worst 2015 TheChristmas Train, a performance both reigned in and phoned in, it's nice to see her giving a crap and in a good movie, one with real snow and production values. I'll be watching this one over and over again.
(Confessional time... I love watching Hallmark movies, and only in a semi-ironic way. They're insipidly terrible by-and-large, and yet they're captivating in their chaste formulae. The fun is in seeing the little differences between them, and finding ones which are almost legitimately entertaining. They're like most Saturday Night Live sketches, if they had time to refine them some of them would be a lot but most of them are just disposable dross you can forget about immediately afterward. I don't review Hallmark movies here (or anywhere), but maybe I should start?)
2019, Disney+
Episodes 1-3 (directed by, in order, Dave Filoni, Rick Famuyiwa, Deborah Chow)
Star Wars fans have been anticipating a live action Star Wars television series for decades now, but, after seeing the first three episodes of The Mandalorian, I can tell you that all but the die hard fans would have left disappointed. We've gotten Star Wars on a budget: The Holiday Special, The Ewok Adventures, various animated series, books and comics and video games, and while some of it is legit great storytelling, most of it doesn't have the same resonance as seeing any of the live action films, particularly the original trilogy. The Mandalorian, with Disney's deep pockets behind it, and the early fate of an entire streaming service seemingly resting on its shoulders is a Star Wars film, but as a TV show.
It's not the first TV series to have epic budget and feel like film on TV, it's the first to do it at this scale, where it feels like no corners have been cut. The CGI is top notch. The makeup, costumes and practical effects are painstakingly realized. The cast is phenomenal. The directing talent is way above par. The score is epic. There's an investment here, from everyone involved in the production, to bringing Star Wars to life in an entirely new medium and realizing Star Wars in an entirely different way.
The influences are evident, spaghetti Westerns and classic samurai stories. These were two of George Lucas' influences for his first Star Wars (on top of 1930's adventure serials and movies about either of the 20th century's World Wars among other), but distilling them down like showrunner/writer Jon Favreau has done here creates a distinct focus for the show that maybe other creators in the Disney era (and Lucas himself with the prequels) may have been missing. There is an experiment at play here, one that audiences may sense, but not quite be able to pinpoint. It's one of reshaping expectations. Not in the same way that The Last Jedi did in a very metatextual sense, rather one that is reshaping how we watch television, how we watch streaming programming, and, most explicitly, how we watch Star Wars. The first and third episode of The Mandalorian clock in just under 40 minutes. The second episode at around 30 minutes. These are not standard episode lengths for any type of television until now, nevermind something that's action, adventure or drama based. Most genre shows of this type typically run "hour long" (with commercials, making for about 44 minutes of actual programming). So this isn't a show made for "traditional TV", the pacing leaves no anticipation of commercial breaks. If anything, these feel like short films, pieces of a whole, but contained on their own at the same time. But they're also Star Wars short films, with the budget to match, and they look phenomenal and feel "of the world" (or, rather, "of the galaxy").
Streaming services have also taught us to binge our programming, to consume it so rapidly that it's hard to tell where one episode ends and another starts. This has a detrimental effect to our long term memory of the programming we watch, and if there's a show that wants you to take your time with each episode, to revisit and disseminate, it's this one. Favreau has said working on The Mandalorian is like playing with his Kenner Star Wars action figures as a child. There's definitely a nostalgia factor into the construction of the show. But it's not like a "hey remember this?" kind of fan-service, but rather, capturing what it was that made Star Wars so magical in the first place... a lived-in world populated by an entire slew of intriguing beings who could each have their own story told about them. What's happening in the background is just as intriguing as what's going on in the foreground. It's not that JJ Abrams, Ryan Johnson, or others have forgotten this, but somehow they haven't quite gotten it as right. And I think I know why...
Yes, that's Nick Nolte's face adapted into the form of an Ugnaut
They're making Star Wars as modern filmmakers, with the demands modern filmmakers have to bring the spectacle and the epic scope. But with The Mandalorian the spectacle isn't going to play the same way on home or mobile screens, and the epic doesn't need to happen in the constrains of 120-ish minutes, or at all even. Expectations are different for TV or streaming, which liberates Favreau and the stable of directors to deliver the story differently.
Episode one finds Lucas' apprentice, Dave Filoni jumping from animation to behind the live action camera for the first time. The story is told in quadrants, starting with a prologue of the titular character bringing in a bounty. This segment is perhaps the roughest of the series, and it may be Filoni's inexperience with live action or it may just be everyone still needing to relax into the reality of making live action Star Wars for "TV". It's still very engaging, and the tone is right, but it feels a little rushed, and perhaps even a little overstuffed. (Bonus points for appearances by Horatio Sanz and Brian Posehn).
The second segment is all set-up for the series, introducing what will prove to be the crux of the season, the Mandalorian's next bounty (given to him by Carl Weathers) and the people tasking him with the job (led by Werner Herzog). We also are fed some of the Mandalorian's back story, and a micro-dive into the current status of the Mandalorian peoples.
This is Gina Carano as Cara Dune... we haven't seen her yet in the show
The third act takes the Mandalorian to another planet where he encounters some alien beasts and finds an unusual ally, voiced by Nick Nolte. There's a "taming-the-wild-horse" sequence that seems unnecessary save for paying homage to the show's western influences. It's a real nod towards the audience that this show is going to take its time some times, and that it's not above having its fun.
The final act finds the Mandalorian teaming up with an IG-series hunter droid (the kind first seen in Empire Strikes Back as part of Vader's bounty hunter team, but never seen mobile and certainly never seen in action, at least not in live action) taking on the very large crew of adversaries who are holding his bounty. This leads to an insane shootout, done in a manner that would only make sense for Star Wars.
This first episode reeks of Star Wars, and while there's plenty of fan service, it's not nudging fan service, but rather building upon things the fans already know and enrichening them within the galaxy far, far away. They're not just visual gags, they add something. This as well is one of our first looks at the galaxy post-Return of the Jedi, pre-The Force Awakens which makes it's fairly unfamilar ground for most fans as well. It establishes the Mandalorian as a respected hunter and as a member of a respected hunting society. It lays a lot of ground work in a surprisingly short amount of time.
The second episode hits hard on the Lone Wolf and Cub vibe that the first episode only hints at with the Mandalorian and his bounty wandering through the desert on the way back to his ship, seemingly having to get through a gauntlet of setbacks and adversaries. Having just established the Mandalorian's competence last episode, Favreau starts writing in some specific traits in this character, namely his short temper and his never-give-up attitude. He's a scrapper, no matter how much he gets knocked down (and he gets knocked down a lot), he's going to get back up again. He doesn't fear the odds and he'll stare down anything.
This episode find the creators really playing with their toys, with the Mandalorian encountering Jawas (familiar from the original Star Wars film, "A New Hope"), and exploring their "sand crawler", both as he climbs the fortress like exterior (with allusions to Return of the Jedi, Raiders of the Lost Arc and even the Adam West Batman series) and later gets a ride inside. Star Wars has always been a mix of sci-fi, fantasy and monster movie and here the Mandalorian also must face a great beast, and for all the lumps he took against the Jawas, it's doubled with the mudhorn he faces. This episode establishes him as the flawed bruiser protagonist in the Indiana Jones/John McClaine vein, which makes him more compelling than indestructible and super-competent heroes we seem to be getting more and more.
The third episode sees delivery of the bounty, but also the Mandalorian's conscience getting the better of him. Without spoiling too much (as if it's not everywhere on the internet already), the bounty was a child and the Mandalorian's past as an orphan ("foundling") obviously gives him a sense of connection to it. There's a deepening investment in the mythos of Mandalorians here. We've seen them explored in The Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons in the past, but this series puts them in a much different place than they were in the past, as refugees, clinging even harder to past traditions. The Mandalorian's guilt overrides him, and he mounts a one-man rescue mission which triggers a sundown showdown with too many bounty hunters to count them all. Again, the Mandalorian finds himself entering a situation that he obviously has no way out of, no hope in succeeding, and yet, there always seems to be a way.
The show is exciting, the story is parsed out slowly, as is character development. It's action heavy, but it also lets its moments breathe, again something that modern cinema doesn't seem to have much time for. It's incredibly dependent upon its score, provided by Ludwig Goransson. With spaghetti westerns in mind, there's obviously a note of Ennio Morricone, which Goransson likes to incorporate with pulsating ambient rhytms and electronic tones, layering in orchestral strings and horns. The dives into the orchestral are probably the weakest moments of the show, at times feeling like knock-off Star Wars from the 80's, but those are scant moments. The score comes alive during the action, sometimes working with noise and sound textures that make it hard to distinguish between the soundtrack and sound effects. There are moments, like when fighting the mudhorn, you have to ask whether that's the score or the noise the mudhorn makes, or is that the sound of the ship's engines or the score. It adds exquisite depth. All of this together, pacing, influence, score, it shares the same sensibilities as Samurai Jack, one of the premiere animated series of all time, but it's a live action show, which, again, seems absolutely unreal, but here it is, finally here.
The only question left is when to we get to marathon this on the big screen?
I have this list of films (& tv) I watched, and yet did not write a review for. I thought perhaps it was a list made up of films (and TV too) I watched in 2018 (the dark year), but in 2018 (the dark year) I actually did much of my film writing on ye olde Letterboxd account (no tv writings though). Letterboxd was a dalliance with dark app magic that hasn't really stuck... not like this hire trusty blogge. But I digress... the list below represents many things watched, mostly, in 2017 (maybe a little before, maybe a little after [the dark year]). Toast was keeping the blogge spirit alive back then, I was too mired in some bullshit or another to put thoughts to 1s&0s. I may have made comments in the blogge about such movie (und T.V.) thinges hence, but perhaps not. I am too lazy to do a search at this time.
Given the passage of time, most of these things will not have taken up much space in my memory, so I may not have much to say... but then again, I may have far more to say than I think. So in this grande experiment, I present to you, quick and addled musings of mostly-forgotten experiences of 2017 (and beyonde!).
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Fast & Furious Franchise - I got into F&F with Fast Five, and was quite taken with its rather brazen tomfoolery. It's big budget action filmmaking that started off as one thing, tried to morph into something else and then wound up becoming something much different, much bigger and much better than its origins would insinuate:
- The Fast and The Furious(2001, d. Rob Cohen - blu-ray) - it started off as a knowingly cheesy Point Break knock-off with illegal drag racing and substitute penises instead of skydiving and other extreme activities. Little wooden boy Paul Walker (RIP) goes undercover with Vin Diesel's criminal gang of souped up street race drivers as they steal truck loads of dvd players (yeah, it ages real well). There's lots of car porn in here and a lot of short shorts and halter tops. Cohen spends most of the movie using his camera to ogle tires and titties. Yet knowing where it's heading it's already got its stupid charms in place. It's all about family, bro.
-2 Fast, 2 Furious (2003, d. John Singleton - blu-ray) - yeah, fucking John Singleton directed this stupidly titled movie. I honestly can remember what happens in this one (and if I'm being honest, I can't really remember what happened in the first one...as with most of the entries in this entire post, I won't remember most of what I watched), but I seem to recall enjoying it more than the first one. I think it uses a lot more CGI, and the absence of Vin Diesel means the acting game is actually stepped up a little in this one (Diesel has screen presence, I'll give him that, but he's a terrible actor). It goes against the grain but I think I would watch this one over the first one.
-Fast and Furious(2009, d. Justin Lin - blu-ray) - I skipped the third one (Tokyo Drift) because it's not really part of the series. Not to get too stuck in the weeds but Tokyo Drift takes place after Fast & Furious 6, if you're trying to sort out the chronology. But really Tokyo Drift is kind of the Halloween: Season of the Witch of the F&F franchise, the one where they tried to do a standalone anthology type thing that just didn't work.... BUT, with his feet already wet, Justin Lin was (ahem) fast figuring things out and set the real prototype for the franchise to follow with the murky fourth entry Fast and Furious, in which he tries to bring together all three of the previous films canonically, while also pushing forward into globetrotting espionage type storytelling with a gang of streetracing thieves with a code of ethics and a strong makeshift familial bond. It's a messy, messy movie, but it certainly started something that Fast Five paid off like gangbusters (...you know, gang busting, like Paul Walker in the first film).
- Fast and Furious 6 (2013, d. Justin Lin - blu-ray) - Fast Five is a legit good time for anyone who has never seen any other F&F movie and it's the legit entryway into it all. Viewing order of F&F should be 5, 4, 6, 1, 2, 3, 7, 8. But anyone coming into F&F may immediately want out with F&F6 since it really ouroboroses it up. Lin just goes for broke and makes a crazy dumb (yet fun) spy movie that brings almost everything from the past right back up front, including resurrecting the dead and tying things back together from Tokyo Drift. It's a film that needs more out of Vin Diesel than he can give, and it overstretches itself with its universe building, yet still certainly enjoyable.
- Furious 7 (2015, d. James Wan - TMN) - And this is where the shit hits the alchemic fan and turns to gold. Jason Statham and Kurt Russell enter the fray of an already ballooning cast. Sadly, Paul Walker died while filming was ongoing and his specter looms hard over the proceedings, creating an honest to god sentimental moment about family in its finale. It's a big, big movie and it goes for broke quite spectacularly. Again it ties itself heavily with the previous three entries, but at this point this ongoing "family" thread is what gives these films connective tissue when otherwise it would just be ridiculously entertaining car stunts.
- The Fate of the Furious(2017, d. F. Gary Gray - TMN) - they may have lost Paul Walker but they gained Charlize Theron and Helen Mirren (yes, fucking Helen Mirren). Never one to let a good adversary stay a good adversary, the bad guy of the previous film (Jason Statham) is reformed as a good guy here (setting up the Hobbes and Shaw spin-off) and it's easily the Statham/Dwayne Johnson chemistry that carries the bulk of the entertainment factor here. Vin Diesel is blackmailed by Theron into being a bad guy who the rest of the team has to take down, and it's kind of a drag, because Diesel, the stunted bad actor that he is, can't play the character as a man trapped pretending to "break bad" but instead just plays a shitty heel figure in the proceedings.
These films, at this point, exceed James Bond levels of action set pieces, and this is the first one that takes major pains to kind of lose the car shtick.... to do other big action set pieces that aren't *only* about cars. It's another turning point in an ever evolving and expanding franchise. There's no way, looking back at that kind of dumb, DVD-stealing crew from the first feature that it would wind up in to the almost-superhero universe it's become. I don't blame anyone for thinking these things are totally stupid dumb and not worth the time. They are totally stupid dumb, but that's what makes them so entertaining. They have absolutely no pretenses about them which is why they are so successful. ---
It's been established that I'm not a big horror movie guy. I can dabble but I'm not very entertained by the cruel nature of horror. I don't get a lot of pleasure out of seeing people tortured or the gags of guts and viscera meant to shock and/or amuse. So when I say that these two films are the best horror films of the decade, you have to qualify that as, like, the sentiments of a guy who really hasn't watched that many horror films this decade. And yet, not only are these two of the best horror films of the decade, they are two of the best films, flat out, of the decade. Two masterfully crafted productions that will stand up for decades to come.
Get Out (2017, d. Jordan Peele - In Theatre) channels so much racial tension, modern and historical, that it's at times unbearable and viscerally upsetting. It's psychotropic horror, a film that doesn't so much as startle you as keep you in a perpetual state of uneasiness. It's a masterful debut from Peele that may have been a big surprise to Key & Peele sketch comedy fans who weren't paying close enough attention to how often those skits descended into some kind of absurd terror.
It Follows (2014, d. David Robert Mitchell - Netflix), in the loosest sense, is about a killer STD. But that's way oversimplifying things. It's a metaphor for shame and guilt around sex, especially in teenage years. Mitchell crafts a film that feels like it's part of the 80's horror explosion, a saturated blueish hue and very specific styles, locations and vehicles all create a bit of a throwback aesthetic with a pulsating synth soundtrack that is brilliant on its own but even more effective in combination with the film. Yet for all its retro homage, it's still a very modern film, thoughtful, sensitive, yet still very, very frightening. An absolute classic.
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*Smooth transition from horror to children's movies*
Finding Dory (2016, d. Andrew Stanton - blu-ray) - Finding Nemo is a brilliant, beautiful, highly entertaining film with a huge heart, an animation classic. A sequel was probably inevitable but hardly necessary. While not quite the equal of its predecessor, Finding Dory does manage to hold up to Pixar's highest standards, delivering another beautiful, highly entertaining film with a huge heart. Dealing with Dory's forgetfulness/disorder and retracing her past makes for a different experience than Finding Nemo while holding onto its structure.
Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie(2017, d. David Soren - in theatre) over the past dozen years of my kids' lives I've been exposed to the rather wondrous worlds of cartoonist Dav Pilkey. The Captain Underpants series is absurd humour for younger readers, but still quite entertaining for adults reading along with their child. The "First Epic Movie" has moments of real inspiration but exposes kind of how juvenile the concept is. It seems to aim for a sort of Spongebob or Lego Movie vibe but misses the mark.
Despicable Me 3 (2017, d. Pierre Coffin, Kyle Balda - in theatre). I haven't actually seen any other Despicable Me movies, so perhaps this one was just lost on me without prior investment, but I find the animation ugly, the minions annoying, and the humour tepid. I recall asking myself frequently "who is this joke for?" In a word: inessential.
Moana (2016, d. Ron Clements, John Musker - netflix) There was a period there where my daughter was refusing to go to the movies, so we didn't see Moana on the big screen. We didn't even wind up seeing it together. She saw it at school or at a friend's birthday party, so I watched it without her. I rather adored it, but the vistas and scale of the picture would have been so much more impactful watching on a big screen. It's an absolute darling of a movie though, truly lovely and adventurous.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968, d. Ken Hughes - rental) I don't remember what the impetus was for watching this. I think the wife and I were talking about films that scared us as a child (see next entry) and she mentioned how terrifying Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was for her as a young'un. This is a weird 145-minute long (!) quasi-musical live-action children's film about a possibly sentient super-car that helps a family survive their ramshackle adventure through a despotic alternate reality. From James Bond creator Ian Fleming, adapted to screen by Roald Dahl, it's fucking bizarre. It's not great, but there's absolutely something surreal and captivating about it. I can see how that surreality was terrifying to kids, for sure.
The Peanut Butter Solution (1985, d. Michael Rubbo - blu-ray) There was no tit-for-tat in our traumatizing childhood movie exchange. I had to watch this one on my own. But I did so happily. To rediscover this film -- about a kid who goes bald after getting massively frightened when exploring an abandoned house, then receiving a mysterious recipe for hair-growth formula (the titular peanut butter solution) from a ghost, and then being kidnapped by his nefarious art teach so he can use his perpetually-growing hair to make the world's softest paint brushes -- was an absolute blast. I saw this film many times as a kid, as it was frequently played on Canadian television, and it was great to be able to fill in the gaps of my memory on it. It's a weird-ass movie, with typically Canadian production values which makes it almost more endearing. It's like Cronenberg-for-kids.
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I can't be bothered to sub-categorize the films any longer. Hot takes a-comin:
Oh Hello on Broadway (2017, d. Alex Timbers, Michael John Warren - netflix) Nick Kroll is responsible for two of the best shows of the past decade, the hilarious coming-of-age-and-sexuality animated Big Mouth and the reality TV satirizing sketch comedy of Kroll Show. The septigenarians New Yorkers George St. Geegland (John Mulaney) and Gil Faison (Kroll) emerged from Kroll Show (as well as other appearances online, in podcasts and elsewhere) as a fully baked comedic duo, telling ribald stories of past glories, and questionable decisions they've made along the way. A stage show on broadway was a surprising next level for these hilarious and unlikeably charming characters... I wouldn't think the mass appeal would be there to sustain such a run, but toss in a loosely structured script for Kroll and Mulaney to bounce around inside of, and bring out a surprise celebrity guest interview each show and it just started buzzing. If filming it for Netflix has a problem, it's that one wouldn't want to watch the same show twice, but instead see as many of the shows as possible. It was probably more fun live, but it's still a great time.
GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (2012, d. Brett Whitcomb - netflix) This doc cropped up on Netflix in the lead-up to their original scripted comedy-drama GLOW. I watched and loved the first season of GLOW and was intrigued to see what they actually took from the source. Not surprisingly, they took very little, beyond the comraderie, a few of the archetypes, and the sense of struggle. But seeing the real performers reminisce and then reunite creates for a quite enjoyable and emotional ride. It's a sweet documentary even if you're not sure how much wrestling matters in the grand scheme of things. Mountain Fiji's story is the centerpiece of much of the movie, as she's so loveable and her struggles so touching. There's never a wrong way to celebrate an absolutely endearing, wonderful, kind-hearted person like her, and where it could feel like it was focusing on her at the expense of the other performers, it actually brings them together and further exemplifies their sense of community.
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (2016, d. David Yates - blu-ray) I thought for certain that I had already written at least once, if not twice about FB&WTFT, but no dice. I only have a letterboxd entry for The Crimes of Grindlewald. I like Harry Potter fine, but I'm not a huge fan, magic just isn't my thing, y'know. And the first time around with FB&WTFT I thought it was trying too hard to be something different, and to be something bigger than it really was. But the second time watching it, I actually responded rather intensely to the characters and their journey, to the point that I was really, really, really looking forward to seeing them again in the sequel. Well, here's how that went. Anyway, I quite like this first one. It really grows on you.
Trump: The Art of The Deal (2016, d. Jeremy Konner - netflix) Johnny Depp plays Trump in this satire of the man's life and his business ethos. It's not as funny or scathing as it needs to be, and it's only clever by half. Perhaps if he didn't become president it would have been more amusing.
Girlfriend's Day (2017, d. Michael Stephenson, - netflix) A cheeky detective noir starring Bob Odenkirk about a down-on-his-luck greeting card writer who gets embroiled in murder and conspiracy around a new fake holiday, Girlfriend's Day. There's probably a good short film in here, but it makes for a bit of a slog at full-length.
The Polka King (2017, d. Maya Forbes - netflix) / The Man Who Would Be Polka King (2009, d. John Mikulak, Joshua Brown - netflix). Jan Lewan was practically a legend when his extravagent lifestyle and inflated ego started overtaking his reality. Unable to sustain himself with his music or business, he starts grifting his fans and his community with a Ponzi scheme. The Polka King is a lightly dramatic retelling starring a delightful cast -- including Jack Black, Jenny Slate,Jason Schwartzman, and JB Smoove -- while the documentary is a little dry but still heartbreaking when it affirms the reality of the hurt Lewan inflicted on people's lives (but also a little frustrating how trusting people were in giving him money to start with). Not essential viewing but rather engaging as a pair (the doc runs just over an hour)
Don't Think Twice (2017, d. Mike Birbiglia - netflix) Comedian Mike Birbiglia is a very gifted storyteller. He's a captivating and hilarious orator and author. It's a bit surprising then that he's rather far from that as a filmmaker, but maybe it's just the story he's trying to tell. Don't Think Twice is a story about an improv comedy troupe dealing with reality when one of their members becomes famous but the rest are left struggling. It's such a narrowly defined reality that even someone like myself, who loves standup, sketch, improv comedy in all its different distributions, could care less about this story or the characters within it. The cast is a great one, with Gillain Jacobs pulling the MVP role within it, but it has no real meat to it, not for lack of trying.
Keanu (2016, d. Peter Atencio - TMN) The transition from sketch to feature has been hard for almost all sketch comedy group, Monty Python excepted. The more successful moves to feature-length scripting tend to find a coherent story formed out of what are effectively a series of sketches. Unfortunately, with Keanu, Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele's first foray into the cinemas as a duo, either the sketches were too restricted by the story of the film, or they weren't intended to be sketches at all. Either way, the film doesn't really work. It's attempting to be a buddy action comedy, and it hits those notes, but they're almost all fairly mundane and and familiar notes. Key and Peele aren't offering anything here that surprises or is memorably quotable, unlike so much from their sketch comedy. It's not a terrible movie by any stretch, but it's missing the sparks of brilliance we had come to expect from the duo.
The Nice Guys (2016, d. Shane Black - TMN) This is Shane Black's thing. Two kind of down-and-out professionals of a type, getting on each other's nerves but developing a respect and friendship along the way. These two guys are Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling... not exactly the dynamic duo on the forefront of everyone's mind, but it works so well. Both are quite into it and Black produced a hilarious and charming script about losers with more style and craft than any of his other outings. A great little movie, worthy of rewatching.
The Late Shift (1996, d. Betty Thomas - TMN) Based on the book, a dramatic retelling of the tensions between David Letterman and Jay Leno following the announcement of Johnny Carson's retirement from The Tonight Show. HBO has been investing in these niche stories for a long, long time, and while it looks painfully like a film made in 1996, it's still actually a very engaging watch. There's no reason anyone should really care about what went on behind the scenes of the Tonight Show any longer, and yet, there's something legendary about this fued which makes this sometimes goofy imagining of it captivating. Kathy Bates playing a ball-busting agent is worth the watch alone.
Arrival (2016, d. Denis Villeneuve - blu-ray) Villeneuve announces himself here as the next great director of big screen science fiction. Next he takes on Blade Runner and Dune, showing that he has little humility in the face of his ambitions. But he produces beautiful looking movies, cast with amazing actors who he draws out commanding performances. This is a procedural, of sorts, which finds linguist Amy Adams discovering how to break through and communicate with a very alien sentience that arrives on Earth. It's not an action film, but the intensity is high, and the depth of emotion is perhaps even more suprising than the aliens.
Fire & Ice (1980, d. Ralph Bakshi - Amazon Prime) This type of fantasy, swords, sandals, beards and crystal balls is not my thing. I find these types of stories tedious and dull. But beyond the tedious story is beautiful hand drawn animation which kept me in admiring awe throughout. There's a stiffness and lack of fluidity at times, but that's somehow part of its charm.
The Lost City of Z (2017, d. James Gray - Amazon Prime) Colonialist epics are a thing of yesterday, unless you can present a story that is absolutely aware of its place within modern cultural norms. The Lost City of Z does have its cake and eats it too, by telling a story spanning three time periods, three adventures in the the Amazon, where explorer Percey Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) discovers evidence of an advance tribe from eras past. The British aristocracy finds any intonation that any non-white civilation would have superior capabilities heretical, but Fawcett, more concerned with truth than politics obsessively forges forward to find further proof, with his family left behind to bare the brunt of his herecy. It's a very tranquil and meditative film, with moments of tremendous intensity, and a few moments of maddening truth regarding our forefathers' ignorance. Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Sienna Miller and Ian McDiarmid co-star.
Jim & Andy (2017, d. Chris Smith - netflix) Jim Carrey played Andy Kaufman in the 1999 film Man on the Moon. It left him a little scarred. This documentary examines Andy Kaufman's life through Jim Carrey's experience trying to completely inhabit another man's skin. It's a fascinating if inessential documentary that provides interesting perspective on Kaufman, but also insight into the craft of acting and how it can be psychologically dangerous to pretend to be someone else for a while. Now all we need is the meta-movie that is the dramatic retelling of this story.
Black Panther (2018 [the dark year], d. Ryan Coogler - in theatre) Turns out I actually wrote a review in 2018 but never published it (all I had to do was attach some pictures). I corrected that and published it now. I've watched the film a couple times since, and it's in my top 10 of all time superhero films.
Creed (2015, d. Ryan Coogler - TMN) I saw at least some of Rocky III and probably all of Rocky IV when I was a kid, but I wasn't that big into boxing movies then, and I'm still not now. I don't really care. I skipped the chance to watch Creed for free on the big screen when it came out (well, actually, arrived late and was locked out of the theatre) but it was my hyped reaction to Black Panther that made it a must-see. I love it. It's a tremendous movie. I've seen it a couple times now and I'll watch it again. Michael B. Jordan is magnetic, his chemistry with Stallone and Tessa Thompson is incredible, and Coogler's direction is amazing (that seamless one-shot of the boxing match is viscerally engrossing). It's a story about legacy, something I love in superhero comic books, and this is really just a comic book superhero of a different type.
The Cloverfield Paradox (2018 [the dark year], d. Julius Onah - netflix) - You can look elsewhere on the internet for the backstory on how this project came to be, and how it came to be on netflix. My hot take is that its incredible cast - Chris O'Dowd, Gugu Mbuthu-Raw, David Oyelowo, Elizabeth Debicki, Zhang Ziyi, Daniel Bruhl - is kind of wasted on such an incredibly badly executed story about parallel dimensions. It's a film that couldn't quite figure out what it wanted to be, sci-fi or horror, not doing either all that well with split focus, and then got shoehorned into a film franchise that isn't a film franchise. There's a few inspired entertaining seeds here but it just doesn't come together. Can we get the cast together again for a do-over?
Ghost in the Shell (2017, d. Rupert Sanders - netflix) There's so much content in the world you have to make blanket concessions somewhere. For me it's books and anime. I've never seen the original GitS so everything in this film is new to me. I get the controversy surrounding it, and I do agree with it: ScarJo wasn't the appropriate casting choice. Moving past the whitewashing (if you can, understood if you can't), the film is quite striking visually and I found the story is very engaging. There's only really one scene, in which ScarJo meets her Japanese grandmother, where the whitewashing becomes so brutally flagrant, but otherwise it's not a constant offense throughout the film (unless to you it is, which is valid).
The Disaster Artist (2017, d. James Franco - rental) Is Franco now cancelled or can we still talk about him with some appreciation? I haven't been keeping up on all the cancel culture news. I know The Room mainly from podcast talking about it and a few clips I've watched obsessively online. Tommy Wiseau is a fascinating personality, and the story of his creation of The Room is bountifully as bizarre as he is. Franco takes one step past impersonation here, capturing Wiseau's strange mannerisms and injecting his own sense of his personality, trying to creating a flesh-and-blood living being out of such an enigma. Dave Franco then, playing Wiseau's de facto best friend and naive partner in crime Greg Sestero, has to do much of the emotional heavy lifting, but since it's a film based on Sestero's book of the same name, it's built for such a focus. It's a very entertaining film about a film that's possibly way more entertaining depending on your disposition. But it serves as a great entryway into The Room for the uninitiated and also a fun dramatization for fans of Wiseau (winking or otherwise).
I, Tonya (2017, d. Craig Gillespie - in theatre) If you were a teenager or older in the early 90's then you knew all about Tonya Harding. Or, at least, you thought you did. She was the "bad girl of figure skating", as the media liked to sensationalize her. She came from lower-class rural America, she liked to perform to hard rock and wore outfits that weren't as refined or standardized as other skaters. She was a curvy, muscular girl, with crimped dirty blonde hair that seemed borderline unmanageable. Everything about her flew in the face of the sport's typical pageantry. So she was stigmatized and villainized by the media, especially when compared to her chief competition, Nancy Kerrigan. Kerrigan was a Disney Princess come to life, long and lean, with flowing, shiny brown hair, doing everything by the book. Of course, as the story goes, Harding kept some pretty bad company (her domineering mother most extremely) and it eventually led to the legendary kneecapping incident that got Harding banned for life from the sport. This is a tragi-comedy featuring both the absurdity and the abuse in Tonya's life, with magnificent performances from Margot Robbie, Allison Janney, Sebastian Stan and Paul Walter Hauser.
Annihilation (2018 [the dark year], d. Alex Garland - in theatre) Perhaps the most intense and legitimately frightening film that isn't an outright horror movie. It's a bit of a puzzle that when pieced all together still requires some thought on behalf of the viewer to get to a resolution. It's got serene moments of beauty, and start moments of terror, with many emotional thoughts in between. It's a film that demands rewatching, but may be too intense for some to actually want to. It's wonderful, one of the best genre films of the decade.
The Shape of Water (2017, d. Guillermo del Toro - in theatre) My dirty nerd secret is that I don't really like del Toro's films all that much. The big benchmarks in his career, Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone are probably my least favourite entries in his repertoire. But Oscar darling The Shape of Water is a strange delight. It's as much a tribute to the history of cinema as it is about a deaf lady falling in love with a fish-man, which explains why the Oscar voters keyed into it so much. There's little else Oscar loves more than films about film. There's just too many beautiful, romantic even, moments in this film to not get swept up, even when it gets cartoonishly heavy handed (intentionally so) and it's so precise (as all del Toro films are) in its details that it's such a marvel to behold. Plus, it's basically an Abe Sapien from Hellboy spin-off in everything but name.
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OH NO! Unwritten about TV shows. Blerg.
11.22.63 (Hulu) - A mini-series adaptation of the Stephen King novel about a guy (played by J*cancelled*o) who finds a time vortex in his closet and goes back in time to stop Kennedy's assassination with disastrous consequences. Kind of fun in the moment, pretty forgettable afterward. The Night Manager (Amazon Prime) - A John LeCarre adaptation about a night manager (Tom Hiddleston) at a hotel who gets recruited into being a spy, infiltrating the organization of a previously untouchable global weapons dealer (Hugh Laurie). Olivia Coleman plays Hiddleston's handler. Elizabeth Debicki plays Laurie's girlfriend. It's a great cast and an interesting story, but it plays too rhythmically like a book, so it feels like it gets distracted frequently from the main thrust. It would probably have made a tighter movie.
The Defenders (Netflix) - Blerg. This was what five seasons and 65 episodes of TV was leading to, the uniting of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist. But the most boring part of the Netflix Marvel was the ninja mob The Hand, and that's the main adversary of this series. The show relishes every scene where characters meet characters from a different series but Elektra and the Hand have them dragging their feet through the mud. Sigourney Weaver is also a main adversary in the show, but mostly separated from everything else going on as we get insight into her terminal illness and how it affects her...she doesn't ever feel like she belongs in this story. What a waste of time and effort. GLOW Season 1 (Netflix) I've written about Season 3 already, but going back to the beginning and remembering Ruth and Debbie and the gang as they were at the start, it's been a remarkable journey for them all. It's really a show about camaraderie, about unity, feminine spirit, and it all starts with Ruth sleeping with her best friend's husband, getting found out, and then having to face that person every day in a challenging, close-knit environment, where failure would be the last straw for all of their careers. There's comedy, which is great, and there's drama, which is even better, and there's wrestling, which is terrible, but in a very fun way. It's ridiculously charming, the cast dynamic is perfect, and it doesn't shy away from having difficult conversations. Its mid-80's trappings are painful reminders of a gaudy, ugly era of fashion, but it certainly gives the show a distinct feel as it leans heavily into the neon style. Ghosted (Fox) Craig Robinson and Adam Scott join a secret organization to fight supernatural entities. It was a rough start. I think I lasted four episodes. I'm certain it could have gotten better (and apparently it did) but a rough start more often than not leads to cancellation rather than patience as it finds its footing. The comedy wasn't sharp or original enough and the characters Scott and Robinson were playing felt like exactly that, characters they were playing. Both leads were better than the material.
Runaways season 1 (Hulu/Showcase) I don't even remember at this point if I lasted out the season. The joke about Runaways, now in its third season, is that it took them an entire season to become the titular runaways. The show got way too mired in the dynamics of the parents and kept harping on the squabbles between the adults, and the tense and/or awkward relationships they had with their kids. I loved the first run of the comic by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, and the show uses almost everything that was there but tries to build out and extend the story to exceptionally tedious results.
Mindhunters S1 (Netflix) I've already written about season 2, so looking back on season 1, I notice that we've completely dropped Holden's love life in the second season, which is great, because it had done all it needed in season 1. Season 2 did drop the ball a bit on Wendy, Anna Torv's character, who was a real highlight of the first season. Season 2 had a more focused story, but season 1's building of an entirely new method of investigation, of criminal profiling, through the gathering of data by interviewing serial killers was gripping television, specifically the interviews with Ed Kemper, a massively imposing man with impeccable manners and a complete emotional detachment from the horror of his crimes. It's not a show for the faint of heart, that's for sure.
Manhunt: Unabomber (Netflix) - a mini-series trying to fall into the American Crime Story vein, a modestly successful stab by the Discovery Channel to enter the premiere scripted television era. It's an engaging story if told a little bit cheaply. It's important to understand that Sam Worthington's character of Jim Fitzgerald is a bit of a lie...he is a real person, but in the show he represents a whole team's worth of activities, so a lot of the actions he takes and conclusions he makes in the show were performed by others in reality. That said, it's certainly bingeable watching and Paul Bettany's Ted Kaczynski is pretty riveting. It makes for a good pairing with Mindhunters, although the latter's production values are so much higher, making this look like a 90's TV show.
American Vandal seasons 1 and 2(Netflix) - I didn't know what this was until I watched it. I had heard raves about it but still thought it was yet another Ryan Murphy or Ryan Murphy-type season-long anthology project. While it is kind of a season-long anthology, it's also one of the funniest shows on TV. Taking inspiration from all facets of true crime documentation and investigation, this show embraces and exploits the tropes to maximum comedic effect while still actually managing to create some genuinely interesting and engaging characters and a reasonable amount of dramatic tension. The first season finds our intrepid duo of high school documentarians investigating the vandal who scratched dicks into the paint of every car in the school's parking lot. One student was suspended for it, but did he really do it? The second season revolves around investigating who put a laxative in the cafeteria lemonade, causing much of the school to poop themselves. These subjects are very silly, and it's the treatment of them with dire seriousness that only heightens their hilarity. It's a shame this only lasted two seasons, but at the same time it's better than none. Worth revisiting.
Black Lightning season 1 (Netflix) you know, I covered season 2 already and that pretty much expresses my feelings about the show overall.
Toast of London seasons 1-3 (Netflix) Have you ever had to ask the question "Can you hear me?" And did someone respond, rather oddly, with "Yes, I can hear you Clem Fandango", leaving you quite puzzled? Watch Toast of London to find out why and laugh yourself silly. Matt Berry is the egocentric Stephen Toast, a thespian of ill-repute struggling to find meaningful work (or any work for that matter) in modern London. This is an exquisitely crafted comedic persona, Berry infusing all sorts of vocal quirks, physical mannerisms, plus curious psychological and emotional boundries into the character creating for truly off beat and bizarre but always hilarious and usually unpredictable scenarios for the character to fall into. He has a chief nemesis in Ray "Bloody" Purchase (the cuckold whose wife Toast frequently sleeps with), an apathetic supporter in his agent Jane, and a confidant in fellow aged thespian/flatmate Ed. It's hard to overstate just how commanding Berry is in this show, which offers the actor/writer/musician the luxury of a new song each episode to punctuate the emotional aspect of a particular scene but also to afford the show some sheer creative lunacy. There's frankly not another sitcom like this. It won't be to everyone's tastes for sure (just seeing Berry's whinnying sex face is enough to put anyone off who doesn't get the hilariousness of it) but it's worth it for the Jon Hamm episode in season 3 and every Clem Fandango appearance.
Jessica Jones season 2 (Netflix) Is there really a reason to continue watching a show where the lead character learns nothing and continues to alienate the people around her. I mean, most shows with a toxic lead tend to have characters surrounding them who either enable that toxicity, dismissive of that toxicity, or absolving of that toxicity. In Jessica Jones, Jess' toxicity does drive the people away from her and even though she could help it, she doesn't, and it's kind of heartbreaking but also extremely annoying. Season 2 dives deeper into Jess' troubled psyche, some of which has to do with her mother, who reappears with superpowers and is a total murderer. This causes Jess some more psychological distress on top of her already potent PTSD. I struggle to understand just what the show is getting at with Jess, what they want us to glean from her... is it that it's okay to still look for the good in someone who acts so awful? Season 2 was a real fucking bummer, with all the performers killing it in their roles, but creating an end product too unpleasant to enjoy too much. Jessica Jones is a great character, and Krysten Ritter excels at playing her, but the showrunners needed to find another note or two for her to play.
Lady Dynamite season 1 (Netflix) With this new golden age of television, so many comedians are being given the opportunity to create a television show with their own unique vision. Too often those visions are too limited by what's come before, and there's a lot of redundancy or familiarity in the outcome. But Maria Bamford's vision is so uniquely her own that it's amazing that Lady Dynamite was even a thing allowed to come into existence. Bamford's comedy is one that explores the diverging topics of mundane life and mental health, and her show is a representation of that kind of schism. It's a quasi-manic time-bounding story that takes place in at least three different time periods, one being the present day with a semi-successful Bamford finding love and cohabitation rather challenging, another time frame being her return to Los Angeles and the cutthroat world of acting and comedy after having a mental breakdown, and the third time period taking place at the tail end of that mental breakdown where she's in and out of the hospital and dealing with her well-meaning-if-not-always-helpful parents (a wonderful duo in Ed Begley Jr. and Mary Kay Place). It's a hilarious but also challenging show to watch, as the time jumping isn't always obvious so it's left to the viewer to sort out what reality we're in, but I think that's a deliberate move on Bamford's part, just a simplified viewport into her brain. It's also got one of the best title credit sequences of the decade. I've been watching this very slowly over the past few years, most of season 2 remaining, but not for lack of enjoyment.
Collateral (Netflix) is a murder mystery mini-series starring Carrie Mulligan as a sleepy London detective inspector trying to navigate a sticky web of intrigue after a pizza delivery driver is murdered. I remember next to nothing about this story. I recall I was somewhat engaged with it at the time, but even then I found the story overly complicated with not enough meat to Mulligan's character to get totally invested in it. If it were any longer than four episodes I probably wouldn't have continued watching past the first episode.
Star Wars Rebels season 4 (Disney XD) - if there are people out there convinced that Disney killed Star Wars, then they haven't watched Star Wars: Rebels. What started out as seemingly a kiddie-fied cartoon set in the pre-A New Hope days evolved into a glorious action adventure drama starring a makeshift-family that grew and grew and grew in scale to something glorious. If there was any burden for the show it was the expectation that it would ultimately dovetail into established Star Wars canon, be it Rogue One's climax or A New Hope's Battle of Yavin. But it found its own path, and its ties to established canon ran much deeper than just, say putting the crew of the Ghost in conflict with the Death Star. The character building reached its apex in Season 4, with each character continuing to evolve, or fulfil their ultimate destiny in exciting or heartbreaking ways. The journey with the cast of Rebels truly is an epic one, as much the equal of any Skywalker or Solo family memeber, and perhaps even more rewarding. This season continues to build upon the understanding of the force, as well as providing insight into the scale of the fight the rebels have against the empire. It comes full circle, bringing together things learned in previous seasons to show that liberal fluidity is more powerful than conservative rigidity. It's a show that further bridges the prequels to the original trilogy, it reinforces the importance of the Clone Wars cartoon in the pantheon, and it gives us some of the franchise's best characters (in a franchise already full of great ones). Thanks to Dave Filoni and the creative crew for this amazing ride.
Star Wars Resistance season 1 (Disney XD) As one series ends, another begins. This time however, it's set in the era of the sequel trilogy, season one ends colliding with the events of The Force Awakens. But unlike Rebels, which seemed to have a mission to further explore the nuances of the galaxy it inhabits, Resistance is a small show with small dreams. It's still spearheaded by Dave Filoni, but Filoni's interest here seems to primarily be channeling George Lucas' love of slapstick and physical comedy. It's central character is Kazuda Xiono, a bumbling Jack Tripper-type who bumbles his way through his espionage mission aboard an outer rim refueling station that the First Order is courting influence with. The selection of Kaz as their spy is the first of hundreds of absurdities that this show asks its audience to believe in. The supporting cast features few likeable figures, and it gets so mired in its sitcom-like setups each episode that it never feels high stakes. The show works best when Poe Dameron shows up, Oscar Isaac's confident performance as an actual competent agent elevating everything about the show, and lending it its only air of authenticity. The First Order is full of threats, with scattered appearances of Captain Phasma, but the only actual menace they actually generate is when the show dovetails into Starkiller Base's destruction of an entire system. The show, it's bad. It's a bad show. The animation is weird, but not unwatchable, which is more than I can say for the rest of the show. I don't like it. Season 1 basically ends where, all things being equal, it really should have began.
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And that's it. The long list of 2017 (and a bit of 2018) in the bag. Some good thoughts, but mostly half-hearted ramblings about things I've mostly forgotten. But that's not all that unusual for this blog now is it.
