Director Set: Sam Raimi Fa So La Ti Do

Perhaps my favourite podcast over the past few years is Blank Check with Griffin and David, which finds actor Griffin Newman and critic David Sims covering the entire filmography of a director (one film per episode) specifically those who were given a blank check at some point in their career to make whatever passion project they want.  It's an entertaining, inviting, insightful, thoughtful and incredibly well researched podcast which goes into deep (and sometimes juvenile) conversations about the director and actors and productions of the films they cover, frequently to the point where the podcast episodes are longer than the films.  They just wrapped a deep dive into the work of Sam Raimi. 

I tried to follow along, but as often happens, some works are just not on streaming services, or at least services I haven't subscribed to.  Of Raimi's 14 films, I did not watch The Gift or For Love of The Game due to this factor.  I also did not watch the Spider-Mans 1-3 since I just did an unrecorded rewatch of them after watching Far From Home, nor did I rewatch Oz: The Great and Powerful, which I've already written about (twice) on this blog (and certainly seemed to like more than almost everyone while also recognizing it's a highly flawed film).

So that leaves:
The Evil Dead (1980 - dvd)
Crimewave (1984 - tubi)
The Evil Dead 2 (1986 - dvd)|
Darkman (1990 - rental)
Army of Darkness (The Renegade Cut, 1992 - dvd)
The Quick and the Dead - (1995, CTV)
A Simple Plan (1998, rental)
Drag Me To Hell (2010, dvd)

The first Raimi film I ever watched was A Simple Plan, which I saw in theatres originally and was quite impressed with.  It's the story of Hank (Bill Paxton) an accountant at a feed supply store in a depressed community with a loving, pregnant wife, Sarah, (Bridgette Fonda) and an older brother, Jacob, (Billy Bob Thornton) who is clearly lower on the IQ scale than average (but not explicitly said to have any impairment or disorder).  Jacob has a best friend in the unemployed, heavy-drinking Lou (Brent Briscoe) who Hank disapproves of.  The three men one day have a minor accident while travelling on a winter road and wind up discovering in the woods a downed plane containing a bag full of cash, over 4 million dollars worth.  Hank comes up with a plan to make sure nobody is looking for the cash before dividing it evenly between the three.

It's not long, though, before thinking and overthinking start to become an impediment to success.  Jacob's seeming ineptitude at lying starts a cascade that includes accidental murder, more murder, mobsters and utter corruption of everything Hank believed himself to be.  It's a slow burn suspense film that expertly ratchets up the tension with every scene.  Each subsequent moment a new layer of complexity is revealed, requiring more and more lies to be delivered.  While Hank is our protagonist, it's hard to see him as a good man, given the lengths he goes through, and even Sarah, who seems like a rocksteady moral compass for him, winds up being seduced by the green.  Old Testament style, for his greed, he certainly does suffer in a one-two punch of a finale that feels straight out of film noir.

Raimi has bag of filmmaking tricks he employs in most of his films, but with A Simple Plan he puts them largely aside to let the story and performances dominate the attention...but it's a testament to how adept a storytelling craftsman he is that, without employing said bag of tricks, he produced one of the under-the-radar best movies of the 90's.  It's as riveting 20+ years later as it was at the time.

But back in 1998 I didn't know about Raimi's bag of tricks.  I thought A Simple Plan a wonderful film, but I had no clue, based on that, what made him stand out as a filmmaker.  I would be over two years before I would discover that, thanks to another, non-Raimi production.

2000's High Fidelity was a landmark movie (and book) in my life, a romance story about the collector persona that seemed to be peering into my very soul (in retrospect, though, the film is largely an examination of the fragile male ego though, ironically, seemingly completely unaware of that fact).  It's a film full of amazing dialogue exchanges about being a pop culture nerd, the standout one being where John Cusak, Jack Black and Todd Louiso are having a conversation about the meaning of the word "yet", as in "I haven't seen Evil Dead II yet".  It devolves into a hilarious "who's on first?" misunderstanding of what the conversation is actually about, but it really trumpets the greatness of Evil Dead II as a film.  I hadn't seen Evil Dead II, yet, but I knew I would have to.

Later that year (or perhaps early the following year) Anchor Bay, a company known for releasing cult films on DVD, released a new (or perhaps the first) edition of Evil Dead II on DVD in a fancy tin.  At the time I was big into buying DVDs, especially of cult films I'd only heard about, and even more specifically ones in limited edition packaging, so I snapped it up.  I watched it, but I'm not sure I got it.  Oh, I'm quite sure I didn't get it.  Was it a comedy? Was it a horror? Was I meant to be scared? Was I meant to laugh? Was I meant to be grossed out?  Yes. Yes. Yes yes and yes. But I didn't get it.  It didn't seem to be for me.

When I started dating my now wife, I found she came with all manner of Evil Dead paraphernalia.  DVDs of the trilogy, she had a painting a friend of hers had gifted her of the Army of Darkness poster hanging in her kitchen, and she had action figures of Ash and Deadite Ash on her bookshelf.  She took me through the trilogy, and, I have to say, I still didn't get it.  

It's been over 15 years since and it's only now, having been indoctrinated into the church of Bruce Campbell, that I can appreciate the Evil Dead trilogies  I don't know what it says about the films themselves that I need to tie myself into the cult of personality, and/or steep myself into the behind-the-scenes rigours of making these movies to appreciate them, but having been through a Campbell autobiography or two, having spent a little time studying Raimi and his flavour of filmmaking, and reading many retrospectives on one or all of the films has led to a deep, deep appreciation of them.

That said, watching The Evil Dead is mostly made tolerable, nay enjoyable, knowing the partnership that Campbell and Raimi will develop over decades to come. As we see throughout the series (and in Doctor Strangemom) it never gets tiresome the heaps of abuse and gore that Raimi inflicts upon Campbell in the role of Ash.

The Evil Dead is a rough prototype of a movie, but still a signal flare announcing the director's arrival. The opening shot is what will eventually be affectionately dubbed "Raimi cam" and there are dozens of clever and inventive shots throughout that will major parts of of Raimi's signature bag of tricks throughout his career.

Despite being a horror movie, and more poker faced than Evil Dead II, Raimi can't hide his goofier instincts, so the film has a comedic energy simmering underneath.  Mostly a fun time throughout, the movie feels overlong by at least 15 minutes, despite being only an 85 minute movie.

Evil Dead II meanwhile is every bit the romp Jack Black said it was in High Fidelity.  Decades later its still very much its own distinct thing that doesn't have an equal.  It's a magical mixture of director, star, and effects team coming together to make something that shouldn't exist, yet has for over 35 years.  It's a film that mixes genres with abandon, is unsparingly gross, and manages to make its star both an utter buffoon and yet pretty cool and sexy. 

Due to copyright issues or somesuch over the original film, the first 15 minutes of Evil Dead II act as an accelerated/truncated "Previously On" recap of the prior movie, but the discrepancies in my mind make it its own Ash-led multiverse.  Frankly, I think there's the Ash from The Evil Dead,  another Ash from Evil Dead II, a different Ash for each of the different cuts/endings for Army of Darkness, a different Ash from the Ash vs The Evil Dead TV show, and then multiple Ashes from the various Army of Darkness comics (and I guess now the video game).  And the Book of the Dead crops up in gory, po-faced The Evil Dead remake so it's clearly part of the multiverse as well.   

While The Evil Dead is pretty much pure concept, with little regard for characters, relationships, or story, Evil Dead II corrects this with establishing mythos, bringing a second group into the fold, including an adventuring young woman with some actual knowledge of the history of the book of the dead to act as the brains against Ash's dimwitted brawn. 

Evil Dead II ends with Ash getting sucked into a wormhole, back into a medieval age which is where Army of Darkness picks up.  Raimi pretty much abandons the horror trope in favour of grand scale action and adventure, but most of all, just rampant silliness.  AoD should put Ash at a distinct cultural advantage over the people he's meeting hundreds of years in the past, and yet he's the same jackass dimwit he proved himself to be in Evil Dead II, only he continues to exemplify it.  

AoD seems to be Raimi's purest expression of his ambition.  On a fairly modest budget he delivered an agreeably ridiculous comedy-fantasy-adventure that tries for a Battle of Helm's Deep-style siege on 1/50th the budget, and with a deep reverence for Ray Harryhousen's stop motion animation.  The greatest feat of AoD is the sequence where Ash battles a group of mouse-sized evil versions of himself in an old windmill.  It's a tremendous sequence that builds a ridiculous amount of tension (which should be somewhat unearned, but isn't) through sound design  and then descends quickly into wild slapstick and just delightful camera trickery.  It's clear Campbell is having a blast while also putting his body on the line in a way few other stars (excepting the likes of Jackie Chan or Tom Cruise) do.  

 Army of Darkness has been cut and recut and delivered on DVD in more iterations than almost any other film (perhaps Blade Runner and Highlander II its biggest competition in this regard).  The tone of the films change based on the edit, and the endings starkly different.  The Renegade Cut features the a twist ending where Ash, sent back to the future, is sent too far forward into a seemingly post-apocalyptic Earth, which feels like a clear homage to Planet of the Apes.  I find it preferable to the "official" S-Mart ending where Ash is back at his old department store job and intones the deadites are still after him for some reason (and it fits more in continuity with the 2018 TV show if one cares about such things as continuity).

Raimi delivered a film between each of the Deadite Trilogy.  His first studio picture was Crimwave, which he wrote with the Coen Brothers.  Yes, that's right, there's a Sam Raimi directed film that he co-wrote with the Coen Brothers... and it's something nobody ever talks about because it's borderline unwatchable. 

With Crimewave Raimi set out to make a live action Tex Avery cartoon, only to discover that for all the elaborate prop setups, pratfalls and comedic mugging, none of it really translates to live action.  It just looks awkward.  I made it about 40 minutes into the film before I turned it off, and by that point I still had no sense of what the plot was nor what direction it was taking, and I didn't particularly care to follow through on it.  I don't shut films off very often but somehow Raimi, the Coens, and Campbell in a supporting role just couldn't make it work.  The characters were universally unappealing, and the aesthetic seemed more of what could be in hindsight called a Tim Burton vibe but without the gothic sensibility to the storytelling.

Between Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness however, Raimi made a monster hit out of bringing a Universal Monsters sensibility to the nascent form of superhero movies.  Darkman rode the wave of post-Burton Batman features to success not on name recognition or star power, but on a shrew advertising campaign that asked "Who Is Darkman?" The poster of a figure in a trenchcoat and bandaged face, standing on a rooftop, while not all that heroic-looking, did inspire people to want to know that very answer.

I saw Darkman once in the theatre, and probably once at home.  I was still a teenaged comic book nerd and was pretty pissy about the fact that studios spent money making a "superhero" movie based on an original property rather that using one of thousands of established heroes from decades of comics publishing.  I even watched the first of the two direct-to-video sequels, but I could already see the diminishing returns on a property I didn't even really care about, and certainly didn't appreciate.

Decades later, revisiting Darkman with all new eyes (remembering next to nothing of the picture), I can see clearly what Raimi was going for - the mash of pulp masked crimefighter serial with 30's monsters blended into an original creation that feels out of time even with 1991. It's of a piece with contemporaries Dick Tracy, The Shadow, The Phantom and The Rocketeer, but with more filmmaking ambition, and the same lack of permeability.

It's exciting because of the filmmaking, Raimi hitting especially hard on those notes recalling Frankenstein and other creature features.  The lens goes on a canted angle so often, but it's not for the superhero camp of 60's Batman, but instead to signify the character's madness.  I didn't necessarily love the story being told: the villains are pretty weak and unmemorable, Frances McDormand is a unfortunately written as a lame duck love interest (one never thinks of McDormand as a damsel in distress), and the hero is never truly all that heroic.  It's more of a revenge thing than a hero thing.  I like that Darkman has a power set, and a weakness in mental instability, as well as technology to make false skin and appear as anyone he'd like (excepting the fact that Liam Neeson is a big man) for a limited time...it's rife for more explanation... but Raimi really wanted a pulpy 30's feel and in that limited scope it kinda drag this down.  Yet the visuals, the style, a Danny Elfman (with Shirley Walker) sweeping, of-the-era heroic score elevate it quite a bit higher than some of the other 90's also-ran superhero/pulp hero movies.  (Newman, on the Blank Check podcast suggested that the aborted "Dark Universe" at Universal, intending to create a shared universe of action movies out of it's 30's monsters, would have been far better had Darkman been its lynchpin character, with Neeson serving as the binding elder statesman, and I can't help but think of the missed opportunities in that).

I recall, somehow, quite vividly the TV commercials for The Quick and the Dead from back in 1995.  I was graduating high school but still very much deeply rooted into geeky things, but slowly expanding my horizons.  I still didn't know Raimi from Adam, so my only impression was, well, a silly looking Western.  Westerns were, in my mind back then, for old men.  Like, for my grandpa.  And I had dismissed Sharon Stone based on her post-Basic Instinct roles which all seemed to be retreads of the sex-thriller.  I also had already dismissed Leonardo DiCaprio as a talentless Teen Beat heartthrob (something I think I've only recently gotten past with him as a performer).  And Gene Hackman... a performer so good at playing unlikeable characters that, in my inability to disassociate, I generally disliked Hackman as a performer.  So, no, The Quick and the Dead wasn't something I was going to see.

But man I wish I had.  The film is an absolute delight, with an immediately intriguing premise and a wonderfully stacked cast of both top tier and character actors.  I hesitate to say it, but I think it might be true...my favourite Raimi movie maybe?  It may just be the shine of newness.

The set-up has "The Lady" (Stone) arriving in the town of Redemption just in time for the annual quick-draw tournament.  It's a competition the town's corrupt, strong-arm ruler, Harrod (Hackman) puts on every year, mainly because he knows he's the fastest gun in the west and he can put anyone down.  The Lady is out for revenge against Harrod because of what he did to her as a child, that history getting teased out throughout the movie (and each return to this in flashback gets more an more brutal, although at the end of the second act it sort of stops the movie dead in order to fully play out).

The Lady enters the competition, looking for a valid shot at Harrod.  It's a head-to-head, single elimination bracketed system which allows the film to have a host of eccentric characters filling in the rest of the gaps.  The two other major players are The Kid (who is Harrod's boastful bastard son, played by DiCaprio) and Cort, a preacher who used to run in Harrod's gang but has since found the lord and given up the gun.  He's basically been imprisoned by Harrod and is forced to compete.

Other players include Lance Henrikson as the flashy showman Ace, Keith David as the steely bounty hunter Clay Cantrell, Mark Boone Jr. as the slimy Scars, and Jonathan Gill as the seemingly unkillable Spotted Horse.  If anything is disappointing about this film its that it doesn't give use more larger than life characters for the tournament (out of the 16 players only about half have any real personality to speak of) and we don't spend enough time with the more named characters.  Perhaps it's just that I was enjoying the premise so much I wanted to see every duel and tease out the personlities of the combatants more.  This tournament could easily be remade into a sports mocumentary via an 8-episode TV minis-series.

Raimi gets to have his visual flights of fancy as well as tell a really fun, modern western tale.  It wasn't at all a hit at the time, but it's aged incredibly well, feeling more and more relevant in the age of the reality competition show.  This will be one I come back to over and over.

Skipping ahead nearly 15 years to Drag Me To Hell, a move I had intended to see upon release but just never got around to seeing until this podcast provide a pretense.  This was very much touted as Raimi's return to horror, and on the fan blogs and news websites that popped up in the 2000s, this was a very big deal.

Now having seen it, I'm so torn about how I feel. While I really appreciate the craft within the production and structuring of the film, as well it's Raimi's distict tone nearing its purest form, I also found it kind of tedious at times.  There's a seeming inevitability to the entire production that it doesn't ever escape.  

What I think was missing was the Bruce Campbell factor, a likeable performer whom Raimi heaps all manner of abuse upon, and is completely invested in receiving it. Alison Lohman is... fine, but she didn't seem like the right Raimi punching bag (one of my disappointments about the Evil Dead remake was that it was done as straightforward horror, but I thought Jane Levy would have been the perfect Campbell substitute). I think this role needed someone who could present themselves as sort of insecure and docent but have a real tough farmgirl with a mouth underneath, an while Lohman delivers on the first, I don't really buy her delivery of the latter. I'm also torn about whether her responses to terror are overly-cartoony, or appropriately so, or perhaps even not big enough (Raimi's drive to create live action Looney Tunes by way of horror has been evident from the beginning of his career).

This also has some (at least 3) highly questionable at best, outright offensive at worst cultural representations that the agnostic blonde white girl needs to navigate in order to learn about and survive the horrors that have been set upon her.  Its use of Romani stereotypes the most egregious of these.

In hindsight I like Raimi's navigation of the character, whether Christine deserves what's happening and whether she is a good person. But in the moment it felt like such an uneven performance. I think I will need a rewatch to really see whether the performance holds up to the intent.

---

---Ranking Raimi---

1. The Quick and the Dead - surprising
2. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness - blasphemy, I know but I genuinely love it
3. A Simple Plan - probably his best movie
4. Army of Darkness - my favourite of the Deadite trilogy
5. Spider-Man 2 - I have a mixed relationship with Spider-man (both in comics and film) but I can't deny how good this is
6. Evil Dead II - it's earned its rep
7. Spider-Man - sometimes I watch it and it's great, sometimes I watch it and I think it's so clunky
8. Darkman - there's something to this, but I wish there were more of that something
9. Drag Me To Hell - going to need another viewing
10. Oz: The Great and Powerful - don't hat it as much as everyone else
11. The Evil Dead - it's not bad, but it doesn't do much for me
12. Spider-Man 3 - it's pretty bad and actively makes me angry to watch it
13. Crimewave - unwatchable?
    did not see:
    The Gift - will see immediately whenever it comes available on streaming
    For Love of the Game - it's a baseball movie so likely will never see it

Obi-Wan Kenobi season 1(?)

 2022, d. Deborah Chou - 6 episodes - Disney+

Besides the return of Star Wars to theatres with Episode VII, no Star Wars offering has been as demanded, as hotly anticipated as Ewan McGregor's return to the role of Obi-Wan. The kids who grew up on the Prequels and the Clone Wars are now adults, and they've been wanting more of McGregor's Jedi.  Even the bitter old-heads, poo-pooers of the Prequels, had to admit McGregor's Obi-Wan was a highlight, and his return would be most welcome.  

It was supposed to be a movie, part of Disney's "A Star Wars Story" slate, but the failure of Solo basically killed that dream.  But the rumours swirled for a long time that the dream would be resurrected as "content" for Disney+.

Upon its arrival, like most everything Star Wars these days, Obi-Wan Kenobi was met with the same mixed bag of reactions - from genuine excitement to mild disappointment to the unfortunate subculture of internet trolls and their extremely loud vehement racism.  

There's much to be said about the culture surrounding Star Wars, but I'm not reviewing fandom, I'm reviewing the show... and watching the show, two very specific things quickly became clear: the budget just isn't there to be able to make a live action series still feel movie quality, and the Volume video-soundstage is showing its limitations.

The Star Wars viewer has been *mostly* spoiled by how seemingly limitless the budget for Star Wars films has been (quickly forgetting the low budgets of The Star Wars Holiday Special and two live-action Ewoks TV movies), and while it seemed The Mandalorian had a hefty investment to start, the level of investment has diminshed with each subsequent release (as Disney+ subscribership must have stabilized by now). 

In that reduced budget also is probably a mandate to rely more and more upon the Volume (the Disney-developed soundstage featuring a 360 degree digital backdrop that is effectively a very high-tech version of matte painting) which, when used correctly can really enhance a set and look quite wonderful.  However, when used incorrectly, it does enter a sort of uncanny landscape, where you know something's not right, but can't quite peg it.  When used incorrectly, or pushed to its limits, as it has been in all the Star Wars shows and even in Thor: Love and Thunder, it makes a scene -- no matter how large its intended to appear -- feel very confined.  And a lot of Obi-Wan feels very confined.

Where The Book of Boba Fett was a mess in its story construction, Obi-Wan is at least its better in telling a more linear and cohesive story, providing a stronger character arc. We really don't know much about what the character was up to between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope.  There have been a couple comic books that touch upon what the old wizard gets up to in the deserts of Tattooine watching over a young Luke, and also one outstanding sequence in Star Wars Rebels where Obi-Wan faces a vengeful Darth Maul for a second duel.  Here, we find him right in the middle of the 20 year stretch between Episode III and IV.  Obi-Wan has cut himself off from the force, he's toiling away processing meat from some massive, beached beast (how long is that meat going to remain good sitting out in that desert heat I wonder).  He's avoiding conflicts and calling any attention to himself because there is a clan of feared not-quite-Sith called the Inquisitors serving Darth Vader by hunting down Jedi and the Force sensitive across the galaxy.

Two Inquisitors, Reva the Third Sister (Moses Ingram, [The Queen's Gambit]) and the unnamed Fifth Brother (Sung Kang [The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift]) have come to Tattoine, not in search of Kenobi, but another Jedi who hasn't left the path of helping people, trying to do right and resolve conflict.  While the Inquisitors are there to find this rogue Jedi, the rogue Jedi is there to find Obi-Wan, which he does.  But instead of finding a ally, a friend, a brother-in-arms, he just finds a broken, aging man who doesn't at all resemble the once great hero he was.  The Obi-Wan sends the Jedi away, and he's found and killed.  

Obi-Wan tries to absolve his guilt by reminding himself of his higher mission, protecting Luke, but even that seems empty.  And when his old friend, Senator Bail Organa calls, telling him Leia has been kidnapped, Obi-Wan is lured out of his island of solitude and on a rescue adventure which will see him encounter the Inquisitors, find the underground railroad for Jedi, infiltrate an Imperial base, find out the true fate of his old Padawan, and face off against Darth Vader not once, but twice.  Of course, along the journey he will rediscover what it means to be a Jedi, to let go of guilt, and find a new hope, just not where he originally thought it might be.

I think in a condensed form, this would have been incredible.  Were this a movie, 2- to 2 1/2 hours, yes, I think it really would have been great, with the usual Star Wars budget placed behind it.

In its current form, it...well, it meanders.  It has some really great quiet moments, giving some insight into Obi-Wan, or Reva, or Vader's states of mind, giving us bits of back story or hints at old wounds coming to the surface.  These are some of the better moments in the show, actually.  But then there are other quiet moments that seem to serve mainly as reinforcement of things we already know, or bits of unnecessary world expansion/fan service, or even just cute asides.  Filler.  We get new allies for Obi-Wan in the form of Kumail Nanjiani, Indira Varma, Maya Erskine and O'Shea Jackson Jr. who either get too much attention for what minimal role they play, or not enough.  Even the opponents Obi-Wan faces, the Inquisitors or even Luke's Uncle Owen (Joel Edgerton) are given too much time so as to dilute their overall impact.  Tightening the story, slimming it down would make all of these characters pop in a way that doesn't work when doing a Disney Plus-style limited series (the D+ limited series is not quite movie, not quite TV show, but in most cases so far hasn't effectively figured out how to operate as its own distinct narrative).

The budget limitations are kind of brutal in this.  The sets vary between gorgeous and thrifty, with more than a few quarry-like environments (some of which have their scale confined by the Volume) to underwhelm.  Even on some of the better sets, the extras feel out of place or uncertain of their position (one particular scene of an infantry of Stormtroopers assembling in front of a large blast door looks more like a Comic Con cosplay gathering for a photo shoot).  Some CGI effects feel on part with CW Arrowverse programming, which suits them just fine, but it's a far cry from what we expect from Star Wars.

But the biggest side effect of the budget limitations and expanded length is how it impacts the logical storytelling.  The siege in episode 5 feels like a budgetary necessity, where instead a sort of "space siege" in an asteroid field or something could have happened.  There's not a lot of logic to why a Star Destroy can't just blast them from the sky.   In some cases, if there had been less time to draw out these sequences, there would be less time to think about all the different ways they could go down.  In other cases more money could have led to more impressive action and effects and that kind of dazzle and pop can go a long way to distract from illogical storytelling.

Within Obi-Wan however, I got something I now love in Star Wars that I never even considered before, which is what Leia as a child was like, and what her life on Alderaan was like.  This series exploration, and the casting of Vivian Lyra Blair, was close to note perfect.  Blair's Leia feels appropriate (and the wardrobe nods to various Leia outfits from the original trilogy were subtle visual cues that helped build the bridge).  I don't know that I want "Young Leia Adventures" series now, but I was very delighted by how she was portrayed here.  Star Wars has had a prickly past with youth casting, so nice to see them get it right.

It's a weird thing to see Obi-Wan, now Ben, as he is throughout the majority of this series.  Much in the same way *some* people were disappointed (/vehemently angry) with Luke's mopey old man portrayal in The Last Jedi I was kind of sad to find Ben here so far past his glory.  With Luke, his glory was pretty much just an extrapolation.  He was just becoming a self-taught Jedi Knight who's dad let him win when bashing their lazer swords together, he was never that impressive.  We only hoped he would eventually become a grand badass Jedi (the old Expanded Universe also delivered on that).  We already knew Obi-Wan was an amazing Jedi, so returning to him to find he can barely flick his lightsaber on is really a let down...but it does create some special moments, especially his first encounter with Vader.  McGregor performs the role well, but we can't help but miss the glint in the eye and the wry smile, that doesn't come until late.

Speaking of which, I was worried that Vader, and a returning Hayden Christiansen, would be too much, even further diminishing the potency of Vader as a chilling and dark character, but it was in fact the opposite  Like two very amazing comic book series baring his name and his appearances in Rogue One and Rebels, the series only managed to enhance his complexity and our understanding of both his inner demons and motivations.

In the end, it's a net positive experience, but I think there's still probably a way to edit this into a movie (and bolster the effects).  I've caught wind that someone has done that online but I think Disney could offer it as two flavours...the expanded experience of as series or a slimmed down movie experience.  Why not?

Thor: Love and Thunder

 2022, d. Taika Waititi - in theatre

(Maybe some spoilers)

During the pandemic I've sunk myself very deeply into film podcasts and youtube channels...not so deeply as to be a commenter or anything but enough that the uToob and Spot-iffy algorithms are constantly feeding me more movie criticism and throwing things into my email inbox.  For the past week I've been dodging commentary on Thor: Love and Thunder, but unsuccessfully enough that I knew that the film was divisive.  A friend clued me in on the divisiveness (after not heeding my warning that I didn't want to discuss it yet) and started discussing how much he hated it.  Before I could stop him, he launched into his rant.  

Not to speak for him, but the gist was two fold: 1) the film didn't do the "God Butcher" story arc justice, and 2) the comedy.... 

Let's tackle these two points briefly before even talking about the film.

The "God Butcher" story arc that took place in the 2013 Thor series (issues #1-12) is one of the greatest mainstream superhero story arcs of the past 20 years.  It's just a masterful piece of storytelling that is both accessible to new readers and extremely rewarding to long-term fans.  It's dark, intense, scary and epic, beautifully illustrated by Esad Ribic and masterfully constructed -- spanning three time periods -- by Jason Aaron.  A direct adaptation would make a (no pun intended) marvelous film, but doing so would be a film more like The Norseman rather than something in line with the MCU's traditional offerings.  It's also not co-writer/director Taika Waititi's bag.

Which brings us to the second point.  Waititi, is a comedy guy.  He like funny things, and he's really good at making things funny.  He's got a particularly - astutely - silly sense of humour.  He's able to do silly, while at the same time being aware that it's silly, not be arch about it, and really just enjoy the silliness. I've very much liked some of his work and largely loved some others in Waititi's output, but would I ever have thought he was the right choice to bring the gritty, gnarly "God Butcher" story to the screen?  That's a hard no.

So, if you're one of those comic book guys, as my friend is, who deeply invests in the stories and the lore and deviations what what is already known causes little stabby pains of irreconcilable differences in one's brain, AND you don't really have a sense of humour about these stories about men and women in capes and tights which you've been taking seriously for decades... yeah, even without seeing the film I can see why this wouldn't be your cup of tea.

I on the other hand, understand that moving a product from one medium to another requires adaptation, and that the artists handling the adaptation tend not to be the artists of the original work, and therefore they're putting their own, often wildly different stamp on it creating a distinctly different product.  I understand these things very well. I also understand the criticism of "the (book/tv show/cartoon/comic/video game/tweet/gif/song/etc) was better" as well. I'm sure I've made that reductive statement myself on this very blog...multiple times even.  It's natural to compare, and it's natural to think that the thing we first encountered/experienced, the thing we're more familiar with is the "right" one/the better one.  It's hard to separate what we know from what we get from an adaptation.  Most often, yeah, the original work is superior (it's always a miracle when any movie -- given everything and everyone involved in making it -- is a good movie) but there's sometimes cases to be made that remaking or adapting something can create a superior outcome.

All this to say Thor: Love and Thunder, while very entertaining, kind of doesn't work.  And why it doesn't work is two fold: it's adapting a very dark, serious story into a lighthearted action comedy, and that action comedy has way, way too much comedy undermining almost every scene for about 100 of its 118 minutes.

I would love to say it isn't so, but it is.  It's too much funny.  

One of the big (and increasingly fair) criticisms about Marvel is its penchant for cutting its dramatic tension with quippiness.  Nearly every major character in every MCU movie has had a quip that lets a little of the tense air out of the bag.  Here, it's not just quippiness, but sound effects, editing tricks, visual effects, background characters, stunt casting, and really letting Waititi, who has become a bit of an unlikely Hollywood golden boy, do his silliness thing seemingly completely unfettered with many tens of millions of dollars.  One of the other big complaints about Marvel has been how directors tend to get quite muted under the weight of the Marvel machine, that they don't really have enough control to really put their distinct stamp on a film.  This, I guess T:L&T is what happens when they are allowed to do their own thing.  

Waititi's Thor: Ragnarok really stood out from the MCU pack because of his distinct sense of humour, but as well from the influences he was pulling from (largely Jack Kirby imagery and Norse mythology-by-way-of-Marvel Comics).   Here, there's less influence, and more Waititi's freewheeling spirit. It's not that the comedy doesn't work in T:L&T.  It does.  I laughed at all the jokes, because they are funny (Waititi is a funny guy), but my brain still recognized that there was not enough time to reset from the previous joke, and that scene after scene after scene was deflated by bringing bit after bit after bit to it.  The bits become the focus, not the actual intent or meaning of the scene.   So when moments happen, like Thor reuniting with Jane Foster for the first time (now herself The Mighty Thor), there's too much quipping, to many cutaways to goofy things, too much happening around them, to really feel them connect, to feel the scene.

I get the sense that Waititi was experimenting to see if he could take an MCU budget and make a comedy-action-adventure, but putting the comedy first.  And, it's apparent, Marvel let him proceed with this experiment. 

The final 20 minutes, the film finally allows scenes to breathe, to let characters have moments together, to let there be something more than comedy, and it works so very well that it just makes me sadder that the earlier scenes weren't afforded the same luxury.  People complain about the Marvel formulae, but I kinda missed it here.

It is entertaining, but it's not a storytelling success.

---

Quickly:
- The Gorr: The God Butcher story here is a pale shadow of what it is in the comics, it's true, and it's not nearly as epic as it should have been.  The film's focus is more on Jane and Thor, so any actual god butchering happens almost entirely off screen.  As such, the menace of Gorr is pretty diluted. 
- In looking at what happens in this film, there's entirely too much to really do any of it justice.  There's the comedy/pathos of Thor still trying to find himself that would have made a fun, much smaller film (or bigger - just more conventional - adventure story).  There's the dark menace and the huge theological ramifications of Gorr killing gods and then introducing a whole realm where all of the galaxy's pantheon gather.  And then there's the tragedy-romance of Jane Foster, dying of cancer, reuniting with the space viking who loved her.  These all don't cohabitate well together, especially when the unifying thread is Waititi's visual gags or silly patter.
- Thor gets all his clothes knocked off of him. Everyone, Thor included, was okay with it.  I'm okay with it. But, there is certainly a conversation to be had about the cultural impact of "the Marvel body", and it's not a simple conversation. For another day.
- Because of the largely silly tone of the film, I'm not sure that Natalie Portman ever finds a recognizable tone for this iteration of Jane Foster/Mighty Thor.  I think she's striving for science nerd with super-powers, while also trying to mirror Hemsworth's well-practiced goofy pathos, but I don't know that the script ever knew what note she should be playing.  If it had more time to breathe it could have given her sort a prototypical origin story to define that.
- The Guardians of the Galaxy make a brief appearance at the top of the film, and it seemed like a lot of work to have them be there, only to not really contribute much.  I can't think of anything more comic booky than having a bunch of recognizable heroes milling around in the background of scenes that have nothing to do with them.  I was hoping this Thor-with-the-Guardians would convey their history together a bit more naturally.  It felt quite forced.
- Sam Neill, Matt Damon and Luke Hemsworth reprise their roles of Asgardian thespian versions of Odin, Loki and Thor, respectively, from Ragnarok.  Here they present the cheap stage version of Ragnarok, joined by Melissa McCarthy as Hela (should have been another Australian, like Rebel Wilson or Nicole Kidman).  It was cute but went on too long, and probably could have been cut entirely and pasted in as the post-credit sequence.  Also, I still think Matt Damon and Luke Hemsworth look much more like brothers than Luke and Chris Hemsworth do. 
- Russell Crowe plays Zeus in what should have been a delightfully subversive sequence...but when every sequence leading into it tries to be delightfully subversive, its impact as delightfully subversive is greatly diminished..

Just a brief ranking of Phase 4 Marvel:
1. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness
2. Spider-Man No Way Home
3. Black Widow
4. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
5. Eternals
6. Thor: Love and Thunder

  

3 Short Paragraphs: The Contractor

2022, Tarik Saleh (Metropia) -- Amazon

Again, I am thinking about how I am not That Guy. Yes, my brain focuses on repeating thoughts, and obsesses on things over and over. As we age, we look back at What We Once Were, are glad to dispense with some things (I saw fewer things out loud without thinking) and lament other aspects as they are lost. Will I ever get back to being that guy who can get lost in challenging movies, embrace the interesting and slow? Or should I embrace my current state of mind, and absorb and consume because even in the consumption of less-than-average, one can enjoy things, learn interesting ideals of the human condition (both from the characters and the film creators) and grow from it. I have never worried about my fondness for trashy paperback fiction (even in digital format) so should I beat myself up about my current focus on the Not So Good? Let's not and see what happens.

Chris Pine and Ben Foster previously starred together in The Finest Hours and Hell or High Water. They return for a movie about two close friends, almost brothers, out of the military; one is succeeding in life, and the other is not. Circumstances force James (Chris Pine, Star Trek) to go to Mike (Ben Foster, Warcraft) seeking work, as a private contractor. On their first job in Europe, things are not as they are presented and they go very very wrong. And despite the need he has, James must set things right. A very, very mundane action-thriller plot.

There's not much to the movie, but in reading an interview between Pine & Foster, I get why they did the movie, and why it was made. Its less an exploration of style or substance in that sub-genre, and more a character study. Pine comments it would have made a better short story, than a film, and that rings true. Straight forward action stories, in written fiction, the trashy paperback fiction I mentioned, can be immensely fleshed out via character studies. This movie attempts that, but I am not sure it succeeds as much as Pine hoped, as James ends up being the tortured-returned-vet we have seen in tons of other movies and TV episodes, and very little new is explored. But again, I can see why Pine enjoyed playing through the character and even Less Than Average movies can give actors and creators something to explore, and something for us, the viewer, to take with us.

I Saw This!! What I Have Been Watching -- Wot? No Movies P3

 I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent(him) 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.  That dog in the fiery house bad.

What I Am/Have Been Watching is the self-admitted state of typically Toast (not him), spending too much time in front of the TV. Sure, the Great Pause is winding down (culturally if not virally) but habits have been formed, doors have been locked and going outside is soooo pre-2019. The weird thing of late is not committing to movies. Sure, we add them to Watch List, we Download them, we say, "Let's watch xxx instead of TV tonight," but then we just either re-watch something classic or I find something else to download. 

One Episode is a segment in which we talk about shows we have watched one episode of (and sometimes more). We would like to watch less volume and more quality Television but that involves wading through a bevvy of meh to get to the good stuff. Sometimes we find gems which, for one reason or another, we don't (or haven't yet) watched another episode of.

P1 is here. P2 there.

The Boys, S3, 2022 - Amazon

(Wot? I never wrote about S1 or 2 ?!?!)

Has The Boys run its course on the amount of shock and shock and repugnance it can deliver? Whatever you answer, they will try to overcome it.  Shows like this, that come with a very distinct premise (superheroes are actually just the biggest, most amoral celebrity assholes and someone has to put them in their place) need to complete a story and move onto another one. Alas, they will likely be stretching out this plot (Butcher needs to take down the worst superhero, the Homelander) as long as they can. I haven't finished this S3 yet, but TV being TV means they need to go on and on and on.

The enjoyment (and I say that out loud with only a twinge of embarrassment) of season one came from the "OMG they did that!" factor. I had already read the comics and knew what to expect but the choices they made in order to adapt and give something new were astonishing, but the plot also felt tighter than I expected. But season two was all plot-stretch, and seemed to be doing some of the themes over and over. The Deep was a pervy dumbass, Homelander is unstable, Starlight is troubled by the life she has to navigate, A-Train is just utterly clueless, Butcher is an abuser, Hughie is naïve, etc. Much of the season felt like it didn't know where it was going, with only one subplot of any impact, in the resurrection and downfall of literal Nazi Stormfront.

Season 3 picks up with lame attempts at closure. Butcher is off the bottle and taking care of his kid, Hughie is working for the congresswoman who runs a dept that holds supes accountable, and Annie is doing her best to navigate... yeah, a lot of again a retread. But they blow some people up, go over the top on the sex stuff, and shock and shock and gross us out even more. But at least the plot seems to be directional -- in that Butcher is using a resurrected thought-lost-greatest-american-hero Soldier Boy (Kripke's buddy Jensen Ackles, Supernatural) to build a plan to take down Homelander. And things are going awry.

The Boys does not lend itself well to being attentive to the plot. So many of the beats are the same, over and over. Character choices are repetitive, the shocks begin to become numbing, and few people learn from their mistakes. But as someone who watch many MANY seasons of Supernatural, that seems to be a Kripke thing. How many times were the Winchester lads going to die or almost die or be altered, only to come back to Save The World. I will watch to see what it is done, but I will burp a sour burp and be done with it.

The Umbrella Academy, S3, 2022 - Netflix

(Wot? I never wrote about S1 or 2 ?!?!)

Seeing a trend here. 

I recall really liking most of season 1, especially anything to do with the time agency, The Commission, and the assassins Hazel and Cha-Cha. They did a pretty good job of adapting a rather non-sensical, whacka-doodle comic book series (it's often more style than substance, which has always had a strong place in comics) into a rather whacka-doodle TV show. I also recall it running out of steam before the end of the season, which worked out as an intro to all the characters. You see, The Umbrella Academy were 7 of 43 spontaneously born children, all at the same moment, all from not-pregnant mothers, from around the world. They were adopted by the strange, proto-typical comic book father figure Reginald Hargreaves (Colm Feore, Bad Cop Bon Cop, who disappears utterly into the role). He is not a good father. He is a "scientist" raising experiments to be super-heroes. The children have more emotional connection with the sentient monkey Pogo (Adam Godley, Powers) and the robot mom (Jordan Claire Robbins, 12 Monkeys), than with Reggie. As adults, the children are very very broken.

Season 3 brings on yet another apocalypse that they are causing, yet also have to save the world from. Seeing a trend here. They have returned from the 60s (season 2) to see the impact their meddling in Time (yet saving the world from apocalypse) has caused. There is no Umbrella Academy, instead Hargreaves has raised other children, calling them The Sparrow Academy. But he was expectedly also a dick to them, and they are, as adults, very very broken.

The show excels when it embraces the whacka-doodle, being so utterly unlike other "superhero" shows, in that nobody ever really does anything heroic, except on the most grand scale, and usually only in reaction to trouble they caused themselves. Unlike other whacka-doodle (Toasty, do you need a tag?) shows, such as Dirk Gently, there is little in the way of charm here. These are not likeable characters. And yet, I find myself absolutely loving so many of them. Of course, Klaus (Robert Sheehan, Misfits) the drug addled medium is my favourite followed closely by nihilistic Five, the old man in a teen's body. And I find myself sighing in contentment at the setting and design choices -- so many other shows, The Boys for example, barely even think about their set production. But all the anachronistic, grand choices in The Umbrella Academy set it aside from other shows. When was the last time that a background character was so distinct, I naturally assumed they were going to play a part in the plot?

Alas, as the show progresses, my enjoyment of the chaos and bizarre plot choices diminishes, as the story once again seems to lose steam. They seem to suffer from a stretching of available plot, needing to fill more and more space with endless moaning & groaning about all the bad choices offered, and bad choices they make.  I live that, I don't need to watch it.

Season 3 ends with another apocalypse averted (but really, was it?) and yet another Universe/Time-Line that the kids are shunted into.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer / Angel rewatch, 1997 - 2004 - Amazon

We have series we wait weekly for, we have series returning from seasonal hiatus, we have series we spontaneously download & watch, we have series randomly discovered, we have access to so much TV, and yet we still feel compelled to rewatch some stuff. Marmy has her crime shows that she rewatches on a regular basis, I have own staples (Firefly, Band of Brothers) and yet, for some reason, since they became digitally available, it didn't include Buffy and Angel.

But of late, given the circumstances around Joss Whedon and the challenge of art vs artist, I wanted to revisit the shows, to see if the difficulty was visible, and also to see if the show withstood the test of time.

We are mid-way through season 4, when it was appropriate to watch Angel though not trying to watch time periods concurrently, just keep the threads together. This was the season, post highschool, that the show hits its groove. The literal growing pains were moved through, childish things were put away and some beats had been established. And yet, the whole Adam as BBEG is one of my least favourite antagonists. Just the whole science-meets-mysticism seemed uninspired, but they were also working through the idea that the numerous human-comingled-demon races were not all cut-and-dry Bad Guys. And even that idea, which was presented by the now questionable Watcher's Council, that all demons walking on Earth were mixed bloods, seems challenged, as plenty of demons are dimension-walking so, they could be pure blood examples of their own race, unlike the mongrels that vampires are. I wish The Initiative had been exploring that, instead of just looking for walking weapons.

Part of the fun in watching a 25 year old show is pondering how the show would have differed if set now. Willow is using the Internet in its infancy (also hacking into proprietary databases) but imagine the knowledge that would be stored in today's massive connected data source, let alone what would be now accessible from the ubiquitous cell phone. The show today would have been attacked on Twitter for being too woke, and likely tackled some of the issues we are dealing with now, while embracing the topics considered ground breaking then. And yet, probably still tainted by the whole Whedon "white knighting"; much of the show seems to suffer in retrospect from now knowing where Whedon's headspace was at the time, especially with the female characters. The creep factor is definitely there.

Angel introduces the idea of greater forces behind the Monster of the Week. Angel himself finds his own "chosen one" destiny as he begins prowling the streets of LA as a weird pseudo "private dick", led by another mongrel demon Doyle, and assisted by Cordy who has run away from Sunnydale after her father went bankrupt / went to jail. In watching so many of the characters, Cordy is the one that seems to be given the most room to grow, and yet still retain her core selfish-self-centered-vapid core personality, but not allowing that to be only what she is.

The first few times we watched, I always adored the tragic love affair that is Buffy and Angel, the pathos of an ageless man in love with a woman who will eventually grow old, the creepiness of an "old man" falling for a 16 year old girl -- even if Angel is forever stuck in the mindset of when he was turned, he was still a man in his early twenties, not the age one should be going after teens. Enter Joss Whedon creep-factor. So, now that I watch it, I am just rather tired of the whole thing. Buffy just needs to move on, and Angel, I believe, is more attracted to the Tragic Love aspect, not her in particular. And that garners some truth, as he moves on to rather different choices later on in his own series.

We have a long way to go, especially to season seven of Buffy, wherein something that was surprisingly introduced early on (The First, season 3, "Amends") becomes the end of the series. I had never thought of Whedon doing the long haul on stories and plot, but how quickly he moves Spike from being the biggest & baddest of the baddies into an almost kicked-puppy role set him up for redemption in the long run. He also minorly does it with the introduction of uber-outsider Jonathan, who comes into the background rather early and is hinted at by season 4 of going to play a greater role.

And into the darkness we go....

House of Bamboo

 

1955, d.  Samuel Fuller (The Big Red One) - CriterionChannel

Hollywood always seems so insistent on remaking classics, usually to lessening effect. It's hard to capture lightning in a bottle twice. So why not spend more time and effort on reworking the noble failures, to take a film with a good concept, but flawed execution, and make a better work out of it?

House of Bamboo is such an intriguing but ultimately inept production that would be served well if remade today with a grittier sensibility and proper follow through on the dominoes that were set up, but never actually included as part of the chain.

I had some serious reservations about a mid50's American-made trans-Pacific crime/suspense flick, but somehow it skates through without being overtly racist. Sexist, yeah, but surprisingly not outwardly racist. It's possible that they may have faked some aspects of Japanese culture figuring a dumb North American audience would never know, but I'm dumb North American audience, and, well, I don't know. Kinda seems to pass the sniff test though, doesn't smell outwardly funky.

What is sadly funky, not in the cool way, is the awful narration (sounds like one of the guys who made a living at narrating grade school film strips about science or agriculture) that top ends the film. It's mostly put there to calm any panicky 1950's North American viewers made immediately uncomfortable with the unfamiliar surroundings of Japan by chiming in and explaining where they are and what is happening and who's who for the first 10 minutes. 

This film is about an undercover military officer who infiltrates a murderous gang of American bandits looting, robbing, and heisting, but also becomes involved romantically with a dead gang member's Japanese wife, in a go-nowhere romantic subplot that, by all conventions of traditional cinematic crime narratives, should have involved her being in some form of peril, and at the film's resolution having to decide to stay in Japan or go with our hero Unsolved Mysteries, to America. Neither of these things happen. The third act pretty much forgets she exists, very much to its detriment.

The big boss of the crime gang is the worst crime boss this side of an 80's cartoon he's Cobra Commander or Skeletor-level inept. He's constantly defying his own rules, and overlooking the most obvious clues, just to keep our hero, Unsolved Mysteries, around, when he should just be super suspicious all the time. The final act finds him setting up a brilliant last-minute plan to kill our hero, Unsolved Mysteries, only to have it backfire on him so spectacularly all he can really do is go on a shooting rampage at a carnival with a video game gun that never runs out of bullets. What's your plan buddy? 

There's was a pretty good set up for some serious intensity when our hero, Unsolved Mysteries, asks the wife to deliver a message for him to his handler, only for her to be spied by gang member Bones McCoy, and the end result is...nothing. No stakes. This movie seems entirely too worried about anyone's blood pressure rising so it never even tries. But it's all there, ready for someone to make a legit thriller out of. Or is this what Tokyo Vice is based off of? I haven't seen it.

I Could Never Be Your Woman

2007, d. Amy Heckerling (Clueless)

Messy. Messy messy messy.

The film has two montages in the first four minutes, one of which is narrated by a spirit guide of some sort (who pops up continually throughout the film) creating an improbable through line from Baby Boomer consumerism to plastic surgery... an ominous start for what's to come: lack of subtlety.

Paul Rudd as the romantic younger lead goes aggressively big throughout... they make it a plot point but it's always too much, too much to be charming, or even attractive.  I don't buy that Michelle Pfeiffer finds it anywhere near as endearing as we're supposed to believe she does.  From moment one when she's sitting in on his casting call, she's biting her lip and really keyed into Rudd's borderline inappropriate, largely inane shenanigans.

Pfeiffer and Saorise Ronan (in her first film) make a pretty great mother-daughter duo, and the only really sharp laughs come out of that pairing.  Ronan is fantastic, just a straight-out-the-box star.  Comedic stunt casting in the form of Tracey Ullman, Fred Willard, Graham Norton, David Mitchell, Wallace Shaun, and an invisible Olivia Colman pay no dividends. There's not a lot of com in this romcom, and there's really not a lot of rom either. Such a waste of Rudd and Pfeiffer.

It would seem Heckerling really wanted to work though Hollywood ageism, the hypocrisy of the lack of acceptance for the older women-younger men dynamic, and parsing through her (possibly problematic) relationship with the much younger Chris Kattan (a relationship that he said he was pressured into). But there's somehow no real insight into any of these, it's all surface level observations and trite ones at that. Heckerling seemed much more in tune with talking about parenting, but it's such a nominal part of this overall film.

This film features cat fights, body shaming, and teaching girls how to not be themselves to impress boys. Bleh. Messy.  I could never recommend I Could Never Be Your Woman. 

Bottle Shock

2008, d. Randall Miller - amazonprime

Not wanting to start yet another TV series, we were strolling through the streamers to see what exactly might pique our interests when we came across this Chris Pine/Alan Rickman vehicle that we'd never heard of.  Missing any sort of new Alan Rickman in our lives (RIP) we gave it a go....  

And it turns out, we've never heard of it before, because it's a total mess of a movie, one that doesn't understand how to just be about its subject: California/Napa vintners gaining international respect after a blind taste test against the French wineries in 1976.

The film could have been a real love story to wine, winemaking and the (snobby) culture of wine consuming of the era, but it gets far too bogged down in individual characters and sorry attempts at providing dramatic and romantic story arcs. It's wildly unfocused at the task at hand, losing sight of the real draw, Alan Rickman as the sommelier mastermind behind the duel.

We instead get a real dogshit arc about Chris Pine as the aimless hippie son of a winemaker who needs to find his purpose and also prove himself to the cute intern that's working for his dad (Rachael Taylor wasted in an utterly pointless and thankless role). Meanwhile his dad (Bill Pullman) is close to losing the vineyard, it seems merely because the film has to have stakes. It does Gustavo (Freddie Rodriguez) so dirty, both as a red herring for the saviour of Napa and also as a love interest for Taylor. The soil may be in his blood but the film, despite making claims to the contrary, can't see past the fact that he's not blonde-haired, blue-eyed Chris Pine. It's pretty ugly (I get that the film is loosely base on a true story, but regardless of the truth, it doesn't care enough to adapt Gustavo into any rewarding or uplifting character arc). 

There's a cute scent at the airport, and the discovery of the "perfect chardonnay" is an interesting segment, but they're fleeting moments from a better movie. Even the ultimate face off, the grand blind taste test, is robbed almost entirely of any grace or intrigue. I think to foodie movies like Chef or Big Night which just luxuriate over the food and food prep as almost the point of the film, and that's what's sorely missing here, the camera's love affair with all things wine. The loveless opening title shots of Napa Valley tip this hat instantly...feels more like boring stock footage that anything resembling romance.

Skip it. Go rewatch Sideways.