Monday, July 7, 2025

KWIF: A Minecraft Movie (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week In Film.  I thought being away from home for the better part of a week with pretty much nothing but time on my hands would mean I would be watching a ton of films, but, turns out, not so much. In fact the first two films on the list below I watched before I left for my trip. But then, upon my retrun, I did a rare triple stint at the theatre in one day because I wasn't ready to return to the usual day-to-day yet.

This Week:
A Minecraft Movie (2025, d. Jared Hess - crave)
Warfare (2025, d. Ray Mendoza, Alex Garland - amazonprime)
The Phoenician Scheme (2025, Wes Anderson - in theatre)
The Life of Chuck (2025, Mike Flanagan - in theatre)
Daniela Forever (2024, Nacho Vigalondo - in theatre)
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I really had no intention of ever seeing A Minecraft Movie. Trailers made it look like a CGI nightmare with overblown performances, and the unofficial "rowdy" screenings of TikTok kids memeifying "S
TEVE!" and "CHICKEN JOCKEY!" certainly wasn't any further enticement.  But a funny thing happened on the way to avoiding the theatre... not only was A Minecraft Movie an absolute monster of a blockbuster motion picture, but some critics who I trust...well, by all that is squarely, they enjoyed it.

Both my kids (now a teen and an adult) played Minecraft and were avid fans. Neither wanted to see the movie.(because they're now a teen and an adult), which, really, wasn't all that surprising. Maybe it was a little disappointing as it's hard to find common ground and experiences with these ones these days. But as I do, I forged onward on my own and...waited for it to hit some streaming platform that I was already subscribed to and then proceed to watch the dang thing over 8 days in at least 4 different sittings.

The opening 20 minutes of A Minecraft Movie (well, once they get past the detail-stuffed intro, anyway), I genuinely adored. Jared Hess, creator of the wonky worlds of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre was at it again, creating a kooky near-reality that's just a notch or two askew from our own world. I liked the introduction to former video-game prodigy now nostalgia marketer Garrett Garrison (Jason Momoa) and orphans Natalie (Emma Myers) and Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen) who are new to town.  The vibe of this part of the movie reminded me of early Taika Waititi, especially Eagle vs. Shark, which is no great surprise given that the film was primarily shot in New Zealand. New Zealander and Hess regular Jemaine Clement puts in a delicious cameo as a storage locker owner who wants nothing more than to be besties with an oblivious Garrett.

Garrett decides to take outcast Henry on as mentor, and his efforts to teach him, well, anything of use are pretty hilarious. Momoa has a specific persona he usually channels, but this is decidedly not that. Instead he seems to be calling upon Patrick Warburton's Puddy from Seinfeld mixed with Jack Burton from Big Trouble In Little China.  Whatever his inspiration, it just may be Momoa's finest comedic performance.

It's all so unfortunate then that going into the Minecraft world, encountering Steve (Jack Black), and facing off against the pig-things that are trying to take over that reality. The film basically forgets about making any of the character arcs meaningful in any way, and just goes about having a goofy time in this strange blocky world. It wavers wildly between amusing and dull and stupid-in-a-good-way and stupid-in-a-bad-way. I love Jack Black, but the script gives Steve nothing for him to hang a character off of, so he's basically just Jack Black's stage persona. (I also find it funny that "Steve" is the player character of classic Minecraft, a real blocky dude, and they hire one of cinema's most notoriously round performers to play him).

I have to admit I loved Rachel House's voice work for Malgosha, the head pig in charge. The character design for Malgosha was also pretty incredible as I was constantly questioning whether it was a practical costume, or completely digital, or a combination.  I also thought the same of the "Nitwit" villager (mind-blowingly portrayed by Oscar winner Bret McKenzie and voiced by Matt Berry) who escapes into the "real" world and is, literally, picked up by Jennifer Coolige's lonely divorcee. Those Nitwit sequences are so ridiculous, but Coolige sells the lunacy of it so well.

In a 100 minute movie, I would say that maybe 40% of it (maybe even 50%) was pretty entertaining, and at one point, early on, I was wondering if we had maybe another Lego Movie on our hands... it's not even close to being as good as The Lego Movie. That it's even as good as it is is still kind of a minor miracle. I mean...what else could a live-action Minecraft movie look like? I certainly can't think of anything much better, but I can think of far, far worse.

[Toastypost - we disagree, and yet, also agree]

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Warfare kind of snuck into theatres unannounced, and left just as quietly, and hit AmazonPrime with about the same amount of fanfare. Recalling the war in Iraq, and specifically the American side of that war, in this year of 2025, was something most people weren't at all interested in partaking in. I should have known coming from Alex Garland that it wouldn't be "rah rah 'merica", and even still it was only with the most hesitant of clicks that I pressed play.

Warfare proved quickly to be an intense military procedural/fight for survival starring a rich swath of fantastic actors pulled straight from some of the best TV shows of the decade so far. You've got Reservation Dogs' D'Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, Shogun's Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn from Stranger Things, Daredevil: Born Again's Michael Gandolfini, Kent household favourite Noah Centineo, Finn Bennett from Season 4 of True Detective and more. It's a really impressive cast that really didn't need to be this impressive for what its acting its performers to do, but still, I'm impressed.

The real challenge here was to make a picture about the misbegotten war in Iraq that doesn't glorify it or its participants, while also not outright villifying them either, and it succeeds surprisingly well.  It is a compelling and nerve-shredding film that shows in excruciating detail the horror and intensity and violence and consequences of warfare, especially in residential sector. Still, telling the story from an American vantage point remains is the film's biggest barrier to entry in the current political climate. But the film is based on the true recollections of some of the soldiers involved in the incident, including co-director/co-writer Ray Mendoza, who Woon-A-Tai plays in the film (Mendoza happened to be the military advisor on Garland's Civil War, which is how this project came about).

The most impactful part of this movie is one word... "Why?" To which the SEALs on screen, and the film itself have no answer. 

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Binary statements like "you either love Wes Anderson movies or you don't" have become increasingly annoying to me as they are completely incalculable, devoid of any gray area, and well  fundamentally untrue. They are statements made by lazy writers (like myself, certainly) to try to simplify arguments to two simple sides.  It's like saying "you're either liberal or you're conservative" and that takes out all the nuance of life and thought and opinion.

That said, everything within me really wants to argue that people who know Wes Anderson's work either love it unconditionally or don't understand it, but such a statement just cuts out the majority of the potential film-going audience by really only referring to the minority of people who pay any attention to filmmakers and the work they do.  That statement also presupposes that no matter the quality or content of an Anderson film, that one side of the coin is predisposed to loving said film, while the other will hate it or just avoid it altogether.

Even as I know this argument to be false -- since I really disliked Moonrise Kingdom and Rushmore does nothing for me so I know there are shades of grey in Anderson's fandom -- I still want to proclaim that if you're an Anderson fan you obviously have to love The Phoenician Scheme, and if you don't like Anderson's work, why would you even waste your time with it at this point.

I stepped into The Phoenician Scheme ready to love it by nature of just being a Wes Anderson movie. I was placing myself into the love side of the "you either love Wes Anderson movies or you don't" binary fallacy, convinced that, no matter what I would come out of the picture feeling enriched and delighted.

Turns out, not so much. If you were to ask me, right now, The Phoenician Scheme sits above Moorise and Rushmore and maybe even Isle of Dogs and Bottle Rocket, but it's definitely in the bottom half of ranking Anderson's oeuvre for me. 

The reason is largely because I had a hard time following the movie, which is not something I generally have difficulty with. I mean, I understood Tenet without even having to think about it that hard. But The Phoenician Scheme is absolutely loaded with Anderson's rapid-fire expressionless patter that moves so quickly and is so information dense that it's hard to extract, at least upon first viewing, what is important about what is being said. There's no doubt that all of it is completely sensible to Anderson, but in the conveying to the audience it is bound to overwhelm.

As well, the titular scheme upon which the film revolves around, well, I never quite got it. It's the reason that problematic industrialist Zsa-Zsa Korda and his daughter (or is she) and heir (on a trial basis) Leisl (Mia Threapleton) make the adventurous journey they do, making five stops to different investors in the scheme to try to convince them to cover the gap made after a consortium of governments raise the price of rivets to negatively impact and possibly scuttle the scheme. Zsa-Zsa, it turns out, is not really a good guy, and Leisl, a convent-raised nun-to-be, seems well aware of his reputation.

The journey, then, isn't so much about the scheme but about a father and daughter connecting, bridging the gap between cold-hearted capitalist and possible murderer, and a selflessly altruistic pacifist. The thing is, though, the scheme eats up so much screen time and dominates the balance of the film that the familial engagement seems secondary. But when the film ends, its coda makes it pretty explicit that it was about Zsa-Zsa becoming a father and finding joy in life as opposed to riches. It's an anti-capitalistic tale, I suppose, but definitely an unfocussed one.

The performances are all great. Anderson's very specific way of writing his character and directing may seem limiting at first blush, but it frees them to do some very, very silly work with the sternest of poker faces. Michael Cera is the obvious highlight, and to say why would be spoiler-y, but you will know it to see it. It's amazing he's not been part of Anderson's cabal of performers before this, but he's a natural fit. A lot of Anderson's newer stable of regular performers like Jeffrey Wright, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Mathieu Almaric, Richard Ayoade, Benedict Cumberbatch and Rupert Friend all have smaller but delightful parts to play in this, and longer-term Anderson regulars like Bill Murray and Willem Dafoe have basically glorified cameos. It's actually a great thing that Anderson branches out on a regular basis and doesn't rely upon the same stable time and again, as accusations of "sameness" would be further emboldened.

If ever you wondered what a Wes Anderson action-thriller would look like, well, it looks like this...a Wes Anderson movies. Alexandre Desplat's score is full of ominous and foreboding notes on either end of the piano that feels like it was ripped out a Hitchcock thriller or an British espionage tale of yore. The score both affirms the subgenres Anderson is referencing, but it's also a comedic juxtaposition to the arch tone that prevails through most of Anderson's films. It's a great score.

It's not an entirely successful movie, but if you're an Anderson fan you will enjoy it far more than if you are not.

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If I see a movie weeks after it has released (sometimes even days after) it's hard for me not to write my reviews completely shaped around the critical commentary I've read/heard, or the reactionary headlines or Letterboxd hot takes. I'm steeped in film commentary in my podcast routine and my socials, less than some but more than your average person is, for sure. So I know that The Life of Chuck has been a pretty divisive movie. A lot of the reaction has been very positive towards it, praising it for being a rewarding, enriching, life-affirming experience, while a large amount of critical reaction has tossed it as cloying and overly sentimental.

Either way, these are not criticisms you typically hear about something adapted from a Steven King story. Nor are they really descriptions you would find for a typical Mike Flanagan project.

And yet The Life of Chuck does have aspirations to being a somewhat sentimental and life-affirming experience, despite its opening act (labelled as "Act Three") that basically presents the end of the world from the perspective of the characters in a mid-sized mid-American city and through the eyes of teacher Chiwetel Eijiofor and nurse Karen Gillan. The internet has stopped working, California has fallen into the sea, the food-producing areas of the world are being devastated by floods or fires or drought, it's all coming to an end much faster than anyone expected. It's heavy and it sucks, and people are trying to go about their daily lives, but what does any of it really matter? And yet, perplexingly, billboards, radio ads, TV ads start popping up "Charles Krantz: 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!" What does it mean, as the stars blink out of existence?  It's intriguing and perplexing.

The second act steps back with narration from Nick Offerman providing colour and detail on the characters we see on screen. Taylor (Taylor Gordon) a Julliard drop-out sets up her drum kit on a Saturday, ready to perform for the day, yet after 40 minutes not quite feeling it. Meanwhile accountant Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) is on break from an accounting conference and feeling a bit dispirited. And Janice (Annalise Basso) just receives a break-up text from her boyfriend who she didn't really even like that much and she storms through the town's promenade. As Chuck approaches Taylor, she starts to match his pace with her drumming. It catches Chuck's attention and draws him near. It eventually breaks into dance, and Chuck's exceptional dancing fires up Janice who joins him and they tear the street up with Taylor's amazing rhythm. It's a simple moment of people needing joy and spreading joy and it leads to a moment of connection. What you extrapolate from that is probably very individualistic, but after the end of the world, to step into something so expressive as rhythm and dance, it's genuinely moving, unless you are at your utmost cynical.

The third act steps back even further in Chuck's life. A lot happens in this "Act 1" to bridge what we've seen and been told in the previous two acts, but we witness Chuck as a child (Benjamin Pajak), his life married with trajedy, learning to love dance with his Bubbe (Mia Sara), and then take it up as an extracurricular at school and become exceptional at it. The segment centers a lot around his grandparent's house and specifically the cupola which is locked and ruled off-limits by his Zadie (Mark Hamill). Zadie tells him, one night when he's deep in his cups, that there are ghosts in that room, ghost of the past and future. It's only years later after Zadie's passing that teen Chuck (Jacob Tremblay) learns what he means. But the lesson, presented to him by a bohemian teacher, and the crux of the film, is that life should be lived to its fullest, that we can be wonderful, that we deserve to be wonderful, and we contain multitudes. It's a mantra that, we see from act 2, is hard to keep in mind as life and career and family and the world weigh on us, but if we remember, we can experience something, shape something, build something at the very least inside of us, if not outside as well.

As a production the author's voice is much more Flanagan than King's, but the story got the horror maestro's fingerprints all over it. Flanagan has adapted King enough times, and his work is so King influenced in general, that sometimes it hard to separate the two, but Flanagan's voice is unique and shows up prominently in the execution. His penchant for long monologues and his emotional connection to his characters are much more a part of his storytelling than King's as evident here.

Is it sentimental? I suppose it is, but I didn't find it overbearingly so. Is it saccharine? Not at all, nor is it cloying or preachy. But I get why it is divisive. It's a film that presents an end of the world scenario in a time where things are as challenging and bleak on a global scale as they have been since world wars were happening. It's all so overwhelming and dire, that a film like this, a movie that dares to say in the face of all of that, at this time, that there's still something about living life on this planet that is truly wonderful...I get how hard that is to accept.

And yet, the notion itself is lovely, even if I am challenged myself to accept it. I'm glad it exists, I'm glad that King and Flanagan have put it out into the world, that is is seeded there to make even one person's life a little better. I liked this movie. I was moved by it.

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The most prominent works of director Nacho Vigalondo are Colossal [a film covered by both David and myself on this blog] and Timecrimes, a film I have seen and written about but in the world before this blog.  The former was a high concept drama that connected the troubled life of an American woman with Kaiju attacks in South Korea. Timecrimes was a twisty Spanish thriller about a series of unfortunate events that collapse in on themselves as time travel gets involved. In both cases, they are rather high concept stories, the former much more of a dramatic production and character study, while the latter was perhaps more playful and energetic.

I don't know that I loved either film, as neither sits fondly in my memory, and yet, I think I genuinely respect Vigalondo's approach to genre. Maybe his execution falters, but conceptually, there's definitely a lot of meat on the bones and he clearly isn't interested in repeating what already exists.

His latest film, Daniela Forever, is more akin to Colossal than Timecrimes. It is a high concept sci-fi story rooted in character drama, executed with a lower-budget, but never lacking for ambition. Here Henry Golding plays Nicolas, a British DJ living in Madrid who has recently lost his girlfriend, Daniela (Beatrice Grannò) after she was hit by vehicle. A year has passed since she died but he is still deep in grief and depression. He is recommended by a friend to an experimental drug trial which is designed to engage the user in a new form of Lucid Dreaming. Nicolas doesn't follow the treatment plan and the dream cues provided to him, instead he learns he can build a world in his mind, one where Daniela still exists.

But the deeper into his trial regimen he goes, the more time he spends with this construct of Daniela in this construct of Madrid, the more it starts to escape his control.

Unlike The Life of Chuck, I went into Daniela Forever totally cold, having not even seen the trailer nor read or heard a single review. It's a rare experience where a film has every opportunity to surprise me, and it never truly did. It never lost my interest, but I also never felt it pushed itself or its concept like I wanted it to. At its root, Nicolas is lost before the story even starts, there's no hope for a positive outcome for him. I've seen too much Black Mirror for this to go well. And that is this film's biggest challenge... distancing itself from Black Mirror

We've seen enough stories of loss and grief and reviving loved ones through technology in Black Mirror, this story does the same but through chemicals. So there's a familiarity to the story and a sense that we know where it is going, even though we shouldn't, even though it should really be a story that exists in a constant state of revelation.  I couldn't help but find it a little predictable.

What Vigalondo does to distance itself from Black Mirror is all in style. The director makes the choice to film the "real world" sequences using (I don't know the technical specs here), like, 1970's TV cameras. They are presented in a 4:3 ratio, staged and composed like soap operas, and every second the format was used I was questioning why. It looks, flat out, terrible. It's a terrible aesthetic. When it was the only TV aesthetic we had, we were conditioned to it, but in this high-def 4K world we live in, it's so hard to look at. I found it highly distracting and unpleasant. The dream-state however looks gorgeous, Madrid looks lovely, even the areas that Nicolas has never seen that are "greyboxed", like TV static.

Golding has to do all the heavy lifting here as our central character and he really succeeds at times, yet goes a step or two beyond what's necessary in some scenes. It's hard to tell whether those are a result of directing, script or performance, but there's times where there seems to be a lack of control. Grannò has the harder task of performing a character who is a construct, easily manipulated by the man whose mind she exists in (there is a darker edge to this story that it never actually reckons with). 

The film end (or attempts to end) on a high note, but it comes at the expense of ambiguity and obfuscation that I believe the director wants to leave the audience with something to think about but I don't think provides the right keys to unlock it. 

As much as I sound frustrated with it, I did like it more than Colossal, in part because even the weird stylistic factors engaged me. I wish it were more twisty and fun like Timecrimes (a movie I really need to watch again) and I wish I could trust that the director really knew everything that was going on in his story. At the same time I appreciate Vigalondo's desire to create a sci-fi story that is small but feels ambitious. I applaud the effort if not all of the results.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Doors

2021, Saman Kesh, Jeff Desom, Dugan O'Neal - Amazon

This indie scifi movie is broken into four segments, directed by the above, respectively, "Knockers / Interstitials", "Lockdown" and "Lamaj".

The premise is fascinating. Simultaneously, world wide, a series of black obelisks appear. They emanate sounds, whisper to some people to enter through their reverberating surfaces. The world is terrified, confused and curious.

The segments introduce the doors and the world's reactions to them. In "Lockdown", a handful of high school students doing a makeup exam are left alone in a school as the "doors" appear for the first time. It sits in the exit hallway and beckons to one of the kids. It is menacing and untrustworthy in its suggestions. Then comes "Knockers" with a later reaction from the world, as teams of "knockers" (knocking on the doors, get it?) are sent through the doors. They are on timed missions, as going past the allotted period leads to psychosis and death. I guess that means you can exit? Then we have "Lamaj" where Jamal (see the backwards title?) hides his door from the world so he can study it, learning how to communicate with it, learning that we are in turn being studied. And finally, "Interstitials" gives us a video recording of someone being affected by a door, but with no door in sight -- their influence is expanding.

This one sat in my hopper for a while. I recall hearing good things about it when it came out a few years ago, but as is usual with me, I saw on it. Any of my influential sources have been forgotten and all I am left with is my impression, which is no surprised - meh. Its not hard to see the thread of what they were going for, especially since the entire "movie" is a shared creative experience, but the only successful thing they communicated was that the doors were weird and scary. And you get that from trailers. A successful scifi mystery needs to go beyond the premise and execute... something. 

Think Interstellar with its revelation that the mission was partially a sham, and the rest of the movie was emotional recovery from that. Think Arrival where not only is a unique form of language & communication discovered, but we learn the aliens are outside normal time-frames. This movie presented the idea that the "doors" are here mysteriously, and in one segment, that they are sent by someone to study us, but the rest is just weird disturbances for the fun visuals. From the art of film making, you can focus on getting good performances (they are all decent here) and producing compelling visuals (honestly, I am bored with the Twin Peaks shortcut to "weird" being compelling) but it all needs an actual story to tie it together. This movie is an idea, an execution of elevator pitches, and that is pretty much it.

Sunday, July 6, 2025

3 Short Paragraphs (Probably Not): Thunderbolts*

2025, Jake Schreier (Beef) -- download

Definitely not.

Stubbing (more like preambling) this before I forget it, because if the few readers out there have happened to notice, I have been slowing down of late. This is not my 3265th Hiatus just a very real state of change going on in my life, some very real person shit that, despite my usual habit of blathering on about all my personal baggage, I will not be getting into here. Kent knows. That will suffice. But it has impacted how I write, impacted how I think, impacted how I watch; the latter primarily in that I have a new Life Schedule right now, and that doesn't often include sitting by myself watching movies. Oh, a lot of TV is being watched, but, y'know, despite that brief experiment, still not interested in writing about TV.

OK, that's out of the way.

I did not, in fact, get out to see this in the cinema, as I hoped to. I did not, in fact, outrageously enjoy this, as I expected to do. It had not been hope; I had been convinced this movie would be right down my alley, and yet... it was just OK

In some ways, it is fair to call this movie, "Marvel's Suicide Squad." It is a movie about the MCU anti-heroes, at best, or villains, to a degree. It is a movie about the Bad Guys being re-tooled into being the heroes and, spoiling something that attempted to stay hidden for quite some time, into being The New Avengers. Except, almost the entirety of that revelation is buried behind a "14 months later" coda. But yeah, for the first time, DC flipped the table on Marvel and still retains the better of the two executions of an idea.

I will let Kent "we disagree" on that note, cuz he probably knows the real comic book Thunderbolts and can explain in educated details how I am wrong. But he probably won't; he's far too gracious with my foot-in-mouth syndrome.

Luckily, this movie starred my favourite character and portrayal of a character in MCU-dom -- Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh, Oppenheimer), of Black Widow and Hawkeye fame. Like her sister Natasha Romanov, or Black Widow, she was raised in the Red Room, a secretive Russian agency that trained assassins from childhood. Unlike her sister, she hadn't escaped of her own volition, and not until the circumstances of said movie. And even after she has escaped, and the Red Room has fallen (quite literally), she remains what she was ... a quippy, snarky, violent killer. And that leads her right into the hands of CIA director  Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julie Louis-Dreyfus, Enough Said), who kind of presents as the less than savoury Nick Fury, as de Fontaine continues to use Yelena for her wetwork skills. And that work eats away an Yelena's soul.

When the movie begins, Yelena professes a desire to leave de Fontaine's employ and is sent to a top secret mountain base to kill someone who wants to steal from de Fontaine. Note to bunker builders, if you want to make a top secret base with an even more secret room "a mile below the bunker", don't start on top of a mountain. It just seems... flagrant. Anywayz, Yelena is attacked before she can stop said thief and ... well, we catch on pretty quick. A was sent to kill B, B was sent to kill C, C was sent to kill... well, you get the idea. The alphabet squad includes: John Walker (Wyatt Russell, Overlord), the Asshole Captain America, Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen, Killjoys) or Ghost, the villain from the Ant-Man movie, and Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko, Quantum of Solace), or Taskmaster from the Black Widow movie, another pawn of the Red Room. They all punch, shoot and stab the other, all playing "I am not here for you, just them" game, with Yelena catching on almost as quick as we, the viewer, does. But before she can halt everyone, Ghost shoots Taskmaster in the head.

Wait, what? Yes, like the opening sequence of Gunn's The Suicide Squad, we start by killing off one of who we assume is the main characters. Its a shock, and frankly, I didn't like it. It was there for only shock value, but also to drive home that all these characters are amoral, cuz nobody mourns her, even when they realize her death, and the possibility of them all dying, was de Fontaine's plan all along -- insert evil cackle.

De Fontaine. She's been a villain-in-waiting for a few movies and TV shows. Unlike Thanos, they have been spreading her thin on the toast for some time now. But Marvel had a lot of loafs of villain in the oven over the past 10+ years, many of which just fell flat. If anything, that is more adherent to the comics where there are tons of villains and supervillains and inbetweeners. Not sure I believe it works in Cinematic Universe-dom. I don't like her as a character (you are not supposed to), and I don't like her as a plot device. To be honest, I kept on expecting her to become a Hydra-lite villain as the character always struck me as a riff on "GI Joe" character, Baroness. But I am not a big Joe fan, so I will once again let Kent talk that one through. At least here, in this movie, other people have noticed her being nefarious and have her up for impeachment, in front of a Senate Hearing. I just wish Real Life hadn't shown us how weak-kneed those hearings are, but still, the whole movie hinges on her scrambling to eliminate any evidence the Senators can use against her.

In much the way the original Avengers movie was supposed to established the assembling of the team because of a specific event, this movie uses the emergence of The Void (Lewis Pullman, Salem's Lot) in NYC as an opportunity for de Fontaine's original plan to actually be given light, despite her mishandling of it. She has literally caused the event that allowed her to use The New Avengers to stop. If she had perhaps intended on that happening, I would have enjoyed her character more, but no, its unintended consequences, leaving her more as comic-relief than supervillain.

If anything saved the movie for me, let me return to my opening comments on Yelena Belova. As Kent says, this movie is her movie. She's the only one playing a real character, and everyone else (maybe Bob to a lesser degree) is there to be either support, or comic relief, to her part in the story. She's deep in the shade of gray of moral behaviour, but unlike others, she knows she's there and... well, regrets it. But she also knows nothing else. She cannot pretend, like her "father" (David Harbour, Hellboy) does, and see herself as ever having been a hero, or becoming one. But she has her sister as a template, a statement of potentiality. Her heroic acts throughout the movie are not the "stop the rock from crushing the little girl" style, but more the being able to step out of her own way and attempt to help Bob. She sees a mirror in him being manipulated by an agency who doesn't care who they hurt in order to accomplish their goals. So, when everyone else wants to shoot or smash their way into stopping The Void, she sees, again, her sister as the template and tries sacrifice. Its not the most mentally healthy of choices, but its... something in the right direction.

Exceeept, de Fontaine is able to step in and pull her "this was my plan all along" out of her ass, and everyone, Yelena included, tags along. They become The New Avengers, for better or for worse. The coda introduces them "14 months later" dealing with the emergence of Sam's own version of The Avengers, which I hope they handle well, but I don't have much actual faith they will. Considering how Ironheart ended, RiRi is more likely to join de Fontaine's team than go anywhere actually heroic.

So, again, it was alright. I enjoyed myself, I like the quipping and the action was well done. But I wasn't all-in, I wasn't satisfied. Is it me? Will I enjoy more in re-watches? Probably, to both.

Kent's post from 10,000 years ago. I agree with everything he said, but he liked it way more than I did.

Saturday, July 5, 2025

1-1-1: Ironheart

 I've fallen way behind on my KsMIRTs (Kent's Month In Reviewing Television) so I'm going to catch up by 1-1-1-ing shows as single posts. Like Toasty does. Which probably makes more sense anyway from all sorts of algorithmic angles. But whatever. I do this for me.

Also, SPOILERS AHOY for Ironheart

The What 100: Riri Williams is expelled from her Stark Grant at MIT and returns home to Chicago to pursue her work of replicating an Iron Man suit outside of the rigid confines (and access to resources) of academia. She's spotted and tapped by Parker Robbins, a small-time gangster who's making big strides thanks to a demonic hood that grants him special powers. Riri is tempted into joining his squad because she needs money to build her Iron Man-esque prototypes. Her dream is to commercialize her warsuits for first responders, motivated by the loss of her beloved stepdad and best friend as a result of a drive-by 5 years earlier. However, in trying to achieve her goals, she seems to make the wrong decisions time and again and the weight of the toll is greater and greater.

(1 Great) I was very impressed by Ironheart, a superhero show that refused to fall into the usual superhero tropes, especially where its main character is concerned. Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) is a genius, but she's not infallible and she doesn't have Tony Stark's generational wealth, corporate legacy or public notoriety (nor his old white man exterior) to come out of a myriad of bad decisions relatively unscathed. So when we first meet Riri and she's selling her old school work to lesser-than students to pass off as their own, and gets caught, she's rightfully expelled. She owns it, but not really. Returning home, she feels like a failure, and despite her smarts, she's unable to achieve her goals without capital. Alternatives are limited. Even without explicitly showing us, the show is aware that systemic racism will not consider a young black woman for any high profile tech internships or whatever (all you need to do is look at the most toxic of comments about this show's very existence to see that mentality is so alive and thriving in our current societal hellscape). So yeah, when Anthony Ramos' The Hood presents her with an offer of so much riches, it is undeniably tempting. A conventional superhero would resist temptation, because that's what makes them heroic, but that's boring and basic. The choice Riri makes is a selfish one... selfish with good intentions, but still selfish. She quickly realizes that she's in over her head and working with The Hood doesn't sit right. But throughout the show, she makes one not-great decision after another which just sinks her further and further into situations not easily escapable and certainly not rectified by anything a flying personalized mech suit can do. We see this in so many origin stories for young superheroes... making bad decisions then having to spend the rest of their career atoning for them. Usually by the end of the movie or the origin arc, they have become a hero, but that is decidedly not the case in Ironheart.  Riri is not a villain, by any stretch, but a character so traumatized and driven by that trauma that it misguides her, and makes her more susceptible to manipulation.  The people she hurts, the trust she breaks, the damage she does, these are things not easily undone (some are outright irreparable) and these are all lessons she kind of learns, but she never gets to the root of why she made these decisions in the first place. It makes her both a frustrating and fascinating and very human lead character. When she's got one final decision to make, the traditional hero's journey tells us which decision she *should* make, but the show stays true to her character, and what has motivated her all this time, and, yeah, it goes there, leading to a finale that melted my brain.

(1 Good) It's been rumoured and hinted and suggested for years now that Marvel's devil himself, Mephisto, would be appearing in the MCU, and many were speculating that, because Parker Robbins' hood is made of dark magic, that Mephisto would finally be appearing in the MCU via Ironheart.  But in the comics, The Hood's hood was actually created by Dormammu, who appeared in the MCU in Doctor Strange way back in 2016, and was basically dealt with in that film. But Mephisto hopes became dashed in episode 4 of Ironheart when Riri consults with a magic wielder who confirms the Dormammu connection...with a 50% accuracy.  It was a fake-out, but a beautiful fake out that seemed to imply Robbins was indeed a manipulated tool of Dormammu to aide in his return to earth or some such. But no, it's episode six where we finally see Mephisto in the flesh for the first time in a flashback to The Hood's origin...and it's none other than Sasha Baron Cohen who, immediately, screams the absolute right choice for the role. Cohen is chameleonic and able to move in an out of different characters and even somehow warp reality around him when he's in a character like Borat or Ali G. From the second he steps on screen you know exactly who he is, and by the time the episode is over I wanted nothing more than an anthology series of Cohen's Mephisto making offers to Marvel characters.  Mephisto was subtly and brilliantly seeded into Riri's story and I don't mean through the Hood.  His fingerprints were there early on and I clocked it pretty quickly.  The finale of the season (and probably the series, which makes it an even bigger whopper) feels explosive. 

(1 Bad) The weakest part of Ironheart is its opening episode, having to deal with what was set up for Riri in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. In hindsight, the "synergy" of introducing Riri in that film did both that film and this series a disservice.  For the most part, Ironheart has to spend its first episode disconnecting Riri from the MCU at large, shrinking it down to her small world within the world. The first episode wasn't great, but setting the table is a dull task especially when you have to clear it first. But once all the players are introduced, the show really cooks, starting with the final beat of episode one leading directly into the emotional fallout in episode two.

META: It's not unheard of but pretty rare for me to watch a comics-to-film/tv show that I don't already have some familiarly or knowledge of the character and the world they inhabit. In the case of Ironheart, beyond having an action figure of her for some reason and playing her in Marvel Puzzle Quest, I'm unfamiliar. I don't think I have read a single comic with her (or at least not with her in any meaningful role in the comic). As well, the Hood is a great damn mystery to me (again, outside of Marvel Puzzle Quest - a match 3 game without much story or characterization). Hell, I don't even have that much familiarity with Mephisto. So this was all discovery for me, and I had no preconceived notions of who these characters were, what motivates them, what their backstory is or where they wind up. 

Riri's hero's journey is, by the end of the season, still really incomplete, and I loved that the show runners made the choice to end it that way. Riri is a flawed character, and that's not something easily rectified. The Hood seemed pretty boilerplate, but, just as with Riri, it sets up who he is and seeds in visual info in the background to provide more context that comes to light in the final couple of episodes where it really puts his journey into focus. Both Thorne and Ramos are very, very good...not explosive, but really good. 

The supporting cast in general, especially Lyric Ross as N.A.T.A.L.I.E., the AI who is borne from Riri's memories of her dead best friend, is the standout (she's widely cited as a standout performer from This Is Us as well). In this world where we're really struggling with accepting AI as anything other than a portent of doom, and another tool for the capitalists to manipulate and corrupt, making an AI character that is charming, loveable and, at times, heartbreaking is a real challenge, but Ross definitely accomplishes it.

The show also features Alden Ehrenreich as Joe McGillicuddy, a collector and dealer of black market technology that Riri blackmails/befriends. Ehrenreich is such a charming performer, and it's so disappointing that his very, very enjoyable, very brief stint as Han Solo not only didn't turn him into a big star, but in fact had a detrimental effects on his promising career. He hasn't been out of work, but his profile has been quite low. Here, he's like, 7th banana in the series, but he definitely stands out, just like he did in Solo and Hail Cesar! We need more of him.

One final great casting note, Regan Alyah as Zelma, the young witch(??) who helps Riri out with her magical dilemma, is so damn charismatic and delightful. It's an even smaller role than Ehrenreichs, but she absolutely pops.

I get that there are a lot of people burned out on Marvel and superhero content. I get that this is a character most people, even comic book nerds, don't care a lot about and weren't clamoring to see on screen, and I get that this isn't the hero's journey most expect to see, but that to me is what makes it so exciting. It's not without action, but it's also not action-packed. It's a character-centric story about the choices one makes in life, the trauma that leads us to those choices, and having to deal with the ramifications. If you just want to see iron suits bashing into each other, that's been done.

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Anora

2024, Sean Baker (The Florida Project) -- Amazon

There is something inherent in my ad nauseum recollections of That Guy in that I have been Not That Guy for longer than I was ever him, both early in life and after whatever twist in spectrum drew me away from movies that meant something. I read a bit about Sean Baker and recall there was a time when I would have known exactly who he was and had been drawn to him, and his works. All I need are a few paragraphs from Wikipedia and I am sure of that, and yet That Guy was from the pre-Internet era (for the most part) so how would I have learned of him, and his work? I can only say that in the pre-Internet era, information was more curated, and "useful information" dominated over the dross. These days I am more likely to watch a cute cat video, or a cooking segment, or a clip of a terrible driver, than I am to watch a segment about a ground breaking film director. Whose fault is that? The Internet's or mine? I am most definitely a product of today's social media and the Internet in general, as it has dominated my experience (likely more than most) for much of my thinking life.

Anywayz, summation -- maybe should watch more Sean Baker? Conclusion; probably won't.

Anora is an Academy Award Winning Movie, something that not even That Guy felt beholden to, but it was also a dark horse of that year, but it won: Best Director, Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing. That's a lot of acclaim. And I can agree, it is an impressively well constructed movie with incredible performances. And so much happens in the movie, and yet, not so much. Ani and Vanya meet, she's a stripper who is not above a bit of sex work, they connect, they get married and then the whole thing gets derailed when Vanya's parents get wind of it. Yet, wow.

I am not going to do my usual half-assed attempt at a recap, just dive into my thoughts.

The first bit of the movie was odd to me. It felt fast-paced, disjointed, more stream of consciousness than plot development. Ani the stripper meets Vanya the peter pan, the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch. We never learn what exactly Vanya's family does, but in one of the many flip-the-table on expectations, there doesn't seem to be anything overtly criminal here. His family is not the Brighton Beach Russians from all the crime movies, just uber wealthy. And he is in America to do nothing but enjoy himself in only the way someone with unlimited wealth can do. 

Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn, Guest from the Future) meets Ani (Mikey Madison, Better Things) in the Manhattan strip club she works; she recognizes a good catch and he becomes enamoured. That was the next turn of expectations, in that Ani is not the Pretty Woman everyone tried to sell this as; she's a hard working sex-worker. There's no denying that; she's a stripper who elevates to prostitution but at her own pace. The club she works at does not reign over her, there is no abusive pimp, she's not hooked on drugs nor does she owe money nor is she being trafficked. This is a character outside the Hollywood norms.

Also, this ain't no Cinderella story.

The first act, fast paced and frantic is really just a setup. Things really get going when the couple return from Vegas, married stereotypically drunken Vegas-style. They throw about the words, say they love each other, and you almost believe them. Almost. You could believe it was actual love, and that love overrules all, if this were that kind of Hollywood movie. But as soon as Vanya hears that his parents are flying from Russia to deal with the "situation", he bolts. He literally runs away. He abandons Ani to her fate.

Ani and Vanya's love is transactional. It begins literally so, but eventually, when she at first becomes exclusive and then when they admit feelings and spend all their time together (she actually quits the club), it is still always about something to be gained. There is never any doubt that Vanya is giving Ani access to his wealth and lifestyle, and Vanya, a hairless man-child (not sure I can accept he has reached the "man" stage yet) is getting an "education" from Ani. 

A rude awakening, for Ani, comes at the hands of the Zakharov family "fixer" Toros (Karren Karagulian, Red Rocket), and his pair of thugs Igor (Yura Borislov, Guest from the Future) and Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan, Lost and Found in Armenia). At first she sees this all as dramatic interference, that once they catch up with the traumatized Vanya, he will make it all right for her. But they do, and he doesn't. Confronting her is as much something he doesn't want to do, as confronting his parents. And then it is solidified when they Zakharovs arrive. Its not in any doubt that the marriage will end, that Vanya will return to Russia to begin his "real life", but it takes Ani a moment to actually get this. All of it, the love, the marriage, was a little boy playing at being an adult. And she was just playing at becoming part of the uber wealthy. In the end, after one final transactional event with Igor, she collapses in anguish. Real Life is hard.

Turning left, I was endlessly fascinated by Toros and the thugs. Again, I believe we are meant to (incorrectly) see them as they classic gangster thugs who toss violence and cash around and can accomplish anything. But even their violent acts are almost play acting -- at most, they mess up a candy store. They do not carry guns, they are afraid to do something that will have real ramifications, and they don't even have the weight of wealth & power to just magically make things happen. Toros is just Vanya's godfather tasked with making sure the boy is safe and doesn't do anything (too) stupid --- and he fails miserably at that. 

In the end, they only present the maybe one actually sympathetic character in Igor, the quiet thug who sees Ani for what she is -- strong, independent and someone Vanya was not worthy of. But again, this is no Cinderella, no Pretty Woman and there is no happy ending.... well, not the cinematic kind.

Kent's view.