3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Fight or Flight

2024, James Madigan (a couple of TV episodes) -- download

What an odd, exuberant, violent little movie. With a conscience?

In our continued series of violent movies for violent minds is what I thought was going to be a rote actioner in the vein of Bullet Train but instead of a train full of killers, we get a plane, and in some ways it is that, but I wasn't expecting a painfully indie/low-budget elevator pitch, but... with heart?

I am struggling to understand what I saw. No, not the plot. That is typical, but I guess this is the world we live in now, where films can get green lit, from the black list, with minimal Purple Suit intervention, which is both for the better, and for the worse? There is a mashup of terrible budget related issues, like lighting (even when the cabin lights are dimmed, everything is brightly, flatly lit) and ADR (Hartnett at times sounds terribly high pitched, like no one understood sound levels) and the "twist" the plot is a bug-eyed, "what if we ...." silly (and yet, somehow still appropriate) idea. But the fight choreography is top notch and creative, and Hartnett & cast really truly play their little hearts out. And its not z-grade Scott Adkins level actioner, to be relegated to the bottom row of "if you liked X, watch Y" list on Amazon -- but no doubts, it will end up on Amazon. But it is most definitely not an A or B level Hollywood flick, which is frankly what I was expecting.

Yeah we see the struggle.

So, it opens with some sort of espionage agency op gone wrong. To chase down escaped criminal "The Ghost", agency head Brunt (Katee Sackhoff, Longmire) activates her ex-BF Lucas Reyes (Josh Hartnett, Trap) in a bar in Bangkok. He will follow said Ghost to a flight out of the country. If he does this one job for her, despite their history, she will wipe his slate clean. He reluctantly agrees.

The Ghost, some sort of terrorist hacker super villain that nobody knows what they look like, has boarded a plane bound for San Francisco, but someone has leaked a bounty on The Ghost, which has filled the plane up with assassins. You know where this is leading.

But almost from the get-go, things go... weird. The strange, colourful Spanish pop singer in First Class (what do we call that these days?) turns out to be one of the "plane full of hitmen" and also happens to have Reyes information. After Reyes dispatches the guy, he unsuccessfully hides the body from the cabin crew, and then has to engage them in what is going on. Huh, was not expecting that. Instead of turning the plane around, Reyes allies with the cabin crew to capture The Ghost. But yeah, expectedly, shit hits fans pretty quickly with killers coming out of the wood work pretty quickly, and ... well, the movie's first "twist" happens -- one of the cabin crew is The Ghost (Charithra Chandran, Bridgerton). Yes, international flight attendant and hacker/terrorist. Somehow she makes that work.

Things get silly almost immediately, but that is the vibe of the movie. And bloody and very very violent. The indie nature of the movie (i.e. not everything is well thought through) has scenes flipping from "their are passengers who are collateral damage!" to "so, the cabin is empty but for Reyes and Bad Guys?" but we forgive it.

Oh, and the conscience I mentioned is because Reyes is on the outs with the Secret Service because he assaulted the diplomat he was supposed to protect, someone who liked to beat on underage prostitutes. And The Ghost is a Good Guy, not a terrorist at all. Sure, she blows shit up, but to do Noble Things like free enslaved children from greedy corporate sweat shops. While Reyes does want his life back, he also feels beholden to her agenda.

And the end of movie twist? The ridiculous thing that ... maybe kind of sorta works? The shadowy "espionage agency" led by Brunt turns out to be Facebook. Not literally but the idea of a big blue-coloured corporation that has more power than it should.

Its a fun movie, if a little unintentionally sloppy and truly the only thing annoying about it was how it wore its influence on its sleeve (insert reference to John Wick) instead of leaning all the way into the wacky nature. Sure, we get a chainsaw scene (who has a chainsaw on a plane ?!?!?) and Reyes is played like a sort of drunken master, but I would have upped the mayhem into almost farce levels.

KWIF: The Fantastic Four: First Steps (+1)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film.

This Week:
The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025, d. Matt Shankman - in theatre)
Miller's Crossing (1990, d. Joel Coen - dvd)

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There was a lot of promises around the latest big screen interpretation of The Fantastic Four: that it would be a return to form for the Marvel Cinematic Universe; that it would stand on its own two feet, no homework required; that it would be super-retro and fun, fun, fun; that it would be a fresh start for Marvel's "phase six"... among other promises either made or inferred.

The film measures up to a few of these promises and struggles to do so with others, which is not to say it's a bad film, but it isn't quite the experience it needed to be and there's one reason, and one reason only for it: Superman.

I hate to review one movie by comparing it to another (lies, I actually love doing that) but I noted at the end of my Superman review that it felt very experimental, that it was pushing the form of superhero movies forward. The Fantastic Four: First Steps, for all its trying to do different, still feels like same old, same old in comparison to the James Gunn film that came two weeks before. My feelings about Superman were positive, but hesitant in coming out of that film, but my esteem for the film has grown and grown in the two weeks since. I find myself thinking about it, and all it does so very, very well, and I have had an ever-present urge to go back and relive it again. There hasn't been an inkling of that with The Fantastic Four. Where I'm holding onto the memories of scenes and characters in Superman tightly, I'm letting memories of The Fantastic Four slip away without a fuss, and after watching First Steps my affection for Superman has only gotten bigger. Unfortunately this movie's biggest mistake was coming out after Superman, and not realizing that the rules of the game have officially changed.

(I'm struggling with whether to lean into the Superman comparisons, or attempt to approach TFF:FS on its own merit, and I'm going to try for the latter but the former is potentially going to sneak in. Let's get back to those promises.)

When we think about the MCU in its prime, it was all about growth. Every film was a gateway to the possibility of other films. It was what made it so fresh and exciting. At times it was like it was a riddle to solve, and so many of us would look at the clues and try to tease out what was to come. Part of the game was the MCU's penchant for defying expectations. But we had a decade of that which culminated in Avengers:Endgame, a literal endgame for everything it started with Iron Man. So trying to replicate that in the 5 years since has been a wildly mixed bag. During peak MCU, countless other studios tried to replicate Marvel's successes and failed, and then Marvel phase 4 (and more specifically phase 5) started to feel like just another imitator. The Marvel machine couldn't get away from being a machine, they had set up their formula and didn't really want to tinker with it because it had been so successful. First Steps carries with it the promise of tinkering, and while the formula may have changed somewhat, the base of it is still too recognizable as the formula, and that's a problem.

The first act of The Fantastic Four introduces us to this superhero family, to Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), his wife Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), her brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) and Reed's best friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) who have already become champions of this parallel Earth that seems to have never escaped the aesthetic of the 1960s. A "helpful" newsreel breezes through four years of the Fantastic Four's history, from origin to how their presence has reshaped the world for the better and garnered them the adoration of practically everyone. It's an intense infodump that unfortunately is what passes for world building here. It does carry with it that naivete of America that shattered after Kennedy's assassination, where idols were heroes and vice-versa. The early tone that there's been this half-century age of innocence is inferred but not really reinforced. The arrival of Shalla-Bal, the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), herald of Galactus, should be the inflection point of the age of innocence, as she tells of the world's impending end. The world looks to the Fantastic Four for a solution to their doom.

In between the newsreel and the Silver Surfer's arrival, we gets some moments that sort of establish character and dynamics. It gives us Reed's logical and pragmatic mind, not entirely devoid of emotion, but emotion is hard for him to render. Sue is the diplomatic one, the peacekeeper, and discovers she is pregnant, although apparently it was supposed to be an impossibility. Ben, transformed into a man of rocks, is making the best out of living a life as a man of rocks... and you'd almost think he liked it if he didn't feel so isolated inside his rock body. And Johnny is...energetic, I guess. The film does a really good job of establishing their family dynamic, how they each engage with one another, but it succeeds less in defining them each as individuals within that dynamic. 

The second act finds the team racing off into space to confront Galactus, and besides the unnecessarily laborious takeoff sequence, the space venture and meeting Galactus sequence is the film's most stimulating (if only the trailers and the merchandise and promotional materials didn't spoil the visual for Galactus already). The encounter with Galactus goes poorly, and the realization is that this is perhaps the worst adversary to debut the team against as he's impervious to fire, the rock-man's punching would have no effect, Reed's super smarts can't really match that of a celestial (and his stretchy powers are of little use), and Sue doesn't quite know how to use her powers maliciously (like putting a bubble in Galactus' head and expanding it...even if that wouldn't work on a celestial, worth trying maybe?).

That opening newsreel tells us who these characters are and sort of breezes past their abilities, but the film really needed an opening sequence that showed us their abilities both in full action and being effective. Otherwise Reed stretches to grab things, Johnny flies around, Ben lifts a car to impress children and Sue turns invisible to avoid an awkward political encounter. Not really scintillating stuff.

I really wanted to luxuriate in the aesthetic of the film, but it so quickly becomes background, and the filter put over the film kind of muddies it all. I think it's trying to be gauzy but instead comes across more like AI slop. Superman proved you could have a vibrant, comic-booky world, and The Fantastic Four somehow, despite having the Mole Man and Galactus, still seems to fear bright colours and embracing the spirit of 60's comic books. It's a film that really wants you to feel the weight of the world ending and understand how the burden of solving this problem sits on the shoulders of these characters so heavily. It loses what sense of fun it had in the process. It feels like the Marvel machine in action. It feels like a film-by-committee with no personal flair or flavour. You can sense the producers in the background putting such pressure on "getting the Fantastic Four right" that they don't let the filmmakers play at all. This feels like work for them, if not necessarily homework for us.

But at the same time, the third act couldn't help but constantly trigger me into thinking about the rest of the MCU from which I this is supposed to be divested from. Reed's various solutions to the Galactus problem all feel like triggering points for the Fantastic Four's entry in the MCU proper, and I found that distracting. Again, part of the Marvel machine has taught us to exprect teases of "what comes next" and I think if we were having more fun we wouldn't be so distracted by it. I mean, we get a scene of a Kaiju-sized Galactus tromping through New York City...why are we not having fun with this?

Much of the film's plot centers around Sue's pregnancy and the fate of baby Franklin Richards. My wife wisely pointed out that Franklin becoming such a focal point pulls focus away from everyone else to their detriment. Perhaps it's because some of us comic nerds know what Franklin is, a living deus ex machina machine that unmake and remake reality, and rather than Franklin being the next step in this family, he feels like both a maguffin and a plot device seeded for the future.

The casting is really good, and it's a very small, contained cast. Beyond the main four, the Silver Surfer and Galactus (Ralph Ineson), there's FF's press agent Lynn Nichols (Sarah Niles), a talk show host (Mark Gatiss), a potential love interest for Ben (Natasha Lyonne) and the Mole Man Harvey Elder (Paul Walker Houser absolutely destroying his one big scene... this film should have opened with the classic first issue battle between the subterrans and the FF just so we could get more of Houser). That's pretty much it, besides Herbie, perhaps the best bleep-bloopy robot in cinema outside of Star Wars?

Michael Giacchino's score is brilliant, sweeping and bombastic, with it's main theme heightened by choral chanting that is both epic and kind of cheesy in a fittingly 60's vibe way. In a film where you have a near-comics-accurate Galactus, it's effusive praise to say it's the best part of the film. 

If this review sounds pretty negative, it's primarily because I'm slightly disappointed by the film. I wanted this Fantastic Four to be a blast, a rollicking good comic-booky time (like Superman was) and instead I got a good-not-great coldly impersonal Marvel movie that, while full of spectacle and the best representation of Marvel's first family so far, didn't deliver on what I felt it promised.

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My viewing of the films of the Coen Brothers continues with the Coen's first venture into period filmmaking, taking us back to prohibition era America (city unnamed). Of course Miller's Crossing is a film about crime, but where the Coens usual strength is in small-scale crime with perpetrators who rapidly get in over their head and frantically try to dig their way out, here they put their spin on organized crime.  

The usual sense of organized crime in cinema is grandiosity, making it feels epic in scale, and important. The Coens, though, make it small in focus, as we follow Tom (Gabriel Bryne), the right-hand to an Irish gangster, as he tries to avert a mob war, and then survive it when it starts. While a mob war may sound like an epic backdrop, the Coens mostly only show it from Tom's perspective, and he's manipulating the fringes, both trying stay out of it while being the eye of the storm.

Tom is, in true Coens fashion, a flawed protagonist. He seems to have a moral compass (for a gangster) and a fierce sense of loyalty to Leo (Albert Finney), and his advice always seems to be in Leo's best interest. But he's also a gambling addict, dedicated to paying off his own debts, but incapable of constantly incurring more. He's also sleeping with Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), and probably loves her, even though she's dating Leo and he knows she's bad news.

The Italian mobster Johnny Caspar (the incredible Joe Polito) asks Leo to whack Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) a problematic actor in his fight fixing scheme, but Leo refuses primarily because he's Verna's brother. Tom tries to convince Leo that Bernie is bad news and Verna's only keeping time with him to keep Bernie safe, but it falls on deaf ears. As tensions escalate between the Italians and the Irish, Tom does the only thing he can do to try and get Leo to listen, which is be 100% honest with him. It winds up backfiring and Tom is excommunicated. 

More than anything Tom seems to want to avert war on the city's streets, so he starts working for Johnny Caspar, which doesn't sit well with Johnny's right hand, and soon honest and loyal Tom starts spinning a web of lies that even he might get trapped in. It's a Coen Brothers specialty, making a mess and swirling it around and around watching the fragments scatter and collide. If it seems like Tom has a plan, it's a highly improvisational one.

I can't think of a move Miller's Crossing makes that is a wrong one. It's simultaneously tense but breezy, moving along fluidly without any stray motions. Byrne, Finney, Turturro, Harden, Polito and J.E. Freeman are all in top form in these fully realized characters, each seems to have their own inner monologue driving them that is telegraphed so readily in their performance without needing to externalize it. There's a lot of the comedic Coen Brothers touches to them which only serves to ground them as human rather than archetypes.

Barry Sonnenfeld as D.P. makes this film look phenomenal, and the whole picture is about having room to breathe, about space. So many sequences highlight the space between people or the distance one has to cross to bridge the gap. Sonnenfeld uses a lot of wide shots, and he holds the frame rather than cutting between the wide and the action shot. Miller's Crossing is patient in that regard, it's not quick to move, it lets the moments sit and play out. This is Sonnenfeld's last film with the Coens before he starts his own directorial career, but he, along with master composer Carter Burwell, are key components to the Coens early success. (Next up is Barton Fink with Roger Deakins providing cinematography, so there's going to be no degredation in the visual department, that's for sure, and Burwell's with the Coens for the long haul).

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Havoc

2025, Gareth Evans (The Raid: Redemption) -- Netflix

I am doing something I don't consider very often, if ever -- started the stub post before I am even half way through the movie. I barely ever watch movies straight through these days, but this one jumped out at me almost immediately that screamed, "Do some research, find out why you are seeing what you are seeing on the screen." So, I paused and here I am.

Literally from the get go, which starts the movie with a chase scene -- cops after a semi-truck driven by thieves in LED masks, you can see that .... well, none of it is real. There are little to no practical effects  happening here, almost the entirety of the scene is CGI & greenscreen and, well this is why I had to go and Google it, maybe some AI. From the chase scene we go to the dirty, grimy unnamed American city which is so CGI enhanced I could easily think I was watching a movie set in the same Batman world of Penguin. It was all very very surreal to look at. And yet, somehow alluring and... successful?

I could not shake the feeling I was playing a computer game.

Later; having watched what remained. Said research told me this was an Evans movie, but that became apparent soon after I passed the above preamble.

And for maybe for that reason, it really appealed to me?

At its core, this is a Gareth Evans movie, i.e. an Asian ultra-violent action movie. How exactly does a label stick to a guy after such a short career? He so very much veered away with The Apostle which traded in his Indonesian martial arts and gunplay for ... his own roots? It was a familiar UK rural horror mystery. Evans is Welsh. This movie returns to his earlier successes but given I didn't know that going in (it was a Tom Hardy violent cop movie on Netflix; perfect for my current mindset), I was kind of surprised once it became apparent.

OK. Walker (Tom Hardy, Taboo) is a corrupt cop in a nameless American city that mashes up Chicago, NYC and Gotham, but a man with some regrets. The opening violent CGI rendered chase scene ends at a Triad club where a couple of the heist kids are paying off some debt to a gangster named Tsui, when a trio of hockey-masked gunmen come in and shoot up the place. When Walker shows up, rookie "not-partner" Ellie (Jesse Mei Li, Shadow and Bone) in tow, it becomes apparent the kids were not the shooters, like all the cops on scene want to assume, but escaped after being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, one of the kids is Charlie (Justin Cornwell, Bel-Air), the son on a wealthy & powerful, but corrupt, city official (Forest Whitaker, Andor) whom Walker is also under the thumb of. This is all well trod dirty cop movie territory.

At this point, the Peanut Gallery, wandered in during one of my sessions, and asked, "Is that supposed to be snow? It looks more like ash...." Yes, the CGI continues throughout the movie making the Xmas setting look more post-apocalyptic when the AI prompt was likely "make the snow look dirty".

The above establishing act is followed by two acts where Walker learns what is going on, and tries to get the kids to safety while being chased by the Triad who assumes the kids killed Tsui. There are a lot of Triad members -- like an endless stream of video game spawned NPCs. The three hockey-masked gunmen (including Timothy Olyphant The Mandalorian), who turn out to be Walker's fellow corrupt cops, have not taken well to his emerging regrets about being dirty, and also want the kids dead, as witnesses / survivors. Everything is tied together, to Walker, to each other, to the corruption at the heart of the movie.

The second act takes place in a club, their John Wick moment, but replacing the precise gunplay of that movie with frenetic blade & gun & kicks. This fight scene is crunchy. Part of me chuckled as I was reminded of the Burly Brawl, doors constantly opening, spilling forth even more Triad gang members, giving us a triangle of violence. With some sacrifices, Walker and the kids escape.

The convoluted, not very clearly mapped plot ends up leading everyone to Walker's hideout, a shack of oddly connected, barely standing rooms that struck me more as the setting for a gun-toting escape room than a movie set. Again, NPCs galore, all shooting and stabbing and kicking each other, ending in a reveal of who-killed-who-why. Its all rather ridiculous, with the fake blood spraying in gouts worthy of a slasher movie, and a pretty-much-everyone-dies moment but that's what we wanted here, right?

Critics seem to hesitantly love the movie, maybe because Evans so unabashedly loves the genre he choses to embrace. The mashup of Asian action "kung fu friday" cinema with dirty cop & neo-noir setting work well for the film minded, but the audience.... not so much. I can see why. On its dirty-snow surface, its almost a farce. But I enjoyed myself.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Accountant 2

2025, Gavin O'Connor (The Accountant) -- Amazon

Since Bill Dubuque wrote the previous movie, he garnered success with Ozark. Neither Kent nor I wrote about that acclaimed show; I watched one episode of it, and where most people suffer superhero-fatigue, mine is more strongly seated in "horrible family crime show" fatigue. For some reason, I more inclined to watch a "damaged but brilliant" detective/investigator show, but watching terrible families do terrible things, even if they are the protagonists, is just not my thing. Is that fatigue? I think I was tired of it before it became a thing.

Anywayz, this is a round-about way to respond to my own comment on the first movie -- that Dubuque would be worth watching. I responded well to the first movie, and even in my rewatch, I still greatly enjoyed it. It was a small movie, quirky. I realized something during my rewatch; I am not convinced that Christian (Ben Affleck, Argo) is an assassin at all. I think he does accounting work for the mobs (plural is important) and because he works with so many, and because of how he and his brother were raised, he is prepared for any sort of violent repercussions. Thus his entire life is contained within an airstream trailer, half domestic necessities, half weapons locker. But he does not kill for a living. He's an accountant.

This movie picks up some time after the first one. Raymond King (JK Simmons, Red One), the Financial Crimes director from the first movie, now retired, is doing private detective work for someone named Anais (Daniella Pineda, Cowboy Bebop). They are meeting in a bar, but someone has followed him or maybe her, and in the gunfight, King is killed, but she slips away. Later, in the morgue Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), who followed in King's footsteps, rising in the ranks of FinCEN with the help of Christian and his handler, reads "find the accountant" scrawled on King's arm.

Something about preambles, and recounting them, always interests me. I like a good (re)establishment of a coming story. Questions arise, reminders are provided. Motives are offered. Medina does indeed call our "hero" and despite being more uncomfortable with his business than her mentor ever was, she begins to work with him. Christian does his "thing" taking all the boxes of information King had collected, and collating it into a story about a family from El Salvador fleeing to America. But the father was killed, found in a mass grave, and ... who was King looking for? The mother? The child? Both? Who is Anais? Why does she want them found? So much of the movie is about filling in little blanks, while providing so much more, establishing Anais as a boogeyman killer, someone both law enforcement and criminals fear, another violent person available by a single phone call.

It leads them to LA. And Christian reaches out, in his usual neurodivergent way, to his brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal, Ford v Ferrari), whom he hasn't talked to since he blew up Braxton's last job. Braxton is a proper hitman and security thug, the usual Goon or Henchmen hired in other movies to do the dirty work for proper Bad Guys. He's pretty pissed at his brother but comes to LA anyway. And thus, the movie becomes a ... cough... buddy comedy?

Its still pretty dark in its content, a story about trafficking and coyotes and child slavery, but the "fun" comes from watching Braxton and Christian interact. It wasn't my thing. Sure, it is funny. Christian gaming a match making agency but still creeping all the women out. Christian adapting well to country line dancing. Braxton always being brash and loud mouthed and violent and ... basically an asshole older brother. Sure, I chuckled. But it wasn't my thing.

Eventually the movie degrades / succeeds into a typical action-thriller mass gunfight. The brothers are tracking down the whereabouts of the surviving child from El Salvador, in a child labour camp in Mexico, while Medina finishes King's investigation and discovers what happened to the mother. Its a weird, odd, very interesting spin on Christian's neurodivergence, having the mother suffering a brain injury, losing her memory, losing her personality, becoming a ... well, world-class killer in about four years, aka Anais. Spin-off character? In Hollywood's current weird confusing world of franchise love, why not? 

Braxton and Christian shoot and blow up their way to heroism, some loose ends are tied up (with murder) and Anais's son, who also happens to be autistic, moves into that weird group home where Christian grew up, and where his childhood friend, and now handler, runs.... an intelligence agency?

Dubuque doubled and tripled down for this movie. Its not at all what I was expecting from a sequel. Its a fine movie, seriously, a decent well-done action-thriller, but... still, not what I wanted.

Part of me wanted to blaze through this movie writeup, and the next few blog posts, focusing on the ultra-violence, the gun play, as all of them are dominated by such, as are my viewing habits. But in the end, that contributed very little to my memory of the movie, beyond a recollection of scenes in the trailers depicting a very different version than what ended up in the final movie. I wonder if that will play out similarly in the next few movie's posts.

KWIF: Blood Simple (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film.

This Week: 
Blood Simple (1983, d. Joel Coen - dvd)
Slayground (1983, d. Terry Bedford - dvd)
Bank Shot (1974, d. Gower Champion - Tubi)
Brick (2025, d. Phillip Koch - netflix)

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My favourite podcast, Blank Check with Griffin and David, has started covering the works of the Coen brothers, and I am so here for it. I will be watching every film Joel and Ethan Coen have directed before each episode of the podcast drops, so buckle in for 18 weeks of Coen Bros. content. 

The trick for me then is to get my reviews written before I cave and listen to the podcast, because, undoubtedly, the podcast will shape maybe what I have to say about a movie, if not necessarily my opinion of it. Although, over time, with the amount of history and information the podcast drops about their subject, it's bound to influence what I have to say anyway. Knowledge is like that. It changes how you think. Who knew?

The Coen's catalogue of films is not the easiest to access. Only a handful of their films are currently available on any streaming service, and most of them are out of print on physical media. I've been waiting for nearly 20 years for some form of complete boxed set of the films of the Coens to get released, but I understand why it's never happened. Nearly every film was released by a different distributor than the previous (not entirely true, but if we look at their 18 films together*, they were released by 12 different distributors) which makes it hard for any physical media manufacturer to coordinate with all those different companies to form a comprehensive set. And so I've made a concerted effort to hunt for the Coens on DVD and/or Blu-ray, which after visiting a dozen different shops selling used and/or new, I'm still six films down from the set.

Blood Simple I knew was going to be one of the easy ones to get. It's part of the Criterion Collection, and thus readily available. Did I get a criterion edition? No I did not, since I found a used version of the original DVD release, and decided to save myself some cash. I had watched Blood Simple for the first time two decades ago and I had been rather enamoured with it. I've always intended to watch it again, to get a copy of it for myself, and it never happened. Over time I began to doubt if my reaction to it was legit, mostly because I forgot anything about the film entirely, except how I felt after watching it. 

This happens to me a lot, which is reason #1 for this blog's continued existence, so I can write about my experience with a film to remind me later of what I actually thought about it and why. I have to say, I think I had the exact same experience for a second time, and I kind of regret not buying the Criterion edition (it's an easy regret to correct).

Looking at Raising Arizona last week, I commented on how it felt like the prototype for the Coen Brothers to come, that everything is rudimentary, and unhoned. All the pieces seem very Coen-esque but they don't quite sing (or yodel) in harmony quite as sweetly. 

But Raising Arizona is one side of the Coen Bros. repertoire, the lighter, more humourous side that seems to be what is most memorable about them. But if you look at their greatest successes, what has garnered them the most acclaim and awards, it's their darker instincts, the noir the percolates inside them. Half their output swings one way or the other, but when that weirdness they infuse in their films becomes disturbing instead of funny, it's so damn gripping. And it's in Blood Simple fully formed. 

It's so rare that a first effort is this definitive, this strong and singular in voice or tone or style. This is a Coen Bros. film through and through (*even though Joel is the only credited director of most of their early films, up to Intolerable Cruelty), but the brothers got lucky in the people they partnered up with. Barry Sonnenfeld is their director of photography, and Carter Burwell's score is just the first of many incredible collaborations between them.  Of course, Joel's life partner Frances McDormand is the co-lead which is an absolute stroke of luck that she turned out to be one of the most talented actors of her generation.

The film opens with Abby (McDormand) on the road with Ray (John Getz). They wind up at a motel together. The phone rings. Ray picks up. It's Abby's husband, Julian (Dan Hedaya) who Ray also happens to tend bar for. They've been followed by a sleazy private eye Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) who brings Julian some tawdry photos of the couple.  

Julian tries to take matters into his own hands, but, in Coen Bros. fashion, he's not some grand crime lord, he's just a sleazy guy with an ill temper. He hires Visser to kill the pair. Visser fakes the murders to get paid, but then shoots Julian but with Abby's gun he stole. What happens after that is about an hour of pure Coens at work and play.

It's a series of assumptions, of missed clues, of mistaken identities that leads to an intense climax and an exasperated sigh of relief that is also as darkly hilarious as anything the Coens would put to film afterwards. This film ends on an absolute high watermark for the Coens careers, a note which they somehow match over and over again, if not always consistently.

The mood is perfectly set throughout and at just over 90 minutes, this film is tight as hell, and really no wasted space (the film was even edited down from the theatrical and early home video cuts by the Coens to tighten it up even more). Like how Raising Arizona is the harbinger of the Coens' comedies to come, Blood Simple establishes what it looks like when they strip away their more cartoonish impulses.  

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One of my active long-term viewing projects is to watch and write about all the various adaptations of the Parker series of novels by Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake). I've never even read any of the books in the series directly, only the brilliant comic book adaptations by the late Darwyn Cooke. Those graphic novels are incredible and instilled a deep affection for the character and the series...or at least Cooke's envisioning of it.

To date I've seen the terrible Jason Statham-starring Parker, the rock solid Mel Gibson Payback (at least one version of them at least), and the nearly note-perfect Lee Marvin in Point Blank,which are the three most readily available adaptations. The rest are all going to take a bit of hunting and keeping an eagle eye out for, like Slayground, which I found on a used DVD rack (while hunting for Coen Brothers films) and *yoinked* off the rack with the utmost gusto.

According to star Peter Coyote in an interview in the bonus features, the film is the product of British ad men who decided to try their hand at filmmaking. And it shows. It's not a bad looking film, but pacing, character, editing and story logic all suffer throughout.

I haven't read Westlake's Slayground, and Cooke didn't get to Slayground before his passing, so the plot was unfamiliar to me. In it, Stone (Coyote's Parker substitute) and a professional acquaintance meet up to enact a planned job, but their driver (unbeknownst to them) has been murdered in an unrelated incident. Rather than abandon the job, they hire a plucky young kid who likes to spin his wheels. The job goes off as planned but in the getaway their driver gets panicked and unnecessarily reckless and causes another car to flip, killing the passengers inside, including a young girl.

The girl's grieving father is a man of means and hires a professional to find the people responsible for killing his little girl... which he does. The driver is his first victim, Stone's acquaintance is next, and after a two close calls, one putting him in the hospital, Stone needs to get not just out of town or state, but the country altogether. He heads to London where a man owes him a favour, but it's not long before trouble finds him, and things come to a dark, dangerous head.

The story is definitely not the issue. There's a skeleton here that is very well engineered and moves pretty elegantly. The heist itself is pretty clever, and the set-up for the story of a bad man running from the consequences of his actions makes for a good crime film.  The majority of the issues are in the muscle tissue over top of the skeleton, they're all gnarled and knotted up. We're talking about Stone. Stone is not Parker, and that's fundamentally wrecks the character's journey.

The thing about Parker is that he's pretty much dead inside. He's a survivor, but he almost doesn't care if he lives or dies. He plots his jobs, gets his cash, lives his life like he wants to and washes, rinses and repeats. When things get complicated, Parker deals with the complications. He has his own code of conduct he adheres to which has little room for morals. Parker has had women in his life, a wife, and girlfriends, who he seems to be able to detach from with only a little difficulty (I imagine some of the tragedies in his life are responsible for his inner deadening). Stone is really none of these things, and it fundamentally breaks the story.

To start, when the substitute driver causes the wreck, Stone insists with violence that he stop the car, and Stone goes to investigate if anyone has survived. When he finds the little girl, he's devastated and mournful. Once he learns of the hitman after him, he sends his wife away to Mexico while he jets off to England because she shouldn't be around him (and when he tries to play it off coolly in a very Parker-esque fashion that she will only get in the way of his survival, she calls bullshit and sees right through him (which would not be the case for the real Parker). In evading this hitman and finding his way out of country, Stone winds up getting associate after associate killed. Parker wouldn't care, but the way Stone is portrayed, he really should.  It's all mixed up and backwards (Coyote talks about how little the writers and director wanted his input on crafting the character) and it cuts the feet out under the picture. It's trying to paint Stone as at least a noble criminal, but he's not. He's a coward, running from the consequences of his actions, and continually getting better people killed. There's something to that idea, but this film doesn't really know what to do with it nor how to reinforce it.

I do love a continent-jumping production, and there's something about watching an '80's crime drama/thriller that originates from an American, is produced by Brits, but starring an American and shot on both sides of the pond. It's a real melange of the two in largely a positive way. As much as it doesn't hold together, I was still fascinated watching it crumble apart.

---

Speaking of Westlake, in searching the streamings for more Parker fuel, I expanded my search to other Westlake novel adaptations and happened upon the 1974 heist comedy, Bank Shot. Not only is Bank Shot a film I've never, ever heard of before, it's ostensibly a sequel to the 1972 Robert Redford vehicle The Hot Rock...which I've also never, ever heard of before. Both films are adaptations of Westlake's "Dortmunder" series, which by all accounts seems to be "Parker, but funny".

Bank Shot stars George C. Scott as Walter Ballantine, a master heist planner. When we meet Ballantine he's in a hard labour prison camp under Warden Streiger (Clifton James). An accomplice of his, Al G. Karp (Sorrell Brook) poses as Ballantine's lawyer and informs him of a particular job that only he can score. He's hesitant but intrigued, so he busts out of prison...with style. He's met by vivacious El (Joanna Cassidy melting the screen) who helps him elude the cops, and they're on a private plane to Los Angeles. (It turns out El is the "money man" backing the job, but it is never explained where El gets the money from, nor is it truly clear why she is backing the job. She's conspicuously fixated on Ballantine, sexually if not romantically, but we're never given any sense why. Ballantine for his part seems to want nothing to do with her, which is both perplexing and pretty funny).

In L.A. they meet up with Karp and Karp's ex-FBI nephew Victor (Bob Balaban), who's into old, old cars, and paranoia. They don't really know that hot on their tail is Warden Streiger and his FBI attached Andrew Constable (G. Wood) although they're just as good at chasing their own tail as following any leads.

The job is a bank heist, but one of serious opportunity. See as a local bank is in the process of building their new facility, they have a temporary trailer that acts as the bank, and once a week the deposits have to be held overnight for plot reasons. The heist, as Karp and team have planned is garbage, but Ballantine figures out the solution: don't rob the bank, steal the trailer.

They set about their preparation and planning and it's tense, but comically so. By the time the big day comes they set out their distractions and off they go with their prize. But Warden Streiger knows how Ballantine thinks and he's often only one step behind, but that's all Ballantine really needs. The only problem is, the safe in the bank is no easy nut to crack, so time in a stolen trailer isn't on their side. All roads lead to...well, the ocean, really.

Bank Shot isn't a lost classic, but it ages surprisingly well compared to other comedies of its era. It's not really punching down on anyone, which most comedies were prone to doing at the time. The script is fun, with a bevvy of unique and eccentric characters, each portrayed by game actors with a real take on the role. Scott is a gifted comedic actor, able to sell sincerity within being straight-laced while still making it funny. He's just shy of being hammy but never goes over the line, he's an intuitive performer an knows the limit. 

The story has many set pieces which all range from competent to well-shot, though perhaps limited by budget and practical effects. The story itself relies upon the ineptness of the police and FBI, which is never not funny even if it's not realistic. 

There's a little bit of slapstick, plenty of visual gags, wacky one-liners, and some straight up character-based comedy. It's striving real hard to be a good time, and it mostly is.

The major drawback is a score that seems to have been inspired by turn of the century circus music, and it's pretty grating. It's striving for whimsy but the film calls for something a lot less obvious.

The tone director Gower Champion establishes is a comedic one, and though his experience as a film director was limited to this and a TV movie, he was a celebrated stage director, which shows in the way he gets his ensemble moving in the frame. His use of foreground/midground/background is often a very strong contributor to the fun of the movie. It's at times halfway to Airplane or The Naked Gun-style comedy. But it never reaches it because the script and the execution are at odds with each other.

The script wants to be a lighthearted romp, while the director wants it to be a full-out farce, and it toggles between the two in a somewhat dissatisfying manner. They both contribute to the levity, but they're at odds with each other. Overall it was a good time but somehow unsatisfying. The payoff didn't quite pay off. 

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Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer) is a video game developer who has been putting his all into his work, to the point of shutting out his wife, Olivia (Ruby O. Fee). She miscarried and it's depressed them both, but rather than bring them closer in their grief it's put up walls. Olivia quits her job and wants to head out on a dream vacation and a head start, Tim's work seems to be nothing but pressure and misery but he can't imagine following suit. So Olivia packs up, ready to leave with or without him, and if she goes alone, she's not coming back... except, without them noticing, literal walls have gone up containing them in their second floor multiplex home.  

It's the strangest material that seems unaffected by any form of impact... hammering, drilling, fire, nothing phases it. It's covered the door, the windows, and even drilling through the exterior walls reveals that it's there too.  But the inner walls, to the neighbouring apartment are fair game. And so Olivia and Tim start connecting with the drug-loving, and most in-love Air BnB couple next door, and then make their way beneath them, encountering more neighbours they barely know (if at all) and discovering a little more about what happened. Of course, one of the neighbours is an unhinged crackpot conspiracy theorist and will go to extremes to stop the gang from attempting to escape their prison, which he's convinced is there to keep him safe.

It's a low-budget, high-concept film that is completely boilerplate sci-fi, that delivers all the expected complications and resolutions, both to the plot and the character conflict. It's got a very watchable sense of discovery even if it all feels so A-to-B-to-C-to-D in its execution. There's some comfort in the familiarity of execution, but very little satisfaction. It's all competently produced and well acted, but it doesn't have any real...zing to it. There's no magic and no surprises. It even ends exactly how I thought it would, because I've seen enough of these to know that every single one of these types of movies owes a debt to The Twilight Zone. Whether the bricks are alien, extradimetional or experimental(/experiment-gone-wrong), the ending was all but assured. No matter what, the story outside was bound to be more interesting than what we followed inside.

If a story is going to be this route one, it needs some real visual pinache to elevate it and it doesn't. I most enjoyed the idea of tearing through walls and floors connecting people together, but it doesn't use that to its fullest advantage, nor really revels in how distinct a conceit it actually is.  

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Old Guard 2

2025, Victoria Mahoney (a lot of TV including Lovecraft Country) -- Netflix

This movie is the sequel to the first one. 

Really deep statement there, toasty me fellow.

I recently rewatched the first one, in preparation for this viewing. It stands up. As is common with what I consider "middling actioners" once I get into the rewatch cycle, I can ignore what I didn't care for first time round, focus on what I do like. I expected pretty much the same from this sequel.

So, yeah, we pick up ... (Googles) ... six months after the events of 1. Andy (Charlize Theron, Hancock) is mortal, Nile (KiKi Layne, Captive State) is still with the team and .... frak, I don't even recall what the opening action sequence was about, beyond re-introducing the characters to us, new haircuts and all. But the real opening sequence is seeing the retrieval of Andy's old girlfriend Quỳnh (Quinn; ahh the stereotypical fantasy naming convention of taking a standard name and adding apostrophes to it; Veronica Ngô, Bright) from her entombed state at the bottom of some ocean location Andy could never pin down. Someone had the resources to locate her, and we know it won't lead to anything good.

Nile has a dream about a library, which triggers a look from Andy. Said librarian is Tuah (Henry Golding, Last Christmas), another immortal Andy doesn't talk about, someone from her past who stepped away from the violence to study... everything? Tuah explains that yet another immortal (they need to sit Andy down with a, "are there any other immortals you need to tell us about?!?") named Discord (the social platform must be named for her; Uma Thurman, My Super Ex-Girlfriend) stole some books from his library and is ... after Andy and her crew. Also, she kidnapped Booker, who was in exile, and yes, she has recovered Quỳnh -- that shakes Andy to her core. What Discord's motives are is unclear.

Now that I think back on this movie, its feeling a bit over-stuffed, like the mid-franchise Marvel movies. There are more immortals, there is a first immortal, there is a mythical connection between the "first immortal" and the "last immortal". There is an old failing and bitterness, and there is an even older bitterness. So much drama. And there is a Chinese nuclear facility that is part modern art exhibit, part death-dungeon, but is very little.. power plant? Absolutely none of that sequence made any sense to me. I don't actively dislike any of the movie, but it all ends up feeling muddled. Like many sequels, it ends up trying to be more than the original, but somehow ends up being much less. And like many other sequels, this one ends on a cliffhanger.

I really enjoy the idea of this movie franchise. I love the fact it is primarily about women warriors and both movies have been helmed by women. Its comic book born and fantasy driven (swords & guns), which puts it square in my wheelhouse. There is a whole wide world to explore here, but I do wish they would mete this out carefully, and focus on the characters. These warriors have been around a really long time and that perspective is worth exploring. Petty grievances are human, and these immortals still are, as are failings & frailty, but I prefer these characteristics contribute to the story, not become focal points. 

ReWatch: District 9

2009, Neill Blomkamp (Gran Turismo) -- Amazon

Yup, my love of Neill Blomkamp all started with this movie, which I never wrote about before, and haven't watched in about a decade.

Weird; not a single Blomkamp post from Kent.

I have been doing a lot of rewatching, primarily to combat the "meh" reaction -- if I watch something I know I already enjoy then I will enjoy it again. But also because of the self-imposed, if I watch it, I have to write about it. Too many hiatus-i has added self-imposed weight to that ideal. But with rewatches the self-imposed ideal doesn't always apply. Sure, there is a tag, but that doesn't mean I have to write about every rewatch I do. That path would surely lead to madness.

Nuff self-justification there?

Anywayz, I never wrote about this pre-Blog movie before, likely because I haven't rewatched it a lot in the past 15 years or so. To be honest, I was kind of holding out for the expected sequel. It never happened. After the much maligned Chappie, Blomkamp never seemed to have recovered in the eyes of the public. He did a ton of short films, many via his Oats Studio, and has briefly returned with some outside of (usual) genre flicks. But I am not sure we will ever see the sequel, nor his return to proper robot-propelled scifi. One can hope.

District 9 takes on the format of a semi-mock-umentary, interspersing a news-style story of how low-level bureaucrat Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley, The A-Team) becomes an alien, literally. The movie postulates that in 1982 an alien spacecraft came to settle over Johannesburg, South Africa. Onboard the ship were a horribly treated worker species, and no signs of what happened to the owners/pilots of the craft and why it showed up at Earth. Not sure how to deal with the million plus bug-like aliens, they do what good humans like to do (most notably, more recently, see Gator Gitmo), and relocate the "prawns" to slum shanty towns. Twenty years later, with little to no understanding and no input from the rest of the world, nobody, prawn (the aliens are never actually given a non-pejorative name) or JoBurg resident, is happy with the situation.

The movie begins with van de Merwe assigned to a resettlement action. They are issuing "evictions" to the ramshackle shacks the prawns live in. Most don't understand, many react violently. The humans are armed to the teeth. But one, who goes by the name Christopher Johnson, has been working on something. Obviously smarter than the average prawn, he has a lost shuttle buried under his shack and he has been processing minute amounts of some sort of liquid for the last twenty years. When van de Merwe tears apart his shack, having discovered a ton of mysterious technology, he is sprayed by the liquid. And it begins... changing him. Not immediately, but not long after, he begins his own Kafka story.

District 9 did a brilliant job of mashing together so many ideas. Social satire, actual comedy, body horror and scifi actioner all come together, as van de Merwe tries to desperately find a way to stop what is happening with his body, and also survive the human response to it -- which is almost immediately intended to be fatal. The people in charge here are the Bad Guys. The effects stand up, startingly so, and its easy to be lost in the visuals between the overly-complicated alien bodies and the real world environments. Blomkamp loves his practical effects as well, as the details applied to the alien weaponry is apparent, even right down to the colour schemes chosen. 

After all these years, I am still astounded with how gripping the movie is, how effective the commentary on how inhuman we can be is. In reality, the alien we use to justify horrors doesn't have to be much. And while I still wish there had been a sequel, I am not sure I could ever be satisfied with what would be produced.

1-1-1: Poker Face Season 2

created by Rian Johnson

The What 100: Charlie is still on the run from mafia bounty hunters after the events of last season and bounces around from place to place, solving mysteries along the way. Beatrix Hasp (the woman who put the bounty on her head) does catch up with her but instead of killing her, she has need of her special talent as a human lie detector. Her help cuts her free of running from the mob. Even still she bounces from place to place, crime and death finding her wherever she goes. Eventually she winds up in New York with her '69 Barracuda on its last legs, but she has a place to sleep and maybe makes a new best friend to aide her in her accidental crime solving ways....

(1 Great) The mid-season episode, "Sloppy Joseph" was the standout episode for me. In a private grade school the quiet but, Elijah, the intelligent child of the institute's janitor is giving ace student Stephanie a run for her money in the gold star department. Stephanie has, to put it bluntly, psychopathic tendencies and cannot abide losing her top status in the class. So when it's time for the school talent show, she messes with Elijah's magic trick through elaborate means and he accidentally murders the class gerbil. Turns out Charlie has taken a temp job and starts to unravel Stephanie's scheming, which it turns out is much bigger than just what she's done to Elijah.

What makes this episode so great is that it's a very, very different type of crime. I guess there's still a murder (poor Joseph) but Charlie facing off against, well, a demon child is something quite different, and it touches on class/status issues that show how rich psychos kind of always get away with it even when they don't. It's like Columbo meets American Pycho except Patrick Bateman is an adorably unsettling 10 year old girl. 

(1 Good) Poker Face by its nature doesn't have a lot of stability in terms of cast and setting. By it's nature it's an "...of the week" type show, which finds Charlie in a different environment with different people every episode. Season one set up the premise that Charlie was on the run from the mob, so it made sense that she was constantly on the move and where she wound up was off the grid. This season however, after resolving the Beatrix Hasp issue, they eventually settle her down in New York City. Shenanigans happen again but she makes a friend in Alex (Kent household favourite Patti Harrison) who appears in the final four episodes. It seems like she's being set up to be Charlie's crime solving partner, which, when you love Patti Harrison like I do, delighted me to no end. What they do with Alex, however, is the show's mandate, which is disrupt any sense of status quo, and so the show's two-part finale kind of ties a bow on the season, bringing things ...if not full circle then into an outward spiral.

So yeah, Patti Harrison. Awesome. 

Also what Poker Face lacks in recurring cast and setting it makes up for in formulae. I still love that the first 10 - 20 minutes of each episode establishes the characters of the week, the environment they're in and the murder that takes place. Part of the fun is guessing how Charlie fits into the picture, which is always revealed after the first commercial break.

(1 Bad) Too much focus on guest stars, maybe? A victim of their own success, stars want to be in the Poker Face business, and boy are they ever. This season opened with Wicked's Cynthia Erivo playing quintuplets, and doing a great job, but it all felt a little too dazzling, especially when the next episode throws Giancarlo Esposito and Katie Holmes into the mix, followed by John Mulaney and Richard Kind, and then Kumail Nanjiani and Gaby Hoffman, and then and then and then...

Actually, looking at this list and more (Carol Cane, Simon Rex, David Krumholtz, Margo Martindale, Sam Richardson, Melanie Lynsky, John Cho, Awkwafina, Alia Shawkat, Method Man, Jason Ritter, Justin Theroux, Haley Joel Osment) I mean, yeah, these are all recognizable faces, but they're all character actors and really not Big Name Stars. These are the type of actors who should be guest starring in a well-made, popular, prestige murder mystery/comedy show. Much like last season's only slightly more modest guest cast.

I guess by the nature of the formulae, they wind up pulling focus away from Charlie, but Charlie kind of is the crime-solving vessel and will pull focus back on herself when she needs to. Is it a problem? Is it really bad? Probably not.

META: This season of Poker Face didn't seem to announce itself as loudly as season 1, which somehow neither Toasty nor I managed to write about on this blog. That seems impossible given that we both really seemed to dig it, but there you go. Time gets away from us all. Toasty had a brief mid-season 2 write-up where he seemed hesitant about this season, and we talked in person about how season 2 wasn't capturing the same vibe as season 1 (Toasty points out there's a new showrunner which probably explains it). It comes down to tone, I think. This season is lighter and more lighthearted than last season. There was an undercurrent of darkness and foreboding to season one that is missing here so it feels like its lost its grit a little bit. Above I called it a murder mystery/comedy. I wouldn't call season 1 a comedy, but season 2 sure is. At the very least, it seems a show that, foremost, wants to be fun. And it is. It really really is. 

I just miss that bit of grit.

[SPOILER]

RIP '69 Barracuda .

Double Dose: About Last Night

(Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...or genre or theme...tilte...whatever...pretty simple.  Today: it's the same film, but not) 

About Last Night... (1986, d. Edward Zwick - hollywoodsuite)
About Last Night (2014, d. Steve Pink - hollywoodsuite)

About Last Night... started life as a play in the 1970's titled Sexual Perversity in Chicago by David Mamet. Mamet tried, and failed, to deliver an acceptable screenplay of the play and eventually Tim Kazurinski and Denise Declue crafted the script that became the 1986 Ed Zwick picture.

The film opens on scenes of Chicago, with the sound of Jim Belushi's blustering voice arrogantly going on and on about his prior night's escapades which, as we cut to the interior of Chicago's public rail transit, we see a wide-eyed Rob Lowe hanging off his every word. His words are crass, vulgar, sexist and, in tone alone, vile. The monologue continues as it cuts between Belushi's Bernie and Lowe's Danny in different settings, and one thing is absolutely clear, Bernie is repugnant.  A real '80's blowhard just absolutely teeming with straight white male entitlement, molesting random women clearly without consent. Sorry, not women... "broads".

Danny is the beautiful nice guy with his piercing blue eyes, square jaw, defined cheekbones, pretty smile and a thick mop of tussled hair. Danny doesn't really give back on what Bernie shells out, but it's clear he revels in these stories like Bernie is his mentor. So when Danny meets Debbie (Demi Moore) and is instantly smitten, all Bernie can say, repeatedly is basically how much monogamy sucks and that Danny is p-whipped. Bernie is the fucking worst. He's supposed to be the comic relief, but he's insufferable.

Hollywood tradition would infer that the film be told primarily from Danny's perspective, but, no doubt in large part thanks to Declue's involvement, Debbie is an equal protagonist here (well, almost, as this here review will wind up lopsiding to more of Danny's side of the script) and along with her cynical, disgruntled roommate Joan (Elizabeth Perkins) they are two exceptionally well-defined characters that feel much more lifelike than Danny or Bernie.

Debbie and Danny are infatuated with one another, and start spending all their free time together (and sometimes bunking off work too). They fuck a lot, and there are a lot of sex scenes which are quite tastefully done and not leering in the slightest. The camera is as enamoured with Lowe as it is with Moore, if not more so (or Moore-less).  Lowe is the prettiest creature in this film, without a doubt. 

Soon Debbie and Danny are moving in together despite the lamentations and protestations of Joan and Bernie. Debbie feels a little regret and confuses things with Danny, so he starts treating her like a roommate. She soon sees the error of her ways and says to Danny that she wants to know him, to get close, and Danny seems relieved. They confess their love for one another (I dunno...shouldn't that come before moving in together?) and things seem to go fine, except for Danny is severely unhappy with work, especially since his manager at the restaurant supply company tells him he has to cut off the struggling diner whose owner Danny is friends with.  This triggers a quarter-life crisis in Danny and he shuts down, becoming somewhat bitter and rather than talking through his feelings he just shuts Debbie out. She can't figure out what's going on with him. I was expecting an '80's romcom to have Debbie feels like she's done something wrong, to try and fix things even though it's not her fault, but she never acts that way. Moore's performance and the script's deft touch really do give her the awareness that she's not at fault in any particular way, except maybe for rushing into things too quickly.

Things continue to fall apart, slowly, over months. Eventually they come to a head at a New Year's party, and they break up.  Debbie is upset for a while, then starts dating again, and just tries to move on. Danny, filled with Bernie's godawful advice, tries to play the field but finds he's not into one-night stands and misses what he had with Debbie. He tries to connect with her, but she's having none of it (because she's a fully realized character and not a cinematic cliche). Danny goes full toxic male and starts stalking her. Really. But she tells him off, again, and he drops it, tries to move on, but can't.

He quits his job and refurbishes the jalopy diner because, bafflingly, he's always wanted to have his own restaurant (even though we never see him cook a damn thing).  With his professional life in place, he's finally happy, and when he sees Debbie again, she can tell he's different. He admits that things went awry because of him, but without really discussing any specifics on what he did wrong or how he could have behaved otherwise. Next to Bernie, it's the fatal flaw of this film that Danny, nor any other character, verbalizes the one thing Danny needed to do: communicate. Oh and drop Bernie as a friend.   

Danny's behaviour shifts from being a doe-eyed dope in love at the film's start to being resentful and bitter, but neither he, nor Debbie, nor this film seem to understand why, and it's a pretty sharp turn. It could absolutely be worse, in that it could *all* have been about being "tied down" or "playing house" like Bernie keeps suggesting.  It's definitely not only that, or even mostly that, although never labelling what it is means that the reunion at the film's finale feels like it's possibly doomed to fail again.

In the 2014 remake (the title of which drops the ellipses) Michael Ealy plays Danny, but this Danny is at least 10 years older than Lowe's, as is Joy Bryant's Debbie. While the story generally follows the same beats as its predecessor, shifting the age of the characters by ten years (or more) changes the situation, it changes the meaning behind what they're going through. In the '86 version, the pair moving in together feels impetuous, youthful, full of hope an energy, living in a dingy apartment starting a life together.  When Ealy and Bryant's duo move in together, they're experienced adults who both feel like professionals... and Ealy's studio loft apartment is pretty damn stunning, even if there is just a high-end bathtub in the middle of the bedroom.

Rather than have Danny dream of owning a restaurant, here Danny has ties to a bar owned by his late father's best friend (played by Christopher McDonald). When Danny has to cut off the bar's restaurant supplies, it cuts Danny to the core in a much more meaningful way. When Danny says he hates his job, it's that of a guy who has been working in the corporate structure for too long and *needs* to get out, rather than Lowe's Danny who is early in his working career and still trying to find what fits.  Danny needing a job and working behind his friend's bar only serves to further sink his emotional state in a meaningful way that Bryant's Debbie tries to make the best of, but is rebuffed adding further tension between them. Again, Debbie not doing anything wrong, but Danny shutting her out of his emotional situation. In the '86 version, Danny goes back to work at the restaurant supply company, only to quit again after the break-up. It's a less effective career journey for the character. I enjoy in both cases that Debbie is the more successful of the pair. It's never a direct point of contention in either case, surprisingly.

In this 2014 version, it's shockingly Bernie who breaks down for Danny what makes relationships work. But then, Kevin Hart's Bernie is a very different character than Belushi's. Where Belushi's take is full tilt toxic masculinity,  where anyone offended by him gets a "you can't take a joke?"  (You just know he's said a million times in his life "you can't say anything anymore.") Hart's Bernie is just a loudmouth, he likes to talk and talk, and he says outrageous things, but, by and large, they're not full of chauvinism and Hart's delivery is much more humourous. 

The biggest worry in the '86 version was that the film was angling to fix Bernie and Joan up. Any scene with the two of them together was full of spite and venom towards each other. Joan doesn't fall into conventional beauty standards (Perkins is so attractive though) and she's doesn't put up with Bernie's sleaziness, so Bernie is nothing but derogatory towards her. But the conventionally Hollywood wisdom is "opposites attract" and that pairing up the feuding best friend characters is funny. Mercifully it never, ever happens, and, frankly, by the end of the film, the two can still barely tolerate the presence of the other.  So imagine my surprise when the 2014 version opens with Bernie and Regina Hall's Joan already dating. In fact, they introduce Debbie and Danny together.

I was worried that if Hart's Bernie was going to be so much like Belushi's that it would ruin the character of Joan. But Hall's Joan is still loud, angry and doesn't put up with shit. She is a match for this version of Bernie...well, actually, his better. Hall goes toe-to-toe comedically with Hart, and their pairing is the film's constant highlight. Their sexual relationship is ridiculous, and these two performers give everything into it. A mid-credits outtake finds Hall and Hart verbally sparring back and forth until Hall drops a nugget that cracks Hart up to the point where he can barely breathe.

In nearly every respect the remake is a superior film. It is funnier, sharper, more insightful, and more logical. It's only in Moore's performance where the '86 film has the advantage. Bryant is really good, but Moore's Debbie had a snarky spark that Bryant's is missing. Both pairings of Debbies and Dannys are hot looking couples, and in both cases the chemistry works very well until its not supposed to. Early and Bryant's couple are shot with more steaminess but still not enough for my liking. I think, in both cases, we should feel the heat of this couple, and at best it's hot tap water.

Some other things the remake improves upon: 

• Danny's ex-girlfirend is a much bigger threat. In this version the film opens with Danny still reeling from the break up a year later (in the '86 version, Danny's hasn't had a serious relationship before, and it shows). As well, Danny's ex-girlfriend is Paula Patton, so, you know, I get it. But also once we meet Patton, who turns up while Debbie is away, we get why Danny didn't really learn how to be in a good relationship. She is a force, and everything is her way. She also tries to seduce Danny and it's a Herculean effort of resistance. In the '86 version, when Debbie and Danny break up he says he never cheated, to which Debbie sarcastically replies "well, let's give the boy a medal! I didn't realize it was such a sacrifice." But when Ealy's Danny says it, well, having seen Patton lock her target on him...he does kind of deserve a prize.
• Each film has a very minor pregnancy scare, and I like how each film handles it. They both handle it basically the same, with Danny being both shocked and relieved but also checking in with Debbie to see how she feels. She is also relieved but in the remake, given their mid/late-30's ages there's more nuance to it all. So moments later, when they're out on the street, Debbie fixates on a puppy from a street side rescue/adoption. She says they're at least ready for a dog, but Danny's not so sure. When he screws up Thanksgiving, he gets her the dog (named Pachino). The dog quickly becomes Danny's dog. I enjoyed how the film would incorporate the dog realistically into their lives (with Danny saying he needs to walk the dog first before doing something). Pachino starts off as a little terrier mutt then seems to blossom a couple seasons later into a weird massive doodle thing...it's the most unbelievable part of the film.
• In the remake, Danny and Debbie have more friends than just Bernie and Joan, which plays better in the scenes when they're out partying or Thanksgiving dinner being more than just the four of them.
• Hart and Hall really set the rhythm and timing of the comedy in this one, where it's sometimes easy to forget the original is intended to be funny. So it is weird when the remake reuses whole lines from the original that sometimes don't even fit in context or don't fit the character's voices...I guess they're just good lines that are too good not to use (I have to wonder how much of that is retained from Mamet's play). It's also very, very weird when Ealy and Bryant are watching the original on TV and commenting on how much they love it.  It's cute but also breaks my continuity-minded brain.

As much as the remake is a much more entertaining film, the '86 version is still very interesting and watchable, and in some ways progressive. It's very much a product of the 1980s and needs to be approached with that in mind, but it doesn't mean we need to detest Bernie any less, he remains one of the most repulsive characters in a romcom ever.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Sinners

2025, Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station) -- download

Hmm, never stubbed this.

Ever wonder how the reader feels about reading your inner dialogue. Cough. And even, two versions of it?

Kent raved about the movie. With good reason. 

...

Still never stubbed it.

And you never even wrote the post, and its like a month later.

...

Vampires and blues music. On the heat map of Toasty interests, vampires are probably in the dark orange and blues, in the hot yellow. I was somewhat into blues when I was a teen, even listening to recordings of Robert Johnson, and the tales of selling your soul at the crossroads for the ability to twang out a tune. It may or may not have been influenced by the 1986 Walter Hill (Supernova) movie, with Ralph Macchio, called Crossroads. Kind of surprised that Sinners didn't bring up the idea of deals with the devil at the crossroads, all things considered. I mean, a primary element of the movie is about the guitar player sinning.

But vampires, vampires have been my thing for a while now. Like the John Carpenter movie Vampires, this movie takes the classic creature of the night out of the Eastern European milieux and places it in the heart of Americana. And then Coogler takes the genre and mixes it into something else tactile and beautiful, if a little pedestrian as vampire movies go. As an example of the genre, its a lot of fun but no really new ground is broken, but as a movie, its tight and expansive and luxurious in nature.

Nice vague-booking there...

Identical twins Elijah "Smoke" Moore (Michael B Jordan, Fantastic Four) and Elias "Stack" Moore (Michael B Jordan, Chronicle) return home to Mississippi after being away for The War (I) and ending up in Chicago. They come home with a deadly reputation and a boatload of (stolen) cash, focused on opening up a roadhouse. It will be a Venn diagram of their likes: booze, music and food. Except the vampire being chased by Choctaw vampire hunters stumbles across their opening night.

Painfully too little of those Choctaw; they looked like they could have been a lot of in-world fun.

Much of the movie is meticulous setup. The characters are painstakingly (pun intended) presented to us, from the conflicting colour tones of the brothers, to the women they love, to the people they choose out of loyalty and history to help them realize their dream. Primary to that dream is music. And key to that music is their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton, feature debut), or Preacher Boy, son of a preacher who hates his son's devil born music. Obviously Sammie is the Robert Johnson of this movie, and perhaps the deal at his crossroads is to play for the two brothers, who are devils in their own right. 

Once the vampires are on the scene, its just ... rote violent fun. Don't get me wrong, I loved it, its a cut above most of the vampire dreck out there. Don't get me wrong; there was a time when we would have put this movie on The Shelf. I prefer the ultra-violent vampire myself, the monster instead of the lover. But considering the absolutely lovely setup the movie had, especially the absolute transcendent scene where they depicted the music of Sammie, how it reaches out past the juke joint he is playing in, out to the ages, across time and space, is just .... wonderful. I wanted more of that in the movie, so when the vampires attack, I was almost.... let down?

Still, in my constant complaining about only being subjected to the "meh" of the cinematic world, I am so glad this came along. I love a movie that I like the more I think about it, the more I recall scenes.

And since I didn't get into all the characterization, let's harp on the cast. Jack O'Connell (Rogue Heroes) as the vampire leader Remmick, an Irish bastard with his own love for music. Hailee Steinfeld as Mary, Stack's ex, who is not as white as everyone thinks she is, and not as black as she wants to be, with all the challenges that statement holds. Wunmi Mosaku (Passenger) as Smoke's ex and a local witch doctor. Delroy Lindo (Sahara) as Delta Slim, legendary piano & harmonica player, and bitter drunk.

Kent's We Agree.

KWIF: Superman (+2)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film.

This Week:
Superman (2025, d. James Gunn - in theatre)
Raising Arizona (1987, d. Joel Cohen - hollywoodsuite)
The Awful Truth (1937, d. Leo McCarey - hollywoodsuite) 

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Superman is exactly the type of comic book movie I dreamed about all through the 1980s and 1990s, one that just drops you in the middle of an active superhero universe, assumes you already have a basic foundation on who these characters are, and goes from there. And boy does Superman go.

It's a lively, adventuresome, superheroic comic book of a movie, and yet I didn't leave completely satisfied. My whole family came out buzzing, having really, really enjoyed the film quite thoroughly, but I couldn't exactly match their energy. I wanted to love James Gunn's Superman, but I don't. I like it quite a bit but there's something holding me back.

This is, without a doubt, my favourite Superman movie, but then I never really cared for any of the others despite being a lifelong Superman fan (the familial surname in common kind of made it mandatory). David Corenswet is a great Superman, doing all the things I wish we'd been able to see Christopher Reeves or Henry Cavill do, both action wise and in a legit superhero universe. Corenswet's Clark is almost indistinguishable from his Superman, which may be the point, or maybe it's that there's not much time for Clark Kent in this film. This is the pure-hearted, people-first, happy-to-help Superman I grew up loving. There's no mopey Superman with a messiah complex here. Also, Gunn, in dodging past the character's origin story, minimizes the burden of Krypton, and, in fact, finds a jettison point so that it doesn't really ever have to be dealt with in this new DC cinematic universe again (despite Bradley Cooper being cast as Jor-El in an unglorified cameo).

Rachel Brosnahan is an incredible Lois Lane, I fell in love with her instantly...and she doesn't get rescued by Superman once this film but still feels integral. Incredible. She's also not fixated on Superman, not in the slightest. She's likes the lug but the world's too be a place to keep Lois' attention in one spot.

Nicholas Hoult's Lex Luthor is an evil slimy supergenius billionaire. We don't have any of those in real life (most of our evil slimy billionaires aren't geniuses) so Hoult is drawing from something other than just the real world. Plus his motivation this time is envy, jealousy, and pure hate (there's still a land scheme of sorts on top of everything though, as is tradition).

I could fill another dozen paragraphs talking about the rest of the cast, including the Justice Gang (Edi Gathegi's Mr. Terrific lives up to the name, while I don't think there's been a more note perfect page-to-screen translation of a Superhero than Nathan Fillion's Guy Gardner [iykyk]), the Daily Planet crew, Luthor's henchpersons, Clark's family, the Superman Robots, and, of course, Krypto.

It is a very well-stocked movie. It has a very large assembly of characters, and it moves fast. I thought at first that, perhaps, Superman was overstuffed, that there's too much going on, with too many characters. But that's not true. I never had a hard time tracking what was happening or why or to whom, and I was never unclear on character motivations. No, what I was thinking was "overstuffed" was actually me just wishing for more time with these characters, more time with this story, and more time in this world.

This is compressed storytelling. In the comic book realm, it used to be you would pick up a single superhero comic book issue, you would get a complete story. The 1980's really started serializing comics like long running soap operas, and by the 2000s the industry had basically solidified the five-or-six issue storyarc as the norm which has sustained ever since. "Decompressed" storytelling they called it.

I want Superman to be decompressed. I want more time with Lois and Clark and how things weigh on their relationship. I want more Daily Planet bullpen banter. I want Lex to really stoke the flames of public outrage against Superman, I want Clark and Lois to have more time with Ma and Pa Kent, I want more time at the Hall of Justice...I just want more of all of this and I feel let down that I don't have it.... that I just have this highly entertaining 129 minute film that is at once a filling meal that still makes me want more. This film, despite being part of a superhero universe, is self-contained. It's not setting up anything beyond the immediate story. 

Compared to other Superman films, the weakest point is the music. James Gunn is so used to constructing his movies around a soundtrack, and here he's opted for, mostly, an original score, but it just doesn't have the same delicious bite or synergy like the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy or Suicide Squad. It's not terrible but I did find the score drawing my attention away from the events on screen from time to time, and not for positive reasons.

In some ways, Superman feels very experimental. It isn't following the rules that its predecessor superhero movies have followed, and it places itself into a reality the one could call escapist. It's a film where a guy in a cape and underwear on the outside has superhero pals and an unruly dog in a cape. Hard to mistake that for the real world. 

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In my teenage years as a budding cinephile, I watched Raising Arizona and, quite specifically, did. not. get it. It was one of those films that came highly recommended and critically lauded that completely went over my head.

Coen Bros. films can be like that. I remember coming out of The Big Lebowski having had an absolutely miserable time, only to fall deeply in love with it upon repeat viewings. My second viewing of Raising Arizona, a decade later, didn't go any better than the first. I don't think I've ever done a Coen Bros. ranking, but if I did, it would have remained in the bottom of my Coen Bros. rankings since that first viewing. 

I'm a more wizened film viewer now, with quite the affinity for most of the Coens repertoire, so surely this latest viewing of Raising Arizona will yield the dividends I always expected. 

Which it did. But...

I still didn't like it. I understood it this time, but I don't think it works. I feels like the prototype for a Coen Bros. movie. The basic tone and sensibilities, the small-stakes crime, the comedy and sentimentality are all there, but they're just not hitting the rhythms the way they would in their later films. 

I liked Nic Cage's H.I., a compulsive robber of convenience stores (with an unloaded weapon) who just keeps rotating through the local prison's revolving door. During every turn of the door, he finds time with Holly Hunter's Ed, a police officer whose main duty seems to be mugshot photos and fingerprint stamping. They fall in love and get married. H.I. goes straight and gets a job and things are good, until they find out they can't have kids and H.I.'s criminal record keeps them from legally adopting. Ed gets depressed, quits her job, and the joys in their life diminish.  And then local furniture magnate Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson) has quintuplets and, according to one newspaper report, claims it's too much to handle. So Ed and H.I. get it into their mind to abduct one of the babies.

As a premise for a crime caper, the script does a fairly good job at showing us just how desperate Ed and H.I. are for a baby, and yet I still don't buy that anyone without a serious mental illness, would steal another person's child. The premise fundamentally doesn't work for me. It's a different story if they find the baby, become attached and fight through their guilt and jump through hurdles to try and keep it, but to proactively go out and steal a child is a big fucking ask that I just can't get behind.

There's a slapsticky sequence with H.I. in the quints' room trying not to make noise and negotiating all the babies as they quickly become too much for him to handle. This is still early in the Coens career (not far off from scripting the live-action cartoon that was Crimewave with Sam Raimi) so their comedic tone still owes a debt to Looney Tunes, something they wind up grounding a lot more in their later movies. It's so close to working here but can't quite grasp it, which is so much of the film for me.

Just as the new family unit is trying to cohere, H.I. and Ed are paid a visit by Gale (John Goodman) and Eville (William Forsythe), H.I.'s friends from prison who have just busted out and are on the lam. They start to ride H.I. about his straight-and-narrow ways, posing that tired-even-by-1980's-standards cliched question of "who wears the pants in the relationship". One thing leads to another and the film descends into a third act clusterfuck of people angling for the baby, including a bounty hunter H.I. envisions comes straight from hell (played, of course, by Randall "Tex" Cobb).

The third act, where everything falls apart in madcap fashion, should be a triumph, and there's glimmers of the Coen Bros. genius that's to come, but it doesn't all congeal. For instance, the fourth party, H.I.'s former boss, should really be in the baby-grabbing mix during this final act. But Goodman and Forsythe's part in it all is so good, I wish we had been following their characters all along instead.

The film's resolution is poppycock. It's the correct emotional payoff, and the Coens do their damnedest to get away from the Hollywood happy ending, but the scenario, just like at the start, finishes with a suspension of disbelief I can't buy into.

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I often think of films from the 1930s and 40s as being primitive, of their time, puritanical, having little to offer in a modern context. And so I tend to avoid them, even though my experience with films from the era have proven that, hey, adults made some of these things, smart adults with skill and talent and vision. Just because they were beholden to certain standards of "social decency" doesn't mean they can't be entertaining, insightful or artistic. I think I continue to avoid golden age of Hollywood movies because I really don't want to have to wade through the dreck, the studio films that were churned out as the "content" of the era. I need to basically trust the consensus on what the good ones of the era are, but I naturally distrust the consensus. It's a burden.

After watching The Awful Truth, I feel a much stronger desire to watch more screwball comedies of the era, particularly those starring Carey Grant. If you've seen a Carey Grant comedy, you know why. The man is a gifted comedic performer with wonderfully understated physical gestures and facial muggings that can accentuate an already delightful script (and no doubt save a film with a less than punchy one).

The premise here finds Jerry Warriner (Grant) coming home from a trip away to an empty house, only to have guests arrive with no hostess. When Lucy (Irene Dunne) finally shows up, she's escorted by a swarthy Frenchman who proclaims to be her voice coach. They were waylaid overnight by car issues. The suspicion is immediate, Jerry doesn't trust a word his wife or this Frenchman say, but it's probably because he knows he's been lying himself, having told his wife he went to Florida but brought home a basket of California oranges. The distrust in the marriage going both ways leads to a big blow-up and divorce court (with custody of their beloved mutt Mr. Smith a heated part of the battle).

They have to have a 60 day trial separation before the divorce is finalized. Lucy moves in with her aunt who introduced her to the neighbour, an Oklahoma oilman named Dan with a slow drawl and dim sense of humour. Dan falls in love with Lucy instantly, and Lucy mainly plays along knowing it will drive Jerry crazy, which it does, but Jerry's sabotage leads Lucy to realize she still loves him and the short engagement is called off, but Jerry is likewise moving on.

A short time later, Jerry is seen with a debutante and Lucy is envious. With only days to go before their divorce is final, Lucy insinuates herself in Jerry's life, and interferes in his budding relationship by posing as his sister.

Things explode, they reset, they explode again, and eventually after a few of these cycles, there's the expected resolution of Jerry and Lucy rekindling their partnership, and it's a pretty delightful ride, if a wonky and lopsided one.

To start, Lucy's suspected infidelity is paid a disproportionate amount of attention compared to Jerry's, which is brought up in the opening moments of the film, and really, never again. The first act of the film introduces the couple, breaks them up and establishes their not-so-bitter trial bitter divorce. The second act is all about Lucy's relationship with Dan, Jerry's interference, and bringing back the French vocal coach (to an incredibly funny denouement). The third act then has to wrestle with Jerry's new love interest, Lucy getting in the way and then contriving a scenario that will pull Lucy and Jerry together again.

It's this final act that needs more breathing room and doesn't fully work. Lucy's "drunk sister" routine is incredible (Dunne is every bit as gifted as Grant is comedically, and maybe even more) but following that sequence, it's a pretty contrived situation that leads to some unusually quiet romantic tension and just the itsiest bit of bedroom smouldering that calls for some sexiness from the leads but (given the times) isn't allowed to get there.

By and large, though, The Awful Truth is a romp, a bustling good time with a scene-stealing dog and hilarious dialgoue and delightful characters. I do need to see more of these from the era.