KWIF: KPop Demon Hunters (+4)

 KWIF= Kent's Week in Film. So much this week. Like, almost a Toasty-paced week of film watching. And a lot of pulling from the binder.

This Week:
KPop Demon Hunters (2025, d.Chris Appelhans and Maggie Kang - netflix)
O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000, d. Ethan (and Joel) Coen - dvd)
Marathon Man (1976, d. John Schlesinger - dvd)
Superbad (2007, d. Greg Mottola - dvd)
Sorcerer (1977, d. William Friedkin - dvd)

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As a lifelong "outsider", I'm intrinsically suspicious of anything that's popular. Suspicious, and sometimes dismissive, perhaps even resentful, and often curious.

KPop, as a genre, is not designed for me, and as music, it is most definitely designed. Like girl and boy bands the world around, it's taking sounds that are popular, hollowing them out, and ramping up the feel goods in multi-part harmonies, unique hairstyles and choreographed dance moves. It's as much about aesthetics and performance as it is about music. It's as much about commodifying images as it is about meaningful sounds. It's just pop. It's for the populace, of which I so rarely feel (or desire to be) a part of.

KPop Demon Hunters is most definitely not designed for me, as it's so designed around the conventions of KPop and KPop celebrities, and yet it is a film that, if you give it half a chance, challenges you, and challenges you hard to not be charmed by it, at least a little.

It is the product of North American writers and directors, based off a story originated by Korean-Canadian Maggie Kang, with Korean-American and Korean-Canadian voice actors as well as Korean and American singers. It's firmly set in Korea, with Seoul being its primary backdrop. Aesthetically it's vibrant and full of life, and its rhythms feel one-part anime, one-part music video, and one-part Nickelodeon comedy.  I went into the film, unintentionally, with walls up, and the humour knocked the first brick out.

The story tells of the the history of demons preying upon the people of earth, and of the legacy of women with golden voices who hold those demons at bay. Now, because of the popularity of KPop, the trio known as Huntr/x -- consisting of brash Mira, peppy Zoey, and leader Rumi -  is so very close to turning the Hunmoon (a protective magic barrier) golden and permanently disconnecting the demons from this world. But Rumi's secret is she's half demon, and the closer she reaches to her goal to cutting her demon half off, the more she loses her confidence.

Meanwhile their adversary, the demon god Gwi-ma, senses his defeat impending, and agrees to let one of his most adversarial demons, Jinu, fight fire with fire by starting a boy band to steal some of the glory of Huntr/x and stop the golden Hunmoon.  Naturally Jinu finds out Rumi's secret, and she sees something in him he hasn't seen in himself in 400 years, and they crush hard on each other. But can they really trust each other, especially when Zoey and Mira are beginning to have doubts about Rumi.

This is a movie full of songs, but it's hard to call it a musical, given that the characters don't bust out into song and dance, except for when giving performances, and they seem to always be giving performances. There is, seemingly, an album worth of songs here, most of them derived/appropriating their style and swagger from modern popular hip-hop and R&B, again with the edges sanded off and the whole thing polished into something shiny and reflective. The songs are mercifully well-crafted (this wouldn't work at all if they werent) and deviously infectious (if you're of a certain mindset, you'll find them aggravatingly catchy, and hate yourself for admitting that you like it, if only a little).

There's potentially some culturally Korean aspects that I didn't pick up on, like its main theme around shame and guilt are relatable to a certain degree, but I wonder if there's deeper cultural context to the struggles the lead characters are facing. For all the soda pop-iness of the picture, there is aspects that dive deeper than just the saccharine sweetness and empty calories that it could have subsisted on at the surface.

By the film's finale, which climaxes in a big song that is at once a reunion, a declaration of self-love and respect, and of a promise to not blindly follow the path that's always been taken when one can see a different way forward... it's powerful and had me swelling with emotion. 

There's been talk of a Buffy The Vampire Slayer reboot, but Buffy had her time and KPop Demon Hunters is clearly the heir apparent to this kind of story. 

It's a well-earned phenomenon. Not intended for me, but I liked it all the same.

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The power of film is often to transport us into another reality. It could be another place, another time, another world, or another mindset or perspective than our own. Movies are an escape, but not all movies are escapist movies. Some are reflective, mirrors of the world we live in or of the self, and some will stir up traumas, intentionally or not.

O Brother, Where Art Thou is intended as an escapist film. Loosely based off Homer's The Odyssey, it follows three convicts of varying intellects and educations as they escape off the chain gang and into a series of vignettes in late-Depression Era Mississippi. It is, at its core, a comedy - full of old timey slapstick and farce - subcategorized as a musical and an adventure.

There are some great visual gags and physical performances in this film, a lot of it from Clooney who really does lead the film with every watt of star power he has within him. Save for some little moments I don't find the film very amusing as I actively resist being transported into the world the Coens are trying to drag me into.

The Depression Era is, like, a total bummer, man, and the deep south is so, so, so very racist (even more so than the film lets on, and it lets on a fair deal...there's an extended Klan sequence that I have a real hard time with). These are not places I particularly want to spend time in, and I can't ever help but question the motivations of characters and the authenticity of how scenes play out. I know it's fiction and it can push and pull and twist its characters how it wants, but I have a real hard time relaxing and letting the Coens push and pull and twist me along with it.

Music plays a very big part in the film overall, with a key moment in the film finding the trio (made up of Ulysses, Pete and Delmar, played by George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson, respectively) stumbling into a radio station/recording studio with Tommy, a bluesman they picked up at a crossroads in a stolen car. They record a very uptempo, impromptu rendition of "Man of Constant Sorrow", which, unbeknownst to them when they continue on their travels, becomes a massive success.  

The music of the film, produced by T Bone Burnett, ripples through gospel, blues, bluegrass, swing, folk and country. It all owes a complete debt to the Black musicians of the south but is largely performed by white vocalists, and the movie is, by and large, excessively pale. I have a hard time spending this much time with culturally appropriated music that really seems like "Black music for white people"... which is exactly what it wound up being. The soundtrack won "Album of the Year" at the Grammys in 2002, and it has sold over 8 million copies since its release, but much of it really sets my teeth on edge.

Like the film, the songs are exceptionally well crafted. The film looks great (thanks Roger Deakins) and the sounds are exceptionally well-produced, but for me I just cannot get into it. When the soundtrack blew up in the early 2000s and indie music bloggers were raving about it, I really didn't know what the hell was happening in the world. The film was a slow burn success but I didn't wind up seeing it for years because it didn't look like something that would appeal to me (and when I did watch it the first time around, I was most definitely right about my assumption).

I've said many times now that Coen Brothers films can take time and repeat viewings to get into. I really had no memory and basically an absence of an impression of how I felt about the film from my first viewing between 15 and 20 years ago, so in essence this rewatch felt like a first viewing all over again. It may truly just be that I need to give it another watch, and soon, to see if I can move through the film with maybe anticipation of certain moments that I liked, but for now it's truly sitting at the bottom of my rankings list.

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I had never seen Marathon Man before, but the dental torture scene, with its "Is it safe?" refrain was unavoidable piece of cinema history. (Did the Simpsons parody it? Probably.) It was a reference I've been meaning to put into context for decades, to wit, I've had a dvd copy of the film since the mid-2000s and have only now gotten around to watching it.

The film opens so damn curiously with a road rage incident in New York that finds a Jewish driver aggressively confronting a German driver, before an intervening tanker truck filled with gasoline calms the whole situation down with fiery death.

The connection at first is obtuse. The film takes its time setting its players up. There's the graduate student, Babe (Dustin Hoffman) practising to be a marathon runner. There's Doc (Roy Scheider), a spook practicing his craft in Paris, who turns out to be Hoffman's brother (have there been two more distinct noses in a film that are playing kin?). There's Christian Szell (Lawrence Olivier), a Nazi scientist who has escaped to South America, but whose brother was the German who died in the New York car crash.

How these three come into engagement with one another is convoluted, and involves Babe's new girlfriend Elsa (Marthe Keller). It is the process of discovery as director Schlesigner pulls on the individual threads that starts binding them into a tighter and tighter knot.

I was never exactly certain where Marathon Man was going, and it's surprising how many genuine surprises it retains even 50 years after its debut. The "Is it safe?" sequence, while memorable, is actually of so little consequence in the film. It's a scene of futility, of a man trying to extract information out of someone who has no information to give him.

I would flat out love this film if not for Dustin Hoffman. I've never been much of a Hoffman fan, even as I admit that his sort of nerdy, naive presence in this film is so close to being exactly what this role needs (he's sort of the Jesse Eisenberg of his generation). But Hoffman goes large too often. Too often the ego of the actor appears in his character and he falls out of servicing the role and instead services himself.

I'm also left with the question (no, not "Is it safe?") of ...how old is Babe supposed to be. Hoffman was in his late 30s shooting this film, and he looks every bit his age. It's clear the film is trying to age him down, but he looks like a middle aged man attending college. If he's supposed to be a college-aged student, then Marthe Keller (who looks like a grown-ass woman) seems way too old for him, but if he's supposed to be his own age, then it's like, she's far too attractive to be interested in a nearly 40-year-old man who is still going to college.

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By the time Superbad debuted in 2007, the majority of crass teen sex comedies of the 1980s had already aged poorly. The "gotta get laid" urgency mixed with the ogling male gaze meant that the gender and sexual politics of the film were beyond juvenile and often criminal.

Going back to Superbad for the first time in quite some time was met with a little trepidation. I mean, in the intervening years, somehow, Seth Rogen has become the busiest man in Hollywood, starring in multiple award-nominated TV shows, appearing in goofy comedies and prestigious auteur-driven movies alike, producing a plethora of successful TV shows in both animated and live action formats, and being a highly accomplished writer and director himself, alongside his partner Evan Goldberg. All this to say, he's gotten to where he is for a reason, so in that I had some trust that Superbad was maybe not going to completely disintegrate with age. 

Rogen and Goldberg started writing Superbad even before they had a career in Hollywood, but when they were given the opportunity, this was the script they knew could be their calling card, the script was very personal to them, an embellishment of their time at the end of high school in Vancouver. The characters played by Michael Cera and Jonah Hill are not coincidentally named Evan and Seth.

As the film begins, Grade 12 is winding down. Evan and Seth are seemingly attached at the hip, best friends for life, but college is going to tear them apart as they're attending different schools. Evan seems eager for change, though not as a slight to Seth, but Seth feels like Evan is going to move on without him. As school winds down, they both have girls they've been crushing on, but have been too awkward to really make a move. They sort of make a pact that they'll both make moves, especially when one of their crushes throws a party and invites them. Their friend, Fogel (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), has just gotten a fake ID, and so they promise to bring the booze. Of course, nothing in the transaction goes smoothly, and what results is a wild and crazy night for these outsider kids as they try to make it to the party and impress the girls they like.

Seth, in Hill's hands, is an abrasive motormouth with no off switch. He seems incapable of over sharing, and has no filter. He's a lot, and, although it takes a while, the film shows us he knows it. For it's many hilarious scenes and the McLovin of it all, the film's greatest accomplishment was casting Emma Stone as Jules, who seems to see through the coarse surface and finds something charming in Seth, something which Jules seems to match and feed off of. Likewise, the pairing of HIll with Cera, who is still in full George-Michael in Arrested Development mode at the time, is spot on. Cera plays the awkward nerd who clearly gets frustrated with his loudmouth friend because he approaches the world so differently, but also he just as clearly admires him for moving through the world in a way in which he never could.

The film's finale, which finds Seth rescuing a passed-out Evan by carrying him from the house party being raided by the cops, is the sweetest damn thing. It ends with the boys having the easiest of reconciliations after a fight earlier and drunkenly dozing off in sleeping bags on the floor of Evan's basement professing their platonic love for each other. It's freaking adorable and warms my jaded heart. If only every story were so open as to show two men sharing honest emotions with each other so as to provide men with both exposure and the roadmap how to.

Also, the cops in this film, played by Rogen and Bill Hader, who take McLovin under their wing, are an absolutely brilliant construct of two guys who abuse their every power, and are representative of cops kind of being the worst (ACAB), and yet, as supporting characters for Fogel, they're fantastic.

Any worries I had about the film not holding up are non existent after the rewatch. If anything, it's the precursor to Netflix's Big Mouth which would debut a decade later, but feels so indebted to Superbad. It's a hilarious movie, with richly formed central characters, an incredible supporting cast, and it executes one of the best in "one crazy night" subgenre of comedy.

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William Friedkin's Sorcerer - a remake of the French thriller The Wages of Fear, itself an adaptation of the French novel Le Salaire de la Peur - has been sitting on my "to watch" list since the 1990s when Tarantino cited it as one of his favourite films and called it one of the best films ever made.

It was a film that came out in 1977, up against some garbage called Star Wars which consumed all the air on the planet and choked it to death. Sorcerer has developed a cult following, in large part thanks to the Tarantino citation, but it has never quite dug itself out of the grave Star Wars put it in.

I found a copy of Sorcerer in the used DVD bins last year and snapped it up. I imagine there has been a more prestigious release (yup, in fact Criterion just released a new edition in June), and I have to imagine a new 4K restoration probably adds something to this film. The old DVD is a "fullscreen" version that is muddy as hell (but then it is literally a muddy pictures... so much wet dirt).

Like Marathon Man the film opens obtusely, with a series of disconnected events. The first shows the murder of a man in Veracruz, Mexico, the next a Palestinian bombing in Jerusalem and very brief manhunt. The third jumps to Paris with a very Fargo-esque vignette about a man deep in debt and desperate to find a way out (without trying to appear desperate), and finally a heist gone very wrong in New Jersey.

All of this leads to a character from each of these segments having fled to a remote village in South America. There's an operation taking place, setting up an oil pipeline, and there is need for a lot of manual labour. The village is largely local, but with no shortage of international players, all who seem in the same escaping-from-something position. When an accident occurs and the well catches fire, the only means the company can find to put it out, given their remote destination, is an old supply of highly volatile TNT.  They need to teams to venture thought the jungle in refashioned, Mad Max-style trucks to transport the dynamite to the site so they can smother the fire.  The journey is, quite literally, killer.

There are certainly political and sociological subtext to examine in this film but it works so remarkably well just on the surface as a riveting and intense procedural, where the procedure is delicately navigating harsh jungle paths and the craziest of bridges while transporting cargo that seems ready to explode at the slightest provocation. There's not really much need to dig deeper even though you can.

There are remarkable "how'd they do that" sequences that feature no indoor sets and no miniatures, just crazy preparation and a little on screen magic. In modern cinema, they wouldn't take on the expense or the discomfort and variability of remote shooting, they would just CGI it all, and it's a gazillion times more impressive in all being practical. As well, the film never oversteps its peril, it shows you the stakes and it lets its scenarios play out those stakes without adding complication upon complication. It's tense enough thank you without having to overtax the audience.

It is, at its core, a dark story about desperate men, and not, say, two evil wizards throwing fireballs at each other in the jungle as I originally surmised it to be. But don't hold that against it.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Superman

2025, James Gunn (Super) -- download

Well, I freaking loved that.

Like Kent, I wanted more, but unlike Kent I was not disappointed nor dissatisfied with what I got. After all, I was never a discerning Superman fan, and I was most definitely not a great fan of the Christopher Reeves movies, maybe just hints of childhood nostalgia. I was conversely  hugely disappointed with Man of Steel (wow, actually, only, three paragraphs) and therefore, not surprised I liked this movie more than any other previous cinematic version. It was already assumed, as a fan of Gunn, I would automatically like it, but.... wow, I really loved it. I had so much fun, I grinned during so many scenes, even the eye-rolling comic booky ones.

So, having not seen this in the cinema, and having already asked Kent (F2F) to go out of bounds from his post, I was going in with more or less a tempered expectation. I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about being dropped into an existing superhero world, one where we get zero explainer. Its not like I am unfamiliar with the Superman world, but considering Mr. Terrific takes majorly front seat in this movie, and I have a barely passing knowledge of him, I was wondering if I might be feeling overwhelmed. 

Nope. It all worked.

The movie begins with Superman's (David Corenswet, Twisters) first defeat of his career, being battered bloody by The Hammer of Boravia, the metahuman response to Superman's interference in the affairs of Boravia, after she tried to invade the lesser developed Jarhanpur. I am assuming a single punch sent him half way round the world to smash into the snows. Supes whistles for his dog and Krypto comes running, little red cape and all. Krypto is not a Good Dog -- he bounces on the injured Superman probably cracking a few ribs, before the barely conscious man convinces the dog to take him home. Home is the Fortress of Solitude which rises from the snow & ice of Antarctica, where Superman is welcomed by his robots, little capes and all. The robots help him heal by the light of the yellow sun.

Of course, Alan Tudyk voices one of the robots.

The Hammer flies into a trans-dimensional portal, which leads him to Lex Luthor's lair, because, of course, Luthor (Nicholous Hoult, Nosferatu) is behind this. Also, Luthor's henchmen, The Engineer (Angela Sarafyan, G20), tries to follow Superman into the Fortress, just as it is swallowed up by the ice again. How vexing for Lex!

All healed up, Superman flies back to Metropolis, where we meet the Daily Planet and Lois (Rachel Brosnahan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), and he puts on the glasses to become Clark Kent, the man nobody ever recognizes as Superman, and also the reporter who always seems to have a Superman interview, and also.... whoah, didn't see that coming, Lois's boyfriend. She knows he is Superman. She also is rather hard on the poor fellow about his political interventions, playing more than just a Devil's Advocate against what he saw as just Doing the Right Thing. Clark / Superman is more than a little annoyed she doesn't see it that way. They almost break up.

Hmmm. This is the age old commentary on superhero antics -- what gives these super powered yahoos the right to stick their nose into human affairs? Sure, everyone appreciates them stopping super villains, and evil alien invasions, and giant monster attacks, but when they interrupt purely human on human political agendas, is that crossing a line? There are some whiffs of Gunn's making political commentary here, without the movie actually saying anything concrete -- but someone has to stand up for What is Right.

There are also whiffs of social media and bot / troll generated outrage against Superman and his woke agenda.

Next, KAIJU FIGHT ! Lex needs Superman distracted so he tosses a lil cootie patootie creature into Metropolis which, just add water, becomes a colossal monster. That allows The Engineer (Angela) and Lex, and the mysterious Ultraman (who was also pretending to be The Hammer of Boravia) to break into The Fortress of Solitude, make quick work of the robots, take down Krypto (they hurt the puppy?!?!?!) and hack Superman's crystal computer, capturing an incomplete message from Kal-El's Dad Jor-El (Bradley Cooper, The A-Team). That can't be good. Back in Metropolis, Superman battles the kaiju with the help of a trio of other superheroes, officially unnamed but monikered by Green Lantern (the douchey version, aka Guy Gardner; Nathan Fillion, The Rookie) as "The Justice Gang". While Superman saves people, dogs and squirrels from being crushed by falling buildings and monster feet, he wants to stop the creature without killing it. But the Gang is more practical, much to his consternation, and they kill it. 

I wonder where they store dead kaiju, and whether Hannibal Chau helps.

So, not a political agenda based battle, and he saved squirrels, so should be an easy win on social media, no? No. Lex has translated Jor-El's lost message and (yoink; pull at collar uncomfortably) apparently Krypton Wanted Earth Women. Yeah, they may have tasked The Last Son of Krypton to come to Earth and be a shining example to the measly human beings, but part of that "shining example" was taking over and having a harem. Lex's real superpower, that of completely mastering negative publicity, takes over the hearts & minds of Metropolis, just like that scene in Spider-Man: No Way Home where someone splashes green paint all over Peter. Its an unrealistic turn of events, and yet given the world we currently (mid-2025 folks) live in, where people are accepting utter ridiculous, downright evil, situations as normal, its not entirely implausible. 

Things go from bad to worse (I just read that Elmore Leonard demands you never use that phrase; I suspect he would cringe at most of my idiom laden writing), when Supes turns himself into the US Govt and they hand him over to Luthor for incarceration, who just happens to have a pocket dimension populated with anyone who has annoyed him: ex-girlfriends, ex-employees, meta-humans he couldn't control and failed experiments. Its like the storage facility from The Cabin in the Woods but morally worse; fewer literal monsters. Clark is controlled by Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan, Barry), a meta-human who can assume the shape of any material, including Kryptonite. In turn, Metamorpho is compelled because they have his infant son. To drive home the point of Superman's helplessness, Lex murders one of his most avid admirers, an average Joe named Malik Ali (Dinesh Thyagarajan, Good Egg), in front of him. That cements it for Metamorpho and he engineers Superman's escape. Meanwhile, on the other side of the dimensional portal Lois has convinced Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi, Twilight) to help and they appear just in time to help the heavily weakened, but by no means down for the count, Superman.

OK, you are pushing the envelope now, on cliches, and [DAMMIT] you've got me doing it.

Terrific Lois ("DC Comics Presents") takes the slowly recovering Superman to his parents. Not his birth parents, obviously, but the Salt of the Earth adoptive parents: Martha & Jonathan Kent in rural Smallville, Kansas. These are the people who raised him, who imbued upon him a sense of right & wrong, who gave him his moral compass and established what he should do with his powers. But Pa Kent (aka Mush) reminds Clark that it was not his birth parents' message, not even their upbringing that made him what he is, but it was his choices. He chose to become a red & blue suited superhero who goes out every day to save people.

We love these Kents. No "Man of Steel" tragedy, no difficult choices, just a couple of down to earth loving, supportive people. But then again, we are biased in favour of Kents.

So, Superman has escaped and Lex is incensed, utterly enraged, and decides his best course of action is to sacrifice Metropolis by allowing his dimensional rift to start tearing the city in half. Even his cadre of loyal henchmen (who ARE these fucks anywayz; how can so many people be so complicit.... <looks southward> ... nevermind) are not convinced this is a good idea, as an unfettered dimensional rift will eventually want to eat up the entire city, planet, solar system, etc. But Lex knows that this will draw back Superman from where ever he is hiding. And probably because he just likes doing evil shit.

I am realizing, that I might be out of practice in doing these long winded, entirely unnecessary recaps, as its just not capture the "fun" of the movie. For example, no mention of Metamorpho becoming an acid, splashing the Raptors and presumably killing them. Great scene! Also, the social media troll monkeys. THE MONKEYS EXPLAIN OUR WORLD !!!

Meanwhile Eve (Sara Sampaio, Wife Like), Luthor's current vacuous social media obsessed girlfriend, is secretly in love with Jimmy Olsen ([!?!??!] Skyler Gisondo, Santa Clarita Diet) and willing to provide him evidence against Lex as long as they can hang all weekend. Alas, all the dirt that Lois requires for a pro-Superman anti-Lex story is behind the scenes in Eve's endless stream of selfies. I am not convinced telling the world some rather simplistic "Lex wants to run a country" fact would turn the tide of public support, considering his army of monkeys at keyboards.

While Superman punches it out with Ultraman, before tossing the clone of himself (!!!) into a black hole and flying back to Lex Corps to actually close the rift, the Justice Gang head to the Boravian border to deal with the once-again-invading army. Apparently the moral quandary of interfering with other country's affairs doesn't apply to them, but they probably don't care, and the world doesn't care as they are non-alien vigilantes. And murderers; Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced, The Last of Us) just drops the Boravian Prime Minister Ghurkos (Zlatko Buric, 2012) from a great height. More Gang than Justice. Metropolis is saved, Jarhanpur is saved, Superman's reputation is restored and Lex is arrested. Oh, and his prison is emptied. We end off the movie with a cameo from a drunken Supergirl.

I agree with Kent; there is sooooo much in this movie, it is almost overstuffed, but by taking the four-colour stripped down behavioural approach, Gunn has made the movie so utterly rollicking that you don't care if things don't always make entire sense. But even as he stuffs the movie to bursting with Big Details, he still has so many fun little details, like Malik Ali helping Superman out of a hole, or Superman saving a squirrel, or how he catches a falling building with his hands (it should just collapse around him, unless he spreads his gravitic flying power across the building's entire surface), or even utter mundane things like Lois parked in the roundabout outside the massive sprawling, and seemingly mostly empty Hall of Justice. I just enjoyed so much about the movie.

I think I need to go back for a rewatch already.

KWIF: Coens crazy

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Spent much of the week with my feet shuffling along the cement floors of Toronto Fan Expo and the asphalt road of the Canadian National Exhibition. My feet hurt. But you don't need feet to watch movies.

This Week:
Honey Don't (2025, d. Ethan Coen - in theatre)
The Big Lebowski (1998, d. Joel [and Ethan] Coen - DVD)

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Ethan Coen's two films sans his brother Joel have instead found him partnered with his editor/wife, Tricia Cooke, and the resulting Honey Don't  and Drive-Away Dolls before it are very much the result of that distinctive pairing. They are the first two entries of what they have informally described as "lesbian b-movie trilogy" (the film they co-directed prior to Drive-Away Dolls, the documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind is not part of said trilogy). Cooke is queer and there is definitely both a queer and feminist agenda (in a good way, not in the toxic manosphere way) with the first two entries in the trilogy. 

They are crime films on the surface - Drive-Away Dolls is much more a wild road trip sex comedy, whereas Honey Don't is much more firmly dime-novel pulp and grindhouse with all the accoutrements that come with it (sex, nudity and brutal, thrilling, squick-inducing violence). But at their core, they are taking genres, subgenres and sub-sub-genres that have normally been manufactured by men, for men and making them very, very gay.

Honey Don't opens beautifully, with a mysterious French woman on a scooter coming across an overturned car in the remote Bakersfield dusty terrain. The woman double checks that the car's driver is dead then pilfers a ring. She then goes and takes a refreshing dip in a nearby stream before venturing back on her way in her leopard-print outfit. She looks remarkably like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, and is styled like her too, hair and wardrobe. That should have itself been the tip-off to me of what this was going to be...a pastiche of a pastiche while forging its own paths off the trail.

The opening credits are fantastic... grainy footage of Bakersfield shot out the side of a moving car, with digitally enhanced moments where the footage pauses to reveal credits on billboards, signs, graphitti and other such locales. Underneath the images, dripping full 70's with a killer bass hook, and in full-blown rasp power vocals is Brittany Howard's "We Gotta Get Out of This Place"... it's an absolute killer.

The film introduces us to hardboiled P.I. Honey O'Donahue getting out of bed after a one-night stand that you know isn't going anywhere. She's brought onto the aforementioned crash site by Detective Marty Mekatawich (Charlie Day) who makes constant advances at Honey non-stop and is relentless in spite of her quite blunt and decisive rebuking. It's passed off as "good natured", and the sheer fact that it's Charlie Day means there's definitely a comedic (and non-threatening) edge to the delivery of his ineffective come-ons, but it's only funny if you don't realize how exhausting it obviously is for Honey to have to deal with. In spite of it, she kind of likes the guy... from a distance.

The person in the car is a client of Honey's, with connections to a local church, led by Chris Evans' egomaniacal cult leader Reverend Drew Devlin. He's in deep with some French investors, and the woman from the beginning, Chere (Lera Abova), is kind of the cleaner. Seems Devlin has found himself in a bit of a mess. Dealin is a guy who knows how pretty and charming he can be and he uses it to his every advantage at all times. Undernea big bright smile and beautiful physique is a vainglorious sociopath whose whole congregation is a front for drug running, and a vehicle to manipulate the women of his congregation into having kinky sex...err...congress with him.

We meet Honey's pregnant sister (Kristen Connelly) and her sprawling brood (she keeps admonishing Honey about judging her as a mother, and it's kind of clear she's got her own issues around it), including her niece Corrinne (Talia Ryder) who is seeing a dirtbag who turns out to be an abusive MAGA douche.

Lady Kent pointed out that the film is a "shaggy dog" story, the kind that is twisting and convoluted only to ultimately have a conclusion that negates or makes the story somewhat futile or irrelevant. The Big Lebowski is a shaggy dog story, and, having re-watched Lebowski days earlier, it's hard not to compare. But the tones are completely different.

With Honey Don't we're expecting a sort of detective noir caper, but it's not that. Honey investigates her client's death but only lightly. She has a client (Billy Eichner) who wants dirt on his boyfriend's infidelity, and she doesn't even manage to start that job before her Neice disappears, which then becomes her primary focus...outside of having frantic hook-upd with MG (Aubrey Plaza) from the police station.

Shaggy dog stories come together in ultimately unsatisfying ways, because they sort of mislead you into thinking everything you see matters, everything you see is connected. Well, it is...and it isn't. I am reminded, thought, that many a Coens film has taken multiple viewings before they click, and I can see that definitely happening with Honey Don't...it just might take a few more viewings then others.  There are definitely standout parts to the production, it's just hard to get a grasp on the tone its going for. I think the "lesbian b-movie trilogy" classification actually helps put it much more into perspective.

Much like in the first half of the Coens career where Joel was getting the director's credit and Ethan was listed as producer (due to Director's Guild b.s.) even though they were co-directing, I have to wonder if these films are co-directed by Ethan and Tricia Cooke. As much as there's a Coen-y vibe, there's also an un-Coen-y vibe that challenges what little expectations I have when approaching a Coen production. Cooke definitely has her hand in the editing, and there's a lot of choices made in the edits, some which are phenomenal and others which prove a little perplexing (at least upon first watch).

I'm keen to give this another watch with a little time a perspective. Right now it's pretty low on the overall Coen's ranking, but I do like it better than Drive-Away Dolls, which I still have yet to give a second viewing.

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What still needs to be said about The Big Lebowski that hasn't already been said? Not much I reckon, but here we go anyway. Sometimes you just gotta put one letter in front of the other and see what happens.

After Fargo became and immediate and beloved cinema classic and masterpiece, eyes were hotly attuned to the Coens' follow-up. I remember seeing The Big Lebowski in theatre and just. not. getting it. I don't exactly remember if I tried again later on DVD or just wrote it off as "not for me". It wasn't until meeting Lady Kent that I was encouraged to try it again. She was a big fan of the film, see, and, as she likes to remind me, got it all from the first viewing. 

By the time I rewatched Lebowski it was in its pop-culture ascendancy, it was only just starting to become part of early internet memes, and you would see Lebowski cosplay out in public on Halloween. Something about all that meme-ification did make it snap it place. It provides an incredible frame for which to display a lively painting of pure irreverence.

Fargo is a perfect movie, and Lebowski perhaps even more so. The intent put into every line, every beautifully constructed Roger Deakins frame, every accentuating needledrop, it's all so very, very precise. It is truly a comedy goldmine, each watch unveils new performance flourishes, or new intentions in dialogue, or new realizations...it's a movie that, in its byzantine shaggy dog construct, keeps giving back to its audience the more familiar they become with it.

This go around, it became so amusingly apparent that Walter (John Goodman), despite being a hair's breadth away from full-fledged lunatic conspiracy nut, is actually right about everything that's happening in the whole scenario the Dude has gotten involved in. Even though Walter can't help but mess everything up, he's got his eyes open, he just can't see past his own issues to bring any situation to resolution. It's like he's looking for conflict.

Jeff Bridges as The Dude is by no means an aspirational figure. He lives a slovenly simple life. He needs his pot, his drinks, his bowling and his car. Anything else, like friendship, or sex, or making money, is equal parts bonus and hassle. 

The concussion/roofie-induced acid trip flashbacks by way of musical montages are magnificent gateways into the way the Dude's mind works, and it's truly as uncomplicated on the inside as it appears on the outside.

Also on this rewatch it stood out to me seeing Carter Burwell's name on the title credits as composer (with T Bone Burnett listed as "musical archivist") since the soundtrack to The Big Lebowski is the first of its kind for the Coens, where it marries so much of its scenes to a song, much in the way Quentin Tarantino or Danny Boyle were doing at the time, and later Edgar Wright and James Gunn (and many other modern auters) would.  We don't see a lot of "various artists" soundtracks from Coens productions (it's something that again jumped out at me about Honey Don't, which along with the shaggy dog storytelling kind of marries the two films, if only a little bit). It's a remarkably successful attempt at the song-story coherence, it's truly a wonder why they really never did it more.

The Coens use, manipulate and subvert the conventions of Raymond Chandler, or so I'm told...I'm not well versed. The Coens love the classic detective noir writers and those seeds form the foundation of so much of their work. But they're still film guys, who have a ridiculously extensive knowledge of cinema, its tropes, and its uniqueness, and they will abuse those classic genre conventions like a chef making ramen noodles, twisting and slamming and dusting and manipulating until something ready for the pot results, and then it just becomes the centerpiece of the Coens' soup. Delicious delicious soup. I think it may be dinner time.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Deep Cover

2025, Tom Kingsley (The Darkest Universe) -- Amazon

It was cute. "Cute" could almost become a Tag for many of the comedies we watch. The "I chuckled" version of "meh" ? 

At least write somewhat of a stub for this movie, that because you only thought of it as "cute", you will quickly forget it.

So, I see a movie about three improv actors dragged into doing undercover work for the London Met, with three faces I like, and I add it to our "something lite" list. Well, technically Amazon doesn't have Lists but mentally OK ? Most services only allow you a single List, sort of a To Be Watched, but it often ends up retaining those long after you have watched them, a reminder of the good, the bad and the meh.

Yes, we could probably do a couple of paragraphs on the interfaces of streaming services, which after almost a decade in existence, have not improved in the slightest, and so often depend on the platform the app is running. Most are OK, some, like Amazon, are just absolutely terrible.

So, Kat (Bryce Dallas Howard, Rocketman) is a failed American actor in London who has taken to teaching improv to make ends meet. Marlon (Orlando Bloom, Gran Turismo) is a failed British actor who can't get any jobs beyond terrible ads, or ... shudder ... standing on street corners, in costume, with a spinny sign. Hugh (Nick Mohammed, Renegade Nell) is an IT Guy lacking confidence who ends up at Kat's class,  seeking said confidence, while Marlon is lurking around in the back. 

They are approached by DS Billings (Sean Bean, Possessor) to assist him in some light undercover work -- go into a corner shop and buy some black market cigarettes. Simple work, easy peasy, and get some cash, which Kat really needs. Kat knows she can do it, Marlon needs, desperately, to now his character and Hugh has barely had one "lesson", is barely socially functional, and stumbles over everything. They over-act everything and instead of cigarettes, they end up in front of low-level dealer Fly. And they are dubbed Bonnie, Roach and The Squire, a new gang in London seeking to make their mark, and are here to buy some cocaine. Billings seems thrilled. This whole "deal" is interrupted by the Albanians, from whom Fly (Paddy Considine, House of the Dragon) had stolen the cocaine, and Bonnie ends up convincing the angry Albanians to buy back their own cocaine -- she's pretty good under pressure. Fly is thrilled; Billings is over the moon.

So, like all comedies, when they should be turning on their heels and getting the fuck out of Dodge, they go in deeper. "Yes, and..... ?" as the improv instruction says. After accidentally killing (!!!) a retired enforcer who owed Fly money, they start working directly for him, and his own enforcer, mysterious, white haired Shosh (Sonoya Mizuno, House of the Dragon), even going out for a night on the town and getting sloshed. Insert some standard comedy confusion when Kat/Bonnie runs into her London friends out for a stagette, and she does her best to drunkenly straddle both characters. Now tight with the boss, they end up being introduced his Fly's boss.

Things only get worse for them. Yet they continually improv their way out of it. The power of improv!

Abandoning the recap, as you always do? Can't commit?

If I liked anything a lot about this movie it was the side-joke that Marlon's ante-upped "character", a belligerent, ex-con with anger issues, who is entirely unlike his own actual foppish personality is a mirror to Orlando Bloom's own career -- just go ahead and enter Orlando Bloom into Amazon's own search engine, and you will see at least two movies where Bloom plays a character very much like Roach, shaved head and all. Bryce Dallas Howard pretty much plays on point for herself, and Nick Mohammed is first-season Nathan Shelley.

The juxtaposition between these average people ending up as actual criminals while the movie humanizes the low-level crime boss and his enforcer is fun, making the real Bad Guys not only a dirty cop but other more violent, more deadly criminals. Is there a point to their journey? For Roach and The Squire, definitely but I think Bonnie ends up exactly where she was at the beginning, which is not so bad afterall, which was the point of her journey.

Cue the ante-upped sequel where they end up in a few shady, European drug-cartel run city alley ways, while on a Improv Tour.

P.S. Yes, Sean Bean dies.

ReWatch: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

1977, Steven Spielberg () -- download

I quickly browsed back through the "rewatch" tag to see how I handle a first-post about something I haven't watched in forever, like maybe decades. Unfortunately, there were not enough examples to form an opinion. But I will keep the "rewatch" as I have seen it before, just not rewatched since the days of VHS probably.

Why rewatch this? Because the terrible YouTube app on my Android TV decided I should be exposed to clips of it. Every month or so, this app chooses a new keyword that barely connects to my interests & previously-watched and lambastes me with repeated examples of the keyword. Its not very good at refreshing the content, so for about a month I was exposed to the least-effort type YouTube posts that are essentially short clips of older, popular movies. I guess the algorithm worked?

I wonder what the YouTube legalities are around "clips" because as soon as a movie or TV show is available digitally, said low-effort clips will begin appearing.

When did I see this originally... I am not sure. I would have been 10 when it hit the cinemas, and while I was probably deep in my UFO phase (before D&D and fantasy took over all other interests), I likely would have been too afraid to convince someone to go see it with me (a parent, uncle, or friend's older brother) so waited the two or so years for it to appear on VHS? Production notes in Wikipedia say otherwise, but I know I saw the original cut long before I ever saw any special edition. Either way, as an adolescent, I know I would have been simultaneously enraptured and terrified out of my mind. I probably spent a few years convinced I was going to be abducted. I only realize now that the anxiety I carry with me now, ever present and constant, was present then as well; it only needed a trigger.

Three paragraphs in and they are almost entirely referential, not about the movie. I am thinking this blog does as much as a diary of All Things Toasty as it does as a "movie review" site. But that's nothing revelational. 

The movie begins with my favourite bits, actually the clips I saw on YouTube, the finding of WWII era war planes in the Sonoran Desert of Mexico. They are in pristine shape, fuel still in the tanks, old photos stuck onto the consoles. The old man sitting nearby tells the investigators how the sun came out at night, how it sang to him. He is sunburned, but I distinctly remember something about him having grown back a full head of teeth from the encounter; false memory or something buried in one of the subsequent editions perhaps. Whichever, this opening sequence still thrills me; it is chaotic and confusing and explains nothing while opening us to so so many possibilities. 

But really, who are these guys? Obviously they have resources, and are international, but they have authority to cross borders. They are led by Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut; apparently of French New Wave filmmaker fame -- didn't know anything about him then, still don't now) who needs an interpreter, and are supported by American military. This rewatch doesn't really give me any more insight, but I assume something Project Blue Book related?

The opening bit is followed by something likely inspired by those "reality reenactment" TV shows about UFOs -- an encounter between a number of commercial airplanes and... something. I love this scene, its almost-non-digital technology and the monotone just-doing-their-jobs statements & confusion between the air traffic controllers and the pilots. In the end, the UFO buzzes them and everyone refuses to make a report, and would rather just forget the encounter happened. This is exemplary director directing actors, to get a tone he wants.

Then we meet our "main characters", or at least our more relatable people. We have Barry Guiler (really, I only know his name from WP) and his mom Jillian (Melinda Dillon, Reign Over Me). In a paradigm making scene, aliens come to their remote country house, wakeup Barry and his toys, and shine bright lights everywhere. Barry almost gets abducted. This visit leads to power outages which drags Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss, Red) into work as a linesman, driving out onto a remote country road to find the source of the blackouts.

I cannot stress how iconic these scenes have become. With Barry and his mom, through the simple use of toys coming to life, Spielberg established an otherworldly intervention that would be reused over and over in coming movies. And that's just this encounter; later, when they aliens terrorize Jillian (Barry seems oblivious) and abduct the boy, the bright lights, intense coloured beams, also established something that would be mimicked in film & TV for ages to come. And let's not forget the strong light over Roy's truck, the ding ding ding of the activated railway crossing and the haunting, albeit amusing "car" pulling up behind him. So so much of these scenes were unlike anything we had every seen before, and not just that, they established so much: fear, wonder, mystery, technological advancement. And yet, even with ages of subsequent comparisons, they still work.

Roy gives chase and ends up on a bluff above the city where the UFOs are being observed by... a family of rednecks? Never understood the "mountain folk" characters, but I can only imagine its related to the idea that its usually dumb rural hicks who reported seeing strange objects in the skies, that nobody gets on camera of course. But a lot of people see these things, even a trio of police cars give chase after the "ice cream!" balls of light. What are they? Piloted vehicles? MicroMachines with tiny tiny grey men? Remote piloted drones? A few are decent single pilot fighter ships but most were small. But, as said, a lot of people see them.

How can I go about introducing the characters without mentioning Roy's family. From the get go, we are supposed to side with Roy, as his family is one big stressor. The kids are nightmares and Ronnie (Teri Garr, Mr. Mom) is shrill & nagging. How very 1970s to do such eye rolling negative stereotypes. I get that Roy's "sunburned on one side" special encounter with the ice cream spaceships was overwhelming emotionally, but his growing obsession with the encounter is annoying from the get-go. I am not sure how he thinks dragging his family back to the bluff in the middle of the night is going to bring back the aliens. Once he gets so far as tossing uprooted trees through his kitchen window, he's beyond sympathy, to me.  And yet, I do recall my younger self empathising with his obsession, the idea that having something so incredibly special happening to him deserves his full attention. I am much more easily annoyed by people these days, if reading this blog hasn't made that apparent.

Meanwhile the crew led by Lacombe are also investigating the experiences, even going so far as to bring in Roy and Jillian, and the rednecks, for interviews. The rednecks scuttle that meeting with their "theories". The crew has also done some further location hopping and found a few other "lost to history" items and received signals from space, including the to-be-played-on-childrens-xylophones-for-ages musical notes -- no seriously, while babysitting, I taught myself the tune. No aliens though. The scene (in India?) where Lacombe finds a cult that SINGS the musical notes --- that still gives me chills and I am not sure why. Today, that scene would be CG / AI generated, without the hundreds of extras -- boo.

Finally, the abandoned Roy and the childless Jillian see / hear about Devil's Tower -- a place I still cannot believe is real. Its just too fantastical looking to have not been invented for the movie. But it is real and its a national monument in the US. Lacombe, who definitely has the support of the US government, has not only been using their knowledge from the space signals to establish something but they have also convinced the state officials to fake an event, something that will scare people away from the area and allow for mandatory evacuation of the entire corner of that state. No matter, Roy and Jillian are persistent and actually break the quarantine to head to the incredible looking natural structure that Roy so accurately created in his living room (to be fair, he makes model railway dioramas, so has some skill in such) that he knows there is a ravine down one side. And it gets the pair, sans one poor fellow, to the site. But the site of what?

Having been enraptured by all this lead up, even in rewatch mode, I admit, I was somewhat disappointed as to the climax of the movie. I can faintly recall my UFO-obsessed childhood reaction (wonderment), but after having seen so so SO many other movies of alien arrivals now, this one just seems almost mundane. That said, the city-sized mothership is still impressive and awe inspiring -- it must have been seen for miles, despite the evacuation. I did note, this time round, that while the communication via music was not understood by the humans at all, they do let a computer take over and play the music for them. I wonder if they knew what the conversation was about. 

When the aliens do arrive, in all their weird, big-headed configurations (the spider legged one must be in pain, in Earth's gravity) only Lacombe and Roy are unafraid. Imagine being one of the support staff guys, hired to setup scaffolding or plug in giant mobile Moog keyboards. They have stories they will be telling their grandchildren; if they aren't locked in Black Sites afterwards. Lacombe seems a little jealous Roy gets to go with them. Not sure if the trade-off was worth it, considering all the people they let go -- Roy is a bit of a nob. 

In the end, what did aliens want? What was accomplished on that "third kind" day? How did it end up being presented to the world? What happens next? Sooooo many questions. And no sequel or bad TV series or legasequel reboot to explain anything, though I am sure there is probably a terribly bot-generated blog post out there somewhere with "Ending of Close Encounters Explained" which explains nothing.

Still an impressive movie, not just from its awesome subject matter but also from the compelling, non-standard film making. It stands out even today, and if it was made today, even by Spielberg, it would not be allowed to have the structure it does. He would have been forced down a road, maybe even by his own experiences, of more adventure, more excitement, maybe some kabooms. This somewhat disconnected experience is still by no means perfect, but it is enthralling.

KsMIRT: vintage retro throwbacks

KsMIRT=Kent's Month In Reviewing Television, where each month (or whenever) Kent steps through the TV series he completed watching recently-ish as relayed in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format, you know, for kids! 

This Month:

Police Squad! (1982, dvd - 6/6 episodes)
G.I. Joe: Operation: Dragonfire (1989, youtube - 5/5 episodes)/G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero Season 1 (1990, 18/19 episodes)
Duster Season 1 (2025, HBO - 4/10 episodes)

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The What 100: If a crime has been committed in Los Angeles, Detective Lieutenant Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) is on the case. His captain, Ed Hocken (Alan North), is already on the scene. Drebin will need to track down clues, interrogate suspects, receive forensics, check out the word on the street, and, invariably, get into a gun fight before solving the case. Freeze frame. 

(1 Great)  "Turns out it was one of those 24 hour wicker joints...". Never a more random and absurd statement then punctuated by the visualization of said all-night wicker spot that will just live in my memory palace to be recalled whenever I need a lift or a chuckle.

(1 Good) Police Squad! found its footing and formula from the first episode. The opening credits - full of gunfire - always featured a "special guest" that was then killed in the opening credits. At the end of the credits, the title of the episode is shown on screen, but the title the announcer presents is completely different. After the precipitating incident was shown, Drebin would always be in his car, en route, providing voice over with some hilarious, irrelevant backstory about where he'd been. It also sets up the gag of Drebin always crashing his car into something when he parks that would carry on into The Naked Gun series. Each episode has a sequence where Drebin consults with his forensics expert Ted Olson (Ed Williams) who is always teaching some kid science when Frank walks in. Drebin also every episode consults with the shoeshine guy Johnny the Snitch (William Duell) who gives him some special dirt, which is always then followed up with some professional asking Johnny for help, like a surgeon asking how to approach a triple bypass. Each episode always ends with Frank and Ed wrapping up, with Drebin recounting all the previous episodes bad guys whom the latest bad guy is getting locked up in, and then freeze framing. Except it's just everyone standing still, with, maybe, one person perplexed by the freeze frame. The formulaic elements are of the sort that they build upon each other and get funnier the more they are used, especially as by episode six they already seemed to be itching to subvert their own formula.

(1 Bad) Out of 6 episodes, only one is a dud, with the comedy just not hitting. The production was obviously having an off week that week. As well, it's annoying that the DVD presents the episodes in the order in which they aired (or didn't air, as the case may be) but you can tell by the wrap-up at the end of each episode that episodes 3 and 4 have been switched 

META: The Zucker-Abrams-Zucker mode of comedy had just been forged with Airplane! and it was with Police Squad! that they started to hone the edge of that sword. While not always as rapid-fire as their work would later become, Police Squad! was still loaded with jokes and gags that ranged from sharp wordplay, stupid characters, visual gags, upending genre conventions and so much more. It's so remarkably successful at achieving what it set out to be (funny!) that it is shocking the series only lasted 6 episodes, of which only four actually aired. Old school television is fascinating  Nielsen opined that the TV viewing audience of the time didn't have the attention span the show needed, and their kind of rapid fire, visual comedy needed the devoted attention of a theatrical audience. It's such a modern argument, that the home-viewing audience isn't actually paying attention to what's on their television, it's remarkable to hear it be said decades ago.

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The What 100: G.I. Joe, America's top secret mobile strike force team. The mission: to defend freedom. The threat: Cobra, an evil organization bent on world conquest. The battle cry: YO JOE! GOT TO GET TOUGH!

(1 Great) Let's be real here, when Canadian animation company DIC took over animation duties from Sunbow, the G.I. Joe series took a nosedive in quality, in terms of storytelling, voice acting and visual animation. Where the Sunbow series was ridiculous, it was a knowing sort of ludicrousness that emphasized the fun the writers were having with the series, while still being pretty focussed on character building. In this DIC series, the episodes are quite juvenile and lacking in anything that could be called character development. But, amidst the poorly drafted characters are some idiotic stories that are stupidly entertaining, such as "Granny Dearest", where Cobra's resident mad bomber/idiot Metal-Head's grandmother pays him a visit on Cobra's latest debacle. Or the two-part |Victory at Volcania" where General Hawk (in his radical 90's-styled Jim Lee-esque superhero costume) is age-shamed repeatedly and bumbles around like an old man when he's, what? 50? Or the Christy Marx-written two-parter "The Mind Mangler/BIOK" where fears of AI (how prescient) are muted when Cobra's artificial intelligence BIOK runs rogue from its world conquering duties and instead hyperfixates on its petty grudge towards Skydive.

(1 Good) The point of the G.I. Joe cartoon was not really entertainment, but to sell toys, and much, much more than the Sunbow series, the DIC series really got them toys in the cartoon, constantly adding new characters and vehicles and playsets to the show. When I was a kid watching cartoons, that's what I wanted, to see more of the toys on screen and in action. The story didn't concern me as much. I still love to see the toys up on screen, but, moof, good stories are needed.

(X Bad) DIC's first stab at Joe was a direct follow-up to 1987's G.I. Joe: The Movie with the middling 5-part Operation: Dragonfire. I had heard legend about how bad the DIC animation was, but Operation: Dragonfire, by and large, looks pretty good (kind of up to DIC's Inspector Gadget standards, if a little more rushed) but the story centered around Sargeant Slaughter -- a ridiculous "real life" character from professional wrestling, and a terrible voice actor -- as he squares off against Serpentor who is also dealing with an internal conflict with a revived Cobra Commander. It's passably watchable but the step down in storytelling quality from Sunbow is evident from the start.

DIC's first full season, however finds the animation quality continually degrading. By the time the series reaches its season finale, the lack of movement and continuity in the animation moves beyond the point of being kitschy and funny and into "embarrassed for your" territory (even though the animation is at its worst, "The Mind Mangler/BIOK" is about as close to the Sunbow series as the storytelling gets with Marx's script fitting much more in the classic mould of the series). 

Though the Sunbow series did have an expansive cast of characters, they were also a largely stable, rotating cast, both on the hero and villains side. DIC pretty much abandons all the characters from Sunbow in favour of the 1989/1990/1991 wave of figures (for obvious reasons) but, again, Sunbow's show runners really defined their characters and personalities, while the roster on the DIC series were basically reduced to, at best, a single personality quirk. Only Cobra Commander is still voiced by his original actor Christopher Collins, and is one of few carry-over characters from Sunbow. The Cobra team shrank to a standard roster of Cobra Commander, Destro, Metal-Head and Gnawgahyde with a host of nameless vipers filling in the background (and even Gnawgahyde disappeared mid-season).

The worst offense of the DIC G.I. Joe series was the demotion of its female characters. On the Joe team, only Lady Jaye was still around and frequently one hair away from "damsel in distress" territory. Gone was her status as, basically, third-in command (in one episode, she's the object of fixation for a resurrected pharaoh who kidnaps her with intent to marry her...sigh). In Operation: Dragonfire Baroness and Zarana are effectively arm candy for Serpentor and Cobra Commander, without much initiative of their own. They stay out of the fight for the most part. In the first season, you can bet that pretty much any new female character is Zarana or Baroness in disguise. The Sunbow series put its female characters just as much in the center of the action as their male counterparts (even if they were vastly outnumbered) so it's awful to see almost no representation in the DIC series.

META: Lady Kent has long been the G.I. Joe fan in the Kent household, but when the G.I. Joe Classified Series of action figures released in 2020, I started really getting into G.I. Joe, more and more so with each year passing. We did the watch/rewatch of the Sunbow series last year and the DIC series started to feel more and more like a gap in my Joe awareness. It was only recently that Tubi had the DIC series also available to stream (unless I've just missed it all this time). Every time I put this series on, it would elicit groans from Lady Kent, it's a real tarnish on the Joe series that she loves. But every time that new, oh so 80's rawk "Got To Get Tough, Yo Joe!" theme crops up I start ironically bopping by head to it, and getting in the spirit of its full-blown jankiness. It is a terrible cartoon, full stop, but even worse when put in comparison to what came before. But I really do think it has its genuinely fun moments that are actually intentional and not accidental, though they are far fewer and further between that its predecessor series. I'm keen to jump into Season 2.

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The What 100: In the Southwest in 1972, new FBI transfer Nina Hayes (Rachel Hilson) requests to be assigned the most impossible case, taking down crime boss Ezra Saxton (Keith David). Where others have failed, and dramatically so, Nina will persist. It's not just about proving herself, it's also personal. But finding the cracks in the organization proves difficult, until she lands on Saxton's ace wheel-man Jim Ellis (Josh Holloway). He's utterly loyal until Nina finds reason for him to doubt his boss... she can prove Saxton killed Jim's brother. So he begins working as an undercover operative while Nina faces obstacle after obstacle both in the field and inside her own agency.

(1 Great) I will love Josh Holloway forever, but he isn't the bright spot of this series. That goes to Keith David who is charming, menacing, funny, caring and brutal whenever he needs to be. David plays it all so well, even if the show finds itself backed against the wall trying to rationalize his character. Eventually it's clear that everything is a game to Saxton and he controls all the pieces...he's good at keeping secrets and manipulation, but he has flaws and that's both his trust and his family.

(1 Good) The opening credits features a rollicking 70's-styled horn-heavy adventure theme by JJ Abrams, with animations by Meat Dept. which is basically a high speed chase through city and desert but the cars are basically Hot Wheels-style and everything is in miniature. It's a delightful, fun, entertaining intro to a show that just doesn't match its energy or vivaciousness.

(1 Bad)  The stunt driving isn't exciting. It's not shot nor edited in a manner that wowed me ever. For a show whose center premise is about a bad-ass driver, it doesn't present the badass driver with enough badass driving opportunity. I was hoping for a TV-ified Baby Driver but the needle drops feel like afterthoughts, and the action doesn't match. 

META: I want Duster to be so much better than it is. I was hoping it would sink into the 1970's style of production and storytelling, instead it's trying to be very modern, with heaps of backstory and character complications and multifaceted dynamics. The themes around family and doing right by them are at the show's core, but it doesn't know how to tie them all together, and it doesn't know the tone it's trying to set. Nina and her associate agent Awan Bitsui (Asivak Koostachin) are the only non-white people in this Agency office and the show gets weighed down by that, even as they both prove themselves over and over to eyes unwilling to see. I expected a peppier, poppier show, one that lives up to its credits sequence and it is just too dramatic to be fun, and the fun it does try to have seems out of place in its own narrative.

Despite my delight at having Josh Holloway back on TV, this show really didn't work for me, and this character really didn't work for Holloway. Worst of all,Coming from co-creator JJ Abrams (with LaToya Morgan), I was expecting something bolder, and perhaps bigger from the show.

KWIF: Weapons and Fargo

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. I went to the theatre three times in the past week but only saw one new film. Partook in a second viewing of Superman which I like even more a second time around, and I caught the 4K theatrical release of Shin Godzilla, the satire of which really stood out this time... there's a Wes Anderson quality to many of the scenes and edits which is a weird thing to say about a Godzilla movie. Anywho...

This Week:
Weapons (2025, d. Zach Cregger - in theatre)
Fargo (1996, d. Joel [and Ethan] Coen - DVD)

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I laughed, I shook, I squicked, I laughed some more.

With his sophomore effort, following Barbarian, I'm sure there were just as many people sitting ready at their typewriters (typewriters?) to anoint Zach Cregger as "the new face of horror" as there were people ready to tear him down as the freshly anointed "new face of horror."

If anything Weapons, paired with Barbarian, is not so much anointing anything as it is diagnosing Cregger with Shyamalan syndrome. And much like M Night or Jordan Peele or Ari Aster, except with an even shorter runway, there's a quiet mob, growing louder one voice at at time to express their displeasure that anyone might even deign to heap such a "new face of" moniker upon him.

Cregger certainly does play in horror tropes, but his origins as a sketch comedian, like Peele, are inescapable in his output, and his horror is just as often comedic as it is horrific. Both of Cregger's films start with an incredible premise for a horror-thriller, but Cregger's comedy genes have taught him that it's funnier to pivot from the narrative than it is to move straight through it.

And so, as with Barbarian, Weapons turns, and turns, and turns again. It's not a direct parallel to Shyamalan's infamous "twist endings" but definitely he's going to be painted with a stylistic expectations brush that will delight some and disappoint others the more he does or doesn't hew to such expectations. You're damned if you do, Zach....

At its core Weapons is a mystery which gets unravelled by jumping from one perspective to the next, moving in an non-linear fashion, until eventually it gives up all the goods of the past leading into wrapping things up in a finale that is both tense and hilarious. Your mileage may vary.

Mysteries, especially those in the horror/fantasy/sci-fi vein are always going to face scrutiny. In worlds where the possibilities are endless, as a mystery is explored, the audience's minds are given fuel to run rampant, and the likelihood that the actual reveal, the actual solution to the mystery is going to disappoint more than it's going to delight is quite high.

So, Weapons starts with the disappearance of an entire class of kids, save one, and their teacher (Julia Garner). The kids all left their homes at 2:17 am, fleeing into the night. The teacher bears the brunt of public scrutiny even though the cops have cleared her of any involvement. The young boy as well.

The imagery, both beautifully composed night shots of children running down the wet streets and the Ring camera footage of children fleeing their homes is captivating and potent. Cregger and his cinematographer (Larkin Seiple, Everything Everywhere All At Once) really doing some fabulous work.

The story is then told jumping through different characters' vantage points, including a few delves into their nightmares. They are basically like sketches -- though premise set-ups lead to more cliffhangers instead of punchlines (or the cliffhangers are the punchlines) -- and enticing in their obliqueness if only a tiny wee bit disappointing as we lose sight of other characters for a while.

If you've read this far (and why would you?) I've already said too much. Cregger's second film, much like his first, is a bigger success the less you know going into the experience, the less you anticipate. But, again, with a mystery in play, it all becomes anticipation at a certain point, and whether it measures up to what you've concocted in your brain, or anticipated fright-or-gore-wise is really going to be a subjective experience.

There is, at least in theory, a school shooting metaphor mixed in the works, but where it's maybe most potent early on, it's all but gone by the finale. To be frank, maybe it's because I'm not American and haven't had to face school shootings to anywhere near the same degree as our neighbours to the south (not even close, like, not at all) so it's not something I have to spend a lot of time thinking about, nor is it something that is easily *ahem* triggered in me, so I didn't even notice the metaphor until after the film was over.

Is Weapons scary? There's definitely an intensity level, but I'm not sure there's any real genuine frights here. There's some gross stuff that happens, often amidst some tremendously funny moments which, all told, makes for a pretty enjoyable time. But this is not the new face of horror...or is it?

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I re-watched and reviewed Fargo back in 2014, and I find it amusing that my preamble of that review is talking about filling the gaps in my Coen Bros physical media collection and bitching about streaming. How far we've come in a decade....

Fargo is about as close to perfect a movie as you're ever going to find. What "perfect" actually means when talking about films is entirely subjective, but I take it to be that everything is working in perfect harmony to serve the vision of the director(s) and the story they are tell. The only thing that mars the whole affair is the lack of cooperation from the Minnesotan weather, which saw fit not to bless the shoot with fresh snow, and so there are plenty of scenes with trucked-in manufactured snow and melted puddles on the ground. (Just like not being American means school shootings are not on my mind, growing up in Thunder Bay means I'm hyper-attentive to what winter weather looks like in TV and movies).

Every time I watch Fargo -- which arguably isn't as often as I should, but still more than most other films -- I find myself surprised by it, noticing things I didn't notice before. The same could probably be said for the majority of the Coens' filmographies. 

The first thing to jump out at me here was the opening sequence, which finds William H. Macy's Jerry Lundegaard towing a car in a snowstorm (the film's only instance of such weather) to Fargo, North Dakota to meet the two goons (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) he's hired to kidnap his own wife for ransom he's hoping his rich father-in-law will pay out. This is the first time I've watched the film that I realized it doesn't tell you exactly why Jerry is doing what he's doing, it doesn't delve into the specifics of the hole he's dug for himself, it just presents us with Jerry standing on the precipice of it.

I've always considered Fargo to be Francis McDormand's movie and Marge Gunderson as our protagonist, but the film spends as much time with Jerry, and nearly as much time as Buscemi's Carl Showalter, the short-tempered motormouth with extremely poor judgement... Showalter can never read a room.  Sure, Marge is the hero, if primarily because she seems like the only intelligent character in the film, but it's sort of a three-hander, jumping and connecting each of their roles in the story as the connect to each other in an ever-tightening circle.

I don't know when "Minnesota Nice" entered my consciousness, but Fargo is truly an exploration of it, looking at how this ...what is it, Dutch?... pleasantness is such a mask for, well, so much darkness, and dumbness.  Well, perhaps it doesn't mask dumbness so much as it hides intellect beneath a veneer of a wide smile and quirky accent.  The dialect is infectious though, if hard to master. 

It's also the first time that the Reaganomics of 1987 dawned on me. The most prosperous time in America was not the most prosperous time for everyone, certainly not for Jerry Lundegaard. His father-in-law (Harve Presnell) is a hard-assed self-made tycoon, but of the capitalist ilk that never wants anyone else to get a leg up. This film is a reminder of how the Reagan era broke the American middle class, left them wanting more and made them desperate to get it.  It's a reminder of how "a little bit of money" makes men do the most deplorable things.  

As I've been going through the Coens oeuvre film-by-film, this is the one I've anticipated the most. It 's one of my "foundational movies" (alongside Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting), just one of those films where I immediately understood how great cinema can be. Fargo is the one where the Coens shed completely their shell, and it's not like they were timid filmmakers before, but this is an "every tool in their bucket" film, all their signatures are here in one place, and at their most accessible. I've mentioned before how it could take me a couple viewings to get into the vibe of a Coens' film, but not with Fargo. I was on board the first time I saw it and I'm more and more on board with every viewing.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Jurassic World Rebirth

2025, Gareth Edwards (Monsters) -- download

Huh. Its a Gareth Edwards movie. Didn't expect that. And it just came and went without so much as a T-rex subsonic rumble. And, I guess the Jurassic World "series" of movies were not done, with the release of Dominion? New trilogy in the sub-franchise? Stand-alone? No matter what they had in mind, this movie is not going to inspire anything further. I hope, at least, that Edwards went away with a big paycheck to fund whatever passion project he had in mind next.

You would figure that Gareth Edwards would be the perfect choice for making a movie about giant, awe inspiring monsters, considering his success with Godzilla and ... well, Monsters. But from my view point, this movie struck me as least-effort, not bothering to exceed the expectations of the Purple Suits who decided the movie had to be made, and directed every second of it. Instead of a proper Edwards movie, we get a pastiche of previous Jurassic movies, as well as his own, but it all ends up feeling more like a mood board of a movie, rather than a creator's vision.

Connected with Kent while this post was in draft, and I mentioned I was surprised we didn't even talk about going to see it. He mentioned how Edwards was brought in late in the movie, not even being the first or second choice director. I get that Hollywood is a machine, that movies are often constructed, but this isn't his vehicle let alone his "passion project" and that is apparent. He's just the guy assigned to the activity.

And yet it still started off strong, to my perception. As this movie is abandoning the cast and story of the other three, but still retaining the continuity, this is a world where dinosaurs got released from the parks, made their way in the world, but.... are now dying off. So much for "life finds a way". Anywayz, the novel way this one sets itself up is to focus on the mercenary team hired to bring someone illegally to the island where the dinosaurs they want to exploit are. The mains are initially presented as this entirely economically driven group.

These movies have always had a "mercenary team" but they have usually been relegated as background fodder, almost nameless, ready to be "joyfully" munched upon by the dinosaurs. You had Ludlow's team sent to capture dinosaurs, under the eye of big game hunter Roland Tembo (The Lost World) and the backup team hired by the wealthy Kirbys in Jurassic Park III. And of course, Vincent Donofrio's Hoskins security head who has his own ideas. They are all less than sympathetic characters playing a dangerous game for money and maybe some thrills. And then they die.

This movie brings us a much more sympathetic Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson, Asteroid City), who is the main character, and the main face draw to the movie. She's entirely in it for the money, offered more than enough cash to hire a team to take the latest Corporate Buffoon (Rupert Friend, Asteroid City) to yet another island where the/a corporation was experimenting with newer, flashier, more dangerous versions of the dinosaurs that were going out of fashion in the rest of the world. And they bring Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey, Bridgerton) an actual dinosaur enthusiast, as a SME, and unappreciated moral compass. Finally, the movie adds in the sympathetic family, a spinoff of the little girl who got bit in The Lost World. The Delgados are on a family sailing adventure, across the Atlantic, when they are capsized by the whale-sized dinosaur our main team is hunting. They are picked up by the main team, but inevitably they all end up marooned on the island where the big nasty experimental dinos are.

Oh, the toss away reason for all of this is that heart-blood from three really really big dinosaurs can create a wonder drug that will save millions of lives, and Corporate Buffoon tags along so he can twirl his moustache. The SME, while accepting the paycheck, would rather the drug become open-sourced, but he is a dinosaur enthusiast, not a Big Pharm scientist, so I am not sure what he thinks he can do with a couple of vials of blood; but shrug whatever, unappreciated moral compass.

Continuing with the pastiche, there are elements that make this almost a family movie as the tight knit Delgados are focused on as much the mercenaries who get munched on and die, sans other named-face Mahershala Ali (Green Book). We even get the frightened-little-girl-gets-cute-baby-dino distraction. If I wasn't so fond of Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Magnificent Seven), who plays Daddy Delgado, I would have found the whole idea annoying AF. Of note, the mercenaries were not the Bad Guys, so each death is supposed to carry a pang of regret, instead of the "yeah, the raptor got em!" of previous movies. It somewhat successful at that, but I am unusually subject to collateral death.

Then we move onto the horror movie, when the two groups finally connect at "the village", or the central compound where the originating scientific research group were based -- basically we get the research station, fuel pipes, helicopter landing pad, and a convenience store / gas station. Oh, and most importantly, to give us some Alien vibes, we get "sewer tunnels" below the whole research station. As Marmy pointed out, the Big Bad, a monstrously mutated very large dino was channeling the human-xeno hybrid (what was with the big bulbous gelatinous forehead? sort of a "shoot here" formation)  from Alien:Resurrection. But none of it is very compelling nor exciting, more just merely by the books. Set design was great though.

As for the presence of Edwards, we get little flourishes and that's pretty much it. You get the lighting reveals of scale from Godzilla once the D-Rex (Distortus Rex) appears, and some of the grand landscape scenes reminded me of the background establishing shots in The Creator. If the ooo and awwww of the dino herd was his, I couldn't tell. And one thing definitely not his, was the terrible terrible CG. Primarily it was composited into the scenes really badly, and usually terribly lit. 

If this movie was meant to be the "rebirth" of the whole franchise, it has failed on every level. ScarJo's presence served nothing for the movie -- she's there, she competent, she has the hint of being an interesting character, but... we get little. There is nothing left in the plot that could lead to more, and nothing distinct about this one that would inspire the re-use of the characters. I really hope this doesn't hurt Edwards career, and just gives him some bank for whatever he would really like to be doing.