3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): They Cloned Tyrone

2023, Juel Taylor (screenplay Creed II) -- Netflix

Welcome back to another episode of "White Men Review Black Movies". 

I kind of cringe when I write "black movie" as a thing because, in all honesty, I am just an observer of someone else's experience, in pretty much all movies. I feel a need to label things to better understand things, to shape them into my experience. Even if my experience of it is entirely based on pop culture (and your demographic, dude). So, let's drop that from now on. I mean, its already been said, but enough is enough.

Kent writes about the movie here.

Dystopian scifi is usually set in the Near Dark Future. But we have been saying, something pithfully, for the last ten years or so, that we might be living in a dystopian future, now. Its the mind playing the same trick that it does for conspiracy theorists, in that things cannot be this horrible without being... fictional... right? Someone is out there manipulating the world, in ways more than it was always manipulated, influencing this greater enshitification (to semi-quote Doctorow) of the world that we cannot seem to claw back from.

This movie envisions a window on one particularly enshitified existence, wherein your life is dominated by run down housing projects, falling apart homes, drug dealers, pimps & hoes, drive-bys, lottery scratchers that never win, and a plentitude of alcohol & drugs. Fontaine (John Boyega, Pacific Rim: Uprising) is a low level drug dealer, morose and sardonic, who personally demands his money from Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx, Project Power), a throwback braggadocio of a pimp. But earlier that evening Fontaine broke the leg of a competitors corner boy, and as he leaves Slick's motel room, he is murdered by the competitor. Thinking-of-retiring ho Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris, The Marvels) witnesses it.

The next morning, Fontaine wakes in his bead to begin his usual routine: talk to mamma through her door, buy a scratcher & lose, buy a 40 of malt liquor, give the bum some, etc etc etc. His routine and life is empty, but not ended. But Slick and Yo-Yo notice; how could they not. Their state of befuddlement allows them to notice the black SUV that snatched up a man and connect it to whatever is going on. Following it, they are led to a typical rundown house which happens to have an elevator in the closet, which leads down to a secret mad scientist laboratory. And thus it really begins.

So, hidden lairs, evil scientists, massive (and I mean MASSIVE) conspiracy, and satirical commentary. At the same time the Shadowy Bad Guys are keeping the cliche thug lifestyles alive they are also breeding a whiter black man, someone who can "pass" (except the hair, the hair is sticky). Yes, this community, and others, are "the control group" because gentrification is the end-goal, a homogenization of all of American, a more united United States. Cringe.

The movie has a lot of fun making its commentary while playing on so many cliches and negative stereotypes. One of the deepest cuts happens as background noise in a hair salon as a teacher complains about having to spend her own money on school supplies, only to have it all fade away as soon as her hair straightener is applied. I cannot comment on how effective the social satire is, but it was all well constructed. 

Wait. "Black-Comedy" ? That tag is its own deep cut.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): High Life

2018, Claire Denis (Un beau soleil intérieur) -- Amazon

I didn't get it. I didn't get the point. I didn't get the point of the movie, of their journey, of the choices on what human interactions were depicted in the movie. I feel dumb, I feel disconnected from an older intellect that, if not tangibly, would have felt a gut reaction to what I had watched, an inherent understanding of what the director had been trying to do here, even if I was not able to coherently say it out loud. 

I think that a lot these days -- what is the point, what was the point. I look back at my choices, my interactions, what I chose to do with my time and I wonder... why? I look at it right at this exact moment, where I watched a movie, and persevered to the end, only mildly entertained, and I wonder why. Why am I watching movies that don't excite me, why am I writing about movies without the enthusiastic desire to do so, why do I fill my queues with movies that stagnate until I wonder why I added them. So many why's that only have one banal answer -- because. Just because. I rage at the dying light, seeing fewer days ahead of me than behind, wondering if I will be filling those days with more value. I don't really have to wonder -- value will be overwhelmed by just because, because that is life. My life. What I choose.

In some ways, dude, that is exactly what the characters in the movie are going through. Some ways. Not much of it.

Kent's point in watching this movie was that he was filling his holidays off with a bunch of movies over seven days. That was the point, enjoying the sheer ability to cram the experiences into the short time period. I get that, that is one of the reasons we (Marmy and me, not Kent and I) do out "31 Days of ...", for the enjoyment of consumption for consumption's sake, for over-exposure, for over-saturation. Because some things are fun, just for fun's sake. He liked this movie much more than I did.

High Life is a space movie in three acts, about a crew of criminals sent into deep space, a journey from which they will not return, to a black hole, to do... experiments, for some reason. Act one is the introduction to Monte (Robert Pattinson, The Batman), a lone survivor with a baby. Act two revisits the journey, the crew of misfits, the experiments onboard and how the baby Willow comes about. Act three, which is very brief, have Monte and Willow, now a teenager, coming to the climax of their journey. Act two dominates the movie, and to be entirely honest, I did not like it, at all.

Even just writing this, I recall why watched this movie. In my head there is an unwritten story about a lone astronaut. It is a tale of space and purpose and technology, but for the most part it is about loneliness and isolation. So, any opportunity to see someone else explore this idea, I am onboard with. And, I like seeing how other creators explore space ships and technology, through practical effects, high & low budgets. This one was very much in the low budget.

The ship's depiction is interesting -- its just a big box with engines and the number 7 on the side. That implies six failed missions before. There is just one crew member, the captain, who has to punch his biometric driven code into the computer system once a day or... well, everything will power down. So, no thoughts of mutiny here, well, until he has a stroke and one of the prisoners, who is also the lead scientist experimenting on the criminals, realizes she can cut out that biometric code trigger and others can pretend to be him. The ship's hallways are not the usual octagonal or metal lattice work dominated conduits, just hallways, with doors, a few air locks and only a bit of greebles to make it scifi. The best part of the depiction is the garden, a massive wild structure just utterly overgrown with green -- they obviously have that science perfected and it feeds them well. It seems everyone has a purpose on the ship, but that doesn't stop them from eventually allowing their little society to break down, killing each other, until only Monte is left. Because, humans are the worst.

This middle act is dominated by the experiments the scientist Dibs (Juliette Binoche, Ghost in the Shell) is performing on them. She is obsessed with reproduction, despite being a child killer herself, and collects semen whenever the men masturbate. And then forces the women to become impregnated. But all the children are dying. The whole segment is uncomfortably intimate and visual, replacing alluring (which typical Hollywood would attempt to seduce us via) with disturbing. Only Monte seems distanced from it all, as he chooses abstinence over interaction. Until he is drugged and raped by Dibs, and she uses it, along with Boyse (Mia Goth, Pearl) the angriest of the women, to create Willow. All of it leading to her birth is so ... unsavoury.

If there was any relief to this act, it was in recollection of act one. Monte's caring for Willow is true and obvious. They still have a long number of years until they arrive at their destination so he is going to keep her alive and happy as well as he can. And he does. The final act has her as a teenager, but once again, I wonder what the point of this final, and very final, act was. I can postulate and come up with all kinds of story telling formulaic ideals, but I am still left wondering why and what was the whole value to the story that is told.

ReWatch: Better Off Dead

1985, Savage Steve Holland (One Crazy Summer) -- download

Sometimes the things you remember from your youth, with great, and I mean vast, amounts of fondness turn out to be ... well, better left in the past, perhaps even... better off dead? Despite still getting some chuckles, this is very very not good movie. And yet, I can still understand why it would have some of that rep-cinema, rerun, yell & throw popcorn at the screen, cult following allure.

Greendale, California. Lane Meyer (John Cusack, Hot Tub Time Machine) is obsessed with Beth (Amanda Wyss, Assassin's Fury), his girlfriend of six months, a pretty, popular blonde. Obsessed. Stalker levels. Photos everywhere, comical extremes such as having her face atop every hanger in his closet so it looks like she's wearing his clothes. Moments after we are exposed to this, she dumps him for the pretty, popular, blonde jock captain of the ski team, Roy Stalin (Aaron Dozier, this was his only feature; guess acting wasn't for him). As expected, Roy is also a bully, and oddly, the movie positions Lane as the counter-nerd, despite it being obvious he dated Beth and skis and has generally higher levels of confidence that most 80s nerds would not. Maybe it isn't helped that his best friend is 80s uber-nerd/stoner Charles de Mar (seminal nerd Curtis Armstrong, American Dad!).

Time doesn't lend itself well to what we are comfortable with --- this level of obsession is just creepy these days, and most plots position it as such. Even creepier is the sub-plot side-plot of Lane's neighbour having an exchange student from France who is constantly subjected to the heavy handed attentions of the fat nerd boy, entirely encouraged to do so by his overbearing mother.

The movie is entirely about Lane trying to get Beth back, amid farcical, absurdist level of weird shit happening around him. For example, his family owes the paperboy $2, so the kid stalks Lane everywhere shouting, "Two dollars !!", which I have been quoting since -- that's fourty years, folks. And his mom is a trad-wife constantly trying new recipes that are less food, more toxic experiments creating new life forms -- why is boiled bacon blue? Every time Lane stops his family car at the lights, two "Asian kids" pull up beside him, visually challenging him to a race, one spouting off like Howard Cosell (Google him kids), but as soon as they are about to pull away, Lane backs into the owner of a local burger joint. The movie is pretty much non-stop non-sequitur situations / running gags, in between the plot to get Beth back by skiing down some deadly peak near their town.

In the 80s, I loved the lunacy of this movie, the utter weirdness of it. I probably had it on VHS. And, as already mentioned, I have been quoting it for four decades. It does not hold up. I can still see the absurdist charm that might have it show up in retro rep theatres now, but... I doubt it. This is more likely one of the movies that the 75 year old owner of the local rep theatre forces on the 20sumthins of every generation, lauding its accomplishments, not understanding why most just don't get it. 

I no longer do.

Oh, in case you are wondering, the title of the movie refers to Lane's first thoughts after Beth dumps him -- suicide. The movie intersperses all the weird shit with scenes of Lane failing to kill himself, while everyone around him is oblivious to him trying to commit suicide. I am not sure anyone would do this now.

3-2-1: Alien: Earth

2025, 8 episodes - Disney+/FX
created by Noah Hawley

The What 100: A deep-space research vessel owned by Weyland-Yutani crash lands in the Prodigy Corporation-controlled territory of New Siam. Prodigy founder Boy Kavalier sends his precious hybrids (completely synthetic bodies housing the minds of sick children who volunteered to have their consciousnesses transferred) to recover whatever is most precious that it may house. And those, of course, are a variety of alien specimens. But one surviving crew member, a Weyland-Yutani loyalist, is not going to just let Prodigy keep what they find. What's the most dangerous thing on Earth: invasive species, a new breed of being, desperate men, or greedy corporations?

3 Great: (1) World building. For the longest time I've never wanted to see "Aliens, but on Earth" because it seemed like the easiest and most obvious answer would be a plague that runs rampant, out of control too fast and too deadly for anyone to stop it. I had no interest in that story, whether in the end it was stopped or not stopped, either way it just seemed ... banal. Creator Noah Hawley's idea, which is to expand the reality of what is actually happening on Earth (it's run by essentially 5 corporations, rather than any sort of governmental structure now), and then carving out its own little pocket of this reality to operate in is the masterstroke of inspiration. In setting up the previously unheard of Prodigy Corporation, as well as establishing not just the Hybrids (as described above) but also Cyborgs (cybernetically enhanced humans) on top of the Weyland-Yutani-created Synths (who we've seen plenty of in the Alien franchise...Ash, Bishop, Michael), it's just opens up the world. For me the most stimulating parts of this reality are the glimpses into the corporate structures and rivalries (but they're not front and center to the show).

(2) The Hybrids, Boy K, and the Peter Pan connection. Centering a show or movie around kids can be a dicey affair, primarily because kid actors tend to always be a mixed bag. Even if they're really good, they're also going to age and that can make for complex storytelling. But Hybrids put the mind of children in adult bodies, and the show has a host of exceptionally capable actors playing the Hybrids who very effectively convey their youthfulness and naivety, both when interacting with adults and with each other. Where the show could have wallowed in boring "exploring their new bodies" stories like many a superhero show of the 2000s, instead it decides to wrestle with the ideas of whether these beings are even human anymore, and also delving into the trauma of severing your identity with your body.  Boy K (Samuel Blenkin, Black Mirror), an early 20-something genius in technology and business, sees himself as the "Peter Pan" of his new crew of post-human beings, and so he names all of them after the Lost Boys, except for Wendy (Sydney Chandler, Sugar), the first of his creations, who is his favourite. Having just watched a whole bunch of Pan movies recently, I loved how it toyed with its metaphorical connections, and, in the season 1 endgame, how it all was revealed to be bullshit, not connecting to the material at all. Boy K doesn't see himself as a parent to the Hybrids, but their cool rebel leader who they should inherently love. Instead the role of parents go to Arthur (David Rysdahl, Fargo Season 5) and Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries) who are the technological and psychiatric experts on the whole Hybrid endeavour (as much as anyone can be an expert on a purely experimental process). Their different approaches to parenting create a pivotal inflection point in the series, and it's so interesting to see how people in this reality deal with their multi-trillionaire overlords who think themselves beyond human. 

(3) The new Aliens. Introduced on the vessel Maginot at the start of episode 1, the research ship has been fruitful in finding new species out in its 60 years travelling the galaxy, and it's ready to bring them home. But they're unprepared for the intelligence of the creatures they have brought with them, and things start to really go sideways. Once on Earth and in the hands of the Prodigy Corporation, things really aren't much better. The hubris of humanity is to think that all creatures are unintelligent, incapable of observing or learning, and that whatever systems we put in place to contain them are beyond their capacity to figure a way out of. Of course we're wrong, and the show is at its most upsetting when it's proving how wrong we are...including thinking that the Hybrids have found a way to escape death Among the creatures is a very large kind of fly-trap like animal (as opposed to vegetable), and there are creatures called "flies" that themselves eat non-organic material. Of course, there's also the Xenomorphs in all their various stages (and because this is a TV show, it has time to explore those various stages in much more depth than ever before...including what a facehugger is implanting within its hosts. But the greatest addition, the greatest creation of the series, even more than Prodigy or the Hybrids or the Cyborgs or any individual character among a host of great characters, is a Trypanohyncha Ocellus, a multi-tenticled eyeball creature whose iris can segment into many irises around its ocular body. It is looking for an ideal host, and when it finds one it brutally and aggressively burrows into its eye socket and replaces the being's eye with itself, and presumably its tentacles are penetrating the brain of the creature in a manner that allows it to control the being. Nicknamed Iris by some in the fan community, it is a very clever, intelligent creature, that much is shown, but we don't know how smart it actually is, or if it's able to communicate with language. It's unknown when it takes a hose whether it's in full control or if there's some form of symbiosis. There so much to explore with Iris, I love it tremendously and it creeps me the fuck out.

2 Bad: (1) The Xenomorphs. Everything around the xenomorphs, from the egg pods to the facehuggers to the infancy stages that are puppets or whatnot are all great and I loved every aspect of them in the show and on screen. The full grown Xenomorphs is where I felt the show didn't work. I appreciate the fact that the Xenomorphs were pretty much always practical, man-in-suit, but I really, really, really disliked the physicality of the creatures on screen. I know the stunt performers spent a lot of time studying the history of Xenomorphs on screen and they tried to adhere as faithfully as they could to history, but something in the way these particular ones were constructed, they didn't ever look right, and the movements were too exposed. The Xenomorphs are seen broad daylight, rarely in the shadows, and it exposes them too much. You need the shadows against the darkness of the body and the details to all be somewhat hidden, to really be more difficult to see, otherwise it...well, looks like a guy in a suit.  It's weird for me to feel that this show that is built on the Alien franchise, a franchise that centers around that classic Geiger design, only truly fails at the one thing that has been done so right so often, and yet succeed at pretty much every single other thing....

(2) ...except the finale. The show was PERFECTLY set up for a Grand Guignal of a finale, to really have the aliens (all of them) run ham on the entire Prodigy compound and just be a bevvy of carnage and chaos for our protagonists (some of them) to survive. Part of what I loved about the world building I described above was how the series so obviously constructed a corner for itself to play in such that when it all came crashing down it wouldn't affect anything else in the franchise. The expectation was there would be an implosion at the hands of the creatures, and there was not. I do not fully dislike the finale, but it fundamentally fails to deliver what any Alien film or story needs to close out with, just an orgy of alien violence.  Instead it pitches focus back to its central characters, and largely has the Hybrids level up. They're the ones that run ham on the Prodigy compound. Wendy/Marcy has learned to communicate and effectively command an adult Xenomorph (one which was borne out of her brother's lung, almost as if it's weirdly family) which neuters a bit of the chaotic element, but adds its own interesting wrinkles.  Where the show ends up, with the Hybrids in control, but Weyland-Yutani descending on the compound and all the adult players who have irked the Hybrids under their thumb could still have been the end result with a big scratch-fest (though sacrifices should have been made).  It's absolutely clear (and confirmed by Hawley on the excellent companion podcast) that the decision was made to not close these out in any real fashion because they're making a  TV series, and didn't want there to be any type of closure that might give Disney/FX the opportunity to say "nah, that's alright, we don't really need more".  It's tactical rather than satisfying.

1 Good: So much good (Timothy Olyphant as a Synth!? Come on! Incredible) but episode 5, which flashes back to the full story of what happened in those final hours on the Maginot is an incredible mini-movie in the midst of the series that also acts as a massive recontextualzation of cyborg Morrow (the magnificent Babou Ceesay, Free Fire) who in the previous episodes was nothing but reprehensible and vile, and he comes out of this flashback being, almost an anti-hero.  But the episode replicates in a way the Nostramo from Ridley Scott's classic original (the idea being that many of these big barges would have been made at the same time, on a sort of assembly line basis, so they're very similar if not exactly the same), allows us to spend more time on one of these ships with a different crew, and for things to go tits up in a very different way for very different reasons. It's an absolute blast.

META: As I mentioned above, I went into Alien: Earth with expectations that it would play to the easiest possible story, and not only was I pleasantly surprised by what it actually about, I really began to love every character and their role to play in the story by episode two (the only character I don't love is Nibs, because she's too much of a wild card...venturing into psychopath territory... I think there will be interesting things around her lack of stability in the next season, but boy is her style of cuckoo-bananas hard to empathize with).

The series had me eating out of its hand pretty much from moment one. It looks incredible (man-in-suit Xenomorph excepting) and it's stories and characters are so laden with complexities, there's a tremendous amount to explore.  This isn't a mystery box show in the slightest. It's not asking questions and depriving the audience of answers, it's just got so much depth to its characters, sci-fi scenarios and psychological ideas that it's got multiple seasons worth of mining to do. But at the same time, it's part of the Alien franchise so it *must* retain the surprise and horror of its most alien aspects. Hawley and company rightly understand that the Xenomorph has been used to death and really isn't surprising anymore (it's still pretty scary), so the introduction of new species with so much to learn about them still, leaves the show with many more scares and gross-outs in its pocket.

It's going to be years before we get a season 2. Again, I wish the finale had performed better as a denouement, just to be more satisfying while we wait, but I'm definitely going to rewatch, probably multiple times, in the meantime. 

3 Short Paragraphs: Locked

2025, David Yarovesky (Brightburn) -- download

Yarovesky followed up the much maligned Brightburn with Nightbooks. 

Interesting, now that Gunn has followed up with his own idea that Superman was sent to Earth for less than savoury reasons, I wonder if it would be worthy rewatching "Brightburn", which was written by two other the other Gunn brothers.

Locked room movies, well locked luxury SUV in this case, usually lean on their elevator pitch. This one surely does. Eddie breaks into William's unlocked aforementioned SUV which instantly locks him inside. The movie is actually based on an Argentinian film called 4x4, which has had two other remakes in other countries, beyond the US. I guess people are mesmerized by the idea of Wealthy Citizen vs Poor Criminal, in today's world. I wonder if any succeed to any degree with the message contained within.

Locked room movies also depend on the performances contained within, as they are reduced to a small number of people, two in this case. Eddie is a petty criminal, full of excuses, dodging responsibility and the SUV is just sitting there. He needs $400 to have his shitbox of a van released from the repair shop and whatever he can find lying around, he will sell. Except he can't get out of this "Dolus". Try as he might, once the doors lock, he cannot break his way out. And the onboard phone keeps ringing. Eventually he answers, to the voice of William, a doctor who is just pissed at the world, and especially at the dregs of society like Eddie who just want to take take take. William's also more than a bit unhinged.

Of course, most of the movie is just William (Anthony Hopkins, A Lion in Winter) talking to Eddie (Bill Skarsgård, Boy Kills World) through the phone, leaving Skarsgård as the single visible performer. Hopkins is the perfect choice to do all his performance through his voice alone, but to be fair, its not a challenging role -- being pissed off and self-righteous is probably built into someone over the age of 75. Skarsgård does handle Eddie more delicately though, running back and forth between the loser he is, and the more thoughtful guy he could be, given he is actually intelligent. William wants Eddie to admit his culpability in what he has done, in what he perpetually does, which takes a while, and a few wounds. Eddie wants William to acknowledge that his demographic always has an upper hand, no matter how tough times get for them, but William isn't having it. In the end, only one moves forward.

Its not a terrible movie, but it doesn't do more than explore the idea, leaving any conclusions to us. Well, mostly. Some things are clear cut, some area... worth the debate. And I still like these kinds of movies that are exercises of the industry, of the makers behind them, as they are entertainment for our side of the screen.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Red Sonja

2025, MJ Bassett (Solomon Kane) -- download

I cover my love of Conan the Barbarian in my posts about those movies, both the original and the later one. I haven't rewatched the "original" Red Sonja (1985, Richard Fleischer) since the days of VHS - it was not very good, even in comparison to the others. This movie is not a remake of that, nor is it connected to the (other) attempt(s) at remakes, based on Gail Simone iconic adaptations which were going to be helmed by Robert Rodriguez, Bryan Singer and a few others. Obviously those properties never came to life. Bassett claims to draw upon the 70s Roy Thomas Marvel Comics source material for this movie, but that's a little disingenuous considering that the entire image of Red Sonja that we know today is that image -- the original Red Sonja by Robert E Howard was not even a Conan character. And she doesn't even do that well, because, well... a big breasted warrior in shiny bikini armour would not go over well, except in passing commentary on it.

I think you're wrong. I think it would go over VERY well. Hell knows that there are probably a thousand butt hurt reviews out there about how "woke" this movie is and how disappointed she is not a back-sore Amazon of a woman. And considering how much the trolls are taking over much of the USA, it won't be long before they control all media.

This is not a very good movie, but as I have said before, Swords & Sandals movies rarely are. So, I judge them by how much eye-rolling I end up doing, and how my genuine investment in the movie there seems to be. This is not one of those numerous "straight-to" fantasy movies that sit on Amazon's "if you like X, try Y" category -- those are generally made by fans of the genre but with very little skill, experience or budget, more akin to fan films with lofty ideals. There was a time, say back in the 1980s, when I would have jumped on every single one of these movies with gleeful abandon, completely ignoring their faults, my imagination filling in every gap & failing with wild head-canon. Alas, I can only watch these movies with a bit of tempered respect & irony now. THIS movie is a cut above those, but not by far.

And I really enjoyed Bassett's other Robert E Howard property, "Solomon Kane", which probably deserves another rewatch & post.

Like all good Conan-not-Conan movies, we start with a tribal society being invaded by an outside force. I hesitate to call either "barbarians" as we know that Sonja is supposed to be Hyrkanian, and we are supposed to reserve that word for the tribal people from the far north, i.e. Conan's people. Sonja loses grip on her ... little brother (?) or at least some young boy she is supposed to take care of, and she sees her mother killed. She flees into the forest and ... many many years later she is an adult and still looking for any signs of her people. Based on how easy it is to find them later, she didn't do a very good job of looking.

In the books and comics, the Hyrkanians were horse riding folk who lived on the steppes. This is exhibited by Sonja (Matilda Lutz, Revenge) being really really close to her horse. Not that close. Sonja's people are depicted like most fantasy movies do these days -- no matter what "culture" their tribe is supposed to represent, they are a mix of whatever extras live near the shoot. This is not "accurate" but is a far sight better than the days when EVERY single tribe's depiction was all (very white) British folk. But my original point is that nothing about Sonja's people looks like "horse people" beyond her having a good friendship with hers.

OK, but what DO you mean? What should "horse people" look like?

Years later, years of just wandering around in the forest with her horse? Well, years later, she comes across mercenaries hunting CGI animals (some sort of Megacerops) for their horns. That leads her to a fortress, something very classic Conan story-telling which just loved its forts on the borderlands. This fort belongs to Emperor Dragan (not pronounced dragon; Robert Sheehan, Season of the Witch), once a slave of the Barbarian King who raided Sonja's village but he fought his way out, and became Emperor, but by way of totally-not-natural use of techno-magical war machines and such. He has a tank instead of a carriage, control collars on the monsters that his mercenaries capture for him, and a city powered by a big shiny orb thing. And he's not a nice guy, having enslaved pretty much every tribe in the area, with only Sonja's people holding out. Apparently they didn't all die that day they were invaded, and his hunters have been having just as much trouble finding them as she is.

Sonja ends up in his gladiatorial pit where she meets, in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink manner, her classic chainmail bikini which was always more scale mail than chain, but pop-culture references aside, its more beach volleyball than it is supermodel. Of course, she does a good job surviving said pit and gets to choose another suit of armour which is... not much better? WTF, after making a big deal about her bikini armour, she ends up wearing a suit with a bared mid-riff anyway; essentially adds on shoulder plates and an armoured skirt instead of the mere bikini bottom.

The idea of the movie is that Sonja's people had a book, and this book contained all the scientific knowledge that Dragan has been using to Take Over the World (maniacal laughter). But he only has half, and assumes if he finds Sonja's people, and the other half, it will allow him to finish His Great Work.

Bzzzt.

Sonja does escape his city, does find her people (basically, "Hey Lady, we're over here. We always were!") but... pretty much wipes them out as she has led Dragan's army of machines and monsters against them? Why they didn't just go back into hiding in their forest, one will never know, but Sonja has to go up against him, his army and his white-haired witchy warrior woman (Wallis Day, Batwoman). Said witchy warrior woman almost kills Sonja, but Sonja's best bud (her horse) saves her at the last second. Witchy Warrior Woman reports back to Dragan that Sonja is dead and when he finds out she isn't, they stab each other. A dying Dragan runs off with his newly acquired other half of the book, which he has learned was not going to fill in the blanks on his Dark Techno-Magic but instead focused on healing and growing and all that woke stuff. He dies with Sonja apologizing for leaving him behind all those years ago, when she lost grip on his hand, but pointing out that all the choices he made afterwards were his own. Consequences, bitch! Also, he tore up the book he was not really pissed at -- I hope they have another copy. 

The movie ends with some weak nods to Conan, a barbarian king in the west, but I wouldn't hold your breath that this movie will get a sequel.

Finally, I say again, Swords & Sandals movies are rarely good and neither are many Swords & Sorcery, but many are entirely rewatchable from my vantage point. A well-tread formula with a main character you enjoy, or an intriguing situation or a fun main villain. All can bring me back to that 14 year old who would absorb anything fantasy with relish. This movie sorely lacks in those areas. Sure, its still technically above the Straight To fantasy movies I mentioned I avoid, and it has pretty decent effects and production values. But the performances are just above phoned-in, especially Sheehan, who has done some more-than-passable fantasy roles prior, and plays his villain in pretty much the anachronistic state that Jeremy Irons did in the 2000 Dungeons & Dragons. Lutz herself is ... well, bland. Sonja is supposed to be a legendary swords woman, but this Sonja states very loudly, she is better with a knife, and the back-to-nature aspects were just ... grating; is she supposed to be a warrior woman or a forest ranger? Her supporting side kicks were forgettable and the presence of monsters almost helped, especially the mild nods to stop-motion (a cyclops) but too little, too little.

T&K Go Loopty Loo: Happy Death Day

 [Toast and Kent love time loop stories.  With this suddenly unpaused "Loopty Loo" series, T&K explore just what's happening in a film or TV show loop, and maybe over time, they will deconstruct what it is that makes for a good time loop. Its been on pause for quite some time. Kent did a few solo, but its time we got back to this.]

2017, Christopher Landon (Drop) -- download

Preamble-y.

[Toast] I am also using this rewatch to kill a Dark Year lapsed movie. When I saw this back in 2018, otherwise known as aforementioned Dark Year, I freaking loved it. Not only did it hit our Loopty vibe, but it was also mildly templated to the teen slasher horror movie vibe that fits well into my 31 Days of Halloween series. It was followed by a sequel, Happy Death 2U, which we liked almost as much, and an amusing thing happened while (re)watching this one -- since both movies are about the same time loop I had some of the loops mashed up in my head. End this movie with a, "Hey, what about loop x?" Does that means we also have to do a Loopty entry for the sequel -- of course it does !

[Kent] Toot-toot, back on the loopty loop train.

How did the Loop Begin?

[Toast] In this movie, I don't think we are ever really told. But we are led to believe its related to Tree's (love the details, Theresa goes by 'tree'; Jessica Rothe, Boy Kills World) current place in her life -- she wakes up on her birthday, which she shared with her mother before her mother's death. She doesn't deal well with this day. She got pretty wasted the night before and ended up in the dorm room of nice guy Carter (no caps, no quotes, no incel energy; Israel Broussard, To All the Boys I've Loved Before) who just let her sleep it off. She barely pays him any attention, while its obvious he is infatuated, and stalks off into the day, through the main quad of the university where we are treated to a bunch of random occurrences that any loopty regular viewer will know are there purely for the repeat value: a goth kid staring at her, an eco girl asking for a signature, kids studying (who studies at 9am?) who are sprayed by sprinklers, pledge kid falling unconscious, date boy she'd rather avoid, etc. She makes it back to the sorority house where she has barely disguised hostility with another girl, and with her roommate, and rests some before she is supposed to attend her own surprise birthday party. Instead she gets killed by someone wearing a mask of the school mascot -- a creepy baby -- on the way to the party.

Enter second loop. 

[Kent] That about sums it up. What is clear from the original day, and the first repeat day of the loop, is that Tree is not a nice person, a key point of the story. She's kind of disgusted that she's wound up in nice guy Carter's dorm room (whom she doesn't yet see as a nice guy, just some guy she assumes took advantage of her while she was drunk... and her lack of reaction to this seems to indicate she's been in this situation before).  She's pretty rude to everyone she encounters, she's ignoring her dad on her birthday, oh, and she's been sleeping with her professor, who is married. She seems like she's on a path with the intent of sabotaging her own life. Just a killer in a baby mask has designs on doing so first.

What was the main character's first reaction to the Loop?

[Toast] Well, like most people who get stuck in time loops, they only just notice the second loop is happening. A major sense of deja vu. Carter, the nice guy who gave her his bed, is happy she remembered his name. Originally she didn't but..

[Kent] Yup, just the usual going through the motions of the first time but with the weird awareness that it's all happened before. Only little moments are different...like not going under the bridge where she was killed the first time and actually making it to her surprise birthday party at a frat house...where she is killed after sneaking off with a cute frat boy (also killed).

WHY did the main character get put into the Loop? Can someone else be brought into the Loop?

[Toast] It is via subsequent loops we learn Tree is not necessarily a bad person but she has not been her best self for the last few years, being completely preoccupied with grief, shutting out everyone and everything in her life. She believes she is in the loop to learn from it, but really, she's tad bit occupied with surviving the night.

No, nobody can be brought into the loop. 

[Kent] At least until the sequel, yeah, we think she's in the loop, because, like in Groundhog Day, we think she needs to learn to be a kinder person, to deal with her trauma. Oh and also solve the mystery of her own murder.

How long is this time Loop? What resets it? Can you force the reset?

[Toast] I am thinking the loop could last days, if not weeks, as long as she survives. But she never does, and with each subsequent death, she's tossed right back into Carter's bed full of the memory of that death.

[Kent] As far as we know from what the movie shows us, only death resets the loop. I wonder if in the one loop where Tree makes amends with her roommate and survives and doesn't eat the cupcake [uh, spoilers I guess], would she, say grow old, pass away, then wake up in Carter's bed 60 years earlier?  At one point though Tree resets the day by intentionally killing herself, because Carter is accidentally killed and she really kinda likes him at that point.

[Toast] OMG now there's a time loop movie for you, one where someone thinks they have figgered it, avoids the death that triggers it, only to find out that ANY death can lead to the loop. I wonder what having an entire life inside your head could lead to, and its not likely you would remember that actual originator day that caused the loop.... or would you, being back in a body that has that day's memories fresh & clear.

[Toasty's Other Voice] Wut? What am I doing here? Oh, making a comment on how this was part of why this whole project started -- so the two of you could ponder the metaphysics of time loop movies.

How long does the main character stay in the Loop? Does it have any effect on them, their personality, their outlook?

[Toast] I didn't count, as I was enjoying just (re)watching the movie, but I would say about a dozen. And yes, oh yes does it have an affect on her, in both emotional and physical ways. For one, she's doing a wee bit of the Groundhog Day thing, where she strives to become a better person. But mostly she has to survive the night because there seems to be a lingering physical effect from each loop. After passing out immediately upon waking, she finds herself in the hospital with signs of numerous death defying scars in her body. Its a bit of a toss away idea, for fun, as after she blows up / is burned to death in the back of a police car, she does not wake up with a body covered in burn scars. But it does imply she will not last very many loops at this rate.

[Kent] I counted ten deaths in total so is that 10 loops, or 11? Does the first day count as a loop? The last? But yes, being in the loop does affect them greatly, and it was my big takeaway from this rewatch. Tree is aware she's not been a nice person, and she's aware that it is self-destructive behaviour, it's avoidant behaviour. She's sleeping around, backstabbing, drinking heavily all to avoid really processing any emotions. Being in the loop, though, has her confronting her selfishness, how her emotional state not only impacts herself but others. It's really that selfishness that has set her killer off, and what Tree needs to overcome in her life in order to progress.

What about the other people in the Loop? Are they aware? Can they become aware?  Does anything happen if they become aware?

[Toast] Nobody else is aware. She almost immediately (maybe loop 5 ?) tells Carter and he doesn't dismiss her immediately, but she is serious by doing the "predict the [quad] events just before they happen" to his amazement. That doesn't make him aware beyond this loop, but does allow him to provide some basic suggestions about ruling out who could be trying to kill her.

[Kent] Right, she tries a couple times to bring Carter up to speed, but for the most part she's aware she's on her own, and sees it as too much effort to explain it all over and over and over again, so she doesn't try too much.

What does the main character think about the other people in the Loop? Are they real? Do they matter?

[Toast] Yes, she thinks they are all real. They do matter. In fact, when Carter dies saving her life, in one loop, she knows she has to die in order to reset and save him.

[Kent] If anything, people in the loop start to matter more and more to her. She starts to connect with them on a more human level, the walls have come down. 

Most memorable event in a Loop? Most surprising event during a Loop?

[Toast] Most memorable event in the loop? Or is this more favourite loop? Definitely the inevitable "fuck it" loop, where the protagonist just gives up caring about anything, cuz its all just going to be forgotten (by everyone else; and forgotten is never the right word) so... well, she parades gleefully naked through the quad. Its about the only time during the loops that we see Tree just feel free; and she deserves the break.

[Kent] I agree, her strutting naked through the quad is her liberation from the barriers she's surrounded herself with. It's an apt metaphor. The sorority has been all about keeping up appearances, about perfection, and she's done with pretending to be someone who she's not. She's freeing herself from pretentiousness.

How does this stack up in the subgenre?

[Toast] This is a perfect mash-up movie, playing on the primary structure of Groundhog Day but having fun via the teen slasher trope. But really, its more about Jessica Rothe's performance -- she just plays the pain, frustration, realization and silliness of it all, so very freaking well. I might feel a bit detracting from the genre as the "reason" is never fully explained, but that is also the centre of Groundhog Day. Does the fact the sequel does explain it, kind of ruin it, or enhance it? We shall see in that writeup.

[Kent] I do not have an official ranking but I would say it's in the top ten on the lower end. It's a pretty basic loop setup and structure (it's just Groundhog Day meets Scream), but as Toasty says, it's Rothe's show and she delivers both the character development and emotional arc so wonderfully.  I have such goodwill for Rothe that I forgot how much of a ...not nice lady she was at the start of this thing, and she had to win back that goodwill, which she does so easily.

KWIF: six films for sick days

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Laid up on the couch with a fever and a stuffed-up head for a few days meant I had plenty of time to start picking away at the list of saved movies on my cable box and some other things of interest, including saying goodbye to a legend.

This Week:
After the Thin Man (1936, d. W.S.Van Dyke - dvd)
Southland Tales (2006, d. Richard Kelly - hollywoodsuite)
American Graffiti (1975, d. George Lucas - hollywoodsuite)
Get On Up (2014, d. Tate Taylor - hollywoodsuite) 
Rainbow (1996, d. Bob Hoskins - tubi)
Three Days of the Condor (1973, d. Sydney Pollack - rental)

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I have a collector's brain. It wants complete sets, whether it's a full line of action figures, the entire run of a comic, the complete discography of an artist, or seeing every film in a series, my brain demands satisfaction, and if I don't satisfy it, a little worm wiggles around in the back of my brain until I do. I've got a lot of worms in my brain. I've learned to tune out the noise they make as they multiply.

After watching The Thin Man last week, a new worm found its way in, and started wriggling frantically. Knowing there was more of Nick and Nora out there to consume perhaps created the fever that bred in me this week. Perhaps I thought acquiring the DVDs of all five sequels and watching the first of them would be enough to relieve the fever, but apparently not.

Picking up where The Thin Man left off, Nick (William Powell) and Nora (Myrna Loy) return to San Francisco, where Nora is immediately beseeched by her cousin, Selma to come over to a dinner party, and to bring Nick, she is in need of help. Nick is reluctant, because Selma lives with Nora's battle axe of an aunt who really dislikes him and is not shy about sharing.  It turns out Selma's dirtbag husband Robert has run off, again, and there's no telling where. Selma in the meantime takes solace in the companionship of her ex-boyfriend David (Jimmy Stewart). 

It takes Nick virtually no time at all to stumbled across Robert at a Chinese nightclub, where he and Nora are very quickly thrust into the mix of intertwining lives and conflicts. The club's chanteuse is having an affair with David while she's also in an entanglement with the club owner. The owner has just beat up and kicked out her brother who was trying to extort money out of her. They learned that David offered Robert twenty thousand dollars to leave Selma and San Francisco and never come back. Robert, much to David's chagrin, pays one last visit to Selma, mainly to steal her jewels. As Robert takes off into the night many players are in witness although Selma is the only one seen with a gun in her hand when Robert is shot and killed.

In acquiring the full set of Thin Man movies I had my worries about the series not maintaining its roots as a screwball comedy merged with noir thriller. The opening moments of After the Thin Man did little to assuage that concern as the formerly rat-a-tat dialogue became more stilted, less easy, less flowing. There's still a lot of comedic punch to what is there but it doesn't sing musically like the first film.  

At a certain early point, with Nick and Nora's return to their home, I thought we may be instead heading into, like, sitcom territory. There's an absolutely bonkers moment where their dog, Asta, spies his kennel where lives Mrs. Asta and their little Wire Fox Terrier puppies...except out of the house toddles a little black Scottie puppy and Asta is perplexed, until an adult black Scottie crawls through a hole under the fence only for an outraged Asta to charge at him. For some reason this little domestic quarrel rears its head again one more time in the film.

But the mystery comes into play (outlined by Nick and Nora's creator Dashiell Hammett) and I was delighted by how intricately woven it was. Though Nick reluctantly takes up the case, he's also partnered up with the easily frustrated Lt. Abrams (Sam Levene). Abrams in Levene's hands is a great character who isn't a hapless detective, nor is he the usual police bully of noir films, but somewhere in between. He's trying to conduct a legit investigation but he's also easily flustered, where Nick is always too soused to let anything truly rile him.

Nora is more intricately involved in the plot of this one, and I absolutely delight in watching Myrna Loy get wide-eyed and enthralled by something. She is captivating. Nick does sideline her (again) at one point and it's so unfortunate how the chauvinism of the era dulls the edge of an otherwise sharp pairing. Splitting Nick and Nora up in these films is a mistake when everything is much more vibrant and lively with Nora on screen.

The film ends with Nora pregnant and the cover of the DVD for Another Thin Man shows Nick and Nora with a baby... which bodes ill if the history of sitcoms has any bearing here.

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Richard Kelly's debut feature, Donnie Darko, was not an enormous success when it premiered in theatres, but by the time it made its way to home video, it had already reached cult classic status. It became a dvd and cable classic in short order, and cemented Kelly as an talent to watch.

A half decade later, Kelly returned with Southland Tales, a multimedia sci-fi dystopian epic dealing with the post-9-11 trauma, and a prescient, bitter awareness of Republican tactics for swaying a nation to give up their liberties in favour of security and fascism. If you oppose the Republicans in any way, you're a terrorist.

It is an ambitious movie, the kind of blank check swing directors don't really get anymore after having a solid indie hit. Now they just get subsumed into the "franchise" circuit, whether it's Marvel, Sony, Jurassic Park...whatever. But maybe it's because of Southland Tales and its miserable (less than one million dollars) box office take that these young directors need to prove themselves with more than just one film.

In perhaps its only nod to Star Wars, Kelly opens his film as "Chapter 4", implying that more came before, and more is to come (there were three graphic novel prequel chapters, and this film is comprised of three chapters). 

Through intense channel surfing of info-dense TV screens as well as info-dumping voice over from Justin Timberlake's character, we learn that the world has escalated into a seemingly never-ending war over oil in the middle east. As a result of their instigation of these wars, the U.S. has been cut off from outside oil and their reserves are depleting. But a billionaire industrialist (Wallace Shawn) has developed a new technology based on ocean currents that will generate limitless energy transmitted as a signal across the globe.  

Unfortunately this new technology has unforseen consequences which is what drives the film, at least in the background until deep into its third(/sixth) chapter.

It tries to center itself around the story of famous actor, Boxer Santaros, (Dwayne Johnson) and husband to a Texas Republican Senator's daughter (Mandy Moore). Boxer, however, went missing and his disappearance has caused a huge stir. He turns up in L.A. in the grips of the Neo-Marxists, a terrorist organization opposed to the US-IDENT technology that will control people's access to the internet and, well, everything. Boxer has amnesia and has found a new romance with porn star/aspiring mogul Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar).

The Neo-Marxists also have in their possession Officer Roland Taverner and his twin brother. They have conscripted the brother into impersonating Roland, bringing Boxer for a ride-along where "Roland" will act very racist and then unprovoked shoot and kill a mixed-race couple having a domestic dispute (all staged for Boxer's camera). The idea, I think, is to use the footage to incite people against the police and to damage Boxer's reputation and by proxy his Republican family.

I dunno. At a certain point the machinations of the various characters and factions and split personalities and dual identities all get too convoluted to track. This is a busy, busy movie, and I suspect, even at 144 minutes was heavily edited down from the full length Kelly wanted to make. The third act/sixth chapter seems like it takes a jump from where the fifth chapter left off, and barrels into heavy exposition mode trying to tie all the nonsense together.

Southland Tales is a wildly bizarre movie, one that has aspirations of being a weighty and important metaphor, while also considering itself a form of satire or comedy. Stacking the cast with Saturday Night Live alumnae, and having the film's big bad be Wallace Shawn certainly tips its hat that it's trying for something...I don't think Moby, who made the score, got the message though, and his drowning electronic soundtrack makes everything feel ominous at all times...except when it pauses for a musical number. 

It seems like Kelly's going for Vonnegut vibes, Breakfast of Champions or Slaughterhouse Five but with the dreamlike surrealism of Lynch (Kelly does get Rebekah Del Rio to perform a soulful, part-Spanish rendition of the US National Anthem, much in the vein of her rendition of "Cryin'" seen in Mulholland Drive). The only problem is Kelly has neither the wit or sharpness or storytelling acumen of either Vonnegut or Lynch, so it comes off as an amateur imitation of both.

I can talk shit about this movie and how much it doesn't work, and how much it feels like a poseur, but in the end I was fascinated by it. I haven't seen Megalopolis yet, but I feel like they're sibling disasters of directorial hubris, films of men with something to say but no clarity on how to say it.

I'm probably going to watch this again at some point. There is so much going on that it would definitely reward rewatching (and tracking down those graphic novels), even if it never finds the competency it needs.  Kelly would make one more feature, The Box a few years later, and has not been able to get another production off the ground in more than a decade. The spectre of this ambitious failure I think still haunts him.

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George Lucas as the creator of Star Wars, founder of Lucasfilm, Lucasarts, Industrial Light and Magic and Skywalker Sound, has meant a lot to the world of film, and to me personally for the past 50 years.  He's a visionary, and an admirable businessman (especially in an age where that's very much not the case) if not necessarily the most revered of directors. 

Lucas' problem as a director, as made most evident by the "Prequel Trilogy" of Star Wars films, is that he's more interested in technology and visuals than performance, very much to a fault. At a certain point he decided that everything could be fixed in the edit, somehow forgetting that performance is in the moment and cannot be adjusted (much) after the fact.

Of his films I'd obviously watched all of Star Wars, and I've dipped into THX-1138 a few times, a real classic "vibes movie". I've avoided, for some time, American Graffiti due mainly to lack of interest in the car culture or teen culture of the 50's and 60's. And surely what could possibly be enticing about a George Lucas film without special effects and sci-fi themes?

As much as I get no Star Wars out of American Graffiti, I do get dozens upon dozens of other things. The teen sex comedy/dramedy seems borne out of this, and the archetypes of the older rebel who can't let go of the glory of his high school days or the nerdy wimpy kid who goes on a big adventure all seem to spill out of here. The opening credits over the imagery of Mel's Diner and "Rock Around the Clock" playing spill into so much TV content of the 1970's...Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Alice... it's surprising Lucas isn't a producer on all those shows for all they owe to this film.  

But at the same time it's clear that, much like he did with Star Wars, Lucas is leaning on reference, the most obvious being James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and The Last Picture Show. 

It's a "one crazy night" kind of movie, though more dramatic than funny. It follows two high school graduates, Curt (Richard Dreyfus) and Steve (Ron Howard) on their last night in town before flying off to college on the east coast, 3000 miles away. Curt is having cold feet on the whole endeavour while Steve's looking forward to a whole new, liberated college life. Steve gives his nerdy pal Toad (Charles Martin Smith) his car to look after in his absence, and they look to their studly drag racing pal Milner (Paul Le Mat) more as a warning sign than an aspiration, as he's still cruising for high school chicks despite being in his 20s.

The film splits everyone up into their own adventures. Steve's is the most tedious, as he asks his girlfriend Laurie (Cindy Williams) to open up their relationship while he's gone, and so their whole evening is fraught with their conflict as well as their obvious connection (or co-dependency?). 

Curt's journey is more meandering, as he winds up in multiple places, including facing off against the local street gang, but ending up in their good graces. It's the story that I had the most difficulty with because the script never tells you who Curt is or what he wants, but it's kind of the point because Curt doesn't know who he is or what he wants. His journey has him exploring a lot of different angles, some great, some not so much.

Toad/Terry's story is the cliche or the hapless nerd with the black cloud hanging over his head, hoping just once to bask in the ray of sunshine. Being gifted Steve's car, Toad immediately takes to cruising, and actually manages to get a girl off the street into his car, mostly by being sweet, even if his horny teenage mind is thinking anything but. Adventure finds him and Debbie (Candy Clarke) as they seek out booze, make out, get the car stolen, try to steal the car back all while Terry tries to pretend to be someone he's clearly not, and Debbie seeing through it all to who he really is and kinda being into it. It's cliche, but it kinda works when Terry gets that ray of sunshine at the end.

The best subplot of the film find John Milner, the fastest cat in town, saddled with a 14-year-old riding shotgun. The dynamic between Milner and Carol (Mackenzie Phillips) is antagonistic, and all Milner wants to do is dump this girl on the side of the street and go cruising, whether for girls or for a race (especially when he hears there a new challenger in town, played by Harrison Ford). But, surprisingly, for all his greaser hair and tough guy exterior, Milner has a big compassionate heart and he takes a shining to this spritely kid. Mercifully it never turns into anything untoward between either of them, it's just fun and playful in a big brother/little sister kind of way and you can imagine these two just being best of platonic friends if not for the era (or the film's bummer of a coda.)

As a dad who has (and has had) teenage kids, I see the Gulf of difference in the activities of kids these days versus my years as a teen, and I can see the huge difference between my teenage and those in the 50's. And those differences feel not just unfamiliar, but almost alien. The gender roles and expectations are the biggest hurdle to surmount, but also just the car and cruising culture, the dance and music, the hangout culture, it's all so foreign.  So in a way, this film is a bit of an archive, a slice. It's not universal, and yeah, it's full of cliche, but it certainly captures something that really doesn't exist anymore... and that's Lucas' capacity to get good performances out of actors (zing!).

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This past week on the Nebula service, film essayist Patrick Willems dropped his latest video about a new age of musical biopic, mostly based around his love of the 2024 Robbie Williams biopic Better Man but also a few other recent examples. He contrasts these against the routine biopics of the 2000s and 2010s, and cites Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story lampooning the formulae as being responsible for killing it. But Walk Hard's failure at the box office resulted in the Christ-like resurrection of the music biopic formulae, the result of which was multiple Oscars for the abominable Bohemian Rhapsody. (If you want to watch Patrick's essay now, ad free, you can sign up for Nebula or wait a few weeks and watch it on Patrick's youtube channel).

It was with this in mind that I pressed play on the James Brown biopic Get On Up. It is everything you expect a music biopic to be, and delivers on all the cliches you would expect. But even clocking in at whopping 139 minutes, it's still hardly long enough to do justice to James Brown's entire life, a life full of highlights and lowlights at every age.

It is your typical vignette-heavy biopic that director Tate Taylor (The Help) and editor Michael McCusker try to spice up by telling in a non-linear fashion. It helps distract from the formulaicness, but only a little, and only for so long. And in its jumping around between time periods, the editing only serves to highlight just how unfocussed the story is they have to tell.

The saving grace for the picture is clearly Chadwick Boseman (RIP King). Boseman was a goddamn supernova, he burned so brightly and then he was gone. But man, when he burned could you feel the heat. He developed a James Brown affectation that he settles into comfortably in the film, he adopts the physicality, the ego, the strengths and weaknesses of the man, all while still shimmering loudly as Chadwick Boseman. I don't know if I ever got over the fact that he's a good half-foot taller than James Brown in heels, and so the amount of people who have to look up to Boseman as J.B. always feels wrong somehow, but it never diminishes the impact of his performance.

The third act finds a purpose beyond just history lesson or highlight reel, it settles into the idea of James Brown as a man alone, a man who puts up walls and barriers between himself and others, and man who put himself so high up on a pedestal he couldn't find his way down to retain friendships or partnerships or relationships.  The through line should have been there throughout the whole movie, centered around his partnership with Bobby Byrd who was his right-hand-man on stage and best friend off stage for decades, until, one day, he wasn't.  The final sequence of the film finds J.B. singing acoustically directly to Bobby in the audience, telling him that he loves him and needs him and misses him through song, because he's only able to express emotions from the pedestal. It's pretty powerful, but it would have been even more powerful if the film had solely focused on that partnership, or told James Brown's story though the eyes of Bobby Byrd from the outside. But this is a production that couldn't truly thing outside of the genre's storytelling conventions.

At times it tries something different, like the half dozen (or less) time Boseman-as-J.B. addresses the audience directly, right down the barrel of the camera. There was something there as well, an alternate path, a glimmer of inspiration of what could have been had we had Boseman breaking the fourth wall throughout the picture, on the regular, giving us insight into the man's mind (which, it seems pretty clear, the scriptwriter and director barely have a handle on, and only Boseman in performing him even gets in proximity of what was really driving James Brown).

It's not a bad movie, but not a great one either, but there's a wonderful one just lurking in the shadows.

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For some reason renowned character actor (and sometimes leading man) Bob Hoskins found himself behind the camera in Montreal in 1995 shooting a children's film that has the distinction of being the first ever production to be fully shot digitally.

If you have any experience with Canadian television of the 1980's and 90's, then you will recognize the aesthetic of this production... unpolished, to put it kindly. For some reason Canadian television always looked very distinct from American TV, far less glossy and polished, the lighting, sets, wardrobe, hair and makeup, and even actors were all less pretty, glamorous, sophisticated. Canadian television did not have the same budgets, and so the same technical gear was not employed, and the craftspersons were used to focusing on fast and cheap over quality. So it's no surprise that an inexperienced director like Hoskins coming to shoot in Canada would rely on his Canadian crew to see him through the execution of this project, especially when it's pretty clear he had no real vision for it himself.

The story is set in New Jersey, where Mikey, along with his two school chums and his older brother Steve (Jacob Tierney, Letterkenny), finds the end of a rainbow, and is transported to the cornfields of rural Kansas. They discover the local farmhouse and are taken to the local Sherriff (Dan Ackroyd in full ham) who wants to put them on a plane home. For some reason the kids don't want to go home and so there's weird airport hijinks as they try to elude their police escort.  The one kid's mom works for the news and they catch wind of the kid's story and there's a crazy media blitz upon their return home, except everyone thinks they stowed away on a plane. Only their science teacher (Saul Rubinek) doubts the official story when he sees the photos the kids took inside the rainbow.

Unbeknownst to anyone but Steve, Steve took golden orbs from the rainbow, so that he could sell them for cash to buy a motorcycle to impress the tough girl he has a crush on. What he doesn't know is that stealing from the rainbow has broken the colour pallette on Earth and ushered in a doomsday scenario. People are going mad as the world desaturated of colour, and violence raises to calamitous proportions. Everyone's mean to each other. Steve tells his mom after being grounded "No wonder Dad left you" and she slaps him. Real greasy stuff.

It's up to the plucky band of kids and adults to figure out the solution to saving the world, and Mikey to take the ultimate trip on the rainbow in order to restore things to normal.

It's a really poorly executed movie overall, lacking any real sense of adventure. Its a film with only a few simplistic ideas to fuel it and it's completely hamstrung by talent and budget despite some actual talent involved. Its swearing and dark-turn third act keep it out of TVOntario rotation where it should otherwise have a home, but if The Asylum had a kid's sub-label, it would fit right in there.

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Robert Redford has never been my guy, because, well, I grew up being a sci-fi/superhero kid and my trigger for being a semi-cinephile were the works of new talents in the 1990s. Redford didn't fit much into this band of viewing. And yet, even having only ever seen five of his acting roles and one of his directorial efforts, I've always liked the man, even though I couldn't tell you exactly why. Since he passed away this past week, there have been plenty of tributes out there that explain why...he cared a lot about film, about the environment, about people and politics, which showed in his work, as did his seemingly effortless charm. While he remained an attractive man even in his golden years, he was devastatingly handsome in his prime.

If ever I was going to start somewhere with Redford's filmography, the first stop of course would be Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but the second stop would be Three Days of the Condor...because next to superheroes and sci-fi, I like the spy stuff.

In Three Days... (based off the novel Six Days of the Condor by James Grady) Redford plays Joe Turner, a reader for the CIA, a devout bookworm whose job it is to look for secret codes and messages in print. When we meet him he's riding an underpowered scooter through New York, holding up traffic (using the coding from American Graffiti, Toad rides a scooter, therefore scooters are for nerds). He's late to work, but when he arrives he walks in like he owns the place and knows everything about everything. He's very handsome and he's very smart and he flaunts both, but instinctively, not intentionally. 

When Joe heads out to collect lunch for the team, a group of trained killers raid the office, murdering everyone. It's clear they have a specific objective, which is to clean house, as they ask no questions. Joe returns and discovers the scene, his coworkers (including his lover) are all dead. Moving past his grief, his logic kicks in and he knows he needs to be careful. He leaves, finds a pay phone and calls it in. He's given a rendez-vous and the CIA find a friend he can trust to meet him, but his distrust of the whole situation leads to caution, and he very quickly learns it's all a set-up. He has no familiar place to go where they can't find him, so his only choice is to find a safe haven with a stranger.

At random, one of the most handsome men in New York winds up picking one of the most beautiful women in New York, photographer Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway) to hold up at gunpoint and hitch a ride out to her Brooklyn Heights basement apartment (we don't see basement apartments in film very often). Joe is desperate and not incredibly sympathetic towards the situation he's put Kathy in. In his mind he's being utterly logical and his actions are justified. He tells Kathy the situation, but in a manner more to work through it for himself rather than to get her on his side. He doesn't really think much of her at all.

Kathy, for her part, was just out buying stuff for a ski-retreat with her boyfriend. When she doesn't show up, the boyfriend calls and the conversation is tense, not just because Joe is holding her at gunpoint to keep it casual, but because Kathy has a pattern of behaviour with him, signifying she's just not that into the relationship.  We never, truly understand Kathy's motivation for suddenly being on Joe's side. He's upended her life, held her up at gunpoint, tied her up, stolen her truck...but at a certain point she's just in it. Stockholm syndrome, perhaps. Or she's just so frustrated with her life that she's kind of happy someone's come along to usurp it. Or maybe it's just the Joe is played by 39-year-old Robert Redford and is just delicious. Or there's the moment where Joe is looking at her photographs, and in the way he looks at them he sees her like no one has before.  There's a bevvy of explanations, none of which are obvious on screen, but I guess she sees a desperate, intelligent, sensitive, hurting man who she wants to help, so they have one of the worst sex scenes committed to screen and then she helps him get a leg up on the men who are after him.

Beyond the perplexing romantic entanglement, Three Days of the Condor is a taut and propulsive thriller that, once set into gear, doesn't really stop til its final freeze frame. The most intriguing espionage thrillers are the ones where the story's protagonist (and therefore the audience) doesn't ever fully understand the game they are playing, and this is one of the best examples of that. Even when Joe thinks he's got it all figured out, it's clear there's still more going on than he knows. It's the source of the film's excellent tension, and the film's ambiguous ending provides little actual relief for our title character, leaving it to the audience to wonder what kind of life Joe will lead from this point forward, and for how long.

Not a perfect movie, but a classic nonetheless. Redford carries the picture on his shoulders with ease, and conveys Joe's hyperintelligence so nimbly it makes you think that Redford is just as smart. This does make me want to watch more Redford, so what should be top of the list?

Double Dose: The Ladykillers + The Ladykillers

 (Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...or genre or theme...pretty simple. This week, continuing my Coen Bros. rewatch and checking in on their source material.)

The Ladykillers (2004, d. Joel and Ethan Coen - dvd)
The Ladykillers (1955, d. Alexander Mackendrick  - hollywoodsuite)

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Easily the most maligned entry of the Coen Bros filmography (although Ethan's recent solo efforts are giving it a run) The Ladykillers is not all that bad of a picture, the problem is it is not all that good either.

It's easy to see from the vintage British film starring Alec Guinness what attracted the Coens to the story. Alexander Mackendrick's version, from a script (or a partial one, apparently) by William Rose, is an arch dark comedy about a rag-tag group of swindlers and heist men who befall upon a kindly old widow.  In the original the old lady is Mrs. Wilberforce (Katie Johnson), who we meet as she ventures into the police station to update them on her previous report that the UFO that her neighbour saw was actually the neighbour boys performing a play. She's sweet and sees duty in being responsive to the law, but it seems clear she's just a little lonely. So when Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness in chonky false teeth giving a very The Man Who Laughs-style menacing grin on the regular) darkens her doorstep, arousing her parrots, but gracing her with eloquent diction, she's happy for him to take up her room for let. He, naturally, is up to no good. He brings in his crew, posing as a musical quintet, and they plot an armored car heist at the train station, not all that far away from Mrs. Wilberforce's abode. Unbeknownst to her, she is also an integral part of the heist.

The first half of the film is about keeping Mrs. Wilberforce at bay, while the second half, following the heist and Mrs. Wilberforce discovering their ruse, revolves around the complexities of murdering a kindly old lady.

The classic film has its eccentricities which are quite inspired for the time. The composite imagery that is used to make Mrs. Wilberforce's house at the end of a lane, ending at a ridge overlooking the train yards is a visual wonder. It's surreal but has purpose, especially for the finale when bodies need to be disposed of by dumping them over the edge onto the passing trains. The interiors of the house make for an equally clever set, with the house all askew due to the bombings during the great war. It doesn't seem like there's a single vertical line in the place that isn't off 90...pictures don't hang right. It feels more like something that would influence Tim Burton than the Coens.

But the Coens do feast on dark comedy and on crime, so the story, moreso than aesthetics certainly had an impact on them. Their rendition of the story transposes the events from London to modern day American south, in a small, quiet town in Mississippi. The kindly Mrs. Wilberforce is now the less kindly, but devoutly Christian Mrs. Munson (Irma P. Hall), who again we meet as she traverses to her local police station (a sleepy little place with cobwebs on it jail cell) to complain about a local boy's loud music playing the hippety-hop.  Tom Hanks, himself in prosthetics and full dapper garb, is The Professor, darkening her doorstep to take up her room for let, and inquiring about space, perhaps underground, where his quintet could perform.

The Coens hew pretty closely to the structure of the original, but bringing in their own flairs and improvements. They give each of the five members of the crew more distinct personalities, and more conflict between them. They justify the crew meeting in Mrs. Munson's basement and the ruse of being musicians as a means of disguising their need to burrow into the ground in order to tunnel to the underground safe house where a local riverboat casino stores its money before weekly transport. And when it comes time to start disposing of bodies, they have already established that there's a trash island off the coast of this sleepy town and a bridge under which the trash barges traverse. The best shots in the film are those Roger Deakins' composed overhead shots of the barges passing and bodies dropping down onto the trash heaps. There's beauty in all that refuse.

There are definite positives to both films, but fundamentally the story doesn't work in either case. In both films, there's an assumption that the elderly lady cannot tell the difference between live instrument playing and the playing on a phonograph or boom box. And when the lady of the house comes knocking, the men have to scramble into position that requires a lot of disbelief that the old lady wouldn't think something is up. In the Coens, there's two incidences of explosions, and it's only after the second that Mrs. Munson discovers their secret. I know it's all part of the farce of it all, but the suspension of disbelief, especially when both Missus Wilberforce and Munson are a bit of busybodies, is too much to bear.  The heists themselves have their cleverness, but despite being in the middle, they aren't the big centerpieces they aught to be. Then again, these aren't actually heist films proper, we don't want these guys to get away with anything, and we certainly don't want them to kill the old lady.

But the fact of the matter is, how can these men have seemingly little compunction for killing each other and yet can't seem to off a fragile old woman standing in their way? 

The Coens don't have a lot of Black characters in their films historically, nor do they regularly do contemporary productions (even things like Fargo are set a few years back in history from its production), so it is strange to me that they would try to centre a film in Southern Black community in modern day. I think there's a timelessness to deeply religious elderly church-going folk, but the Coens stabs at then-modern urban dialect, a lot of it coming out of Marlon Wayans' mouth, doesn't hit right...as much as Wayans tries to sell it. There's discord in the film between its gospel and gangsta influences. The Coens probably could have done better placing it in the early 1990's with a more boom-bip hip-hop soundtrack and the then already antiquated language of the streets of that era. I can just imagine how much more amusing Hall's bow-legged gait walking to the kick-drum rhythms of "I Left My Wallet In El Segundo" during the opening sequence would be, especially as she references the song at least three times (which by that point no youth would probably be playing vintage A Tribe Called Quest anyway).

I didn't get many laughs or a lot of joy out of either version of The Ladykillers. The performances are all pretty good-to-great, visually the classic has a grain to its film that gives it a lovely grit, while Roger Deakins is a master at play so frequently in the Coens version, but many good parts to not make for a good whole. It's not that something is missing from the recipe, the recipe is just flawed to begin with.

3 Short (Or Not) Paragraphs: The Hunt

2020, Craig Zobel (Z for Zachariah) -- download

Decided to watch this one, even if its been four years since Kent piqued my interest. Trump's first term ended just a week after Kent posted it. Trump's second term started about six months ago. In a current world where he (Trump, not Kent) constantly spawns conspiracies to fit the world into his desired view point, I was curious as to movie that pissed him (Trump, not Kent) off so much.

OK, there have been plenty of "human beings are the prey" movies, so the premise is not shocking. Its a Blumhouse production, which generally means its coming with at least a little bit of side-eye and not taking itself too seriously (except when they do, and want you to Be Afraid) but this spin on the premise is worthy a little chuckle, no matter which end of the North American political spectrum you are. Essentially, the movie begins with a bunch of hillbillies waking up in a field, after a brief intro where a bunch of very rich assholes have to deal with one of said hillbillies waking up early on their plane.

OK, not all hillbillies, but quickly it becomes apparent they are of the Right Wing American persuasion (it's a lifestyle choice, they are not born that way) especially after they knock off a few of the recognizable faces with long distance gun shots or a minefield. But calm, collected Crystal survives and walks off on her own. 

A few others escape and end up at a roadside gas bar, the kind the kids usually stop at on the way to a sex fueled weekend by the lake. One eats a donut and dies, another is shot by the owners, the last is gassed. Then Crystal (Betty Gilpin, Mrs. Davis) shows up and discerns pretty quickly, the whole thing is a ruse, a deadly trap. She also has figured out she is nowhere near Arkansas, which is where the gas bar was pretending to be, but somewhere in Eastern Europe. 

That was an odd turn for the movie, and I was hoping it would get odder from there. But, also like most Blumhouse, they stretch a bit out of the average thriller-horror comfort zones but not too far. Still, its an enjoyable romp. The "reveal" is that the rich assholes are Extreme Left who were cancelled because they joked about doing a redneck hunt, each of them removed as heads of their respective corporations. So, they decided they might as well do a redneck hunt, but specified against each of the conspiracy minded, yell about it on the Internet types that accused them all of the hunt. This is a spin on PizzaGate idea of the Democrats running a pedophilia ring, and the QAnon nuts running wild with it. 

The fun thing is that they got the wrong Crystal. Sure, she's from Mississippi and sounds the part, but this Crystal is a well-educated, well (militarily) trained woman down on her luck, and maybe a wee bit unhinged in her own right. It is kind of funny that the exact reason Trump went bonkers on the movie kind of matches up on how the Right misconstrued what these Rich Assholes were doing in the first place. I think that was intentional, as all press is good press? Alas, it didn't work out and this movie kind of disappeared into the ether.

Even so, we get such a wonderful performance from Betty Gilpin. Sometimes the smallest of characterizations can just add so much to a role. Crystal knows she's a bit off, and is not at all bothered by the idea of killing whichever Rich Asshole stands up in front of her. She's got some rage in her, which she acknowledges with head nods and whistles, and they just gave her a reason to give into it, much to our delight.