KWIF: Rebel Ridge + The Hudsucker Proxy

 KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. This week, one of the better Netflix originals (as happens when it's a more auteurish director at the helm) and yet another film from the Coens (we're only 1/3 of the way through folks). I also rewatched Thunderbolts* but nothing new to contribute since my original review... except to say that the measly 2 deleted scenes on the blu-ray adding maybe 20 new seconds of material to the film was utter bullshit. There has to be more that was cut, but Marvel always seems resistant to expose what has been excised from their films.

This Week:
Rebel Ridge (2024, d. Jeremy Saulnier - netflix)
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994, d. Joel (and Ethan) Coen - dvd)

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The films of Jeremy Saulnier have a common thread, which is protagonists out of their element. In Hold the Dark, Jeffrey Wright is a wolf-hunter brought to Alaska. In Green Room [I've seen it but no review... but Toasty's is spot on], it's a desperate punk rock band playing a remote neo-nazi bar. In Blue Ruin, it's a nebbish vagrant trying to enact a revenge plot. In all cases, the conceit itself contains an innate sense of tension, and Saulnier is masterful at ratcheting it up, often with a dramatic pivot (or two).

In Rebel Ridge, we meet Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) who is biking to a small town in Louisiana to bail out his cousin from jail. On the road into town a cop car starts trailing him, no lights, no siren, and then aggressively manoeuvers and bumps his rear tire sending Terry flying. The cop, weapon drawn, starts barking commands, and soon is joined by another cop, again, no sirens or lights. Terry's large hiker's backpack is searched, and in it is discovered a bag with over $30,000 in cash. As Terry calmly and clearly  explains it's to bail out his cousin in town, and then they're going to buy a pickup truck to long-haul boats across country. The cops twist everything he says into being a cover for drugs and drug running (his cousin is in prison for possession afterall). Terry is eventually let go, but his money is seized under "civil forfeiture", a law that effectively lets the police seize assets they think have been or will be involved in crime. 

The dynamic established in this opening sequence is prime Saulnier...just every muscle tense pretty much from the first moment. The violence and aggression of a car bumping a bike, if you've ever had it happen, makes your stomach churn. The vulnerability of a cyclist against a 1 ton car is like Bambi vs Godzilla. And from there, it's hard not to see a black man being railroaded the way that Terry is as purely racist in intent. When places in the United States, under the thumb of Tangerine Palpatine, now feel emboldened to declare their towns "whites only", you can't help but think that Shelby Springs is one of these places.

Terry's mission to free his cousin is a desperate one. His cousin had previously turned against gang members and if he goes to state prison, where he will be sent since Shelby Springs' jail is under construction, he will surely be murdered. Terry has mere days to either get new money or recover the cash from the cops. He finds an ally in a Summer (Anna Sophia Robb), a courthouse clerk with a troubled past, but with an acute awareness of the laws and how the laws are being bent by the local police department.

It comes clear that Terry's assault wasn't an act of racism...or, rather, not *just* an act of racism, but a scheme the local chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson) and his officers have cooked up with much complicitness at different levels of local law and bureaucracy.

Terry is an ex-Marine, but never served overseas, which carries some weight with the PD. It's only when they discover he was the trainer close quarters combat, disciplined in many martial arts ("Uh oh...I think he's on the Wikipedia page") that they realize that they're going to have a real problem.

The expectation when have from films of this ilk is that Terry is going to use his "special set of skills" to absolutely destroy this police department full of fuckheads. Instead Saulnier is careful to point out that Terry's skills are specialized, and that he is outmanned, outgunned and is fighting not just against the law but legalized corruption. So when the Sheriff gives him an out, Terry takes it, ending act one.

Act two finds Terry drawn back into Shelby Springs, where things have turned pear-shaped, and what was already a bad situation gets much worse. But Terry is awakened in this moment and he's driven into action where once he retreated.  In a normal film, this is where the action would kick into higher gear, instead the film goes into detective mode, as Terry and Summer start digging into the Sheriff's dirt and seeing what they can find. There's certainly something that's off-board and a state case of corruption could be made against the police department.

Again, the expectation set by the genre is that once our hero and protagonist establishes a plan of action it's going to be a success. Saulnier would never have such simple pleasures. By the time we think a film of this sort should be winding down, Rebel Ridge is just ramping up to its third act where the catharsis we've been looking for all along is waiting.

Except every time we think that Terry has got the upper hand, Saulnier's reality comes shaking down. It's still one man versus a so many and Saulier grounds it pretty tangibly so that the reality of the One-Man-Army is still just a fairy tale. There's only so much one man can do even a man as skilled and determined as Terry.

Rebel Ridge is gripping from moment one. It has its quiet moments, but even those never let go of the tension underneath. Saulier's script is built around injustice and the abuses and corruption within law enforcement, but there's a whole layer that is casting an eye at race without anyone ever explicitly calling it out. It's all micro aggressions and subtlety, like the fact that Terry looks to Officer Jessica Simms (Zsané Jhé ) - who Burnne clearly indicates was a diversity hire - for solidarity.  The script is sharp, insightful, and has more than a few wonderful moments, both on the action/standoff front and in dialogue.

Aaron Pierre, very shortly after Rebel Ridge's debut on Netflix was quickly cast in the HBO Max Green Lantern TV series as its lead character, John Stewart, which having now seen him in action, is completely on point. Pierre has presence, charm, wit and grit.  Don Johnson should look out, because playing a villain this well could have repercussions of people thinking he's actually this slimy, with scales about to poke out through his skin. It's an excellent performance, and the scenes between Johnson and Pierre crackle with electricity.

As immediately ramped up as I was upon watching Rebel Ridge, spending time thinking about it started posing questions which undermined the story, if only a little, and it starts with the opening moments based on a reveal towards the end. Also, as a cyclist, it's absolutely crazy Terry wasn't wearing a bike helmet, and listening to music while cycling, come on, man?.... And I don't think stomping SD cards into the dirt is going to have the effect on them you think it is, dude....

Hands down the best "Rebel" Netflix movie by a very wide margin.

[toastypost...we agree!]

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The Coen Brothers blasted onto the scene with the radical neo-neon-noir Blood Simple, announced themselves to a receptive public with the live action cartoon antics of Raising Arizona, impressed critics with the very different mob drama of Miller's Crossing and won the Palm d'Or at Cannes with Barton Fink. Even if none of these was overwhelming blockbusters, they were all strikingly unique and bold storytelling successes made relatively cheaply. Producer Joel Silver wanted in on the Coen Brothers business and gave them over $25 million to play with for their next movie, at least two and a half times their previous most expensive production. That movie was The Hudsucker Proxy, and its domestic box office barely reached $3 million. It flopped. It bombed. And like all Coen Bros. movies, it eventually got itself a cult following.

The Hudsucker Proxy is a weird, weird film for 1994, hearkening back to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and '40s mixed with the heightened reality of a Frank Capra production, it's a full-tilt period piece that is homage to the cinematic entertainments of yesteryear while being bathed in the glorious, incomparable cinematography of Roger Deakins. As retro looking as it was, it also wasn't looking too far askance from modern filmmaking, with elements owing to Terry Gilliam's Brazil and the works of Tim Burton up to that point, almost like those director's bold aesthetic choices showed the Coens how visually fastidious they could be given an appropriate budget.

At once a fantasy and a nightmare about capitalism, The Hudsucker Proxy is like It's A Wonderful Life filtered through The Producers, as the board of the monolithic Hudsucker Industries enacts a scheme to tank the share prices of the company. You see, the founder and majority shareholder of the corporation has swan dived out a window, and with no heirs, as per the corporate rules, his shares go public in a month's time on January 1. In order to tank the stock, they need a rube, an idiot, a patsy to put in charge and purposefully ruin them.

Enter Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) who just arrived in the big city from Muncie, Indiana with a college degree, big idea and all the gumption, but no experience. He finds a job in the mailroom at Hudsucker, but a chance awkward encounter with shark-like Sidney J Mussberger (Paul Newman) finds him moving on up to the big time in a jiffy.

The media is aflutter with news of this new, ever-so-random President of Hudsucker, and tough-talking, Pulitzer Prize-winning ace reporter Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is on the beat. She pulls a ploy on Norville, and (hud)suckers him into thinking she's a helpless fellow Muncie-ian who just fell off the turnip truck, so he gives her a job being his secretary. She writes a scathing story on him, and the inverted Lois Lane/Superman dynamics at play are pretty delicious as he starts to question this pseudonymous reporter's character to her face.

But the best laid plans of mice and men go awry when Norville's big idea  of the hula-hoop becomes the national fad and  the stock prices soar. His rise to the top of the business world was swift, but his rise to the top of public notoriety and fame is even swifter. It goes to his head, and Norville becomes too big for his britches. Amy wants to be the one to knock him down a few pegs, especially upon developing feelings for him and seeing him for not quite the hayseed she initially though he was (he's definitely a hayseed, just smarter and more capable than the stereotype suggests). But it's the board, using the court of public opinion and planting false stories, that finds Norville's good fortune dry up just as fast as they came. 

The film opens with a sweeping cityscape that is a gorgeously constructed miniature set that tricks the eye and the brain constantly. It's at such a huge scale that it's hard to believe that anyone outside of a Godzilla flick would have taken the care to build such a dense network of art deco mini-buildings, primarily for an establishing shot. These days it would be a bland CGI recreation of somewhere or other, and not wow nearly as much. The city could is intended to be New York but it could be Chicago, Metropolis or Gotham, or another unnamed surreal fantasy location (the cityscape was reconfigured and reused in many other films including Batman Forever and 1998's Godzilla, among others).

The sets, costuming, wardrobe, hair and makeup are all exceptional. Though it's set in the late 1950's, it feels like a mashup of the 1920s, '30s and 40's, but with the encroaching beatnik crowd (complete with Steve Buscemi cameo) bursting the bubble otherwise.  Carter Burwell delivers yet another incredible score. Blood Simple has some great themes, and Miller's Crossing was a stylistic triumph of mixing traditional Irish sounds with noir-stylings...here it's completely orchestral sweeping, lush and epic, with hints of playfulness without directly acknowledging the levity to the crowd. Each Burwell piece for the Coens so far is distinct from the last. The only thing that sticks out as a unifying component at this point is exceptionally high quality and thoughtfulness.

Paul Newman's cruel, capitalistic villain is a timeless one. A power/money monger that seems to be just as  prevalent today as it did in 1994 as it did in the 1958 and the 1930s and in Dicken's A Christmas Carol. (We learn nothing as a society from these tales, as we expect these villains to change on their own or be destroyed by goodness, only in reality they just keep succeeding with the backing of government and others of their kind). Jennifer Jason Leigh's reporter character is so fantastic, even if at times I don't agree with the Coens handling of the character, undermining her confidence with Norville's talk of her not being womanly enough (but it does fit the time period, so it's a nominal complait...). At this stage I have to wonder if I've seen a JJL performance that has not impressed me, that has not been fantastic? Doubtful. I find Tim Robbins to be the weakest link in the production. He's playing at least 10 years his junior at the time of filming, so he just seems too old to be so...fresh. His peformance delivers the appropriate nativity, hopefulness, ambition and eventual callousness, but the apparentness of his age undermines the fact that he is supposed to be a newly graduated youngster. If the parable of Hudsucker were spanning years instead of weeks, the casting would seem more appropriate, but it's like Norville ages from a 23-year-old to a 34-year old in 3 weeks as a result of his success. Maybe that's intentional on the directors' part.

I sound like a broken record, but many a Coens film requires multiple viewings before the vibe kicks in. I definitely didn't "get" The Hudsucker Proxy upon first viewing years ago, but this delighted me greatly now. I know I didn't really have any foundation in the classic cinema the Coens were calling upon, but even just a few dribbles into that pond since were enough to give me the language I needed to engross myself here. The Coens are so much more film literate than most of the filmgoing audience that when they smash up styles and genres in the way they do, and then defy storytelling conventions on top of that, they can be pretty perplexing upon first visit if your unable to catch on and hang on for the ride..

Also this is the first Coens film, and one of few, not to be centered around a crime...unless the kind of stock-tanking is a white collar crime, at which point nevermind (but even if it is a crime it seems like one of those "legal crimes" not unlike the one at the center of Rebel Ridge).

The Hudsucker Proxy may have bombed at the box office, but it's is an unequivocal success. For a 30-year old film that is recalling tropes and styles of 70, 80, 90 years ago, it still feels really, really fresh, exciting and unique. I've seen the film before and yet it was still utterly surprising.

The film's title is terrible if you're trying to convey something to an unknowing audience. They don't know what a "Hudscuker" is and "proxy" is such a rarely used word, it's sometimes hard to contextualize. But The Hudsucker Proxy walked so The Phoenician Scheme (and most of Wes Anderson's output) could run.

3 Short Rants (Definitely Not): War of the Worlds

2025, Rich Lee (a long long list of music videos) -- Amazon

Well, his list of previous work at least explains something.  

A lot of things went through my head while I continued to watch this absolutely terrible movie. As I caught myself consciously continuing to watch said movie instead of just turning it off. That said, I think I had said it before, that I generally turn movies off for being boring, not for being bad.

A movie from the perspective of two 14 year olds saying, "I can write a better movie than that!" and doing so.

It seems like there has been a lot of "War of the Worlds" projects in the past decade or so. The novel became public domain internationally around 2015, which would make you think everyone would jump on their own attempt, but really there are just the two British / European TV series (both started in 2019, which is where my perception likely came from) and a low low budget 2023 movie. Spielberg's movie is outside this window.

A movie based on your grandmother's perception of technology, the Internet, conspiracy theories she reads on Twitter and how "data" works.

William Radford (Ice Cube, Ride Along) is a DHS analyst trapped in working out of a locked room in the basement of a DHS office building. He is depicted as "the guy in the chair" personally tasked to help FBI agents perform a raid, help NSA Director Briggs (Clark Gregg, The Road to Christmas) do stuff, etc. He also stalks his children with the same technology he uses to "keep the country safe" -- hacks CCT cameras, sends drones after them, listens in on their phone calls, tracks their purchases, etc. None of it is Good Dad stuff. But the major issue I had with all this was not the invasion of privacy and his lack of focus at work, but my knowledge of THAT IS NOT HOW THIS IS DONE !! Even in cinema, even bad cinema you know its a room full of analysts each tasked with specific things, each taking time to complete said task. Instead, this movie has Will and only Will running commands, clicking buttons, tapping screens, etc. They replace the usual nonsensical hacker jargon with interface screens.

I should've been waving at the screen, yelling incoherently about how utterly ludicrous these plots points are. "WHY? Why did that happen? HOOOW ???"

If I can give the movie anything, it is that it indulged my love of interface depiction. The gimmick of the movie is that it is entirely done through the lense of digital cameras. So, we see Will from his monitor's camera, and we see the rest of the cast from phone cams, CCT cameras, drone cameras, etc. Admittedly, its a fun gimmick, and even though the interfaces are incredibly dumbed down (I swear, he ran command "hack camera" at least twice -- he didn't actually, but that is how it felt) it is exciting. And to the unexposed, it all looks incredibly technical and snazzy.

When I write terrible terrible pulp fiction vignettes, and never consider it being possibly published, I should remember, "This Got Made."

While Will is stalking his family and half-assedly doing his actual job (the idea is that Will is so good at clicking & scrolling that even half-assed, he is the best of the best) something weird is going on in the background, which of course, is an alien invasion. In the click of a mouse, there are CGI tripods climbing out of holes and zapping people. Beyond watching news casts and peeking through CCT cameras, Will also tasks NASA scientist Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria, Brooklyn Nine-Nine) with letting him look through her phone cam. For no other reason than she works for NASA, she goes to one of the craters of the perfectly spherical meteors. She's a scientist (for NASA !!) so she is... doing science-y stuff? Not really, she's just getting far too close and poking things she shouldn't be poking -- she's not even wearing a hazmat suit. Oh yes, the real reason Will originally reached out to her because she has access to satellites, and many many satellites had gone offline due to... weather?

Why is DHS Analyst working with the FBI but reporting to the NSA and (AND !!!) tasked with getting the warrant so the FBI can raid someone. So, we can be technologically thrilled by seeing him send a PDF. Ooooo, its like "Law & Order" but updated !!!

Once the aliens start fucking with the world, within minutes, because all of this is supposed to be happening in real time, the armies of the world unite and start fighting back.  The news casts start calling the response to the invasion, "The War of the Worlds." We are supposed to consider that witty.  Its not like there are hundreds of thousands of the tripods, just a scant three to five for each major city. Cue flag waving rah rah Michael Bay scene.

Unite?!?! How the fuck is the world UNITING ? Its just the armies in each independent country fighting the aliens on their own soil !!!

Buuuut, then the real alien agenda shows! The aliens start focusing their attacks on data centres, each tripod seemingly disabled but actually sneaking weird bio-cables into the data centre to suck off the data (phrasing !!). Will somehow has a graphic that shows data centres as stacks of "data" like the battery bar on your (old) phone -- as each green stack diminishes, it becomes red. Not sure why this visual would exist on any system but... TECHNOLOGY !!

The aliens eat our data. Eat. As in sustenance. They did not come to Earth to eat our brains, but to eat our data. As if data was a tangible resource. There is a brief, miniscule comment where they suggest the aliens are using the data to become smarter, to know more about us, but then it flips to.... suddenly the armed forces of the world are losing. Without the "data" Command cannot communicate to their soldiers and everyone starts dying. Why. WHY?!?! Based on the fact that we are still watching Will do shit on his computer screens, it means the operating systems are every fucking computer in the world is still working, the core functions are still there. Radios still work, CELL PHONES STILL WORK! EYES STILL WORK !! Point and shoot, you stupid soldiers !!

Again, all this is happening in real time. It struck me the movie was originally meant to be yet another mini-series in that things that normally take a long long time happen in minutes. In the span of the ten minutes when all the data centres are emptied. the soldiers fighting would still have bullets, and bombs and rocket launchers and tank shells and.... could still pull triggers !!

Yes, both voices of this writer are now both screaming at the screen in unison.

I should mention that Will has now abandoned trying to satisfy his bosses, as he has a few other things on his mind. His pregnant daughter has been injured and despite him sending a robo car to drive her to his secure data bunker, he has discovered that Briggs, the NSA boss guy, could have stopped this, but didn't. You see, the aliens were attracted to his super duper extra top secret privacy invading data mining system -- all of the world's private data was... extra tasty and irresistible? And he hid the system in the basement of the building Will works in. SO, to hide the system from the aliens, and from the prying eyes of his own government, he sends fighter jets to bomb the shit out of Will's workplace and bury it in rubble. Yes, fighter jets that five minutes ago couldn't fight back against the aliens because all their data centres were slurped up. And the bomber fighter jets are B-2 Stealth Bombers, because they look cool, cuz nothing right now needs to be stealthy.

The car has a "losing battery" scene, in which Will has to hack the systems of the car and reduce energy consumption to conserve just enough battery life to get her to the destination. The car was a mile & a half away. So, this dead battery car was just sitting on the side of the road waiting for the owner to come back with the EV version of a can of petrol?

MEANWHILE it should be mentioned that his daughter (Iman Benson, The Midnight Club) is a scientist in her own right, and she .... if you know anything about "War of the Worlds" ... she made a virus. This "cannibal virus" is supposed to reprogram DNA to eat cancer cells. This sounds like the making of a spin-off horror movie unto itself, once that virus gets out and makes data-hungry zombies, but for this movie, once they realize the aliens are bio-synthetic, they know they can upload the "cannibal virus" into the xtra-tasty data centre. Someone writing the movie associated DNA code and computer code as being the same thing. In the silliest "upload the virus" scene since Independence Day uploaded Microsoft Windows onto the alien's MacOS system (Google the fan theory), this is how they defeat the aliens in a novel-reminiscent manner. 

Don't forget them having to send the virus by USB key via Amazon drone by... ordering the USB key from the website... by now the movie doesn't even attempt to make any sense, and doesn't shirk away from shilling for its parent company.

When the movie ends, Will has decided to dump being a sweater vest wearing privacy hacking spy for his government, to being a black hoody wearing hactivist, spying on the government to make sure they don't create anymore top secret surveillance technologies that will attract aliens.

So, this movie got made. And secured a handful of face actors. And got sold to Amazon. And enough budget so that what camera work there was, did not look like something out of Asylum's catalogue. Its going to generate enough buzz (its already touted as worst movie released this year) to gain enough of a hate-watch audience, but this could not be intentional by any means, as it takes itself far too seriously, to even be fun by Bad Movie standards.

Holds up Toasty's notebooks --- got ya some NY Times Best Seller's material here !!

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): How to Train Your Dragon

2025, Dean DeBlois (How to Train Your Dragon) -- download

The live-action. My post for the original animated movie is here. The original is also a pre-Blog movie, so said post is a rewatch.

 I am prone to say posts about movies that are more Marmy (the Peanut Gallery) movies than mine, are "our" posts.

This movie post wedges in nicely with my current project -- the one about live action remakes of Disney animated movies. Not because it is Disney, but because for some reason, Dreamworks decided that their super-popular animated series about an island of dragon riding Vikings needed to become live-action. 

i.e. if Disney can do it then Dreamworks can DO. IT. BETTER. (screams a purple suit)

I imagine this concept is designed for introducing an older movie to a newer generation, but the old man yelling at clouds in me cannot help but reflect on the "there are no new ideas" rant of the past decade or so. Everything is nostalgia, everything is reused, all that is old is suddenly new again. But, despite me yelling at that cloud, I am not bothered by this ideal at all. Sure, mine my childhood, create something new from it, rework and reboot it to your heart's content. Yet, if its pretty much the same content, same story, same look & feel, then... why?

We have to be careful to not write here what should be said during the post of the first project movie's post, or... gasp... repeat myself.

Didn't repeat myself ! In the Disney post[s], I am not asking "why" at all, well not "Why is Disney Doing this?" but probably going to ask, "Why am I doing this?" more than once. Why did I do this one? Cuz we love the original and I was curious what they would do with this. I am still wondering why.

OK, Berk, an island somewhere.... north? Its all treacherous coastlines, grassy knolls and somewhere out back, pine forests. The Vikings are being attacked on the regular by dragons. There is a commentary on how most of the homes on their island are new, because they keep on having to rebuild, but there are no signs of previous attacks, and all the buildings look well lived in, until the preamble ends and half the houses in the opener are exploded and/or on fire. Part of me will repeat this adage of cartoons -- in animations, even 3D animations, we don't care about these kind of details, cuz its a cartoon, but in Live Action, it annoys me. Details folks, details.

Hiccup (Mason Thames, The Black Phone) is our reluctant hero. Other than the Tiktok hair, he's not as goofy as animated Jay Baruchel, and yes, part of what lent to Hiccup's distinct character in the original was Baruchel's refusal to give up his Canadian-isms. Of the rest, only Gerard Butler (Greenland) plays his original character, which is a fun detail on its own, but I was disappointed they went with Nick Frost (Paul) for Gobber instead of just sticking Craig Ferguson (The Drew Carey Show) in a ton of makeup -- no slight to Frost; love the guy but despite his expanded role, he was lacking for this character. And in the current tradition of Generated Outrage (I hate that an actual marketing tactic is to court the worst aspects of humanity for controversy; even bad publicity is free publicity) they cast a (gasp) black actor for Astrid, one Nico Parker (The Last of Us) and to supplement the idea of black Vikings, they added more to the island. I don't have state the ludicrous nature of disputing that their could be fictional black Vikings in a movie about dragons. If I was going to have any dispute with character change choices, it would be the twins not twins. 

Again, my love for the original is unabashed, and the D&D player in me should love the idea of these cartoony fantasy aspects finding some (real)life but... it all fell flat for me. Sure, the story is the same, and much of the imagery is faithful, but... it did not stir me. No real complaints, but for minor quibbles, but munch... burp... done, and its gone from memory. Even the majestic dragon flight scenes were... yawn. Was it me? The movie? Probably me.

I should at least be gracious and give some credits. Snotty Snotlout is Gabriel Howell (The Fence), giant sized dragon nerd Fishlegs is Julian Dennison (Deadpool 2), the "twins" Ruffnut and Tuffnut are Bronwyn James (Mickey 17) and  Harry Trevaldwyn (Sweet Sue) respectively; and yes, I get the idea they were "identical" twins for hyuk-hyuks. Nods to Peter Serafinowicz (The Tick) and Ruth Codd (The Midnight Club) as Spitelout and Phlegma respectively.

I am not sure this bodes well for this little project, even if you yell at me and remind me that technically, this movie is not part of the project.

ReFried Disney: Lilo & Stitch

2025, Dean Fleischer Camp (Marcel the Shell with Shoes On) -- download

Note: I just re-wrote the title based on what Kent suggested below. And because I loooove me some refried rice, refried beans, refried pizza, etc.

And thus begins my "stupid boy project" wherein I choose, of my own volition, to watch all the Disney live-action adaptations of their own animated movies, in order from most-recent to first. Why? Cuz. That's it, no deep reason. Just cuz. But a proper "why" may emerge as I write about them.

We, again the Peanut Gallery and me, were devotees of the "new wave" of Disney animation back in the cinema & VHS days. That was back when owning a movie for home viewing depended on finding a copy, usually second hand, from a VHS store. Eventually Disney would re-release them for home purchase, but for a time, when these movies would "go back into the vault", they were worth their weight in gold. I briefly worked for a place that hunted them down and resold them for hundreds of dollars a piece. This made them exclusive, precious, sought after things. It was an industry, but still, we just enjoyed them, songs and all. 

And then we grew up (that's highly debatable). And Disney switched, almost exclusively, from traditional to CG animated. Things just feel... different. We stopped dedicating effort to seeing things. These live-action re-imaginings derailed the watching, entirely.

I think this movie's original (from 2002, which is astounding unto itself [it still feels new], and explains no post) was one of the last of the traditionally animated movies, after which 3D CG animation became the norm. So, its not surprising that the merger of live-action and CG animation would follow as a "new thing". Yes, CG is used in probably all movies to some degree, but ... actually, I am not sure what I am trying to get at, but there is a difference in intent between movies that add in CG to enhance the fantastical/challenging-to-shoot (or too lazy to shoot) elements, and movies that come from the approach of cartoons but with real people. If I think about this anymore, I am probably going to end up rabbit-holing into questions of whether Barbie was a live-action cartoon. Better not, not yet.

Some rules, because what are "projects" without rules. I will do them all, so that means two versions of The Jungle Book, even the 1994 one, but I will not be doing live-action spin-off's or sequels of a live-action adaptations. So, no Maleficent or Mufasa watching. Also, I think that I need to write my posts from an original viewing perspective, as opposed to comparisons, though I doubt I will stick much to that. It will be too difficult to not compare, especially when the live-action version is lacking.

And we begin.

On a distant planet, a mad-scientist Dr. Jumba Jookiba (voiced by Zach Galifianakis at this point; Muppets Most Wanted) is being sentenced for his genetic experimentation and creation of Experiment 626 (voiced by Chris Sanders; Lilo & Stitch original), a nigh indestructible little agent of chaos creature. Jookiba will be incarcerated and 626 will be exiled, which strikes me as folly considering the characteristics Jookiba built into it, but this is a family movie so shooting it into the sun is not on the table. Buuuut, 626 doesn't like being "captured" so it steals a police starship (the red one) and escapes. Its ship is tracked to backward planet Earth and Jookiba is tasked capturing, and returning 626, along with assistance from Earth expert, Agent Pleakley (voiced by Billy Magnussen at this point; Velvet Buzzsaw). Again, seems like the opposite of a good idea, but this is a cartoon / family movie.

There is a side note of 626 becoming incredibly dense when submersed in water so it crash landing on an island (Kaua'i) is to everyone's advantage -- it won't be getting off the island anytime soon.

So, yeah crashed into Hawaii, where we are given our main characters: Lilo Pelekai (Maia Kealoha, feature debut) and her older sister Nani (Sydney Agudong, At Her Feet). Lilo is an agent of chaos unto herself, being left alone most of the time as barely out of teen years Nani attempts to work enough jobs to keep them alive. Their parents' death is not explained, but ever present. Also, Nani has to prove to CPS, under the stern but sympathetic eye of social work Mrs Kekoa (Tia Carrere, Wayne's World), that she is a suitable guardian for Lilo, or she will lose her. 

Neighbour Tūtū (Amy Hill, Magnum PI), who takes care of Lilo on occasion, thinks getting Lilo a pet is a good idea (its not) and that is how they run into 626, napping in a little cage at a local shelter. 616 realizes quickly that it doesn't look like the other dogs, and sucks in its extra pair of arms and antennae. Still doesn't look like a dog (blue fur for one) but sure, whatever -- adopted ! Not long after, Lilo names it Stitch.

Jookiba and Pleakley show up, armed with a portal gun and their own agendas. Pleakley loves the planet and its people but, the rest of the galaxy doesn't care for us humans -- its only protected as a sanctuary for mosquitos. Umm, thankyou mosquitos? The pair are mismatched, of course, dressed in odd looking human holograms. Their pursuit of Stitch is interrupting the little blue monster's attempting to blend in with the little broken family. He's not pleased.

Eventually Lilo and Stitch's antics get Nani fired from one job after another, and its becoming certain the two sisters will be separated. But Stitch is starting to see beyond the end of his own nose, and even Lilo is starting to see that antics (fun antics, but disastrous) can have consequences. The two are learning from each other.

In the end, once Jookiba's desire to recapture Stitch, not for the safety of the galaxy but for his own further experimentation, reveals that the little blue dog is a sentient alien monster, but one with a really big fondness for a little girl named Lilo, Nani has to fight to save the really heavy when submerged creature, and explain to Grand Councilwoman (who shows up in her space ship; voiced by Hannah Waddingham, Ted Lasso) that Stitch is not a mindless monstrous experiment but a member of their little broken family. She gives in and leaves 626 in exile, on Earth.

And breathe. Impressive sentence, if I do say so... 

Its a challenge doing a recap of such a flick because they are all so much about the multitude of moments. Live-action has to be about the performances and pacing, and not just what happens. The two leads of this movie are spectacular. I was able to not be lost comparing casting choices against the images I have in my head (I mean, those images were put there by the original animation) and also not get dragged into the ever present controversy ANY movie is going to get when casting peoples of colour. If I had any gripe, its not re-casting Ving Rhames as Cobra Bubbles (here via Courtney B Vance, Project Power), the man-in-black masquerading as a CPS care worker. I can only assume Rhames was busy doing MI stuff. And I was incredibly surprised how much I loved the silly slapstick performance of Bleakley; only a little of my guffaws were at inappropriate "I needed this stupid shit" levels (its been a challenging last few months) and I was equally not annoyed with the Jookiba man-suit as performed as/by Zach Galifianakis, which was a surprise.

As a beginning to this project, I am not sure I captured what I want to capture. As reboots of their original media, they cannot stand entirely apart. Its not like comparing the two Robocop movies, which are entirely retooled in order to give an updated version. Nor was this movie a scene for scene retelling of the original animation. Was it a success, as a movie, in my mind, apart of comparing to original? Somewhat? Its fine, its a fine fun movie. But I have to claw back my desire to not compare the movies to each other, but I am not sure I can write about the new one without doing so. 

The original is a cartoon and therefore can be quite easy to leverage acceptance of silly situations. Unlike a family movie like Paddington where the suspension of disbelief is built into the world making of the movie, this one is supposed to be set in our world, and I had trouble understanding why anyone would take this blue furry definitely-talking creature as a dog. Yes yes, its for kids, but... that's my brain folks. At least the movie's David (Kaipo Dudoit, Magnum PI) says it for me, as he did in the animation, "Did that dog just talk???".

If I can say one final thing, its that I can like cartoon kids. I have trouble endearing myself to real kids. Sure, I liked Kealoha's performance fine enough, but I didn't want to hug & squeeze her like I would the animated Lilo.

KsMIRT: must've heard and catch up

 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 that's set the world on fire.  That's right, it's Kent's fault.

This month:
Untamed (2025, netflix - 6/6 episodes)
Deli Boys (2025, disney+/hulu - 10/10 episodes)
The Eternaut (2025, netflix  - 6/6 episodes)

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Untamed created by Mark L. Smith and Elle Smith

The What 100: A young woman takes a header off of El Capitain at Yosemite National Park. Ranger Kyle Turner investigates with his newly imported-from-L.A. partner Naya Vasquez. Turns out the girl is connected to a missing persons case Turner investigated a decade earlier. Also drugs. Also a private investigator begins sniffing around a different missing persons case from around the time Turner lost his son, a trauma he 's still not recovered from.

(1 Great): The show opens incredibly strong with two climbers scaling El Capitain when one climber looks up to see a body hurtling towards him. It's chaos as she collides with him and winds up getting tangled in his ropes. Turner's (Eric Bana) arrival on scene and premilinary investigation of the body (still dangling) is a really gnarly and unique moment in the long pantheon of detective mysteries. It also very effectively sets up some of the main and supporting cast, including Milch (William Smillie).

(1 Good): Milch was by far my favourite character in the show. He first presents a surely, sardonic sonofabitch ranger who doesn't like Turner very much, so we're immediately to think Milch is the asshole. But no, really, Turner's kind of the difficult one, the exceptionally flawed lead, and yeah, Milch's general demeanour is unpleasant, but he's a decent guy overall. If this were an ongoing series with a 20+ episode season, Milch would likely be the fan favourite who the show bolsters to more and more prominence.

(1 Bad): [Spoilers here] This should have been a movie. It belabours its characters' "secrets" while also telegraphing them so profoundly that after only two of the six episodes I was exhausted by them. The show fakes you out with Turner's dead son from the onset, though by the end of the episode it's clear this is the situation, but then the show teases out what happened, and how it connects to a missing persons case, and how all of these things tie together like a Celtic knot of mystery and intrigue and...frustration. This would have worked much better as a straightforward mystery with our characters' traumas and burdens laid out at the beginning. We learn by the end that Turner's ex, Jill (Rosemarie Dewitt) was responsible for the death of the man who killed her son, and that Turner covered it up... it would have been far more fascinating if this was up front information that then raises stakes and tensions as the private investigator show up and starts probing. I dunno, maybe not. It's interwoven narrative (which you know Sam Neill is caught up in in some way because...Sam Neill... that doesn't get revealed until midway through the final episode, and it's kind of dumb).

META: Also why I think this should have been a movie... they could have actually shot it in Yosemite, instead of Chip Kerr Park in BC, where they composite in shots of Yosemite and it really triggers the Uncanny Valley receptors. I was hoping there would be a plethora of gorgeously composed shots of the park wilderness, and, well, not so much. It's not a terrible looking show, but there's not a lot of care put into its cinematography. It feels direly like television, and I really want it to look like a movie. Instead we basically get neu dad TV.

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Deli Boys created by Abdullah Saeed

The What 100: Self-made millionaire deli and convenience store baron Arshad Dar is dead, having taken a golfball to the temple on the golf course. Arshad's spoiled, privileged sons, business grad Mir and new-age party boy Raj are his inheritors, only the company is then raided and fortunes siezed by the Feds as they suspect it was a front for importing and distributing cocaine. It was, but the raid proves nothing. All Mir and Raj are left with is one remaining deli shop and the life-threatening responsibility of retaining the front. They do have help though from Auntie Lucky who may be conspiring against them as much as helping.

(1 Great): I started into Deli Boys because of Poorna Jagannathan, who left a pretty big impression as Nalini, the main character's mom in 4 seasons of Netflix's Never Have I Ever. She had such great screen presence and she was able to convey layers in her performance that went so far beyond the "mom" role of in a teen sitcom (it helped that the show was also interested in her as more than the "mom" character) . As Lucky in Deli Boys she's not the maternal type in any real sense, she's a fucking boss, a stylish badass, with no damn time for nonsense. She comes off as cold, calculating and vicious but Jagannathan turns what would be a reprehensible character into a pure comedic force reacting to a world of fools around her. She's always the smartest person in the room, but isn't ever respected as such. As the series builds, her character evolves, developing the smallest shred of heart for the two young dipshits who are in way over their heads.

(1 Good): Deli Boys is a comedic goldmine of offbeat characters and eccentric weirdos and full fledged dumbasses that it's a non-stop parade of delightful discoveries as we watch two very naive, spoiled rich kids try to utilize whatever untested skills they have in this very scary and intense world where they really don't belong. The best parts of the show are how the characters bounce off each other, usually in genre or convention subverting ways. Mir and Raj are kind of the chief offbeat weirdos that set the tone for the show, Mir has a desperate need to please and succeed and live up to the image of Baba that he's established in his mind, while Raj's free-wheeling, no-worries sensibilities bash up against the super-serious world he's entered.  The boys feel a need to connect to their Baba by trying to sustain his illicit empire that they never knew about, but at the same time they find new strength in themselves and each other. It's late in the series that it really starts to connect all the emotional dots, but they're in the show's foundation from the start, and it winds up pretty rewarding. Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh as Mir and Raj respectively are both really great in the show, tremendously fun performers in very different but complimentary ways. 

(1 Bad): Is there a bad? I don't think there is a bad. The worst part for me was getting over the hurdle of watching these good boys "break bad". It's a convention I'm so generally exhausted by, largely because shows of "good folks gone bad" try to really tug on the intensity of normal people getting involved in organized crime and being way out of their depths. Deli Boys could have easily made these parallels but turning it into cringe comedy instead of dramatic intensity, but they instead go a different way, through character-centric resolutions and genre subversion. It's constantly surprising and frequently hilarious, even as it occasionally descends into quasi-Tarantino-esque  violence.

META: Just a goddamn surprise out of nowhere. It's a pretty hilarious show from the start and yet for the first half I kept anticipating it to turn into something I wouldn't enjoy anymore, whether it be changing Mir and Raj into characters I don't like or it letting go of the comedy for something more uncomfortable. But there was no turn. By episode six I had settled in and could trust the creators were committed to the comedy and the characters were on a journey that had some substance, it was a smooth and tremendously enjoyable (and satisfying ) binge in the back stretch.

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The Eternaut show created by Bruno Stagnaro based on the comic by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López

The What 100: A strange snowfall has occurred in Buenos Aires, an extremely rare occurrence for the city. The only problem is one touch of the snow on bare skin means death. The city becomes a ghost town as those who have not succumbed to the snow are sheltering in place. Our protagonists are a group of friends who were playing poker when it all started. One of the players, Juan Salvo, cannot sit tight, he needs to head out into the city and find his wife and daughter, only to learn the snow is not the only deadly thing outside.

(1 Great): Now obviously the show is based on a legendary-in-Argentina comic, so it has a roadmap to play by, and despite being set in modern day, it's said to be a fairly faithful adaptation. But it could very easily not have been. It could very easily have been a cheaply made in-name-only adaptation which follows a group of people bunkered down while a sci-fi event occurs outside. It does start out that way, but it effectively grows and grows in scale with each episode, and it manouevers the characters, at least in some cases, in surprising ways. This is grand-scale sci-fi that isn't subverting tropes so much as works its way through them like passing through towns on a highway. It slows down enough to have a look around, and then forges on. For something based on a 60-year-old story, it didn't feel dated in the slightest, and it constantly surprised me on where each chapter turned to.

(1 Good): I loved the Buenos Aires setting and how the show and story explore the city. As a North American/Anglo viewer of film and television I get so used to the sights of L.A., New York, Vancouver, Toronto, and all the other stand-in places we see. I can't think off the top of my head what the last production set in Buenos Aires I might have seen, if any. The show isn't as much a love letter to the city, because it puts it through the wringer, but it's definitely keen to use it and many of its landmarks... you can feel the pride in doing so.

(1 Bad): Overall, The Eternaut is a good-looking production, but at time the digital snow triggers the Uncanny Valley receptors. Come to learn that the production needed to use AI tools to aide in doing the work, and I will neither hand wave away the necessity for modest-budget productions to use an available tool to accentuate their work, nor will I excuse it for not employing actual artists (technicians?) to do the work.

META: What sold me on The Eternaut was one image from the original comic of an man in a scuba diver's mask and hooded jumpsuit carrying a rifle amidst the snow. It's a striking image from Solano López that made me immediately want to read the comic but it's out of print (published in English by Fantagraphics in 2015, a new edition coming later this year). The image and the title are so evocative, my mind raced with the potential story being told. The first episode of The Eternaut seemed perhaps a little too conventional, but the series' grand sense of adventure kicked in and every episode continued to pay off in new and exciting ways.

This is also suuuuuch a Toasty-styled product, I'm so very surprised he hasn't written about things and we haven't even talked about it in person.

Series Minded: The Nakeds Gun

[Series Minded is an irregular feature here at T&KSD, wherein we tackle the entire run of a film, TV, or videogame series in one fell swoop. This one kind of snuck up on me. I wasn't expecting to re-watch the original Naked Gun trilogy for the new film's debut, but I enjoyed rewatching the first so much I had to watch them all].

The Naked Gun: From the Files of the Police Squad! (1998, d. David Zucker - netflix)
The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991, d. David Zucker - netflix)  
The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994, d. Peter Segal - netflix)
The Naked Gun (2025, d. Akiva Schaffer - in theatre)

Parody films used to be so bankable, both as financial successes at the box office and as tremendous sources of big time laffs, chuckles and guffaws (not to mention titters and chortles). But the parody film has become something rather derided in the past decade or two, in no small part thanks to the prolific output of the "Not Another X Movie" series which treated mere reference as comedy and relied on being gross, crass, or punching down on others as their default mode. But even when parodies were in the hands of parody maestros, like Buck Henry, Mel Brooks and the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker trio, The Naked Gun stood apart.

Leslie Nielsen would go on to star in a slew of parody films following The Naked Gun but to greatly diminished returns. They replied upon Nielsen's comedic persona almost entirely, what they lacked was a central character like Detective Frank Drebin that was a defined suit of comedy armour for Nielsen to wear. Of course, Nielsen had debuted the character in the short lived TV series Police Squad! six years earlier, so the character had already been built and tested. 

I had forgotten how central to The Naked Gun comedy engine Frank Drebin is. He's not a buffoon, yet he can be. He's not oblivious, but he often is. He's awful at his job, but also very successful. He's a mix of the hardboiled detective from film noir and the jaded shoot-first, ask-questions-later cop of the Dirty Harry movies. He's a walking talking cliche that constantly defies the cliche. By the nature of the cliche, Drebin is poker-face serious at all times (except when he needs to react to something, at which point Nielsen's comic mugging is rivalled only by the likes of Jim Carrey) and delivers every line like he's chewed on the words for a millennium even though it's clear he hasn't really thought them through at all. 

Drebin is the primary joke delivery vehicle for The Naked Gun series and why it works so well is because the cliche is so well-worn and time tested and reused ad nauseum, that even a thorough lampooning of the character and story tropes do not diminish the effectiveness of the tropes.  With Austin Powers lampooning the Bond cliches so thoroughly, Bond and spy movies had to evolve from the cliches. Detective and police stories didn't budge an inch after The Naked Gun.

The Naked Gun and its first sequel weren't just keen on parody though. They are joke machines, set-up and punchline followed by wordplay followed by background visual gag followed by slapstick followed by callback followed by character-centric joke followed by topical joke followed by surprise cameo followed by fourth wall break followed by political gag followed by pop culture poke followed by innuendo followed by overt sexual joke followed by non-sequitur, inanity, and silliness... all swirling down the same drain intermixing and popping up again.

The big surprise of the series' first cinematic entry, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, was not only how damn funny it still remains (even outside of nostalgia and intense familiarity) but how little (if at all) it uses punching down in its comedy.  Likewise it was surprising to me, given that David Zucker fell down a right wing rabbit hole in the 2000s, how snarky and satirically scathing they were of the police, Republicans, and jingoism. At one point in the first film, Drebin is asked to hand in his badge and gun and states "Just think, next time I shoot someone, I could be arrested." 

Plot is kind of besides the point in these films, and yet, at their core the first two films still have a meaningful (if irreverent) caper for Drebin to foil in and an emotional arc for him, centered around his love affair with Jane (Prescilla Presley, who the first film convinced a 12-year-old Kent was the most beautiful woman in the world).

The first Naked Gun has O.J. Simpson's (I know!) Nordberg getting shot up during a drug stakeout at the L.A. docks. This coincides with the impending visit from Queen Elizabeth II. In investigating the shooting Police Squad links the events at the docs with prosperous businessman Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalbán) who happens to be the main host and sponsor of the Queen's visit.  Paying a visit to Ludwig's office, Frank and Jane spark an immediate attraction, and Ludwing sends Jane after Frank to find out what he knows. One safe-sex-joke-that-I-totally-didn't-get-when-I-was-12 and a delightfully silly montage later, they're a steadfast couple. But not so fast... of course Frank quickly suspects that she was using him for Ludwig's benefit so they have a romantic complication to overcome as, during the third act, Frank needs to save the Queen from being assassinated at a baseball game. Though perhaps a big detour from the detective/cop genre the film is lampooning, the baseball sequence finds an insane amount of gags from Frank's impersonation of an opera singer for the national anthem (of which he doesn't fully know the words, but then who really does if we're being honest?), to him impersonating an umpire and getting too into the audience adulation for his positive calls for the home team, to him trying to pat down the players throughout the game to check for guns. All that plus getting to watch O.J. as Nordberg get accidentally abused and tortured over and over and over again is its own kind of schadenfreude.

The second (and a half) film finds the comedy less omnipresent than its predecessor, largely because it's a bit more stuck in its time, yet it still has much the same snap as the first. Frank and Police Squad are in Washington D.C. for a Presidential commendation, which finds Frank interacting with George and Barbara Bush, replete with Frank accidentally delivering all manner of assaults and insults upon poor Barbara over and over again. (The George Bush impersonator is caked in thick make-up to a distracting degree, which, really, you couldn't just nab Dana Carvey?). President Bush announces he's deferring his entire energy policy to one man, Dr. Meinheimer (Richard Griffiths), who it turns out that Jane now works for. Frank and Jane split up before their wedding and Frank is heartbroken. Jane is now with oil baron Quentin Hapsburg (Robert Goulet), who is secretly running a cabal of energy industry leaders, and they're plotting to fix Bush's energy policy by replacing Meinheimer with a double.  Of course Frank gets in the way, in no small part thanks to Jane's connections to it all. One awkward encounter after another, the pair reunite and they have wild night at the pottery turner (if you don't know the Ghost reference it just becomes a delicious bit of absurdity). After a disastrous incident with a tank, Police Squad is no more, but Frank, Ed, Nordberg and the real Dr. Hapsburg infiltrate the state dinner (as a mariachi band no less) where the fake Hapsburg is to present his fake energy policy and stop a nuclear bomb. Hapsburg nearly manages to escape but is interrupted by a beautifully orchestrated callback. 

The (thirty-three and a) third movie moves itself squarely into the 90's. By this point the spoof movie had taken off with National Lampoon and Mel Brooks back in the game quite heavily, so it seems there was a pivot.  Whether it was studio demands or the absence of Jim Abrahms and Jerry Zucker, this third entry in the series leaned in hard on spoofing then-recent (and not-so-recent) cinema, including opening with a parody of the stairs sequence from The Untouchables, riffing on Thelma and Louise, and, strangely, Staying Alive ( but only in the most rudimentary ways).  Not satisfied with in-story (or in-dreams, or in-tangent) parodies, the film's final act takes place at the Academy Awards (the curious roster of celebrity cameos - like "Wierd" Al and Vanna White is very charming) where they have more opportunity to do out-of-story spoofs like "Geriatric Park". Divesting itself of classic detective and cop tropes and going into 90's crime thrillers and prison dramas along with xenophobic, gay panic, rape jokes and transphobia (in the guise of a Crying Game riff) is the series at its absolute lowest, but sequences that play like hack observational comedy (such as Frank's visit to the grocery store or Frank trying to talk to a cabbie) lay the foundation for this weakest entry in the series.

33 1/3 leaves behind the noirish tendencies, savvy wordplay and even the regular running gags to fit into the "movie riffing on other movies" trend that wouldn't subside for another couple decades. It's really disappointing. On top of that, the story doesn't have any character resonance. It opens with with Jane having become a busy lawyer with her biological clock ticking. Frank has retired and is bored. They want a baby but Jane's too busy and Frank's feeling neglected. The "domesticated man" comedy is dated, but Nielsen sells it pretty good. Ed and Nordberg need his help in a case, and he goes undercover at a sperm bank. After Jane discovers Frank is a cop again, she leaves him, so Frank dives headfirst into more undercover work, going into high security prison to befriend freelance bomber Rocco Dillon (Fred Ward). He helps him escape and Jane reenters the picture just as Rocco's girl Tanya (Anna Nicole Smith, who the film convinced 18-year-old Kent was the most beautiful woman in the world) inexplicably makes fresh with him (it must have been something in Nielsen's contract, as she does it again and again in the film). Rocco's plan is to bomb the Academy Awards, and through various shenanigans (some of them actually amusing) Frank stops them.

It's Frank and Jane's relationship in the first two movies that works so well at its core. The smartest thing the second film did was open with them broken up just so it had an excuse to put Jane with yet another foil for Frank and then bring them together again. Here, the break-up feels contrived and doesn't seem to carry a lot of weight on Frank for the remainder of the film. Jane's return to the fold at the end of the second act is handle well enough to bring her back into the picture, but it's just so she can be the damsel in distress again (though pointedly so, if not quite pointedly enough).  There was an opportunity here to establish a formulae for the series itself, with Frank and Jane starting each film broken up again already, and to continue to abuse Nordberg (which this third entry mostly neglects)... but the series would not continue anyway due to diminishing returns... that is until 2025.

This new iteration of The Naked Gun was resurrected by writer/director Akiva Schaffer (of The Lonely Island), co-writers Dan Gregor & Doug Mand, and producers Seth McFarlane and Erica Huggins, and it falls squarely into the "legasequel" terrain. Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr. while Paul Walter Houser plays the Junior version of George Kennedy's Captain Ed Hocken. Where the Senior Ed was the man in charge of Police Squad in the original series, here both Frank and Ed report into their Chief, played by CCH Pounder.

It's been 30 years since the last Naked Gun film so there's a LOT of cops and detective fiction and non-fiction in the intervening years, and the awareness of police abuses and corruption is much more in the consciousness, so a modern day spoof on the genre has plenty to play with. The film opens with a Christopher Nolan-styled bank robbery sequence that featured prominently in the trailers. Neeson, like Nielsen, is shameless in his comedy guise and had no compunction about doing an action sequences wearing a schoolgirl uniform. Like the original series, this downplays the violence, despite noting how frequently Frank likes to shoot perps (offscreen gun violence is something he shares with his father apparently).

The robbery was a smokescreen for the theft of the P.L.O.T. device, which is handed off to billionaire tech mogul Richard Cane (Danny Huston). His plan is a big modern supervillain grand scheme...to send a signal that will drive the world into a primordial rage, while all the rich shits go live in a secret volcano bunker with "Weird" Al and wait out humanity's self destruction.

As a result of his egregious abuse of his police powers, Frank is booted off the robbery case, and onto investigating an auto wreck. The victim's sister, Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson, which this film reminded me that 14-year-old Kent was convinced she was the most beautiful woman in the world) advises Frank her brother worked for Cane and so the storylines dovetail. Unlike Frank Sr. and Jane, their flirtation is filled with more disdain than attraction, which softens slightly with each subsequent encounter. Beth is much more a woman of action...as a true crime author (based on stories she's made up) she figures she can follow the cliched path of investigating her brother's death and exact her revenge. Only Frank Jr. stands in her way. Unlike its predecessor, and in modern action movie fashion, Frank fails to stop the evil plan, and then has to deal with the fallout. I never could have predicted where it would go, not in a mil...not in a doz... not in, say, seven guesses.

The film is loaded with sight gags, non-sequiturs, wordplay, etc... all the hallmarks of a Naked Gun movie, and its approach to parody is more in line with the first film of the original trilogy, rather than the third. Shaffer opts for stylistic parody rather than direct scene-for-scene or lampooning. He adopts the tone of Tony Scott or a David Fincher when the need serves him, but adopting such sensibilities does bump up against the comedic sensibilities at times. 

There's some of The Lonely Island's trademark pop-culture riffing, with an 80-styled montage of Frank Jr. and Beth, whisking away to a log cabin and having sexy times, but quickly turning weird when they build a snowman, practice witchcraft and bring the snowman to life...and it just gets weirder from there. It's mashing so many references and genres together, it made my brain spin, and yes, I loved it. 

On a joke density level, it's pretty high, especially for a modern comedy released in cinemas (ha... what's that?) but its still not to the level of the original Naked Gun... but I say this with only one viewing. Part of what makes the original so fantastic is familiarity, having watched it dozens of times so as to have seen every joke it has to offer. I have to wonder/hope this version has more in store than upon first watch.

As said, Neeson is game. He's not been shy about dispelling his on-screen image, from A Million Days to Die in the West to The Lego Batman Movie to a cameo in Donald Glover's Atlanta, it's clear the man has a sense of humour and is more than aware of his on-screen persona to subvert it.  After seeing Paul Walter Houser steal his main scene in Fantastic Four: First Steps, I was hoping he would have a bigger spotlight here, but as Ed Jr. he gets about as much screen time as George Kennedy would, but his presence is still enjoyably welcome. Pamela Anderson's comeback career trucks on, after The Last Showgirl showed everyone (who watch it...it's on my list) that she has real-deal acting chops, here she's able to spotlight her comedic sensibilities once again, and all you need is "Sassafras Chicken in D" to tell you she's got the goods. It's hard to think who the modern Ricardo Montalbon or Robert Goulet, because Hollywood doesn't really produce these kind of personalities anymore... and Danny Huston is far too good and capable an actor to be considered in their league, but he does a really good job, culminating in that amazing final showdown with Neeson in the end.

The biggest letdown of this new film is it didn't feature the patented Naked Gun opening title sequence with James Ira Newborn's rollicking, swinging, horn wail of an theme playing over scenes of a police siren wailing while it intones a cop car driving through ludicrous situations (it does play the theme during the end credits and reedits the opening sequences from the original trilogy, which seems a poor concession). That said, the title card of the film does have a good gag, and there are jokes scattered throughout the end credits.

Will The Naked Gun revive comedies on the big screen, or, will it just revive more parody movies (in which case, God help us all)?

One final note, I took my kids (16 and 23) to see the film, and it played well for my eldest who is kind of obsessed with procedurals and detective stories, but my teen hasn't really ever engaged with the genre and found only a few scenes really amusing. This generation of kids who experience most of culture through youtube videos and tiktoks of other people talking about culture makes this kind of spoofing and satirizing difficult, because the kids don't have the cinematic language for it. Or maybe that's just my kid.

 

KWIF: Barton Fink

 KWIF = Kent's Week in Film. There was more than one film I watched this week but they were all part of the same franchise, so separate "Series Minded" post coming up.

This Week:
Barton Fink (1991, d. Joen [and Ethan] Coen - DVD)

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As the legend goes, during the writing of the screenplay to Miller's Crossing, the brothers Coen hit a brick wall. They got lost in that film's labyrinthine construction and couldn't find their way out. Writer's block hit. Well... sort of. They instead pivoted to a second script, Barton Fink, which surprisingly enough deals with a writer who is struggling with his own case of writer's block. To quote (ish) actor/podcaster Griffin Newman, "it's the most productive case of writer's block in history".

As with many a Coens' film, Barton Fink does not have an easy access point, and the brothers writing, directing and producing the film aren't keen to really show you the way in. Often their films require repeat viewing to develop a palette for what they're serving. I mistakenly thought that my familiarity with their output (they're one of the few directors from a pre-2000 age where I can say I've seen all their films) meant that revisiting those films I've only seen once, some time ago, would be easier to digest.

Barton Fink, at its core, is a satire...I think? In the context of the Coens wrestling with another screenplay, here they're scripting the story of a lauded playwright who is lured to WWII wartime-era Hollywood and despite his penchant for delving into the struggles of the everyman, is put on a wrestling picture which he just can't find a way into.  

The Coens have a fascination with olde timey Hollywood, but also have enough awareness and insight into the Hollywood systems, both old and new, to have an active and healthy disdain for it. Barton''s (John Turturro) meetings with studio execs, producers, and other writers finds a slew of people with massive egos, full of bluster, but ultimately empty of any substance, artistic or otherwise. The studio head (Michael Learner) talks fast and talks a lot, kissing Barton's ass because he thinks Barton's ass is one to be kissed. He is, in Toasty's words, a "purple suit",  telling Barton he has nothing to prove to him, except everything.  All he asks of Barton is to abandon any sense of individuality and free-thinking creativity and deliver more of the same of what he already knows he can sell tickets to. 

Barton also meets another studio screenwriter (John Mahoney), W.P. Mayhew, who it turns out is a novelist Barton greatly admires. He also turns out to be a raging alcoholic who hasn't produced a single thing of note in a long time, and what he has was largely ghost written by his assistant and mistress, Audrey (Judy Davis). Mayhew is a vision of Barton's future, one where the promise of Hollywood riches comes at the expense of one's artistry, individuality, self-worth, and dignity.

Barton's journey from New York to L.A. is a lonely one, but one gets the impression Barton is solitary being anyway. He's neither particularly charming nor affable. He's kind of a pretentious ass, in all honesty, as immediately highlighted in his first encounter with his hotel room neighbour, Charlie Meadows (John Goodman). Having first pissed Charlie off by calling the front desk on him for laughing too loud, the two make a sort of peace over a drink in Barton's room.  Charlie explains he's an insurance salesman and boy, he has stories to tell. But Barton can't stop sermonizing about the importance of art and story reflecting the plight of the layman long enough to listen to the plight of an actual layman.

The Coens filmography largely centers around crime, mostly on a small scale, and the people who are involved one one side or the other. With Barton Fink the crime element still comes into play, but feels almost an afterthought. Barton and Audrey have a one-night stand, but in the morning Barton wakes to find Audrey dead in bed next to him having bled out. It's the start of the third act and it's a hard 90-degree turn the film takes, with Barton shell-shocked by it all. Charlie steps in an helps him out, disposing of the body. Barton continues to take meetings with the studio and eventually finds his muse in the situation, finally writing again.

The denouement of the film is one of fire and brimstone, a compact having been made with the devil (or at least inferred), but as with every deal with the devil, it's got its catches. 

Something the Coens get charged with is not having much sympathy for their characters, and I think that really stands out here. They don't seem to actually like Barton Fink very much nor do they feel terribly sorry for his plight. His struggles are a result of the choices he's made and the way he presents to the world. That said, they seem to empathize with him though, they truly understand the frustration of not finding the words for the page and the irritability that comes with that. They understand the deadlines and the pressure and the imposter syndrome Barton faces, though its clear they don't respect how he handles it (and they don't want him to handle it respectfully).

This is a thriller or even horror movie done Coens-style. With Roger Deakins on Cinematography, things are framed in various ways that recalls Lynch primarily but touches of Cronenberg and Kubrick too. There's an intensity from the outset, with both Carter Burwell's score, and the absence thereof. The sound design is key, such as the moans and wails heard through the wall, or the jarring interruption of a phone ringing, or even the slimy slurp of the wallpaper peeling are all very visceral and present as distractions to Barton.

It's an easy film the appreciate while at the same time proving a difficult film to like. It's not the Coens most cohesive work, but it's also very hard to dismiss given how much it reflects their attitude towards their industry and profession.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Heads of State

2025, Ilya Naishuller (Nobody) -- Amazon

Two things kept up rising up in my brain while watching this porridge level digestible action comedy. 

One, which is a topic that often arises, especially during the last decade -- American identity as the "good guys", primarily in their own minds, but also in the collective world pop culture consciousness. This is a difficult fiction to maintain right now, but also makes one wonder whether Hollywood creators might use light entertainment as a way to comment on the political bodies? 

Two, its only a matter of time before an entire Hollywood script is produced by a well-trained generative AI model via some really skillful people entering prompts to produce a movie which is exactly what the Purple Suits are asking for. This movie strikes as a very real possible example of such. Its painfully obviously constructed to push all the right buttons.

My intent in the last few posts was to comment on my predilection for violent action movies, and the irony of them being light fare, even in my brain, and even if you ignore the action-comedy tropes. Instead, I found myself more talking about the construction of these movies, the presentations they chose, within all that gunplay and killing people. But it still fascinates me that this is a thing, in that in the Hollywood presented mindset, a pair of bared breasts holds more power than the senseless slaughter of a dozen people. Maybe it has something to do with the unreality of it all -- we are all going to be exposed (pun intended) to sex, but very few of us will ever experience true, real violent death. I wonder if people who do see it, caution away from violent movies, while the rest of us find escapism in them.

In case you care, yes I will spoil major aspects of this movie, but even the movie expects you to have figured it out long before its "revealed".

This movie, a movie about two arrogant Leaders of the Free World, one being the American President, Will Derringer (John Cena, Freelance), an ex-action movie star now charismatic, if a bit naive politician, and the other is the more sobre, somber Sam Clarke (Idris Elba, The Take), ex-soldier, just trying to do right for his country, his people, knowing it is a challenge for a non-politico type, begins with an exciting but truly horrific setup segment. Coerced to travel together to a NATO event on Air Force One, the plane is attacked and only the two leaders escape. The dozens of staff, attachés and other governmental officials are all killed or die as it crashes. I mean, I know why, as in all such action movies, it is about something terrible happening that our heroes barely escape, to provide a clue as to how bad the Bad Guys are, and to motivate our heroes. But like I did in one of the White House slaughter movies, I felt the weight of the collateral damage. It did not feel light to me.

The rest of the movie is about the argumentative leaders trying to get from Point A to Point B while straining to figure out who betrayed them. Of course, its the Vice President (Carla Gugino, Lisa Frankenstein). Even Derringer quips, "Its always the Vice President." Very little of the action stands out in the movie, but for a small segment in the middle which guest stars Marty Comer (Jack Quaid, Novocaine) as a fan-boy CIA station agent who is surprisingly effective, but dies (not really, suggesting a spin-off). To be honest, what stands out is as surprising to me, but it was the quippy dialogue between the two world leaders as they get to know each other. Derringer is an ex-action movie star and approaches everything in life from the point of view of being adored by his fan base. Its naive and annoying, but he has a point in that it allows him to cross barriers that are sometimes put up by his own people and foreign dignitaries. He actually has a genuinely good heart. Meanwhile, Clarke is a no-nonsense, mostly angry, dismissive, sarcastic bastard (a man after my heart) who dislikes Derringer's use of his fame and rose-coloured glasses approach to leading a country. Sam only wants to do right by all his people, and knows its 99% challenges. There is an honest attempt to say stuff via the banter between these two men, even if its political stance lite. Too bad its fiction, cuz as we well know, neither country has a strong, moral, likeable or capable leader.

Its entirely cookie cutter, entirely constructed in small chunks of everything expected from such a movie with requisite recognizable faces, interesting locales (in the vein of the "travel Europe" trope I have commented on in the past), funny scenes galore combined with an endless supply of mooks to be gunned down. It even plays with the "love interest" trope, as Sam is a single guy hung up on his ex intelligence agency girlfriend (Priyanka Chopra-Jonas, Citadel). 

The script could have been designed by a room full of Purple Suits, or a room full of nerds typing prompts into a laptop. Those that fear AI (and they should) visualize someone saying, "Computer, make me a comedy-action movie" and it spitting out a full-formed script. But those in tech know it will be much more complicated, nuanced and challenging to get an AI, or many AIs combined, to produce a workable script -- machine training, source material fed in, skilled prompt writers, etc. But eventually it will become a very real thing, and yes, jobs will be replaced, with different jobs, far less paid jobs, far less creator oriented jobs. And if we think all movies feel the same now, imagine when they are.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Fight or Flight

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

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

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

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

Yeah we see the struggle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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