KWIF: A House of Dynamite (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Usually when I take a week of work just to have time off I spend much of that time consuming and writing about movies. We'll stupid mice in the house have had me checking and repositioning and rebaiting traps, cleaning up messes and hunting for nests while only getting 5-6 hours of sleep at night because they're stressing me out. In the other times, I've been boardgaming or rearranging the house for new shelving so I haven't had much time at all for movies. Poo. 

This Week: 
A House of Dynamite (2025, d. Kathryn Bigelow - netflix)
Final Destination 5 (2011, d. Steven Quale - rental)
Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025, d. Adam B. Stein, Zach Lipovsky - crave)

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A House of Dynamite is a political procedural taking the audience through a "what if" scenario from as many vantage points as it can in its just shy of two hour runtime. That scenario asks what would happen if a rogue missile was launched from an unknown source. What would we actually know? What could we actually do? And by "we" I mean the United States government officials and military personnel who are in charge of monitoring and responding to such things. [I'm not really part of that "we" statement].

Because of the nightmare landscape that America (and much of the world) is in now, politically and socially speaking, A House of Dynamite already feels out of date. It's a film that presents an intense and terrifying scenario that assumes competency at the helm of all these levels of decision making, which we're all (mostly) keenly aware isn't the case anymore. Hell, there's a character played by Moses Ingram that is a FEMA agent... does FEMA even exist anymore?

The commander-in-chief here is played by Idris Elba (with a real wonky American accent...didn't he have a better one nearly 20 years ago in The Wire), he loves podcasts and basketball, so he's very Obama-coded. Honestly, somehow I feel more comforted by an Obama-like presidency where there may be a nuclear strike on American soil than I do about anything the cheeto-in-charge is doing these days.

The film takes place in three segments, each focusing on a few central players. In the first it's Anthony Ramos at a military monitoring station, Rebecca Ferguson at the White House Situation Room ("the Whizzer") and Moses Ingram's FEMA agent as she gets evacuated to the safety bunker in the Appalachians. The subsequent two segments loop back to the other sides of conversations being had from different perspectives, be it Tracey Lett's STRATCOM Commander, Gabriel Basso's deputy national security advisor, Greta Lee's foreign military expert, or Elba's president, among others.

I get the impulse to really drill down deep into the procedural aspect and try to show this situation from as many different points of analysis and decision making as possible, but it only leads to diminishing returns as we keep looping back. There are far too many characters to really care about any of them, so all we have to really care about is the situation, and, somehow, it's not strong enough to sustain itself satisfactorily.

There's no doubt that Bigelow is a great filmmaker, and this is constructed so well, with a commitment to detail and nuance, and it is an incredible feat of editing, but it presents its conundrum, repeatedly, and it doesn't have an answer. America is about to lose a major city to a nuclear strike that may or may not have been intentional. Does America retaliate against an unknown enemy with a show of strength, and if so, against whom? Will the nuke actually hit the city, or the nearby major body of water? And will the nuke actually go off?

There's a lot of positing that this film teases and tease and never resolves. It's going for "clever" but it's just edging the audience with no relief, and it makes the journey a frustrating one.

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James Wong and David R. Ellis see-sawed on the Final Destination franchise for four years, each with a slightly different take on what the spectre of death should look like, and how the films' protagonists would deal with death's designs for them. It would have been more fun if each of the directors' second efforts weren't so bad.

With fresh blood in the form of unremarkable director Steven Quale from a screenplay by soon to be accomplished screenwriter Eric Heisserer (Arrival, Bird Box) they present the Final Destination equivalent of a workplace sitcom.

The scenario the protagonists here face is a ludicrous but thoroughly entertaining bridge collapse. It's a pretty epic spectacle that is the series' second best disaster to date (though about to be trumped by the next film). It's shot decently enough, the special effects aren't as atrocious as the previous two films, and the script has all but gotten rid of the cast of characters you just immediately want all dead.

Here wanna-be chef Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) is on a bus on a work retreat when he has a vision of the bridge collapsing. Stuck in traffic on the bridge, he manages to rile up a few other passengers who follow him off the bus and to safety as the bridge collapses. This includes his best friend/manager Peter (Miles Fisher), his girlfriend Molly (Emma Bell) who literally just dumped him, intern Candice (Ellen Wroe) and a few others who will all die horribly later.

This is a series that's all about the deaths, and the fake-outs leading to the deaths. It's about teasing the audience with possibilities before executing Death's design. Final Destination 2 did this the absolute best, and while this doesn't fully live up to that, nor does it really recapture the magic of discovery of the first one, it's pretty decently entertaining throughout, with some particularly squicky kills (one involving a laser eye surgery laser that had me flinching)

There are two big diversions here. The first is the inclusion of Courtney B. Vance's FBI agent who is investigating Sam's vision, wondering if Sam committed an act of domestic terrorism, only to come to understand that as connected as the dead are, there's no corporeal perpetrator. I really would have liked the whole movie to be from his perspective, as he comes across the scenes and he and his team need to try and unpack what happened, Will Graham from Hannibal-style ("this is my design"). The second is a new explanation as to how to end the cycle from Tony Todd, "Mr. Final Destination" himself. In this case, it's killing someone else and taking their remaining time for one's self. It's an interesting premise on its own that, while constituting the focus of the third act, doesn't get explored much outside of its needs for a horror film.

If you pay close enough attention throughout the film, the coda shouldn't be a surprise, but it's still a delight and probably the best ending of the series.

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14 years later and Final Destination is back, and bigger than ever. Enough time has passed with the series laying dormant to build up a nostalgic reverence, plus the current state of Hollywood is all about exploiting intellectual property so a new Final Destination was inevitable.

What wasn't inevitable was the love and care that seemingly went into this franchise re-launch. It's not that the film is straying very far out of its lane, but rather it just navigates the series and its concepts in a manner that seems to indicate the writers (Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor) and directors Stein and Lipovski are all real fans of the series and have been thinking about how to freshen it up for some time.

The centerpiece of the film is its opening prologue, an epic 20-minute sequence set in the late 1960's where a young couple (Max Lloyd-Jones and Stargirl's Brec Bassinger) are out for a special evening at the newly opened Sky View restaurant, a posh space-age joint at the top of a Space Needle-esque building. They encounter some class-based prejudice that threaten to ruin their evening, but it turns out all it would take is a little 10-year-old shit chucking pennies from the lookout to destroy the whole facility. It's a spectacular disaster, at least the rival if not the better of the highway disaster from Final Destination 2.

The whole sequence is so vibrant and colourful with that gauzy 60's feels to it, and the polite menace beneath chipper smiles that I really wanted the whole movie to be a period-set Final Destination. Alas, it was not to be, as we smash cut from the collapsing building to a modern day lecture hall where Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) has just awaken, screaming, from the nightmare. It's a recurring vision she's had, and she thinks the woman in it is her grandmother.

It turns out it is her grandmother, Iris, in Stefani's vision. Iris has been estranged from the family for decades. She was an intense mother, overprotective to a fault, hounding the family about safety once grandkids were born. Nobody will talk about her, so with the only clue she has, Stefani goes to meet her grandma for the first time as an adult, at a remote cabin in a clearing in the woods surrounded by all manner of defences to ward off death. Iris is a kook, but we watchers of the franchise know that despite how nutty she appears, Iris is right.

Turns out Iris had that same vision and saved everyone from the Sky View disaster. But the ripple effects have been a constant in the 55 years since. Death is still cleaning up this mess, and it's only now catching up to Iris's family. [In this explanation, but no hard connective threads, it assumes that the events of the previous movies are all connected to this one event]. Stefani thinks Iris is crazy until Iris says "seeing is believing" and she intentionally lets up her guard for one second, affording Death the opportunity to claim her right in front of Stefani. Stefani tries to convince her dad, uncle, cousins and brother of the danger that's coming for them but it takes two freak accidents before they start seeing things her way.

As much as I wanted the fully-period-set Final Destination, Bloodlines offers a thoroughly entertaining and trope-twisting entry into the series. While I seem to like the hamminess of FD2 more there's a playfulness to Bloodlines that's hard not to be amused by. I mean the sequence where Stefani's cousin jogs off into the background only to get hit in the head by a soccer ball, sending her off balance and into a big garbage bin which is then promptly picked up with the side arm and dumped into the back... maybe the best single moment in the franchise for sheer delight in execution.

The deaths aren't as Rube Goldberg-ian as I would have liked them to be but they are plenty gross, with more than a few that had me squirming in my seat while also giggling in delight.

This also is probably the most accessible cast in the entire series. There are no annoying characters or performers here, for probably the first time since the first movie, we're actually not rooting for these characters to die.

This also marks Tony Todd's final on screen appearance, shockingly gaunt, but still full of gravitas and an absolute legend.

[poster talk, briefly - the Final Destination series has had a skeleton-based focus for most of its poster life, with the first two films being the very late-90's-styled muddy blue and black, shadow-heavy group head shot which got real boring real fast. But Bloodlines' main poster, selling the whole "space needle" thing is vibrant reds and oranges popping off, real solid seller. My favourite though is the series of four posters selling the backyard barbecue and the dangers lurking there...just a real deviation from the norm of the series while also maintaining the skull motif]

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I've really enjoyed my time watching Death work its designs out on screen. Regardless of how bad some of the acting or directing or scripting could be, there was always entertainment value to be had. It's super obvious that the third and fourth entries are the worst of the bunch, which means the rest are all great fun... four out of six is pretty good! Plus, Final Destination: Omen is apparently in production, this time a cruise ship disaster. Keep em coming I say.

Ranking Final Destination:

1. Final Destination 2
2. Final Destination
3. Final Destination:Bloodlines
4. Final Destination 5
5. Final Destination 3
6. The Final Destination

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Ranking the Coen Bros.

2018, d. Joel and Ethan Coen - Netflix
[Reposted from my letterboxd, typos and all, originally written Nov 16, 2018]

Anthologies are always a challenge for me. Movies, books, comics... I'm never left satisfied. There's too many stories, usually of different length, sometimes connected by theme or genre, sometimes only tenuously connected, often not really connected at all. They usually vary in length and tone, often by different creatives, and invariably you have to compare one story against the rest, and even in the best cases there's always a dud, or one that overshadows all the others. It's never a satisfying experience.

I think the only place where the anthology can really work is television. We're talking The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Black Mirror, but also the idea of season-length anthologies like Fargo, True Detective, or American Horror Story. With the former, the episode by episode format of anthology gives separation, but also structure. Not every episode will be equal but the separation between stories (talking about old school weekly viewing, but also the separation provided by opening title and end credits sequences) provides a buffer to immediate juxtaposition. As individual episodes they're standalone, like short films, not treated as a necessary part of a whole package. The season length anthology is just more fulfilling, a mini-series that lives on it's own each year, all the benefits of regular television but with the satisfaction of both an intended story structure and closure.

Which brings us to The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an anthology feature from the Coen Brothers (Ethan Coen no stranger to anthology storytelling, having written more than a few collections of short stories). The early rumour was this exploration of the old West was intended as a tv anthology but it's six tales each run at wildly different lengths (from 10 to 40 minutes) which would make tv serialization impossible. [edit: the "series" rumour has been disproven]

The only real way to tackle reviewing an anthology is story by story, but that type of reviewing also exemplifies the fact that an anthology cannot really be viewed as a whole unit, rather only it's pieces.

The film takes its name from the opening story, following Tim Blake Nelson's singing gunslinger through a breif and violently whimsical journey (it makes me want a Shaolin Cowboy movie adaptation from the Wachowskis). I had incorrectly inferred that Buster Scruggs would be the film's Cryptkeeper, the connecting thread between stories, but no such luck. Just the turning of pages transitions us from one to the next.

James Franco robs a bank in the next story, but gets foiled by the teller played by Stephen Root. It's the shortest of the stories but tonally consistent with the previous, if a little less fantastical.

The third story follows a limbless orator as he travels the countryside with Liam Neeson as his caretaker making a meager living entertaining meager (and thrifty) crowds. Is this a friendship? A business partnership? Or an exploitative relationship? Ultimately, it's overlong, cast in such grey, and lacking the wit and charm of the previous entries, destroying the cohesiveness for the rest of the film.

The next story takes full advantage of Bruno Delbonnel's beautiful cinematography as Tom Waits panhandlers for gold. It's luscious color palette is in stark contrast to the four dankness of the previous story. It's just as deliberate a story as the last, really getting the sense of the time to spare on such endeavours people had way back when.

While the first two stories were rather pithy and energetic, these two slow things right down, peeling away the idealism of the old West, leading into the fifth story, a forty minute romantic tragedy on a wagon train to Oregon. Due to it's length it's easy to invest in the characters, and understanding the painstaking hardship of travel seems to be the point. The early romanticism of old West tropes have washed away, here there's bare practicality and excruciating nothingness, coupled with a gut blow of an ending.

The final story finds five heads in a carriage, talking, a spectre of darkness aptly surrounding them, but the Coen's see fit to return levity via the uncomfortable, forced interaction of strangers who would otherwise not associate with one another. It's an engaging dialogue but quite much to take after three tales of a more photographic quality and already nearly 2 hours deep. If anything, it serves as a reminder of how awesome Tyne Daly is, and she should be in more things.

As a whole, it's a Coen Brothers production so it's worth the time spent, but as a Coen Brothers production it's on the bottom end of their spectrum. I also wished the had better Native American representation than just as attacking war parties.

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I'm being lazy with Buster Scruggs i, not writing a brand new review because, well, I don't have a lot more to say about it, just as I didn't have much to say about it then. I did find it generally tedious to watch and frequently checked the timestamp to see how much was remaining. The Coens love a tight movie so whenever one goes over two hours, you feel it.

The Blank Check Podcast pointed out that the connecting thread of these stories is death, but it's tough for me to really think of it a theme of each of these stories. 

My ranking of the Buster Scruggs stories:

1. The Gal Who Got Rattled
2. All Gold Canyon
3. Near Algodones
4. The Mortal Remains
5. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
6. Meal Ticket

Now that I have rewatched all 18 of the Coens films together, here are my rankings, subject to change.

1. Fargo
2. The Big Lebowski
3. Hail, Caesar!
4. Inside Llewyn Davis
5. A Serious Man
6. No Country For Old Men
7. The Hudsucker Proxy
8. Blood Simple
9. Burn After Reading
10. Miller's Crossing
11. True Grit
12. Barton Fink
13. The Man Who Wasn't There
14. Intolerable Cruelty
15. Raising Arizona
16. O Brother, Where Art Thou
17. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
18. The Ladykillers

It's a difficult list to make because 60% of these films are flat out masterpieces, and most of the rest are troubled but still generally likeable. I mean, True Grit is an incredible, maybe even perfect film, and I have it out of the top 10, which is absurd.

My top 3 was my top 3 going into this rewatch and they remained relatively untested. LLewyn Davis and A Serious Man were both a lock for the top 5 and jockeyed back and forth, with Llewyn taking the edge because I couldn't stop thinking about it for days. The films in the 6-13 slots could probably be re-arranged any which way and I would still be happy with that ranking.

The only real surprise in making the list is that Raising Arizona jumped 3 spots from the bottom...and maybe that Burn After Reading made it into the top 10. It's probably the only non-masterpiece in the top ten, but it is so much fun. It's very possible that I may be finally warming to Raising Arizona but I just don't have the sentimentality towards it like so many others do. But sentimentality is why Fargo and Lebowski are my 1 and 2.

Of all these films, only the bottom three do I feel hesitant to watch again. In fact, I would probably watch The Ladykillers before O Brother or Buster Scruggs but it's pretty unanimous that The Ladykillers is absolutely their weakest film. For the record, if I were to add in Joel and Ethan's solo works, Honey, Don't would slot in between The Man Who Wasn't There and Intolerable Cruelty while Drive Away Dolls would slot in just after Raising Arizona. I don't even know where to put The Tragedie of Macbeth because it's nothing like the rest of their oeuvre. It sits on its own outside of it all...or it's last, I guess even though it's clearly a better film than The Ladykillers at least.

But what an unbelievable delight it is to have all these films in the world, and to revisit them in succession. It was a real effort to watch them week-to-week and not gorge myself on them. But, next time there will be a gorging.

So This Is Christmas Leftovers (2024) - Hallmarkied Out

 Last Christmas (I gave you my heart), and even the 2022 holiday season, I barely watched any Hallmarkies... less than a half dozen each year.  I consciously uncoupled from Hallmark, but I just couldn't quit it entirely. I suspected at the time that I was missing the comfort of the formulaicness of Hallmark movies, and their stabs at stepping outside of those trappings was perhaps a painful transition and maybe Hallmark wasn't up for it, especially with their limited budgets and rapid production schedule.

This year (to save me from tears) it was almost all-Hallmark-all the time, with 10 Hallmark-produced movies, 4 non-Hallmark Hallmarkies, and 2(!) Hallmark-produced TV series.  And my impression is that the productions still suffer from lack of budget, but they've gotten much better at managing their ambitions within their budgets.  It's clear they still want to do the traditional holiday romance for 80% of their output but their stabs at "Holiday Magic" have really improved.  Hallmark has also is now actually letting comedy happen purposefully, rather than relying upon goofiness and irony (which, I get it... comedy requires timing which can mean more takes and run up the production costs), and while it's still a bit of a mixed bag storytelling wise, they're giving their writers, directors and stars a lot more freedom than it seems they ever have. As a result there are more films coming out of the Hallmark churn that are entertaining, and not just in the making-fun-of-the-tropes way.

It also seems like there's been a marked decrease in non-Hallmarkies. Lifetime and Netflix barely showed up this year, and the other outlets seemed to have gotten buried by the big "H".

All is not sunshine and rainbows with Hallmark though. Finding Mr. Christmas resulted in an absolute travesty of a movie with their "next Hallmark leading man" falling flat on his face. And their first holiday TV series, Holidazed, ended with a 40-minute wet fart of a finale... oh, but I forgot to write about those final 3 episodes...:

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Holidazed 

Episode 6: The Camarena Family: wherein Gaby is confronted with making nice with her high school bully Katie Manetti-Hanahan, who is now dating her brother, Kevin. Katie seems to be making nice with Gaby, and yet every turn seems to be an "accidental" assault or slight on Gaby by Katie. The family, though, loves Katie and poo-poos Gaby's concerns that Katie's true nature is not what they see.  Kevin asks Katie's dad Chuck for his blessing to marry her, and Chuck, who's been at odds with the Cabrera family for years, denies him. Gaby finds old footage of the moment where Katie came up with the nickname "Easy Bake" that Gaby couldn't shake for years. Turns out that happened because they used to be best friends, until Gaby got new high school friends and ditched Katie. The two reconcile, but not in time. Gaby's family finds the video and Kevin asks for time from Katie. There's a confrontation at the Christmas market stroll between Katie and Kevin, which then leads to a fight between Katie's dad. 

The "comedy" of someone reliving childhood trauma by having to confront their childhood bully is a difficult line to toe, and this episode does not handle it deftly. I think they were trying to go for cringe comedy, but it was just sad. I also wasn't sure whether the show wanted us to believe Gaby was misremembering Katie as a bully or if Katie was still actively Gaby's bully or not really either. I was dreading the expected scene where they have their confrontation and rather than owning the hurt she causes Katie has an excuse for being hurt first. Credit where due, they handle this quite well, actually, with Gaby first realizing that fighting fire with fire only leads to more fire and instead she works to douse the animosity and they come to an understanding as grown-ass adults, and maybe even rekindle a decades-lost friendship. The complication though has nothing to do with Gaby, and so the finale's going to need to get Katie and Kevin back together.

Episode 7: The Manetti-Hanahan Family: Of all the episodes of Holidazed, this is the one that focuses the most on the family of the episode title. When you have two mega-hitters in John C. McGinley and Virginia Madsen as the patriarch and matriarch of the family, Chuck and Connie, it should be something special. The family is of the teasing-and-sarcasm-is-our-love-language variety. Connie makes the family sign a pact that says no fighting, no swearing, no aggression. But with this family that's easier signed than done.

Chuck is that breed of person who always needs to be right, who always needs to have his voice heard loudest over everyone else, and uses his military background to intimidate everyone. One has to wonder if Connie has had enough, hence the pact, but no, turns out she just wants to have a nice family Christmas in case it is her last, as she's waiting on test results. It's a story beat that is aggressively manipulative, and it's not handled with any tact.

Chuck's not allowed to beef with his neighbours, so he starts beefing with his son Clark instead over Clark's "green energy". Turns out Chuck has an inferiority complex because of Clark's "university education". They settle their differences when Clark's green energy keeps the house lit up after the power goes out.

 Clark's wife Rebecca is at odds with Clark's sister Laurie because of their "clean living" and perceived pretentious superiority complex. But they settle their differences when Rebecca starts eating meat and Laurie discovers Rebecca is pregnant (after earlier in the episode exploding over not being able to have more kids, again more manipulative storytelling)

I actually liked this episode, the characters and the actors quite a bit but the key problem is it needs to set up character arcs for each character (or pairings of characters) which need to be resolved in 40 minutes (or quickly in the following episode) while also fitting into the over-arcing story structure of the series (which means heading to the holiday stroll and the eventual storm and power outage) and also sandwiching in Katie into the episode after the events of the previous episode.  It leads to oversimplification and predictable, telegraphed stories... something the entire series is guilty of... Connie at one point even says to Chuck something to the effect of "you never know when the neighbours might need our help" or something, clearly telegraphing the final episode...

Episode 8: The Finale:  In which the Manetti-Hanahan family is the only house on the block with power so they invite their neighbours over for a big Christmas day feast. Chuck agrees to a truce for the day with Manny Camarena, and then they start acting like real pals. Connie, with assistance from Grandma Lin, gets her test results which are negative. Chuck tells Clark he's proud of him. Ted confesses to Grandma Lin that he's gay, and she's heartbroken only because he lied to her, but Marcus smooths it over and Grandma then gets the whole neighborhood to plan an impromptu wedding. Gaby records her audition video with Katie's help, and then Gaby smooths over things between her brother and Katie and they're engaged again. Lucy and Sylvie reconcile, and Sylvie gets Cole back over for another date. Annie and Max talk, and they both like each other, so they play video games. Josh's girlfriend says it's obvious Josh wants something different than moving to Australia, and Josh and Nora kiss, and I guess Theo has a new father-figure. Most annoyingly, Evan steps aside and points Linda towards his new friend Robert, and they reunite, and head off on a Norwegian vacation together to see the Northern Lights.

It's aggressively annoying how obvious every single one of these story lines is, and so obviously telegraphed. While I liked some of the episodes and many of the performers, I legitimately hated this finale and I'm not feeling to positive about the series overall.  

It's a show with a massive cast of characters but only serves a third of them well. So many characters get shoved to the sidelines, to the point that any sub plots that there may have been in most of the families (the Lins, the Lewins, the Hills) are kind of forgotten about in the Finale. I'm certain that certain players aren't even in the episodes (and it's so hilarious that in most scenes in the Finale, in this crowded Minetti-Hanahan household, the background actors are not any of the characters from the series...seriously there's like another 40 people in that house on top of the 40 named characters we've already met.  That's one big cul-de-sac.

A show like this needs to be three times as long and juggle its storylines, let them breathe, and it needs to offer some real drama, not greeting card company happy endings to every story. Sometimes the happy ending is learning to live with a sad outcome. I wanted Robert to find a new life, not end up with his ex-wife. I wanted Laurie and Rebecca to become friends not because she finds out she's having another baby, but helps her to accept that she cannot.  And I wanted Grandma Lin to hold a grudge so much longer than basically 5 minutes.  I want there to be consequences in all this and there aren't really any. Even the fact that Katie took the Camarena family to a protected area to cut down their Christmas tree is resolved by having Josh step in and "I am Spartacus" it for...no real reason.  

A total waste of time, and quite frustrating when it teetered so close to being quite good.

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As noted the transition of Hallmark movies from bog standard formulaic romance to holiday fantasy and/or holiday romantic comedy (and even dabbling in adventure and mystery) has been a rocky transition in the early 2020's, but there have been definite signifiers of the promise of something more..."elevated Hallmark" if you will.

2023 was the banner year for this with Catch Me If You Claus delivering a "one crazy night" comedy adventure (with romance and fantasy) and coming out quite entertaining despite its budgetary limitations, and Hallmark's best-ever holiday movie, Round and Round which is a Hanukkah romcom that is also a time loop movie that absolutely knows what its doing.  There's a third massive entry in the 2023 elevated Hallmark stable that I neglected last year (although Toasty didn't) and that's A Biltmore Christmas (directed by John Putch).

The story is an ambitious time travel fantasy romance about a writer, Lucy (played by Hallmarkie regular Bethany Joy Lens) who is tasked with writing a remake of a classic Christmas movie (shot at the Biltmore Hotel) but struggles with the happy ending of the original and wants to make a more realistic, sober ending.  She is sent by the studio on a trip to the Biltmore to hopefully gain some inspiration and finalize the script. There she starts learning the behind-the-scenes history of "His Merry Wife" (the fabulously 40's-styled movie-within-the-movie) and getting access to authentic props and wardrobes.  But when she turns the infamous hourglass used in the movie she finds herself transported back in time to the set of "His Merry Wife", getting first hand experience on the behind-the-scenes...and meeting the suavely handsome co-star of the film, Jack Huston (played by Christopher Polaha), who is immediately taken by her. When the sands of the hourglass run out, Lucy returns to her time, but she's both freaked out and utterly intrigued by what happened.

Using the sprawling, gorgeous North Carolina estate of the Biltmore hotel (built by George Vanderbilt), A Biltmore Christmas has a built-in aesthetic that means the production crew didn't have to do much heavy lifting in making the production look good, which meant they could focus more budget on the costuming and make-up which made the 1940's set look more authentic than Hallmark could traditionally go for.

When she ventures into the past again, she accidentally breaks the hourglass, and becomes trapped on the set of "His Merry Wife". She and Jack start to grow closer, but the lies she's spun to remain on set start catching up with her, but she's made a few friends along the way who back her up.

Like the best Elevated Hallmarks it's surprisingly ambitious, calling its shot early on opening with black-and-white, cinematic-looking scenes from "His Merry Wife" which look and play so good you actually half wish you were watching that movie instead. But A Biltmore Christmas earns the viewer's attention.

Is it still stricken by budget limitations? Of course it is, it's Hallmark, so the cut corners are going to be evident. Here it's primarily in the present day scenes which feel less thought out, less refined than the events in the 1940s. The film builds to a series of cross cut as Lucy needs to escape the studio dogs in the 1940s, while in the present day a friend Lucy made is trying to stop the Biltmore concierge (Jonathan Frakes) from taking the hourglass away. The stakes feel so much higher in the 1940s, where it's clear Lucy has outstayed her welcome, than in the present day where the film hasn't established its time travel rules effectively enough (is it just the hourglass, or is it the combination of the hourglass plus the room it was in? What happens if you flip the hourglass before the sands run out, does time rewind, or do you go back even further in time? How are the two time periods connected?).

Polaha is absolutely incredible as Jack Huston. He nails the movie star charisma and charm, he has confidence and gumption, but also insecurities. There are a lot of Hallmark leading men who have charm and talent, but we're so used to seeing them in the same-old-same-old that we don't think too much about them as actors. This is absolutely a performance, and probably the best leading man performance ever in a Hallmark movie.  The 1940's cast is uniformly good, and Lens really carries the weight of the film with perfect energy (even if the stakes really aren't very high for her). The end of movie dress she gets to wear, a beautiful, layered, deco-styled silver black and gold number, is a work of art compared to the typical off-the-rack red/blue/green dress that a Hallmark leading lady would normally end their film in.

I really dug A Biltmore Christmas (we agree), so much so that I feel compelled at this time to do a tops list of elevated Hallmark :

TOP 5 ELEVATED HALLMARK MOVIES:

1. Round and Round
2. Three Wise Men and a Baby
3. Crashing Through the Snow (this is actually one of those in-transition Hallmarkies, but it's elevated based on scripting and performance)
4. A Biltmore Christmas
5. Sugarplummed 

These are all films I could see myself watching again (and in fact I've seen Three Wise Men... and Crashing... multiple times each).  If I were to make a list of more traditional Hallmarkies that I would watch multiple times it would be a list of 3:

TOP 3 SENTIMENTAL FAVOURITE TRADITIONAL HALLMARK MOVIES:
1. Nine Lives of Christmas
2. The Christmas Club
3. An Unexpected Christmas (this is another one of those in-transition Hallmark movies, part romcom, part traditional, but the traditional takes hold over the movie)

Go-Go-Godzilla: final thoughts and ranking

 Last year, on Halloween, when I decided to start watching All The Godzillas*, I didn't know that there was both a new Toho Godzilla and Legendary Godzilla feature in the direct path of my stupid boy project. It was genuine good fortune that my viewing experience culminated with the release of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. 

I also didn't expect that, just a few weeks prior to GxK, I would be cheering for a crew of Japanese visual effects artists as they held their Godzilla action figures in one hand and their Oscar in the other. Or that the best of all Godzilla films would be that latest Toho production.

As I reflect upon viewing  All The Godzillas*, it's a pretty messy blur of textured suits, destroyed miniatures and radiation blasts. If you were to pick out any pre-2010 Godzilla title and ask me to explain to you the plot, with the exception of the original Gojira I'm not sure that I could.  The Toho films run through so many of the same tropes and iterations of the same creatures, they reuse so many of the same actors in different roles, and their plots are so often labyrinthine or nonsensical or convoluted, and rarely ever with connective tissue from one film to the next, that it's really hard to make one stand out from the whole.  

Rather than a full or rich understanding of story or character, with each of the pre-2010 Toho films I am left with instead an impression, a sense of something that I liked or disliked about it, something that I reacted strongly or negatively to.

As I've said a few times, what I respond to most in Godzilla films is a strong character story. In almost every Godzilla film, Godzilla is not really a character. He is what the film is built around, weather as a force of nature, or as a planetary protector... he may have characteristics, or perhaps even a bit of personality, but he's never the central story character, certainly not like Kong usually is. I don't recall ever feeling a tremendous sense of sympathy or empathy for Godzilla.  Sure, you root for or against the big bastard, but you're never invested in him for his wants and desires, biting nails hoping he achieves his objectives.  And if Godzilla ever stares down a human, it's usually anyone's guess whether their monster is even clocking human facial expressions. Have you ever stared an ant in the eye and felt a genuine connection? There should be nothing remotely human about Godzilla, and he shouldn't care about us as a species at all.

As I wrote up each film for this "Go-Go-Godzilla" series, I assigned each film a ranking (out of 5 Zs). I also would enter my viewing in Letterboxd, assigning the film a ranking out of 5 stars. For the most part these rankings aligned (but not always, sometimes as I write things out my opinions can become more, or less, favourable). But I used these ratings to maintain my rankings list, adding to it with each film watched.

Very quickly the rankings list started to feel more and more arbitrary. By the time I was watching Tokyo S.O.S. do you really think I could earnestly compare it to Godzilla vs Megalon? All I really have to go on is my Z/star ratings as guide to establish tiers and then my general sense memory to sort the films within the tiers.

I mean, it was pretty obvious to me what my favourites were, and very clear what I genuinely did not care for, but everything in-between is the "mushy middle". 

Even with the Z/star rankings as guide, my "sense memory" of certain films wants me to push it higher, or perhaps question it's spot. Like Mothra vs Godzilla was a big win early on after two dudes, but is it really at equal stature or enjoyment to me as Minus One, 2014, or Shin?

Gojira is classic cinema, a massively influential and important film with a deeply resonant message. But its storytelling is disjointed and visually its perhaps not as potent as it was 50/60/70 years ago. But surely it's better than any film with MechaGodzilla, right?

And I feel like I would go to bat for Ebirah, Horror of the Deep any day, and think it should be in my top ten. So why isn't it?

I'm sure if I dared do a rewatch of all these that they would shift all around. I think Minus One, 2014, and Shin would all remain top 5, and that most of the bottom five would stay right there, but everything else could swing in unexpected ways. 

But I don't think Lady Kent would tolerate me doing a full Godzilla rewatch any time soon, and there's a whole lotta other kaiju tourism for me to partake in.

*********
RANKING
*********

1. Godzilla Minus One (2023) ****

2. Godzilla (2014) ****

3. Mothra vs Godzilla (1964) ****

4. Shin Godzilla (2016) ****

5. The Return of Godzilla (1984) ***1/2

6. Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2004) ***1/2

7. Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974) ***1/2

8. Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II (1993) ***1/2

9. Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975) ***1/2

10. Gojira (1954) ***

11. Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966) ***

12. Godzilla vs Kong (2021) ***

13. Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999) ***

14. Godzilla vs Megaguiras (2000) ***

15. Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971) ***

16. Godzilla vs Gigan (1972) ***

17. Godzilla vs Megalon (1973) ***

18. Godzilla vs Destroyah (1995) ***

19. Ghidorah the Three Headed Monster (1964) ***

20. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024) **1/2

21. Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) **1/2

22. Godzilla vs Mothra (1992)**1/2

23. Destroy All Monsters (1968) **½

24. Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-out Attack (2001) **½

25. Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)**1/2

26. Godzilla vs Biollante (1989) **1/2

27. Godzilla Raids Again (1955) **1/2

28. Godzilla 1985 (US version 1985) **1/2

29. Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002) **

30. Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994) **

31. All Monsters Attack (1969) **

32. Invasion of the Astro Monster (1965) **

33. Godzilla vs King Ghidorah (1991) *1/2

34. Godzilla King of the Monsters (1956) *1/2

35. King Kong vs Godzilla (US version 1962) *½

36. Son of Godzilla (1967) *

Did not watch:
Godzilla (1998)
Godzilla Planet of Monsters (2017)
Godzilla City on the Edge of Battle (2018) Godzilla The Planet Eater (2018) 

Go-Go-Godzilla: Millennium Era in review

 

I've written thousands of words about and around Godzilla and, frankly, I'm exhausted. 

I mentioned previously that throughout the Showa and Heisei eras of Godzilla I would routinely fall asleep whilst watching those films. The pleasant surprise of the Millennium era was how engaged I was throughout each and every one of those movies, well, except GMK (Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidora: Giant Monsters All-out Attack). There I was close to unconsciousness a number of times, but, I never fully fell asleep. (Edit: I did nod off while writing this though). 

The Millennium era hits a point where digital effects have a bigger and bigger impact on the films, and being lower budget films in the early 2000s, you can guess how bad the digital effects can get. And yet, kind of how we accept silly, loose-fitting rubber suits, miniatures-that-are-clearly-miniatures, and camera-tricks- which-aren't-fooling-anyone from previous eras, many of the digital effects have a quaintness to them that don't rub abrasively. Instead, in many instances, they have their own charm. Credit to the Toho team at the time that they conservatively used digital effects much of the time to enhance scenes or sequences, rather than overreach...although surely overreaches did happen, and...moof.

I struggle to say that any of the Millennium Era films were great, and I would have a hard time recommending any of them to anyone who wasn't already interested in watching Godzilla films. My  favourite of the era (and there will be a full ranking update at the bottom of this) is a sequel film within the Era and probably not the easiest film to enter into coldly. 

Once again I find myself at odds with the G-fan concensus. GMK, touted as one of the highest watermarks of Godzilla films, is my second least favourite of the era.  Just as I didn't take to Godzilla vs. Biollante as G-Fans had in the Heisei era...I get what they're reacting to in those films, they just don't work for me. Once again, my appreciation lies in the storytelling, which is still pretty shaky throughout the Millennium era, but there is a palpable evolution, and seemingly a larger desire to invest in characters than in the previous era. As well the ambitiousness of the suits, the effect, the miniatures from film-to-film also intrigue me. But I would rather have a better composed shot, a more artistically lit scene, a more thoughtfully edited Godzilla fight sequence than the bog standard side-scrolling wide shot or that 3/4 tilt from on high which is so pervasive.  

There also seemed to be more effort to put the human characters into the midst of the fight (especially with Mechagodzilla in the fray).  Having the humans be active and meaningful participants makes the third-act brawl much more engaging. This also includes a lot more scenes of human characters navigating the mid- of post-fight wreckage, which I loved every time.

My favourite aspect of Godzilla is using sense of scale, getting that human POV of these titanic monsters, and we get a tremendous amount of those in the Millennium Era compared to the previous Eras, which had limited ability to truly blend live action and real locations with miniatures and suitmation.

I'm now heading into the final stretch with the three Warner Bros. Monsterverse films (leading into the fourth coming out at the end of March), and the two Reiwa Era live action films. Almost all of these I've seen already (save for Shin Godzilla), but I'm excited to watch them because I know what I'm in for. 

While I've been doing this series, I've watched the Monsterverse-related TV show (Monarch: Legacy of Monsters) and I've seen Godzilla Minus One as well, and also watched the first episode of the seemingly charming Netflix anime series Godzilla Singular Point which I think I'll get back to. I'm still skipping the '98 Godzilla as well as the three Netflix anime movies, but never say never.  I'm also flirting with doing a Gamera series of recaps, kind of the official competition to the Godzilla juggernaut in the Kaiju field.  I'm also thinking about the four Mothra solo films, since I clearly reacted well to that creature in this series. We shall see.

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RANKINGS

Millennium Era:

1. Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S
2. Godzilla 2000: Millennium
3. Godzilla vs Megaguiras
4. Godzilla: Final Wars
5. Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack
6. Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla

All of the films (so far)

1. The Return of Godzilla
2. Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S.
3. Godzilla vs Mothra (1964)
4. Gojira
5. Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974)
6. Ebirah, Horror of the Deep
7. Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II
8. Terror of Mechagodzilla
9. Godzilla 2000: Millennium
10. Godzilla vs Megaguiras
11. Godzilla vs Destroyah
12. Godzilla vs Mothra (1992)
13. Godzilla vs. Hedorah
14. Godzilla vs Gigan
15. Godzilla vs Megalon
16. Godzilla: Final Wars
17. Destroy All Monsters
18. Godzilla vs Biollante
19. Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-out Attack
20. Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla
21. Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla
22. All Monsters Attack
23. Ghidorah the Three Headed Monster
24. Godzilla vs King Ghidorah
25. Invasion of the Astro Monster
26. Godzilla Raids Again
27. Godzilla 1985
28. Son of Godzilla
29. Godzilla King of the Monsters (1956)
30. King Kong vs Godzilla (US version 1962)

Go-Go-Godzilla: Heisei Era in review

I come out of the Heisei Era of Godzilla (1984 - 1995) wondering if I even like Godzilla at all anymore. I mean, I must otherwise I wouldn't be putting in this kind of time and energy into watching every damn last one of them. But I'm trying to remember if there's a single Godzilla film that I didn't fall asleep to while watching, at least since maybe the first two from the Showa era, and I can't think of one.  If I need to go to naptown, it looks like Godzilla is the guy to take me there.

The Heisei spans 7 films over an 11 year period, as opposed to the Showa era which spanned 15 films over a 21 year period. All things told, both eras were dispensing films at almost the same rate. Toho, once they get the machine up and running, can seemingly just crank these things out. The last 5 films of the Heisei era all came out in a 5 year span (the last 12 Showa era films came out in a 13 year span). But that kind of speed does show in the quality of storytelling.

The first four of the Heisei era films are not readily available to stream, rent or buy. I saw a copy of Godzilla vs Biollante on Blu-Ray at a video store a few weeks ago, and it was selling for over $200. I wound up finding free streams in Japanese with subtitles on the Internet Archive. The video quality was ok, but the sound quality was terrible...all I can say is it's good that there was subtitles. I did wind up acquiring the latter three Heisei films on DVD, since distribution rights were acquired by TriStar in America. Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla came in a sealed 7-movie set with all the Millennium Era Godzilla films (so I'm set for the next phase) while Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla and Godzilla vs Destroyah came on a single, double sided disk which I found at a used store.  These three were all dubbed, which is not my preference at all. I did watch most of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla with the Internet Archive subtitled version on my phone just to compare the dub vs the sub, and they weren't exact, but they weren't too egregiously different either, not like the heavily edited American versions of the Showa Era G-films.

After I watch a Godzilla film -- or rather, after I start watching a Godzilla film, fall asleep through half of it, get confused and frustrated by the ending, then re-watch another day, and do my silly and wholly unnecessary play-by-play write-up -- I hop over to youtube and watch Big Action Bill's amazing "history of" videos which go deep into the pre-production background, details on the suits used for the production, info on the director and performers and writers and music...just really well researched and essential compendiums for pop culture tourists like myself who are only going to spend a limited amount of time and investment in a property before they move onto something else.

Through Big Action Bill's videos, it sort of confirms the chaotic nature of these films behind the scenes. Scripts seem pretty rushed in coming together, often just cobbled from the dregs of past disposed-of story ideas and monster concepts. Where a lot of time and energy are put into building miniature cities and the suits, the actual filming of these movies seems very much a "get the shot, move on" concept. 

There's a marked improvement in both miniature construction and suit construction in 9 years between Terror of Mechagodzilla and The Return of Godzilla, but the production values seem comparable between the two eras. Depending on the director , you might get some absolutely gorgeous shots, with impeccable lighting that really trick the eye in a delightful way, or you might just get puppets on strings swirling around on what's clearly a badly lit set, and  sometimes both even within the same film... there's no consistency.

After 22 films, they still haven't figured out how to do a flying creature well. Whether it's men in big rubber suits hoisted in the air by cables, or static mini-puppets bashing into each other, they all look unconvincingly awful.  Every time they introduce a new monster with wings I have to groan, because the monster fights with flying creatures are the absolute worst. 

Big Action Bill also pointed out that in Japanese cinema it's common for extraneous or tertiary characters to pop in to deliver exposition or do an action beat or take up space that one of the main characters would otherwise take in a North American film. Most Godzilla films in both the Showa and Heisei era sink because there are too many characters, and the "main" characters of the film are really non-entities with no development to speak of. That Toho recycles their actors from film to film in different roles only confuses things even more. I found myself asking myself "Are we supposed to know that guy?"  

The Heisei era had a few recurring characters, including government and military personnel, who, if they had a name, I never really cottoned to it, because they are so minor and inconsequential despite being in (nearly?) every movie. Then there was Miki the Psychic Girl who appears in 6 of the 7 films, but has no distinct character arc and no defining personality to speak of. She's a consistent presence but has so very little to do. She's supposed to have this strong connection with Godzilla, but it amounts to almost nothing but an exposition dump every time.

The first two Heisei films, The Return of Godzilla and Godzilla vs Biollante, felt ...elevated somewhat from their Showa Era predecessors, but following that it felt like the Heisei era was really reverting back to Showa-era goofiness to varying effect. Godzilla vs Destroyah does effectively return a bit of actual horror and tension with Godzilla's impending meltdown set to destroy the world, but really inept scripting and storytelling rob the film of much of its dramatic and emotional impact.

I went into the Heisei era really excited, hoping to see better stories, better characters, tighter continuity, and, well, I got one of those three, the one that matters least. I come out of the Heisei era feeling pretty drained on the property, and let down overall.  Many fans, I've been hearing, consider the Heisei era to be be the best of big G, which has me even more worried as I head into the Millennium era. 

One big change needs to happen in this process of watching all the Godzillas is a further adaptation of the template I'm using to recap them... especially the "recapping" part. It started with the Double Oh series for James Bond and then was almost a necessity with our A Toast to HallmarKent series, but recapping a movie beat by beat, or even in broad strokes, has become one of my least favourite things, primarily because Godzilla films are so anti-structure and, frankly, poorly written, event-focused stories.  So recapping all the sort of stream-of-consciousness flow to these movies is kind of maddening, because they don't make much sense and trying to capture every absurd swerve is a fools errand. I'm that fool, but I can no longer be.  Heck, maybe we'll find the Millennium era finally finds some narrative drive to their movies....

At least I know, post-Millennium, getting into the Monsterverse and Reiwa era, that there's some actual great stuff happening there to look forward to.  

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Rankings:

Heisei Era

1. The Return of Godzilla
2. Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II
3. Godzilla vs Destroyah
4. Godzilla vs Mothra
5. Godzilla vs Biollante
6. Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla
7. Godzilla vs King Ghidorah
8. Godzilla 1985

All the films (so far):

1. The Return of Godzilla
2. Godzilla vs Mothra (1964)
3. Gojira
4. Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974)
5. Ebirah, Horror of the Deep
6. Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II
7. Terror of Mechagodzilla
8. Godzilla vs Destroyah
9. Godzilla vs Mothra (1992)
10. Godzilla vs. Hedorah
11. Godzilla vs Gigan
12. Godzilla vs Megalon
13. Destroy All Monsters
14. Godzilla vs Biollante
15. Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla
16. All Monsters Attack
17. Ghidorah the Three Headed Monster
18. Godzilla vs King Ghidorah
19. Invasion of the Astro Monster
20. Godzilla Raids Again
21. Godzilla 1985
22. Son of Godzilla
23. Godzilla King of the Monsters (1956)
24. King Kong vs Godzilla (US version 1962)