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that America (and much of the world) is in now, politically and socially speaking, A House of Dynamite already feels out of date.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

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Site

2025, Jason Eric Perlman (Threshold) -- download

I would have plugged this into the most recent "31 Days of Halloween" but, a) its been too long hence to insert posts into a chronological stream that is so deep in the past, and b) it wasn't very horror, more scifi thriller. It had horrific elements but its an example of how just tone and intent can change a plot from one genre to another. The poster wanted to imply horror, the creator did not.

On that note, I am listening to audiobook of Joe Hill's "King Sorrow" about college students who accidentally summon a malevolent dragon spirit and thought, "This is a horror book but you could do a fun contemporary fantasy adventure novel about an ancient dragon slayer who gets resurrected every time a dragon reappears in the world." How about it, Joe?

Family drama. Do plots exist without them? Are they the rote framework that people write dramatic fiction on? Would a scifi thriller exist if the main character had a happy home life, liked his job and had a good social life absent of toxic people? Or would people just see that as farcical, for who doesn't have something going on? I know a lot of people who have utterly bland mundane lives sans any drama.

Anywayz, so we have recently separated Neil Bardo (Jake McLaughlin, Will Trent), cuz of a drunk driving accident that he won't accept full accountability for. He works as a site surveyor for recently divorced Garrison Vey (Theo Rossi, The Penguin) who plays at understanding accountability but really, blames everything on everyone else. Garrison has a lucrative potential job turning an abandoned government facility into a new school -- basically loot the thing for anything worth selling, plow it all under and build a school. That is, if there aren't any pollutants that could quash the deal. So, Neil and Bardo survey the massive site on their own, poking around in the offices, and find an unmapped sub-basement with a classic scifi particle accelerator at one end of a long tunnel.

Like most of these movies, the physical setting depicted vs the plot-based setting don't usually match up. The structure appears from the outside as a massive warehouse compound, which the pair could not have quickly surveyed on their own and which they also seem to bypass entirely. The two end up focusing on abandoned office buildings, and the strange lab beneath. So, what was the above used for? Just an empty cover so the weird science being done below could be ignored? Also, if an illicit scientific experiment, that had unforeseen dark consequences, had happened in the building, I doubt the government would allow it to end up on the market. But I guess they needed a reason to have grown adults blunder into it, outside of the usual "curious teens jump the fence on a dare" idea.

Anywayz, Bardo turned on the power so he could see what he was surveying and that activates the weird science thing. Almost instantly he is given visions of the past, of a Chinese internment camp during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the late 30s. He also loses time. Garrison is pissed.

The visions / hallucinations continue. Things degrade. The sale is in jeopardy, during one of his hallucinations, his kid is injured so badly, the boy might lose his eyes if surgery doesn't happen immediately and they are in no place to afford it - the tension between Bardo and his wife Elena (Arielle Kebbel, Midnight, Texas) is increased exponentially. But its not just Bardo having them, but also Garrison, though he won't admit it to anyone. And when Bardo's college friends show up, friends with baggage pertaining to Bardo's behaviour in college, Bardo's ex Naomi (Miki Ishikawa, The Terror) starts experiencing the hallucinations as well, as he exposes her to show others he is not insane. It just makes things worse for all, baggage opened again, drama between all being enhanced.

This all boils down to those exposed to the device, flashing back into the histories of those in the internment camp. The experiment was one with the pseudo-science catch phrase of "entanglement" which in this case implies particles which make up people are tied together, forward and backwards in  time. The visions can reflect the kind of people they are, or can be. Bardo is not the hero of the situation, but the "evil" camp director, and the "two" are influencing each other through time. Bardo makes a decision in our time, which changes history in their time, allowing the focal point family to escape, changing historical fact of "nobody escaped Unit 731" to "a single family did". Bardo had to accept that he has perpetually made terrible decisions, and in that understanding, make a choice that is not about him, but for the benefit of his family. In turn, it influences the chief scientist in the original experiment, in the 70s, to change his own choice, creating a paradox -- if the experiment was never completed, how did Bardo change his mind? All of it never happens in the first place; well except for Unit 731 in Manchuria, which was still a horrible event in actual real world history.

I do like pseudo-science quantum / entanglement scifi stories and this was a decent example, marred by, in my opinion of course, heavy handed family drama. I do understand that human emotional conflict is core to story telling but I do tire of the constant people-making-bad-decisions of American story telling.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Brick

2025, Philip Koch (Play) -- Netflix

Kent's post.

I never wrote about Rec, the Spanish horror movie (but did about the sequel, during another year's "31 Days of Halloween" series; and used the remake Quarantine as a filler for this year's) but it starts with people waking up inside a building that has been tarped over due a viral breakout. They are quarantined inside the building because someone inside is infected. I came into this movie assuming it was going to go with the same premise, just updated for technological obsessions. Maybe it would be tech, maybe it would be aliens.

Is saying what the movie is NOT a Spoiler? If Yes, then stop now, do not pass Go, pay $200.

Disappointed it was not aliens. Would have been great for them to finally break through the brick wall to find themselves on an alien planet.

Anywayz, Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer, Army of Thieves) and Olivia (Rubby O Fee, Army of Thieves) are going through a rough patch, as they say. Not so long ago they lost their child in miscarriage, and neither are dealing with it well. Well, more Tim than Olivia, and on that fateful night, she offers him a lifeline -- drop the video game he is obsessively working on and just drive to Paris; drop everything, start anew. He refuses. The next morning, they find the doors, windows and pretty much everything are bricked up. Not quite brick, but some weird geometric pattern of an unknown material. And its cut off much, like water, cellular service and Internet, but not air or electricity. Their differences are put aside to focus on escape.

They know they will run out of food and water pretty quickly so, they try going through the wall. The substance is not only blocking windows and exterior walls, but also their door and the walls leading to the hallway. But not the walls between apartments, and not the floors down. And thus begins a trek downward into Cold War tunnels as they don't think any man-made barrier could possibly extend below ground. In their quest, they meet an AirBnB couple next door, a grandfather & his granddaughter below, and find a deceased tech guy and his... intimidating friend.

Again, I wish it had presented as scary, more attuned to the theme I expected, but can I fault it for being a generic scifi thriller? No, not really. Its just that it wasn't very thrilling. As Kent said, its very boilerplate but watchable, but... meh?

I was going to shoehorn this into the current run of "31 Days of Halloween" but no, not even its alluding to "Rec" allows me to do that. Let's just leave it here with "3 Short Paragraphs".

I liked it well enough, but it again leaves me thinking about the effort put into making a movie vs the effort of the viewers watching the movie. There has to be more people, like ourselves, who just feel dissatisfied and film makers must know this ... well, at least in the editing room? I get that a movie is more akin to a puzzle being assembled where the script the box cover, but do creators/producers just accept when things are "good enough" ? I know I do, but my creative endeavours (this included) are more for me, than anyone else, and movies are primarily for the money giving audiences. Is it just because you only need to do so much to sell the movie, and its not worth retooling? Once its sold, that's it, goal achieved?  Still, no matter what the reason, I am left wondering.

I have been thinking a lot about creative materials and the mass amount of "just OK". There is so much to watch, so much to read, so much to absorb, and so very little has me thrilled at the end, and after just coming off a binge-fest, I am left disappointed at the effort it takes to absorb without reward. Is it me? Am I just hard to satisfy?

31 Days of Halloween: Kristy

2013, Olly Blackburn (Donkey Punch) -- Amazon

We continue the trend of clicking past all the movies we have in our Lists on streaming services, as well as the getting-longer list of horror movies I have already downloaded (previous years worth of them) for something new & shiny that caught our eye. We have always liked a final-girl who turns the tables on her attacker.

Justine (Haley Bennett, The Magnificent Seven) is staying for the long weekend at her university -- she cannot afford the flight. Originally she is staying with her roommate, whose family is abroad, but plans change at the last minute and suddenly Justine is alone. That is weird. In an entire campus, she is the only one who stays? Anywayz, I am skipping past the over-share preamble & opening credits which sets up a Dark Web based network of thrill killers, led by a mysterious woman (Ashley Green, Twilight) who has something against pretty girls and Christians. She organizes "hunts", i.e. those collections of masked & hoodie wearing thrill killers who terrorize and kill isolated young women.  And then she bumps into Justine at an all night convenience store near the campus, and the unfortunate young woman is marked as a "Kristy".

This is another movie with distinct style, sometimes a bit too heavy handed with it. It is so very much a product of the 2000-teens, with the non-stop period appropriate music (music that sounds so distinctly 2000-teens) and the nausea inducing panic-stricken shaky-camera runs. But its effective. Kristy... sorry, Justine, plays the role of the final-girl when there are actually no other girls, just a handful of campus staff who are quickly killed off more or less as innocent bystanders.

But Justine is capable. Despite her fear, she eludes her hunters with ingenuity on multiple occasions, getting tired of running, and even turning on them eventually. There are only four, so it doesn't take long, once she is underway, but the movie enjoys having us run along with Justine, rooting for her, cheering her on. And in the end, via voice over, we understand Justine is helping authorities find all the "cells" of this thrill kill cult, and end them. A post-credit scene, which was entirely wasted, implies they are still active, likely to setup a sequel that never happened.

31 Days of Halloween: Revival

2025, download -- 3 / 10 episodes

I once said, "It wouldn't be Halloween without something by Mike Flanagan." I should have kept my big mouth shut as all his shows and movies are still forthcoming, while 2024's The Life of Chuck is not Halloweenish, nor watched yet. But, its nice that there is usually something on TV, this season or this year, that is genre appropriate. And people coming back from the dead is Halloweenish, right?

A reporter and a crematorium/morgue staff member have a traumatic beginning to an event in the rural Wisconsin town of Wausau -- the guy being toasted kicks the door off, and then the person in the body bag sits up. Meanwhile across town, Deputy Dana Cypress (Melanie Scrofano, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds) is trying to quit her job and leave town, but her dad, the Sheriff (David James Elliot, JAG) won't have any of it. Revival Day interrupts her plans.

A month later, the town is still under quarantine, nobody coming in or going out. No mention of food logistics, but at least their lockdown has been lifted. The month has proven that all the people who died within a two week period of the fateful day woke up. Miracle or supernatural or freak physics phenomena? Nobody knows, but the CDC has sent Dr. Ibrahim Rahin (Andy McQueen, Mrs. Davis) to investigate. One doctor, and maybe some support staff? Seems underplayed.

Like most SyFy / Canadian specific TV, its focused on the people element, so the first three episodes are about getting to know the characters, including Em Cypress (Romy Weltman, Slasher), the younger sister, who turns out to have also revived, waking up from drowning in the river, but with no memory of how she died. But she's having weird visions and filling sketch books with ominous imagery. All the Revived are normal, but for an encounter with old Arlene Stankiewicz who has been pulling out her own teeth, watching them grow back -- oh yeah, side effect of being revived -- you are now invulnerable, and heal from any wound; ANY wound. Arlene goes bonkers and kills her own daughter in law, which leaves the town nervous that maybe other revivers are going to go off the rails.

Its not bad. Its been a while since we had some familiar Canadian scifi/horror/specfic, so its almost like comfort food. I covered some of the plethora of fictional media that deal with this same topic back in 2014, and the graphic novel from which this was adapted is 2012, so right in there. Unlike many TV shows, where three episodes is enough to determine whether to give it a pass, I have a feeling, again like much Canadian produced TV, this will be OK enough but satisfaction will come only if they handle the final few episodes of the season well. I mean, something is going on, we just have to slowly reveal what it is and stretch it out enough to last more than one season. I am not convinced so far this will get its second.

KWIF: One Battle After Another (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. This week, Kent is brain-tired after an exhaustingly thinky period of work and game, so buckle in for some abject mediocrity in the world of film reviewing (as if I deliver anything different).

This Week:
One Battle After Another (2025, d. Paul Thomas Anderson - in theatre)
A Serious Man (2009, d. Joel and Ethan Coen, dvd)
Final Destination (2000, d. James Wong, crave)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982, d.Tommy Lee Wallace  - hollywood suite)

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I just happened to be looking at a Google search result for One Battle After Another to see an "audience rating summary" of the film that, as of this writing, was sitting at an average of 3.1 out of 5 stars with over 2000 review. The rating breakdown was almost an even split between 5-star and 1-star reviews with very few 2-through-4-star reviews scattered throughout. Doing a cursory glance thought these reviews (I mean, who exactly is reviewing on Google? I don't think I've ever even looked at the Google "audience rating summary" for a film before, nevermind read any of them.) I had, wrongly, assumed that the 1* reviews were going to be simple right-wing bot-generated reviews decrying this film for it's anti-government/pro-antifa viewpoint, but from the dozens or so I took in, they *seemed* to be from legit viewers genuinely disappointed by the movie. Of course, in scanning through about 100 of these reviews, I did wind up seeing the same or similar review from the same or multiple users so, as with anything on the shitternet take it all with a healthy dash of salt. [Toasty, I think it's time to take this blog into old school 'zine territory. Get off-line and IRL.]

I thought for sure that One Battle After Another would, in today's world, rub the MAGA crowd (more specifically the MAGA leadership) the wrong way. It opens set in the nebulous past, 17 years-ish ago (it's very hard to say if the "present day" of OBAA is today-present-day or some past and/or future present day... it all goes to show how achingly timeless the film feels in a way) with a group of "freedom fighters"/"domestic terrorists" in the Weather Underground vein of militant left-wingers raiding an encampment where illegal immigrants, mostly of a Central or South American persuasion, are being held.  The French 75 liberate the prisoners from the camp and their explosives expert, "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) makes a real show of it. Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), whom Pat is s sort-of in a relationship with, takes the base's commanding officer hostage and sexually denigrates him. Unfortunately for Perfidia, Lockjaw (Sean Penn) totally gets off on it, and becomes obsessed with her, stalking her in her subsequent efforts, and, on occasion manufacturing encounters with her, which he always lets her takes control of.

The immediacy of seeing people in pens right at the start in the film is disarming and, regardless of one's political views, is likely to pull their brains right out of the film with thoughts of the modern day. But it should also cause one to call into question the time period of the film, and think about just how long the government and military has been putting immigrants in pens and how little any of it has solved over the past 20+ years. It's also asking the audience to immediately be on the side of a domestic terrorist group, and that can be a tall ask, as well as making a left-wing militia the center of a big-damn Oscar-play movie is only going to fuel the fires of the commander-in-cheesepuff in his anti-antifa crusade. It's a film based on the 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel "Vineland", so it predates all our current strife, but it's uncomfortable just how explosively relevant it feels to the immediate now.

OBAA's  lengthy prologue runs through a year in the life of the French 75, along with moments in the relationship of Pat and Perfidia as she winds up pregnant, has a baby, and Pat tries to pressure her into settling down. But Perfidia is a warrior, and a runner, and she will never stop fighting as long as there's a fight to be had. At least that's what she thinks of herself as she's petrified of being a mother and anything other that a fighter. "Settling down" infers giving into the capitalistic nightmare of the American dream and nuclear family and she would rather die in a blaze of bullet than be suffocated by such a life. She keeps fighting and eventually Lockjaw, who has let the whole thing go on under his obsessive watch, turns the screws. Either Perfidia will love him or he's going to tear it all down. Caught between a rock and a hard place, she turns rat, and gives up her people to save herself, going into witness protection. Only a few of the French 75 manage to escape alive, including Pat and their daughter Charlene. Perfidia, meanwhile, escapes her new life and runs to Mexico where she disappears forever.

Pat becomes Bob, Charlene becomes Willa, and 16 years later they've forged a new, if uncomfortable life in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross. Bob has taken to extensive drinking and routine pot smoking while Willa is an intelligent, hyper-competent, teen with a fighting spirit, and a strong anti-establishment streak. Lockjaw, meanwhile, has risen slowly through the ranks and positioned himself as a right-wing idealogue within the military. He catches the attention of a think tank of rich and powerful racists, The Christmas Adventurers, as a potential new member. It's Lockjaw's deepest dream to be a part of that club (hovering right above his dream of being loved by Perfidia). They ask him a litany of questions about his "purity" which he answers with the most assured lies committed to film. This sets Lockjaw off, and he uses his position and power to hunt down the ghosts from his past that could jeopardize his chances of joining the Adventurers ("Hail Santa!"). This includes looking for Perfidia among the refugees in Baktan Cross, under the guise of the city being a hotbed of heroin manufacturing.

This military raid on the city leads to riots in the streets and Bob/Pat becoming reactivated, mostly because Willa/Charlene (Chase Infiniti) has been taken by the French 75 remnants, and Bob's brain is too fried to remember the safety phrases and pass codes to get the information to go to her.

Currently in the hot-bed of Coen Brothers filmography, it's hard not to see DiCaprio's Bob/Pat as "The Dude" Lebowski-coded. Much like The Dude, Bob spends the majority of the film thinking he's being proactive but never actually accomplishing anything substantial. He's pretty feckless. The appearance is everything revolves around him, but the reality is, things are happening around him, but he's inconsequential to it all. It's relatable in a way. How many of us feel like "progressives" but do very little to advance "the cause" (any cause). How many of us wish we were revolutionaries, fighting the fight that needs to be fought, but incapable of pulling ourselves away from screens or shopping or sports or other distractions to make that much of a difference. DiCaprio has been a superstar for so long, and a guy who seems so bought into his own image, that he's disconnected from reality. He's not seemed human for a very long time. Playing Rick Dalton in Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood showed he was ready to break free of his image, and here he's playing his most fallible, most human character, I think ever, and he's at his most likeable in doing so. 

Sean Penn's Lockjaw is such a unique figure on screen. At once he is a human cartoon, the absurd posture and physicality, the that-stick-up-my-ass-ain't-ever-coming-out look on his face is never not laughable. He is a figure that deserves mockery and derision. But he's also an absolutely vile, utterly gross individual who couldn't be any creepier if he had snakes and crickets crawling out of his orifices. His sense of superiority, even in the face of his own inferiority, just makes you want to puke on him, and one gets the sense that he would like that, because he's gross.

Chase Infiniti, as Willa, has to contend with a constantly disappointing father, her abandonment issues, the ghosts of her parents coming back to directly haunt her, and ultimately go face-to-face with Lockjaw who had a very uncomfortable relationship with her mother... and in every scene, Infiniti plays Willa as the adult in the room. The moments where Infiniti has to play simultaneously tough and scared is a really hard emotional balance to achieve and she absolutely loves there with seeming honesty for much of the film. It is an incredible performance and we will be seeing much more of her soon if this were a just world.

OBAA is long, it's challenging, it's darkly funny and at times exceptionally thrilling. It's bracing and confrontational, it's uncomfortable, and it's a little icky, even. It's exceptional and sometimes unpleasant. I can see why there are viewers who earnestly detested it, because it's a provocation. It's a film that is getting in your face both politically and emotionally and trying to rub you the wrong way often. It doesn't necessarily want you to agree with it, and it may not agree with you. 

I found it to be epic and engaging, but I didn't love it, whether it's because I kept fighting it, or it kept fighting me, it's hard to say. And yet, in spite of not loving it, I still think it's great.

[Poster talk ... the two posters I selected for this entry are two of the greatest things about this pretty great film that I didn't love. The first is a weird IMAX poster representing the film's climax which is a slow pursuit through the rolling hills of a desert highway. there are a lot of great sequences in the film, but this is an all-time great moment in cinema. the second poster I chose because it features Infiniti, and she deserves even more of a spotlight (and I didn't want to use the "character poster" because I'm tired of "character posters"] 

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As I've been watching their films week-to-week alongside the Blank Check Podcast, one of the things that keeps coming up over and over again with the brothers Coen is how much they dislike talking openly or honestly about their films. They're cagey interviewees who fuck with anyone who dares ask them an honest question about their films or filmmaking. You may get an answer out of them that is the truth, a lie, or a joke, or sometimes just a spiteful retort, and a lot of the time you can't tell the difference. As filmmakers, they want their work to stand on its own, and as creators they have no interest in being subjects themselves. They make narratives, they don't want to be part of them.

For A Serious Man they did drop hints about how their mid-west Jewish background influenced the story about a Jewish man in the 1960's mid-west whose life begins to unravel. But is this film any more personal to them than any other? Who can really say but the Coens and they're not really saying.

But after their massive critical, box office and awards-darling success of No Country For Old Men (and the lest critically and awards-decorated, but equally box-office boffo Burn After Reading) the Coens were due for a true blank check/do whatever you want project, and A Serious Man feels like the definitive Coen Brothers film.

It is an unpacking of Jewish culture that seeks neither to define it, nor be a statement on it. It is a film that lives and breathes the culture, but whether it's doing so honestly is besides the point. It isn't the Coen Brothers working through something, it's them in full-blown storytelling mode being hyper-specific about place and time and yet fudging the details because sometimes they can't be bothered to research and sometimes it's just more entertaining to make it up.

Michael Stuhlbarg plays Larry Gopnick, a professor of theoretical physics at a Minnesotan university. He has a Korean student failing his class trying to bribe him for a passing grade, while also being under review by the school whether he's right for tenure. When he returns home, Judith (Sari Lennick), Larry's wife, asks for a divorce, because she's gotten involved with the widower across the street, Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed). His shrieking eldest teen Sarah is frustrated with everyone and everything in the , and his younger teen Danny is getting ready for his bar mitzvah while also ducking a monstrous classmate he owes money to for the pot he bought off him. Also Larry's older brother Arthur (Richard Kind), the one with the sebaceous cyst on the back of his neck, has been sleeping on his couch for weeks with no signs of him leaving.

On top of his marriage falling apart, Larry's heard that the review board is getting letters about him, painting him in a bad light, he has Columbia House calling him about overdue payments, and his alpha male war vet neighbour seems to be waging a passive aggressive war to take over some of his property. Everything is getting worse for Larry, and all he wants to know is why? He never did anything.

And that's the crux of the film. Well, the two cruxes. The cruxi.

Why?

And

"I never did anything!"

Larry searches for answers from various rabbi, from friends, from adversaries, from lawyers, and nobody cans answer "why" these things are happening to him. The film teases and teases that revelations are forthcoming, that there is potentially answers, that there's some form of text or knowledge or wisdom or signs that will provide answers. But even after Sy Abelman dies suddenly, and Danny gets through his bar mitzvah beautifully (despite being high as the stars), and Larry's seemingly given good news about his tenure, with things suddenly looking up for Larry and Danny after much angst (and oh so traumatizing anxiety dreams), the film ends screaming at them that shit. just. happens. There's no answers, there's no karma, it just is the unknowable, the chaotic nature of reality that provides no certainty. (Larry's two big class showcases are talking about the mathematical formulae proving that the Schrodinger's Cat paradox is scientifically unknowable, and the the mathematical equation proves the Uncertainty Principle (which, after doing a quick search about, I'm pretty certain that the Coens are uncertain what the Uncertainty Principle actually is, beyond thematically relevant to the story they're telling.))

Larry (and even Arthur's) refrain of "I never did anything", applied to in different contexts is not the excuse they think it is, the way they try to get out of trouble our avoid consequences. But the truth is, "I never did anything" basically is the answer to Larry's question as to "why". Nearly everything that's happening to Larry is because he never did anything. His absence of doing has led him down a road to being unfulfilled and disconnected.

A Serious Man is an incredible film, one that toys with the audience as much as it toys with its characters. It opens with a prologue that, as the Coens describe in an interview, they wanted to carry the air of a Jewish folk tale, but they didn't know any Jewish folk tales, so they made one up. It is, they say, an amuse bouche, not a prologue. It's like the short cartoon before a feature, bearing no weight. Except it's obviously a lie, as well as being the truth. It's setting up the deep-rooted Jewishness of the film, even if it's a fabrication.  It's a wonderfully twisty opening sequence that feels both deeply connected to and worlds apart from the film that follows it.

It's a riotously funny, deeply uncomfortable film without ever being cringe-comedy. Cringe comedy comes from a protagonist doing the wrong things and being adamant about their rightness, whereas here Larry is just a passenger in his own life, unable or unwilling to take the wheel despite it being right in front of him. It's a film for all of us meek types who just want things to be okay, too afraid to take risks, too worried about uncertainty, and so things crumble around them as a result of inaction.

Burwell's score is intense. Deakins once again shoots the goddamn hell out of it (through Deakins' lens, nothing is more idyllic than this suburban Minnesota neighbourhood). It is not my favourite Coen Brothers films, but it probably should be, and it's a contender for their absolute best.

[Poster talk... there is only the one poster for A Serious Man. it's a shot from the film of Larry on his roof fixing the aerial because Danny can't watch F-Troop or something, and the moment when Larry spots his next door neighbour, the divorcee played by Amy Landacker, sunbathing nude, and Larry can't help but take a reluctant ogle. there are so many gorgeous shots Deakins makes in this film but somehow that moment becomes a turning point moment for Larry in the film (but does it really?) so it makes the poster. The restraint though of never showing the nude sunbathing any closer than Larry's vantage point is such a perfect Coens move though, a real "am I actually seeing what I'm seeing" moment)

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Final Destination released its sixth entry in the franchise this year with Bloodlines. I'm not sure I ever saw another entry beyond this first one (and the internuts is trying to tell me that Ryan Murphy created a TV series called Final Destinations that ran 5 seasons, well, I say "show me proof, because I don't think it ever existed"). 

The film opens with teen Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) and class getting ready for their senior trip to Paris. Alex is having a lot of anxiety over the trip, but manages to get on the plane. He seems to pass out and has a vision of a disaster happening on the flight and when he wakes, the events from his dream begin to repeat. He freaks out and he, and a few others, are kicked off the plane. The plane does explode shortly after take off and Alex isn't feeling good about any of it.

The other survivors, though, starting with Alex's best friend, have freak accidents or unceremonious death. Alex thinks that death is coming for them, because they tricked death or escaped it. Alex begins looking for patterns and slowly goes mad, but as more deaths occur, others begin to reluctantly see what he sees. There is, possibly a pattern. 

Final Destination does a few things exceptionally well, the first of which is really effectively capturing the anxiety of flying, and even if you're not an anxious flyer, the film effectively relates that feeling. Secondly, it logically starts turning Alex into a sort of conspiracy nutcase, and by the end of the film Sawa leans into it pretty effectively. Third, the deaths are all very entertaining in how Rube Goldbergian they get. The domino effect that is needed to cause the wild deaths are so utterly improbable, except the film really makes it feel like it's the obvious outcome in any of these situations.

This started life as a treatment for an X-Files episode, if the internets can be believed (can it?), which explains how X-Files greats James Wong and Glen Morgan got involved in the film. It's so perfect a premise for a teen-deaths horror movie, where the killer is none other than fate, one that can't truly be escaped.

[Poster talk... there are a few posters for Final Destination, including the most typical one with the main young cast along the lower half in a very black and blue colour pallette with the plane in a lightning storm above the title... but that's so played out. i chose the so very, very X-Files-inspired poster which I'm not sure if I've ever seen before. It's so fitting given the director]

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In Halloween III, a doctor treats a patient who was found having collapsed outside a rural gas station. The patient clutched a soft vinyl halloween mask so tight, the hospital staff couldn't release it from his grip. In his few waking moments he proclaimed "they will kill us all". Shortly after being sedated and put in a room, a suited stranger walks in, crushes the man's skull, and leaves, only to die shortly after entering his car.

The whole situation is just perplexing, and the doctor, Dan Challas, (broad-chested, mustachioed Tom Atkins) starts inquiring wherever he can about what the fuck is actually going on. He meets Ellie (Stacey Nelkin, a real Adrienne Barbeau-type), the patient's daughter, a fetching woman about half his age. She's even more eager for answers, so Dan schluffs off his parenting duties (yet again) to run away with this young lady to the Silver Shamrock mask factory not far away in upstate California. It's a strange town completely run by this factory and its owner, and it has a 6pm curfew every night.

Nothing is right in this town and between screwing each other's brains out Dan and Ellie go investigating, only to learn the terrible secret far too late to do anything about it.

Season of the Witch is a sublimely ridiculous horror movie that just revels in its 1980's-ness, from the TV and radio ads, to the kind of American folksy quaintness that had already disappeared but was still being clung to.There's only the slightest hint of anti-capitalism baked into this story about a rich industrialist asshole who effectively buys a whole town so he can set in motion a plan to turn children's brains into snakes and crickets. To what end? Probably the raising of some elder god. And also this genius has figured out how to make lifelike automatons. This movie is wild and so much stupid nonsense fun.

I've seen Halloween III at least four times, but I still didn't really remember how everything played out in this film, so the process of discovery of Dan and Ellie playing amateur detective was thrilling. I had no recollection of what the big eval plan was (hell, I still don't). It's a rare film that seems to feel like you're discovering it all over again each time you watch it (not that it would stand up to regular repeat viewings mind you).

In the long list of Halloween films, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is probably my favourite next to the original. Michael Meyers is a fun horror icon, but also a pretty redundant one and his potency has never truly surpassed the original. But it's Season of the Witch's deviation from Meyers that makes it so exciting and enjoyable. It was the promise of something maybe really different, except audiences at the time rebuffed its lack of masked murderers (it's full of masked murderees instead) and so the fourth entry would go right back to the same old well.

[Poster talk... this one is cuh-lassic. Just so beautifully engineered with the bold seric font that was so highly prevalent in early 80's horror, along with the drop case first and last letter, all seemingly sweeping out of the haunted figure hovering in the clouds over costumed children in distorted silhouette. the red-orange tinge amidst a sea of black offers a haunting pop of colour. it's all so ...rough, unrefined, and yet completely charming. there's no other poster, but why would it need one. this is perfect]

31 Days of Halloween: The Menu

2022, Mark Mylod (Entourage) -- Disney

Why am I not surprised he directed episodes of Entourage and Succession; this was most definitely an exploration of wealth and privilege. And assholes.

So, its inevitable every year that we watch at least one movie that gets the label of "horror" by its respective service and/or end up on a list of "best horror", but I would personally label more "thriller" than anything. I came into this movie expecting more of a horror theme; I honestly thought there was going to be a significant element of cannibalism to the movie, as in "eat the rich"; I guess I just convinced myself that is what the movie was about.

Last little preamble bit; yes, this was one of the movies on my "finally got around to" list given its foodie nature.

A bunch of rich fucks are heading to an exclusive island restaurant, essentially in the harbour of some nameless coastal city. Our point of view characters are pretentious foodie Tyler Ledford (Nicholas Hoult, Superman) and his date Margo (Anya Taylor-Joy, The Gorge); she is our primary connection to reality, but the two seem to somewhat appreciate each other. The rest include a movie star, a renowned restaurant critic, an old money couple, and some hedge fund bros. From the moment they arrive on the island and meet Elsa (Hong Chau, The Whale), their guide to this experience, things feel extreme and off. The resto is Hawthorn and the famed chef is Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes, 28 Years Later). Everything is told to us as if we, yes we the viewer, should know who this man is and be in awe of what is happening. Which is typical upscale eating bullshit.

Of note, I have never eaten food at this level. Some of my friends would consider me a foodie because I try so many things. I am not. I just enjoy eating, and because I have a diminished sense of smell, I usually enjoy strong flavours, varied flavours. But yes, I do enjoy the idea of haute cuisine, food prepared as much for technique & presentation as it is for taste & substance, but could never really subscribe to it, even if I could afford it. I want to relish food, eat food and yes, I prefer the restaurant at the beginning of The Bear than what it becomes.

But, wow, is this story told with precision and menace! All the expected details are there, but amped up a bit. The pretentious menu, the cult like behaviour of the staff of the resto, the yells of "Yes Chef!!", the constant stream of irritants as we get to know the guests, the control with which Slowik demands over how the guests behave. We are learning, and yeah, it doesn't take long, to not life these diners, nor are we expected to like the staff nor Slowik. Margo is abrasive but, we easily warm to her because she challenges everything ! 

It doesn't take long for Slowik to reveal his End Goal, in that everyone here will die. Everyone. Everyone seems terrified and angry, except for Ledford. He, now matter how horrible Slowik gets, seems thrilled by it all. More than a little unhinged. Unfortunately there is no eating of the guests, just some light abuse, for the goal of this eating adventure is to just fucking kill everyone. Boo. Still, the movie is incredibly well done, and I really enjoyed myself but I wish there had been some real terror in the situation instead, "Weeee, yeah boyz, let's see everyone die." 

But not Margo, because Margo likes fucking cheeseburgers.

31 Days of Halloween: Jaws

1975, Steven Spielberg (Duel) -- Netflix

"Duel" was a TV movie ?!?! Interesting; it started as an ABC Movie of the Week and then got theatrical release. 

Anywayz, I would have been 8 when Jaws was originally released. I probably caught bits of it later on at a drive-in, which probably did not help with my fear of swimming. Eventually, post age-10, I taught myself to swim by staying under the water and marveling at the views. And in ponds, not the ocean. No sharks there.

I must have seen this at least once after on VHS but its been many decades since. The legacy of "shark movies" was created with this movie, and we have seen a few of them, but only one during this series: The Shallows. I do have a Tag though. But, my point was that the impact this had on movies is indelible, especially the "sense of impending doom" that became synonymous with the "Jaws Theme", but also the idea of showing a placid scene but the viewers being very aware that it could become a blood bath at any moment, and quite literally!

I swore Kent did a Spielberg Director Series which would include this movie, which his wife loves, but that must have been in a previous alternate reality.

The munching begins almost immediately. On an early summer night (it must be cold there, as the kids partying on the beach are all in heavy sweaters) on a Massachusetts beach, a girl goes skinny dipping and gets eaten. At night. Interesting how the iconic image of a girl in a bikini with the shark coming up under her is more Mandela Effect than reality. Or maybe its just my memory. Either way, she is mostly nude, its not during the daylight and is, in fact, quite horrible as we get to hear her scream, "I don't want to die!!" Not long after, a kid is taken from a crowded beach, after the authorities sweep the girl's death under the pier. The kid is slain in full view of hundreds of beach goers.

The feeding frenzy after that death is palpable, the metaphor very real. The shark hunters and reporters and lookey-loo's flock to the small island town each thinking they can take care of the shark. Quint (Robert Shaw, The Sting), the bedraggled old fisherman, says he will kill the shark, but for $10k, no less. And Oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss, Stand By Me) shows up to give some real talk on sharks, immediately dismissing the first sharks all these fishermen haul in as something other than what ate the kids. Nobody listens to him but for the not-an-islander town police chief Brody (Roy Scheider, Seaquest 2032), but after this catch, the town Mayor allows the July 4th beach festivities to go through, as Amity Island is a summer town, dependent on tourism. After an initial hoax (two kids with a fake shark fun, again creating a prankster legacy) the shark eats another boater, and the mayor's fate is sealed. Quint is hired, and Hooper and Brody join him.

This is where the meat (chum, no less?), pun intended, of the movie happens -- the hunt on the not-big-enough boat. Quint is a seasoned shark hunter, having survived a WWII incident where "1100 men went into the water, 316 came out" (do I hear The Tragically Hip suddenly?). He dismisses Hooper's rich-college-boy knowledge, but eventually the two men bond over war stories and scars. Brody is almost an incidental character in all these scenes, a man who is utterly afraid to be on the water.

This Great White becomes Quint's White Whale, refusing to give in, when it terminally injures the boat. Nothing will stop him from killing this shark, but ... well, the shark itself. I totally forgot the man gets munched on himself and Hooper only survives by hiding out on the bottom of the bay, thanks to his scuba tanks. Also thanks to his scuba tanks, Brody is able to blow the shit up out of the shark.

I really liked this one, even with my general dislike for the cinematic 70s, and I was surprised at how much I liked Ricard Dreyfuss in this role, considering how much I disliked Roy Neary. The jump scares are still effective even knowing all the practical effects history behind Bruce the Shark, and the whole "we're gonna need a bigger boat" scene is a chef's-kiss perfect scene. 

3 Short Paragraphs: Locked

2025, David Yarovesky (Brightburn) -- download

Yarovesky followed up the much maligned Brightburn with Nightbooks. 

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

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

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

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

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

KWIF: six films for sick days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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