The Mandalorian Season 3: Chapter 17 - The Good, The Bad and the U.G.L.Y

 2023, Disney+

Chapter 17: The Apostate
directed by Rick Famuyiwa

Another season with our old friend Din Djarin, Mando, The Mandalorian.  It's hard to believe that Chapter 16 was ...three years ago... unless you count The Book of Boba Fett as Season 2.5 of The Mandalorian...which I do. (They really should have titled it The Mandalorian: The Book of Boba Fett...it would have been much clearer why it played out the way it did). Even still, that series ended over two years ago. So yeah, we've been without our Mandalorian pals now.

The first episode back is, well, all over the place, quite literally. At least three different planets and one totally wizard space battle. It's a lot to pack into just under an hour. Let's get into it:

The Good

Din Djarin, still an outcast from his sect for having removed his helmet, visits Navarro, where Greef Karga offers him a respite from his religious indiscretions, a job as sheriff in his new bustling hub of trade and prosperity. But Mando is on a new quest, one of redemption, which involves bathing in the mines of Mandalor, or something banal.  But Mandalor may be impassable terrain for a humanoid, so Mando wants a droid he can trust, and asks Greef for IG-11's remains, hoping to resurrect him. It doesn't go well. Greef has the droid's remains taken to his local crew of techsperts, a bunch of Anzellans.  They're the 9-inch tall species of which Babu Frik (the best part of The Rise of Skywalker) is one.  Shirley Henderson returns to voice the various Anzellans, and they are just too adorable. Yes, so adorable that even Grogu cannot resist just grabbing one for a cuddle. It's only a day later and I'm guessing it's already a meme.

As Mando and Grogu leave Navarro, they are flanked by pirate fighter ships. Mando's new Naboobian Starfighter is a lot faster and more manoeuvrable than the pirate fighters and it's a pretty crazy dash through an asteroid belt, as well as a bit of exciting cat and mouse.  It's pretty great and easily top 3 of live action Star Wars asteroid belt navigating sequences.

The Bad

Much of this episode was retreading ground covered in prior episodes, reiterating that Mandalor is destroyed, that Mando is in exile from his caste, that the Darksaber Din wields has importance, and other bits and bobs we already know. Props to both Favreau and Famuyiwa for injecting as much action, fan service and cuteness as they could to help this rather expository episode click briskly forward.

One of my pet peeves about the Star Wars live action TV shows is the insistence on showing starships landing on the ground, and it never looks good...it always looks awkard and animated and takes me out of the moment.  A cut from the ship approaching for landing to the crew disembarking would suffice without the awkward landing sequence.

Unreal problems

I have to wonder how IG-11's upper torso survived. Wasn't the thermal detonator in his chest? If anything wouldn't his arms and legs have survived and little else (oh right, his legs burned up in lava floes)? Shenanigans.

Galaxy building

When Mando and Grogu are in hyperspace early on, Grogu espies the shadows of some creatures seemingly travelling in league with them. The shape of these are clearly the purrgil, a tentacled space whale with a natural ability to travel hyperspace. We last met the purrgil in Season 4 of Star Wars: Rebels and last saw them dragging Grand Admiral Thrawn's starship (and Ezra along with it) into hyperspace, destination unknown.

Also, so nice that they brought the Anzellans back. I want a whole series of shorts about these guys. They (babu) frikin' adorable. They remind me of the Doozers on Fraggle Rock.

Oh, and Mando asks about Cara Dune, and where she went off to. Greef notes that she was effectively recruited into a special missions force. It's a shame about Gina Carano's toxic wing-ed-nuttiness, I really liked Cara Dune. Credit to the show for not just ignoring her altogether though. Also a quick update on the fate of Moff Gideon (he's off to stand trial for war crimes).

Looking forward

I love the dichotomy of Din Djarin and Bo-Katan Kryze. Din doesn't hold any reverence for the mythology around the Darksaber and thinks it silly that Bo-Katan's followers all effed off after she failed to get the saber for herself. Likewise Bo-Katan does not think highly of Din's weird sect of zealots and their oddball helmet traditions. I would really love it if the show followed both of these characters equally this season on their journey of self discovery and letting go of traditions or beliefs that are more harmful than helpful, not just to themselves, but their society at large.

Yes, toys of that please

Word has it Mando's Naboobian starfighter is coming soon, which is good because my pitiful attempt to make on out of the classic Phantom Menace version resulted in, basically, a pile of garbage sitting in a box.

3-2-1: The Recruit

 2023, 8 episodes - Netflix
created by Alexi Hawley (The Rookie, The Following)

The Plot 100

CIA lawyer Owen Hendricks is only days into his first professional gig when he comes across a "grey mail" case that threatens to expose a vast network of undercover agents. In attempting to handle the case, Hendricks finds himself way over his head, not only in dealing with the Belarusian spy wanting out of prison, but in navigating the cutthroat politics of working for the government, the intense competition and backstabbing within the agency, and in sacrificing his own personal life for career gains.

3-2-1

3 Great: (1) Noah Centineo. I've watched this kid through the past few years, mostly in Netflix's plethora of teen romances (the Lara-Jean trilogy, the Perfect Date, Sierra Burgess is a Loser) and most recently in Black Adam, and he's good. He's damn good. He's charming, sympathetic, good looking, and affable.  He's got everything that young Mark Ruffalo had, and more (mainly an additional 6 inches in height).  The teen romances threatened to pigeonhole him, but The Recruit is the perfect breakout vehicle for him, one which lets him do everything he did so well as a romantic lead, but also delve into action, intrigue and espionage. Centineo is the absolute center of this entire series and he carries it ably on his broad shoulders. His greatest trick (as likely guided by the showrunner and various directors) is to not fall into the trap of the action hero. At every step, Owen Hendricks is out of his dept, but always seems to find himself ably wading in these waters. Owen is never surprisingly good at anything, not driving in a car chase, not shooting guns, not "playing the game", but he is clearly smart, thinks nimbly on his feet, and isn't risk averse. He takes chances, some which pay off, some which don't. What Centineo brings to all this is the weariness and the wear and tear of "sink or swim" living, and he's desperately swimming, though he could so easily sink. Centineo remembers the bruises and emotional scars from episode to episode and by the penultimate entry of Season one Owen is traumatized, panic attacks setting in, and he's doing his best to just make it through yet another crazy day. It's a really fun, thoughtful performance.

(2) The CIA is a problem. This show isn't sugar coating anything, the CIA and the various disconnected units, are a real problem. They compete, rather than work together. They backstab and try to take each other down a few pegs, if not take each other out of the game altogether. Nevermind the actual work, it's gruelling just surviving the internal threats.  It's a wonder anything gets done. The show paints Owen as a good guy (perhaps the only good guy), though it shows the wear that CIA and its methodologies has on him and his conscience. The rest of the agency are dicey, unreliable fuckers who certainly aren't trustworthy.  

(3) Doug Liman. The director of The Bourne Identity and Edge of Tomorrow) helms the first two episodes of the series and it looks really, really good.  It's a series that requires its lead character to navigate many different environments in many different areas across the globe and it all looks pretty damn good.  While they shot it in Quebec and LA, the substitutions for many different European cities, desert scenes and Washington all work quite well. It's not a show that spends a lot of time admiring its locations, it moves so quickly, and in the first two episodes it plunges Owen into action that he's just not used to, but Liman certainly is.  It's nothing crazy, but it all feels much more dynamic than the network TV fare.

2 Good
(1) Momentum.  There are no shortage of complications in The Recruit. Despite everything Owen Hendricks is juggling, the show, by being mostly laser-focused on its lead, never feels convoluted. Owen is navigating inner-office rivals (Aarti Mann, Colton Dunn, and Kristian Bruun), inter-departmental contacts (including the joint chief of staff and the justice department), an office romance, court cases, dodging a subpoena, various encounters with scary black ops teams, the Belarusian assassin, and his best friends/roommates who are validly concerned about him.  The result is a very propulsive, very consumable viewing experience that offers a lot of laughs, excitement and investment in the characters

(2) Alexi Hawley also created The Rookie which stars Nathan Fillion, and you know Fillion is always down to do a little something with his friends. He pops in for the final two episodes in a very minor but perfect Fillion-esque cameo.  It's maybe not as fun as TDK in The Suicide Squad or voicing the telepathic octopus in Resident Alien but still always fun to see him in these little roles.

1 Bad:  One of the subplots has the sort of will-they/wont-they of Owen and his roommate/ex-girlfriend Hannah (Fivel Stewart) that mostly works fine in the context of the show, except when it decides to have scenes of Hannah and other-roommate-Terence (Daniel Quincy Annoh) together and all they talk about is Owen. And then in the late stages of the series Hannah does something that seems pretty much pointless, which as a story means is trying to accelerate the romance.  But at the same time, the way the show subverts the expectations of this subplot for the finale is pretty good.

META

I was genuinely surprised when I (a) started watching The Recruit and (b) found myself thoroughly enjoying it. I crashed through just over three episodes in a Sunday afternoon when I remembered I had things to do, but I easily could have kept watching all the way through. I recommended it to the wife, who caught up on the episodes I had already watched and we watched the rest together, both enjoying it quite tremendously. Was very happy to see the notice at the end of the season that it's been renewed for a season 2.  It certainly wrapped very little up this first season and left a lot to explore on the table.

Also learned Alexi Hawley is brother to Noah Hawley.  They're styles of storytelling don't seem comparable, but there's certainly a quality they demand for their shows that is up on the screen.

KWIF: Tootsie, plus Do Revenge (+3)

 Kent's week (or two) in film #5:
Tootsie - 1982, d. Sydney Pollack - Criterion Channel
Do Revenge - 2022, d. Jennifer Kaytin Robinson - Netflix
Caro Diario - 1993, d. Nanni Moretti - Tubi
Tampopo - 1985, d. Juzo Itami - Criterion Channel
Sharper - 2023, d. Benjamin Caron - AppleTV+

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From moment one, something didn't sit right with me about Tootsie. I mean, it's Dustin Hoffman, an actor I've never particularly cared for, playing a character that is recognizably Dustin Hoffman the actor, ergo a very difficult person nobody wants to work with (I'd forgotten about the multiple accusations of sexual predation which makes the irony of the film's intent even more distasteful). That unease I started into the film with never left me throughout the viewing.

It's the early 80's, and there's still a battle of the sexes going on, and Sydney Pollack wants to tackle it head-on by putting a womanizing, arrogant, self-involved actor in the shoes of a woman, in order for him to play a female character role on a soap opera, because the actor thinks he can do it better than any woman could. Throughout the film, Hoffman's character uses his disguise as armour while he performs his perception of a tough (but not in a manly way), independent (but not in a manly way), no-nonsense (but not in a manly way) woman. In the most unbelievable reach of the film, Pollack asks us to buy into Hoffman going off-script on a soap opera on.the.regular. They wouldn't have lasted a day in reality. One warning at best before they were turfed.

In its day I'm sure its very binary perception of gender roles and gender politics seemed progressive, but at the same time we had "nerds" who were "revenging" on the cool kids by having non-consentual sex with women for comedy. This is an equally unamusing and toxic film. 

The binary perception of gender roles here cannot sustain with a modern lens, and I cannot turn off my modern lens in watching it. There are trans, drag and other queer lenses this film is unintentionally filtering through, and since I don't think for a moment Pollack had them in mind, he's not addressing these demographics in any satisfactory way. Nor is he even having the characters reasonably question their own roles and identities, at least not beyond a knee-jerk-reactionary homophobic/transphobic-for-comedy way. It's ugly. But also, it's the 80's, so ugly is expected. So of course we wind up with a story about a cisgender, heterosexual white male who lies and uses pretty much everyone around him and succeeds as a result. It's probably the most truthful thing about the film.

Taken even at just a base, binary comedy with a love story sub-plot, it fails. I don't want Jessica Lange to be with him. I want her to despise him and let him know that he abused her trust, her dad's trust and the trust of everyone they work with for his own selfish gain, and that his love means nothing to her. There's nothing he can do to repair that trust except to respect her wishes and leave her alone. But who am I, a cis-het white man to tell another cis-het white man what the woman he's writing should or shouldn't do with her love life.

Really, kinda fuck this film, y'know. The soundtrack and score are godawful, it's not funny, it's certainly not romantic, and I just don't buy into it. But also fuck this film mostly because it's pretty insidiously watchable despite everything I said...but maybe I kept watching just hoping for a comeuppance that never really happens because 1980s.

---

With Do Revenge, I found myself with mixed feelings watching upper-crust high schoolers "do revenge" on one another, in what could be an expanding whirlwind of destroying people's possible futures and trajectories in life. It can happen so simply. But at the same time these are the asshole kids of rich asshole parents (parents we never meet or see) who generally cannot see past their own wants, amusements and ambitions. They are, as reiterated numerous times, sociopaths, and it's hard to feel sorry for them for having to experience any sort of complications in life.

So the film relies upon us seeing these charismatic leads (twenty-something-year-old stars from Riverdale and Stranger Things) as complex people, not just snobs or psychos (though they are respectively each that), despite their Strangers on a Train-like bargain.

Camila Mendes' Drea, despite being the "poor kid" at school, has entrenched herself as a queen bee academically and socially, but her boyfriend Max (Dash and Lily's Austin Abrams)-- the most elite of the elite offsprings attending the school-- coaxes her into sending him a cam vid which he then shares with everyone. But, being the elite of the elite, he successfully spins himself as victim leaving Drea an outcast. During summer tennis camp she meets Eleanor (Maya Hawke), an outcast lesbian who will be transferring to Drea's school in the fall which means she will encounter the girl who maliciously branded her a sexual predator a few years earlier. The plan is to do revenge on each other's offenders.

Though we recognize Drea's elitist, selfish tendencies, we see what she has done to survive, thrive and elevate herself above her contemporaries, with none of the resources they have. She's an inspiring figure, though one clearly having lost perspective and empathy as a result of their status, but earning our support as victim of what is an actual crime. Yet her casual ability to just destroy mean girl Sophie Turner at tennis camp is a really frightening side to her personality. Eleanor has developed anxiety and keeps herself at a distance from most people so it seems like a real coup for her to befriend Drea, but the unease sets in when she becomes too comfortable blending in with Drea's old crowd. Are they a bad influence on her? Is Drea? 

The film doesn't sit with these questions for too long as it has a few tricks up its sleeve, as the revenge they do don't go so according to plan, and they have unintended consequences... but not enough for my liking. This film is entertainment, not a morality play, but I wish there was more fallout to the events at hand. Even nth degree shitheel Max, upon receiving his comeuppance, will probably just wind up backpacking around Europe with his camera (likely coaxing many European women into nude photography that he'll share without their permission) and dad's money and (unfortunately) be just fine.

Both Drea and Eleanor provide voiceover during the film, but its used inconsistently and not always effectively, and I wonder, if I actually paid attention on a rewatch, if these POV shifts would actually break the film.

Do Revenge is fun, surprising and quite engrossing, but I question if it is smartly using its elite-class setting or if it just thinks it is.

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I thought for the longest time that Caro Diario was a film I first watched on the Canadian cable channel "Showcase" back in the late-90's.  It's a small Italian film with no real narrative, just kind of a travelogue/slice of life, and I really connected with it back then.  Rewatching it on Tubi (of all places), I had a potent sense memory of sitting in the theatre watching certain scenes and realized that Caro Diario was one of the movies I watched at Thunder Bay's first film festival held by the North of Superior Film Association (which I'm happy to see is still a thing) back in 1994.

'94 was a big year for me in film. It's when both Clerks and Pulp Fiction hit and my brain exploded, realizing there was more to movies than I ever thought or new, and the NOSFA film festival was another big part of that awakening. Caro Diario holds a special place in my heart and brain as a result.  

It's a sweet, often funny picture that finds director/writer Nanni Moretti playing a version of himself as he, through narration of his diary entries, first, rides his Vespa around Rome, contemplating architecture, dance and cinema, and having a chance run-in with Jennifer Beals.  His second diary entry finds him trying to find escape to focus on work, jumping from one island to another, never to find peace (but with comedic results).  The third entry is more serious and personal as he finds himself sleepless and itchy only for it to take a year of medical examinations before a cancer diagnoses is given. This isn't documentary, it's not a drama or comedy, but somewhere in the center of the venn diagram of these.

It's not the monumental, life changing picture I remember it being, but I'm not in that same place or time I once was. It's a charming, often amusing, and serene picture that doesn't ask much of the audience except to try and enjoy the world as Moretti sees it.

--- 

Directors du jour The Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert of Everything Everywhere All At Once) have cited Tampopo as having a direct influence on their filmmaking style, which I guess we could call an "anything goes" style.  But "anything goes" undersells the craft of actually selling the "anything goes" style, of telling a story where "anything goes" but within the frame or context of the story so that it all hangs together.

Tampopo is, as far as I know, the sole entrant in the subgenre of "ramen western", and I think that label does the absolute best job, simply so, of describing what this movie is. It's set in an unnamed city in Japan in its current-day 80's, following a truck driver who inadvertently becomes "sensei" to a ramen shop widow who wants to figure out what she's doing wrong and become the best ramen shop she can.

This is a food porn movie before food porn was a subgenre, but it maybe invented it? There are interstitial scenes, disconnected from the main plot, that feature bizarre eroticism involving food (among other, non-erotic adventures in enjoying one's meal), including one particular moment where an egg yolk is sensuously(?) passed from mouth to mouth between two lovers until the female climaxes from the sensation, breaking the yolk's membrane and dripping yellow goo everywhere.  But it's mostly about finding the ramen recipe, the Japanese noodle soup I can not partake in due to onion and wheat sensitivites (one makes me barf, the other I break out in hives). In total, it's about the pleasures of food, but with a spaghetti western pastiche. (Disclaimer, there are scenes of a turtle and prawn being killed on screen but for the purpose of food preparation...still, rough stuff).

---

If the opening sequence, "Tom", were a stand alone short film starring Justice Smith and Briana Middleton, it would be a pretty compelling piece. The attractive leads have great chemistry but also there's a sense of "why are we watching this" that just underlines the whole thing. Knowing the basic plot of the film from trailers, it unfortunately cuts this seemingly stand-alone bit right off at the knees. And there's a reveal, a reveal you know is coming from almost moment one as this type of film has you questioning everything you're seeing all the time. 

Sharper stars Smith, Middleton, Julianne Moore, Sebastian Stan and John Lithgow, which is a curiously intriguing cast. If you know nothing about the film and have not seen a trailer, and this cast does curiously intrigue you, maybe stop reading, and go watch it.. as I think it might play fairly well if one watches with no prior knowledge.

Buuuut...[now spoilers] even then, once you catch onto what the film is, which is a movie about grifters who are just scamming, scamming, scamming one another, it becomes somewhat obvious to see where it's going. It's the inevitable flaw in a film about grifters, it becomes a very binary picture where you either trust everything you see on the screen or you trust nothing. After its first three acts (of five), the film has taught you not to trust anything about it and so whenever it tries to surprise you, you're never surprised because you're already anticipating it.

It's a really good, often great looking film (director Caron, comes into his feature debut after working on expensive and ambitious TV projects like Sherlock, The Crown, and Andor), often cloaked in hard black shadows contrasting against the fairly spare and flat aesthetic of the nouveau riche.  The contrast between Tom's cozy bookstore and his father's sprawling, contemporary, sterile apartment are so telling of the differences between the characters. It's got an interesting structure, but the nature of the story makes it hard to invest in almost any of the characters (save Tom who disappears for a long stretch), and thus makes it difficult to really enjoy the film.  Caron surely will have much better features in the future.

3 Short Paragraphs: Jung_E

2023, Sang-ho Yeon (Train to Busan) -- Netflix

Almost got back to it, but fell off the wagon again. Actually watching movies, I mean. Instead of not being That Guy, I wonder if I can embrace the New Crap and redirect my energies into writing earnestly about what I end up doing instead?

Anywayz, I did end up watching yet another middling treatise on AI and fancy robotics AI, this time from South Korea. I had originally assumed it would take the typically American path, in that a movie about a combat AI based on a legendary soldier would be all about the combat. Interestingly enough, and boring AF to a lot of the public reviewers, it was more about the utilization of AI, and incipient rights. In this world's future, the environment has gone awry (as expected) and the waters risen, flooding most of the cities. Instead of fixing things locally, most people escape to orbiting rings, some of which almost immediately try to secede from their Earth bound leaders. The goals of the two factions are a bit washed over, pun intended, but there is a war, using hyper capable soldiers and robots... so many robots. 

The movie picks up as an Earth based AI company attempts to perfect the combat soldier via a AI driven simulation of the last battle fought by super soldier Yun Jung-yi. This simulation, is trying to push past whatever caused her to fail to win the battle, and will apply that success to The Best Combat AI Ever. The program is led by her adult daughter, under the auspices of an exuberant and annoying Director. Its been a long time since that battle took her mom from her, and this affords her opportunity to feel like there is still a connection.

Interestingly enough, the movie never actually has any true battles between the factions. Its entirely set in the facility where they experiment on Jung_E. You see, in this world, AI is not so much as fabricated from scratch, but cloned from dead people. When someone dies, they have a number of choices - be digitally cloned and housed in a robot shell with full human rights, or down the spectrum to digital copy with no rights, and they can do with your mind as they see fit, BUT their loved ones get a stipend -- basically sell your relatives to the corporation. Jung_E's family did that, because being a super mercenary paid well but all the money went to fighting her daughter's illness. Said daughter obviously recovered, and is now stuck in a terrible dilemma, forced to watch her mother's likeness tortured day in and day out.

So, while the movie was not as much about the war as an American copy would have been, there is not much weight behind the emotional impact or philosophical impacts it wants to make. Like many Korean movies, families torn apart by terrible circumstances are depicted through long crying jags and terrible choices. There are some interesting ideas presented but they are more supplanted by emotional reactions that get a bit tiresome. And the whole exploitation of digitally cloned humans is barely touched upon, and really only culminates in a sex bot joke.

That said, the action scenes are spectacular. The robot designs, the factory layout (all those impractical angles and jagged metal bits jutting out everywhere) and the water logged PA world is wonderfully depicted. But the competing choices of Robot Philosophy vs Pew Pew Pew was a loss.

3-2-1: The Phantom Lady

 1944, d. Robert Slodmak - Criterion Channel

The Plot 100:
Scott Henderson meets a woman at a bar. She seems in distress, he doesn't seem to notice. They don't really get to know each other but they attend a revue together, and say their good-nights afterwards. Scott returns home to find policemen waiting and his wife dead. The bartender, the cabbie, the people at the show all don't remember him with any lady. He's convicted and sentenced to death. His secretary, Carol, certain of his innocence, hits the pavement to save him, with Inspector Burgess smelling something fishy, and Scott's best friend Jack returning from South America to assist...except....

3-2-1 (there be spoilers)
3 Bad - (1) Structure.  This film doesn't know who its protagonist is. The basic plot would have us think Carol is its lead, but we don't even meet her until 15 minutes into this 86-minute movie, and she doesn't really start her investigation until over a half-hour into it.  Until then it's mostly about Scott, who only pops up briefly in acts 2 and 3.  In the second and third acts, the film seems to want to spend more time with Jack Marlowe, or Inspector Burgess than it does with Carol, taking a lot of ownership of the story away from Carol, and it's certainly not very interested in any form of investigative procedural.  

(2) "Paranoiacs" and other mental health disorders. Jack, we learn about mid-way through, is the murderer. He's paid off all the various people, as well as stumbled into a lot of happy coincidences, that let him get away with his vengeful murder of Scott's wife.  He thought they ware in love. But at the same time, Jack is a psychopath who just can't help himself. He has a need to kill, and the way this movie handles it is with corny hand-wringing and facial twitches. It's the '40's so the film's understanding of mental health disorders is quite poor. Likewise there's the "Phantom Lady" and her depression, that the film uses but doesn't seem particularly sympathetic with or careful in portraying.

(3) Motivations. Carol is putting herself in danger, running around town, pushing buttons, because she's in love with her boss. Sigh.  

2 Good: (1) Alan Curtis' moustache. It's pretty dashing. As much as I was like "get on with it" during the first act of the film, I just marveled at Curti's thin lip pelt and wondered how it was tended to.

(2) The danger women constantly face.  I'm not saying the danger women must face in navigating a toxic, patriarichal society is good, but this film presents that danger very, very well.  There's the leering, obvious, creepy men, the disgusting predators, and the insidious ones who can disguise themselves as seemingly kind, normal guys.  Even in the scene with no lady present, where the cops are interrogating Scott about his wife's death, they all kind of understand that a sour marriage, a woman who laughs at him, a woman who won't give him what he wants are all too common an excuse to abuse or murder her. 

1 Great: Ella Raines, at times. Sure at times Raines acts like so many other emotive screen darlings of the era, where she talks in that cadence, you know the one, the type that no real person ever use.  Or with that softness that it seems all women of the era just had to talk with, lest they seem too tough and masculine, heaven forebid it.  But here Carol has some wonderful scenes, including the stalking of the bartender which thoroughly unravels him. She doesn't say a word and cracks the man open like an egg...unfortunately he almost kills her as he stops just shy of pushing her in front of the subway (again, the threat against women comes at all angles here).  But it's her scenes with sleazy drummer Elisha Cook Jr. (The Killing) where she's coming onto him, luring him into her trap, but absolutely detests him, and cannot hide her repulsion. These scenes are so incredibly well performed by both Raines and Cook, and just bristle with an uneasy energy (again, you're fully aware of how much danger Carol is in at all times with a guy like this).

META

I'm still new with olde Noir, but, like any genre at the height of its popularity, you can easily see there's the greats and then the slew of lesser-thans. Criterion sold this as a proto-feminist picture, and there are hints of it at best. I was really, truly hoping for a surprise, something of a Promising Young Woman of the '40's, of a woman willing to go to any lengths to get the truth out. Alas, Carol is still all too reliant on men in this, and it's mere minutes into her "investigation" when Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez) offers his assistance, basically the film assuring the olde-tyme audience "don't worry, there's still a man involved here".  It kind of sucks. Slodmak and team handle the camera well here, and between some nifty angles and lighting it's at times a really striking picture, but like Raines' acting it's not persistently good, just sparks of greatness.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

 2023, d. Peyton Reed - in theatre

As a longtime comic book reader, I recognize what Feige is doing. Where many people are judging the latest batch of Marvel as "cinema" and, fairly, finding it lacking, I see that the MCU has settled into its ongoing shared universe storytelling mode... Feige is doing what comics have been doing for decades. If you're looking for "cinema", this isn't it (was it really ever?). It's comic books on the big screen in (somewhat) live action, it's spectacle and entertainment, with a smidge of serialized character drama.

I get the frustration and the fatigue. These are big, expensive movies that became so successful and popular that they've became the beating heart of cinema for a hot decade, much to the chagrin of anyone who finds this kind of entertainment beneath them. Marvel was undeniable for a time. That time has passed. Though Sony and WB are still trying, studios are learning that Marvel is an anomaly that is not easily replicatable, but there's no recognizable "next big thing" taking its place (though I think horror will prove itself the genre of the 2020s). Marvel is now the scapegoat, or rather the dead horse to flog for anyone who is sad about the state of cinema, and the level of attention the highly distracted masses pay to the movie going experience. Is superheroes all they want? (No, but it's among the few things they're willing to leave the house for.)

Feige has settled into the storytelling cycle of the media that birthed it. The first 20 years of comic book movies, Starting with Superman, were like the golden age of comics: everything was stand-alone and basically one-and-done. The silver age started with X-Men and Spider-man, being more serialized in nature. The Avengers kicked off the bronze age, with everything being connected, and rapidly accelerated into the modern age of event comics and cross-overs. It can be exhausting if you're expecting the rhythms of cinematic storytelling, if you just want the three acts, beginning, middle, and end. But when you're reading comics (well, Marvel or DC comics, I should specify) there's no end. There's always another issue to come, and another event next summer. From experience it can get exhausting. Some are there already. I'm not there yet.

It's true, Quantumania is not a great movie. It lacks any real meaningful character arc, and it's burdened by both its own franchise and the larger franchise empire that surrounds it. This movie would have been tighter were it just Scott and Cassie who made the trip, or just Hope and Janet (imagine centering on some mother-daughter stuff in a Marvel movie, oh how the trolls would revolt). Or funnier if it were the squad of Paul Rudd, Michael Pena, David Dastmalchian and T.I. But it needed its biggest stars, which split the adventure into two in very comic book fashion.

Quantumania fulfills the promise of exploring the Quantum Realm that the first Ant-Man hinted at but shied away from for seemingly budgetary reasons in is sequel. The rescue of Janet in Ant-Man and the Wasp left a lot of questions about what Janet was up to in her 30 years in the Quantum Realm, and in comic book tradition, here's now a whole storyline about that. This new environment gives us a lot of weird creatures and beings (including a really toyetic looking guy with a cannon for a head) and Moebius-esque living buildings that are also rocket ships (like, hell yeah!). These quantum residents (including a telepathic William Jackson Harper) aren't given "the bump" here...were Marvel able to use The Micronauts (a popular long-running series in the 80's, but licensed from a Hasbro toy line) surely this would have been a backdoor pilot for their own franchise. Alas, these characters are mostly relegated to the background beyond their initial introduction.

It feels very comic-booky, a mid-run story arc that deviates from the norm and does something unexpected (except that we've been bombarded with ads for this thing for 2 months). I can't count the number of times I've read comics that take a trip into new terrain and yet leaves before it feels you really got to know it in a satisfactory manner. The Ant-Men and Wasps are tourists in the Quantum Realm and so we only really get that limited perspective of it.

My worry from the trailer was that this was going to be the same distractingly confined Volume mess of Thor: Love and Thunder or Obi-Wan Kenobi, and while I did sense the limitations early on in the arrival to the Quantum Realm, the film did grow out of it. I'm sure if you're looking for it, you'll see it, but it didn't call attention to itself as it has when used elsewhere.

Writer Jeff Loveness' time with Rick and Morty is felt in this, particularly in the introduction to the denizens of the Quantum Realm and in...well...all of MODOK...one of comics most ridiculous character designs that I'm sure was a deal breaker for many an unfamiliar viewer. I never saw MODOK as a possibility for the MCU, and that Loveness managed to not just get him in here and also tie him into the series at hand was pretty wild.

I can watch Jonathan Majors all day, any day, and his Kang is the seriously heavy heavy of piece. In this lighter franchise-within-a-franchise, he outclasses the heroes of the story. It serves dual purpose, to provide Scott and co with a formidable adversary to overcome (proving themelves as capable heroes) and setting the threat level for Kangs to come. 

Rudd is effortless as always, he seems comfortable in any surrounding, bless him. It's unreal how keyed into this franchise Michael Douglas seems to be...is he actually... enjoying himself? Kathryn Newton is a natural fit as Cassie Lang, and I look forward to her and Hailee Steinfeld's Kate Bishop becoming best friends. Evangeline Lily, despite being a title character, is given little to say or do, and it feels like Hope unfairly sidelined (which makes me wonder if the studio was punishing her for her anti-vaxxer status during COVID times, or if it was just Loveness unable to work her into the script meaningfully). Michelle Pfeiffer, then, becomes the titular Wasp of this film, as she gets a bulkier part as the center of the story. But Pfeiffer seems to be the one having the most difficulty acting in her digital surroundings. She's at best fine, but at times not great.

I enjoyed this for what it was -- a big, messy comic book adventure-- even though I see seemingly infinite variations of what it could have been. 

It's burdened with labels - "the Ant-Man Trilogy", "the start of Phase 5", "the 31st Marvel movie"- and all the expectations and baggage that comes with it. It can't ever just exist on its own. But no Marvel comic truly exists on it's own, either, even the best of the best is saddled with history and baggage and expectations of what it should be. Navigating shared universe storytelling isn't something everyone is well versed in. It takes experience to learn you don't *have* to read every title, you don't *have* to like or follow every character, that you really can step in and out as you please. All the complaints that all these post-Endgame films are just stepping stones to the next big thing, and that they don't really mean anything well, the meaning is what you ascribe to the experience of investing in this universe. If you think it's a waste of time, then most of these will be a waste of your time. I read a couple Marvel titles monthly, and every now and then they tie into or seed some big crossover I'm not reading. Cross-referencing and teasing the future is just part of the language of superhero comics that Feige is bringing into this medium (the Arrowverse brought into TV first). If one quick reference to something you don't get from another story you haven't seen, or a hint at setting up something forthcoming ruins the entire story at hand for you, it's pretty clear shared universe storytelling is not for you.

---
I haven't done a proper MCU Ranking in a while...

Ranking the MCU:

(including D+)

    the top tier - my favourites, all just good stuff

1. Avengers: Infinity War
2. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
3. Captain America: Civil War
4. Guardians of the Galaxy
5. Thor: Ragnarok
6. Spider-Man: Homecoming
7. Captain America: First Avenger
8. Hawkeye
9. Captain America: Winter Soldier
10. Avengers: Endgame
11. Black Panther
12. Spider-Man: No Way Home
13. Loki
14. Ant-Man
15. Avengers
16. Wandavision
17. She-Hulk
18. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
19. Werewolf By Night
    
     the second line - stories I like but perhaps don't fully resonate
20. Iron Man 3
21. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
22. Black Widow
23. Doctor Strange
24. Ant-Man and the Wasp
25. Captain Marvel
26. Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    
    third wave -- flawed but still fun, stuff I'll still go back to
27. What If...?
28. Ms. Marvel
29. Spider-Man: Far From Home
30. Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special
31. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
32. Eternals
33. Falcon and the Winter Soldier
34. Moon Knight
35. Avengers: Age of Ultron
36. Iron Man 2
    
    the bottom - the ones I don't know that I ever want to watch again
37. Thor: The Dark World
38. Iron Man
39. Thor
40. The Incredible Hulk
41. Thor: Love and Thunder

Horror, Not Horror: A Knock at the Cabin

 2023, d. M. Night Shyamalan - in theatre

Toasty and I saw a movie together! His review. We agree, methinks.

The most recent Shyamalan I watched was the latter half of The Village airing on one TV channel or another, at least a decade and a half after it stunned and/or frustrated audiences. The Village was a breaking point for some, I had basically tapped out after Signs, and little has enticed me back in. Not The Visit, not Split, nor Glass or Old. I really just thought I was out completely on Night.

But he got me. The trailer for A Knock at the Cabin got me. The premise seemed predictable in terms of the drama it would create, the tension of "truth or delusion" seems quite obvious, and yet there's a hint of spectacle in the trailer, and a surprising cast (do I want to see Jonathan Groff and Dave Bautista scene spar? Yes, yes I do...and I did! I did see it!)

The film is, pretty much, what the trailer sold it as, for good and bad. There aren't many surprises, but everyone involved is committed to the bit. I had questions, though, which the film didn't answer (why the sacrifices?), and I thought it had the opportunity to develop the story into a real head spinner but it chickened out in favour of being as straightforward a narrative as it could. The "news" reports were both the lifeblood of the movie, and also its weakest part. At the very least I was never bored. 

I've heard about the book (The Cabin at the End of the World) and how Night's film deviates from it. Toasty pointed out as we left the theatre how bleak it was, and I mentioned that Night certainly wanted it to feel optimistic in its finale. Toasty pointed out rightly that its a film that leaves so much trauma in its wake, it really can't be optimistic. I don't have a religious background so I'm not really well trained into seeing  undertones (hell, sometimes the overtones escape me) of that sort, but the book leans heavily into the "What kind of God would do any of this?" question, and the end result of the book seems much more truthful and differently bleaker than what happens here.  I honestly can't say what Night's approach to whatever religious angle he's playing with here. Given the events of the story, no matter the outcome, God doesn't come out looking very good.

Bautista, though, comes out looking fantastic, the real highlight of the picture. He's obviously physically imposing, but he can play soft-spoken, kind and tortured very well, and the juxtaposition of the two is phenomenal.  All Night's close-up shots of Bautista's massive head, the way his glasses just kind of pinch his face rather than rest on his ears and nose...there's an undeniable power to it, a great marriage of performance and production. It's said Bautista wants to be known for his versatility as an actor, and he is definitely showing it. It would have been very easy for him to just become the next direct-to-video muscle-bound action star, but he's got so much more ambition than that. I think he's achieving it.

I'm not fully back on board with Shyamalan, but I'm willing to dabble a little more again.

BUT IS IT HORROR?
For some, I'm sure it is, but it strangely shies away from the character deaths (mass deaths aplenty are shown on the news programmes).

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Knock at the Cabin

2023, M Night Shyamalan (Old) -- cinema

Wen (Kristen Cui, premiere) is vacationing in the woods with her two Dads, Eric (Jonathan Groff, The Matrix Resurrections) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge, Lucky Man). While Wen is out catching, and naming, grasshoppers, she is approached by the friendly, calm but incredibly physically imposing Leonard (Dave Bautista, Blade Runner 2049). Initially calming her down, once his friends show up, Wen rightfully gets scared of the stranger and runs back to the cabin, convincing her dads to lock the doors, close the windows and barricade themselves inside. But its a cabin with glass doors, and the four strangers, each armed with weird, arcane weapons force their way inside to restrain Eric and Andrew. Leonard then explains that the world is about to end, and unless one of the three is chosen by their other family members to perish, all the world will end, in biblical style plagues & disasters.  

The premise is rather straight forward. Either these four strangers are sharing a delusion, as Andrew suggests, angrily and desperately, or the world is about to end, and a terrible choice has to be made. Amusingly enough, its the same choice that has to be in A Cabin in the Woods, but they decide to go with, "Fuck the world, let it burn." Not amusing at all is how utterly dedicated this family is to each other. With flash backs and recollections, we see the family's past, through challenging situations and perfect moments in time. All we know about the four strangers is what they are compelled to share about themselves, which is also desperate and sad. They claim to have each had visions that brought them together, and they are continually plagued by what they know will come, if the acts laid out before them, happen as described.

You are not meant to know which what it is going, one way or the other. Are they insane? Possibly. Are they telling the truth? Possibly. Is there compelling evidence that the world is going to end? Yes. Is it faked? Possibly. We are not meant to know, and Shyamalan does a great job of keeping us guessing, despite missing an opportunity to have the strangers themselves beginning questioning reality, we are not sure which way this will go, until the very end.

I really "enjoyed" how this movie played out. Love him or hate him, Shyamalan likes to take challenging, inexplicable situations and have them played out via haranguing performances. I hesitate to truthfully say I enjoyed myself, as it took my already 99.8% anxiety level (work shit) and ratcheted it up to 125%. Or maybe it just replaced one anxiety with another. Either way, it worked as it was supposed to. 

And this is where I spoil.

But at the end, I still was just left with a big, "So, what the fuck was the point of all that?" If it had turned out to be a big play on delusions, then it was just torture porn, which I dislike. But it was real, the world was ending, and therefore, what was the message?!?! Yes, a family's love for each other & sacrifice can save the world, but only if a fucking sadistic, psychotic higher being puts them into that situation. Why? What are they hoping to accomplish? Thousands, if not millions of being died, so a point could be made? Nobody will know what they did, unless they tell, which is unlikely. And if they did tell, the damage would be catastrophic. On one side, the truth behind a higher being would be provided, but with the understanding they are a wrathful god. That might create new, more powerful religions, but it also would have heretical outcomes that wouldn't work in their favour. So, again, what as the fucking point?

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Archive

2020, Gavin Rothery (visuals on a few things including Moon) -- download

There is a breed of movie I am rather fond of, one that starts with Shorts by visionary directors, that establishes, with us the viewer, their visual and emotional kit box. The best example is Neill Blomkamp, who blew us all away with his premiere District 9. He has a visual style that probably type-cast him (note: I am yet to see his horror movie Demonic but I should see it soon) but has kept me a fan, even as he returned to explore more ideas via animated & live action shorts (see Oats Studios). Everything in Archive smacks of someone with a bunch of visuals in his head, ideas and emotional constructs that need to be depicted. Unfortunately, a lot of these ideas are other people's already; homage - maybe - rip-off - more likely. Its a shame though, as there is something tangible there, but if the first real attempt is muddled in these choices, as well as a eye-rolling twist plot, I am not sure where it will go. 

George Almore (Theo James, The Time Traveller's Wife) is an AI/Robotics scientist assigned to a remote facility in Japan, a beautiful, bleak location in the mountains, perched on a gorge. The facility has seen better days, with most of the security offline, and things constantly breaking down. George has been working on the hallmark of all AI/Robotics movies -- the human like machine. His first two attempts are mild successes, one a clunking, walking box much like GNK-series (or gonk) droid from Star Wars, with the emotional & developmental level of a five year old. The other is a classic "person in a box-y robot suit" 16 year old, petulant, jealous and constantly challenging George like all teens do. The last, the one the company doesn't know about, is a perfect looking human torso. He's not finished yet and the company is pressuring him for results, but we get the idea he is not telling them what is going on, nor what his own personal end goal is.

Wrapped up in that is the death of his wife Jules (Stacy Martin, The Serpent), and a technology called Archive that keeps her mind alive, and able to communicate with him, for a short period of time. George's ulterior motive is that he is using the Archive technology to feed his AI technology, stealing their IP to further the intelligence, and yes, using his late wife's archived mind as the template. His end goal is to resurrect her. And he succeeds, or so we think. The twist ending is so fucking annoying, I am going to hand-wave it all away, even though it was somewhat broadcast, almost as if they re-edited Rothery's movie because he couldn't come up with a decent ending. When in doubt, twist ending!

I liked the look of this movie, but primarily because it looked like other movies I liked. The mild bits, like the monolithic Archive unit smacking of 2001 and hinting at how this technology will change mankind, is cute and somewhat eye-rolling. But the blatant ripping off of The Ghost in the Shell both anime and live action, during his "the human-like robot is complete" sequence was annoying enough that I wanted to just throw something at the screen. Amusingly enough, with the twist ending in place, its more acceptable. OK ok, the twist is that nothing of this is real, its all in George's head. He died in the car crash, and he is in the Archive, not his wife. The whole movie is just his brain filling in the gaps between chatting with his wife and finally dying. So, the idea his "sleeping" brain rips off a Japanese AI story is ... amusing? But no, dude, find your own metaphorical visuals.

In the end, there is a little play on the themes I was hoping more for. George does not create machines as just machines, he sees them as emotional beings, and while he treats them as badly as any human might treat another human, he does care for them. But he also uses them to his own ends. The final act has him sacrificing his opus creation to resurrect his wife, which is a very human, callous act, tossed aside for a farcical twist. But I wished they had doubled-down on his choices, and explored the impact of them to his own life, and that of his (simulated) wife.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Plane

2023, Jean-François Richet (Assault on Precinct 13) -- download

Big Dumb Action movies succeed when they have heart, when they give the viewers something or someone to latch onto beyond the bang bang, quip quip. Totally unexpectedly, in a movie that didn't even bother trying to come up with a proper title, Plane has a whole lot of heart. But yeah, its still a pretty dumb movie.

Brodie Torrance (Gerard Butler, Greenland) is a pilot doing the redeye out of Singapore on New Year's Eve, playing the time zones, to meet his daughter in Hawaii for the last night of the year. There aren't a lot of passengers, but he gets saddled with a prisoner delivery. They are told not to avoid the bad weather, as it will use up valuable fuel, and of course, end up in a very very bad electrical storm. One zap later, all the instrumentation is fried; they are flying blind. Just when all hope seems lost, an island appears on the horizon and Brodie is able to make a perfect landing on a dirt road surrounded by jungle. Already the hero, but unable to report where they landed, Brodie heads into the jungle to find a building he saw from the air. His co-pilot has cautioned him these islands were home to Indonesian separatists and criminals. And he is right. From exciting plane landings to gun fights with Bad Guys, the movie never wastes time on keeping people in danger. Meanwhile, back in the US a Fixer (Tony Goldwyn, Lovecraft Country) has been brought in to help find the plane and manage the event, surprisingly playing a competent, sympathetic character actually invested in finding Brodie and his passengers.

The heart bit? Brodie is the tenacious, growling hero that Butler loves to play, but they do it an  unannounced way -- he just has to protect his passengers. He is assisted by the prisoner (Mike Colter, Luke Cage), a man who was on the run from a murder rap, who spent time with the French Foreign Legion. Together they go against the ruthless separatists, who want to ransom the passengers, but who are not above murdering a few to make their points. Eventually they are assisted by a merc crew sent in by the fixer, and just when things cannot get rah rah, bang bang heroic enough, Brodie has to fly them back out on a one engine and a half-tank, to a nearby airstrip on a protected island. As he takes a moment to breathe in what he, and his passengers have just been through, he collapses inward, emotion spilling forth. He was not a stalwart warrior who revels in just killing a bunch of people, just a man who did what he had to do.

Back when I was That Guy, I hated these kind of movies. They were just so unfettered from anything but the moment. The 80s and 90s were full of these on VHS, and despite First Blood being the role model for them, it being a little more heartfelt than its brethren, almost all were dumb, dumb, dumb. I wanted something a little smarter, something I could sink my teeth into. But these days, I more so need distraction. My mind is always racing, always being drawn back to  the stressors of my day, week or year. Concentration is hard, so the challenging movies I loved in my heyday are not accessible. And yet, I still need something to latch onto. Sometimes, just a little heart in all the bang, bang is enough.

Side Note: I might end up calling these movies "one poster flicks" as I usually get my poster choices from IMP Awards, where you are offered a plentitude of choices. But these movies usually only have the one. 

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

2022, Ryan Coogler (Creed) -- Disney+ 

Just watched it, and in that disarray of thoughts stage. Phase Four of the MCU is a weird one, but not to be unexpected, as its all coming "out" of The Pause (we truly aren't out, but we are all in that big pretending mindset, like we are Back to Normal, which we aren't), which meant that most of this material was / is being produced during the height of it all. Much of the material for cinematic release seems like pushes to remind the public that the MCU is still around. Nothing is ground breaking, most is sequel-ish, and very little feels... fully invested. Its like they have intellectual property that they have to do something with, or they would lose it. The TV stuff has been more successful, from a creative standpoint, than the cinematic releases, which all feels like... filler... to me.

Now to this movie specifically, they were already crippled by the tragedy that was Chadwick Boseman's unexpected death. Unexpected by us, the public, but I am sure he and the Marvel team knew for a very very long time. Cancer is not a villain that even the Avengers can always defeat. How could they go on? How could they do a "sequel" if their main character actor is gone? Replace him? No, too disrespectful, but in Marvel comic tradition, you can just have someone assume the mantle. This entire movie could have been about that, been a small movie about tragedy and legacy and grief, but instead... they went typically bombastic, BIG ! Unnecessarily big ?

The movie does some nice MCU filler work. A year after Shuri (Letitia Wright, Black Mirror) fails to save her brother T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman, Gods of Egypt) from illness (cancer? purple flower withdrawal?) Wakanda is a now known world power, and still the only country with a source of vibranium, and that pisses off other governments. They aren't handling it well, and make mistakes, assuming T'Challa's death would destabilize Wakanda. They are wrong.

But one of the other countries actions awakens a previously unknown world power -- Atlantis. OK OK, I know the MCU wants to have the underwater kingdom establish its own identity, wrapped up in meso-American mythos, calling it Talokan and calling him K'uk'kulkan (each syllable strongly pronounced) and making it all a rather recently built nation, but I call a merman a merman, and an underwater kingdom, Atlantis. At least his personal name is Namor and he has little feet wings! Tee hee! Anywayz, they have their own source of vibranium, and when the US encroaches on their territory, they strike back harshly. Oh well, at least Lake Bell (Surface) got a bit part.

But Talokan also mixes Wakanda into their actions, basically extorting allyship through threats of attack. Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett, Strange Days) does not respond well to extortion. Shuri, still suffering her grief stricken guilt at not saving her brother, needs distraction and takes actions against Talokan, which essentially leads to her being kidnapped by their Asgardian power level blue skinned warriors, where she (and we) learns their somewhat sympathetic 400 year old history.  And infuriates Ramonda into response.

Meanwhile, the US represented by Agent Ross (Martin Freeman, Cargo), has no fucking clue what is going on and wants to blame Wakanda for all these nasty superpowered hijinx, likely just an excuse to take action to secure vibranium. Cross-over character Director de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep), seen before in a few Marvel TV shows, a secretive, deceptive CIA Director and Ross's ex-wife, continues to manipulate things, hinting through a megaphone how critical she will be in Phase Five. But the US, and the rest of the world, are incidental to this movie.

Ramonda's actions to get back her daughter enrage Namor (Tenoch Huerta, Tigers Are Not Afraid) and he attacks Wakanda with his whales and his water bombs. Beyond being physically more powerful than Wakandan humans, I don't understand why they are considered so undefeatable. If Wakanda was supposed to be such a world power as to make the US quake in its Avenger ** boots, surely they can defend themselves against a few hundred fish folk. I mean, Wakanda fought against the alien armies of Thanos. But it takes Shuri's genius and a bit of subterfuge to bring Namor down, forcing him to yield. And with this humbling, comes understanding.

** The last few movies have had me wondering, "But why haven't the Avengers taken part in any of these world changing actions?" And then I remember: Captain America OG is gone and his new one is learning the ropes, Iron Man and Black Widow are dead, Thor is off dealing with the destruction of his world and people, Spider-Man is dealing with his own messes, Wanda is a villain, Hawkeye is dealing with PTSD and basically retired, and Hulk is ... well, back to being a scientist? Not a lot of Avenger-ish superheroes to help deal with the world. And SHIELD remains disbanded, I guess?

Like Kent mentioned, this movie took its time for Shuri to be the new Black Panther, with a small subplot of her recreating the Purple Flower which Killmonger had destroyed, so as to properly juice up and don the suit. But it never feels truly invested in that mantle, never fully focused on the idea. The Wakandan idea is that the Black Panther leads the people, so King and Protector? But I truly believed the country would have been served better with Ramonda as Queen, Shuri as Chief Thinker, and Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o, Little Monsters) wearing the Black Panther armour, instead of her weird, blue, almost The Shape of Water fish-suit, armour.

In the end, we get an exciting, adventurous movie with great CGI spectacles (albeit, more than a bit of rubber balling) and massive set pieces. But the story itself is lacking and the execution is piece meal at the best. Too much is trying to happen, with not really much of anything really happening.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): No Sudden Move

2021, Steve Soderbergh (Kimi) -- download

While I didn't really take any proper hiatus, as I intended, there are a few flicks I have watched, or rewatched, since working at Cleaning Out the Cupboards, which included finishing some really old, half-done posts, that I won't be writing about. Maybe less hiatus, and more "finishing draft posts" ?

Anywayz, in returning to / resuming (watching and) posting, I have a ton of To Be Watched. In fact, I have an entire Draft Post which contains 10 years of movies I intended on watching, but never did. I also have those massive "add to my list" that are in every streaming services. And I have movies I have downloaded, and sit unwatched. Strange that I can remember, from the That Guy days, when I had seen every movie present in the cinema, and every movie I intended on seeing from the Video Store Shelves. That all said, this was from the "downloads" bucket.

Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle, Volcano), fresh out of prison, needs cash and accepts a babysitting job from mobster Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser, Journey to the Centre of the Earth), to work along side Rene Ronald Russo (Benicio Del Toro, Snatch) and Charley (Kieran Kulkin, Scott Pilgrim vs The World). Business man Matt Wertz (David Harbour, Black Widow) is to pull something out of his boss's safe, while the three gunmen watch his family, all wearing wonky eye-masks, making them look like The Beagle Boys. But this is a Soderbergh movie, so there is a LOT more going on, a whole lot more.

Of course, the job doesn't go as planned, and Goynes figures out they are being setup, which leads him to working out his own caper with Russo and Wertz. The whole thing centres around a mcguffin, the paperwork that was supposed to be in the safe, paperwork representing the designs for the catalytic engine, and a little Googling will tell you, this is the time when the Big Four (GM, Ford, Chrysler, American Motors) were going to be indicted under an anti-trust investigation, accused of purposely delaying "anti-smog" technology. The caper represented Studebaker-Packard trying to get the plans for the catalytic converter, assuming to be ahead of the game. Goynes works it out, to get the paperwork and sell it to the original buyer's contact Mike Owen (Matt Damon, The Great Wall), while also dealing with the bad business that sent him to jail in the first place, and has put him at odds with a lot of the gangsters in Detroit.

As is typical in neo-noir, the whole plot is convoluted, has lots of players moving about the board, and in typical Soderbergh style, has a turnabout at the end. In watching this all play out, I realized that Goynes, like many of Soderbergh's thugs in other movies, is a very smart guy. I like to think of myself having a decent brain, but I would never be able to see how things are lining up, and put a whole bunch of details and double-turns together in order to find a favourable outcome. In other words, I would make a terrible criminal, and I could never write plausible crime fiction. But it does make for satisfying caper flicks, and while very little of this movie tells you it is being a caper, more just criminals reacting to circumstances, its enjoyable once you see the players have played the game. And again, like in all Soderbergh flicks, there are little details he puts in that I really enjoy, such as the fact that Goynes is seeing walking everywhere, being fresh out of prison, having no cash, and not a lot of friends that would drive him around, but also affording us the fades from opulence to decrepitude, that the already gentrifying Detroit is going through, before it all fell down entirely.

Kent's post.

Paul T. Goldman

6 episodes. 2023, d. Jason Woliner (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm...) - CityTV/Peacock

Paul T. Goldman is a true crime documentary about a man who uncovers that his wife might be part of an international sex trafficking ring.

Paul T. Goldman is a biography of Paul T. Goldman, the man who believes that his wife is part of an international sex trafficking ring and then wrote a book about it. And then a screenplay.

Paul T. Goldman is that screenplay about a man who discovers that his wife is part of an international sex trafficking ring and then becomes a secret agent trying to bring it down.

Paul T. Goldman is the making-of of the film of the screenplay based on the book about the man who believes that his wife is part of an international sex trafficking organization.

Paul T. Goldman is a very intimate examination of one "Paul T. Goldman", the pen name of Paul Finkleman who married a woman who manipulated him, tried to steal his money and property, and in the proceedings of getting divorced, uncovered secrets about her. In his investigation of those secrets he started coming to the conclusion that his soon-to-be ex-wife was a local madam and also involved in a larger, international sex trafficking ring. His deep dive into his wife, her lover, her ex-husband and the people she was involved with led to meetings with the FBI, all of which sparked in Paul Finkleman the idea to dramatize his life story into a semi-autobiographical (but mostly fictional) espionage thriller Duplicity, under a new, cooler pseudonym. 

In promoting his book, Paul started expanding on the adventures of Mr. Goldman into new novels, and ultimately a screenplay.  Once the screenplay was written, active twitter user Paul Finkleman, under his Goldman pseudonym, started @ing anyone and everyone he could with any Hollywood association.  This included Human Giant, Thunderheart and Parks and Recreation director, Jason Woliner, who, unlike most, was intrigued by this man.  Woliner did his research, filing through the "Goldman" twitter account and youtube pages.  He read Duplicity,  and reached out in 2012, clearly intrigued by Paul Finkleman/Goldman.  This six-episode series from Peacock is the result of a decade-long partnership between Paul and Woliner attempting to get something made, after a few false starts.  What results is a baffling and fascinating character study that recalls stories of complicated oddballs like American Movie or American Splendor (the latter especially with its masterful blurring the lines between fiction and reality).

Finkleman/Goldman is best described as a cross between Pee Wee Herman and Buster Bluth (from Arrested Development). He's an adult, brimming with relentless positivity, mostly because it seems he doesn't understand the way the world works enough for it to bring him down. He smiles so hard and so often that, in portraying the cinematic "Paul T. Goldman", director Woliner needs to cut and constantly tell him to stop smiling.  

But Paul's biggest trait is he's naive, and he approaches the world honestly (even in attempting deceit, he's shockingly honest) and expects the world to be honest back with him, so he's remarkably susceptible to lies and manipulation. And as we learn over the course of Paul T. Goldman's six episode, he is lied to and manipulated often. 

His naivete is also painfully embarrassing to witness in action, as he talks up being a crusader against sex trafficking, but his only experience with sex trafficking is this situation he's found himself in, and the validity of the situation is constantly called into question. I mean, it's fishy, for sure....  Paul puts himself out there for anti-sex-trafficking speaking gigs where he recounts his story which always starts with him looking for love with mail-order Russian brides. One audience member (in a speaking engagement set-up for by the show, and paid for an audience to attend) questions Paul "Isn't mail-order brides a form of sex trafficking?"

The show uses editing to pointedly highlight Paul's love for telling his story. He basically tells it to everyone he meets. An early sequence shows Paul jumping through his recounting, practically verbatim, between multiple people. When he's acting, shooting his own script, he puts himself up against other professional actors with no hesitation, and delights in every moment. But as soon as the cameras stop rolling, he launches into the "behind-the-music" details of the scene they were working on, as it comes from true life.  The patience that the actors, including veteran character actors like Melinda McGraw, Dennis Haysbert, James Remar, Dee Wallace, Frank Grillo, and Rosanna Arquette.

Paul is an awkward, friendly, honest, cheerful and outgoing guy. He should be likeable, but he's not exactly. You kind of want to smack him for being so honest, so trusting, and yet these are not qualities we should damn. You also kind of want to dislike him for his incessant self promotion and even some of the ridiculous extremes he's gone to in his life, but it's also very hard to dislike him. At the root of the entire story, the heart of it all, is a lonely man looking for love. The final episode Woliner loops back in with Paul's father, and the statements Paul makes about the love he feels his father has withheld from him. It's the point Woliner puts on it (but not too fine a point, he's not hammering us over the head with it), and paralleling it with the heaps of (perhaps too much) love Paul has doled out to his own son.

The journey of Paul T. Goldman includes interview footage from 10 years ago, the casting process for the filming of the screenplay, the recording of the Duplicity audiobook, talking heads with members of the cast and people in Paul's life, and a lot of candid moments with Paul himself (Woliner tries to hide from the camera as much as possible, but cannot escape it at times). It's a surprising wild adventure.

I Saw This!! Cleaning House

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  Which is weird, considering I need to clean house, so I can have a brief hiatus, so I can just watch, and not with the intent, I have to write about it.

Also, I have Cleaned the Slate, and Cleaned out the Cupboards, but have I ever Cleaned House?

The other weird thing is that I gathered these all into a I Saw This!! post as it is usually used to write short bits about a bunch of stuff I am forgetting. But I wrote enough for each, to warrant their each own original post. Why? Who knows. But as you know, this blog, for me, is as much writing about writing the blog as it is about the movies, TV and other pop culture sources we watch to feed the blog. Just not after midnight.

See How They Run, 2022, Tom George (This Country) -- Disney+

Loved the trailers, chuckled out loud at a few quips and pratfallish jokes, was expecting a movie full of fun, whit, those kind of movies that I am waxing nostalgic on these days, the kind rented from Video Stores on Friday night for the entire family to watch. I guess I got much of that, but not a whole lot of the humour hit home for me. More puns were needed, I guess.

The elevator pitch for this movie must have been fun. It's a WhoDunnit based around one of the most famouse (wow, Freudian 'e') WhoDunnits, "The Mouse Trap". For those who don't know, this famous play has been running in London's west end, from 1952 until The Pause ... paused it. The movie has a murder take place during the celebrations of its 100th performance. That brings in Inspector Stoppard (I assume he's a Tom; Sam Rockwell, Moon) and the incredibly eager fledgling Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan, Hanna; ten bonus points for spelling her first name correctly the first time!). The humour comes from the interactions between the two police folk, and a few of suspects, especially once every one starts comparing the act of investigating a murder against the tropes and trappings of the WhoDunnit they are all so intimate with.

Unfortunately, "not cheeky enough" is also my determination, to quote Kent's post. I just wished that every joke fell as charmingly and disarmingly as Stalker's observation, "It's all downhill from there," after describing the victim being hit in the face with a ski. You see, the character cannot help herself from jumping to conclusions (the running gag which mostly loses steam) but also quipping about every thing. To be honest, more quips! That said, the underlying stories (Stalker trying to break through the glass ceiling, Stoppard's familial woes) are interesting, but just not interesting... enough.

Troll, 2022, Roar Uthaug (The Wave) -- Netflix

OMG I loved this, but more for the campy, tongue firmly in cheek manner in which he chose to direct the movie, than the actual plot. You see, its a rather intentional by-the-numbers plot but its the Michael Bay Norway Method he chose to execute the movie that makes it so much fun. Oh, and the fact that we get to see a troll kaiju stomping through Oslo.

That said, I cannot help but compare it to the earlier flick with pretty much the same premise, Troll Hunter, in that real life & giant trolls make themselves known to the world. In much the way most kaiju movies begin, circumstances awaken a troll, in shadowy and unclear visuals, which forces The Government (of Norway) to reach out to a panel of experts, including paleontologist Nora Tidemann, whose father is a disgraced scientist who was convinced trolls were real. Not sure why a paleontologist is of use to this investigation, but of course, she's the only one to notice the big arm in the blurry protestor footage (they were digging a tunnel through protected mountains) so they bring her along when they follow the path of destruction and big ol footprints. 

Its on its way to Oslo! Call in military! Find a way to defeat it! Smashy smashy helicopters who get closer than they should! All the familiar kaiju fight maneuvers and failures are dragged out, as the big thing galumphs his way towards the city, which they, of course, are able to miraculously empty out before the big guy stomps his way through. There is a back story as to why he is on his way to Oslo, and a redemptive arc for her father, who was right all along. And some tragedy. And lots of Baysplosions. 

Uthaug has a LOT of fun.

Bullet Train, 2022, David Leitch (Dead Pool 2) -- download/Amazon

Speaking of having a lot of fun, Brad Pitt (Fury) tries his hand at being John Wick, but without all  the angst and dead puppies, but with all the violent, colourful characters and massive body count.

Pitt is Ladybug, another aging, angsty hitman attempting to hang his guns up. His handler tasks him with retrieving a mcguffin from a bullet train leaving Tokyo, which ends up full of other colourfully named assassins, and yakuza thugs, in a plot/conspiracy all tied together in a confusing, often frustrating knot. This is Leith wanting to do what Tarantino has done in the past, albeit with even more glitz and confetti, but more often just leaves us as confused as Ladybug spends most the movie.

To be honest, despite the morass of badly convoluted plot points, which leave me not even attempting to recap, the movie is a whole lot of fun. Well, fun scene by scene. Veteran Pitt is able to carry the movie along, ever convincing as a reluctant killer on a streak of incredibly bad luck, and even worse luck which he transfers to others around him, which... well, strangely benefits him. But yeah, all colour and action and reserved quipping. But it does not succeed in what it is attempting to be, which is to become a new cultural phenom generating sequels, which considering the Japanese novel source material, is readily available.