KWIF: Superman (+2)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film.

This Week:
Superman (2025, d. James Gunn - in theatre)
Raising Arizona (1987, d. Ethan and Joel Cohen - hollywoodsuite)
The Awful Truth (1937, d. Leo McCarey - hollywoodsuite) 

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Superman is exactly the type of comic book movie I dreamed about all through the 1980s and 1990s, one that just drops you in the middle of an active superhero universe, assumes you already have a basic foundation on who these characters are, and goes from there. And boy does Superman go.

It's a lively, adventuresome, superheroic comic book of a movie, and yet I didn't leave completely satisfied. My whole family came out buzzing, having really, really enjoyed the film quite thoroughly, but I couldn't exactly match their energy. I wanted to love James Gunn's Superman, but I don't. I like it quite a bit but there's something holding me back.

This is, without a doubt, my favourite Superman movie, but then I never really cared for any of the others despite being a lifelong Superman fan (the familial surname in common kind of made it mandatory). David Corenswet is a great Superman, doing all the things I wish we'd been able to see Christopher Reeves or Henry Cavill do, both action wise and in a legit superhero universe. Corenswet's Clark is almost indistinguishable from his Superman, which may be the point, or maybe it's that there's not much time for Clark Kent in this film. This is the pure-hearted, people-first, happy-to-help Superman I grew up loving. There's no mopey Superman with a messiah complex here. Also, Gunn, in dodging past the character's origin story, minimizes the burden of Krypton, and, in fact, finds a jettison point so that it doesn't really ever have to be dealt with in this new DC cinematic universe again (despite Bradley Cooper being cast as Jor-El in an unglorified cameo).

Rachel Brosnahan is an incredible Lois Lane, I fell in love with her instantly...and she doesn't get rescued by Superman once this film but still feels integral. Incredible. She's also not fixated on Superman, not in the slightest. She's likes the lug but the world's too be a place to keep Lois' attention in one spot.

Nicholas Hoult's Lex Luthor is an evil slimy supergenius billionaire. We don't have any of those in real life (most of our evil slimy billionaires aren't geniuses) so Hoult is drawing from something other than just the real world. Plus his motivation this time is envy, jealousy, and pure hate (there's still a land scheme of sorts on top of everything though, as is tradition).

I could fill another dozen paragraphs talking about the rest of the cast, including the Justice Gang (Edi Gathegi's Mr. Terrific lives up to the name, while I don't think there's been a more note perfect page-to-screen translation of a Superhero than Nathan Fillion's Guy Gardner [iykyk]), the Daily Planet crew, Luthor's henchpersons, Clark's family, the Superman Robots, and, of course, Krypto.

It is a very well-stocked movie. It has a very large assembly of characters, and it moves fast. I thought at first that, perhaps, Superman was overstuffed, that there's too much going on, with too many characters. But that's not true. I never had a hard time tracking what was happening or why or to whom, and I was never unclear on character motivations. No, what I was thinking was "overstuffed" was actually me just wishing for more time with these characters, more time with this story, and more time in this world.

This is compressed storytelling. In the comic book realm, it used to be you would pick up a single superhero comic book issue, you would get a complete story. The 1980's really started serializing comics like long running soap operas, and by the 2000s the industry had basically solidified the five-or-six issue storyarc as the norm which has sustained ever since. "Decompressed" storytelling they called it.

I want Superman to be decompressed. I want more time with Lois and Clark and how things weigh on their relationship. I want more Daily Planet bullpen banter. I want Lex to really stoke the flames of public outrage against Superman, I want Clark and Lois to have more time with Ma and Pa Kent, I want more time at the Hall of Justice...I just want more of all of this and I feel let down that I don't have it.... that I just have this highly entertaining 129 minute film that is at once a filling meal that still makes me want more.

I have to respect James Gunn's restraint in not seeding easter eggs all throughout the film despite having plenty of opportunity to do so (believe me, I was looking). He's put enough in here that he doesn't need to load this baked potato up with anything more. It really allows the viewer, especially the nerdy ones, just relax and enjoy what is on the screen, not what's hidden in the background.  This film, despite being part of a superhero universe, is self-contained. It's not setting up anything beyond the immediate story. 

Compared to other Superman films, the weakest point is the music. James Gunn is so used to constructing his movies around a soundtrack, and here he's opted for, mostly, an original score, but it just doesn't have the same delicious bite or synergy like the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy or Suicide Squad. It's not terrible but I did find the score drawing my attention away from the events on screen from time to time, and not for positive reasons.

In some ways, Superman feels very experimental. It isn't following the rules that its predecessor superhero movies have followed, and it places itself into a reality the one could call escapist. It's a film where a guy in a cape and underwear on the outside has superhero pals and an unruly dog in a cape. Hard to mistake that for the real world. 

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In my teenage years as a budding cinephile, I watched Raising Arizona and, quite specifically, did. not. get it. It was one of those films that came highly recommended and critically lauded that completely went over my head.

Coen Bros. films can be like that. I remember coming out of The Big Lebowski having had an absolutely miserable time, only to fall deeply in love with it upon repeat viewings. My second viewing of Raising Arizona, a decade later, didn't go any better than the first. I don't think I've ever done a Coen Bros. ranking, but if I did, it would have remained in the bottom of my Coen Bros. rankings since that first viewing. 

I'm a more wizened film viewer now, with quite the affinity for most of the Coens repertoire, so surely this latest viewing of Raising Arizona will yield the dividends I always expected. 

Which it did. But...

I still didn't like it. I understood it this time, but I don't think it works. I feels like the prototype for a Coen Bros. movie. The basic tone and sensibilities, the small-stakes crime, the comedy and sentimentality are all there, but they're just not hitting the rhythms the way they would in their later films. 

I liked Nic Cage's H.I., a compulsive robber of convenience stores (with an unloaded weapon) who just keeps rotating through the local prison's revolving door. During every turn of the door, he finds time with Holly Hunter's Ed, a police officer whose main duty seems to be mugshot photos and fingerprint stamping. They fall in love and get married. H.I. goes straight and gets a job and things are good, until they find out they can't have kids and H.I.'s criminal record keeps them from legally adopting. Ed gets depressed, quits her job, and the joys in their life diminish.  And then local furniture magnate Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson) has quintuplets and, according to one newspaper report, claims it's too much to handle. So Ed and H.I. get it into their mind to abduct one of the babies.

As a premise for a crime caper, the script does a fairly good job at showing us just how desperate Ed and H.I. are for a baby, and yet I still don't buy that anyone without a serious mental illness, would steal another person's child. The premise fundamentally doesn't work for me. It's a different story if they find the baby, become attached and fight through their guilt and jump through hurdles to try and keep it, but to proactively go out and steal a child is a big fucking ask that I just can't get behind.

There's a slapsticky sequence with H.I. in the quints' room trying not to make noise and negotiating all the babies as they quickly become too much for him to handle. This is still early in the Coens career (not far off from scripting the live-action cartoon that was Crimewave with Sam Raimi) so their comedic tone still owes a debt to Looney Tunes, something they wind up grounding a lot more in their later movies. It's so close to working here but can't quite grasp it, which is so much of the film for me.

Just as the new family unit is trying to cohere, H.I. and Ed are paid a visit by Gale (John Goodman) and Eville (William Forsythe), H.I.'s friends from prison who have just busted out and are on the lam. They start to ride H.I. about his straight-and-narrow ways, posing that tired-even-by-1980's-standards cliched question of "who wears the pants in the relationship". One thing leads to another and the film descends into a third act clusterfuck of people angling for the baby, including a bounty hunter H.I. envisions comes straight from hell (played, of course, by Randall "Tex" Cobb).

The third act, where everything falls apart in madcap fashion, should be a triumph, and there's glimmers of the Coen Bros. genius that's to come, but it doesn't all congeal. For instance, the fourth party, H.I.'s former boss, should really be in the baby-grabbing mix during this final act. But Goodman and Forsythe's part in it all is so good, I wish we had been following their characters all along instead.

The film's resolution is poppycock. It's the correct emotional payoff, and the Coens do their damnedest to get away from the Hollywood happy ending, but the scenario, just like at the start, finishes with a suspension of disbelief I can't buy into.

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I often think of films from the 1930s and 40s as being primitive, of their time, puritanical, having little to offer in a modern context. And so I tend to avoid them, even though my experience with films from the era have proven that, hey, adults made some of these things, smart adults with skill and talent and vision. Just because they were beholden to certain standards of "social decency" doesn't mean they can't be entertaining, insightful or artistic. I think I continue to avoid golden age of Hollywood movies because I really don't want to have to wade through the dreck, the studio films that were churned out as the "content" of the era. I need to basically trust the consensus on what the good ones of the era are, but I naturally distrust the consensus. It's a burden.

After watching The Awful Truth, I feel a much stronger desire to watch more screwball comedies of the era, particularly those starring Carey Grant. If you've seen a Carey Grant comedy, you know why. The man is a gifted comedic performer with wonderfully understated physical gestures and facial muggings that can accentuate an already delightful script (and no doubt save a film with a less than punchy one).

The premise here finds Jerry Warriner (Grant) coming home from a trip away to an empty house, only to have guests arrive with no hostess. When Lucy (Irene Dunne) finally shows up, she's escorted by a swarthy Frenchman who proclaims to be her voice coach. They were waylaid overnight by car issues. The suspicion is immediate, Jerry doesn't trust a word his wife or this Frenchman say, but it's probably because he knows he's been lying himself, having told his wife he went to Florida but brought home a basket of California oranges. The distrust in the marriage going both ways leads to a big blow-up and divorce court (with custody of their beloved mutt Mr. Smith a heated part of the battle).

They have to have a 60 day trial separation before the divorce is finalized. Lucy moves in with her aunt who introduced her to the neighbour, an Oklahoma oilman named Dan with a slow drawl and dim sense of humour. Dan falls in love with Lucy instantly, and Lucy mainly plays along knowing it will drive Jerry crazy, which it does, but Jerry's sabotage leads Lucy to realize she still loves him and the short engagement is called off, but Jerry is likewise moving on.

A short time later, Jerry is seen with a debutante and Lucy is envious. With only days to go before their divorce is final, Lucy insinuates herself in Jerry's life, and interferes in his budding relationship by posing as his sister.

Things explode, they reset, they explode again, and eventually after a few of these cycles, there's the expected resolution of Jerry and Lucy rekindling their partnership, and it's a pretty delightful ride, if a wonky and lopsided one.

To start, Lucy's suspected infidelity is paid a disproportionate amount of attention compared to Jerry's, which is brought up in the opening moments of the film, and really, never again. The first act of the film introduces the couple, breaks them up and establishes their not-so-bitter trial bitter divorce. The second act is all about Lucy's relationship with Dan, Jerry's interference, and bringing back the French vocal coach (to an incredibly funny denouement). The third act then has to wrestle with Jerry's new love interest, Lucy getting in the way and then contriving a scenario that will pull Lucy and Jerry together again.

It's this final act that needs more breathing room and doesn't fully work. Lucy's "drunk sister" routine is incredible (Dunne is every bit as gifted as Grant is comedically, and maybe even more) but following that sequence, it's a pretty contrived situation that leads to some unusually quiet romantic tension and just the itsiest bit of bedroom smouldering that calls for some sexiness from the leads but (given the times) isn't allowed to get there.

By and large, though, The Awful Truth is a romp, a bustling good time with a scene-stealing dog and hilarious dialgoue and delightful characters. I do need to see more of these from the era.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Wrath of Becky

2023,  Matt Angel, Suzanne Coote (The Open House) -- Netflix

This sequel to Becky is expecting a third, a conclusion to the trilogy, as we will finally get to find out what that fucking neo-nazi white supremacist key was all about. But unless someone with some indie movie money to burn makes it, I doubt we will see said conclusion. Like its predecessor, this is a very small budget, almost bottle-episode movie, a "small" movie as I am wont to say. Maybe even more so than the first.

Now 16, Becky (Lulu Wilson, The Haunting of Hill House) is not adjusting well to the foster system and finds herself on the road, with Diego, working a shitty diner while living with a nice old lady named Elena, who respects Becky's boundaries. Three "Noble Men", or white supremacist men's rights incel shitbags as I like to call them, eat at her diner, are typically misogynist towards her, and she responds in kind -- she dumps a hot coffee into the lap of one. Afterwards they follow her home, beat Becky & Diego unconscious and kill Elena. Fucking harsh opening act, but that is the point of these movies. Dads and dog were killed in the first one, her only trusted adult is killed in this one, which incurs the wrath.

Much of this movie, beyond the expected brutal violence, is the mockery of white supremacy and fragile male ego movements. The movie continuously reminds us how these men, even the capable ones, are all making up for inadequacies of one kind or another. In today's climate, where these kinds of men are being validated left, right and centre (puns intended), it is nice to see a movie unabashed in its opinions of that group. Even the "sympathetic antagonist" is a shitbag.

As for the violence, Becky is growing up. She was an avatar for teens "acting out their anger" in the first movie, but this one is more about her coming into her own as an unrepentant killer. That has its own commentary attached to it, and she is no longer the "the trauma caused her to do it" little kid; she's exchanging her childhood knitted fox stocking cap for a geared-up slayer outfit. And then the movie just jumps its own shark by .... well, having her recruited by the CIA. Well, if John Wick can start with a movie about an ex-assassin becoming a mythical agent in a alt-world-wide society, then why not Becky.

1-1-1: The Bear Season 4

 Season 3 | 2 | 1
created by Christopher Storer

The What 100: The Tribune review is in, and it neither made The Bear, nor broke it, but left it to fend for itself. Uncles Jimmy and Computer put a countdown clock in the kitchen for when the money runs out which hangs over everyone's head (even though it's on the counter).  Carmy realizes that he is his own worst enemy and that his past trauma and trauma avoidance has maybe been sabotaging not just the restaurant but his own life. Sidney wrestles with her decision to stay or go. Ritchie's anxiety reaches its spillover point as his ex's wedding approaches. Tina struggles with insecurity in the kitchen, Ebraheim gets a mentor, while Marcus levels up and also avoids his dad. You could almost forget Sugar had a baby.

(1 Great) Episode 9: "Tonnato". Ever since Season 2's "Fishes" Donna "DD" Berzatto (Jamie Lee Curtis) has been the livest wire in a show of livewires. She supercharged with electricity and she flails around ready to strike, and you're never sure what kind of shock she's going to deliver. In season 3 it was DD showing up for Sugar at the hospital, being a real mom, and helping her daughter through a difficult time with almost no selfishness at all. In Season 4, DD is in a better place. We see that she's helping Uncle Jimmy sell his home, we hear from "Uncle" Lee that she's going to therapy and she's quit drinking, we see her take herself out of an equation as much because she can't handle it as she knows others can't handle her presence. In Episode 9, Carm is encouraged by Sugar and Sid (and even Claire) to personally bring her the photo albums she wants, and he reluctantly does. When she asks him to stay, he does, and she takes him through some old photos, giving him new perspective on his family. Then DD reads Carm a letter that is full of her regrets, acknowledgement of the pain she caused, awareness of her destructive behaviour, awareness of the distance she has put between her and her children, and honesty about how gutted she still is by Mikey's passing. The show started around Carm coming back to Chicago because of Mikey's suicide, and in season 2 and 3 it was maybe just a spectre that hovered over the show, but this season deals with it head on, as Carm deals with it head on, which gives us even more perspective that he wasn't the only one to lose somebody. The bridge Carm forgets with DD here is very powerful, and Jamie Lee Curtis is for sure getting her second Outstanding Guest Actress Emmy for this, as she did for "Fishes". She absolutely destroys this scene reading her note to Carm, and Jeremy Allen White's reaction is equally powerful (no surprises if he gets an Emmy win either). 

(1 Good) Episode 7: "Bears". It's Tiff's wedding, the day Ritchie has been dreading for months. Ritchie still seems to be best friends with Tiff, and he wants to hate Frank (Josh Hartnett) but he is really such a good guy. Ritchie and Frank have to come together to help Eva, Ritchie's daughter, as she's hiding under a table and won't come out. Meanwhile Carm shows up and verges on a panic attack but has his entire life put into new perspective by, of all people "Uncle" Lee, who he vehemently dislikes. Sid (as Ritchie's plus one) meets Donna for the first time, and it's totally awkward, but in a nice way. The Fak's sister, Francie (Brie Larson) turns up and immediately gets into it with Sugar, as they had a falling out years ago, and have not seen each other since. There's other little moments between characters, and the set-up is that every one of them is entering the wedding like a grenade with the pin missing. The explosions can go off at any time. Thinking back to Season 2's "Fishes" in terms of family gatherings, it's like we know what to expect. And yet, for everyone here, for all the anxiety they're carrying, they're in a different place now, looking for a different path, more receptive to dialogue, to listening, and the fireworks never really explode. Much still is left unsaid, but everyone winds up under that table with Eva, Ritchie and Frank, expressing their greatest fear to help Eva get over hers. It's the season in a nutshell, changing behaviours, trying to be a better, more supportive person, because these people are family, some blood, some found, but they mean something to each other, and any barriers getting in the way are not insurmountable.

(1 Bad) There is nothing outright bad about season 4. It's not the perfection that was season 2 but it's a lot more propulsive and impactful than season 3, with so much more meaningful growth and interactions. The weakest part is Tina's story and Lisa Colon-Zayas' involvement in the season, which was pretty minimal compared to the past. Tina's entire story here consisted of her getting her pasta dish down to under 3 minutes. It would almost be a running gag if Colon-Zayas weren't so good at selling what the emotional stakes are for Tina, which continues the thread from previous seasons about wanting to feel like she has earned her spot in this kitchen and she belongs.  Marcus' story is similarly a bit under baked, as it's tantamount to him dodging his dad's phone calls and texts for 10 episodes, but they manage to incorporate L-Boy into this season much more and give him a few big wins as well as pair him up with a returning Luca (Will Poulter), a guest spot that makes me wonder if Poulter is going full cast next season. Nice to see Marcus' roommate Chester back as well. Definitely not bad is Ebraheim's sub-plot which finally gives that character more life and stake in the show (and the restaurant), after a season in which he all but disappeared. He has an incredible sub-plot with guest star Rob Reiner. For the most part the secondary cast is used well, so it's just a disappointment that Tina feels put on the sidelines.

META: I described Season 3 as its most assured, and yet also its weakest as it failed to resolve almost every storyline. Season 4, which picks up immediately as season 3 ends, might as well be season 3.5 as it wraps up pretty much every thread that was dangling, and picks up more that, by its end, also feels like they've come to very satisfying conclusions. 

The journey this season was so much more dynamic and more than any other season I felt pulled through it, rather than pushing myself through it. It's kind of the Ted Lasso effect of people gaining emotional intelligence and there being less drama, which doesn't mean less conflict, but rather more ability to work through it without plot contrivances or story cliches getting in the way. It's a season of evolution and where it leaves off is both beautifully ambiguous but also quite satiating. If the final episode, a remarkably well done bottle episode that pits our three leads in difficult conversation at the end of the clock's countdown, it's not that *everything* is resolved, but it ties up enough threads that it could act as a series finale should they wish it to. They don't, of course, as it's still an awards juggernaut, but it definitely would be a terrific finale.

And also, not for nothing, this season is kinda funny again.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Killers Anonymous

2019, Martin Owen (Twist) -- Amazon

This was a fascinating film, as a viewing experience. I gave it a thumbs-down on the "recommend" button in Amazon. And yet, I didn't dislike the experience enough to turn it off. I trudged through to the end, what there was of it. Rotten Tomatoes has it at a literal zero for Critic Reviews (all nine of them disliked it) and 18% for audience reviews. Letterboxd is a smattering of 1 and 1.5 stars. The review on the Roger Ebert site says the movie, "...is a bit like a Magic Eye painting: the more you scrutinize it, the less coherent it is.". By all weights and measures, this is a terrible movie. 

And yet I persevered.

Ugh, don't hit me for that one.

It begins, a man running a support group in LA gets a call and immediately heads to the UK, where he meets Jade (Jessica Alba, Sin City) in a pub. Jade looks like the terrible depiction of a super model dressed as a biker. And she has a story for the man, a not very well told Tarantino-ian anecdote that is supposed to explain why she screwed up a job, a job to kill an American Senator. She finishes the story, gets picked up by a trashy looking bar girl, who subsequently kills Jade with her own gun. End cameo.

We then cut to the main setup of the movie, a meeting of a group colourful characters in the basement of a church -- the meeting for "Killer's Anonymous", a rag tag group of psychopathic or at least sociopathic murderers who find solace together, and learn tools to keep their urges at bay. As one would expect of killers, none like the other very much.

The man (Gary Oldman, Slow Horses), the LA support group man, sits in a lawn chair nearby watching them enter the church, or emerge on its roof for a smoke break. The voyeur seems to flip from an alley way to a nearby rooftop, depending on which angle the movie wants him to have a vantage point from. Up, down, weird angle -- he never seems to actually move but... 

A lot of stylistic schtuff happens in this act. We get back stories for the killers, done in a spotlight and flashback motif where each character tells about their first kill and why they do what they do. Its weird because this is definitely not the first meeting, so wouldn't they have covered this all in previous meetings? Also, there is a general sense of distrust between them, which is understandable, because they are all killers after all, but added to that is a new member. No one knows who she is or how she learned of the group, but she appears to be normal. And American. Also, there is someone hiding in the vents observing them. And finally, for this act, one of the killers is the trashy bar girl who killed Jade, and the topic of Jade's failed assassination of an American Senator keeps on coming up, as it has the city (London) in a stir. A lot of "ooo, this is a cool plot" things going on.

In the basement are: MyAnna Buring (Ripper Street), Michael Socha (Being Human), Tim McInnerny (Notting Hill), Tommy Flanagan (Sons of Anarchy), and a few others. Too many.

Owen really wants to be doing a Tarantino movie, but its no longer 1998, so I am not sure that excuse is valid anymore. The movie is scatter brained, all over the place, not in tone or style, but it what it seems to want the plot to be directing you towards. I am not convinced they knew where the plot was headed and envisioned the creator, not some Purple Suit to be blamed this time, jumping up every ten minutes of shooting with a new "Ohhh, you know what would be cool? Say this !" In the end, we just have a convoluted mess with no satisfactory conclusion to anything. There are some middling decent performances (Jessica Alba's cameo is not one of them) from familiar face character actors just being the character actor they are, and the stylistic choices are at least visually pleasing, but.... it hurt my brain to pay attention. Good thing I had my phone nearby.

I am thinking that being annoyed at a movie is what you want these days, like so much else in your life....

KWIF: A Minecraft Movie (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week In Film.  I thought being away from home for the better part of a week with pretty much nothing but time on my hands would mean I would be watching a ton of films, but, turns out, not so much. In fact the first two films on the list below I watched before I left for my trip. But then, upon my retrun, I did a rare triple stint at the theatre in one day because I wasn't ready to return to the usual day-to-day yet.

This Week:
A Minecraft Movie (2025, d. Jared Hess - crave)
Warfare (2025, d. Ray Mendoza, Alex Garland - amazonprime)
The Phoenician Scheme (2025, Wes Anderson - in theatre)
The Life of Chuck (2025, Mike Flanagan - in theatre)
Daniela Forever (2024, Nacho Vigalondo - in theatre)
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I really had no intention of ever seeing A Minecraft Movie. Trailers made it look like a CGI nightmare with overblown performances, and the unofficial "rowdy" screenings of TikTok kids memeifying "S
TEVE!" and "CHICKEN JOCKEY!" certainly wasn't any further enticement.  But a funny thing happened on the way to avoiding the theatre... not only was A Minecraft Movie an absolute monster of a blockbuster motion picture, but some critics who I trust...well, by all that is squarely, they enjoyed it.

Both my kids (now a teen and an adult) played Minecraft and were avid fans. Neither wanted to see the movie.(because they're now a teen and an adult), which, really, wasn't all that surprising. Maybe it was a little disappointing as it's hard to find common ground and experiences with these ones these days. But as I do, I forged onward on my own and...waited for it to hit some streaming platform that I was already subscribed to and then proceed to watch the dang thing over 8 days in at least 4 different sittings.

The opening 20 minutes of A Minecraft Movie (well, once they get past the detail-stuffed intro, anyway), I genuinely adored. Jared Hess, creator of the wonky worlds of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre was at it again, creating a kooky near-reality that's just a notch or two askew from our own world. I liked the introduction to former video-game prodigy now nostalgia marketer Garrett Garrison (Jason Momoa) and orphans Natalie (Emma Myers) and Henry (Sebastian Eugene Hansen) who are new to town.  The vibe of this part of the movie reminded me of early Taika Waititi, especially Eagle vs. Shark, which is no great surprise given that the film was primarily shot in New Zealand. New Zealander and Hess regular Jemaine Clement puts in a delicious cameo as a storage locker owner who wants nothing more than to be besties with an oblivious Garrett.

Garrett decides to take outcast Henry on as mentor, and his efforts to teach him, well, anything of use are pretty hilarious. Momoa has a specific persona he usually channels, but this is decidedly not that. Instead he seems to be calling upon Patrick Warburton's Puddy from Seinfeld mixed with Jack Burton from Big Trouble In Little China.  Whatever his inspiration, it just may be Momoa's finest comedic performance.

It's all so unfortunate then that going into the Minecraft world, encountering Steve (Jack Black), and facing off against the pig-things that are trying to take over that reality. The film basically forgets about making any of the character arcs meaningful in any way, and just goes about having a goofy time in this strange blocky world. It wavers wildly between amusing and dull and stupid-in-a-good-way and stupid-in-a-bad-way. I love Jack Black, but the script gives Steve nothing for him to hang a character off of, so he's basically just Jack Black's stage persona. (I also find it funny that "Steve" is the player character of classic Minecraft, a real blocky dude, and they hire one of cinema's most notoriously round performers to play him).

I have to admit I loved Rachel House's voice work for Malgosha, the head pig in charge. The character design for Malgosha was also pretty incredible as I was constantly questioning whether it was a practical costume, or completely digital, or a combination.  I also thought the same of the "Nitwit" villager (mind-blowingly portrayed by Oscar winner Bret McKenzie and voiced by Matt Berry) who escapes into the "real" world and is, literally, picked up by Jennifer Coolige's lonely divorcee. Those Nitwit sequences are so ridiculous, but Coolige sells the lunacy of it so well.

In a 100 minute movie, I would say that maybe 40% of it (maybe even 50%) was pretty entertaining, and at one point, early on, I was wondering if we had maybe another Lego Movie on our hands... it's not even close to being as good as The Lego Movie. That it's even as good as it is is still kind of a minor miracle. I mean...what else could a live-action Minecraft movie look like? I certainly can't think of anything much better, but I can think of far, far worse.

[Toastypost - we disagree, and yet, also agree]

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Warfare kind of snuck into theatres unannounced, and left just as quietly, and hit AmazonPrime with about the same amount of fanfare. Recalling the war in Iraq, and specifically the American side of that war, in this year of 2025, was something most people weren't at all interested in partaking in. I should have known coming from Alex Garland that it wouldn't be "rah rah 'merica", and even still it was only with the most hesitant of clicks that I pressed play.

Warfare proved quickly to be an intense military procedural/fight for survival starring a rich swath of fantastic actors pulled straight from some of the best TV shows of the decade so far. You've got Reservation Dogs' D'Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, Shogun's Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn from Stranger Things, Daredevil: Born Again's Michael Gandolfini, Kent household favourite Noah Centineo, Finn Bennett from Season 4 of True Detective and more. It's a really impressive cast that really didn't need to be this impressive for what its acting its performers to do, but still, I'm impressed.

The real challenge here was to make a picture about the misbegotten war in Iraq that doesn't glorify it or its participants, while also not outright villifying them either, and it succeeds surprisingly well.  It is a compelling and nerve-shredding film that shows in excruciating detail the horror and intensity and violence and consequences of warfare, especially in residential sector. Still, telling the story from an American vantage point remains is the film's biggest barrier to entry in the current political climate. But the film is based on the true recollections of some of the soldiers involved in the incident, including co-director/co-writer Ray Mendoza, who Woon-A-Tai plays in the film (Mendoza happened to be the military advisor on Garland's Civil War, which is how this project came about).

The most impactful part of this movie is one word... "Why?" To which the SEALs on screen, and the film itself have no answer. 

---

Binary statements like "you either love Wes Anderson movies or you don't" have become increasingly annoying to me as they are completely incalculable, devoid of any gray area, and well  fundamentally untrue. They are statements made by lazy writers (like myself, certainly) to try to simplify arguments to two simple sides.  It's like saying "you're either liberal or you're conservative" and that takes out all the nuance of life and thought and opinion.

That said, everything within me really wants to argue that people who know Wes Anderson's work either love it unconditionally or don't understand it, but such a statement just cuts out the majority of the potential film-going audience by really only referring to the minority of people who pay any attention to filmmakers and the work they do.  That statement also presupposes that no matter the quality or content of an Anderson film, that one side of the coin is predisposed to loving said film, while the other will hate it or just avoid it altogether.

Even as I know this argument to be false -- since I really disliked Moonrise Kingdom and Rushmore does nothing for me so I know there are shades of grey in Anderson's fandom -- I still want to proclaim that if you're an Anderson fan you obviously have to love The Phoenician Scheme, and if you don't like Anderson's work, why would you even waste your time with it at this point.

I stepped into The Phoenician Scheme ready to love it by nature of just being a Wes Anderson movie. I was placing myself into the love side of the "you either love Wes Anderson movies or you don't" binary fallacy, convinced that, no matter what I would come out of the picture feeling enriched and delighted.

Turns out, not so much. If you were to ask me, right now, The Phoenician Scheme sits above Moorise and Rushmore and maybe even Isle of Dogs and Bottle Rocket, but it's definitely in the bottom half of ranking Anderson's oeuvre for me. 

The reason is largely because I had a hard time following the movie, which is not something I generally have difficulty with. I mean, I understood Tenet without even having to think about it that hard. But The Phoenician Scheme is absolutely loaded with Anderson's rapid-fire expressionless patter that moves so quickly and is so information dense that it's hard to extract, at least upon first viewing, what is important about what is being said. There's no doubt that all of it is completely sensible to Anderson, but in the conveying to the audience it is bound to overwhelm.

As well, the titular scheme upon which the film revolves around, well, I never quite got it. It's the reason that problematic industrialist Zsa-Zsa Korda and his daughter (or is she) and heir (on a trial basis) Leisl (Mia Threapleton) make the adventurous journey they do, making five stops to different investors in the scheme to try to convince them to cover the gap made after a consortium of governments raise the price of rivets to negatively impact and possibly scuttle the scheme. Zsa-Zsa, it turns out, is not really a good guy, and Leisl, a convent-raised nun-to-be, seems well aware of his reputation.

The journey, then, isn't so much about the scheme but about a father and daughter connecting, bridging the gap between cold-hearted capitalist and possible murderer, and a selflessly altruistic pacifist. The thing is, though, the scheme eats up so much screen time and dominates the balance of the film that the familial engagement seems secondary. But when the film ends, its coda makes it pretty explicit that it was about Zsa-Zsa becoming a father and finding joy in life as opposed to riches. It's an anti-capitalistic tale, I suppose, but definitely an unfocussed one.

The performances are all great. Anderson's very specific way of writing his character and directing may seem limiting at first blush, but it frees them to do some very, very silly work with the sternest of poker faces. Michael Cera is the obvious highlight, and to say why would be spoiler-y, but you will know it to see it. It's amazing he's not been part of Anderson's cabal of performers before this, but he's a natural fit. A lot of Anderson's newer stable of regular performers like Jeffrey Wright, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Mathieu Almaric, Richard Ayoade, Benedict Cumberbatch and Rupert Friend all have smaller but delightful parts to play in this, and longer-term Anderson regulars like Bill Murray and Willem Dafoe have basically glorified cameos. It's actually a great thing that Anderson branches out on a regular basis and doesn't rely upon the same stable time and again, as accusations of "sameness" would be further emboldened.

If ever you wondered what a Wes Anderson action-thriller would look like, well, it looks like this...a Wes Anderson movies. Alexandre Desplat's score is full of ominous and foreboding notes on either end of the piano that feels like it was ripped out a Hitchcock thriller or an British espionage tale of yore. The score both affirms the subgenres Anderson is referencing, but it's also a comedic juxtaposition to the arch tone that prevails through most of Anderson's films. It's a great score.

It's not an entirely successful movie, but if you're an Anderson fan you will enjoy it far more than if you are not.

---

If I see a movie weeks after it has released (sometimes even days after) it's hard for me not to write my reviews completely shaped around the critical commentary I've read/heard, or the reactionary headlines or Letterboxd hot takes. I'm steeped in film commentary in my podcast routine and my socials, less than some but more than your average person is, for sure. So I know that The Life of Chuck has been a pretty divisive movie. A lot of the reaction has been very positive towards it, praising it for being a rewarding, enriching, life-affirming experience, while a large amount of critical reaction has tossed it as cloying and overly sentimental.

Either way, these are not criticisms you typically hear about something adapted from a Steven King story. Nor are they really descriptions you would find for a typical Mike Flanagan project.

And yet The Life of Chuck does have aspirations to being a somewhat sentimental and life-affirming experience, despite its opening act (labelled as "Act Three") that basically presents the end of the world from the perspective of the characters in a mid-sized mid-American city and through the eyes of teacher Chiwetel Eijiofor and nurse Karen Gillan. The internet has stopped working, California has fallen into the sea, the food-producing areas of the world are being devastated by floods or fires or drought, it's all coming to an end much faster than anyone expected. It's heavy and it sucks, and people are trying to go about their daily lives, but what does any of it really matter? And yet, perplexingly, billboards, radio ads, TV ads start popping up "Charles Krantz: 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!" What does it mean, as the stars blink out of existence?  It's intriguing and perplexing.

The second act steps back with narration from Nick Offerman providing colour and detail on the characters we see on screen. Taylor (Taylor Gordon) a Julliard drop-out sets up her drum kit on a Saturday, ready to perform for the day, yet after 40 minutes not quite feeling it. Meanwhile accountant Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) is on break from an accounting conference and feeling a bit dispirited. And Janice (Annalise Basso) just receives a break-up text from her boyfriend who she didn't really even like that much and she storms through the town's promenade. As Chuck approaches Taylor, she starts to match his pace with her drumming. It catches Chuck's attention and draws him near. It eventually breaks into dance, and Chuck's exceptional dancing fires up Janice who joins him and they tear the street up with Taylor's amazing rhythm. It's a simple moment of people needing joy and spreading joy and it leads to a moment of connection. What you extrapolate from that is probably very individualistic, but after the end of the world, to step into something so expressive as rhythm and dance, it's genuinely moving, unless you are at your utmost cynical.

The third act steps back even further in Chuck's life. A lot happens in this "Act 1" to bridge what we've seen and been told in the previous two acts, but we witness Chuck as a child (Benjamin Pajak), his life married with trajedy, learning to love dance with his Bubbe (Mia Sara), and then take it up as an extracurricular at school and become exceptional at it. The segment centers a lot around his grandparent's house and specifically the cupola which is locked and ruled off-limits by his Zadie (Mark Hamill). Zadie tells him, one night when he's deep in his cups, that there are ghosts in that room, ghost of the past and future. It's only years later after Zadie's passing that teen Chuck (Jacob Tremblay) learns what he means. But the lesson, presented to him by a bohemian teacher, and the crux of the film, is that life should be lived to its fullest, that we can be wonderful, that we deserve to be wonderful, and we contain multitudes. It's a mantra that, we see from act 2, is hard to keep in mind as life and career and family and the world weigh on us, but if we remember, we can experience something, shape something, build something at the very least inside of us, if not outside as well.

As a production the author's voice is much more Flanagan than King's, but the story got the horror maestro's fingerprints all over it. Flanagan has adapted King enough times, and his work is so King influenced in general, that sometimes it hard to separate the two, but Flanagan's voice is unique and shows up prominently in the execution. His penchant for long monologues and his emotional connection to his characters are much more a part of his storytelling than King's as evident here.

Is it sentimental? I suppose it is, but I didn't find it overbearingly so. Is it saccharine? Not at all, nor is it cloying or preachy. But I get why it is divisive. It's a film that presents an end of the world scenario in a time where things are as challenging and bleak on a global scale as they have been since world wars were happening. It's all so overwhelming and dire, that a film like this, a movie that dares to say in the face of all of that, at this time, that there's still something about living life on this planet that is truly wonderful...I get how hard that is to accept.

And yet, the notion itself is lovely, even if I am challenged myself to accept it. I'm glad it exists, I'm glad that King and Flanagan have put it out into the world, that is is seeded there to make even one person's life a little better. I liked this movie. I was moved by it.

---

The most prominent works of director Nacho Vigalondo are Colossal [a film covered by both David and myself on this blog] and Timecrimes, a film I have seen and written about but in the world before this blog.  The former was a high concept drama that connected the troubled life of an American woman with Kaiju attacks in South Korea. Timecrimes was a twisty Spanish thriller about a series of unfortunate events that collapse in on themselves as time travel gets involved. In both cases, they are rather high concept stories, the former much more of a dramatic production and character study, while the latter was perhaps more playful and energetic.

I don't know that I loved either film, as neither sits fondly in my memory, and yet, I think I genuinely respect Vigalondo's approach to genre. Maybe his execution falters, but conceptually, there's definitely a lot of meat on the bones and he clearly isn't interested in repeating what already exists.

His latest film, Daniela Forever, is more akin to Colossal than Timecrimes. It is a high concept sci-fi story rooted in character drama, executed with a lower-budget, but never lacking for ambition. Here Henry Golding plays Nicolas, a British DJ living in Madrid who has recently lost his girlfriend, Daniela (Beatrice Grannò) after she was hit by vehicle. A year has passed since she died but he is still deep in grief and depression. He is recommended by a friend to an experimental drug trial which is designed to engage the user in a new form of Lucid Dreaming. Nicolas doesn't follow the treatment plan and the dream cues provided to him, instead he learns he can build a world in his mind, one where Daniela still exists.

But the deeper into his trial regimen he goes, the more time he spends with this construct of Daniela in this construct of Madrid, the more it starts to escape his control.

Unlike The Life of Chuck, I went into Daniela Forever totally cold, having not even seen the trailer nor read or heard a single review. It's a rare experience where a film has every opportunity to surprise me, and it never truly did. It never lost my interest, but I also never felt it pushed itself or its concept like I wanted it to. At its root, Nicolas is lost before the story even starts, there's no hope for a positive outcome for him. I've seen too much Black Mirror for this to go well. And that is this film's biggest challenge... distancing itself from Black Mirror. 

We've seen enough stories of loss and grief and reviving loved ones through technology in Black Mirror, this story does the same but through chemicals. So there's a familiarity to the story and a sense that we know where it is going, even though we shouldn't, even though it should really be a story that exists in a constant state of revelation.  I couldn't help but find it a little predictable.

What Vigalondo does to distance itself from Black Mirror is all in style. The director makes the choice to film the "real world" sequences using (I don't know the technical specs here), like, 1970's TV cameras. They are presented in a 4:3 ratio, staged and composed like soap operas, and every second the format was used I was questioning why. It looks, flat out, terrible. It's a terrible aesthetic. When it was the only TV aesthetic we had, we were conditioned to it, but in this high-def 4K world we live in, it's so hard to look at. I found it highly distracting and unpleasant. The dream-state however looks gorgeous, Madrid looks lovely, even the areas that Nicolas has never seen that are "greyboxed", like TV static.

Golding has to do all the heavy lifting here as our central character and he really succeeds at times, yet goes a step or two beyond what's necessary in some scenes. It's hard to tell whether those are a result of directing, script or performance, but there's times where there seems to be a lack of control. Grannò has the harder task of performing a character who is a construct, easily manipulated by the man whose mind she exists in (there is a darker edge to this story that it never actually reckons with). 

The film end (or attempts to end) on a high note, but it comes at the expense of ambiguity and obfuscation that I believe the director wants to leave the audience with something to think about but I don't think provides the right keys to unlock it. 

As much as I sound frustrated with it, I did like it more than Colossal, in part because even the weird stylistic factors engaged me. I wish it were more twisty and fun like Timecrimes (a movie I really need to watch again) and I wish I could trust that the director really knew everything that was going on in his story. At the same time I appreciate Vigalondo's desire to create a sci-fi story that is small but feels ambitious. I applaud the effort if not all of the results.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Doors

2021, Saman Kesh, Jeff Desom, Dugan O'Neal - Amazon

This indie scifi movie is broken into four segments, directed by the above, respectively, "Knockers / Interstitials", "Lockdown" and "Lamaj".

The premise is fascinating. Simultaneously, world wide, a series of black obelisks appear. They emanate sounds, whisper to some people to enter through their reverberating surfaces. The world is terrified, confused and curious.

The segments introduce the doors and the world's reactions to them. In "Lockdown", a handful of high school students doing a makeup exam are left alone in a school as the "doors" appear for the first time. It sits in the exit hallway and beckons to one of the kids. It is menacing and untrustworthy in its suggestions. Then comes "Knockers" with a later reaction from the world, as teams of "knockers" (knocking on the doors, get it?) are sent through the doors. They are on timed missions, as going past the allotted period leads to psychosis and death. I guess that means you can exit? Then we have "Lamaj" where Jamal (see the backwards title?) hides his door from the world so he can study it, learning how to communicate with it, learning that we are in turn being studied. And finally, "Interstitials" gives us a video recording of someone being affected by a door, but with no door in sight -- their influence is expanding.

This one sat in my hopper for a while. I recall hearing good things about it when it came out a few years ago, but as is usual with me, I saw on it. Any of my influential sources have been forgotten and all I am left with is my impression, which is no surprised - meh. Its not hard to see the thread of what they were going for, especially since the entire "movie" is a shared creative experience, but the only successful thing they communicated was that the doors were weird and scary. And you get that from trailers. A successful scifi mystery needs to go beyond the premise and execute... something. 

Think Interstellar with its revelation that the mission was partially a sham, and the rest of the movie was emotional recovery from that. Think Arrival where not only is a unique form of language & communication discovered, but we learn the aliens are outside normal time-frames. This movie presented the idea that the "doors" are here mysteriously, and in one segment, that they are sent by someone to study us, but the rest is just weird disturbances for the fun visuals. From the art of film making, you can focus on getting good performances (they are all decent here) and producing compelling visuals (honestly, I am bored with the Twin Peaks shortcut to "weird" being compelling) but it all needs an actual story to tie it together. This movie is an idea, an execution of elevator pitches, and that is pretty much it.

3 Short Paragraphs (Probably Not): Thunderbolts*

2025, Jake Schreier (Beef) -- download

Definitely not.

Stubbing (more like preambling) this before I forget it, because if the few readers out there have happened to notice, I have been slowing down of late. This is not my 3265th Hiatus just a very real state of change going on in my life, some very real person shit that, despite my usual habit of blathering on about all my personal baggage, I will not be getting into here. Kent knows. That will suffice. But it has impacted how I write, impacted how I think, impacted how I watch; the latter primarily in that I have a new Life Schedule right now, and that doesn't often include sitting by myself watching movies. Oh, a lot of TV is being watched, but, y'know, despite that brief experiment, still not interested in writing about TV.

OK, that's out of the way.

I did not, in fact, get out to see this in the cinema, as I hoped to. I did not, in fact, outrageously enjoy this, as I expected to do. It had not been hope; I had been convinced this movie would be right down my alley, and yet... it was just OK. 

In some ways, it is fair to call this movie, "Marvel's Suicide Squad." It is a movie about the MCU anti-heroes, at best, or villains, to a degree. It is a movie about the Bad Guys being re-tooled into being the heroes and, spoiling something that attempted to stay hidden for quite some time, into being The New Avengers. Except, almost the entirety of that revelation is buried behind a "14 months later" coda. But yeah, for the first time, DC flipped the table on Marvel and still retains the better of the two executions of an idea.

I will let Kent "we disagree" on that note, cuz he probably knows the real comic book Thunderbolts and can explain in educated details how I am wrong. But he probably won't; he's far too gracious with my foot-in-mouth syndrome.

Luckily, this movie starred my favourite character and portrayal of a character in MCU-dom -- Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh, Oppenheimer), of Black Widow and Hawkeye fame. Like her sister Natasha Romanov, or Black Widow, she was raised in the Red Room, a secretive Russian agency that trained assassins from childhood. Unlike her sister, she hadn't escaped of her own volition, and not until the circumstances of said movie. And even after she has escaped, and the Red Room has fallen (quite literally), she remains what she was ... a quippy, snarky, violent killer. And that leads her right into the hands of CIA director  Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julie Louis-Dreyfus, Enough Said), who kind of presents as the less than savoury Nick Fury, as de Fontaine continues to use Yelena for her wetwork skills. And that work eats away an Yelena's soul.

When the movie begins, Yelena professes a desire to leave de Fontaine's employ and is sent to a top secret mountain base to kill someone who wants to steal from de Fontaine. Note to bunker builders, if you want to make a top secret base with an even more secret room "a mile below the bunker", don't start on top of a mountain. It just seems... flagrant. Anywayz, Yelena is attacked before she can stop said thief and ... well, we catch on pretty quick. A was sent to kill B, B was sent to kill C, C was sent to kill... well, you get the idea. The alphabet squad includes: John Walker (Wyatt Russell, Overlord), the Asshole Captain America, Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen, Killjoys) or Ghost, the villain from the Ant-Man movie, and Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko, Quantum of Solace), or Taskmaster from the Black Widow movie, another pawn of the Red Room. They all punch, shoot and stab the other, all playing "I am not here for you, just them" game, with Yelena catching on almost as quick as we, the viewer, does. But before she can halt everyone, Ghost shoots Taskmaster in the head.

Wait, what? Yes, like the opening sequence of Gunn's The Suicide Squad, we start by killing off one of who we assume is the main characters. Its a shock, and frankly, I didn't like it. It was there for only shock value, but also to drive home that all these characters are amoral, cuz nobody mourns her, even when they realize her death, and the possibility of them all dying, was de Fontaine's plan all along -- insert evil cackle.

De Fontaine. She's been a villain-in-waiting for a few movies and TV shows. Unlike Thanos, they have been spreading her thin on the toast for some time now. But Marvel had a lot of loafs of villain in the oven over the past 10+ years, many of which just fell flat. If anything, that is more adherent to the comics where there are tons of villains and supervillains and inbetweeners. Not sure I believe it works in Cinematic Universe-dom. I don't like her as a character (you are not supposed to), and I don't like her as a plot device. To be honest, I kept on expecting her to become a Hydra-lite villain as the character always struck me as a riff on "GI Joe" character, Baroness. But I am not a big Joe fan, so I will once again let Kent talk that one through. At least here, in this movie, other people have noticed her being nefarious and have her up for impeachment, in front of a Senate Hearing. I just wish Real Life hadn't shown us how weak-kneed those hearings are, but still, the whole movie hinges on her scrambling to eliminate any evidence the Senators can use against her.

In much the way the original Avengers movie was supposed to established the assembling of the team because of a specific event, this movie uses the emergence of The Void (Lewis Pullman, Salem's Lot) in NYC as an opportunity for de Fontaine's original plan to actually be given light, despite her mishandling of it. She has literally caused the event that allowed her to use The New Avengers to stop. If she had perhaps intended on that happening, I would have enjoyed her character more, but no, its unintended consequences, leaving her more as comic-relief than supervillain.

If anything saved the movie for me, let me return to my opening comments on Yelena Belova. As Kent says, this movie is her movie. She's the only one playing a real character, and everyone else (maybe Bob to a lesser degree) is there to be either support, or comic relief, to her part in the story. She's deep in the shade of gray of moral behaviour, but unlike others, she knows she's there and... well, regrets it. But she also knows nothing else. She cannot pretend, like her "father" (David Harbour, Hellboy) does, and see herself as ever having been a hero, or becoming one. But she has her sister as a template, a statement of potentiality. Her heroic acts throughout the movie are not the "stop the rock from crushing the little girl" style, but more the being able to step out of her own way and attempt to help Bob. She sees a mirror in him being manipulated by an agency who doesn't care who they hurt in order to accomplish their goals. So, when everyone else wants to shoot or smash their way into stopping The Void, she sees, again, her sister as the template and tries sacrifice. Its not the most mentally healthy of choices, but its... something in the right direction.

Exceeept, de Fontaine is able to step in and pull her "this was my plan all along" out of her ass, and everyone, Yelena included, tags along. They become The New Avengers, for better or for worse. The coda introduces them "14 months later" dealing with the emergence of Sam's own version of The Avengers, which I hope they handle well, but I don't have much actual faith they will. Considering how Ironheart ended, RiRi is more likely to join de Fontaine's team than go anywhere actually heroic.

So, again, it was alright. I enjoyed myself, I like the quipping and the action was well done. But I wasn't all-in, I wasn't satisfied. Is it me? Will I enjoy more in re-watches? Probably, to both.

Kent's post from 10,000 years ago. I agree with everything he said, but he liked it way more than I did.

1-1-1: Ironheart

 I've fallen way behind on my KsMIRTs (Kent's Month In Reviewing Television) so I'm going to catch up by 1-1-1-ing shows as single posts. Like Toasty does. Which probably makes more sense anyway from all sorts of algorithmic angles. But whatever. I do this for me.

Also, SPOILERS AHOY for Ironheart

The What 100: Riri Williams is expelled from her Stark Grant at MIT and returns home to Chicago to pursue her work of replicating an Iron Man suit outside of the rigid confines (and access to resources) of academia. She's spotted and tapped by Parker Robbins, a small-time gangster who's making big strides thanks to a demonic hood that grants him special powers. Riri is tempted into joining his squad because she needs money to build her Iron Man-esque prototypes. Her dream is to commercialize her warsuits for first responders, motivated by the loss of her beloved stepdad and best friend as a result of a drive-by 5 years earlier. However, in trying to achieve her goals, she seems to make the wrong decisions time and again and the weight of the toll is greater and greater.

(1 Great) I was very impressed by Ironheart, a superhero show that refused to fall into the usual superhero tropes, especially where its main character is concerned. Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) is a genius, but she's not infallible and she doesn't have Tony Stark's generational wealth, corporate legacy or public notoriety (nor his old white man exterior) to come out of a myriad of bad decisions relatively unscathed. So when we first meet Riri and she's selling her old school work to lesser-than students to pass off as their own, and gets caught, she's rightfully expelled. She owns it, but not really. Returning home, she feels like a failure, and despite her smarts, she's unable to achieve her goals without capital. Alternatives are limited. Even without explicitly showing us, the show is aware that systemic racism will not consider a young black woman for any high profile tech internships or whatever (all you need to do is look at the most toxic of comments about this show's very existence to see that mentality is so alive and thriving in our current societal hellscape). So yeah, when Anthony Ramos' The Hood presents her with an offer of so much riches, it is undeniably tempting. A conventional superhero would resist temptation, because that's what makes them heroic, but that's boring and basic. The choice Riri makes is a selfish one... selfish with good intentions, but still selfish. She quickly realizes that she's in over her head and working with The Hood doesn't sit right. But throughout the show, she makes one not-great decision after another which just sinks her further and further into situations not easily escapable and certainly not rectified by anything a flying personalized mech suit can do. We see this in so many origin stories for young superheroes... making bad decisions then having to spend the rest of their career atoning for them. Usually by the end of the movie or the origin arc, they have become a hero, but that is decidedly not the case in Ironheart.  Riri is not a villain, by any stretch, but a character so traumatized and driven by that trauma that it misguides her, and makes her more susceptible to manipulation.  The people she hurts, the trust she breaks, the damage she does, these are things not easily undone (some are outright irreparable) and these are all lessons she kind of learns, but she never gets to the root of why she made these decisions in the first place. It makes her both a frustrating and fascinating and very human lead character. When she's got one final decision to make, the traditional hero's journey tells us which decision she *should* make, but the show stays true to her character, and what has motivated her all this time, and, yeah, it goes there, leading to a finale that melted my brain.

(1 Good) It's been rumoured and hinted and suggested for years now that Marvel's devil himself, Mephisto, would be appearing in the MCU, and many were speculating that, because Parker Robbins' hood is made of dark magic, that Mephisto would finally be appearing in the MCU via Ironheart.  But in the comics, The Hood's hood was actually created by Dormammu, who appeared in the MCU in Doctor Strange way back in 2016, and was basically dealt with in that film. But Mephisto hopes became dashed in episode 4 of Ironheart when Riri consults with a magic wielder who confirms the Dormammu connection...with a 50% accuracy.  It was a fake-out, but a beautiful fake out that seemed to imply Robbins was indeed a manipulated tool of Dormammu to aide in his return to earth or some such. But no, it's episode six where we finally see Mephisto in the flesh for the first time in a flashback to The Hood's origin...and it's none other than Sasha Baron Cohen who, immediately, screams the absolute right choice for the role. Cohen is chameleonic and able to move in an out of different characters and even somehow warp reality around him when he's in a character like Borat or Ali G. From the second he steps on screen you know exactly who he is, and by the time the episode is over I wanted nothing more than an anthology series of Cohen's Mephisto making offers to Marvel characters.  Mephisto was subtly and brilliantly seeded into Riri's story and I don't mean through the Hood.  His fingerprints were there early on and I clocked it pretty quickly.  The finale of the season (and probably the series, which makes it an even bigger whopper) feels explosive. 

(1 Bad) The weakest part of Ironheart is its opening episode, having to deal with what was set up for Riri in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. In hindsight, the "synergy" of introducing Riri in that film did both that film and this series a disservice.  For the most part, Ironheart has to spend its first episode disconnecting Riri from the MCU at large, shrinking it down to her small world within the world. The first episode wasn't great, but setting the table is a dull task especially when you have to clear it first. But once all the players are introduced, the show really cooks, starting with the final beat of episode one leading directly into the emotional fallout in episode two.

META: It's not unheard of but pretty rare for me to watch a comics-to-film/tv show that I don't already have some familiarly or knowledge of the character and the world they inhabit. In the case of Ironheart, beyond having an action figure of her for some reason and playing her in Marvel Puzzle Quest, I'm unfamiliar. I don't think I have read a single comic with her (or at least not with her in any meaningful role in the comic). As well, the Hood is a great damn mystery to me (again, outside of Marvel Puzzle Quest - a match 3 game without much story or characterization). Hell, I don't even have that much familiarity with Mephisto. So this was all discovery for me, and I had no preconceived notions of who these characters were, what motivates them, what their backstory is or where they wind up. 

Riri's hero's journey is, by the end of the season, still really incomplete, and I loved that the show runners made the choice to end it that way. Riri is a flawed character, and that's not something easily rectified. The Hood seemed pretty boilerplate, but, just as with Riri, it sets up who he is and seeds in visual info in the background to provide more context that comes to light in the final couple of episodes where it really puts his journey into focus. Both Thorne and Ramos are very, very good...not explosive, but really good. 

The supporting cast in general, especially Lyric Ross as N.A.T.A.L.I.E., the AI who is borne from Riri's memories of her dead best friend, is the standout (she's widely cited as a standout performer from This Is Us as well). In this world where we're really struggling with accepting AI as anything other than a portent of doom, and another tool for the capitalists to manipulate and corrupt, making an AI character that is charming, loveable and, at times, heartbreaking is a real challenge, but Ross definitely accomplishes it.

The show also features Alden Ehrenreich as Joe McGillicuddy, a collector and dealer of black market technology that Riri blackmails/befriends. Ehrenreich is such a charming performer, and it's so disappointing that his very, very enjoyable, very brief stint as Han Solo not only didn't turn him into a big star, but in fact had a detrimental effects on his promising career. He hasn't been out of work, but his profile has been quite low. Here, he's like, 7th banana in the series, but he definitely stands out, just like he did in Solo and Hail Cesar! We need more of him.

One final great casting note, Regan Alyah as Zelma, the young witch(??) who helps Riri out with her magical dilemma, is so damn charismatic and delightful. It's an even smaller role than Ehrenreichs, but she absolutely pops.

I get that there are a lot of people burned out on Marvel and superhero content. I get that this is a character most people, even comic book nerds, don't care a lot about and weren't clamoring to see on screen, and I get that this isn't the hero's journey most expect to see, but that to me is what makes it so exciting. It's not without action, but it's also not action-packed. It's a character-centric story about the choices one makes in life, the trauma that leads us to those choices, and having to deal with the ramifications. If you just want to see iron suits bashing into each other, that's been done.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Anora

2024, Sean Baker (The Florida Project) -- Amazon

There is something inherent in my ad nauseum recollections of That Guy in that I have been Not That Guy for longer than I was ever him, both early in life and after whatever twist in spectrum drew me away from movies that meant something. I read a bit about Sean Baker and recall there was a time when I would have known exactly who he was and had been drawn to him, and his works. All I need are a few paragraphs from Wikipedia and I am sure of that, and yet That Guy was from the pre-Internet era (for the most part) so how would I have learned of him, and his work? I can only say that in the pre-Internet era, information was more curated, and "useful information" dominated over the dross. These days I am more likely to watch a cute cat video, or a cooking segment, or a clip of a terrible driver, than I am to watch a segment about a ground breaking film director. Whose fault is that? The Internet's or mine? I am most definitely a product of today's social media and the Internet in general, as it has dominated my experience (likely more than most) for much of my thinking life.

Anywayz, summation -- maybe should watch more Sean Baker? Conclusion; probably won't.

Anora is an Academy Award Winning Movie, something that not even That Guy felt beholden to, but it was also a dark horse of that year, but it won: Best Director, Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing. That's a lot of acclaim. And I can agree, it is an impressively well constructed movie with incredible performances. And so much happens in the movie, and yet, not so much. Ani and Vanya meet, she's a stripper who is not above a bit of sex work, they connect, they get married and then the whole thing gets derailed when Vanya's parents get wind of it. Yet, wow.

I am not going to do my usual half-assed attempt at a recap, just dive into my thoughts.

The first bit of the movie was odd to me. It felt fast-paced, disjointed, more stream of consciousness than plot development. Ani the stripper meets Vanya the peter pan, the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch. We never learn what exactly Vanya's family does, but in one of the many flip-the-table on expectations, there doesn't seem to be anything overtly criminal here. His family is not the Brighton Beach Russians from all the crime movies, just uber wealthy. And he is in America to do nothing but enjoy himself in only the way someone with unlimited wealth can do. 

Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn, Guest from the Future) meets Ani (Mikey Madison, Better Things) in the Manhattan strip club she works; she recognizes a good catch and he becomes enamoured. That was the next turn of expectations, in that Ani is not the Pretty Woman everyone tried to sell this as; she's a hard working sex-worker. There's no denying that; she's a stripper who elevates to prostitution but at her own pace. The club she works at does not reign over her, there is no abusive pimp, she's not hooked on drugs nor does she owe money nor is she being trafficked. This is a character outside the Hollywood norms.

Also, this ain't no Cinderella story.

The first act, fast paced and frantic is really just a setup. Things really get going when the couple return from Vegas, married stereotypically drunken Vegas-style. They throw about the words, say they love each other, and you almost believe them. Almost. You could believe it was actual love, and that love overrules all, if this were that kind of Hollywood movie. But as soon as Vanya hears that his parents are flying from Russia to deal with the "situation", he bolts. He literally runs away. He abandons Ani to her fate.

Ani and Vanya's love is transactional. It begins literally so, but eventually, when she at first becomes exclusive and then when they admit feelings and spend all their time together (she actually quits the club), it is still always about something to be gained. There is never any doubt that Vanya is giving Ani access to his wealth and lifestyle, and Vanya, a hairless man-child (not sure I can accept he has reached the "man" stage yet) is getting an "education" from Ani. 

A rude awakening, for Ani, comes at the hands of the Zakharov family "fixer" Toros (Karren Karagulian, Red Rocket), and his pair of thugs Igor (Yura Borislov, Guest from the Future) and Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan, Lost and Found in Armenia). At first she sees this all as dramatic interference, that once they catch up with the traumatized Vanya, he will make it all right for her. But they do, and he doesn't. Confronting her is as much something he doesn't want to do, as confronting his parents. And then it is solidified when they Zakharovs arrive. Its not in any doubt that the marriage will end, that Vanya will return to Russia to begin his "real life", but it takes Ani a moment to actually get this. All of it, the love, the marriage, was a little boy playing at being an adult. And she was just playing at becoming part of the uber wealthy. In the end, after one final transactional event with Igor, she collapses in anguish. Real Life is hard.

Turning left, I was endlessly fascinated by Toros and the thugs. Again, I believe we are meant to (incorrectly) see them as they classic gangster thugs who toss violence and cash around and can accomplish anything. But even their violent acts are almost play acting -- at most, they mess up a candy store. They do not carry guns, they are afraid to do something that will have real ramifications, and they don't even have the weight of wealth & power to just magically make things happen. Toros is just Vanya's godfather tasked with making sure the boy is safe and doesn't do anything (too) stupid --- and he fails miserably at that. 

In the end, they only present the maybe one actually sympathetic character in Igor, the quiet thug who sees Ani for what she is -- strong, independent and someone Vanya was not worthy of. But again, this is no Cinderella, no Pretty Woman and there is no happy ending.... well, not the cinematic kind.

Kent's view.

KsMIRT: well...maybe I do

 KsMIRT=Kent's Month in Reviewing Television in which Kent (that'sa me) reviews the television series he watched in the past month (*cough* April *cough*) in the patented 1-1-1 format. I have been writing these things rather expediently at the beginning of each month and yet, for some reason, sitting on them for weeks (and weeks), and posting them at the end of that month, so they're, like, a month behind (*cough* now, like, three *cough*). Whatevs. Let's do this:

This Month:
The Residence (8/8 episodes, Netflix)
Mythic Quest Season 4 (9/10 episodes, AppleTV+)
Yellowjackets Season 3 (7/10 episodes, Crave)
Dark Winds Season 1 (6/6 episodes, Crave)
Daredevil: Born Again Season ? (9/9 episodes)

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created by Paul William Davies

The What 100: There's been a murder in the White House (not the president this time) during a state dinner with the Australian Prime Minister. The victim is the Chief Usher of the White House (Giancarlo Esposito) and the suspects are plentiful with, like, 60 staff members and residents plus nearly 200 guests. Given the sensitivity of the issue the chief of the Metro PD calls in a favour and brings world renowned detective Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba) on the scene where she takes control locking the premises down for as long as she can against mounting opposition and unrest.

(1 Great) I haven't ever really considered myself a big fan of murder mysteries, but the recent spate of eccentric detective mysteries like the Poirot films, Knives Out mysteries and, especially, Poker Face have certainly brought me closer to fandom. Uzo Aduba makes for a wonderfully eccentric detective, as Cordelia Cupp obsesses as much about her birding as she does the case, and often applies her vast knowledge of the birds of the world to the case at hand.  She is exceptionally observant, patient, and never gets ahead of what she knows (she never identifies a suspect, more just persons of interest). She's certainly not a people person, but at the same time, Aduba manages Cordelias frankness as something more charmingly humorous than rude or abrasive. She puts some very powerful people in their place.  8 episodes is a long time to maintain a murder mystery like this given that most of these kinds of stories are done in a 2 hour movie or 1 hour TV show format, but the show makes it less a whodunnit and more about Cordelia's process.  She's an exceptional detective and she knows it, and has a little bit of an ego about it, but it's also clear she enjoys the challenge the work brings.  I also appreciated that amidst it all she remembers that there's an actual person who lost their life in all this. It's a pretty breezy watch.

(1 Good): I do find myself enjoying these big ensemble murder mysteries, and here we have a sizeable cast of recognizable faces. They're not all big, big stars, but if you've watched any TV/streaming in the past decade (or even just the 80's) you're bound to recognize at least a half dozen faces, if not more. You've got Jane Curtin (3rd Rock From the Sun), Jason Lee (My Name is Earl), Bronson Pinchot (Beverly Hills Cop), Isiah Whitlock Jr. (The Wire), Randall Park (Aquaman), Ken Marino (Party Down), Taran Killam (Saturday Night Live), Al Franken (Saturday Night Live), Eliza Coupe (Happy Endings), Mel Rodriguez (Last Man on Earth), Mary Wiseman (Star Trek: Discovery), and even Kylie Minogue as herself, among so many others. It's a sprawling cast that makes you point and say "heeyyyy!" over and over again throughout the first episode or two, and nobody is so obviously outsized compared to the rest to be the immediate obvious choice for who did it.

(1 Bad): I really did enjoy the show, quite a bit, and found it really, really easy to digest. Buuut... it was too long, and there were obvious points in the show that felt like padding. There were at least three lengthy cold opens that take place outside the central mystery, starting with the opening of episode 4 which finds Cordelia on Hawaii teaching her nephew birding. It's a nice mini-story in itself, but it really hastens the narrative thrust of the central mystery.  Likewise, the framing device of a Congressional hearing about White House security turns the whole story into a retelling, and, again, it was unnecessary. It is where we get former actual senator Al Franken and Eliza Coupe sparring with each other, but I don't think any aspect of this framing device was really servicing the story. This could have been 6, or even 5 episodes easy. 

META: The final episode is almost 90 minutes, so, movie length. The majority of this episode is Cordelia assembling her shortlist of persons of interest (not suspects) and then walking them painstakingly through the events of Chief Usher A.B. Wynter's death. It really is a tremendously convoluted mystery and there's no way the casual observer could figure it all out given the clues presented, because there's still clues revealing themselves in this final episode that tie it all together. It mostly works, but if there are more Cordelia Cupp adventures, it can't be a repeatable formula.  I would hope a future series might be movie length individual adventure (Columbo/Sherlock-style) or a series of shorter, tighter mysteries.

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season 1 | season 2 | season 3

The What 100: Ian and Poppy have returned to Mythic Quest but are the runners-up to their former protege Dana who has a massive hit on her hands with Playspace -- a game development tool and user-developed-game sharing hub -- and developed a massive ego along with it...but is seeing none of the monetary rewards. Jo and Brad have gone all-in on backing Dana, but find even their considerable abilities to manipulate David has its limits. David and Rachel are called before Congress regarding an inquiry on whether Playspace is actually child labor. It goes poorly. Oh and Poppy has a boyfriend...and then gets pregnant, and Ian just can't handle it.

(1 Great): This season of Mythic Quest has been, generally, quite fine, and consistently so. It's settled into its character types and their dynamics pretty well and knows how to get the mileage out of them for a lot of chuckels, chortles and laughs. The season's best episode, though, is "The Fish and the Whale", episode six, which finds Brad attending a poker night at David's house thinking he can completely shark David, and win Dana a release from her contract. David's space, vintage 70's decor through-and-through is perfection, and the local first responders that he's assembled as his poker crew, who genuinely admire him no less, baffle and dismay Brad to no end. Danny Pudi's narration certainly recalls the classic "My Dinner With Abed" episode of Community, mainly in how it stands out from the normal structure of the show. Pudi usually only gets the spotlight once a season, but he always makes it count, and David Hornsby is really the show's secret weapon. He's the Charlie Brown of the series, so it's always tremendous when he actually gets to kick that football.

(1 Good): The second best of the season is "Villain's Feast" where the gang are summoned to a murder mystery party by a mysterious benefactor, and sussing out the benefactor becomes more of the objective than the murder mystery. Everyone's dressed up and the manor that the episode is shot in is perfection. It's a real work-outing detour of an episode which allows all the main cast to interact with each other and to really hit those dynamics hard. As noted above with The Residence, I'm liking a good murder mystery and this one is so silly and fun.

(1 Bad): It's not a bad season, but the past three seasons of Mythic Quest have all had a definite highlight in their stand-alone episodes which usually travel back in time and explore characters and subject matter almost tangentially related to the show. Lady Kent and I were really anticipating such an episode this year, and it kept us waiting later in the season than ever, episode 8, "Rebrand"...and it wasn't really worth the wait. It's not a bad episode but it's also decidedly not as good or emotionally impactful as any of the three prior standalone episodes. This one focuses on a now late-teens Pooty, Ian's estranged son and massive YouTube celeb. He's a kid who has everything he could want but realizing that money doesn't buy happiness or a genuine connection with his father.  I dunno, I just don't really care about the struggles of a YouTuber, and even though it finds an emotional core, it still doesn't resonate very strongly. 

META: David might be the glue of Mythic Quest, but the dynamic between Ian and Poppy is what the show has grown to revolve around. It's the heart and the muscle of the show. This season does a really solid job of showing Poppy wrestling with life decisions (ugh, the dreaded pregnancy), and then showing how Ian is wrestling with those same decisions that are Poppy's to make, and thinking he has a say in any of it.  The end of episode seven land like a meteorite, just threatening to crater the show, and I was really curious as to what that would look like, but after stepping back for the Pooty episode, we return to ...not really face the fallout, and to just get back to Mythic Quest's usual chaotic "who's in charge" nature. It's all quite fine, but not the strongest of the show's run.

After writing (and sitting on) this "review" it was announced that Mythic Quest had been cancelled by Apple, but they were giving the show a chance to re-edit the season finale to provide different closure. [edit: the change, it turns out, was the tweaking of the last scene. In the original "airing", Ian and Poppy share a kiss to which they immediately a confusedly recoil from, while in the edit they simply get back to work. I did not like that first ending and was glad for the re-edit]. After writing this I had been thinking how Mythic Quest was a rare show in this streaming age that was surviving beyond the two or three season run, only for it to then be cut down. I will miss it.

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season 1 | season 2 

created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson

The What 100: In fallout of Nat's death last season, Misty looks to solidify her friendships with Van, Tai and Shauna, but to no avail. Lottie burdens herself on Shauna, only to turn up murdered? The 'jackets investigate. Shauna is harassed by an unseen person, but blames Misty. Back in the 90's in the woods of Ontario, the 'jackets have forged a new life and society  in the wake of the cabin fire that left them unhoused. But finding coach Ben once again starts creating schisms in the group as they put him on trial. And the woods present new surprises.

(1 Great): I can't talk about the surprises that the woods present at the end of episode 8, but it's a fantastic reveal, which leads into episode 6 which may be my favourite episode of the show since season one. I just didn't see it coming, and it's the shake-up the show needed. I had started to tire of the woodland rites and rituals of the now savage 'jackets, but Coach's trial was certainly unexpected and the fallout from that trial (which carried on longer than I thought but mercifully not as long as it could have) is pretty wild and surprising. 

(1 Good): I'm sorry but Shauna and Tai, in the present day, are outright villainous, and Misty, the diagnosed psychopath, is somehow now the most sympathetic character of the modern day crew (you would think that would be Van, given the cancer and, well, being saddled with Tai...but she's kind of riddled with inaction). I've grown up watching Christina Ricci grow up and I've basically had a little crush on her the whole time, and it persists. With Misty she threads a fine line between too much and wounded bird, with woman-of-action wedged right in the middle and she's a delight to watch no matter what's going on. 

(1 Bad): Shauna seems to be getting pushed further and further into being the most awful character on the show in both time periods after, seemingly, being ostensibly our protagonist in the first and second season. I'm feeling a bit jerked around by it all and she's becoming an increasingly frustrating character to watch in both time periods...whether that's self-destruction, the show setting up specific stakes for later payoff, or just the complications of the trauma she's experience, it's all very, very hard to look at her the same way we once did.That her daughter Callie calls this out directly shows an awareness that the show

META:  The weirdest part of the show this season is Lottie's sudden murder. It seemed so out of the blue and not anticipated. It all happened off camera in episode 4 after Lottie being rather present for the first three episodes. It was just weird. Dark Taissa makes another return and she's an unsettling figure...but I find regular Tai to be even more disturbing, just a purely unhinged woman.  These 'jackets survivors are severely fucked up.  I feel like after a very rocky start the first half of the season, the second half really rebounded, capturing some of the wild, go-anywhere sensibility of the first season.

[Edit: In the spirit of honesty, I had written the above write-up thinking I had just finished episode 9 with only one episode to go, when I had in fact just finished episode six. The radical turn of events that happen in episodes 7 through 10 rather reinvigorated my interest in the show. The writing team upended the status quo twice in those four episodes and, yeah, they quite clearly are painting Shauna as the wickedest of the bunch. That twist at the end of episode 6 perked me up on the show when I was feeling pretty down, and then a special guest star shows up for two episodes that rocks the status quo even further.  The creative team also introduce a new "facing who you were" motif that bridges the character's pasts and presents in an uncertain metaspace that, once again, toys with the metaphysical in a way that is so typically non-committal of the show, but seems presented with real intentionality as to where it's all leading.  For the first time since the earliest of episodes of season 1, it feels like creative is in control and know where it's all going.]

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created by Graham Roland

The What 100: It's the early-mid 1970's and a bold armored car heist in Gallup, New Mexico has drawn the feds to the nearby Navajo reservation.  Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police is trying his best to investigate a murder where the only witness is a blind woman, but he doesn't have the resources. Enter the FBI, who give him a "you scratch my back..." offer if he will investigate the heist. The Feds plant a new deputy in the form of Jim Chee, who seems uncomfortable being out of the white man's world, but slowly finds connection he didn't know he was missing.  

(1 Great): Ever since season 2 of FX's Fargo, Zahn McClarnan has been an actor I'm always on the look out for, and just adore watching him perform. There are some actors who elevate any material they touch, some actors who don't know how to fail in a role. That's definitely McClarnan, and here as Joe Leaphorn, the center of the show, the question is how did it take so long for him to lead a series? (Answer: systemic racism, of course.)  He is the center of gravity upon which this show spins, and he's never seemed more comfortable, like he's been ready to be up front and in charge this whole time. We've seen him play dangerous, we've seen him play goofy, we've seen him play paternal, and here he's playing stoic, intelligent, observational, but with, so clearly, a deep wound inside him that he's pushing through every day. The scenes he has with Deanna Allison who plays Ellen Leaphorn, his wife, are a new take on the strained relationship of a cop and his domestic partner, one that has its own history and strains, but there's still a connective bond that refuses to separate them.

(1 Good): The tone of Dark Winds is integral to what makes it so special. It's a show that is proactively putting Native American culture and heritage as well as trials and tribulations specific to its community front and center. It's containing most of its show within the confines of the Navajo reservation, but the ugly influence of the white man's world - capitalistic greed, systemic oppression - it all is weight in the subtext, as the characters and community can sense it. But it's not a show that buries itself in weight,it's not a message show outright. It's still a detective procedural in its own way. In the sun-drenched New Mexican desert lands - often shot beautifully, and just as often shot with intensity - the subtext is just the sweat running down one's back.  

(1 Bad): This is really nitpicky. Some of the sequences feel under-baked, lacking vision, and so the edits or the framing might feel cheap or out of place in what seems to otherwise be a prestige drama. I'm curious to see if those awkward moments show up in the second or third seasons, or if it was just a matter of the crew learning as they go.

META: My expectations for Dark Winds were set, oddly enough, by an episode of Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries.  Season 3 featured an episode that put the spotlight on the rangers of the Navajo Nation, and the rangers who investigate paranormal activities reported by residents across the grand span of the land. If ever there were a new take on the X-Files that needed to be a series, this was definitely it. I thought Dark Winds would be, if not outright be a paranormal-only show, at least have a foot in the paranormal door, kind of like True Detective.  The interesting thing (and not actually disappointing) about the show is that it's never overt about anything metaphysical, but it's there, they acknowledge that there are aspects to life and culture that have unexplained origins, even if, at least in this season, there's nothing paranormal at all about the events. It's a very human drama.

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created by Dario Scardapane, Matt Corman, Chris Ord

The What 100: Wilson Fisk is elected Mayor of New York City, because, hot take, all elected officials are criminals. He's instilled a ban on costumed vigilantes and assigned a task force of the NYPD's most unhinged and morally bankrupt officers to take down anyone who would dare do some masked crimefighting. Thankfully for Matt Murdock, he's already hung up his horns after the death of Foggy Nelson pushed him to the brink, and Karen Page left, unable to stand by and watch him self-destruct (again). But a series of event in Matt's professional lawyering life force him into doing more on the streets of Hell's Kitchen again, including taking on a mass murderer and paying Frank Castle a visit. Matt also dates a psychiatrist who also happens to be Fisk's marriage counsellor.

(1 Great): It is remarkable how much goodwill there is out there for Charlie Cox's Matt Murdock/Daredevil. He was in three wildly uneven seasons and one definitively not-great crossover series on Netflix in the mid 2010s, but nobody ever questioned how good Cox was in the role. And when Cox turned up in Spider-Man: No Way Home for a brief cameo, people lost their shit, and many cite his appearance in She-Hulk as the series highlight. So it really is just great to have Cox in the role back on the screen any time he wants to play it. It's a pretty comfortable glove for him and he wears it very, very well.

(1 Good): Born Again is not "Season 4" of the Netflix series, nor is it a reboot. It is a hybrid sequel that takes what it can of the past while seeding its characters and setting much more firmly into the MCU, and you know what? I liked it a lot. Fisk making a comment about Spider-Man, Matt getting invited over to Kamala Khan's house for dinner, callbacks to characters from Hawkeye... yes to all. Shared universes still make me giddy (maybe less so than they used to, but I can't help it).

(1 Bad): While I generally enjoyed Daredevil: Born Again it definitely does not hang together as a whole. It fails to find a thematic through-line to build its season around, even though it has so many options. Talking about corruption at the highest levels of government and the people who support them and how just punching and kicking will not take it down would be one theme it could explore. Another would be talking about police brutality and the injustice that takes place when the men in blue use their influence to protect even the worst of their kind. Another could have been just exploring trauma, both Fisk's post-near-death experience and Matt's grief over Foggy (and his fear of his own rage in response)... dating a psychiatrist should have yielded so much more. It winds up taking these elements and more and tossing them into a pot of soup such that no individual piece has its own flavour anymore.  The story arcs are ill-defined, which, in a way, gives it a very 1980's comic book feel, back when serialization was still kind of experimental, but it was somewhat unsatisfying as a week-to-week experience overall.

META: Born Again began life as a much longer project, it was intended to be Disney+ and Marvel's longest single-season series (it was to clock in at 18 episodes) and be more forthright a continuation/season 4 of the Netflix series, last seen in 2018. But around half-way through production, Marvel execs could see that either what they had wasn't working, or what they had wasn't working for the new direction they wanted to pivot to. And so the head writers/showrunners were let go, a new team brought on, new scenes and episodes filmed, and never is that patchwork more noticeable than in the first episode.  But it continues to be felt throughout the entire series where the total whiplash can really wreck your brain.

There's definitely more Daredevil to come, I just hope there's a better plan (and more actual Daredevil in costume) next time around. And I want to see Matt at the Khan's for dinner.

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