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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3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): In the Lost Lands

2025, Paul WS Anderson (Resident Evil: Retribution) -- download

There's a lot to unpack in my head over this post-apocalyptic CGI fantasy movie from a director who apparently makes movies for his wife to star in. I rather enjoyed his previous romps with his wife, primarily his adaptations of the Resident Evil video games into ... something entirely different. They are terrible, but I find them terribly fun. They, at the very least, have somewhat of a focus to them. This one seems the opposite, unfocused and unsure of what it was doing beyond individual scenes, like trying to make a movie from someone's concept art portfolio.

This movie should be right down my alley. Its mythical, its fantastical, its post-apocalypse. It has monsters and magic, guns and swords, and even an Old West vibe. And noting my oft yelled complaint about lack of style, its has "style" in buckets.

The problem is that it was terrible, and not Fun Terrible, just plain terrible.

Earth, after an unnamed apocalypse, but harkening back to 80s scifi, very likely nuclear. Civilization is now boiled down to one city, a hell hole of a place dominated by an Overlord and a Church. Its people seem to spend all day digging in a strip mine for ... something; I don't remember, and its not any major part of the plot (plot???). If there are Churches, then there are witches, and this one is Gray Alys (Milla Jojovich, Monster Hunter), whose motif is to give a person whatever they ask of her, no matter the consequences. The movie opens with them failing to hang her.

And there is Boyce (Dave Bautista, Blade Runner 2049), a hunter (of what? not sure.) and anti-hero in a cowboy outfit with guns and a two-headed snake. When he's not fucking the Overlord's queen, he's wandering the Lost Lands. Gray Alys is approached by said queen with a request -- steal the power from a shapeshifter in the Lost Lands for her, so she can take control from her dying husband. Alys accepts, because she can refuse no one, and grabs Boyce from a bar on the way out of town.

There is a handy RPG style map of the path from the city to the lair with various points of interest along the way, all with cool po-ap names. They are pursued by members of the Church who steal a train and are lucky that Boyce's journey also happens to follow train tracks and that this po-ap world still has... a functioning rail system?!?! At any moment Boyce could have lost his pursuers by ... just taking another path, but implications of "epic adventures" are that there is "one safe path".

Like I already mentioned, the movie is not so much made of continuity but a vast series of visually stunning CGI backdrops connected by vibes. Unto themselves, they are lovely to look at and intricately built but as a movie... not so much. Dialogue is usually in three word bursts punctuated by grunts. Say something, cut to another CGI rendered scene, say something, move on, say something, burning skyline, say something, thundering train... you get the idea. The action scenes are commendable and impressive and probably the only contiguous thing in the whole movie.

If I was 14, I would have loved this movie. The riot of visuals would have overwhelmed much of my brain and just produced fodder for my D&D or Gamma World games, but Old Me is less impressed, and more easily annoyed.

If you are wondering what ended up happening plot-wise, it was supposed to be a twist that the shapeshifter was actually Boyce and everyone he leads into the Lost Lands, he ends up killing. We are supposed to get the idea that lots of people go into the Lost Lands to kill the werewolf, but the movie never says "why" -- it is a vibe of epic fantasy that heroes (there aren't any actual heroes in this movie, just anti-heroes) always seek out monsters to slay. Gray Alys does slay Boyce, does take his skin and then brings it to the Queen so she can depose her husband and the head of the Church but... well, it all just ends in a confused pseudo-epic muddle with Boyce alive again.

Meh.

I had to constantly tell me the movie was not called "Into the Lostlands", which is harkening back to a different po-ap TV series called "Into the Badlands", which I swore I would have written about, but the evidence is not to be found.

KWIF: Materialists (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week(end) in Film.

This Week(end):
Materialists (2025, d. Celine Song - in theatre)
I Like Movies (2022, d. Chandler Levack - Netflix)
Postcards from the Edge (1990, d. Mike Nichols - Hollywood Suite)

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In Materialists, Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, a matchmaker for a high-end matchmaking firm in New York City. Her clients are, not unexpectedly, pretty much the worst. They have impossible standards that they want to be met, which, as Lucy points out, comes down to ticking boxes and math. Dating is just a numbers game for her, and she's pretty good at negotiating that game for her clients.  She knows that if enough of the boxes get ticked, and the chemistry is agreeable, there might be something long term there, and she also knows that for the boxes that don't get ticked, there's some salesmanship that needs to happen. 

The type of people who use a high-end matchmaking service do so to meet people who are like them, shallow, vapid, materialistic, arrogant, with a certain level of wealth and status that they don't want to be challenged by trying to date anyone in an lower tax bracket. 

The men Lucy needs to interview are ugly human beings, just vile and entitled and very wealthy, and it would seem it's only through gritted teeth that Lucy would dare set them up with one of her female clients, except for the fact that most of her female clients are just as equally withering at their core. Of course, this is all in the context of people searching for the "ideal" partner, and mostly the ideal doesn't exist. Lucy's job is to set expectations while also providing hype. She really is very good at her job.

If this were a romcom, Lucy would be on the outside looking in, being the "everywoman" character who hates and makes fun of her clientele, who is morally above all the shallowness because she believes in love, and then there would be the complication of her falling for one of her rich clients while the poor ex-boyfriend who was the love of her life reenters at the same time.

But Lucy isn't above it all. Lucy is a titular materialist, she wants fancy restaurants, silk sheets, a 2000 square-foot Manhattan apartment, so in a way she relates to her clientele fairly deeply. But she is not proud. Where does love fit into the equation? In Lucy's profession, it's very much a product of the box ticking, a promise for the future, and not, like, the first box that needs to be ticked. 

Materialists is not a romcom, though it could very easily be twisted into one (without much twisting at all). It is a romantic drama that explores the idea of dating and relationships as something that can happen in a quantifiable manner.  In the backstory, despite loving her poor actor boyfriend John (Chris Evans in his best role and best performance in seemingly a very long time) she couldn't stand being so poor and she hated herself for it. Five years later at the same time she runs into John working catering service at her clients' wedding, she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), who is kind, smart, thoughtful, considerate, rich as fuck, handsome, ticking every damn box (a "unicorn") who, unlike his contemporaries is looking for a woman who is her own person, is smarter than he is, and will challenge him and make him better. Together they are ticking each other's boxes, but romantic stirrings of an unresolved relationship complicate the scenario (not that there's much time at all spent on screen gnashing teeth over this). 

In a typical Hollywood romance, these two men would be vying for her affection in direct competition, but this is not that film. The film explores Lucy's relationship with each of them, and deepens our understanding of both her character and theirs along the way. There's no competition, as Lucy has full agency over what she's doing with her life and with whom.

I am not much of a Dakota Johnson fan. I find her very reserved, almost robot-like on-screen persona very cold and unappealing. She is often hard to read emotionally, or very constrained in her emoting, which means her range as an actor has always seemed very limited. This is pretty much the perfect role for her, where she is, by nature and profession, very calculating, and the lack of big emotional reactions means that the smaller ones have a much greater impact. I still can't help but think how much more charming a movie this would have been if Celine Song's Past Lives collaborator Greta Lee were the lead of the film, but nothing about Johnson is actually detracting from the production, which, if you haven't guessed, I liked quite a damn bit.

Hollywood has, for a long, long damn time celebrated and revered lifestyles of the rich and wealthy, and it's only in recent years that the "eat the rich" mentality has creeped its way into the on screen discourse, but this film isn't actively chomping down on those corpulent, cash-rich bones, and it's not directly engaging in class warfare, but it is more than making its point that wealth cannot buy either love or happiness. It is also very directly calling into question how money changes one's nature, how commoditizing people, whether as potential romantic partners or as subjects reduced to checklists, can have pretty brutal consequences, especially if you have any ethics or emotions at all.

Good movie!

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It's a tough slog hanging out with 17-year-old Lawrence, who says he "likes" movies but has built his whole personality around loving movies and being smarter or more knowledgeable about them than anyone else in Brampton. His hyperfixation has led to a superiority complex over something most people don't really care about, and his obsession has isolated him from others, while that isolation has fueled a need to feel superior, that his knowledge of and experience with films somehow means he has talent and a future that matters more than others. It means none of these things, except that Lawrence is pretty much a narcissistic asshole most of the time to most everyone. Thank god this was a period piece because if Lawrence had youtube and twitter he'd be sucked right up into the manosphere, whining about what he is owed for literally doing nothing, how every problem in his life is someone else's fault and how hard it is for people to like you when you have a terrible personality and refuse to work on changing it.

In 2003 there was still hope fore people like Lawrence, still hope that when someone called you out on your toxic bullshit you would actually, you know, take it in and, just maybe try to be better.

We all know or knew someone like Lawrence, some of us were in danger of being Lawrence, and that make Lawrence a very, very difficult protagonist to get behind when virtually everything that comes out of his mouth makes you want to slap him across the face. But just when you're ready to give up on this obnoxious, aggravating shitheel of a person, writer-director Levack humanizes him again, showing him having a panic attack as the egocentric bubble spring a leak, deflating faster than the hot air he can give it.

It's a bold performance from young Isaiah Lehtinen, who weaves between being a snotty petulant ignorant jerk and a puddle of vulnerability with mastery. Krista Bridges as his mom, Terri, is able to deliver a mother's unconditional love through gnashed teeth, clearly unable to figure out how her little boy became this petry, insignificant tyrant, and how to undo it. Romina D'Ugo is the film's stealthy weapon, as Alana, Lawrence's boss at the video store. She's taken pity on this kid whose passion has warped him in a way she seems to recognize and be more than able to handle. From what we learn, it sounds like Hollywood is filled with Lawrences and it doesn't need another. Alana is the deepest performance in the film, her motivations much trickier to figure out than anyone else's, but clearly acted with purpose.

I Like Movies is painfully enjoyable, but ultimately rewarding, full of nostalgia triggers, Canadiana, and wonderful performances, as well as a coda that is far more hopeful than the Jordan Petersen-tinged future it seemed to be barrelling towards.

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It was only after Carrie Fisher's passing that I finally got around to reading some of her books. She was an amazing writer, telling stories of her life with a terrifically sardonic, biting sense of humour, being self-deprecating and playfully vicious.  In reading a few of her memoirs, I got a small sense of her life before, during and after Star Wars, and what a rocky road that was to her. She touched on being the child of famous parents and what that did to her, but it was never blame so much as origin story.

I didn't read Postcards from the Edge when I was in this little reading binge, but I had added it to the "someday" watchlist of movies to see. For the screenplay, Fisher adapted her own book which I didn't realize until doing a little "research" following the film wasn't another of her memoirs, but a fiction that had loose parallels with her own life in the "hey, write what you know" vein. 

Throughout the runtime I couldn't escape trying to place what I saw on screen into what I knew of Fisher's life, only to learn later it was a bit of a fool's errand. 

The story finds the 30-something, established-yet-still-proving-herself actress Suzanne Vale (Meryl Streep) overdosing while on a night out with a new (not-so-)gentlemanly acquaintance, Jack (Dennis Quaid). When she won't wake up he rushes her to the emergency and drops her off anonymously, where she has her stomach pumped. She's forced into rehab by her doctor and mother, of which we only see a little. A month later she's signed on to star in a new gig but the film's insurance company will only sponsor her if she is under the observation of a responsible party, so either stay in rehab or live with her overbearing, alcoholic show-biz legend mother, Doris (Shirley MacLaine). She reluctantly chooses the latter.

The sober life, both on set and off is difficult for Suzanne, temptations ever present and addictions supplemented. She is pushed and pulled and prodded and denegrated every which way by her producers, co-stars, director, mother and the re-emergence of her gentlemanly acquaintance Jack seems like a fantasy as he sweeps her off her feet, only to find that relation-ship is full of holes and sinks fast.

Given how Fisher wound up living next door to her her mother, Debbie Reynolds, for a decade and a half before they both passed away within one day of each other, I was thinking that Postcards would center around their relationship, maybe how their recovery from addiction wound up in much healthier co-dependency.

But the film is unfortunately much more unfocussed than that. Where a whole film could be sustained around a celebrity's time in rehab (maybe John Mulaney will write that one), or the pressures of performing and creating while struggling with addiction, or a toxic Hollywood romance that starts out like a dream and ends in near slapstick... Postcards instead tries to do it all. It's not that it does any of these stories badly, it just doesn't give them the time or space they deserve. (Apparently in the novel, Suzanne's mother is barely present at all).

Could Meryl Streep act badly if she tried? It would probably be a good performances of someone trying to be a bad actor. She just can't fail. And here she clearly spent time with Fisher and picked up on her tone and mannerism, even if physically they look very different. It was hard not to hear Fisher's voice in her performance, and even though it was performed very well, it didn't fully seem natural. MacLaine, on the otherhand, is a powerhouse through and through and through. She was locked in, and you always get the sense of a proud, loving mother, but also riddled with flaws being the product of the showbiz system for so many decades.

There's small roles for Gene Hackman (in a beautifully tough yet tender role as Suzanne's director), Annette Benning, Richard Dreyfuss, Rob Reiner, Oliver Platt, CCH Pounder and more than a few other recognizable faces, but it highlights again the scatter shot nature of the film overall as none of these characters ever develop or have lasting presence in the story.

The film features three musical performances, two featuring Meryl singing which I always forget she can do (one performing live with Blue Rodeo over the end credits), and one finding MacLaine wringing out a Sondheim number. Music in the film is by Carly Simon.

There's a lot that is remarkable about Postcards, but it needed tighter focus. In the end it's got Fisher's fingerprints all over it and it makes me miss her. Time to read a few more of her books.

KWIF: 28 Years Later (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. One brand new movie and a lotta real old shit. Yes, stuff from the 90's is now real old.

This Week:

28 Years Later (2025, d. Danny Boyle - in theatre)
Earthquake (1974, d. Mark Robson - HollywoodSuite)
The Swimmer (1968, d. Frank Perry - HollywoodSuite)
Look Who's Talking (1989, d. Amy Heckerling - HollywoodSuite)
Sudden Death (1995, d. Peter Hyams - HollyWoodSuite)

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28 Weeks Later was my inauguration into the post-apocalyptic trope of "the worst thing about the end of the world are the other survivors". Ever since that film, any time I'm watching anything po-ap I've come to expect the worst out of the people we haven't met yet, the others alluded to off in the distance. It is, frankly, my least favourite part of po-ap, but also probably the most honest.  Zombies, aliens, natural disasters, giant/tiny monsters we can survive...but each other? We're showing ourselves Right.Now. we really can't do it, we can't learn a goddamn thing about peace and harmony and coexistence as long as there are people who want more than what others have and are willing to go to any extents to have it. But I digress.

So imagine my surprise when the spectre off in the distance is not what they are believed to be, and in the darkest of spaces we find humanity, and humanity not just caring about life, but caring about death. 

In 28 Years Later, the UK is closed off from the world and the survivors are left to the infected, and the infected are left to the survivors. Our protagonists Isla (Jodie Comer), Jamie (Aaron Taylor Johnson) and Spike (Alfie Williams) live in a busy, close-knit village on an island connected to mainland Scotland by a causeway. Tide goes out, one way in, one way out, tide comes in. Jamie is taking 12-year-old Spike to the mainland for his first hunt, a right of passage among the villagers. Isla suffers from an unknown malady and is only sporadically aware of the here and now. There is no medication and no doctors to aide her. So after a very tense hunt full of close calls, when Spike hears of a doctor, even one gone mad, out on the mainland, he takes Isla out by himself to get her care.

I'm skipping over plenty, but that's the glory of discovery in a film like this, where our protagonists (and the filmmakers, and us, the audience) have gotten to a certain comfort level with the setting, surroundings and threats... it's the unexpected, and scripter Garland and director Boyle have much up their sleeve in this regards.

This includes hints at the nature of the infected, survivor subcultures on the mainland, the status quo of the outside world, and a bookend that... well... let's just say there'll be a lot of discussion around it until the sequel comes.

I had no expectations when it came to 28 Years Later, so they were neither met, nor dashed. Boyle both impresses and frustrates with his choices in direction and editing, but more the former than the latter. His shots of wilderness (with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle) are incredible, but his zombie frenzies, full of quick cuts and abstraction, are the weakest part of the film, and the style pulls me out more than enhances the chaos and scariness. 

Garland's script takes a turn that pleased me greatly, as I worried Jodie Comer's whole role was to be the frail, discombobulated matriarch whose whole purpose and contribution to the story is to motivate young Spike into rash action. I mean, it's a bigger role than just that, but doesn't exactly serve a nobler purpose (in a turn in Garland's script that displeased me only minorly).

But, that ending is bound to baffle, or even infuriate some, especially if you didn't know there's more on the way. Even if you did... I mean... I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it, which, after nearly 2 hours of stone-faced severity in muted, grainy colours, to have this blast of pizzazz and vibrancy...it's jarring. It hearkens to British subcultures, nodding to the droogs of A Clockwork Orange and the Inglorious Basterds, and promises something quite different in the picture to come.

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The disaster movies were the superhero movies of the 70's. All spectacle, where big stars would grab their paycheque to entertain the masses with an eventful show of calamity and destruction. There are the ones with the lasting legacy, like The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure and Airport, and then there were the rest.

I don't think I had heard of Earthquake before this year (if I had, it definitely didn't stick in memory), the Charlton Heston-led production which attempts the same ensemble cast put though their paces through not dissimilar story beats in the aftermath of calamity. In this case, if it weren't evident, there's an earthquake in Los Angeles.

Of course, the first act is all about setting up our cast of characters whose personal drama don't really matter at all once the shit goes down. It's all just kind of about survival. Ol' Chuck plays an ex-football star with a trope-addled wife (Ava Gardner) one could only call "queen of the harpies". There's a young woman (Geneviève Bujold) with a pre-teen kid who Chuck likes to visit. The film plays it off as altruistic, Chuck helping the widow of a colleague, but his wife thinks he's having an affair.  

There's a good cop having a bad day (George Kennedy), the seismologists who, in Jaws-like fashion, warn the mayor of the earthquake, but refuses to sound the alarm, and there's a motorcycle stuntman (Richard Roundtree) and his team who are also here because Evel Knievel (only took me 3 tries to spell it correctly) was hot at the time. There's also a few other odds and sods, including a creepy grocery store manager and Lorne Greene playing Chuck's father-in-law (only 8 years older than him in Last Crusade fashion).

The earthquake kicks off the second act with a whole lotta miniatures, and Star Trek-caliber flopping about as the camera shakes and tilts and applies an in-camera distorting effect to make it look like buildings are wobbling. It's delightfully corny, but the titular earthquake is not the threat of the film... it's all the crumbling infrastructure, downed power lines, and, of course, the human component afterwards that are the real threat.

Earthquake is not a great movie, it's most definitely a product of its time, but it is tremendously entertaining. I loved all the creative effects and model work and set pieces and matte paintings. I also really appreciated how the filmmakers here really tried to think logically about what the threats would be in a post-earthquake scenario, and how normal people, not superheroes by any stretch, could work through their treacherous situations. In keeping with the formulae, not everyone comes out unscathed.  If only there were any real weight behind it all. The characters are so basic and average, you almost forget most of them are movie stars.

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When we first meet the titular Swimmer, Ned, he's running through the woods in his swim trunks... it's a 55 year old Burt Lancaster looking better than I ever did at my absolute fittest. He breaks through the clearing an dives into a pool. It's not Ned's pool, but he is also not an unwelcome guest, although he has missed the party by 8 hours or so. The hungover men love him, the hungover women love him even more, and Ned ably flirts with them all. He's far from home, but obsessed with pools and swimming and reckons he can "swim" home, backyard hopping from pool to pool.

As Ned progresses through his journey, hitting on anything with breasts along the way, it becomes clearer and clearer that Ned isn't right in the head. He's having some kind of existential crisis mixed with a nervous breakdown peppered with a psychotic episode.

The closer Ned gets to home, the more the real Ned comes to light. He's not that life of the party to those who had really gotten to know him, he's not the wonderful father he purports to be, and as a lothario he's left them wanting, but not wanting more Ned. He's a cad, a deadbeat, and probably broke.

The journey of The Swimmer is one of character discovery for the audience, the teasing out of information that paint the picture of the man, but leading to no decisive clarity as to what triggered Ned's break, and leaving dangling the question of "how did he get here?" (both in the physical and metaphorical sense).

It's at times a riveting journey, but also at times a tedious one. The film could easily shave 25 minutes of montages and kaleidescopic lollygagging and not be the lesser for it (it's s film padding out a short story and it shows). I have to imagine that Matt Weiner, creator of Mad Men is a huge fan of this film, as Ned's journey seems to have made the map that Don Draper would follow.

I never knew where The Swimmer was going. It opens with such jovial frivolity, that it seemed like it was just to be a simple lark of a movie, a real late-stage Rat Pack-style hangout film with good looking people in swim trunks having whatever kind of conversations people in the 1960's had. Instead it doglegs pretty sharply into uncomfortable and darker terrain that had me saying "nope!" out loud, only for the film to be fully aware of its impropriety. It is a fascinating film, one I knew nothing about as it played immediately after Earthquake (it self sort of a random find one evening) and so happy to have had the chance to watch it.  It's stuck in my mind more than almost any other film I've seen this year so far.

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My favourite film podcast, Blank Check, has been covering the films of Amy Heckerling the past two months. As is typical with me and Blank Check, I want to follow along, but if the films aren't readily available on the streaming services I have (or in my DVD binders), then I tend to fall off the "follow along" train pretty quickly. Fast Times at Ridgemont High is streaming nowhere at the moment, nor is Johnny Dangerously  (while National Lampoon's Euorpean Vacation seems to have just popped up on Crave, weeks after "the two friends" have ripped the movie a new one so I think I safely pass that one up)  Look Who's Talking and Look Who's Talking Too popped up on the cable package Hollywood Suite last weekend, and I couldn't set the PVR to record any faster.

I can't remember how many times I saw Look Who's Talking, but it seemed like a lot. I was pretty into Rebecca from Cheers at that time -- hot messy women were my thing as an adolescent -- but even so, this Kirstie Alley-starring vehicle about a woman who has a baby as a result of an affair with a married man was such a quintessential 1980's "chick flick", I really shouldn't have cared. But for that baby to have an inner monologue voiced by Bruce Willis, suddenly this "chick flick" was the comedy sensation of the decade, drawing in people from pretty much every age group.  I mean, can you believe the things Baby Mikey is thinking?

Honestly, it was a revolutionary concept at the time, one which very quickly got beaten into the ground with subsequent sequels, TV spin-offs, and other shows and movies and commercials pilfering the gimmick.

The reality is Look Who's Talking is a sort of charming film about a woman, Molly Jensen, becoming a single mother and struggling real hard at it, trying to date and find a dad for her baby (the wrong way to date), while she strikes up a weird alliance with a hairy taxi driver (John Travolta) who agrees to babysit for her so that he can use her address to set up his grandpa in a local care home. There's definite chemistry between them, but she doesn't see him as being a good baby daddy, even though he's awesome with kids. *Shrug*.

The fact that baby Mikey has his inner monologue said aloud it Willis' playfully wry cadence kind of gets in the way and undercuts the journey Molly is on by more than half. At least a third of Willis' interjections were jarring in their insertion and, since we've all long gotten over talking babies, not contributing anything of real merit to the plot or story.

It is a strangely personal films for Heckerling, who found herself pregnant as a result of an affair, and George Segal's character reflects Heckerling's frustration with her real-life baby daddy, and doesn't paint a very kind picture.

It really is a hard film to hate. It's bright and filmic with two leads who are the opposite of unappealing, but whatever it was about its gimmick that made it such a phenomenon in 1989 has mostly worn off.  My apathy towards this one has left me with zero desire to watch Look Who's Talking Too.

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Director Peter Hyams has not gotten a series on Blank Check, where they review directors' filmographies one film at a time, nor will he likely ever. He is a journeyman director, one who had a stable career for over 30 years, and he quietly made some of the sleepiest of sleeper cult hits during that time. Three of his films have been covered on the Quentin Tarantno/Roger Avery podcast Video Archives (Bustin', Narrow Margin and The Relic) all with largely favourable critiques, and they haven't even touched 2010, Outland, Capricorn One, Timecop or Sudden Death.

It's almost too easy to look at the cover of any 90's Jean-Claude Van Damme flick and snicker, at least just a little, but Sudden Death is probably the least JCVD-esque vehicle of all JCVD films. In what can only be called "Die Hard in a hockey arena", JCVD is playing a fire marshal at Pittsburgh's Civic Arena, and he's scored seats to the Penguins' Game 7 Stanley Cup final against the Chicago Blackhawks bringing his pre-teen son and younger daughter. In attendance at the game is the vice-president so security it high.  But not high enough.

A large, well prepared team of mercenaries have descended on the stadium and successfully taken the vice president hostage, murdering plenty along the way. A deeply complicated money transfer scheme is their aim, based on seized off-books reserves the US government has access to, and their leader, Joshua Foss (Powers Booth), will stop at nothing to coerce the VP into getting it for him, including blowing up the arena.

The surprising thing is that there's really only one lengthy choreographed fight sequences (between JCVD and a stuntwoman in the Penguins' mascot costume) that shows off JCVD's usual fighting prowess. In this, his fire Marshall isn't an ex-marine, or has a black belt in tae-kwon doe, he's just a scrappy person with a few power moves, but he still gets his ass beat up quite a bit.  Most of what JCVD is asked to do is look stressed and panicked as he tries to disarm bombs and figure out how to rescue his kids, all while a big-time hockey game goes on inside, and the Secret Service attempt to reign in control on the outside. Is it the best use of JCVD's talents (and butt)? No, but he serves it just fine.

It's all second-tier Die Hard stuff, but it's still really damn enjoyable. Booth may not have the same gravitas as Alan Rickman or Jeremy Irons, but you want a big bad on a budget the man can deliver.. He's absolutely vicious, and the death toll he and his team are responsible for is ridiculous. They really don't care (they even pull the trigger on a child at one point!).

Hyams and crew use the Civic Arena to its fullest. The arena sports a moon roof feature where a wedge of the roof retracts to reveal the night sky and fireworks.  It also is wide enough to, infamously, drop a helicopter into. There's such an energy added to the movie by having a hockey game going on in the middle of it, with the big roar of the crowd and the excitement of the goals being scored. It's a film taking its threat and its scenario seriously while also remembering to have fun with it (at one point JCVD needs to go out on the ice disguised as the Penguins' goalie, to which he keeps repeating "oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit" as the play starts streaking towards him).  

I delighted in this movie. Hyams is such an ultra-competent director, he keeps the suspense suspenseful, the action actiony, and paired with JCVD manages to keep the protagonist of the film the underdog throughout.