Watching: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

2024, Amazon

I am just going to assume the writeup for the first season got eaten by my great TV Writing Malaise, which was not as bad as The Dark Year but does contribute to my "really, I didn't write about that?" reflections.

Kent did though. And this season as well. I am entirely fine with them making this series even if they don't attempt to be faithful to any Tolkien writings. For me, and my currently short attention span, simultaneously easily amused / bored by everything brain, just watching Tolkienest swords & sorcery play out on the screen is worth whatever travesty they are causing. Oh look, cool looking elves with sword & bow. Oh look, nasty orcses getting chopped. Oh look, a known Tolkien character! And another one! I am fine with it all. Marmy is not and she refuses to watch. But remember, she is the one who held a viewing party for one of the original movies and started it all with a background primer to the world. She knows her Tolkien and cannot abide the bastardization.

What 100. When we last left our liberal interpretation of the pre-LotR Tolkien world, a lot of shit had happened. We now find ourselves with Sauron (Charlie Vickers, Medici; sorry, but they need an actor with a more intimidating name than "Charlie" for such an evil figure) finding a new identity and a new patsy in Celebrimbor (Charles Edward, The Crown), vain smith of the elven city of Eregion. The survivors of Mt Doom flee the orcs back to the ruins of Pelargir. The rings have already started corrupting bearers and Durin's dad (Peter Mullan, Baghead) is fully engulfed. Galadriel (Morfydd Clark, Dracula) is at odds with Elrond (Robert Aramayo, Behind Her Eyes) about what should be done next. And not-yet-Gandalf (Daniel Weyman, Foyle's War) is separated from his not-yet-Hobbits but meets Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear, Men). Oh yeah, Númenor is fucked.

1 Great. To be honest I find it hard now, at least 5 weeks since I completed it, to remember anything actually great about it. I enjoy watching just about everything but nothing really digs in deep. I guess if there could be anything, it is the continued depiction of the dwarves. I have always loved everything dwarf and even the slightest bit of world building satisfies me greatly. The mirrors that bring in outside light to allow the gardens to grow! The appearance of other dwarves lords from other realms! The dwarven market place! Love it all, give me more please.

1 Good. Tom Bombadil. An almost unrecognizable Rory Kinnear as the cheerful, wise, always humming a tune side-character is just grand. He is there as a reminder that the wizards of the Tolkien world are not a bunch of normal guys who went to a school and learned stuff, but almost divine beings in their own right. 

1 Bad. I was not at all interested in the power-corrupts story of Númenor. I always balk at stories where an entire people can be entirely invested in their beloved "Queen" one day, only to be led down a garden path of "kill her! kill her!" the next day. Sure, if we currently look south of the border, utter lunacy is happening IRL but Númenor did not have social media and fake news, and to be such a power in the Tolkien world, they must have had more than a couple of people with backbone willing to stand up against obvious corruption. Its just tired story telling to me.

31 Days of Halloween: In a Violent Nature

2024, Chris Nash (ABCs of Death 2: Z is for Zygote) -- Shudder

This was one of the first movies I downloaded for the season, made moot by the fact we activated Shudder powers, but the last movie we actually watched. I heard it was a deconstruction of the slasher-in-the-woods (aka, the Friday the 13th / Jason Voorhees template) but it was less deconstructed, as it was stripped down and mostly from another viewpoint (aka, the slasher). 

I rather liked it.

Somewhere in Northern Ontario some stupid kids from the city are wandering around in the woods. They come across a ramshackle falling down... something and are talking off camera about stuff when one notices a necklace hanging from a pipe. He takes it and they depart.

The ground begins to burble and shift and a massive figure climbs out, shaking the soil from his shoulders. The Antagonist immediately sets off in... a random direction? Or is he being drawn to the necklace? The forest is ... beautiful? This is not the eerie forest of 21st century horror movies, no tall stark trees draped in spanish moss, no dead undergrowth and cold mists. Its quite lovely -- wild flowers and chirping birds. This is the wood you would wander with no worries of machete carrying freaks wearing hockey masks, even if it is Canada.

The Antagonist's (Ry Barrett, The Hyperborean) first stop is a poacher's place. We hear the argument between the Park Ranger and the poacher long before the shambling monster wanders into the guy's yard; we won't begrudge him being the first gruesome death. But no stupid kids, no necklace, so back into the woods.

And that's how the movie goes. We literally are following the killer as he makes his way through the long trek, finally drawn to where his totem is being held. The stupid kids joke with each other, tell each other tales, tell camp fire stories about the killer known to be in these woods, from some 70 years ago.

And then he starts killing them. But with patience, with graduated ferocity as these movies were always wont to do. The movie is not breaking new ground on the style for it is all horrific, unwarranted and terrible but how they choose to tell the story is ... interesting? I mean, there is already an assumption of some "enjoyment" to this sub-genre of horror, so I applaud the exploration. And its not overly festooned with extras, no useless adornments or shocking plot twists. He is a dead killer, who had shoddy reasons, and there is no reason why he keeps on coming back from the dead to kill again, nor why he also can be killed... well, kind of. 

In the end there is a Final Girl, as there always is. And only after she actually escapes the antagonist did I actually feel any sense of fear. She may be far away from him, far away from the gruesome deaths of all her friends and lover, she may be safe inside the vehicle of someone who picked her up on an empty road, but she is... utterly traumatized. And we know, we feel, we fear that the killer could appear at any moment. And we are afraid. Utterly.

This movie is like a study of these types of slasher movies, but in narrative form. In presenting each of the sub-genre's tropes it is commenting on them and their use in the movies that follow it. The mask, the weapons, the "creative kill", that the isolated wilderness should be inherently scary, that callousness carries karmic response from the universe and sometimes the universe is murderous. But the fun bit it carries through the movie is that the wilderness may be wild and terrible, but it is still so... beautiful.

Well, except for the black flies... the little black flies, picking your bones.

31 Days of Halloween: I Saw the TV Glow

2023, Jane Schoenbrun (We're All Going to the World's Fair) -- download

I entered into this movie, hearing only a bit of the buzz, with a concept as to what it was about... one that proved not quite accurate. I knew it was about a cult TV show that may be more than just a mere TV show, maybe one that was not quite ... real ? Like Channel Zero? And it was that, at one layer, but at the deeper layer it was more about the experience of gender dysphoria and being trans.

But let's talk about the horror movie as a horror movie aspects first, as I am not sure I am qualified to make much commentary on the actual meanings to the movie.

Owen (Ian Foreman, Let the Right One In) and Maddy are weird kids at school in the 90s. They find connection and Maddy invites him to experience a TV show she is into, a late night, sshhh-only-we-know-about-it low budget magic realism show about teenage heroes fighting odd creatures led by the evil Mr. Melancholy. 

The opening act sets the tone for the movie, definitely indie, definitely left of centre, weird and nostalgic, everything tinted in other worldliness. It wouldn't be for everyone, it would definitely be for That Guy, but it would also draw a lot of mundane viewers down the road of "I don't understand what I am seeing, but I know I am supposed to think its important". The creator has mentioned being influenced by Donnie Darko and I can definitely see that.

The movie shifts to years later, Owen (now oddly Justice Smith, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, only two years later) is still sneaking off to watch The Pink Opaque, at Maddy's (Brigette Lundy-Paine, Downsizing) place. I believe the horror is carried through the obsession the kids have for the very very bad looking show, the pink glow (yes, that pink glow) and the mild hallucinations Owen is having. Then Maddy confesses she is going to run away her abusive mother and wants Owen to come along. But at the last minute, he panics and bails. He confesses what he is doing to the mother of the child he was supposed to have been doing sleep-overs with. But Maddy does disappear, and it is depicted that its not seen as just a running-away, police tape and investigations.

And The Pink Opaque is cancelled.

Eight years later Owen lives a lonely, isolated life. His mother has passed and he is entirely disconnected from his father, an actor with nary a line, a father who he has to apologize to for coming home late, even though Owen is an adult. He works at the local cinema and is mocked by his coworkers.

Then Maddy shows up again. She tries to tell Owen what The Pink Opaque was really about, that it was not just a TV show, but... the real world? Maddy confesses to Owen that they are the main characters in the show (she does so in a bar on the edge of town; oh, look, there's Phoebe Bridgers on stage) and they were captured by The Big Bad of the show. This world, the one Owen lives in, is The Midnight Place, the scary dark realm of the show. And the only way to get back to the "real world" is to bury yourself alive. And she is going to do that soon, to go back, and wants Owen to come with her, because Owen is actually Isabel, the main character.

It is during these confessions that we get brief flashes of Owen wearing a dress, Isabel's dress from the show. There was more than just obsessing over a TV show going on in Maddy's basement. And when offered the opportunity to run away and embrace who Owen really was, he chose to stay. He chose to stay "he". Its not overt, the scenes are brief, but the disconnection you see apparent on Owen's face is terrifying, his voice thin and strained, his wheezing even more apparent.

Another time jump. Owen is in his 40s. He has embraced modern, adult, male life. He has a family (which we don't see), a career (fuck, he just works at a kiddie ball pit / entertainment zone because the movie theatre closed down) and a big screen TV. He looks half dead. He lives in the same house he grew up in, his father now also dead. The Pink Opaque is now available on streaming (so, it was a "real" show after all) but Owen sees it for what it was --- terribly low budget and badly done. 

One last time jump; he's in his 50s. He looks older, barely alive. During a kids party he has a breakdown, and... the other characters just... fade out... just NPCs without a script. We see Owen cut his own chest open, no blood, just the glow & static of an old CRT TV. Its still inside him, the "real world" but... he just leaves, meekly apologizing to everyone.

So, you may ask, where was the horror? What I recapped didn't have it, maybe a little bit here and there. But the style of the movie, how it was shot, scored and the tones all say that Owen was trapped in a world, both of his own making, and not ... real. Its too terrible a world, that initially was tinted with nostalgia for the 90s but once that has faded, the world is dark, dim, cold and empty. Nothing colourful, nothing PINK about it at all. Its fucking bleak. And the supernatural elements are very real to the movie, not just metaphors on top of the allegory. 

The director is clapping back against the response to the ending of the movie, people commenting on and complaining about its bleakness. But the salient point is that The Pink Opaque is still inside Owen, the possibility of finally letting it out, of finally embracing Isabel is there. There is always still time. Not everyone has to be trapped in an utterly mundane, middle-American, work to live, live to work lifestyle (OK, that's a bit of transference from my experience), where your true self is hidden -- you can become The Real You.

Kent's take on it, different yet more poignant.

31 Days of Halloween: Nightwatch

1994, Ole Bornedal (Nightwatch) -- Amazon

No, not the Russian fantasy-horror movie by Timur Bekmambetov; that came later, and has a space between 'night' and 'watch'. And no, not the movie with Ewan McGregor, that came not long after, but was also by the same director, and was the English language remake. This is the original Danish movie with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau long before he slept with his sister. OK ok, before his character slept with her. But OMG the baby-face! The frizzy hair!

Martin ((Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Game of Thrones) is a law student who takes a job as a night watchman in a local morgue in Copenhagen, hoping for more quiet time to focus on his studying. At the same time young women are being killed all over the city, and on one of his first few nights, a body is brought in by a cop, revealing the psychopath is sexually assaulting the dead women and scalping them.

The morgue is presented in the typical fuck-its-scary manner, but Martin is required to do his rounds. Modern day security guards have smart phones and QR codes they must snap as they do the rounds, but this one had Martin grab a key at certain points along the way and use them to move a timing device forward. The last key is in the cooler where the poorly draped bodies are, and where he is told about a rope that connects to an alarm. Should someone not actually be dead, they... would know to pull the rope? Anyway, no one wants the rope to actually be pulled.

Much of the movie is focused on building up the characters: Martin, his best friend Jens, his girlfriend Kalinka and Jens' girlfriend Lotte, as well as a few supporting characters like the cop investigating the murders who befriends Martin, claiming he had the same job when he was Martin's age. If you need an example of a movie that lives in its time (and possibly place? I don't know, not all that familiar with 90s Copenhagen) and how even "progressive Europe" was riddled with problematic sexism and misogyny, this could be a case-book. Jens is a horrible human being, and I assume part of his depiction as a prostitute humiliating drunken asshole is to have us assume he is the killer, but you might say Martin is worse for allowing Jens to do everything he does. I am not sure how we are supposed to see the main character as likeable but I guess that was the time? Boys will be boys?

Eventually the story collides directly with the murders as a prostitute Jens messes with becomes a victim and everything points its finger at Martin. Martin catches on that this is happening and does his own investigation, which leads him to the actual murderer but not in time. In the final act, Martin and Kalinka and Jens, finally showing some redeemable features, defeat the bad guy, and sum up a pretty decent murder mystery. 

But not a horror movie. While I remember the McGregor one being more... horror adjacent, this one sidesteps any such thing but for one scene where a tired Martin hallucinates a corpse getting up and walking down a hall. But all in all, an enjoyable flick, if you are able to stomach the problematic bits.

Of note, one of the reasons we chose to watch this old one is because the sequel, also with Coster-Waldau has just appeared on Amazon as well.

31 Days of Halloween: Itsy Bitsy

2019, Micah Gallo (feature debut) -- Amazon

The second in the spider trilogy we are imposing upon ourselves. Luckily, this spider was so obviously animated, I did not react in the bit. The movie also smacked of Straight to VHS level (and I mean .. from the VHS days) that any hint of "scariness" melted away in bad drama and lack of any real tension. 

If Infested had the spider coming from a Jordanian desert (would have been scarier to write 'dessert') and collected by capitalistic opportunists, this spider comes from a ... tomb raider in ... Asia? In a mildly interesting bit of backstory, the tomb raider is stealing the egg jar from a weird spider-god cult out of spite, for they killed the woman who raised him, the wife of a known treasure/antiquity collector... the seedy kind, not the Indiana Jones kind. Either way, the tomb raider tries to gift the egg jar to the collector, Walter Clark (Bruce Davison, The Lords of Salem), but they argue and the tomb raider smashes the egg jar before running off.

Meanwhile, Clark's new live in caregiver, a single mom with two kids in tow, arrives in time to see the tomb raider run out. The caregiver Kara (Elizabeth Roberts, Days of Our Lives) also comes with a major amount of PTSD from an accident that killed one of her children, and ended her marriage, and an oxy addiction. She is not a good mom. But the movie wants to set her up to be seen as a Good Mom, or at least a protective mom, but really, I side with her kid, she is not a good mom. Even on her good days, she leaves the 12 year old Jesse (Arman Darbo, Defenders of Life) to take care of his younger sister -- like everything: food, cleaning, dressing, etc.

So, yeah the egg jar had a spider egg in it, and the spider bit the tomb raider, who crashed his van soon after. But don't pay attention to that, as it doesn't really play into the plot. Pay closer attention to the not-really-ever-hidden puppy sized spider running around Clark's house. Oh, it moults a time or two, but it never really becomes sizeable, just enough to look icky big.

And that's the rub of this movie. It may be the 80s VHS style lack of tension (I mean, Bruce Davison was the king of these bad movies) and cheesy effects, but I was not scared of the spider one bit. Usually spider scenes make me jump out of my skin but..... not so much here. And despite them focusing on seeing the spider lay eggs in two places, we don't end up dealing with more than one spider. They leave that to the lame attempt to hint at a sequel.

Also, I am kind of annoyed that they would associate the movie with kid's nursery rhyme but not play into it. But it did lead to amusing Search Results when I entered into Amazon's search bar.

31 Days of Halloween: Caveat

2020, Damian McCarthy (Oddity) -- Shudder

We have fallen behind more than a bit. A work conference plus nightly "teammate socializing" followed by Con Flu (nasty head cold) has interrupted the flow of watching. Hopefully we can do better in the last week of the month.

Yes, we watched Oddity just a little while ago, and saw his previous feature available, and were curious. Its an odd duck of a movie that fills one of the niches for horror movie binging, in seeing what an indie film director can do with limited budget and an idea.

Isaac (Johnny French, Oddity) is hired by an acquaintance to babysit his niece at a remote location. The man explains that the girl's mother went missing and her father, his brother, has recently died. He needs someone to watch her as she has schizophrenia. When they arrive the location turns out to be an island only reachable by a ramshackle rowboat. Isaac tries to refuse but the man, Moe (Ben Caplan, Call the Midwife), tells him he doesn't have much choice as he needs the money. But that's not all. There is a caveat. 

The niece Olga (Leila Sykes, Lancaster Skies) goes catatonic when approached by strangers, or anyone goes into her room. So, Moe has a vest attached to a chain that allows one to traverse the house but stops at her door. The vest is padlocked and only she has the key. Isaac just has to stay with her until Moe arranges a place for her to stay off island. Shouldn't be long.

But that's not all. The unspoken, plainly ignored bit, is that the house is essentially some abandoned hovel the film producers found in the woods. It has holes in the walls, no heat, barely any power or water. Isaac is expected to stay here without any real food (there is a nod to a can of Spam he finds) or anything to stay warm. That anyone actually lived here is astounding and I cannot believe its an aspect of Irish rural living I am not aware of. Something is up.

Also, there is plainly a ghost wandering around. Olga herself, in a preamble, wanders around with a weird raggedy rabbit-playing-a-drum doll (you know, like those creepy fuck monkeys) which she holds out before like a dousing rod, discovering.... ghost activity. Ghost around, rabbit taps. Also, Isaac has an unnerving painting in his room which he tries to turn to face the wall, but it won't have it.

Also, Isaac seems to have memory loss. Olga, when lucid, tells him he was here before. And that is assumed true because his own brother's jacket, is found in the house. 

All this, whether jumbled together because of sloppy indie film making, or because of an unnerving agenda on behalf of the film maker strangely... works? The surreal setup is as much the horror as the jump scares they add in to remind us of the supernatural. You see, there is a conspiracy at works, involving Moe, his brother, them getting rid of his brother's wife, and Olga being held captive by them all. Why? Who knows, doesn't matter. But despite the convoluted plot (Moe's plot, not movie's) there is a leering ghost afoot and Isaac is just an unwitting pawn in all of this.

It was an effective movie, creepy as all hell, sometimes unintentionally funny ("OK, ghost lady, now I know you are just fucking with me !!!" -- I said that, not the character, but he should have) but always keeping you off-kilter.

KWIF: I Saw the TV Glow (+2)

KWIF = Kent's Week in Film. Been busy with TV, particularly a binge watch of season 5 of Lego Masters Australia which I found all-consuming most of the week, and a Mike Flanagan series the week before. But this isn't KWIT, it's KWIF.

This Week:
I Saw the TV Glow (2024, d. Jane Schoenbrun - Crave/HBO)
Hellboy: The Crooked Man (2024, d. Brian Taylor - rental)
Hard Target 2 (2016, d. Roel Reiné - Netflix)

---

I Saw the TV Glow is bound to perplex some people...maybe even most people who watch it. It is a highly stylized psychological horror film that acts primarily as - but not exclusively as - a Trans allegory. Actually, it's not even allegory. The text of it seemed so overt to me, but I also went into the film knowing only that it had something to do with Trans identity.  I can't imagine what most cisgender people who went into this without the Trans coding knowledge just what exactly they might make of it. 

But with the knowledge, I picked up on the subliminal very early. In the opening moments as young 11-year-old Owen is watching TV, a commercial for a Buffy The Vampire Slayer-esque program (by way of Canadian-produce kid's horror) "The Pink Opaque" provokes a reaction out of of their otherwise slack-jawed viewing. Later he's with his mother at a high school where she is voting to re-elect "the saxophone man", so that alerts us to it being around the start of Bill Clinton's second term. But in the booth, Owen's mom lets them press the voting buttons, and even though they knows who they're supposed to be pressing the button for, their finger starts trailing off for other options. "Don't ask, don't tell" is hard to ignore when his name comes up in an LGBTQ-framed context.

Milling about afterwards, Owen meets Maddy, a grade niner reading the season 1 episode guide to "The Pink Opaque". Owen is curious. Maddy, at first dismissive, senses something in Owen and engages. Owen can't watch the TV show she loves and she can sense that it will come to mean as much to Owen as it does to them. Owen fakes a sleepover at a friends in order to get to Maddy's to watch the show. It's a revelatory moment for Owen and a bonding moment for both. Two years pass and Owen is in high school and though they don't socialize together really, but Maddy leaves Owen messages and tapes of the show, and they start hanging out together to watch the show, season 5.  Late in the school year Maddy says they're skipping town, escaping it's small-minded trappings as well as an abusive stepfather. They encourage Owen to come with them, but Owen gets scared and tells on themself to get grounded so they can't be with Maddy when they leave.

Then Owen's mom dies, leaving them with their abusive, neglectful father. Shortly after that Maddy disappears, their TV set on fire in the back yard. Eventually everyone thinks Maddy is dead. And then "The Pink Opaque" is cancelled.  (The question I ask, was the burning of the TV in response to Owen's betrayal or was it in response to the cancellation, or are both, effectively, one-and-the-same...how real "The Pink Opaque" is is part of what makes this film so layered and fascinating)

This is the first half of the film, roughly, and generally. It's very much vibes...the music and the score, the neon haze and/or crackle of TV static as illumination sources. It's almost as if Owen and Maddy were floating between two worlds. Maddy says that, sometimes, "The Pink Opaque" feels more real than real life. 

The film is beautiful and atmospheric. It's patient and full of surrealism. It blurs lines between what we (and Owen) are seeing and what Owen is feeling (and therefore what we should be feeling). It's a difficult thing to really catch onto unless you understand Owen, the quiet, apologetic, mumbly kid trapped in their own head, narrating their own life from the inside. If you get the meaning it's like being sliced open and having your guts spilled out. Jaden Smith, who plays Owen, captures this hesitancy so effectively, as if Owen is this awkward bag of flesh and bone that seems to keep moving in spite of itself. 

The second half of the film jumps another 8 years ahead in time and we observe Owen's life...without Maddy, without their mother, as if there's nothing left in the world for them, but they keep going through the motions anyway. Owen is now in their early 20s, and their asthma is affecting them so direly that it's like they can barely breathe. But it's not asthma. Their skin is literally choking the life out of the not-Owen person within. Strange events keep happening to Owen, strange apparitions of TV static or pink haze that seem so alluring and yet Owen is so utterly wary.

And then Maddy, but not Maddy, returns. They return for Owen, but not Owen. They return for Isabel, the main character of "The Pink Opaque", but Owen is confused and doesn't understand. Not-Maddy tries to explain, to relate their life since they left this shitty town and its constricting mindset. Layers of analogies that should punch through only seem to make Owen dizzy, unable to accept anything they are saying.

More time passes, Owen ages faster than the rest of the world around them. They are trapped in a cage of their own making. Revisiting "The Pink Opaque" exposes to Owen an entirely different show than what they remember, something far more juvenile (much more the cheap Canadian Are You Afraid of the Dark, less of the Buffy), and containing none of the importance and meaning that it did to them for so long. They are lost in the world they've built around themselves, still apologizing for their existence.

I can tell you the broad beats of this whole movie and it won't even elicit a tiny fraction of the actual emotional wallop the film does. I was devastated throughout watching this film, tears streaming from my eyes uncontrollably. For an hour or two afterwards I just couldn't compose myself and I would still find myself sobbing in response to the intention of the film.

If you don't get it, it's not easy to explain. From a very high level, it's a film about being trapped. The Trans and non-binary messaging is the foremost intention, but the resonance, the emotion of feeling trapped, just in general, should feel at least somewhat familiar to most people. And finding escape, in television, in friendship, in shared experiences is so liberating to a point, but it's not everything if you're just not able to live life as you want to live it.

I refer to both Owen and Maddy as "they". When I call Owen "they/them" it's because there is who Owen really is and who they are pretending to be. Maddy's more subliminal story is about them understanding that they're not the lesbian everyone (including themself) though they were in high-school, but non-binary.

This definitely falls under the "horror, not horror" moniker, as there are no scares and not even really scary moments, but as a whole it is horrifying just the idea of being trapped in one's own skin, to have to wear not just an image, but an identity that is inauthentic, and to be aware of it, whether suppressing it or confronting it on a day-to-day basis. The film could have went really far into outright horror with metaphors of body dysphoria but Owen has so buried their authentic self that it's only in the films final moments that Owen is directly addressing that side of it.

After that the very end is so painful to watch if you are connecting with what you're looking at, a human in such excruciating emotional turmoil, a cage not entirely of their own making, but one they do actually have the key to escape from. It would be sad if I didn't have such empathy for Owen...instead it's heartbreaking.

The film has definitely connected with some (like me) and puzzled others, but it didn't break out into a cultural phenomenon, nor even a cult one...yet.  There's a lot of David Lynch in this, but where Lynch often doesn't seem to know where his ideas manifest from, leading to stories and scenes that are inexplicable, here Schoenbrun seems to know every intention they have in every moment, and every scene. There is not a single piece of absurdism or surrealism that doesn't have a specific purpose.  I felt a kinship between this and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Schoenbrun themself has also said Donnie Darko was a big inspiration. The inspirations are many beyond that. And it transcends them all. 

Maybe my favourite film of the year? I regret not seeing it in theatre.

---

When Hellboy debuted in comics in, I want to say, 1994 (what, research?) I was very much in. I loved the artwork of his creator Mike Mignola a tremendous amount and the mythos of the world of Hellboy expanded beautifully. Very quickly Hellboy became the best original creation of the 1990s.

But Mignola wasn't content to let Hellboy remain his sole vision, and the world of Hellboy grew, the stable of writers and artist participating in telling the legacy of the character expanded, and soon I was overwhelmed. I wouldn't say it was a deluge, but it was much more than I was prepared to take in. I don't know if any of it was watered-down, but I felt my connection to the character slipping.

The first Guillermo Del Toro movie re-sparked an interest, but my re-approach of the comics only showed me how far behind I had fallen and it felt daunting to catch up. The second Del Toro movie dove into fantasy in a way I couldn't connect with and I pretty much left Hellboy behind after that. That was 16 years ago.

I tried to watch the 2019 Neill Marshall-directed, David Harbor-led Hellboy feature and I just could not get into it. It's in a very small group of film that I've started watching and never finished (like, count-on-one-hand small).  I liked Harbor as replacement for Ron Perlman, but that's about it. This new, very low-budget (about 20 million) Hellboy is at the very least much more watchable than that.

Here Hellboy and fellow Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense Agent Bobby Jo Song are trying to take a demon spider back to home base, but get derailed. They're stranded in the Appalachian Mountains, coal mining territory which, they learn is besieged with witches. A World War II veteran, returning home after a long absense, seems to have much familiarity with what's happening and why. He tells the story of the Crooked Man, one of the first settlers to reach American shores, who played both sides in the Civil War, who was hanged for his treason and greed, but was given the task of collecting souls for the devil, with payment of one penny per.

Witches seem to be in vogue right now (see also Agatha All Along, Star Wars: The Acolyte for just two prominent examples) almost with a sympathetic eye towards them. Here, however, they're nasty creatures with nasty ways of dealing with things nastily, treating witches as humans-turned-creatures, less as humans transcending humanity.

Hellboy here is played by Jack Kesy, an actor I'm not all that familiar with (though I did watch some of the first season of The Strain which he was the lead in). He's seemingly emulating Ron Perlman's depiction of the character, and I'm not sure if that's for "consistency" (from the producers/director) or lack of his own definitive take. It's a good performance, even if he's not quite got the same presence as Perlman or even Harbor. 

Of the other key performers in the film  Adeline Rudolph as Bobby Jo I thought was the strongest actor in the film (and maybe got a little swooney over). She's a novice to the field, primarily an in-house researcher, and so Hellboy is quite protective of her (he's also a little swooney over her, but subtly). I also liked Jefferson White as Tom Fennell, the not-a-witch-man returning home and finding his old world in a bad state and feeling very much responsible.  Even the old, blind reverend, played by Joseph Marcell, is low-key incredible.  It's a good cast overall.

The film is, at 20 million, cheap for these kinds of things, and it feels it. In his review Toasty [we agree, almost] cites "fan flick that had been given a budget", and for sure it feels that way especially in its opening prologue where it uses a lot of unrefined cgi-effects to, well, ill-effect. I would say extract the prologue altogether and it would be a better film, but it does circle back into the story and is sort of necessary. I really wish they figured out a practical effect for that spider instead of a cheap digital render.

Most of that "fan film" feeling falls at the feet of director Brian Taylor, a filmmaker who has been in the Hollywood system since 2006's Crank, a movie I very much did not like. He made a lot of films with Crank co-director Mark Neveldine, including Crank 2: High Voltage, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, and Gamer, all of which I very much did not like.  I have seen some of Taylor's solo work, like some of the TV series Happy! (which I also did not like) and Mom and Dad (which I found ok). 

The feeling of a Taylor-Neveldine film was one that is frenetic, high energy, but not in a controlled way. It's ADD on acid, just out of control and I found them very unpleasant to watch. Taylor on his own is more toned down but he still doesn't seem to know how to resist constant cutting between obtuse angles and weird stylizations with little consistency or always carrying purpose. Here, with probably one of his lowest budgets, but highest demands on that low budget, his lack of stillness winds up looking quite cheap quite often. That said, he also captures some fairly stunning shots, and there are some very visually striking frames in this film. Buuuut, for every one moment framed so acutely, there are two that are not, and they can be distracting.

As Toasty opined, it "presents as a horror movie but without embracing it". And that's true. But in true Hellboy sense, at least that of what I remember of Mignola's 90's works, it was always a bit more "supernatural adventure" than "horror". This lives in a John Carpenter's Vampires vein, and in that vein it works for me. It's not a spectacular production, but I think for what Hellboy has been in film in the past, we've hit the right budget and style to be an ongoing franchise of 20 million dollar direct-to-streaming productions, especially if it's going to have Mignola and long-time collaborator Christopher Golden on scripting duties.  It's not rekindled a fervour in me to start cramming more Hellboy comics in my diet, but I really would watch more of these it they can sustain this upper-echelon-of-90's-DTV sensibility.

---

I'm writing these in reverse order of what I watched them in. I watched I Saw the TV Glow immediately after watching Hellboy: The Crooked Man, and within literal seconds of Shoenbrun's film starting I said to myself, "this is what a real movie looks like". Not to diss Taylor any further, but there's an assuredness to Shoenbrun's craft that Taylor just never had. Oh, Taylor's work has often seemed cocky, but it rarely backs that cockiness up with ...well, being objectively "good".  But compared to Roel Reiné, Taylor looks like Scorsese... at least he's getting 1 out of 3 shots that are really something appealing to look at (and most of the rest at least have some level of competency even if they are erratic and sometimes ugly), watching Hard Target 2 was even like watching a fan film. At least fan films the people involved care about what they are trying to do. I think Reiné, whose credits include The Scorpion King 3, Death Race 2 & 3, SEAL Team 8: Behind Enemy Lines, 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded, and seemingly a dozen other cheap-and-quick in-name-only sequels and/or paycheck vehicles for action movie has-beens and never wases.

Now, I've said it before, I inexplicably enjoy the "most dangerous game" man-hunting-man movies, so seeing a Scott Adkins sequel to the not-a-classic classic John Woo/JCVD film Hard Target pop up on Netflix's "coming soon" roster made me uncontrollably "oooh", and click that "notify me" button. You can bet I watched this dogshit as soon as possible. 

It was on a sick day. I laid in bed, not wanting to move. The only reason I finished this film is because I let myself be held captive by it. It's definitely not a so-bad-it's-good, it's just bad. Bad-bad. Bad bad bad bad bad. Stupid, and bad. And cheap. Lazy. Dumb. Nonsensical at times.

There's a whole world of direct-to-video/streaming/on-demand filmmaking that's been in operation since the 80s. Before that it was sci-fi and horror B-movies, or cheap foreign knockoffs, or Spaghetti westerns as opposed to the regal American ones. There's always been a place in cinema for this type of garbage. But ever since the digital age made the "film" part of filmmaking unnecessary and the accessibility of editing and other digital tools a thing of the past, these types of movies have gotten so cheap, and churned out so lazily that I fail to see how anyone gets any joy out of watching them, nevermind making them. They're soulless product that are soon to be even further deprived of soul by being entirely AI scripted. We probably won't even know the difference.

Scott Adkins is, in this sphere of modern direct-to-whatever a well known and respected commodity. He's a fairly handsome guy, not too shabby an actor sometims, and he's fucking fit at hell and loves doing stunts. In this film, the stunts seem like an afterthought so they're as cheap and lazy as everything else in the film. 

As far as the man-hunting-man element goes, this is a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy-of-a ....well, you get it. Nothing, absolutely nothing original is happening here that has not been done in another story of this type, and any attempt to add "flavour" to this by way of some form of romance or intrigue or political message is handled, well, stupidly as to make the effort irrelevant. 

We know Adkins is going to escape his very stupidly set up predicament. We know hes going to give his ill-gotten riches to his newfound local lady friend, and we know his comidically burdensome guilt that he carries is going to be absolved by an external force rather than any internal resolution. Its climax is one of the worst boat chases I've ever seen ending in one of the stupidest standoffs I've ever seen. 

I couldn't watch 2019's Hellboy for more than 30 minutes but I watched all of this garbage? I must have been sick....

31 Days of Halloween: Outside

2024, Carlo Ledesma -- Netflix

Full disclose; watching after October, but inserting into the empty spots, just because.

There is an aspect of zombie flicks that I would say started when The Walking Dead kicked off 14 years ago, in that the story is more about the humans than about the zombies, or the apocalypse, or more facetiously, "the humans are the real monsters here...." I think I have distinctively tired of that aspect.

Fourteen years ago I was fully immersed in the zombie survival story, in The Walking Dead, where we found out Rick and his wife Lori were having marital issues, and she ended up sleeping with Rick's best friend, and deputy, Shane. I mean, yeah they all thought Rick was dead, but... it was For the Drama. These days, this drama just tires me out.

I get it, you often write in interpersonal disputes to round out the characters, to make them more relatable, make them more human so they don't end up just being cardboard zombie killing machines. But I tire quickly when the human drama overshadows the survival story. Maybe its just me now, but I don't need to hear about your issues.

The movie opens with a family escaping an existing zombie apocalypse. The van they are riding in is damaged and covered in filth, dirty bloody handprints covering it all over, showing what they have come through to get here. The "here" is the family hacienda, the home where the parents of Francis (Sid Lucero, The Fake Life) live(d), a place he hasn't been to in decades because his father was an abusive asshole. After dispatching his zombified mother and finding his father dead from a self-inflicted bullet, Francis moves his family in.

Of note, this is a movie from the Philippines and the family home is a familiar character from other South Asian movies, what I can only think is a colonialist style of large home. I could probably find at least 3 other South Asian horror movies on Netflix right now that have such a house dominating the story. I suppose that is no more prevalent than Gothic Victorian Mansions playing the part of haunted houses in all American horror movies from an era. I wonder when they will be supplanted by McMansions from the last twenty years....

But all is not right in the little family. Iris (Beauty Gonzalez, Stolen Life), the mother, is more than a little shell shocked, and its not just from the zombies. Apparently she and her husband were already on the outs before people started eating each other. Francis owed a lot of people a lot of money, and it felt like it had only recently been revealed that she slept with his brother at least 15 years prior and Francis's oldest son Josh was actually his brother's child. Francis has only dragged the family to this last place he would ever go due to some desperate attempt to show control over his family situation. And control is all he really wants. They could have gone to a safe zone but he chose otherwise.

I would have been fine if this was established as character development, but this becomes the whole fucking movie. This movie is less about the zombies and more about Francis unravelling. And sure, if you want a movie about the drama of a man coming undone as the cycle of abuse repeats itself, then at least do it well. I am so tired of the cliches of a "weak man" being depicted as the one wearing glasses and a little chubby, while his more handsome, six-packed, perfect-haired brother is the "strong one".

Eventually the movie plays up to a point where Francis starts stopping his family from going "outside", not because there are zombies out there, but because freedom is out there. None of it makes sense; if no one goes outside, then there is no water, no food and death soon to come. But I guess that is supposed to be part of his psychosis?

The movie does try to redeem Francis, the external forces (the zombies) forcing him to actually protect his family instead of abusing them, but too little, too late and there is no way anyone was actually going to have sympathy for him.

But what about the zombies? At least the little part they played had some interesting ideas. They are not actually the undead, just infected people who ignore bodily harm as much as the walking dead do, but Iris does point out that they are dying off, all on their own, the bodies breaking down. They also have a little affectation that has shown up in a few zombie movies over the last years, in that their brains seem to be stuck in the last thing they were doing, the last utterances which they repeat over and over, full of anger and remorse, instead of guttural moaning. Still, not enough to redeem the movie anymore than Francis was.

Of note: because of the poster I swore the movie was going to be about the family retreating to a bunker where things would get worse, but I see now that was just a depiction of the basement, oddly ornate, where Francis was abused by his father as a child.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Wolfs

2024, John Watts (Spider-Man: Homecoming) -- download

Weird, but the main thing I liked about this movie was how it was shot.... the winter happening in NYC, snow coming down, turning to slush in the next scene, being depicted as heavier & sticking around the further from Manhattan the characters got, the emptiness of the city close to Xmas. Also, Aging Men with Guns which is my thing, but I refused to attach a tag to it. 

Again, with the inserting into October and the "I Saw This!!" vibes.

Margaret (Amy Ryan, The Wire) is somebody, a woman with the pull to call someone else to clean up her mess. This particular mess is a dead kid in his underwear and her covered in his blood. "Margaret's Man", as he is called in the credits but we will call Clooney (George Clooney, The American) from this point on (maybe he comes from "Margaret's Museum" ?) as that nomenclature is too bulky (like the word "nomenclature" isn't?) shows up -- an Aging Man with Gun, black jacket and a fixer's kit bag. She called a number, he came, he has a plan.

Then "Pam's Man" shows up, whom we will call Pitt (Brad Pitt, The Mexican) from now on. Pam is the hotel's owner who saw everything in the not so hidden camera and activated fixer Pitt to clean things up. He's a veritable clone of Clooney and they instantly see it and instantly dislike each other. That is the elevator pitch for the movie. Well, that and the body or "The Kid", who we will continue to call Kid (Austin Abrams, Dash & Lily), is not dead, just really out of it due to the amount of pure heroin he put up his nose. Said heroin is the actual focus of the movie, the MacGuffin the characters have to get back to its original owner before all shit hits all fans.

No point in going over the plot, as its all fun chase scenes and "old married couple" banter between Pitt and Clooney and Kid, a kid out of his depth, just being weird. Kid is really the highlight of this movie, running around either in his underwear or in the not-chosen outfit for Margaret. He starts off as all grunts and energy to spare which he burns off running from Clooney and Pitt. But eventually he is onboard with the plan.

"It was fine," as I am wont to say. Amusingly this was more Clooney and Pitt from the coffee commercials than it was cranky, crafty, aging fixers. But still, they are always charming. And I like any opportunity to visit the somewhat-comparable-age of an "action hero" character.

Kent's view -- we agree.

31 Days of Halloween: The Inevitable TV Insert

There is always some TV watching to be had at this time of year, shows that emerge just before, that are thematically connected to what we watch at this time of the year. Remember, its not just horror movies. I have been leaving most of my TV writeups to the now adopted Kent format, and only posting them once seasons complete, but for this thing, I may just use the series as inserts for bad nights. We shall see. Also, giving that I am not using the Watching format, I will just muse on the shows for now. Maybe they will each get their own segment post-Halloween. We shall see.

Agatha All Along, 2024 - Disney+
Grotesquerie, 2024 - Disney+
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, 2018 - Netflix
Teacup, 2024 - Download

If witches aren't Halloween, I am not sure what is. Buut admittedly, I am not sure about this show, and I guess I am kind of playing into the, "Who wanted this?" camp. I didn't find her all that compelling of a "villain" in the Wandavision show, which I didn't write about for some reason. But the show was there, and I guess we are solidly in the "watch everything MCU" camp.

The first episode amused me in its campy nod to Mare of Easttown and a genre of TV we watch a lot of. But as Agatha (Kathryn Hahn, Glass Onion) emerged from the character imposed upon her by Wanda, I lost interest. BUT once the rest of the coven were added in, and they went on their warped & twisted version of the Yellow Brick Road, I was caught again... and then very soon after, lost again. I guess I should have stayed on The Road?

Of note, later on in the show, we see the "Mare" bit from another character's viewpoint and its hilarious.

Meanwhile on Grotesquerie the new horror/thriller/murdery show from American Horror Story (which also has an anthology series I might check out, American Horror Stories) creator Ryan Murphy seems to want to embrace that sub-genre of murder-mystery focused on grotesque scenes of murders, shows like Hannibal or True Detective. But the underlying aspect is the simultaneous grotesque nature present in real, mundane life.

Sure, the religiously symbolic murders are horrific, but that doesn't seem to bother Detective Lois Tryon (Niecy Nash, The Rookie: Feds) as much as it should. But like all these shows, she has her own shit to deal with, including a husband in a coma and a daughter prepping to be a contestant on a reality TV show I think was about morbidly obese people? Pop culture always seems to be caught in a swinging pendulum of how it feels about being fat -- either they embrace all bodies and shapes, or its on display as body horror. And there is the weird nun insinuating herself into the crime scene investigation, who has all the background details on the religious symbology used to stage the murder scenes.

We only watched one episode and I might have returned to it if I hadn't been spoiled as to an aspect of the show that eliminates the whole point of watching such a show. Even so, it might be interesting to see the production values of how they play it out.

We returned to Chilling Adventures of Sabrina after having dropped it. Riverdale did not interest me and this show is ostensibly a spin-off of that teen drama show, but it is also an adaptation of a horror-based comic version of the "Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch" comics (from "Archie") by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, under the Archie comics own horror line. Just writing that is weird but I do remember when I would read those digest comics of Archie, there was a fondness for campy horror.

Anywayz, we dropped it (again) for one reason or another, likely tiring of the teen drama, the same way I did with Riverdale, but more likely Oct 1st coming up. But in this rewatch/continuance, which we started in September I noticed a different reaction, as in one of amazement that the Satanic aspect of the witches in the series is so obvious, blatant and embraced. Maybe its the climate of the last few years, but I cannot believe it was greenlit. Would such happen in 2024, and since this show only started in 2018, what has changed so much in four years that makes me wonder if the world would accept a show where teens literally worship Satan would make it.

Either way, I still found the base idea of Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka, Totally Killer), a half-witch (its blood based), trying to find her way in the world ... charming? I hope I can push past the stuff I don't like and watch it for what it was.

Finally, the Robert R McCammon adaptation of his book Stinger is from Peacock and I am enjoying it immensely, not in spite of but probably because it is by the books horror-scifi. Its Under the Dome without a dome. A family is trapped inside a circle around the land, that captures their farm and a few others. If you cross over, your body does horrific things to itself. Inside the circle the family is dealing with family drama, as all horror TV usually depicts, and the discovery of what is going on.

Excceeeept, as the show went deeper, and things started being explained I was less enthused. The "not knowing WTF is going on" was a strong part of what caught my attention and once we knew (SPOILER !!) it was aliens, good aliens vs bad aliens, my keen interest faded. Oh, I will finish, but the gloss of the first few episodes become duller. 

We also have Sweetpea in the hopper, and Hysteria but likely they will get their own "Watching" posts.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Informer

2019, Andrea Di Stefano (Escobar: Paradise Lost) -- Netflix

Not sure how much it carried over but this is a movie based on a Swedish crime novel called "Three Seconds". From my viewpoint, it was a Standard Netflix Crime Movie just a tad above "alright". I watch these movies as comfort food, but also to feed this blog. When I can choose between stock & trade crime thriller or rewatch of something easy (last night was Pacific Rim: Uprising; migawd that movie actually gets worse the more I watch it) I should choose the former, for even at its worse, I can write something about it. 'Feel Compelled' is more accurate than 'can'.

There is a whole sub-tangent about a desire to just consume films, consume consume consume, quantity over quality. Not sure where that comes from but, there it is...

Peter Koslow (Joel Kinnaman, Silent Night) is an ex-con working undercover for the FBI, having insinuated himself into a Polish mafia run by "The General" (Eugene Lipinski, Fringe). The initial operation goes awry when one of the mafia thugs Pete runs with goes off book and kills a cop. The FBI drops Pete like a hot potato. The General blames Pete for letting his nephew kill the cop. To make amends, he demands Pete break his parole and be sent back to jail, where he will take control of the local drug trade. The FBI see this as another opportunity to take down The General and make all sorts of false promises to Pete, like keeping his family safe. Meanwhile NYC detective Grens (Common, John Wick: Chapter 2) is slowly putting it all together as he investigates the death of the rookie cop he put undercover, the cop that was killed.

As a movie I consumed, and this finally being finished off months later (it falling into the I Saw This!! realm), I am struck by wanting to at least tell you what I remember, beyond plot. If there is a general theme about the movie its, "Don't trust the authorities." Pete was not a criminal, just a vet who killed a man in a bar fight and got connected with the criminal underground in hail. The FBI took advantage of that, but in this movie they are depicted as just corrupt, self-serving opportunists that don't care an iota about the crime they are fighting nor the pawns they make use of. Everyone is a shell of a developed character, but I don't begrudge movies of that if they at least tell us an engaging story. Its barely that. Kinnaman does a decent job of making us like Pete, but for the most part he is just surrounded by recognizable faces putting in a paycheck.

You don't do well convincing us as the value of why you watch these movies... in many ways these lackadaisical posts parallel these movies and their creation.

I suppose when it comes down to it, this is a movie I saw, and I liked Kinnaman.

31 Days of Halloween: Oddity

2024, Damian McCarthy (Caveat) -- Shudder

The opening ten minutes of this Irish movies were more tense than all of the movies we have seen this season. In it, a woman, Dany (Carolyn Bracken, You Are Not My Mother), is alone in a recently renovated coach house in the Irish countryside, remote enough that there is only one spot upstairs where she can get strong cell signal. Her husband Dr. Timmis (Gwilym Lee, The Great) works nights at the local asylum when she hears someone jiggle the door handle, just after she returned from looking for said cell phone in the car. She slides back the peep whole to see a wild looking man with a glass eye (Tadhg Murphy, Time Bandits) telling her someone is in the house with her, he slipped in while she as at the car.

Alone, no cell phone, stranger outside, possible stranger inside. Let him in? Is he a killer? Is the killer already inside? What will she do? This opening scene was just ... so tightly done, so tense.

A year later. She died. She let him in. He was a patient of her husband who had been recently released after a decade behind locked doors for killing his mother with a hammer. Her husband has gone by to see his late wife's sister, a twin, blind and owner of a curio shoppe, full of oddities. She claims to have psychometry, where she can feel impressions from objects. She has asked for the glass eye from her sister's murderer. Dr. Timmis invites his sister-in-law over to the house, where he still stays, but now with is new girlfriend. But not immediately, not right now. She is not happy that he has moved on so soon, and in the house where her sister was murdered.

The sister Darcy (Carolyn Bracken, The Lodgers) has a box delivered to them, and then just shows up, just as Timmis is about to had back into town, and his girlfriend Yana is heading out soon after. Awkward. A blind woman with no knowledge of the house, says she wants to stay, if that's alright. Weird. Also, the box has the most strange, creepy, fucking scary looking "oddity" from the sisters' dead mother's collection -- some sort of wooden golem or homunculus -- a life sized, roughly carved figure with hollow eyes, an open mouth and holes in its head like a bowling ball. Yana's keys go missing and the oddity has been placed at the dining room table.

I would like to say the movie does things I didn't expect, but... no, it was pretty trope driven and in our exposure to horror plots, pretty much by the book. But it was well executed. And that oddity. Its not even a monster, just a wooden thing, but I am not sure how anyone would want to be in its presence. It is just fucking unnerving. Of course, it plays its role in the discovery of how Dany actually died, her actual murderer (not the mad looking one-eyed man) which I don't feel like spoiling, but if you are like, us you can probably guess.

But still, that fucking .... thing. shudder.

31 Days of Halloween: Late Night with the Devil

2023, Cameron & Colin Cairnes (100 Bloody Acres) -- Shudder

This was added to The List earlier in the year, downloaded as soon as it came out, before I signed up for Shudder. This year, 2024, has been a bumper crop for horror movies and I was downloading more that caught my interest than in any other year before. That may have been because of some factor a few years ago that spawned bankable interest in horror, but unfortunately it doesn't mean an increase in quality films, just volume. All things pointed to this being a break-out movie: the unique setting (found footage from a 70s TV talk show), a face we know and like (David Dastmalchian) and a pair of directors with some horror cred under their name, albeit not ones we had seen before.

So, as said, found footage. Via a voice over, we learn we are about to watch the last ever episode of "Night Owls, with Jack Delroy", a late night talk show competing with Johnny Carson. We start with a positive background to Jack (Dastmalchian, Ant-Man), a likable scamp who experiences some tragedy, and who has some connection to some weird culty "men's club". When his ratings flag, he begins to court controversy to gain viewers. That all leads to a Halloween episode where he is going to interview a girl possessed by a demon, and her handler.

The setup is a lot of fun. We see actual TV show segments, but we also get to see documentary style or "b-roll" from when it cuts to commercials. It begins with Christou (Fayssal Bazzi, We're Not Here to Fuck Spiders), an obviously fake medium channeling the dead relatives but basically screwing it up, until he hits the pre-setup ringer. Joining him onstage is the renowned skeptic Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss, Kuu Kuu Harajuku) to refute and mock everything he is doing. Basically they are recreating The Amazing Randi vs Uri Geller animosity for an audience (us, not the TV show's audience) too young to remember these people. That is, until Christou has an unfortunate encounter with a real spirit who shouts "Minnie!" followed by him vomiting an unimaginable amount of black liquid and collapsing on stage. Cut to commercial and rush the unconscious Christou away on a stretcher, while the crew rushes to clean up the stage, and Haig, for the next act.

Said next act is psychologist and supernatural investigator June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon, Harrow) and Lily (Ingrid Torrelli, The End), a girl who survived a Satanic cult. Ross-Mitchell has found a way to "safely" communicate with the demonic entity that inhabits Lily, but.... well, we wouldn't have a movie if that didn't go wrong.

And it does, but the movie was all focused on the build up, and ... not the climax? There were so many elements to juggle: that Jack was part of one of those Hollywood occult club, that his wife had died of cancer and maybe as part of a club sacrifice (what a scamp!), the skeptic getting definitive proof of the supernatural, the psychologist getting come-uppance, and Lily being more than a willing supplicant to whatever demonic entity ("Mr. Wriggles") they were summoning. But the payout wasn't as... fun? Lots of lights, death and Jack looking shell-shocked, along with a brief otherworldly depiction as we see the movie switch from the TV format to widescreen, to show us we are not in the found-footage mode any longer. The movie was rather well polished in what it laid out but less than satisfying in how it concluded, but I am not sure what it should  have shown us, just that we were disappointed.

Still, nice to see Dastmalchian get a bit more scenery to chew on.

31 Days of Halloween: Salem's Lot

2024, Gary Dauberman (Annabelle) -- download

Seriously? A speedrun through a vampire invasion story? You wouldn't think an almost 2 hour movie would move at a break-neck (pun intended?) pace, but here you have it. Arrive in town, piss off some locals, kid goes missing, poof the entire town is vampires. The End.

This is the third adaptation of  Stephen King's original novel, the first in 1979 and the second in 2004. Neither of them have much place in my long term memory though I know I would have seen both. This one will definitely join them in fading away quite quickly.

Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman, Top Gun: Maverick) arrives in Jerusalem's Lot ('Salem) sometime in the 70s; he lived there as a kid but since moving away has become a famous author. He has returned to write about the "Marsten House", the local haunted house on the hill. At the same time two mysterious figures have purchased said Marsten House and opened an antique business in town, Barlow & Straker (the original "tee hee" from the book, i.e. Bram Stoker). Ben moves into a boarding house, flirts with a local girl Susan and pisses off some locals as outsiders always do.

I assume the movie chooses to be set in the same time as the book so as to not have to be bothered with dealing with updates to technology and ease of communication?

Then Ralphie (Cade Woodward, Hawkeye) the meek kid disappears on his walk through the mysterious woods with his older brother Danny (Nicholas Crovetti, Boy Kills World; and not The Boys whose role is played by his twin brother Cameron). For some reason there is no mention of the town interrogating weirdo outsider Straker (Pilou Asbæk, Game of Thrones) who the kids detoured into the woods because of. The "some reason" is because the movie doesn't have time for such nonsense as logic and plot flow. Ralphie was actually taken my Straker and fed to Barlow as some sort of sacrifice to begin the take over of the town. All rather symbolic I guess, cuz if he is up and walking around, he can just fly around and fest to his heart's content, but I guess he likes the idea of creating a nest of vampires? Anywayz, Ralphie takes his brother Danny a few nights later, and Danny takes the gravedigger Mike (Spender Treat Clark, Glass).

Not long after, school teacher Mr. Burke (Bill Camp, Joker) invites Mike to stay at his place because Mike doesn't look so good. In any other movie, there would be some inherent creepiness to the bachelor 50+ schoolteacher inviting a younger man to stay in his spare bedroom, but Burke presents as the trustworthy nice guy. Alas Mike "dies". In the spirit of the speed run Burke has concluded, "VAMPIRE !!" but still has called in the cops and the local doctor (a wasted Alfre Woodard, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur).

Immediately after, Danny and Ralphie's mother also dies and the Fearless Vampire Hunters, now including Ben and Susan, approach the doctor for support. Since she has the mother in her morgue, it should be easy enough to show her evidence. Yeah yeah, moving sheets and the doctor is quickly bitten, BUT she has a rabies shot so that keeps her from turning into a creature of the night. You would think that could become an important detail in saving more people in the town.

But no. Almost immediately after pretty much everyone is already a vampire. No town meeting, no murmurs in the cafe that is half empty, no people hurrying home before the sun sets. Just boom your town is empty, except at night where they perch on roof tops like an evil Snoopy in a tree (that's a reference for the old farts in the room). The doctor doesn't even bring along a bag of rabies shots.

After a failed attempt to kill the vampire at the source, losing Burke, Susan and a priest who joined their ranks the remaining FVH are the Doctor, Ben and Mark, best friend to Danny, armed with all the knowledge his horror comic books can provide him, seek out where the nesting vampires must lie. In the basements of each of their homes? In some dank & dark abandoned factory on the outskirts of town? In the dangerous collapsing tunnels of the town's shutdown mine? Nope, in the trunks of their cars at the drive-in. At least, you would think, this will be an easy mass kill -- just pop the trunks and stand back, watching the sun do its thing. Alas, shadows. Also, it only takes about 2.5 hours to go from waking up inside a church to arriving, near sunset, at the drive-in. Whatever will they do ?!?!

At least in "Hellboy: The Crooked Man" when they wanted to take advantage of "evil things happen at night" they commented on how local time followed Devil Time, as in night comes up awful quick, with days that only last a few hours and nights that go on forever.

Anywayz, the Doctor gets shot by a Renfield (I wanted to make a pun about "with an Enfield" but the Enfield Shotgun is a motorcycle) and the sun falls down, goes boom, along with the drive-in screen, which does allow for at least a handful of vamps to eat dying light of day sunbeams. Alas, Mr. Barlow makes his appearance, buuuuut Ben uses Mark as bait, as we all know that creepy old vampires love succulent young boy flesh, and is able to stab him thru the heart. So much for supernatural vampire hearing. The End.

At least the previous mini-series attempt to show that some vampires, and their Renfields, escaped the town and Ben is obsessed with hunting them down, but this one is just, "We did it, we killed the Big Bad and are done with it...."

This could have been a decent movie if it had just given itself some pacing. I can only assume Purple Suit Meddling™  dashed any plans they had for a longer movie, or maybe the It idea of two movies? Instead, we seem to rush through most of the "plot" and are hyper-focused on other scenes, like Mr. Burke holding off Mike the Gravedigger with his neon cross -- not literally neon, which would have been cooler, but an effect in this movie in that crosses held near vampires glowed from internal holy batteries, which in effect, gave them a Vampire Early Warning Alert.

31 Days of Halloween: Hellboy: The Crooked Man

2024, Brian Taylor (Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance) -- download

As this movie started I had the distinct feeling I was watching a fan-flick that had been given a budget. In a fan-film there is no time for backstory or explanation, they just jump into the action, full understanding that anyone watching the movie/short understands the world into which the viewer is entering. Sure, there have been three Hellboy movies prior to this one, from two other franchises (that's being liberal with the word), but usually a movie at least tries to establish itself assuming a viewer may have not seen the previous examples. But nope, boom, Hellboy is on a train with a coworker transporting something evil when everything goes wrong and he is deposited in an Apalachian Hillbilly Themepark. 

Unlike the other examples, this one is adapted straight from an actual Mignola story. The thing about Mignola comics is that they are often contained stand-alone stories, refined examples of horror-meets-adventure. He infuses them with world building, in this case Appalachian witches, war profiteers returned from Hell and haunting the land, magic trinkets, etc. I applaud trying to turn it into a movie. Trying. 

The previous Hellboy movies were definitely all adventure, and this one wanted to embrace the horror elements, whiffs of Evil Dead in that the woods are haunted, demons and witches are everywhere in the mists and shadows, and there is a local legendary "devil" called The Crooked Man. Hellboy (Jack Kesy, Without Remorse) and his sidekick Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), a BPRD researcher out for some field work, are trying to be focused on getting back their cargo but are distracted by the local story.

The problem with this movie, which surprisingly wasn't as humdrum as the last example, presents as a horror movie but without embracing it. I have been writing stories in my head & in my notebooks for years about characters, like the brothers from Supernatural, who come into a horror movie as heroic adventurers to defeat the evil. I am saying I am fully onboard with Hellboy wandering into a horror movie and sarcastically fighting all the monsters that would frighten the average horror movie character, but you have to fully be onboard with the horror movie you are presenting. This one just seemed to jump from one example of the trappings to the next. If the last Hellboy movie jumped one mythological example to the next, this pretty much did the same with horror examples. 

In the end I still say I was surprised it did rise above feeling like a low budget fan-flick, but it did not satisfy anything for me, neither my Hellboy interest, nor my horror movie fan.

31 Days of Halloween: Alien: Romulus

2024, Fede Alvarez (Don't Breathe) -- download

OK, that was a weird experience. We started this movie on Tuesday night, a proper 4K copy, and I was entranced from the moment it opened: the colours, the contrasts, the dystopia and the machinery. It looked like my scifi vignettes jumped off the paper. We are quickly introduced to the characters, indentured slaves to Weyland-Yutani on a mining colony with 0 hours of sunlight and lots of non-xenomorph deaths. The company is the monster. But then we noticed the time and that the movie was 2 hours and had to pause.

The next night, started it earlier and... the glow was dimmed. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the movie, but only for the briefest moment in time, I had recaptured my cinematic aura, the guy (no, not That Guy) who just is enraptured by the movie watching experience (ok, maybe a little That Guy) and was settling in for 2 hours of just smiling enjoyment. I mean, I knew what I was about to watch -- a teen slasher take on the Alien franchise but occasionally my brain just lets me go along entirely for the ride.

Just sliding right past the fact this post is/will-be dated as Tuesday? Letting someone see behind the curtain that you/we write these and back-date them?

I mostly got that this time? Mostly.

OK, our main character is Rain (Cailee Spaeny, Civil War), with her "brother" Andy (David Jonsson, Industry). Andy is a "synthetic person", aka a person shaped robot filled with milk. He's not a fully functioning synth, and has to be "reset" by Rain often; he presents as an intellectually underdeveloped adult. Rain and her family were "farmers" on a colony that is all about mining, and where the population is dying from numerous causes, including her parents. You get the feel Rain was born here, and as a young adult (teen? early twenties?) she has finally "worked off her hours/years" but the company needs bodies in the mines, and instantly re-ups her, adding five or six years to her contract.

She finds her friends have a plan. A couple of them run a cargo tug that carries containers of ore up to a ship in orbit, a ship probably much like the Nostromo from the original movie. In fact, the movie starts with a preamble act showing an automated small ship coming across the wreck of the Nostromo and extracting a chunk of ... something that has a xenomorph contained within. Anywayz, this tug crew picked up a signal in their last run, a signal for an abandoned Weyland-Yutani ship that will definitely have cryopods, which will definitely get them to an independent colony away from Wey-Yu, away from a life of slavery, and onto a planet with days & nights and warm sunlight on their faces. But first they have to get into it, and they know Andy will have that ability. But its dangerous, as if they are caught they will relinquish any chance they have of working off their contracts. You can tell Rain is not actually doing a good job of convincing herself to not do it, so she eventually agrees.

This opening preamble is just beautiful. From the initial scene of a black shape against the stars to the fly thru the window where we see a MU/TH/UR turn on with all its lights and clicking and whirring sounds, the retro future tech that the original movie presented so lovingly, to the anonymous scientists extracting the xeno with us knowing full well, "they're all gonna die."

Once onboard the not-a-ship-but-a-station the wash of immersion kind of reduced. I get it, the movie has to shift from world building to setting building, setting the scene for what this station was doing, and that it was all xeno all the time, and it, of course, all went wrong. There is supposed to be a lot of tension, as Alvarez was tasked with doing his Don't Breathe thing but with Alien and return us back to the original movie horror feel, but... I guess he was really tasked with a mishmash of all the movies, including the new ones around the Prometheus franchise? Requels these days are supposed to mush all the nostalgic bits into a new movie, but honestly, what I wanted was not the rest of the Alien franchise, what I wanted was the slow methodical pace of the first movie mashed with a teen slasher movie.

Minor note: Romulus refers to one half of the station itself. The kids arrive at the Remus side, and are presented with decorative motifs all over the place. Given the station has been ruined by xeno's running amuck we don't get to see how much the decorative nature of the ship was present. 

Still, I guess I enjoyed myself. It is all done rather well (that's been your go-to of late; vague and not clear; C-) and I definitely liked it better than I did the last two movies. 

Kent's view -- we agree.

KsMIRT: step timber

 K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month (ahem) I step through the TV series I completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.

This Month:
Bad Monkey Season 1 (2024, 10/10 episodes, Apple TV+)
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 (2024, 8/8 episodes, AmazonPrime)
Nobody Wants This Season 1 (2024, 10/10 episodes, Netflix)
Slow Horses Series 4 (2024, 6/6 episodes, Apple TV+)
Squid Game Season 1 (2022, 9/9 episodes, Netflix)
Unsolved Mysteries Volume 5 (2024, 4/4 episodes, Netflix)

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Bad Monkey Season 1 

The What 100: Andrew Yancy is a police detective with a problem... he can't let go. It's got him in trouble before, and it will get him in trouble again. Having been booted from the Miami PD to a small cape on the southern tip of Florida, Yancy's motormouth and unwavering conviction that the worst should be punished have now got him suspended and working as a health inspector. When a severed arm is reeled in by a fishing tour boat, Yancy can't just follow his chief's directions to just get rid of it. Instead it takes Yancy on a winding whirlwind of romance, action, deceit, and even a little magic.

(1 Great) Vince Vaughan. I was reticent to watch the show, mainly because I haven't watched anything with Vince Vaughan in it in a long, long time. Sometime after Made I just realized I didn't like his energy, his arrogance. But either I have softened or Vaughan has, because the energy he gives off as Yancy is astounding. Yancy is a very upbeat guy, very positive even in the face of bad things happening. Even if he genuinely dislikes someone he still tries to go at them with positive vibes, kill them with ...well, not kindness...affability. He's a lot. He's always talking, but the way in which Yancy twists moments, changes the timber of a situation...it's not that he de-escalates (though I think in his mind, that's what he's doing) but instead of making people want to shoot him, they just want to smack him.  It's a skill. He's charming in a way I haven't seen from Vaughan.  He carries a high energy vibe that still seems, somehow, chill.  And I like the way he wins people over with compliments, just as much as I like it when he pisses people off with the very same tactics.

(1 Good) It's so hard to limit myself to just 1 Great and 1 Good thing with this show. I enjoyed it so, so thoroughly. I haven't mentioned that the show hops between South Florida and The Bahamas, where an unscrupulous land developer has impacted the small coastal town there. Jodie Turner-Smith was a real surprise for me in After Yang, a stunning woman but also a strong performer who, seemingly out of no where is acting alongside Colin Farrell. She turned up again in a smaller part earlier this year in Star Wars: The Acolyte and had real presence. Here she's The Dragon Queen, the mystical protector of the island who doesn't quite believe in her practice. Her role in the whole proceedings seems very outside the centre, but she gets her own story arc that weaves in and out of the main thread and it is both beautiful, intense, and tragic. 

(1 Bad) If I had one complaint, which is not even really a complaint because I enjoyed this show pretty thoroughly, it's that it felt maybe an episode too long. The eighth episode felt like it was barrelling towards its conclusion and the ninth episode felt like it was resetting for the finale.  In actuality the ninth episode was more about setting up character resolution where the finale was about closing out the plot, so it has its place...I think in this modern age of shortened seasons, any sort of breathing room feels like wasted space, even when it's certainly not wasted. It speaks more to changes in modern storytelling on television and how we consume it, than it does about quality of storytelling or even purpose of storytelling.

META: What got me into Bad Monkey, past my Vince Vaughan reticence, was Bill Lawrence's name in the trailers. I liked Scrubs, I loved (still love) Cougar Town, I really liked both Ted Lasso and Shrinking, so he has a very winning track record with me.  I knew that there would be something here that I would enjoy, as I always do in his productions...I just didn't think I would enjoy pretty much everything.  This may be, I'm boldly stating, Lawrence's best show.

There's a minor character, the owner of the charter fishing boat that opens up the series played by Tom Nowicki, who winds up being the narrator for the series. He's somehow in the head of every character (including Neville's pet monkey Driggs) telling you there innermost thoughts, sometimes at inopportune times. He also provides the best "previously on" recaps maybe ever, or close to it. The bit is he hates doing the recaps, and he lets you know this. They're spiteful recaps.

I could see some people finding the show a little unfocussed, the way it darts between Yancy's story, the Dragon Queen, Neville, Yancy's sometimes-girlfriend Bonnie, and others in ways that don't directly connect to the central crime story that Yancy is working on... but I love the fact that this show is more interested in the characters as characters than it is in them as agents servicing the main story. It a show where the world doesn't exactly gravitate around its main character and the main character's interest, and that's damn refreshing.  

The cast is uniformly phenomenal, with Vaughan, Turner-Smith, joined by Michelle Monaghan, L. Scott Caldwell, Rob Delaney, Meredith Hagner, Natalie Martinez and so many more. Even minor players in the story make multiple appearances, and it's always a delight to see them pop up again.

I imagine a second season will only see some of these players return, for obvious reasons, but the experience to see how it jumps around a whole new ecosystem of characters Yancy endears himself to (or pisses off)  absolutely puts a smile on my face just thinking about.  

An utter treat of a series.

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The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2

The What 100: Lord Sauron has disguised himself as an elfin deity and wormed his way into Celebrimbor's forge, encouraging him to make more rings of power, rings that he himself will taint with his darkness, thus eliciting control over their wearers. The dark elf Adar and his army of Orcs, aware of Sauron's return, are on the warpath to find and vanquish him once and for all, and they don't care what they have to destroy along the way. King Durin, wearing one of the tainted rings of power starts making some terrible decisions for the Dwarven realm, leaving his son Durin conflicted over his devotion to his father and doing what's right. The Stranger and his Harfoot companions get separated but each find new allies who are somewhat familiar. Back in Númenor, following the awful defeat against Adar's army, the queen finds herself challenged, and her throne wrested from her by the most evil-looking guy in history. And other stuff.  A lot going on in Middle Earth.  

(1 Great) I could have just watched just a whole series about Prince Durin IV and his turmoil over, first, his spat with his father following his actions last season, and then the dire situation as Khazad-dûm enters a dark age following a tremor. And when King Durin III puts on that ring, and starts getting money hungry and going mad with an unquenchable thirst for riches, it's just really wonderful melodrama. I love all the dwarf actors - Owain Arthur is probably my favourite performer on the show. Just real soulful, deep-thinking performance in such a heavyweight layer of makeup and prosthetics and wigs and wardrobe.  

(1 Good) I've been strangely invested in the journey of The Stranger and the Harfoots Nori and Poppy in both seasons, even though their trials have kind of been the most gentle and most disconnected from the central plot. As disconnected as they are, they also provide a very whole-view look at Middle Earth, a "what else is happening" outside of the main conflicts, and their Hobbitsy adventures are so much more gentle than what's going one elsewhere, it's a nice respite.  But that gentile nature of their story means that any threat seems that much more severe.

(1 Bad) There are entire character plots that just get shoved aside, like Isuldur seems to be an afterthought every time he pops up. It's like "oh right, him!" His story gets tied up with Arondir, the ronin Elf, who I loved in the first season, but has no storyline at all here. His human love interest died last season, and his attempts to connect with her son don't work out, so he takes off and just roams realm looking for action. He's a badass fighter with the coolest chest plate ever, but he gets nothing. Ok, that's actually 2 Bad...well, here's a third... I freaking hated everything going on in Númenor.  Just the most blatantly evilest group of fucks with the most obvious tactics of riling up crowds into supporting them in overthrowing the queen.  They're goddamn Republicans and it was just too real.

META: At about the midway point of this season of The Rings of Power I was starting to stretch a leg out, ready to step away altogether. I didn't but so much of the show was about the corruption of power, of the people in charge, and how it was all so inevitable that it was all going sour everywhere. Given that this show takes place, what, 1000 years before The Lord of the Rings trilogy, it just means that it all goes very dark, very quick and doesn't come out of that darkness for a very long time.  I don't know if showing people the descent into darkness works as a cautionary tale or just reinforces the hopelessness of opposing it when people are acting so irrationally. There really isn't any light this season to guide the way and it's feeling quite oppressive...and feels like it's only going to get worse from here.

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Nobody Wants This Season 1

The What 100: Joanne hosts a successful dating and sex-themed podcast with her sister, Morgan. She's been very unlucky in love and her frankness about talking about it has garnered her a sizeable audience and a pretty relaxed lifestyle.  Noah is a rabbi -- some might even go so far as to call him "Hot Rabbi" -- who has just exited a long term relationship with his very devoted (and attractive) girlfriend after she dug out an engagement ring out of a locked drawer. Everything was perfect on paper, but the sparks were not there. At a mutual friend's get-together Joanne and Noah meet, and sparks fly, but can a rabbi really be with a gentile and keep the respect of his family and congregation, and will being in a stable relationship impact Joann's podcast success?

(1 Great) One of my favourite aspects of the delightful friends-sans-benefits sitcom Platonic was how low stakes it was. It didn't spend much time at all revelling in drama or tension. It presented its characters as conscious, conscientious, thinking human beings who don't immediately always jump to the tropey sitcom conclusion to create tired hijinks for our amusement. It's a comedy of rapport, and I'm on board for any show that wants to be such. Here, not only are the characters presented as thoughtful, but they're also observant, and they're open to conversing about difficult topics. Sitcom comedy was borne out of withholding and misunderstandings. Cringe comedy exploded out of the rise of Seinfeld which was not just withholding, and misunderstanding, but genuine selfishness and bad behaviour. It's really time for our entertainment to show us a new way of coexisting, a new way of engaging with one another, a way that shows us that bringing up a mistake or a shameful emotion with a loved one is far better than hiding it, only for it to explode like a time bomb.

(1 Good) The cast here is uniformly awesome. Kristin Bell is a bankable and reliable comedic presence at this point, and though it's sometimes hard to shave the Eleanor-from-The Good Place feels from my brain, she's really fun. Adam Brody is charming, funny, and thoughtful, very aware and receptive and open. He is the ideal dreamy nice-guy boyfriend, who happens to be a rabbi. As a duo they're exceptionally cute together and they play off each other well. They're both over 40 now, but playing like they're in their late 30s, which works, but just barely.  The real flavour of the show though comes from their respective siblings. Morgan (Justine Lupe, Mr. Mercedes) is both fearless and shameless and will shake up any room she's in, usually for the better, but not always. Sasha, Noah's brother, (Timothy Simons) is less fearless and shameless than he is kind of oblivious. He's desperate to be included and so he includes himself in everything whether he's invited or not, wanted or not. Morgan and Sasha become platonic buddies is one of the most far fetched but delightful spins of the show (a lesser show would create some weird secret romance, but here Sasha clearly loves his domineering wife [probably because she's domineering] and family, he's just happy to have a new friend who actually wants to talk to him).

(1 Bad)  Nobody Wants This does a great job at showing the stakes for Noah: he's up for head Rabbi at his synagogue, and the faith has a very strong edict to congregate and procreate, so his relationship with Joanne, while providing him the sparks he's always thought a relationship should have, threatens his professional life, as well as creates friction with his family (his sister-in-law is best friends with his ex, his mom is really against the pairing). For Joann, there's less intense focus on what she's risking.  According to Morgan, at least, her being in a happy relationship is having an effect on the podcast (she's telling boring stories), which is being eyed for purchase by Spotify. Most of the gamble here is the romcom threat of "losing the guy". It's a fairly savvy show, but (from my very male perspective) it doesn't adequately emphasize what she's giving up or sacrificing, it rather seems to only imply that she should.

META: A very quick blast of research finds that show creator Erin Foster a) looks a lot like Kristin Bell, b) worked a lot with her sister (including as Insta influencers and as creative heads for the dating app Bumble among other things), and c) converted to Judaism before getting married.  So this show, while not autobiographical, comes from a place of authenticity and truth. It's a really charming romcom that isn't about the act of getting together, but about what it takes to stay together.  It's not even that interested in the drama of tearing Joanne and Noah apart but instead the joys and rewards of unifying and being together.  I feel like this is such an antidote to Hallmarkies, and we're still a week away from those things ramping up.  EEP

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Slow Horses Series 4 (aka "Spook Street")

The What 100: There's a terrorist attack in central London. Meanwhile River Cartwright's grandad, suffering from dementia, shoots a man he thinks is River in his house. River fakes his own death and takes the place of this man, heading into France on a passport that's actually a "cold body", one of many MI-5 fake identities created for their field agents. But how is this one "in the wild" so to speak, and now in River's hands? It all billows out into something very personal and very dangerous.

(1 Great) This is the first season where it feels like Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb is a supporting character and not the lead, and that's actually a good thing. Lamb has been so front-and-center that it's left him a little exposed as a character, as someone who is very much who he is, and not likely to change. River's always been the secondary lead of the show, and giving him the full spotlight here reveals the wild depths of his history and, in learning his origins, has potentially disastrous ramifications for The Park.  It's the most character-centric of the series yet, and it really, really works.

(1 Good) Nothing is stagnant in this show, things are always moving. When we ended last series, Taverner was looking to finally be accepting her place as First Desk, but this season we learn she's right where she was last season, with instead new First Desk Claude Whelan, a died-in-the-wool bureaucrat appointed to the position. He's an idiot, and an idiot is dangerous in his position. Taverner's used to playing games with other very intelligent intelligence officers, so manipulating an idiot is surprisingly difficult.  Whelan is played by James Callis who played the conniving Baltar in Battlestar Galactica... his character here is not that different than Baltar in ambition, but Callis plays him much, much differently. Kristin Scott Thomas as Taverner really revels in that steely, all-business, woman-with-secrets-that-you-will-never-know energy. I really hope one of these series deep dives into her life and history.  The games at the Park were some of my favourite bits this season.

(1 Bad) Oh God, I get angry watching this series week-to-week. I just want to eat it all up in one bite. It's so consumable, and it just pulls you through its story.  You can tell these were crafted out of novels because they're so perfectly structured to deliver the right amount of story and character moments for every ongoing character. We lose some, we gain new ones, and it's a roller-coaster where you're not sure what's happening to start with and it unfolds alluringly and brilliantly.  So yeah, it's great, but I don't like being confined by AppleTV's pacing (I could always wait...but I can't, I look forward to it too much).

META: Mick Herron's Slough House series currently consists of eight full length books and five novellas. I really, really wish that they would produce the novellas as like a standalone episode or extra-length episode between the series'.  So far we've only missed one, between series two and three, and there's two more series before there's another one, so we'll see... or maybe once they tap out of the eight books, they'll just do the novellas as specials to keep it going... I dunno, I just want it all...without having to actually read. Yuck!

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Squid Game Season 1

The What 100: You know what Squid Game is already. I'm just that fool who waited two years to watch it. Ok, quickly... 456 desperate individuals sign up to play games in hopes of winning a massive cash prize. Once they learn it's games of death, well, it ultimately doesn't change much, and the people enlisted will see it through to the bitter end. A detective, looking for his missing brother, infiltrates the compound and starts to uncover what, or who, is behind it all.

(1 Great) Despite this series being absolutely something right up my alley, it got real popular, real quick and you know me with popular things...I bristle. Well, if that many people like it, then it can't be any good, because people who make things popular generally have terrible taste. It was watching Lee Jung-jae in The Acolyte (second Acolyte references this post) that drove me to finally watch it. He was such a charismatic and soulful performer in The Acolyte that he really made an impact and I wanted to see more from him. And yeah, he's absolutely great in this. Here he's Gi-hun, a man in debt, divorced, and just mooching off his diabetic mother. He's not a good guy. It's not even that he wants to be a good guy, but he knows he should be. If he wants his daughter to respect him, if he wants his ex (whom he obviously still loves, but knows she's better off without him) to respect him, if he wants his mother to live and have a good life... then he needs to be a better man. But he doesn't have the tools for it.  And then he's offered an opportunity. It's within the confines of this horrifying environment that Gi-hun learns to be a better man, supporting other players, trying to understand people and help them survive, and giving most people the benefit of the doubt when it's obvious he shouldn't.  He's obviously going to be the victor, because the show is centred around him from the beginning, but can he actually live with himself if he does survive? 

(1 Good) So much of the show, being such a phenomenon, was spoiled for me before I even watched it, but  even if it hadn't been so popular, I probably could have guessed the rhythms of it. It's a formulae for a group of people in a confined space. They tribe up, there are betrayers, there are people who appear one way but are revealed to be something else...there are archetypes to these things and this plays right into them. But, the Squid Game offers the contestants an out...if they collectively, by majority vote, decide to end the games, they all get to leave. And after the first game, in which over a hundred of them are murdered, they decide to leave. So the second episode finds them back in their lives, back in their abysmal lives which have no hope, no promise of reward, just more misery. It's its most bold critique of capitalism in this second episode showing how without a social safety net people fall into despair and ruin with no opportunity to get out. As such, the Squid Game, with its death-or-prizes alternatives, seems like the more appealing option. It's unfortunate that it's the high-point of the season only two episodes in, but it's a great episode.

(1 Bad) Like I said, Squid Game relies upon tropes for character drama and conflict so it can feel pretty routine. It's only the games themselves that electrify the series, but even then I found the games to be oddly primitive, and designed with a lack of competitive spirit in mind.  They're games of death designed to kill, not to be won. The way the games masters manipulate their players especially outside of the games is all part of their fun, which is less fun to watch knowing that it's all stacked against them.  it feels like the games masters are just the writing staff who want to see as much death and misery and heap it upon the audience It should be a poignant commentary, about our fascination with observing human misery from a distance, but it never really does ask the audience to consider their role as spectator in all of this. So it loses its juice, its motivating factor if it's just entertainment and not asking anything of its audience in return.

META: I've said before how much I like the "man-hunting-man" subgenre of thrillers, your "Most Dangerous Games" and "Hard Targets" but this sort of "game show" version is another sister subgenre in the "Running Man" or "Hunger Games" style where it's a spectator sport. I thought it was going to be more of a spectator sport, much more public in a dystopian future, but no, instead it's a secret spectator sport for only the richest of rich to observe.  The detective who finds his way into the back-end of the Squid Game, and starts digging into its secrets unfortunately demystifies it too much, in a way that breaks the logic of it.  If they're stealing 400+ people off the streets of Korea each year for decades, leaving behind a lot of trace evidence like their weird cards, surely people will take notice.  I dunno, I found the more I learned about the behind-the-scenes, the less I bought into it.

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Unsolved Mysteries Volume 5

The What 100: An upsetting double homicide in broad daylight in a public park in Cleaveland. Roswell revisited. A paranormal investigator and his ghostly companion. Cattle mutilations are back (and really haven't ever left).

(1 Great) "Great" sounds too enthusiastic to talk about the very upsetting story of the two friends murdered in Cleveland. It's not great, it's fucked up and horrible, and the interviews with the loved ones of the victims is heartbreaking.  But it's also compelling the circumstances around it, and just how bizarre the situation is. Each season of Unsolved Mysteries on Netflix has had one of these... a murder case so unusual that it kind of breaks one's brain about how it could happen in the first place... and they linger with you, unanswered questions that, were I closer to the case, would drive me mad.  In this case, two friends of about 40-years-old meet up on a park bench. Within clear eyeshot is a parking lot where sits a truck. The two friends are executed, shot in the back of the head, and the guy in the truck sees and hears nothing. Less than 15 minutes pass between the time the woman last used her phone and their bodies are discovered. There's a busy road that goes right by there. Any suspects that knew the victims have been ruled out. Gang related? Hate crime (the man was black, the woman white)? But how brazen an act, and how is there nothing to go on? It's viscerally upsetting.

(1 Good) The investigation into the rash of cattle mutilations in Oregon in between 2019 and 2022 is just freaking bizarre on its own, but when put into the context of thousands of reported cattle mutilations across the US and Canada since the 1960s it's the silent epidemic that nobody talks about. The surgical precision of the removal of skin and the tongue and, often, genitals, why? To what end?  And the weird states that the cows are found in, sometimes upside down on fences, or sitting upright in full rigor, with very little blood on the scene... just completely eerie.  A true unsolved mystery that wants to lean into the "alien abduction" of it all but holds itself back at least somewhat by talking all angles.  Just wild.

(1 Bad) As much as UM gives us some upsetting cases of murder, and mysterious mysteries, sometimes its exploration of the paranormal just seem like weirdos or mentally unstable people putting on a show, being excited about things they're making up. The case about the paranormal investigator and his ghostly companion just made me giggle. The revisiting of the Roswell crash made it seem more and more like "this is a thing because people want it to be".  Here's where I've settled on Roswell... if there were actual aliens, and the President of the United States is advised about it, do you think Trump could shut up about it. He's worried about Mexicans, you don't think he'd be stirring up shit about grey aliens if they were real? He would not be able to contain himself. 

META: The past couple UM volumes have been more paranormal-heavy than I'd like. It's always been an aspect of the show, but I like the weird crime (doesn't even have to be murder) aspect far more, and it seems far more helpful to talk about unsolved crimes than it does about sasquatches and aliens.  But I love how the show upsets me with the horrors of humanity, and I've always had a bit of a soft spot for entertaining these flights of metaphysical fancy. I wish this were a weekly show again.