KWIF: Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Last two weeks, actually. With the Olympics last week and all the new TV shows popping up this week, as well as fending off a bug or two, I didn't get to many movies, but the ones I did get to...well...a couple of them are real gems. I'll let you determine which of the three I maybe didn't like as much.

This Week:
Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (2025, d. Matt Johnson - in theatre)
Lady Snowblood (1973, d. Toshiya Fujita - Crave)
Bye Bye, Red Riding Hood (aka Bye Bye, Chaperon Rouge; "Tales for all #9", 1989, d. Márta Mészáros - Crave)

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What an exceptionally bizarre and niche idea to take something as exceptionally bizarre and niche as Nirvanna The Band, the bizarre and niche musical-ish duo of Matt Johnson and Jay McCarroll, who had a short-lived, two-season bizarre and niche show on the bizarre and niche Viceland TV network, and turn it into a bizarre and niche movie that may well be the biggest (in ambition and scale) comedy movie of the decade.

I'm sure anyone reading this, like most of the population, have no idea what the heck Nirvanna The Band or Nirvanna The Band The Show are. Hell, I barely knew myself. If you know co-creator Matt Johnson from anywhere, it's likely from making Blackberry a few years back.

No, Nirvanna The Band is not a Nirvana cover band. McCarroll plays piano and Johnson...well, he talks a lot about what he's going to do over McCarroll's piano playing, and all the admiration and reverence he's going to receive from the audience without really having any other specific set of skills or talents put on display.Their deepest ambition is to book a gig at the famous Toronto resto-bar/performance space The Rivoli, but they don't actually attempt to book a gig at The Riv (as we locals call it) by contacting the bar. No instead they think they can somehow trick their way into performing there. The logical fallacy of all this is I don't think "Nirvanna The Band actually has any songs to perform should they get there, so what they're actually going to do with their platform should they ever achieve it remains a mystery.

Having never seen Nirvanna The Band The Show, I can infer from the story of Nirvanna The Show The Movie that each episode of the show is a Pinky and the Brain-style set-up of of Matt coming up with a scheme to get the band into The Riv that night, Jay reluctantly following along, and it all falling apart. The Show, if it's at all like The Show The Movie (and it must be) is all shot verite style, with a mix of Johnson and O'Carroll interacting with real people and actors in pre-planned if highly improvised situations. The Film just takes it to...well, not just another level, but to astonishing extremes.

It starts with Matt coming up with the plan "Seventh Inning Stretch" where the two will jump off the CN Tower and parachute into the Skydome (as it will forever be known) announcing that they have a gig at The Rivoli that night (and the stunt will be so spectacular that The Riv must give them the stage for the evening right)? 

Ambitious, but certainly there's countless things getting in the way of Matt and Jay in succeeding with this plan. Well, would you believe that the only thing that gets in the way of the plan is the Skydome's roof closing, and Matt and Jay's timing being off such that they land on the roof instead of in the stadium?

I couldn't believe it either. And yet, it looked very much like two people (though absolutely not Matt and Jay) were skydiving in downtown Toronto and landed on the roof other Skydome.

With today's level of digital and AI technologies, it's not hard to deepfake this sort of thing, and yet, there's a level of gritty craftsmanship here at play that definitely make it hard to tell what's real, what's staged, and what's trickery.

The main story of Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, however, involves a second scheme Matt comes up with, which is to pretend to be time travellers from 2008 flung into the future, using Back to the Future logic, only for things to go awry and Matt and Jay actually travel back to 2008, mess things up, and then return home to find Jay has become a massive celebrity leaving Matt behind.

It's profoundly silly and insanely entertaining. The Movie is incredibly propulsive, moving a pretty rapid clip, not giving the audience a lot of time to sit with all the questions they might be having (the movie, so self aware, is savvy enough to address many of them anyway, if only to side step). At the same time, even if you have zero investment in Matt and Jay as a duo (like me) the film slowly starts investing you into the stakes of their friendship (I mean, there's really no other characters in the film beyond the camera guys and Matt's alt-future roommates).

As one of the most Toronto films ever made, it's bizarre, sure, but maybe not so niche. It's an extremely accessible film if (like me) you've never actually engaged with Nirvanna The Band in any capacity before. But I'm now hooked, and I'm ready to dive into Nirvanna The Band The Show and their precursor web series of the same name... if only there were anywhere that I could watch them (the presumption is that Crave, who partially produced The Film, will pick up The Series for when The Film hits streaming).

Much like, say, Strange Brew or Brain Candy, other Canadian comedy films derived from TV shows that preceded it, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is also a surprise gem of a film, but much more immediately recognizably a triumph than maybe the other tv-to-film comedies that came before it. (Do I need to watch that Trailer Park Boys movie now...?)

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Lady Snowblood is a big name in classic Asian action cinema (and classic manga), one that I'm sure was jotted down on one of my many "to watch" lists decades ago but, without ever truly understanding what the movie was about, and as such was never prioritized.

How unfortunate for me.

The film is the grandmommy of revenge dramas, or "revenge-o-matics" as Quentin Tarantino likes to call them, and in fact Lady Snowblood was QT's primary (but far from only) inspiration for Kill Bill.  There's little doubt in my mind that Lady Snowblood has inspired dozens upon dozens of films in the 50+ years since its debut.  Having such an influential legacy can actually tarnish a classic film when it's watched for the first time, as one might only see story ideas, action sequences, shot framing or other such ideas that have been used and probably bettered in the years since. 

Not so with Lady Snowblood.

The opening sequence, taking place at night, the moonlit road that much brighter because of the snow, is beautifully shot and staged. It finds our titular character in her tight kimono and sandaled feet shuffling quickly into place, a carriage quickly approaching. She gets in its way and proceeds to dispatch the entourage rapidly and bloodily, before fighting the man in the carriage. His skills are not even close to competing with hers.

This visually striking, blood-and-snow-soaked extravaganza is a marvel, but also the low point of the film. The action is stilted and Lady Snowblood's portrayer, the stunning Meiko Kaji, doesn't seem very adept at wielding the utensils of her character. 

But as I said, this is the film's weakest point. From there we delve into her wild backstory, which predates her even being born. It has it's roots in Japanese history from the later-1800s where the country's troubled leadership was directing it to build a grand army and conscripting the young men of villages across the land, disrupting the labour force dramatically. Yuko's mother's husband, a teacher, was killed when it was suspected he was an army recruiter, and her older brother was also murdered. Her mother was kept and abused and enslaved, but dreamed of nothing but revenge. She managed to dispatch one of the men who killed her family and was sent to prison for murder, cutting her revenge story short. She knew the only way of continuing her revenge was to have a child who could carry her burden, and so she aggressively pursued the prison guards and managed to get pregnant. She died shortly after childbirth but made her fellow inmates promise to have her child, who she likened to a demon, trained to pursue her vengeance.

We see Yuki's training from a young age to adulthood, a brutal inhuman life, but then, as has been reinforced by her trainer, she is not to be human. She is a demon of revenge. The first act is comprised of all this history, and it is told moving forward like running water, rather than cutting back and forth between the past and modern day, with elements referencing directly the Manga in a stylish way that seems incredibly ahead of its time.  The fact that it moves through the darkness of Yuki's mother's tale and her own training without being overly sensational and distanced from making the abuse seem alluring is remarkable for the era.

When it returns to the modern day, the story moves constantly in unexpected zigzags. It never moves towards the typical narrative choice, and at the same time is not playing with expectations that it will. It so secure it its storytelling that it feels assured in its atypical manoeuvres, and it's thrilling to experience.  I very quickly learned not to anticipate where it was going, and I don't imagine I can ever have that experience again. But it just highlights that what this story does, and how Toho and the director present it, hasn't been repeated, at least not to an extent that can deny the power of this production.

What is most surprising is how the film tries to humanize one of Lady Snowblood's targets. A unwell drunken degenerate of a man, with a sweet daughter who cares for him despite what she has to do to make money so that he can drink and gamble it all away. You would think Yuki's disposing of this man would be a blessing for the poor girl, but it's not the case. The man even seems to have a death wish, until death stares him in the face. There's some rather meaty drama amidst all the arterial spray.

Yuki's gets involved with a reporter, who begins to tell her tale, sensationalizing her and spreading her story across the country, more fable or urban legend than fact, but distinguishing between the two, at that time wasn't always the case. The stories are told to draw out her prey, and it works, but it's all so much more complicated than either thought it would be.  Magnificent twists and movements abound.

The doubt I had in Kaji's physical prowess really only held away in the film's first sequence. I don't know that she ever proved herself an agile swordswoman, but subsequent scenes she's definitely more confident in her wielding of the blade, and is just as often posing with it as she is using it.

Visually, I love this era of vibrant red gushing blood samurai story, but this one stands out as special, because it doesn't approach the world with a gawking lens. It's not revealing in its nudity and abuse, it's matter-of-fact in its presentation. It's honest about how harsh the world is and the truths of the time its set it, but it also gives way to its revenge fantasy elements without letting them overshadow those truths. 

It's fantastic, and I wish I'd seen it 100 times by now.

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The 9th entry of Quebec producer Rock Demers' "Tales for all" series once again finds funding as a co-production, this time with Hungary, and filming there as well rather than in Canada. This once again leads to a release with no native soundtrack. You can watch the French or the English dub, it doesn't matter, because the entire production is dubbed as not all performers are speaking the same language.  (I don't like watching dubbed movies, and find it frustrating when the dub is so obvious, as it is here... the preferred alternative is watching the French dub with English subtitles, but I was too tired for subtitles for this viewing).

Bye Bye, Red Riding Hood, as you may have guessed, is loosely based around the classic fairy tale. Here, the film opens with five-year-old Fanny in her city apartment bedroom, decorated entirely in red, trying to fall asleep only to be roused by her parents arguing and her father walking out on her mom. We then hard cut to "Mother" (no other name given) taking Fanny through the airport and confirming that they're going to go live in the woods, near her Grandmother's.  

This hard cuts to a forest montage and Fanny is now twelve maybe (played by Fanny Lauzier, who was the young star of Tales for all #6 -  Tadpole and the Whale), and she's a free spirit roaming the woods with her pet lamb, when she comes across a wolf who, it seems, can telepathically communicate with her. It appears the wolf means her no harm, and in fact wants to be friends...but his tone of voice, sinister and sleazy, gives his intentions away.

Fanny's woodsy home with her "Mother" (who works as a meteorologist) is in a artistically brutalist construct of all odd angles and bizarre stairs to nowhere and brightly coloured nonlinear shape accents. There is no meaning to this bizarre structure, only that it's likely a building the production company found interesting and decided to use (you need some visual flair when 90 percent of the film takes place in the forest I suppose). 

Fanny's traipses through the woods aren't exactly established as "adventures" as they're poorly structured and really not edited to be framed as such, but on one journey to her grandmother's house, she encounters a magic tree, and on another, she gets lost and is rescued by a man in a grey hat and trenchcoat who she thinks might be her father. On another adventure she meets a gang of similar aged school children out on a field trip and she sparks up a friendship with a dashing young boy who is very curious about this red-clad woodland girl who doesn't go to school. 

Fanny's grandmother, despite what you might think, is not her mom's mom, but rather her father's mother, and she does not get along with Fanny's mom at all, so they don't communicate much. Also Fanny's great-grandmother is there, an old crone who never moves from her spot sitting in a carved out seat in the trunk of a tree grandmother's house seemed built around. Great-granmother has inexplicable mystical powers, including the ability to see what's going on outside her trunk-chair, as well as send telepathic communications across great distances. 

There is a general sense of the fantastical in this production, but it establishes no rules for them, so the stakes are never clear, nor are the paths to resolution. This whole production seems like it was crafted on the fly, without a tremendous amount of forethought.

Fanny seems charmed by the man in the grey ensemble, in part because he lives in a weird hovel with a tremendous amount of birds (he's an ornithologist) and he saves her in the woods more than once from getting lost or a heavy storm, but when she determines that he's not her dad and then finds out that he's hooking up with her mom, she inexplicably loses it and runs away... where she's lured into the wolf's den and he refuses to let her go, and needs to be rescued by her young male friend from the city but only after Great-Grandmother telepathically calls out to him to help her. After she's rescued, they set all the man-in-grey's birds free and steal his truck, heading into to the city where Fanny does some petty thieving.

Eventually she returns home, and Fanny is sent with a picnic basket of soup and other goodies to Grandmother's house because Grandmother is not feeling well, not realizing that the wolf has swallowed her whole and taken her place (but not before the wolf and man-in-grey have what seems like a metaphysical exchange which implies the two are connected but it's nothing the film ever elaborates upon). When Fanny arrives, we get the what big hands/eyes/mouth thing, when Fanny too is swallowed whole. The wolf is a furry TARDIS, bigger on the inside than it appears no the outside, and fanny and grandmother reunite next to the wolf's beating heart (a charming set piece to be sure).

Mother and the man-in-grey arrive, and the man-in-grey shoots the wolf, killing it and releasing Fanny and Grandmother, only Great-grandmother dies for some reason. It's sad, I guess. The story picks ups with Fanny - wearing heavy make-up and styled to look like an older teen I guess - back in a very red room in a city apartment...with no real explanation or even insinuation as to what this scene means or what the seemingly happy Fanny is going through. Are we to infer that this was all just in her head? Is that why the story seems to be so dream-like?

The story is one hundred percent nonsense, so very little of the characters' actions are explained, there's no logic to anyone's motivations, and personalities and intentions shift on a dime. It seems like there was an intentional story here, about a lonely little girl making the best out of life, and a single mother trying her best, but it all got lost when trying to film what may have been an English script but performed by a Hungarian and Quebecois cast.  

When it eventually gets to its interpretation of the classic fable, Bye Bye, Red Riding Hood seems like a completely different film. It's like if the characters of the film were performing in a play, it in no way seems organic to the story being told.

There is some really nice imagery here. The damp, lush, Hungarian forests are shot with reverence, even if the colour sense is pretty muted. Some sets are really quite impressive (Great-Grandma's tree-chair is outstanding, as is the wolf's innards, and lil' Fanny's very red bedroom), but there's not a tremendous amount of cohesion happening here.

Even dream-logic would imply a sense of logic, and there is none here. If the film's finale intends to intone that the whole film was but a dream, well, that isn't explicit, plus there's little more frustrating in storytelling than such a "twist". A deeply flawed and odd film.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Anaconda

2025, Tom Gormican (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) -- download

I love the premise of this movie. Adult fans of the original 1997 Anaconda movie (starring J Lo, Eric Stoltz, Ice Cube and Jon Voight) are living unfulfilled lives leeching off the fond memories of the home movies they made in their adolescent years. Failing actor Griff decides they need to all get back together and shoot their own spiritual successor to the '97 movie, telling his friends he has attained the rights. They go to the Amazon to make their low low low low budget movie only to encounter a real anaconda snake, thus giving us a meta reboot/sequel.

I recall loving the first movie, a cheesy self-aware monster movie. I don't recall seeing the three proper sequels, nor the crossover with Lake Placid. I definitely did not see the Chinese remake. This one interested me peripherally because I love meta stuff and the cast was solid. 

Alas...

Wasted talent. So much wasted talent. 

Yeah, so Griff (Paul Rudd, Antman) just got fired from the TV show he was guest starring in, having put waaay too much of himself into the role -- essentially the opening scenes of Wonder Man (stillll not writing about TV but that show was fucking great) -- and ends up back home in Small Town Somewhere, where everyone has shitty normal lives. Doug McAllister (Jack Black, King Kong) makes "wedding videos" while constantly trying to insert his filmatic flair into people's personal memories. His friend Kenny (Steve Zahn, Sahara) is a loser. Their friend Claire (Thandiwe Newton, Westworld) is a lawyer who just got divorced. And then Griff shows back up, desperate to reignite.... something, gathering them all together to look at the cheesey, ham-fisted home-movie action flicks they shot when they were kids.

The whole problem with this opening act is that only Zahn pulls off being small town -- everyone else are just too larger than life actors to be believable as the small-town schmoes. I mean, they are all more than capable actors able to play those roles, but this movie doesn't allow them. I mean, c'mon, who is going to believe Thandiwe Newton as a sadsack with a sad life, even if you ignore her entirely flat American accent. And Jack Black as the (mostly) Straight Guy?

So, Griff convinces them that he has the rights to Anaconda the original movie and convinces them to put together whatever money they all have and go to the Amazon to film a re-make, re-boot, sequel... something. They even arrange a proper "snake wrangler"... well, proper is a strong word but he has a snake. That is, until a startled Griff kills it. And it should be said that there a B-plot about Ana (Daniela Melchior, Road House), a local Brazilian woman on the run from some tough guys with guns who has convinced them she is their riverboat captain, AND an actual anaconda of monstrous proportions is eating said tough guys.

And, there is not much else worth recounting. The rest is a cheesey, ham-fisted attempt at comedy mixed up with fish-out-of-water mixed up with actual horror. There are some moments where the selling points of the script are there, for example, when this crew runs across an actual crew filming an actual reboot to Anaconda but they, in turn, are eaten by Big Snake. And Ice Cube shows up to mirror his original role while playing himself. All fine & dandy ideas, as if the original script of the movie was full of serviceable ideas which were just ... wasted. Not enough precision to make it funny, not enough skill to juxtapose actual horror with insightful silliness. And only one, truly, absolutely ludicrous scene involving Jack Black with a "dead" pig strapped to his head, which had me giggling uncontrollably and then... sigh, back to bored. It was the sheer stupidity of that scene that had me laughing. And not much else.

Double Dose: The Wiz(ard of Oz).

 (Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...or genre or theme or property...you get it...pretty simple. Here, it's a return to Oz, but not Return to Oz...that will probably come later.)

The Wizard of Oz (1939, d. Victor Fleming - crave)
The Wiz (1978, d. Sydney Lumet - rental)

I am on the record multiple times on this blog as saying that I do not like the 1939 adaptation of L Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz. I even insinuated at one point that I perhaps detested it.

Harsh words.

Untrue.

In the latest rewatch (full disclosure, I rewatched while listening alongside a podcast's audio commentary) I couldn't help but continually be dazzled. It is one of the most vibrant films ever made, it has an allure, the primary colours of the yellow brick road, the Emerald City, the ruby slippers and red poppy field and all the rest of it that is impossible not to find alluring and utterly watchable.  As many times as I have seen it throughout my life, I still can't exactly remember how it plays out its story (likely muddled by the multitude of other interpretations no doubt) so there's also a sort of memory game that I play when I watch it.

But, I also find the songs verging on interminable. They've been such ubiquitous songs in my life that they have run their course into tunes I don't think I really ever need to hear again.  There's no magic left in them for me, they've been played out.

Likewise the performances are legendary but have also been mimicked and mocked and impersonated so many times that they've become a victim of their own success. I imagine should I ever watch The Godfather I'll probably have the same reaction.

I recognize with The Wizard of Oz there is an inescapable delight, but for me, also, an exhaustion.

So being prompted to watch The Wiz for the first time, ever, was a bit of a revelation.  Watching The Wiz was never something I've ever really wanted to do, in part because its previously generally maligned reputation preceded it, but also the last thing I ever really want to watch is yet another spin on Dorothy Gale's journey down the yellow brick road. There are dozens of Oz books beyond the first one, but Hollywood seems solely fixated on reinterpreting aspects of the 1939 film, and not paying any attention to the Baum novels beyond his first.

Yet within opening minutes of The Wiz -- a film produced by Motown in association with Quincy Jones, based off an award-winning stage musical that debuted earlier in the 1970's -- it was very clear that the film has a different take on what the story is about.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy's journey is literally a journey, a fantastical adventure through another land where the character's sole focus is returning home, while making friends along the way. In The Wiz (soon --or already? -- to be released in a Criterion Collection edition) Dorothy (Diana Ross) is 24 years old (Ross was a decade older than that) living in a Harlem apartment with her aunt and uncle, afraid to leave her neighbourhood, afraid often to leave the house, working as a kindergarten teacher afraid to move beyond being around children, afraid to even risk love by going on a date or speaking to a nice eligible bachelor. Dorothy is riddled with a crippling anxiety in a time where such emotional disorders weren't adequately qualified. Her anxiety keeps her not only constrained, but detached. She thinks of Em and Henry's place as home and their nudges for her to go out in the world have her fearful that it would mean she loses home, but then "home" also doesn't feel like home, a feeling she doesn't understand.

So when her precious cairn terrier Toto runs out of the apartment into a blizzard, and she gets caught up in a ridiculous snow tornado (snownado), aided by the gentle guidance of Glinda, she's sent to the upside down of Oz, where a very familiar, and yet wildly unfamiliar adventure awaits her.

The Wiz was critically panned for years and a bomb at the box office. It was no doubt a massive disappointment, in no small part because of it's massive budget (doubling that of Star Wars but not recouping it at the box office). The money is absolutely on screen. Massive set pieces are decorated to the nines, the costuming is all exceptionally unique. Noted legend in the visual effects game Stan Winson was on the project and so much of the realm is intriguingly chaotic and unexpected. The world of Oz in The Wiz is like the Stranger Things upside-down reality version of New York, a bit more of a nightmare than a fantasy. It's almost a wasteland, with husk of buildings surrounded by rubble, or walls of trash lining the streets, and cabs who are perpetually off-duty the moment you hail them, and street vendors stalking, stalking, stalking you. There is a sequence in Oz's parallel subway system that is genuinely creepy and had me absolutely giddy watching its unsettling practical effects play out.

Oz here is everything Dorothy fears, all the worst case scenarios come to life, except... she meets the Scarecrow (Michael Jackson) whose brains are made of garbage. She meets the Tinman (Nipsey Russel) whose wife has done away with him, but he yearns to have a heart to still love her with. She meets the Lion, an outcast, full of braggadocio but nothing to back it up with.  She makes these fateful companions who become friends on her journey to find her way back home, hoping that the Wiz will help them. 

But first they must defeat the wicked witch of the west who runs a sweatshop with an iron fist. The wicked witch (Mabel King) is not a major part of this story, she is yet another vignette kicking off the third act, and otherwise not a presence in this film. The adversary Dorothy has to face is her own discomfort, and when she finds out the Wiz (Richard Prior) is nothing but a simpering charlatan, she realizes that he wasn't needed at all. Dorothy teaches her friends to have compassion for their own perceived deficits and to prove to them they have the strengths they fear they lack. But it takes Glinda (Lena Horne) to show Dorothy that her desire to return home is not the same as her desire to find home, and teaches her that "home" is a place that exists within herself, the center of her being, something she carries with her wherever she goes, an idea that can comfort her no matter what happens or where she is. Diana Ross then delivers her big moment, tears streaming down her face, filled with a new sense of self. It's not the same as the Lion's gaining courage, but instead she's found comfort within herself and a sense of her own being.

It's a journey not taken by Dorothy in Victor Fleming's classic, the only message in that film is stamped right on the package "there's no place like home". The Wiz delivers a journey that's much richer and deeper.

Of course, The Wiz is not without its flaws. At 2h 13 minutes it's a full half hour longer than the classic film, and those extra 30 minutes are dearly felt. The songs are, generally, really quite good, with that Quincy Jones magic spinning around the creations conceived for the stage production five years earlier, but also, some of them get belaboured in the long-playing disco era where the instrumentals just keep repeating and the dance breaks become long enough to literally take a break to grab a snack or go to the bathroom.

As exceptional as the production values are, I found the makeup on both the Scarecrow and Tinman to be immediately horrifying and that reaction didn't abate much throughout watching the remainder of the film (and then watching the film again alongside a podcast commentary track). I get the design sense behind them but they're not great (and yet every background dancer in every scenario looks phenomenal).  

The film's key problem is that director Lumet is not a director for this scale of production, with this many moving pieces (literally). His direction of the music numbers and extended dance sequences is ... uninspired. Often with static cameras at vast distances away taking in as much of the scenery as possible without really anything in the way of camera work or editing to capture the momentum or excitement of the moment. He's telling the audience to look at the spectacle but not inviting them to be a part of it. It just so happens I like to look at spectacle so I was still enamoured with the composition, but there is definitely energy lacking.

I can understand why The Wiz didn't catch on. It's not an overtly uplifting film and Oz isn't the most obviously fantastical place. Dorothy, played by a 34-year-old woman, is constantly in tears and seems petrified all the time (it's really effective in hammering home her anxiety disorder, frankly), not making for the most inviting or inspiring protagonist... and yet, I believe the journey she takes. I believe her when she sings her heart's song that she has grown as a person and is ready to live the life she's been too timid to find before. And the weird, unfamiliar, slightly dangerous and exciting nature of Oz makes it such an incredible place to visit, especially compared to the vibrant familiarity of The Wizard of Oz.

If The Wiz were a Wicked Part 1-style smash hit, I'm sure I would be as sick of it today as I am of the 1939 film, but even after almost 50 years, The Wiz feels like a forgotten gem, an underdog, a secret (mostly) success nobody wants to talk about and certainly nobody wants to license songs for their commercials. It only makes it more enticing to me. I thought I was running out of big spectacle films to discover from the 70's and 80's, I only needed to branch outside of science fiction to find more.

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3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The King

2019, David Michôd (The Rover) -- Netflix

So, in 2013-ish Joel Edgerton and director Michôd collaborated on the screenplay for The Rover. At the same time they revealed they had worked also together on a script for an adaptation of Shakespeare's "King Henry" plays, often called the Henriad, which cover the reign of King Henry IV and the rise to power of his son, Henry the V. I fully admit I know very little of the plays, only knowing Branagh's 1989 film. I also know very little of the historical period. But it fascinates me that this movie displays as a historical drama, yet retains the fictional character of Falstaff, from the plays, as played by Edgerton himself.

Enough of the meta. This movie just looks & sounds goooood !! Its grim and gritty, yet so very fucking precise in its use of language (close, but not quite Shakespeare-ian) and imagery. And very oddly curtailed in its "historical" depiction. Usually these kinds of movies cover a long range of time keying on points from the history blogs, the sound bites of a figure of notoriety. This movie focuses on Hal's coming to power, and his famous battle with the French at Agincourt. That's it. It helps that its based on plays and not history.

So, Hal (Timothée Chalamet, Dune) is a bit of a layabout. He doesn't care for his father at all and spends his time in Eastcheap drinking and whoring with John Falstaff (Joel Edgerton, Train Dreams), an ex-soldier given to fat and hanging out with the wrong sort, leaning on his royal friend to get him out of tough situations. Meanwhile after fighting the Scots, King Henry's vassals are less than happy with his paranoid responses, one named Hotspur going so far as to insult the King to his face. That leads to the King (Ben Mendelsohn, Captain Marvel) naming them outlaw and sending his son to deal with the "rebellion", his younger son who he has now named as heir, because of Hal's rejection of everything.

Hal is actually incensed, knowing his little brother to be weak, ineffectual and desperate to please their father. He interrupts the grand battle between armies by challenging Hotspur to singular combat. The two fully armoured knights clash, grunting and striking each other in the mud until Hal comes out victorious, stealing glory from his brother. You get the feeling that despite Hal being a drunken fool, he knows how to fight and is keenly aware of his father's failings. Not long after, his brother still dies, trying to prove himself in Wales. And soon after that, King Henry IV dies in bed, covered in sores and regretting everything. Hal is forced to accept the crown.

Hal bears his crown with a heavy heart but a stubborn desire to Be Better. He doesn't want to be his father, a man continually at war with everyone, but also doesn't want to be seen as ineffectual. When, during his coronation, the French send him a single tennis ball, he doesn't react with violence to the insult, as all expected of him. But it becomes clear to us, the viewer, if not Hal himself, that there is a lot going on he was never aware of and there are constant outside factors influencing every aspect of his reign. This is probably when Hal could have used the friendship and guidance of Falstaff, but he leaves the man to his drink and his debts. Until he needs him.

It doesn't take a keen mind to see Hal is being manipulated, primarily by his lead advisor, Sir William Gascoigne (Sean Harris, Mission: Impossible - Fallout), a man always quick with loaded advice, and a very very affected way of standing, as if posing for the camera. It is William who unmasks an assassination attempt leading to the execution of two nobles, one who was Hal's friend in childhood. And it points all swords at France, a challenge not even peace-seeking Hal can ignore. 

Dude, you are being played.

Hal apologizes to Falstaff and brings the drunken knight along as a chief advisor, and they all set sail for France. They are armed with the attempts on Hal's life and some complicated, probably fabricated explanation as to how the King of France is not legally entitled to be king. But in front of the king is his foppish and arrogant son, The Dauphin (Robert Pattinson, The Batman), a cruel man who taunts Hal. They "easily" take the first castle but when they meet the Dauphin's army proper, he has The Higher Ground.

The Battle of Agincourt, the definite point in history. This is where Falstaff's brilliance comes into play. He is a man who suffers from his experiences in wars past, but wants what is best for his friend, and king. He also wants as little death as he can allow to happen, devising a plan where the lightly armoured English will feint an attack on the outnumbering, but heavily armoured French, allowing everyone to go down in the mud. It goes as planned, but at the cost of many English including John. Peace is drawn up and Hal is to marry the French princess (Lily-Rose Depp, Yoga Hosers) to seal it. He asks one thing of her -- always speak truth, because if there is one thing Hal needs it is an advisor who isn't entirely self-serving. 

The movie ends with Hal realizing how everything, the insults by the French and the entire war, was put into play by Gascoigne, to better the man's holdings. Hal dispatches the man in a less than dramatic fashion.

Again, I say the movie just looks good. There is budget and intent in the depictions. The lighting and colouring remains grim even in the lighter scenes, of which there are few. Given the movie is less a recollecting of historical facts, it is not surprising it is more a collection of artfully built vignettes.... much like a play generally is. Dialogue is at the forefront and it also is very precise, but not entirely period nor Shakespeare. If anything, it does feel a bit muted, with the tale of a heavy crown obvious, but not really impactful.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): We Bury the Dead

2025, Zak Hilditch (These Final Hours) -- download

I swore I saw These Final Hours but maybe I am more remembering that Kent did, as the plot doesn't sound familiar. Hilditch returns with another end-of-the-world, but more the end of "a" world as the US naval vessel "accidentally" sets of an experimental atomic/nuclear weapon off the coast of Hobart, Tasmania. Who isn't killed by the initial blast dies from the actual purpose of the weapon -- a pulse of energy kills every living thing it passes through, as it flows inland. 

This movie isn't about the US nor the consequences. This movie is about a single woman, Ava (Daisy Ridley, Cleaner), an American herself, who joins the "body retrieval" process as the Australian government is overwhelmed in the grim recovery & identification of the dead. She has volunteered because her husband had come to Tasmania on a corporate retreat, and they had recently had an argument; she needs closure. There is also the unsettling fact that while the pulse caused instantaneous brain death, it is known that some undetermined time later, some people "come back online", essentially awakening as shambling, teeth-clacking zombies inside their decaying, very dead bodies. Obviously she's a little off-kilter if finding her husband in this state is her goal. There is also the challenge in that the resort where the retreat was taking place is in an area that is currently off-limits, too close to the still-burning city of Hobart.

As readers here know, I am a "zombie movie guy". These days, I prefer when movies explore the genre beyond survival-horror-action, even if that is often the most exciting of the story structures. This movie never intended on being "exciting" and I am not surprised by the spate of 1-star reviews, by audiences, at RT. For me, the draw was the "clean up" after a mass-casualty event, something that is not / cannot generally be covered in virus or zombie-apocalypse movies because... well, everyone is dead. Alas, the movie only kicks off with that idea, the elevator pitch, while most of the rest of the movie is two-fold. 

One, the road trip through the hellscape that is south Tasmania, from relatively safe protected-by-soldiers areas of the island, to the proper wasteland littered with bodies and wreckage, ending in the juxtaposition-ing of a resort-spa populated by only the dead. which allows the character study of Ava and why she is so desperate to get to where her husband most clearly died. 

And two, the zombies themselves -- who or what is coming back online, what remains of the person who was originally there, if the brain was entirely wiped. The soldiers mollify the clean-up crews saying they are slow, plodding and harmless. But we, regular viewers, know how far that will go. Soon after leaving the safe areas, Ava, and her side-kick Clay (Brenton Thwaites, Titans), discover some definitely faster, angrier undead full of clacking teeth and malevolent intent. A lone soldier (Mark Coles Smith, Hard Rock Medical) they bump into explains that the longer they are online, the more agitated the undead act, as if tortured by their own returned existence. And yet, something of what they were does remain, as they try to return to whatever they were doing before the bomb went off. The existential horror of being aware inside a very dead and decaying body (its been weeks) is palpable, and yet, to extend the horror, this is what Ava was hoping for -- to find her husband, to find him "returned" and demand answers to questions about their relationship. The dead may have unfinished business, but so does Ava.

Many of the one-star reviews complained how the movie had no proper ending. I am not sure what they were looking for -- Ava was there to confront her husband, corpse or otherwise. And she did. And had her closure, for better or for worse. We all knew it was a fool's errand, no matter what she found. She would not find solace, not find forgiveness except within herself. And then the movie gives a little melodramatic tacked-on sub-plot involving the bumped-into-soldier and his ... wife. She was very much pregnant when the bomb went off. She is very much pregnant as the broken man ties her to the bed, hoping for his own sort of closure. The shock of the final scenes, where a baby is born from a corpse, a baby that should have been its own form of corpse but is warm and squalling, is yet another level of horror. Its not meant to answer any questions, just leave us with more.

Final thoughts? I was left with many, and the conflict between movie-making (telling a story, giving us plot) and the world-making of a different, new type of zombie apocalypse. The character development, the study of a woman in grief is at least managed but I felt it should have been harsher. I did like that this one made me think -- they are not just the mechanical zombies of most movies, with only death on their mind. And the horror of a callous US government is so obviously very current. I wonder how far these movies go with quiet-drama instead of full-on horror, and why.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Rats: A Witcher Tale

2025, Mairzee Almas (Shadow and Bone) -- Netflix

As of this stub's date (Feb 19) I have been off for a week, and ill most of it. Yesterday was the first day I felt somewhat human. My winter ailments usually involve sinus infections and that always puts my brain & moods out of sorts. One additional effect has been furthering an inability to watch/enjoy much. I literally have four movies in some state of "started". The only things I have been able to complete are TV episodes, which I continue not to write about, and a couple of movie rewatches, only one which I will write about. And this movie, which is more a movie-length episode of The Witcher, which I also watched in fits & starts.

The movie stars some characters from a side-plot in the series, a group of street urchin thieves who call themselves The Rats. In the main show they are seen as a self-aggrandizing bunch of teens/20-sumthins that are more bluster than successful rogues -- admittedly, my own opinion colours that statement. And they all die horribly before the season is out. In fact, this movie picks up right after those deaths and is done as a sort of recollection-tale by the show's scariest villain, a tale that doesn't make a lot of sense considering what he could know and not know, but... well, this show doesn't care.

My whole feeling for this movie, and these characters, makes me feel like an Old Man Yelling at Clouds. I want to dismiss my dislike for the whole setup and their depictions as a "they are not meant for my age-demographic" situation. But the objective pop culture consumer part of my brain, the one which is currently coming back online after weeks of fuzziness, recognizes its just Not Very Good. I highly doubt youth would make me like them/it any more.

I am also struggling with this while watching "Star Trek: Starfleet Academy" in that I am only enjoying it being in the "Star Trek" universe and not really enjoying all these runs at Teen Drama™ that the show is literally built upon. I am not going so far as saying its a terrible show, as much of the Enragement Bait Internet Rhetoric relies on, but I spend a lot of time rolling my eyes. And I don't really like any of the main youthful characters. Holly Hunter as the immortal Captain/School Chancellor... well, she rocks.

So, The Rats. This movie gives us Moar Background on them, primarily for the pack leader Mistle (Christelle Elwin, Death in Paradise) and her vaguely mentioned royal and/or wealthy background. I got the impression from the main show that she ran away from her life of refine, but this movie establishes that her family, and her girlfriend, were killed by the show's Main Bad Guys -- the fascist dresses-all-in-black country of Nilfgaard. It also gives us some connection as to why Mistle fell for Ciri so quickly in the main show, cute blondes and all that.

Anywayz, if you are going to do a show about rogues then it has to be about acts of thievery, so this one's a heist, where in they intend to rob the vault of a fighting ring, one run by the most dangerous & notorious crime gang BUT also more directly organized by a Bad Guy involved in the death of Mistle's family. And there is a monster involved, so they need a Witcher, and happen to find a drunken useless example doing his own play-fighting for coin in a bar, one Brehen (Dolph Lundgren, Aquaman) of the School of the Cat. His Tragic Backstory was that he failed to free King Foltest's daughter from a curse, losing his friend in the act, and Geralt of Rivia had to get involved. Blah blah, he's a self-pitying drunk. But they convince him to join them on the heist and ... ouch, I hurt myself rolling my eyes again... they all become a fast family.

Insert training montage after training montage.

Apparently this movie was cobbled together from the failed attempt to spin off a side-series. And it shows. Its rushed and empty of any real heart. Sure, they actually accomplish the heist, stealing a goodly sum of coin (but are broke again by the time they enter the main show, months later... losers) but losing Brehen in the attempt, and garnering the ire of the biggest, baddest villain the show has had in all its seasons, literally the only thing that compelled me -- one Leo Bonhart (Sharlto Coply, Elysium), a scarily effective and nasty killer of people, not monsters, especially enjoying adding to his collection of witcher pendants. He's the teller of the recollection-tale.

Maybe it could have been better, as a series, but I doubt it. Even as a big fan of Generic Fantasy, always enjoying the set dressing of these shows, this has no center. Reminding me of Xena: Warrior Princess which was the template for Terrible Generic Fantasy in terms of empty story telling, uninspired costuming and flat, bright lighting that makes everything look like a sitcom, this show squandered a substantial budget in lieu of terrible quipping and boring "quirky" characters. It looks good in many ways, as money was spent, but as mentioned earlier just doesn't have any heart. The locales, while full of sweeping vistas, don't have any particular feel to them, they just transplant from The Witcher's European forests to a place of stone and sand, but it doesn't feel authentic in any way, just bland, brown and boring.

But, yay (?), I finished it?

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Dead of Winter

2025, Brian Kirk (21 Bridges) -- download

No, not a remake of the 1987 Mary Steenburgen flick, but a curious cold-weather crime thriller set in the snow-bound northern reaches of Minnesota, shot entirely in Finland. It has a limited cast that makes it feel like a Pandemic flick but somehow doesn't feel... small. We watched it because it has Emma Thompson doing her best Frances McDormand "homespun midwest" accent. And because I like cold weather flicks.

As mentioned, in the wilds of Minnesota, probably close to the Canadian border, amid rural dirt roads, lakes and bad cell reception, Barb and her husband ran a bait shop. They lived a small life, their home a cozy mobile-home across the yard from the bait shop proper. Her husband Karl has recently passed and she has promised him that his ashes will be scattered on the lake where they had their first date -- yes, he took her ice fishing on their first date and it seems they never left that life behind. The depiction of that connection is exquisite, emotive and true. 

But Barb hasn't been to Lake Hilda in quite some time, and a news-making snow storm is on its way, so when she chances on a tucked away cabin on a side road, she stops to ask for directions. A startled man is nice enough, tells her she is near it, and explains away the blood on the ground as a nose bleed. Barb thinks nothing of it and heads off, finding Lake Hilda and getting lost in memories. But then she hears a gun shot, a crack as clear as new ice in this empty wilderness. She hides behind her truck and spies the man who just helped her chasing a young woman across the ice. He recaptures her and suddenly Barb has a new goal.

The Man (Marc Menchaca, Companion) is married to an irascible Woman in Purple (Judy Greer, Halloween Kills), who is obviously very ill. They have kidnapped the young woman for reasons unknown, but obvious The Woman is desperate, and The Man is utterly under her thumb. Barb dives into a rescue mission without thinking, promising the young woman (Laurel Marsden, The Pope's Exorcist) through the basement window that she will not leave her, no matter what.

The thriller part of the movie is pedestrian enough, but Emma Thompson is, as usual, compelling as Hell. Barb is not the woman Emma Thompson is, entirely rough around the edges, likely having spent most of her adult life in a stinky one-piece set of overalls. I cannot say if the accent is accurate but it is definitely regional. I could not help but think of her other recent role, as Zoë Boehm in Down Cemetery Road, which I did watch but did not write about (still having issues with writing about TV despite a failed attempt to reignite it), in that the character entirely stands out. I could not say faithfully that Emma Thompson has been a "character actor" throughout her career but maybe she is giving it a go? Maybe next up she will get a Liam Neeson "aging action star" type role?

If I was disappointed by anything with this movie it was the lack of role that Winter played. The movie starts with the hinting of coming Bad Weather but.... we never really see it. Its gawddamn cold, for sure, but there is no blinding blizzard or even never-stopping heavy snow. The movie is just set in a wintry environment. I wanted to feel the weather instead of just observing it having happened.

KWIF The Secret Agent (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. It's Olympics week, full of figure skating controversies, ski jumping controversies, and yes, even curling controversies. All it really left time for was a Saturday double feature at the movies.

This Week:
The Secret Agent (aka "O Agente Secreto" - 2025, d. Kleber Mendonça Filho - in theatre)
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2026, d. Gore Verbinski - in theatre)
Summer of the Colt ("Tales for all #8", 1989, d. André Melançon - Crave)

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The Secret Agent is the latest of unlikely critical darlings to transcend the festival circuit into both audience attention and awards acclaim. The Brazilian film debuted at Cannes where it won best actor for Wagner Moura and best director for Filho and has now achieved the rare double nomination at the Oscars for Best Foreign Feature and Best Feature, along with other nods its way. 

I've been keen on seeing the film since it's Cannes triumph, intrigued by the title and its 1977 setting because I'm sort of an espionage guy. I knew little else going in, other than many critics casually described it as "weird", and "not really a spy movie". I hadn't even seen a trailer.

And, indeed, it is a weird film, but not weird for weirdness sake. It makes highly unusual storytelling decisions which are, in its own way, disarming without being shocking.. You cannot anticipate the moves this film makes, not without prior awareness, and even then, it would be really hard to see how the pieces fit without experiencing how they actually play out in concert with each other.

The Academy Awards have really embraced the atypical in recent years, starting with The Shape of Water, and continuing with Everything, Everywhere All At Once and Poor Things among others in recent years. Given how outre the storytelling is here, I would say this is maybe its most unusual best picture nomination thus far. And yet, all that uncommon narrative is in service of something. I'll come back to that.

When we meet Wagner Moura's Marcelo, he's pulled into a gas station in his yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Before he's even stopped the car he spies a dead body in the adjacent dusty field, covered by a sheet of cardboard. His gut instinct is to keep going, even as the portly station attendant comes out. It's a bad scene but it's evident there's more on Marcelo's mind than just the dead body. The title of the film crafts in the viewer's mind all sorts of paranoid thoughts on behalf of Marcelo. There's an incredible tension to the scene that the charismatic station attendant slowly disarms, finally easing when the attendant shoos a pack of wild dogs away from the body as if he's had to do it dozens of times by now. But then a police car shows up and the tension's right back up again as they're not there for the body, but to pay attention to the yellow VW they had passed (once again, the tension is only disarmed by comedy, as a family-filled car is about to pull into the station, only to spy the body and rethink their decision, the young children catch sight and scream). 

It's an incredible sequence, waves of tension and levity, masterfully crafted and beautifully composed. At the same time it's an aside but also sets the tables for the film. Carnival is happening and apparently crime and deaths are rampant while it goes on. Marcelo is anxious about something, police especially, but it will be some time before we find out what it is he's so nervous about. There's corruption aplenty, and Marcelo's is  tense but also a nimble thinker.

The first scene is prefaced by a series of pictures, pictures that look like legit photos of the era and not manufactured for the film. It's easy enough to intone that director Filho is setting the scene for the time, place and attitude of the film (as is the caption, "Brazil 1977, a time of great mischief" which seems to be an understatement). I do not have any context for Brazil of this time period, it's political turmoil of the time is not something I've ever delved into. The fact that there is political upheaval is not lost on the viewer, but what is actually happening is not explained. This is not a film interested in educating an exterior audience, and I'm sure Brazilians are very in tune with the the imagery, captions, billboards, and intonations made in the film that would float past or at least not fully register with an outside audience.

It is then credit to the film's writer/director that this film so readily resonates outside its home country. At first it may be his stylistic choices, but any examination of what the stylistic choices are about all lead back to the themes of the film, which are about corruption, class structures, money, power and justice, as well as the unusual bonds of families. There's also too much to unpack after only one viewing.

Marcelo finds himself in Recife - a northeastern coastal city in Brazil - hosted in a, for lack of better term, refugee hostel with others who we learn are fleeing persecution of some sort or another. Also in Recife is Marcelo's son and his in-laws. Marcelo's has to remind his son that the boy's mother died of cancer, but it seems unspoken that she was perhaps assassinated. Marcelo's intent is to get his son and flee the country, but obstacles are in the way. In the meantime, he's been posted at a documents bureau, where he searches for some form of identification of his mother, a seeming lifelong quest he's had to just prove her existence (the story, explained late in the film, is a troubling one, and seems to have specific cultural resonance to the country that I don't fully understand).

Meanwhile, a shark is found with a human leg inside it. The police chief and his two thug sons seem very intent on handling this discovery themselves. In the wake of Jaws' success, the film's reputation living large in the minds of kids too young to see it, the story of the leg takes on a life of its own in the newspapers. Urban legends are built up around the leg, the phantom limb starts taking on a life of its own. 

Marcelo is also being hunted by two hitmen, a father/stepson team. The repeating pattern of fathers and sons and parents and children seems very deliberate, yet I struggle to understand fully the significance. Again, this is a film that will need repeat viewings and probably some extracurricular reading for full dissection. And these seemingly disparate threads - Marcelo, the police chief and the hitmen - all become rather woven into the same thatch. 

Outside all of this is a piece of the film set in the relative modern day, where a young woman is listening and digitizing audiocassettes featuring the voices of some of the players in the film. The abrupt jumps to the modern day are just that, abrupt, and yet, there's a sort of comfort in the fact that this character is discovering the events along with us. She seems to know more than we do, but with less exacting detail. The bigger surprise of these segments is they progress without ever using them as opportunity for exposition, which could have easily been the case. The purpose of these scenes, though they interrupt only a few times in the film, is only made clear in the final sequence of the movie, and it's kind of the lynchpin to the whole thing.

The Secret Agent is not at all what I expected given the title, and it's a far more unique film than I could ever have anticipated. It's not far afield from the works of a Bong Joon Ho or Yorgos Lanthamos, and yet director Filho is also not aping other directors work either. If ever he was in the past, in this his fourth feature, he's operating with his own voice (I'll need to dig up his three prior productions).  Moura, who has been quietly proficient in supporting (and even lead) roles in North American productions, shines here as both a charming and adept protagonist. Expect Moura to get a few big chances to shine in the next few years. 

I predict The Secret Agent won't win any Academy Awards in its nominated categories except perhaps Best Foreign, but given how it penetrated this year's ballot, I expect Filho will be a prominent awards contender and higher profile filmmaker in the coming years. The film, however, will live on beyond this year. It's just too deep and too unique to get lost in the sea of generic movies.

[Poster talk... many of the Secret Agent posters adopt the aesthetic of 70's spy or paranoia thriller posters, whether it's using a painted style of the era, or establishing the feel of a hand-cropped photograph. I love so many of the posters for this film. The most common theme across the posters is the image of Moura holding a telephone, looking anxious...such a 70's vibe recalling the image of Gene Hackman with the headphones on in The Conversation or Robert Redford at the telephone in 3 Days of the Condor.]

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Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is a time loop movie that doesn't show you start and end of the time loop, it takes place completely within the span of one loop. Loop number 118, if we're to believe Sam Rockwell's unnamed man from the future. 

The film opens with a rapid sequence of up close shots of aspects of a Los Angeles diner setting. Focusing more on the patrons than objects, but giving us little hints as to character or dynamics without showing us their faces. We get a sense that there's life here. And then there's a rattle, a barely noticeable skip in the image and a tell-tale "fwump" sound effect that tells us savvy audience members that something metaphysical, even temporal, has happened.

Into a busy diner walks Rockwell, sporting massive scraggly reddish-gray beard, a wild look in his eye, a manic trash-bin wardrobe, and complete disregard for any sort of social formalities. He interrupt the scene, starts spouting some end-of-the-world gibberish, touches upon his time-travel shenanigans and starts looking for recruits to help save the world. He's convinced the right combination of people in this diner will save humanity from a dystopian future ruled by artificial intelligence, but he just keeps finding disaster. Nobody is interested, which, he seems prepared for. 

But this time, he gets a volunteer from Susan (Juno Temple) who we learn in flashback, lost her son in a school shooting. No worries about that though, as she finds out her son can be cloned and because he died in a school shooting, the government will pay for most of it, and what they don't cover can be paid for by her son-clone having a sponsored ads setting.

The man from the future conscripts the rest of his crew, including troubled couple Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), teachers who we learn accidentally awakened the teenage social media hive mind and are now on the run.

The final team member was hesitantly accepted by the man from the future. At first Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), in her princess party dress and smudged makeup, was deemed too weird, but a trick of a fateful bottle of hot sauce convinces the man to bring her along.  We learn that Ingrid was born with an allergy to phones and wifi. The signals give her headaches and trigger nose bleeds. She kind of hates the technological world, as it's a bit of a hellscape for her to navigate.

The film jumps between the perilous journey the rag tag group needs to make from the diner to a 9-year-old's house where the child is busy inventing the AI that will disrupt the world and the flashbacks that fill in the blanks on the most prominent members of the group. (Asim Choudhry's Scott doesn't get such treatment, alas). 

The story in general, but flashbacks especially, feel like truncated, lighthearted episodes of Black Mirror, just technology accepted into society but making everything slightly worse when promising to make things better. It's hard not to call this "Black Mirror Lite" but it kinda is.

The third act makes some big moves and in doing so undercuts its own reality. The logic of the film seems to get tossed aside unless I'm missing a clear explanation/revelation somewhere.  It doesn't stop being entertaining, but it doesn't hold together conceptually.

The performances are fun, by and large, and there's a good sense of humour around the idea of technology destroying our lives but also being impossible to live without. It's really in how it's applied, awareness of the impact it has, and how we react to it that the film is concerned with, but...not that concerned. It's a satire, but it's also just silly. It's making statements but it's not committing to them. Things that would normally get a GenZ eyeroll would likely slip past them because it's not really old-man-yelling-at-clouds.  

Director Verbinski is known for being a visual stylist on The Ring and Pirates of the Carribean movies, and there's no doubt this is a film that looks a lot better than its twenty million dollar budget. But whatever style Verbinski brings is top loaded in a way, with some exceptionally interesting and well composed shots calling attention to themselves in the film's opening sequence and then seemingly falling away for the rest of the film (perhaps intricate compositions take time which costs money?).

I like both the main story and the flashbacks and they do all connect, but they almost feel like they should be separate pieces. There's probably a whole 90-minute "one crazy night" story in just the team getting from point A to point B, but the flashbacks interrupt that flow (and the lack of Rockwell in them is to their greatest detriment). Each of these microstories could have possibly supported their own feature, or maybe this could have been a multi-part anthology rather than a movie. 

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is solidly entertaining, but I imagine I'll have largely forgotten about it in a few months.

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As I prepared to do my Saturday double-feature this week, the intent was to finally knock The Secret Agent off my list (success) but the second feature was more up in the air. A few intriguing-but-still-February releases had just come out, but there were also a few Oscar contenders I could pick off. The biggest of them is Sentimental Value, a family drama centered around filmmaking (oh, the Oscars love films about films and filmmaking). I realized/remembered, in this decision-making moment, that I am never excited to see a dramatic movie. Nothing about watching characters deal (or not deal) with their emotions or confronting the challenges or difficulties they face in their lives has any appeal to me...that is unless there's some sort of genre twist to it. It doesn't sound like there's a genre twist to Sentimental Value, and I suspect I will never see that film in my lifetime, unless I wind up doing some stupid boy project where it slots into (I can't even fathom what that one would be).

So imagine my surprise when I get to the next "Tales for all"* film on the list, Summer of the Colt, which turns out to be a horse-centric family drama. I think what appeals to me even less than a dramatic film is a dramatic film centered around horses. Black Beauty or The Black Stallion, no thank you.

(*"Tales for all" being the series of family films made by Quebec producer Rock Demers, the earliest of its installments which were mainstays on Canadian weekend afternoon television through much of the 1980's and 1990's)

So it's no surprise to me that I found the first half of this film to be nearly interminable. The set-up finds Laura, Daniel and Felipe visiting their Grandfather's horse ranch in Argentina. They're met by their young friend Martin, whose family lives and works on the ranch.  But Laura is a young woman now, and not as interested in playing as the boys. There's horse riding aplenty and kids being kids and it's all so tranquil and kind of pointless for what seems like forever. 

It should also be mentioned that this is an Argentinian co-production with Demers, and it was most likely filmed in Spanish as both the English and French dubs do not sync with the performers' mouths. It's an obstacle. Also an obstacle, as we find with most of the "Tales for all" is the child actors are not the most seasoned performers and a lot of their performances can be very stilted and/or conveying incorrect emotion. The English dub voice performers are pretty solid though, but all this is barriers to enjoyment. It's important to establish all this film had going against it, because, in the end, I actually quite liked it overall.

What builds slowly in the film is Laura's sensing hostility from her Grandfather. He loved her just last year and now he's suddenly standoffish, cold, and even mean towards her. She sees it as sexism, that now that she's blossoming into womanhood, she's not such a tomboy, and he can't relate to her. But he's also not trying. So she takes drastic measures to try and fit in with the boys, by cutting off her long locks into a choppy bob. Her Grandfather can only retort snidely "Well, I hope you're proud".  The film sometimes presents Laura from Grandfather's point of view, and he sometimes catches sight of her and he sees an entirely different person. We can infer, based on comments made, that he's seeing in her the children's grandmother, who left for Paris and never came back, and it's too much for him to bear. It would seem  one tainted experience with a woman nearly 50 years ago just turned him into an old misogynist and a control freak.

Meanwhile summer pals Daniel and Martin are having a great time chumming around, doing horse sports and such, but when Martin points out a golden colt to Daniel, Daniel falls in love with the horse and asks his Grandfather if he can have it. His Grandfather agrees, but only if he can break the horse in... neither Daniel or Grandfather realizing that Martin has already bonded with the horse and has been slowly breaking the horse in for weeks already. 

It's a juvenile love triangle, but instead of a girl, it's a horse. Daniel becomes obsessed with the horse... some choice Daniel quotes:

D. "I've never seen a horse like that.... He's the one I want... Yeah, I want him for myself. He's beautiful!"
D. "Be quiet, Martin, he belongs to me!"
D. "you and me will do a lot together you'll see. You and me will go everywhere together...you're mine now."
D. "you had no right to let anyone else mount you! You're mine!"

Don't read these as gentle cooing, no read them as a steely-eyed psychopath, because that's how they come across (at least in the dub).

When Daniel catches Martin riding "his" horse, their friendship becomes a bitter rivalry. That is, until the horse bucks Daniel off and nearly kills him (for a second there, I thought it did, which I wouldn't put past one of these "Tales for all" to do), and then it's all bros before ho(rs)es. Well, not really, but the boys do talk it out.

The second half of the film spurts to life in full blown telenovela style. Just meaty melodrama with intense looks and leers, and heightened emotions which could lead anywhere. At one point Daniel pulls back his bed covers to find his grandfather has left him a silver-sheathed knife... a real Chekhovian play where we have to legitimately worry if this obsessed, nearly-psychopathic kid is going to stab another kid over a horse.

Laura's journey into young adulthood starts off as a real non-entity in the film, as Laura spends much of her time either alone or with her Great Aunt. But her delight in becoming a woman starts to sour because her relationship with her Grandfather calls into question how these changes in her body affect how others see her, it's a real mind fuck, and she doesn't understand it. She tries to get clarity and only gets pushed away. So the only way for her to process is through drastic measures and even those don't work. As coming of age stories go, it's pretty powerful at times. 

Likewise Grandfather is not just this nasty figure, he's actually pretty kind, but also myopic and out of touch with his own emotional core. His relationship with his grandchildren is based on a foundation of control, and suddenly with Laura and Daniel he's finding his control challenged. They are children, not horses, as Laura reminds him, they should not have to be broken in.

The film's second half shows the character developing emotional intelligence, realizing that the feelings they have inside don't need to stay there. Talking about things is the only way to make a situation better, even if it's uncomfortable.

Visually, Summer of the Colt is perfunctory, it does the job it needs to do. It captures the horses nicely and gets those emotive looks from the performers right center of the frame in full melodramatic fashion. There's little fancy here, but it all works. 

Next to Bach and Broccoli it's the most cohesive and resonant of the "Tales for all" but without a real genre hook, it's not quite as fun.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Greenland 2: Migration

2026, Ric Roman Waugh (Greenland) -- download

The original Greenland came out in 2020, during The Pandemic which I was calling The Pause at the time. Disaster Movie seemed an entirely appropriate response for a world that kind of felt like it was ending, but nobody really believed it was. We believed we would end up exactly where we did end up -- barely remembering that things were really different then and only shadows of the traumatic time haunting us. But in this first movie, the world did end -- the comet Clarke did hit the Earth, and the only survivors were those that made it to the bunker in Greenland. 

Except it didn't. Only a large chunk of Clarke hit the planet, likely many large chunks, but the world did not truly end. Civilized life did, but we persisted. Five years later, life in the Greenland bunker has become challenging and tenuous. Outside is radiation and toxic storms. Inside is boredom, tension and trauma. They have minimal contact with other bunkers and groups of survivors, as well as a rumour about a supposed paradise tucked inside the crater of the largest Clarke chunk, in southern France. Apparently the crater walls protect all within from radiation storms and other terrible stuff. 

The movie hand-waves this ridiculous idea away without so much as a quick argument around a bunker council table. I mean, the usual stuff of post-apocalyptic movies hasn't even happened. What about the atomic winter? Isn't it a mainstay of asteroid strikes that large amounts of material are tossed into the atmosphere bringing on endless winter? Maybe that happened in the first couple of years, but outside doesn't reflect it. Things are wrecked, but ... its all still there. And there are survivors in other bunkers and elsewhere.

And then a catastrophic earthquake strikes, tearing open the bunker and a tsunami wipes out pretty much all of the inhabitants. All but a handful are killed, and in that handful are our main characters John Garrity (Gerard Butler, Plane), his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin, Deadpool) and their now teenage son Nathan (Roman Griffin Davis, The Long Walk). They escape in a beached lifeboat before the wave kills everyone else. Everyone. Fuck you, Disaster Movie -- these people survived the comet strike and five years inside a bunker, only to be killed en masse so this movie can have an imposed road trip to a mythical New Eden. I just didn't like that premise. But it gave a reason to recreate the A to B trip of the first movie, like all great/terrible sequels do. 

So, Road Trip! The lifeboat makes it to the coast of England, Liverpool to be precise, where... well, things aren't wiped out, they are just rather typical examples of po-ap life. The military has its own bunker, which they keep survivors out of, but at least there are Outside Survivors. Five years on they have food, water and refuge from the tsunamis and radiation storms! Until the Garrity-s show up and a storm scatters them to all corners. Again, fuck you Disaster Movie. OBVIOUSLY these Outside Survivors have been surviving these storms, so then why does panic ensue. They must have safer refuges nearby but instead they all try to outrun the thing. Most don't. John trades his watch for a spot in a camper van for him and his family. 

And the movie continues the trip, interrupted by a series of violent spectacles that keep the focus on this little family, and only the family. They escape the sea, in that little lifeboat, with a few from the bunker. One dies at the gates in Liverpool, another is killed by raiders as they drive south. In fact, the driver of the camper van is killed when everyone stops for a respite and Clarke reminds us it still has quite a few chunks left to throw at the planet. 

That is the sequel-itis formula that just irritates the fuck out of me. Sequels often have to follow the beats and moods that made the first popular and memorable. The first Greenland had only the main characters traveling, each with some additional cast, who dies or move on without the others, until its only the little family left heading to Greenland. The first movie also had occasional bouts of rocks falling from the sky at precise angles, destroying cars and survivors. Sure, evocative scenes. And economy of cast is easier to manage. But...

Anywayz, from England, they cross the channel, which is, well, drained like a leaky bath tub. Apparently a great crack formed and all the water drained away. Exceeeept, there are lots of oceans & seas to either side of the English Channel -- the water should be still flowing. But no, they have to evoke scenes of po-ap wastelands so cross a desert between England and France, and cross over rickety ladders across the big crack, which then shakes & rattles dumping any other visible survivors into said crack, leaving our family again, alone, to head into France.

This is where they learn that the Clarke Crater is indeed a real thing and that there is a war being fought over it. Yes, there are enough out-of-bunker survivors in France, where the biggest chunk of the comet smashed into the planet to have armies fighting over entrance into this mythical paradise. A war that has a front-line and trenches and lots of bullets. While, again, very evocative in its depiction, it was so very very silly. The movie feels very much like it spit-balled a story & script in order to fulfill an agreement. 

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Fackham Hall

2025, Jim O'Hanlon (Your Christmas or Mine?) -- download

OK, a British absurdist comedic parody of other classic British movies about the divide between upper-class and lower-class in the 1930s; think Merchant Ivory or Downton Abbey, but with Jimmy Carr's humour, albeit tamed down significantly. Apparently its based on an idea he and his brother Patrick put together.

The Davenports are the lords of Fackham Hall but that is in jeopardy because Lord Davenport (Damian Lewis, Billions) has had no male heirs. His daughter Poppy (Emma Laird, 28 Years Later) is set to marry her first cousin Archibald (insert, "Eww, David."; Tom Felton, Rise of the Planet of the Apes), while his other daughter Rose (Thomasin McKensie, Last Night in Soho) is the weird one, who reads books and wears glasses ! Except on the day of the wedding Poppy runs off with a local manure hawker, for love, leaving the family in disarray. Meanwhile Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe, The Witcher), low-class pick pocket and orphan, has found his way into the home whilst delivering a message. He was also run down earlier, by Rose, when their eyes met and sparks flew.

Oh, and they toss in some Agatha Christie by killing someone off, requiring a detective to show up and solve a mystery.

Its not like the plot really matters. What really matters is the non-stop silliness and crass humour. But again, rather tamed down considering its from the mind of Jimmy Carr. The movie maintains the play on language common to the genre they are spoofing, as well as a heavy dose of Cockney mockery, but never really gets as crass as he can in his own stand-up. I think I might have been disappointed by that timidity. Jimmy himself has a bigger-than-cameo role as the minister who constantly pauses his sermons in the wrong spots (insert shocked titters), and who looks like Hitler.

It was alright, I chuckled a lot and enjoyed myself. Admittedly, I am not a big fan of the parody comedy movie genre (yes, that includes The Naked Gun) but I was hoping this could be just a bit sharper in its wit. I prefer my comedy without giant floating turds, and no, not metaphorical ones. 

KWIF: 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and Send Help

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. A Horror, Not Horror double feature at the movie theatre.

This Week:
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026, d. Nia DaCosta - in theatre)
Sent Help (2026, d. Sam Raimi - in theatre)

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The 28 X Later franchise could have so very easily been franchised all to hell into a series of bog-standard direct-to-streaming films, like 29 Weeks Later or 2.8 Years Later or whatever, just shitty no-concept movies about boring-ass idiots getting killing -and getting killed by rage-virus zombies.  As direly awful as our world is now, at least we can say that never happened.

Instead, the creators of perhaps the only zombie film to measure up to George Romero's still-vital classics seemed to retain some ability to control the fate of the series, and reunited 20 years later to bring a new saga to life within the reality that they created.  

In last year's Danny Boyle-directed, Alex Garland-scripted 28 Years Later we met young Spike (Alfie Williams) who was mollycoddled by his ailing mother and as such didn't have the resolute toughness needed to venture into the rage-zombie infested wilds and survive. But when the only hope for his mother was the mad doctor Ian Kelson (Ralph Feinnes), Spike sets out on an adventure to seek his help. When we finally meet Kelson, we learn he's spent the intervening 28 years studying and surviving among the infected, and building epic shrines out of the remains (bone temples, one might call them) out of the many dead and departed.  We also learned of the concept of Alphas, a sort of leader to the rage-infected that have swollen to gargantuan proportions and are seemingly unstoppable.

When we last left Spike, he had ventured off from his community on his own journey of self-discovery, meeting in the prior film's final frame, the Jimmys, a group of blonde wig and tracksuit-wearing roughnecks who knows parkour and dispense the rage zombies without any apprehension. As much as Spike was saved by the Jimmys, it was clear he was not safe.

This film picks up showing us exactly how not-safe Spike truly is. He's been put up against another Jimmy in a fight to the death. The winner gets to be one leader Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell)'s seven fingers, the loser gets to be free of this hellish reality. Spike triumphs because in spite of his timidity, his instincts serve him well, but it's clear that just because he won his place in the Jimmys, bestowed his own wig and tracksuit, it doesn't mean he's been accepted as one of them nor does he actually want to be one of them.  

Sir Jimmy, you see, is a Satanist of his own devising. He teaches his seven fingers the word of his father, Old Nick, who whispers in his head what his wishes are: dispense "charity" and sacrifice on the land. Sir Jimmy was the child of a preacher but was still quite young when the virus spread across the land, and his understanding of the world is shaped by his lack of understanding of the religion that was taught to him, and his own psychopathic sense of self-importance means he desires to learn less about the world, as it's easier to help it burn than to do anything else.

Meanwhile Dr. Kelson befriends an Alpha named Samson. Samson seems addicted to Kelson's morphine-laced darts, and keeps returning to Kelson for another hit.  The morphine seems to calm the rage virus within the Alpha, Kelson notes, and in the beast's haze, Kelson sees a semblance of humanity in Samson's eyes. Kelson continues to experiment with Samson, yielding highly unexpected results, and a breakthrough on the nature of the rage virus. What he learns would, in the old society, be the key to combating, maybe even curing the virus, but the machines of mass production and distribution have long since passed, so the reality of this discovery is tantamount to nothing much at all. But with Samson, Kelson has found an odd friendship, and a new purpose as he engages his scientific brain once again.

The two worlds, however, are bound to collide, and when it does, it's not the Grand Guignal I think we come to expect from horror films. Instead it's something far more dramatic and theatrical. One of the Jimmys spies Kelson cavorting with an Alpha and thinks the red-skinned man (as a result of Kelson's iodine bathing) is Old Nick. Jimmy himself, approaches the man he thinks to be his father, but is quickly assured otherwise, and the two engage in a most unexpected exchange.

I expect there will be a big contingent of horror fans, the kind who watch said films because they get a charge out of the gore and violence, who will be utterly confounded by the direction of this series, who will pretty much hate the majority of this film. It is a movie, and now a series, that is not at all interested in the threats of zombies and viruses, and unlike 28 Days Later it's also not reiterating its case that man is still the most dangerous threat to other men.

No, instead, Garland, here with director Nia DaCosta, are much more interested in exploring how people retain their humanity, their hope and optimism in a world where imperative number one is survival.  In this story, Sir Jimmy isn't the same character as Major West in 28 Years Later. Both are convinced that in this new world that all the power to control society that remains is theirs for the taking, but where Major West approached it as a military strategy with knowing sacrifices to be made, Jimmy approaches the world from a stunted idea of the lessons he learned as a child, and has developed really no further, except for being more cruel and complacent. The suspense of the film is largely in the worry for Spike, and whether the Jimmys will corrupt his innocence. 

With Dr. Kelson, he's finding hope in science and humanity in monsters. The worry is that there's a Grizzly Man situation in play, with Dr. Kelson getting too comfortable around the beast he thinks he's befriended. This is not a conventional horror movie set up by any means anyway, so we have to abandon convention horror movie thinking that things will go horribly, terribly awry for Kelson. It's not just Kelson that humanizes Samson, but the film does as well, quite remarkably. Chi Lewis-Parry's physical and emotional portrayal of Samson is remarkable, so much of it necessitating subtle changes in posture or facial tension or just softness in the eyes.  There is a verbal component as well, one that goes beyond just rage virus screaming.

It's hard to recommend The Bone Temple as a stand-alone film, as it does need the setup of 28 Years Later for some of our understanding of Kelson and Spike and to a lesser degree Samson and Sir Jimmy. But at the same time, The Bone Temple is a very different film than everything else in this series and I found it exceptional and fascinating. Along with backing off of zombie attacks (they're still here, just not the focus), DaCosta also steps away from shooting with Boyle's grittier sensibilities (he shot 28 Years Later largely on an iPhone) and instead focuses heavily on composition and lighting, rendering a surprisingly beautiful movie to look at. The shadows are heavy and dark, while the film's most prominent light, fire, is rendered in vibrant reds, oranges and yellows. 

For some The Bone Temple may suffer from middle-film-itis, where much of the weight is in the set-up film and the concluding film rendering this feeling but an interlude or stop-gap, but this is such a soulful, considerate and contemplative movie, that I find it impossible to dismiss. Quite the opposite, this lives so much larger in my mind than anything from the series that came prior.

But is it horror? Close...let's say horror-adjacent.

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If you've seen the trailer for Send Help, the premise is evident. An underappreciated female employee and her dickhole boss are stranded on an island after a plane crash. He's injured and suddenly she's in charge, and it looks like she's gone a little gonzo.

And yeah, that's sort of it, with maybe just a little more nuance. Rachel McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a meek, homely member of the Planning and Strategy team at a Fortune 500 company. She is the unsung rockstar of that company, an absolute wizard with numbers and planning, but also an absolute doormat. The company's founder has recently passed and his son, Bradley Peston (Dylan O'Brien) is taking over, and appointing his college buddy into the VP position promised to Linda. She tries to ingratiate herself to Bradley but succeeds at the opposite, and Bradley, the tried-and-true child-of-money, full of self-importance, entitlement and unearned status, is frankly disgusted by her. He's been told that she's basically the glue holding the company together, but Bradley seems to want her gone, and puts her on the plane to Thailand where they're brokering an acquisition, looking for her to fail.

The private jet doesn't make it and, as we saw in the trailer, Linda (who studies survival techniques as her chief hobby) takes charge. Injured Bradley cannot concede that he is Linda's superior, her better, that she shouldn't be deferential to him, to listen to his barking commands and his plans and strategies. As much as he needs Linda for everything, he cannot admit such. Even when he ventures off on his own and comes crawling back to her, it's not with any sense of concession... he's admitting defeat, his own ineptitude for survival, but if she's in charge he can only resent her for it.  

This is a really sly and devilish two-hander that refuses to go to expected places. It's a fantasy but it's grounded in a single idea that someone like Bradley will always view someone like Linda as inferior in every situation. And so all the moments and all the opportunities Linda gives Bradley to see her as something other than an object of derision fail over and over again. Bradley can never let go, and always looks for an edge, a leg up on Linda, some way to take control of the situation he is completely and totally incapable of actually competently being in charge of.

In similar films in the past, Linda would be in the right, up until she was in the wrong. Here, she has an early opportunity for rescue, but she says "not yet" (Bradley is ignorant of this moment). It's a savvy way to undermine Linda as the hero of our picture. Where we're with her 100% in the beginning as a trod-upon underdog, with the sudden turn of tables post-crash, we're maybe only 75% with her on her decision not to be rescued. As the film progresses, it becomes harder and harder to stay on Linda's side. Has she become unhinged?  In some films, we would then have our allegiances and sympathies turn to the only other character on screen, but Bradley never earns our trust or allegiance as an audience, and so by default Linda stays our protagonist, even as her actions become more and more extreme.

Sam Raimi has had a very varied career, starting in horror and comedy-horror and adventure-horror, before turning to suspense and westerns and superhero and fantasy movies. Raimi is more than capable of fantastic drama and epic adventure but this is where fans always want him to be. Like Drag Me To Hell or Evil Dead 2, the purest Raimi delivers an unserious thriller full of gross-out gags meant to put a big smile on the audience's face and squeal with equal parts laughter and revulsion.  If he wants to do another Spider-Man or Doctor Strange, fine, I'll take it happily, but this type of production is the director's sweet spot. What Raimi does to McAdams in that boar-hunting scene is as glee-inducing as anything he ever did to Bruce Campbell, and there should be a line-up of A-list actors wanting to get that same treatment at the master's hands.

A damn fun time at the movies.

But is it horror? Nah, it's not really ever scary, it's too much fun. There is one jump-scare though, but otherwise there's no real intent to scare the audience.