KWIF: tubi-ular bells

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. An annoying end-of-summer cold as well as intense end-of-quarter workdays and TIFF wreaking havoc on showtimes downtown all conspired to keep me out of the theatre this week. Movies got watched, but maybe not what I would have seen otherwise.

This Week:
The Philadelphia Story (1940, d. George Cukor - tubi)
Starflight One aka Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land (1983, d. Jerry Jameson - tubi)
Legend of the Eight Samurai (1983, d. Kinji Fukasaku - blu-ray - also on tubi)
The Guest (2014, d. Adam Wingard - tubi)

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The Philadelphia Story opens with a shock. Cary Grant's C.K. Dexter Haven being thrown out of his home by Katherine Hepburn, playing his wife Tracy Lord. She snaps one of his golf clubs in half and he, enraged, restrains himself from striking her. Instead he puts his meaty hand softly on her face and then pushes her to the ground and walks away. He's a hurt man unsure of where to place his emotions, and so his act is clearly a show of dominance rather than intending to be violent. But it is still so shocking. It's still violent.

Let's be clear...assault is assault, and this constitutes assault. But it's also kind of funny because it's so unexpected. It shouldn't be funny, but I couldn't help but laugh. The jaunty, whimsical music is also telling us to not take it too seriously. It's a very weird note to start this movie on.  Throughout the film, unfortunately, there are multiple snappy remarks about domestic abuse that are meant to be funny, as striking one's wife was just an accepted part of a domestic relationship back then apparently. Thankfully, there's no further physical violence upon women in the film. 

After that very brief (and did I mention shocking?) opening scene, when we next cut to Tracy, she's getting married again. We learn that she's from an affluent family (as was Dex) and that she's marrying George Kittredge (John Howard) a man of new money who isn't as well versed in high society. Their marriage is to happen on the weekend.  Macaulay Connor (James Stewart) is a writer assigned by his editor to cover the wedding, with his partner, photographer Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) to accompany him. They both question how they will get access to the wedding, and the answer comes with Dex leading the way. Yes, Dex is going to crash the wedding (but also introduce Mac and Liz as friends of Tracy's brother who's away in South America...) The jig doesn't last long but there are reasons they go along with it.

Tracy is  passive agressive in her welcoming of these people into her parent's home, and certainly isn't welcoming of Dex appearing back into her life, not at this time.  Mac is a crusader and an artist, and has genuine disdain for the wealthy, and certainly has no real desire to pursue this assignment. But when Tracy finds Mac's book of short fiction (or was it poetry) at the library, she's kind of smitten by the deep thinking, soulful man she'd so easily dismissed, and Mac, meanwhile, sees she's not the vapid snoot he assumed she was.

And so here we have a strange love pentagon where Mac, who is with Liz, now finds himself falling for Tracy (and Liz keenly aware of it and really just kind of relaxed about it, as if this is something Mac does all the time), and Tracy, likewise, falling for him, while getting married in a day or two, and then Dex is lingering in the peripherals dropping hints (or giving gifts) about their past when times were really good and romantic. 

Based on the stage play of the same name by Philip Barry, which also starred Hepburn and she also produced it. She was also the instigator for bringing the play to the big screen as a means of hopefully getting her out of movie jail after a string of bombs. It's a very sharp, twisty, unexpected story that doesn't follow traditional romance or romantic comedy beats. Most of the struggle of these characters and what they are feeling is internalized. For all the words they spew (it's a very punchy, fast-talking script) they aren't talking as much about what's really going on inside, merely hinting at it.

Hepburn here is fully in charge. This is Tracy's story, and she's not willing to fit the role that any man wants to put her in... not Dex, not her father, not George, and ultimately not Mac. Because Tracy is so fiercely independent, so frustrated with the patriarchy, she rebuffs it, and refuses to submit to it. As a result, these men who proclaim to love her have put her up on this pedestal, that she's a goddess or a queen, something other.  

Dex spent his years of marriage treating her like she was a wild horse that needed to be broken, because that's the role women were expected to play, to be submissive to their husbands. What alternative examples were there? He called her goddess, but he refused to worship her...even worse, he just refused to respect her. Mac, meanwhile, sees her, sees the person she wants to be, but also still elevates her to royalty status, someone above him... they're not equals.  He's drawn to that imbalance, but even though she's into it now, it's apparent she wouldn't put up with it long. And then George, the man she's supposed to marry, idolizes her, but also wants her to fit in a box, and play the role of kept woman, be at his side, and that definitely won't work for her.  

And while the point of the movie is Dex -- still seething with contempt, jealousy and little boy hurt feelings -- sees Tracy with these other men, and how other men act around her, and how she responds to that, and realizes he played it all wrong, that she wasn't meant to be a possession or a god, that she was meant to be supported and loved and given the same respect and companionship that he himself wanted from her.  At least I think that's the realization he comes to. As I said, this is Tracy's movie, and Dex disappears throughout much of the film a surprising amount. I really thought the possibility here was that Tracy learns to love herself and that she doesn't need a man in her life for any sense of fulfillment.  But that's not how the films of the 1940's worked.

This is the most interesting I've ever found Jimmy Stewart playing bitter and spiteful and turning that around into a dashing romantic lead. Hepburn I've not had much experience with, but this gives her the opportunity to be hard and sometimes comically nasty, but also flirty and vivacious. It's amazing to watch her face transition from stern to soft. The Philadelphia Story is a tremendous romantic comedy, the wordplay razor sharp, the comic setpieces are small but uproarious, and everyone involved is completely on point. Maybe not a flawless story, as we're still dealing with the affairs of the wealthy as if they're all that matter (and this is a film that is warning us not to judge them so harshly, which, from a modern lens, I cannot agree with at all), but what entertainment!

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One of my slow-burn projects has been to watch as many of the 70's disaster flicks as I can stomach. There are obviously the biggest of big - The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure -  but there's also a plethora of try-hards and hardly-tryings that came out of that era - your Earthquake or Juggernaut.  They all follow the same formula, which is spending a half hour introducing all the players we're going to follow through the film, as well as teeing up the disaster to come, and then having the big disaster set-piece killing a whole bunch of people, and then having our survivors (those we met in the opening act) traipse through the aftermath trying to find safety... and we're never quite certain who will perish along the way.

(Toasty covers a lot of the modern disaster flicks - check the "disaster" tag - which tend to just follow a single protagonist surrounded either by family or, like, a research team, and not the ensemble of disparate characters as per the 70's formulae.)

Hal Linden (Barney Miller) plays Josh Gilliam, the head designer of the Starflight, a cutting-edge rocket-fuelled plane that will climb to the upper atmosphere and move a 400mph, making a direct flight from L.A. to Sydney in two hours. While the simulation tests don't reveal any outright problems, Josh feels reluctant about the rocket system, and worries something will go wrong with the inaugural flight to Australia.

Pilot Cody Briggs (Lee Majors) is having domestic issues, his marriage is hanging on by a thread, and he's reluctant to commit to single mom Erica Hansen (Lauren Hutten), the press secretary for Starflight's parent company, Thornwell Aviation.  She, and her daughter will be on the plane, as will dozens of press people, a wanna-be aeronautics mogul, a gold thief, and a contest winner chosen from the Thornwell employees who worked on the plane.  As well, last minute, the plane is held to allow for the loading of the recently deceased ambassador from Australia in his coffin.

Despite the set-up of something being wrong with the plane, it's in fact, outside events which cause the tragedy to happen. A experimental satellite rocket launched too early explodes in the atmosphere which sends debris hurtling towards the Starflight. Their only option to avoid it is to climb higher using the rocket boosters. The only problem is the debris struck the ship and now they can't turn the rockets off. They rocket into space, into orbit of the earth, with a limited supply of food, power and oxygen. The plane is out of fuel, and they have no heat shields to even re-enter earth's atmosphere. How ever will any of them survive.

Space shuttle Columbia, that's how. Somehow, over less than a two-day span in this film, NASA manages to land the Columbia four times and launch it three. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for an nearly billion-dollar experimental rocket plan that only seats like 40 passengers (and you thought Fly Emirates was expensive...) but turning around launch times in two hours is not only improbable, but impossible.

Presented on Tubi in glorious 4:3 aspect ratio, I was wondering if Starflight One was a TV movie given that it has a run-time of nearly 2 hours and figuring most TV movies are, like, 90 minutes given that they have a 2 hour timeslot to fill and that they have to run commercials...but I forgot that back in those days that networks would block of 2 1/2 or 3 hours for "event" movies. It's most definitely a TV movie. I mean, look at the cast list. Even with John Dykstra on special effects, this is special effects on a TV budget. Once the Starflight reaches zero gravity, there's only a scene or two of people floating, and from then on it's painfully obvious that the actors are trying to mimic weightlessness by slowly bending and straightening their knees. It. looks. bad.

The far-fetched idea, the cliched formula, the bad cast of characters (I mean, the gold thief just got married and is going to Australia on a honeymoon with his unsuspecting bride, and they don't use that for anything other than to have gold bars in the cargo bay... at least the Australian ambassador's coffin is used as an air-tight transportation unit to shuttle a dude from Starflight to Columbia, but it's still a dully executed sequence)... Starflight One is a tired regurgitation of better ideas.  The most interesting part of the film is the love triangle between Cody, his wife and Erica, but Majors seems to be taking a paycheck and can't be bothered to invest in caring about the emotional life of this character. The big "I love you" scene between Majors and Hutton is up there for one of the worst on-screen kisses I've ever seen, beaten only by a kiss that happens between them later in the movie when they're saying goodbye, perhaps forever (Majors doesn't even attempt to participate in the kiss, and you have to wonder what was going on behind the scenes for such a dispassionate effort).

That said, as badly executed as it sometimes is, and as poor an example of this genre as it is (and pretty much the end of the era for this kind of disaster movie), it's still so in the mould that it is kind of watchable (kind of), even if most of the entertainment value is laughing at its absurdity.

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A note to my future self... if you get a recommendation for any sort of Asian action film from the 70's or 80's, check Tubi first before dropping any coin on a blu-ray release. Watch the film and then decide if you like it enough to want to watch it again, uninterrupted by commercials and in a much better quality presentation, and care enough to delve into special features.

I've seen many a samurai movie, and I genuinely love the genre, and I've seen many wuxia fantasy films which I also like. I'm less versed in Japanese fantasy which sort of bridge these two, or if that's even a common thing. Legend of the Eight Samurai plays out less like either of those two niches and instead feels very much like an homage to the made-in-Italy sword-and-sorcery movies of the 60's (which I guess also trickled out throughout the 70's and came roaring back in the 80's).

Princess Shizu (Hiroko Yakushimaru) is on the run. Her family has been murdered, and it's only Shizu  which stops them from fulfilling the revenge curse of the Motofuji clan. The evil Hikita Gonnokami Motofuji (Yūki Meguro) and his lover/mother, the witch Tamazusa (Mari Natsuki) have discovered the secret to immortality (it involves taking a bath in a massive blood pool) and are on the path to ruling Japan and possibly the world so long as they vanquish their enemy completely. 

But Shizu finds her own destiny is tied to eight samurai ("dog") warriors whom she collects along the way (these include actors like Sonny Chiba (The Street Fighter) and Etsuko Shihomi (Sister Street Fighter)). But continued run-ins with vainglorious outcast Shinbei (a young Hiroyuki Sanada) turn from disgust to admiration to love in pretty rapid succession, with a lot of contrivances and complications along the way.

Legend of the Eight Samurai is a loose adaptation of a classic Japanese serial from the 1800s ( Nansō Satomi Hakkenden by Kyokutei Bakin) that was definitely an attempt to Star Wars-ify such fantasy tales (there's even a Luke-and-Leia-rope-swing moment which is composed pretty much exactly the same). While there are moments that feel like Star Wars homages (including the sort of Stormtrooper-y samurai hordes), I couldn't escape the feeling of the many getting-the-band-together fantasy adventures I'd seen over the years. While visually the big sets and setpieces, the rotoscoped animated effects, and the use-what-we-got outdoor environments felt of the 60's era, the synth-heavy soundtrack from Nobody, and the oh-so-'80's power ballads from John O'Banion feel very much of their time. The style of fantasy and the tone of music don't mesh innately, but at the same time it makes for a very distinctive production.

It's not that I disliked Legend of the Eight Samurai, but I had a hard time settling into it. It's...different. It moves at an unfamiliar pace, and it often seems to lack focus.  It's always hard to watch a film where the protagonist (Princess Shizu) is really so defenceless, and the heroic figure (Shinbei) is a real aggravating rascal for much of the film, but eventually comes around (young Sanada is so damn cute though) to being the inevitable eighth samurai (not really a spoiler, is it?). If I watch it again, it will have to be in dialogue with maybe other adaptations of the source material, or director Fukasaku's work... or maybe I just want to hear those cheesy ballads again, because they're so spot emulations of the hit songs of the era that it's astonishing that I've never heard them before.

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And finally this week, I decided to watch The Guest after years of saying "no thanks" due to fundamentally misunderstanding what type of movie it was. It's a psychological action thriller that takes on the feel of 1980's action and horror movies but in a 2010s setting. I thought it was just a psychodrama in the Cape Fear, Pacific Heights, Single White Female vein where someone who isn't what they seem completely insinuates themselves into the lives of an unsuspecting victim, demolishing their reality from the inside.

And it is sort of that, but also not. 

Laura Peterson (Sheila Kelley) and her husband Spencer (Leland Orser) are still grieving the loss of their son, who died in combat overseas, when turning up at their door is David Collins, a veteran from their son's unit, and a friend with a message for them.

They invite David to stay with them, and he's so respectful and kind and courteous. He helps out around the house and starts mentoring their bullied son Luke (Brendan Meyer). Their daughter, 20 year old Anna (Maika Monroe) is wary of this stranger, something about his vibe puts her off, that is until she catches him in nothing but a towel coming out of the bathroom, and she's fully switched on. But the glamour spell doesn't last. Little things tweak her, and she's right to worry.  What the family doesn't see, but we the audience, is the way David's face drops anytime someone turns their back to him or leaves a room, and the way he peers out windows in anticipation. David instigates a fight with Luke's bullies at a bar where he utterly demolishes them, he defends Anna's friend from a toxic ex-boyfriend at a party, he provides comfort and guidance for the family...it seems like David is the good guy, but the tone of the film, everything from scene composition, to the tone of the music to Dan Steven's steel blue eyes and wry, unnerving smile feel off. And then there's the cutaways to a shadowy government contractor led by Major Carver (the late, great Lance Reddick) which maybe intone David is a victim and on the run...?

The Guest comes from director Adam Wingard (Godzilla vs. Kong, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire), whose latest film in theatres (at the time of writing), Onslaught, is not a sequel, but in the same world as this film. That most definitely looks like an action movie, and it was conversations in media around that film which alerted me to the fact that The Guest was not much at all what I was expecting. Rather than being tense and uncomfortably dramatic, this is more heightened intensity and pulpy, with shades of John Carpenter and James Cameron pumping through its celluloid veins. It's not a very surprising movie, but it seems to know exactly what its doing and how it wants to do it. It may not seem the most logical leap from this to giant apes and lizards, but Wingard proved he knew how to capture tone and create an movie that is fun and exciting that also thrills.

[Poster talk... there's not a single good poster for The Guest. Most of them feature either David or Emma in silhouette against vibrant neons that intone/imply nothing. There is a poster of Stevens with a ditty bag slung over his shoulder that implies just a little more but not enough. And then there's the follow-up posters, once again using the vibrant colours and shadowed figures just with big bold quotes from critics. They do not sell the movie at all. Paired with the trailer, which make it out as another sort of secret psychopath story this was a poorly promoted movie.]

Stubbing Out: Samara & Karl/Kyle

Eenie Meanie, 2025, Shawn Simmons (primarily a writer; directorial debut) -- Disney+
Carolina Caroline, 2025, Adam Rehmeier (Snack Shack) -- download

Well, fuck. I had it all planned out in my mind, and I thought I had properly confirmed it, but apparently Samara Weaving was not starring in two star-crossed lovers, back-water America, crime stories with the same guy. Turns out, Karl Glusman (Eenie Meanie) and Kyle Gallner (Carolina Caroline) are not the same actor.

But, same look in each movie, same initials... there is something going on here.

My original intent was to, and I doubt it would become a new tag, but begin the write up(s) just after I started the movie(s). I often watch movies, these days, in fits & starts: with week day morning coffee, and just after I get up on weekends. Life interrupts. Occasionally, when doing so, I like to put in a "stub" post, to capture what I was thinking as I watched, even before completing the movie. Given this post was going to be about two movies, I tagged that onto the post title.

Original original intent aside, the plan will still goes, just with no comparing about how odd it was for Samara, and really she is the star power here, to be in two very similar movies with the same co-star. She is still in two very similar movies, in genre if not tone, about people on the ass-end of American life making terrible crime-ridden life choices.

Samara Weaving started her career, in my eyes, as "not Margot Robbie" but came into her own, again in my mind, in a 31 Days choice of The Babysitter -- for some reason, I did not do proper credit-ing in that post. Not long after, she stood out again in Ready or Not. She hasn't been a Margot Robbie stand-in, in my mind, for quite a long time, which makes her role in Babylon all the more amusing.

Karl Glusman will always be, to me, Sergei from Devs but that is because I never saw any of his previous projects. The Internet loved his threesome in Love, a Gaspar Noé movie --- odd note, Kent references his movie Enter the Void at least three times in other posts, but neither of us wrote about it.

Kyle Gallner doesn't really have any prevalence in my mind. He's just one of those ten million character actors that have played a single episode of all the TV crime dramas and just enough roles in movies that I recognize his face. I guess his only stand-out, to me, would be "Beaver" from Veronica Mars some 20 odd years ago, but he was a kid then.

***

Edith, or Edie, Meade (Weaving) was raised by two degenerate drug-using criminals. When she was 14, she picked them up from a bar and while attempting to escape the cops, crashes the car, killing her mother and paralysing her father. She spends the rest of her youth in the usual abusive foster system, in Cleveland. After escaping that, she ended up back in the seedy crime-ridden underbelly of her parents. The movie begins when she has escaped that, going to school, keeping a job. But what she hasn't escaped is her on-again off-again relationship with John (Glusman), who is a complete loser.

We are introduced to Edie in a nightclub; she is supposed to be the typical skanky but smart girl, wanting to go home early so she can study. I don't buy Weaving's American skank -- she's just too statuesque. But she's a bad girl wanting to go straight: school, shit car, shit boss, shit job at a bank, which gets robbed and Edie is knocked unconscious. When she awakens at the hospital, she finds she is pregnant, and that means a hard decision: should she talk to John (Glusman), her ex, the father, or should she avoid him.

She should have avoided him. She walks straight into his shit show, where he owes Nico the Mob Boss (Andy Garcia, Wrath of Man) and she has to put her legendary driving skills back into action. In the intervening years between the car crash and her going to school, Edie was a driver for Nico, a very very good driver. But John is her Achilles Heel, an entire mess of a human being, stupider than pavement, but able to charm Edie in ways she cannot control.

John had kidnapped Nico's card counter, a man who makes Nico a lot of money. Then the card counter is accidentally killed, and now John owes Nico all the money the card counter could have potentially made. Edie has two options: help John on a job for Nico that could recoup the money, or let.... John... die. We wouldn't have a movie if Edie didn't love John, trainwreck and all.

What plays out in tragi-comedy is a fun mish-mash of violence and stupidity and adrenaline, from the guy who did the YouTube / TV show Wayne, a violent little romp about a high school kid on bicycle trying to get his dad's car back. John continues to make bad decisions, Edie ends up having to make some really hard decisions.

I would do some comparisons to specific car chase and/or heist movies, but we know the tone. There are tense chase scenes, avoidances and bone-jarring crashes. There are betrayals and murders that don't sit well with Edie. Its all familiar ground, but... I rather enjoyed it. Weaving wraps herself in the role, and unlike the next one, it is not as enamoured with her statuesque body. We get most of her performance from her eyes, sad and disappointed most of the time, hard and determined when needed.

***

Caroline (Weaving) opens the movie alone, carjacking her ride, driving off into the sun. She is going to end up here, but where we really meet her first is a gas filling station in Texas where the makeup-lite Caroline (code for innocent, unworldly) observes customer Oliver (Gallner) con the gas station owner out of $20. She's annoyed he would take money out of the hands of another; he is amused she caught his con so quickly.

Later they bump into each other at a roadhouse, she is surprised he is still in "town". Why would anyone stay in her little bumpkin speck-on-the-road of a town? She, of course, is desperate to get out. Commenting leads to flirting, flirting leads to dating and dating leads to sharing -- Caroline's mother left her when she was young, and she has always wanted to go to Carolina, where she believes her mother is, to ask why. She's also mesmerized by his little con jobs, and asks him to show her how its done. They are taken with each other, but you are always left wondering how much of their interaction is him controlling the beautiful blonde in front of him, but I remember the opening scene where she is alone, and wonder whether she is manipulating him from the very start.

When they do couple-crime dramas, the go-to is Bonnie & Clyde but this is more akin to True Romance but without all the Tarantino quirkiness. Its romantic, its exciting, its tense. 

By midway through the movie, things have escalated. Simple $100 cash shuffling has become large sums of money, has become lifting wallets and emptying bank accounts, has become... robbing banks. Caroline wants more: more excitement, more cash, more slinky outfits. That is, until she sees the darker side of what they are doing: the fear they generate, the intimidation and violence they have to use to keep things going -- the harsh cruelty that keeps Oliver moving along so he can do the next job. Caroline likes it when its fun & exciting, not so much when they have to pistol whip someone. That escalation also brings real life into play, and they are on a Wanted List.

Reality has Caroline question where's she from, so the original intent of the road trip, before the con jobs, before the slinky dresses, before the bank robberies, was to find her mother in Carolina. But we all know how those visits turn out... Meeting Deborah (Kyra Sedgwick, Bad Shabbos) for 10am screw drivers is not a pleasant experience and Sedgwick is incredible in this pretty-much cameo, eliciting waves of revulsion from the way she holds her chin and the words vomiting out of her mouth. But, instead of a call to her Daddy and a wake-up call, she asks Oliver if they can rob the world.

"How do we know if we are good people pretending to be bad, or bad people pretending to be  good?"

Their world comes crashing down pretty quickly, and hard. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't provide much breathing room for neither us, nor the couple. Caroline should have just taken the time to absorb the reality of her mother, but instead it leads to the death of a state trooper and, finally, Oliver taking Death by Cop so Caroline can escape. TBH I was imagining he would abandon her, to return to his life of lone con jobs, but I guess he really did love her.

So, two stories with similar paths, similar bad decisions, both ending with Weaving's characters alone and expecting. Two entirely different tones. The first is more my thing; my days of being charmed by violence-crossed lovers out against the world are gone. Like Edie, I have grown out of that. But the latter was a competently done story and I cannot fault it for anything, including the familiar story, because telling the same story over and over again is how the telling of tales is done.

Three Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Def-Con 4

1985, Digby Cook, Paul Donovan, Tony Randel -- Amazon

I told Kent I was going to do it, and since I don't have the spare brain cells for anything real at the moment, I watched this one over a few days.

Wow, that was bad, but not as bad as I recall judging it way back in Ye Olden Days of VHS. Don't get me wrong, its terrible but terrible in the way most 80s post-apocalypse movies were. And the Canadian-isms of it all, sort of allow me to forgive it much. I also am amused that I recalled two very important details from my first viewing: when I saw the Alexander Keiths stubbie beer bottle being used as a candle holder I knew the movie was Canadian (ignoring the Maury Chaykin role), and I believed the whole movie having taken place in Nova Scotia, based on the map in the Bad Guy's lair.

So, this is Cold War hype at it hype-iest. A handful of astronauts in a satellite space station grumping about how long they have been up and looking to get back to Earth, when it happens -- someone pisses someone else off (oh, say... someone calls The Prime Minister his Governor) and the missiles start being lobbed. They are supposed to launch their own but they argue and, don't.

Minutes later, which I gather is supposed to be weeks, one of them gets a message from his wife. Radiation has caused a sickness, most people are dead, anyone ill is quarantined and his child is dead. The crew argue again and Howe (Tim Choate, Babylon 5) fiddles with the computer, sending them on a landing trajectory. I admit, I was washing the dishes so I didn't catch everything, but I believe they got a signal from Earth, which was weird cuz everything should be all blowed up. Oh, the other astronauts are Walker (John Walsch, absolutely nothing else) the commander, and Jordan (Kate Lynch, Lost Girl) the doctor.

Weird note. There were moments when I thought the movie was going to stray into sexytime. One, it had to be Walker as Howe is married, watches a "blue movie" and Jordan just rolls her eyes. Entirely inappropriate. There are a few other very terribly written sexual scenes, as if the script was done by a 14 year old boy whose only exposure to sex was a bunch of nudie mags in a plastic bag hidden under his bead.

They land. Not sure how, as their space station doesn't actually have a visible lander module. BUT not before they launch all their own nuclear payload. All but one, and it starts ticking down. Its a rough landing and Jordan is knocked unconscious and they are jammed weirdly on a sandy beach. As Walker tries to dig his way out, he is grabbed by unknowns and ... only his hand drops back into the hole. When Howe emerges with a flimsy stick as a weapon, he sees people sawing chunks of meat off Walker -- CANNIBALS !

He runs, but is caught by a random trap put out by Vinny (Canadian royalty Maury Chaykin, My Cousin Vinny) the redneck survivalist, in his best Canadian Tuxedo and kilt. While this movie never mentions its in Canada, and always seems to at least pretend its following American style politics & military structure, it also drops regular Canadianisms. 

Weird note. Its been... what, a few months? They have been revolving up there for the few months and the planet has fallen into complete barbarism? They haven't even landed in an urban area but they have cannibals and bandage wrapped muties, but everything is "The Road Warrior" level PA. Why? Even with mass death and collapse of society, things would hang onto a near-normal for at least years. But, whatever, this wants to do the "Planet of the Apes" thing and have them arrive to a shocking change of affairs.

So yeah, Vinny. He has a pretty good setup with booby traps (I am sure he giggled when he set them up) and land mines and secret tunnels back to his slapped together shack. Again, he should at least have a fortified hunter's cabin, but nope, he's hidden inside hammered & glue sheets of wood and metal, pure PA ramshackle. He has a girl in his basement, and seems to have lost all eating utensils as he forces gruel upon Howe. He has nudie mags pasted all over the wall. How tries to convince him to help, offering half of his space station food supply (months!!) in exchange for some guns and information. Vinny says he will just kill Howe and take it all; fair point. But then he's distracted by an interloper blowing himself up outside, and Vinny heads outside to see what "the kids" are up to.

While Vinny is outside, the girl in the basement, named JJ (Lenore Zann, X-Men '97), crawls out, all dressed in a school uniform. Hmmm, so the kids must refer to a bunch of youngin's that she was part of ? Once again, Howe offers food if she will help, but before the two can escape, Vinny returns. He's taking the pair with him as he checks out the beach where the station crashed, in his Mad Max'd out tractor, complete with armoured cage. When they arrive, Vinny makes some comment about the "lunatics from Fort Blah Blah" and suddenly there is a beached blonde guy with a terrible moustache and a sloppy military uniform. And other guys with guns. Vinny boots it, back to his tractor, but they capture him with hooks and chains.

Back to Fort Blah Blah, I guess. Its just another example of slapped together ramshackle, but there are a LOT of civilians, some in cages, some in holes, most in weird favela box shacks but otherwise looking like filthy normal people. I was left wondering why. There is no world building in this movie; its not smart enough to have such. Sure, we can postulate that the disease, radiation sickness, cannibals and muties (I know they are not radiation mutants, just bandaged survivors, but they present as muties) run rampant in the surrounding landscape, so people have congregated here under the auspices of being protected by whatever military folks are in Fort Blah Blah, but really, they've just become slaves / fodder for his whims.

And who is him? The "kids" turn out to be, and we learn from an exposition scene from JJ, a handful of boarding school kids (college? highschool?) who were in a helicopter with the General Dad of one of them, and it crashed before they could get to safety. So, he, the preppy as Kent called him, is Gideon, a charismatic and ruthless son of the dead General, and he is not entirely stupid, so people follow him. JJ is his ex-girlfriend who doesn't appreciate his ruthlessness, and ran away, only to be captured by JJ. 

The spacestation / lander thing / whatever has been carted back from the beach by slaves, and off camera, they got Jordan out of it. She, and the rest of the prisoners are tossed into cage holes, where they are subjected to the half-eaten Walker. Eww. Meanwhile Gideon and his henchmen are trying to get coordinates of a proper base of survivors, the usual mythical "safe zone" from all the PA movies. They will get that by hacking the computer module from the spacestation. Gideon has a tech guy with a broken back, who he taunts with freedom and food. Together they get the required coordinates, and plan to escape on a boat. Howe has also said he wants a boat, a sailing boat, which should allow him to get to South America where the radiation won't be as bad. Meanwhile, the one remaining nuclear warhead, stuck in its launch tube, is still ticking down, unbeknownst to everyone.

So, the prisoners are to be executed via lots of melodrama and eye rolling on my part. But just as the crowds scream for blood and the hangin' is about to happen, the broke back dude has dragged himself out, somehow got a gun, and opens up. Total Chaos! Gideon is shot! Jordan offers to help but only if they are all freed. When she medically assists him, she tries to convince him that the poison is a pain killer but he turns the tables and kills her instead! Drama! Tragedy! In all these PA movies, everyone but the lone Main Guy and the Cute Girl have to die. Meanwhile outside, Vinny has freed all the average-people slaves and prisoners and convinced them to fight back. In the ensuing chaos, Gideon escapes to the boat, with the coordinates, and JJ. The "fighting back" does not really go well.

Still doing dishes.

Howe and Vinny chase after the boat, only to see it sailing away. Howe jumps in the water, is tossed a rope by JJ, fights Gideon, and the boat is theirs! Gideon and his blonde henchmen Lacey escape back to Fort Blah Blah just as the clock countdown finishes.

Boom. 

Credits roll. 

The final victory has been won. Mankind can now rest in peace.

What? What final victory? A single boom that wipes some part of Nova Scotia off the map? Victory for who? And there are people in the boat, and at whatever Safe Zone they are sailing to, so no final rest for mankind. What does that even mean??

Speaking of not-making-sense, the tag line from the poster, "The last defense. The last hope. The battle for the future of the world has begun." Huh? They were not "battling for the future of the world", they were just ... well, fighting over food and a girl. These are just words on a poster; nothing to do with the movie. Gah.

As big messy productions go, this was all the mess, but in some, mostly MST3K kinds of way, it was kind of fun. Or maybe it was the kind of terrible that I like to write about. Either way, it distracted me.

KWIF: Hope (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. 

This Week:
Hope (2026, d. Na Hong-jin - in theatre)
Is God Is (2026, d. Aleshea Harris  - amazonprime)
The Christophers (2025, d. Stephen Soderbergh - amazonprime)

---

I knew three things going into Hope:

1) it was the biggest budget Korean-produced film ever
2) the opening hour is an epic, action tour-de-force
3) the poor CGI for the film's creatures many say spoiled the film for them.

The first item is just a fact, the other two are subjective statements. What I had heard about the opening sequence, which again, is about a full hour in length, is absolutely true. It is an incredibly paced, beautifully shot, exceptionally well-structured sequence that spends the majority of its time using deft camera positioning and brilliant practical and digital effect to hide or obscure the creature at the centre of the chaos in this small Korea border town of Hope Harbor.

The set-up is phenomenal. Local police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min, providing a believably harried performance) arrives in the very rural farmland scene where hunters point out the very large, dead bovine in the middle of the road. It's been mauled severely, but not eaten. The hunters and the chief puzzle over both its placement (far enough from any grazing land) and the claw marks, which are not bear nor, as suggested, tiger. 

The parties split up with help called for, but unable to arrive due to regional fires being fought. Bum-seok enters the main street of the eerily vacant town and screeches to a halt when he spies a massive, destructive hole straight through the center of a shop, its proprietor dead under the rubble within. And then off in the distance, smoke, then gunfire, and it all pops off. 

Bum-seok races through town on foot, shotgun in hand, witnessing carnage as flung items crush people, people are tossed dozens of meters down the road, roving pickups loaded with ammo and men and women chase, then flee from whatever it is they're attacking. Bum-seok meets people and then separates from them, loses some of them, and generally is overwhelmed and questioning his own bravery.

It's an exhilarating hour of cinema, and, then the creature is revealed, and, even being forewarned and prepared, it's still a let down. In the preceding hour, minute-by-minute, the mind races at the possibilities of what the creature could be. Even knowing beforehand that it would be a disappointment, I still had (ahem) hope that the creature would at least be interesting. 

And you know what...it kind of is. It's definitely not what I was expecting (and I'll save said description for spoilers below), and it did kinda take me aback, both in its composition and in what's best described as excellent-for-2002 CGI effects.

It's clear that Hope Harbor is close-ish to the border with North Korea. There's signage about reporting spies and talk of heavily mined fields to the North. I suspected that there might be some form of North Korean-invasion or panic angle to this film, in metaphor if not literal, but no. It's just backdrop. I guess it explains why everyone has so many guns (or is it just an aping of American action cinema and going intentionally overboard?) 

The creature is taken down, and the second hour of the film cuts back and forth between the fallout of this epic rampage in the town, and what the hunters are discovering out in the woods. Bum-seok and his deputy Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) independently find out more about what others have discovered in the woods, as Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) and his posse of hunters encounter some pretty fascinating and gnarly scenes in the trees.  

This process of discovery, which also includes a very gooey impromptu autopsy on the creature, is really, really good. It's the appropriate cool-off from the pulse-racing opener, and really gets you invested in the story a very fun, 1980's creature-feature kind of way (and Hope borrows more than a shots from such films throughout). There's not much CGI to speak of in this so the small let-down of the creature starts to fade (especially as it's a big, rubbery, practical piece for the autopsy).

Everything converges in the woods in the third act, and, well, this is where the film loses me. It's not the CGI. We've been dealing with unreal-looking computer generated images for over 30 years in movies and television, I can accept a lot if the story earns my trust...so long as the effects aren't unbelievably awful (which they aren't here, they just don't have Hollywood money to put into them to refine them over and over). No, what loses me in the third act is the tedium of it.

The second act give us enough of we need to know, the creatures motivations seem somewhat clear, providing a path to resolution. But the third act seems to disregard that we have this knowledge, and instead is another hour of shooting guns and chases and ugly cgi monsters crashing through trees and that hoary trope of going into slow motion as something near-misses biting or grabbing as it passes mid-air (we only see this about a dozen times in the film, mostly in this third act, ugh). It culminates in what should be a breathless chase sequence on the highway, Sung-ki on a horse and the rest of the gang in a police car fleeing the creature, but it feels just so staged and pointless and it goes on so long. Where in the first hour, each minute that ticked by seemed to open up new possibilities in your mind, really stimulating the imagination, every minute of the last half hour had me wondering if it was over yet.

The third act introduces that the creatures can talk, but in a language that isn't Korean (or English). But late, late in the third act, we start cutting to the creatures, independent of what else is happening to our main characters, and we start seeing subtitled conversations with them.... WTF!?! You can't just all of a sudden thrust on the audience that these are fully sentient creatures who we now need to invest time into understanding the meaning of what they're saying this late in the film (the creatures are voiced -and maybe motion capture performed?- by Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Cameron Brittan and Taylor Russell). 

And the film just ends on a conversation between these creatures, unresolved. After nearly 160 minutes, and a dire and truly pointless third act, there isn't a resolution, but instead the cliffhanger (but not really a tried and true cliffhanger) for the sequel.

I do not recall the last time I bought into a film so hard and then was so off board by the end. I can forgive overly-ambitious-for-its-budget digital effects, but I really can't forgive poor story planning and even poorer execution.

The cinematography by Hong Kyung-pyo (Parasite) is outstanding from frame one, some absolutely gorgeous vistas of this Korean terrain, and just making the immaculately decorated/destroyed streets and buildings of this town look incredible (I can't help but think of the devastation in Godzilla Minus One and think that, even if it is on a smaller scale, they one upped it here...this town got wrecked, or at least we truly are give the feeling that it's just been demolished). Even the highway chase, as overworked a sequence as it is, still looks incredible.  The score from frequent Jordan Peele collaborator Michael Abels will get your blood pumping. 

There's so much to like about Hope that is could have...it should have been incredible. This could have been next-level Attack The Block even with its middling-looking creatures, but it's clear Director Na has lore and mythology for the creatures that he wants to get into, just in another film next film. I would be fine with that, but finish. this. one. first.

Spoilers at the end of this post.

---

Is God Is, directed by first-timer Aleshea Harris, is an adaptation of her own multiple-award-winning off-Broadway play. When you hear that a film is an adaptation of a play, you think more of a chamber-piece, more of a two-hander, or something rather...upscale... meaningful... contemplative... important.  You don't generally think of plays as being revenge thrillers with an elevated grindhouse aesthetic (now that we've finally laid the term "elevated horror" to rest, I'm trying to pomp up a new term to annoy people).

We meet twins Racine (Kara Young) and Anaya (Mallori Johnson), whose first trait we notice is their scars. Anaya, the quiet one, has extensive burn scars on her face, while Racine's right arm is horribly disfigured, carries a fire in her just waiting to erupt. The twins live together and work together and have a sort of synchronized routine to their day, including icing down each other's burns with extreme tenderness. It seems like it's the highlight of their day, despite all it may connote.  They also have a way of communicating non-verbally that is presented in distinctive subtitling on screen.

Their lives, obviously, have not been easy. Racine's rage as much, if not more of an impediment than whatever prejudices their appearance may elicit. One day they receive a letter from their mother, who they've long thought dead (having spent their childhood in a series of abusive foster homes), but turns out is now dying. She summons them and they hit the road heeding her call. Also horribly scarred (far, far more) and tended to by what seem like cherubs-in-disguise, Ruby (Vivica A. Fox) tells the children of their horrendous origin story at the hands of their even more horrendous father (Sterling K. Brown, just seeping sociopathic nefariousness). She then tasks them with but one goal: "make your daddy dead".

And so they're back on the road, trying to track down their father, along the way discovering the impact this despicable human being has had on the lives and minds of the people who have had the misfortune of being around him, including a few half siblings along the way.

The film side-steps any racial violence against Racine and Anaya (in fact, I think there's not a single speaking role not played by a Black actor here) because there's more than enough threats that Racine and Anaya have to face in trying to hunt down their father.  Along the way, Racine's fury, her lust for violence starts to conflict with Anaya's demure sensibilities, and suddely they're not in sync anymore. There is, one more than one occasion, a reason to question nurture versus nature, but also examine the context in which Racine and Anaya were raised. It becomes a complex idea to fully grasp, what's fueling the fire in Racine at any given time.

Is God Is may not have been a commercial hit, but it's a very successful movie. It isn't the naval-gazing, highbrow art that one might thing going into a stage-to-screen adaptation. It's a sprawling, intense, violent, pulpy romp that also has a sense of theatricality and thoughtfulness to it that distinguishes it and, yes, elevates it from typical B-movie fare.  But you can meet it at either, or both levels and be satisfied. Or maybe exploring this kind of darkness, even with the lighter elements and stylistic flourishes, might just be too off putting.

---

A friend attended the world debut of The Christophers at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and raved about what a great movie it was. They had never seen Michaela Coel before and were blown away. 

I assumed, given how critically well-received it was coming out of TIFF, and also it being a Stephen Soderbergh production that it was going to be released in the fall of 2025 for awards contention.  I eagerly awaited its release. And waited. And waited. 

When it finally was released early this Spring, it was not released very wide, and screenings around Toronto, a very movie-friendly city, were not as regular as your average release, nor did it remain in theatres long enough for Lady Kent and I to catch it on the big screen. 

Next think I know it's on Amazon Prime, which I don't regularly subscribe to and which continues to have a pretty user-unfriendly interface (it's designed to sell you stuff, as well as gather data on you, not give you movies to watch). Point being, it took a lot longer to get to seeing The Christophers than I wanted. 

And, holy cow... this is one of Soderbergh's best films in a very lengthy filmography of good-to-great films... it's also one of Ian McKellan's best performances in a very long career of good-to-great acting, and, well, Michaela Coel whom I already liked a lot (while unfortunately admitting I've not followed her career closely enough) is just one of the most captivating performers in film and television today.

McKellan plays famous artist Julian Sklar, a notable painter of the modern age, but who hasn't released much work in decades, and has become more of a media personality in recent years. His most famous works are the two series of paintings of his lover from the 1990s, labelled The Christophers. Rumours have long held there is an unfinished third series that, despite how his reputation may have fallen off, audiences are still anxious to see finished... including Sklar's own son and daughter.

Barnaby (James Corde) and Sally (Jessica Gunning) see the third series of The Christophers as their inheritance. They look to Lori Butler (Coel), an art restorer and former classmate, to become Julian's assistant, and, more specifically, they want her to covertly finish the paintings. 

That's the set-up, but the execution is a complete two-hander between McKellan and Coel as Julian waxes poetic to the sound of his own voice, barely letting Lori get an word in edgewise. He dismisses her and is disinterested in her, until he does a web search and reads her critical think-pieces on him which take on his ego and take him down more than a peg or two. And he is intrigued, and also more than aware of the ploy his shiftless offspring are trying to parlay.

With the jig up, Lori doesn't need to hold back as her already tenuous employment is now obviously severed, and she proves herself to be, at the very least, his intellectual equal, if not artistic one.

With two fascinating characters played by two incredible actors, the script serves them both, Julian with a sharp, self-satisfied, erudite wit, while Lori is reserved but tactical in her words. McKellan gets bold with his body, embodying Julian half-robed, as much for his own comfort as for the discomfort of others. Coel, meanwhile, delivers some of the slyest glances in the film, at times telling more with her facial expressions than with her words.

For Soderbergh's part, it's all about capturing a space, being Julian's London double townhouse, which is the home of a disorganized artist. There's no reason for Julian, who hasn't worked with any proficiency since the '90's ended, to have a home in such disarray, but it's clear he hasn't managed his money well, and that how he lives is of no bother (his sectional corner sofa looks like it's from the 70's and hasn't been used in years, but was very well used at one time). Soderbergh captures and sometimes focuses on the surroundings as his characters negotiate them, making the space a major component of every scene.

I was expecting an almost psychological drama out of The Christophers for some reason, not a surprisingly fun and immensely enjoyable while still emotionally resonant picture. What a true delight with just the most satisfying ending.

---

***SPOILERS FOR HOPE***

As I said, you're just not at all prepared for these creatures when you see them, and yes there are multiple creatures, and no they are not the same. The first creature, the one wrecking havoc on the town, is teased so exceptionally well. It is a mystery to us, and we're given clues, like the goopy, goopy blood, the fishy smell, the cut in on fish here and there throughout the chase, the description that it looks like a pile of beans? But also, it's clear that the way this creature is fighting, and the speed at which it's moving around, it's not running on instinct, it does have some kind of thought. It's using tools to kill people, and it seems like its on a distinct mission to kill every human in town. It's like the cow was a mistake, and it learned who its enemy was, and it was going to destroy every one of them. And when it's revealed, it's large (as expected) but shockingly humanoid. It's got green skin, looks a little slimy, a human-ish face, long scraggly hair, human-ish limbs and hands, but triple-jointed legs like an animal. I was thinking that it was maybe a sea hag, hence the fishy smell, and that its skin would be so tough and dense because it has to be able to withstand the crushing depths of the Pacific. But no, it also turns out that it's an alien. We see at least four more alien creatures, and each one is different than the others, still humanoid but their bodies are differently composed. One of them can transform into something that looks like the dog-alien from Alien 3 while another has two massive racks of horns growing out of their shoulder blades that makes you wonder about the logistics of living with those. We also see their space craft, which is a gigantic orb, and it looks fantastic, both outside and in. The interior is clearly cribbing from the Geiger school of ship design, but it has its own distinct feel from the Alien/Prometheus tekno-organic look. Again the discovery process exploring all this in the second act I genuinely enjoyed as much as the hyper first act. It just falls all apart in the third act.  The second act finds sympathy for these creatures, so when the third act just starts shooting them all up again over and over and over again, you keep wondering where the sympathy plays into this. There's clearly been a misunderstanding between species, but nobody is keen to resolve it, certainly not the director, not in this film. Sigh. The only possible route for the second film is to redo much of the first film but from the creatures' perspectives. But that would take beaucoup bucks (or a heavy reliance upon AI-generated effects, which double gross), so I don't think it's going to happen (and I'm not sure I would even see it if it did).

***END SPOILERS FOR HOPE***

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Death of Robin Hood

2026, Michael Sarnoski (Pig) -- download

I've had a story in my head for a few years now. A few actually, tied together. One speaks of The Slayer or The Unkillable; he's had a few names. It tells of an unkillable (duh) sword wielding warrior, a man who has been killing men and monsters alike, a warrior who fears no one and nothing. Another iteration of the tale tells of him in his old age, long since "retired" from swinging his sword, and now only swings an axe. He is the mysterious woodcutter living deep in the woods, avoiding people, avoiding his reputation, hiding from his legacy of endless death, a tired man, a sorrow-filled man who only wants peace and hard labour.

This movie tells the tale of Robin Hood, but a long aged Robin (Hugh Jackman, Logan), and not the man of legend. The legend was created by him to mask the brutality and killing he wrought in his youth. He was never truly the hero of myth, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. He was just a brigand, a killer of people so he could take what they had. And his legacy is that he is endlessly pursued by the families of those he has slain, always on the run, no longer a young and unkillable warrior, just an aching, but still powerful man hiding when he can, killing when he has to. 

This movie begins as a grimdark, violent, bloody and gritty tale. They needed to set the story who the real man is. There are no flashbacks, no images of a dashing hero in a green hood, flashing a smile as he steals bags of coins from the moustache twirling Sheriff of Nottingham. There is just the mumbling Little John (Bill Skarsgård, Barbarian) who is fleeing after having been outed from his farm by vengeful foes, a farm that he acquired himself by killing the previous owner. Fuck, this is a dark world -- there is no irony in John's (now calling himself Edward, a name taken from the man he killed) description of what he has done -- he killed a man and set himself as the head of his new "family" and, well, they have accepted him. He comes across Robin on the road, and seeks his help in recovering what is his. Together they kill the vengefuls, but not before all but one of John's Edward's family are killed in front of him. 

One escapes (not really, as Robin puts an arrow through the back of the boy's head, and he stumbles, dying, home, bearing the mark of who did the deed) causing the return of the head of the family, armed and armoured, unlike the usual staff & pitch fork bearing farmers that Robin and John can easily dispatch. And the battle is so brutal, it leaves Robin on the edge of death. John all but carries him to a boat which takes him to an island where a Prioress, Sister Bridgit (Jodie Comer, 28 Years Later) is known to heal all who are brought to her. Edward hands "Roderick" over to her care, who is barely alive, cut and crushed and suffering great blood loss. Their lies are accepted, and Edward departs.

Act Two. Healing. The tonal shift in this act is palpable. Via music (the use of "Twa Corbies" is wonderful) and mood, we observe Roderick heal, but all the while wondering when the tables will turn. This is not an unfamiliar story telling technique, where we wonder whether a violent amoral character will stay true to that course, or will he be swayed by kindness and acceptance. The Prioress has her own past, but its only just touched upon, but other members of the priory tell of it being full of darkness and loss. Meanwhile, a quiet wise leper lives out his last days on the island, bringing Roderick into his confidence, offering his place as the protector of the apple and pear groves. You know the leper knows who Roderick might be, but there is no judgement, no coaxing, just an ask that Robin not bring his violence to the island. 

Roderick's healing is not quick, and the gentle touch does soften him, especially when Edward's daughter appears on the shores -- her "papa" was attacked and she fled to here. She has been abused and traumatized but when she sees Roderick, she grasps him silently. And also, with time and a gentle touch, she softens to him, finding a new father figure. It surprises him as much as the rest of the islanders. BUT we still see the darkness behind his eyes. We wonder if he will end up returning to his ways, kill her for revealing who he is.

I absolutely loved Jackman in this role. And not because he is the living image of the retired Slayer from my mind's eye, but for the reserved manner he approached the role. This was not big acting, but quiet and brooding.  Hell knows, I love a good brood. Comer is, as usual, magnificent. And Skarsgård just disappears into his small role, more than he did behind the makeup of Pennywise. This movie won't be for everyone, as it can be ponderous at times, and does very little to rise from its dark mood, but for me, already steeped deeply in such a mood (not a good time in my life right now), it was pitch perfect.

KWIF: Coyote vs Acme (+5)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Oldies, and some not-so-goodies. Let's try and be quick about this...ha!

This Week: 
Coyote vs. Acme (2026*, d. Dave Green - in theatre)
Love Wedding Repeat (2020, d. Dean Craig - netflix)
9 to 5 (1980, d. Colin Higgins - hollywood suite)
ABBA: The Movie (1977, d. Lasse Hallström - hollywood suite)
The Gumball Rally (1976, d. Charles Bail - hollywood suite)
Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance (1974, d. Toshiya Fujita - tubi)

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At a holiday Monday matinee in a local neighbourhood repertory theatre, I expected a film like Coyote vs. Acme to have at least a few children loading up on sugary drinks and popcorn and running around the theatre. While there were probably over 100 attendees at this screening, I don't think I clocked a single person under the age of 10, and the vast majority were at least 30 or older.

The early millennials were probably the last to experience Looney Tunes as part of the general pop culture diet. Anyone younger, like my GenZ kids, would have probably experienced them on some sort of physical media presented to them by their parents, if at all. While these ridiculous cartoons were a very large part of peoples childhoods for over 60 years, the changing nature of entertainment has rendered these characters and their antics somewhat...obsolete.  There are other characters in other animations on other media that are doing the Looney Tunes thing, but in a modern context, servicing a modern audience.

This is all to say that Coyote vs. Acme is, maybe, the best thing featuring the Looney Tunes characters that I've seen in many decades.  It's not saying much. The efforts to bring these characters to a modern audience have largely been failures (whether artistically or commercially) outside of the original Space Jam and Tiny Toons back in the 1990s. I don't know how often I have though about the Looney Tunes gang since I started "adulting" half my life ago, but I can tell you, it's not very much, not really much at all.  And I think about this kind of stuff all the time.

Coyote vs. Acme was set to release in 2023, and the buzz at the time was that it was a real winner of a film. An honest-to-gosh funny, entertaining, and meaningful film revitalizing these somewhat antiquated characters. Anticipation was already starting to percolate when the film was unceremoniously shelved by Warner Bros. in 2023 for tax writeoff purposes (alongside a nearly completed Batgirl movie and a Scooby-Doo project already in production).  The belief was that we were never going to see this film.

Ketchup Entertainment stepped in and I guess offered Warner Brothers the correct sum of money to release distribution right to them.  I can't imagine that Ketchup did this for any other reason than a strong desire to see the film, because the Looney Tunes box office track record over the past 30 years speaks for itself. 

But it's here, and it's, frankly, magnificent, whether people are seeing it in droves or not, this is both a deliriously funny and entertaining movie and a real love letter to the Road Runner cartoons and cartoon violence in general.

The plot is pretty basic: after decades of faulty equipment and zero successful attempts at capturing and eating the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote decides he wants to sue Acme, the provider of all his bird-chasing gear. Kevin Avery (Will Forte) makes a living out of filing frivolous settlement claims with Acme for token sums to the point that it's a very routine and uneventful process. But Wile E. isn't interested in settling and communicating by using only paper cutouts, a limited supply of placard signs and wild gesticulations, he gets Kevin to commit to taking on Acme on a much, much larger scale.

Accompanied by his neice, Paige (Lana Condor), Kevin and the Coyote start investigating Acme only to start hearing scuttlebutt about secret projects and experiments, with their own carrot-chewing Deep Throat informant guiding them on.

This is an Erin Brocovich meets Mr. Smith Goes To Washington-type mash-up that somehow gets to the noble heart of the little guy persevering in taking on the big guy even though they know they will lose. It's a story about continuing to try even though failure is the most probable outcome, of making movements out of adversity.  There's a "thank you" to all the people who hold up signs and stand up and make noise in the credits, and it spells out perfectly what's at the heart of what should be just a silly live action/animation mash-up.

We've been living with real people in animated worlds on screen for decades upon decades now, but most of that is cgi (not that this isn't) and not the melding of toon worlds with the real world. There are more than a few examples dating back to classic Disney (the best of the more recents being the Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers from 2022) but the gold standard has always been Who Framed Roger Rabbit, being a film that merges these realities into an odd yet cohesive place of existence. Coyote vs. Acme finds if not exactly that same balance then very, very close.  You believe these human characters are occupying the same space as these cartoon beings, and vice versa.

The way director Dave Green and his crew subtly (well, as subtle as a cartoon can be) inject animated things into the everyday world (like the screen on someone's cell phone being a cartoon screen instead of a real one) further serves this meshing. There's a super fun action sequence in the third act which finds a human character employing animated devices to wreak animation-style havoc on the real world (like grabbing the pavement on the road, pulling a section up like it were a carpet, and then jerking it causing ripples to wave their way down the road, tossing cars up into the air...really fun special effects).

The comedy comes from all angles, including physical and animated, wordplay and situational comedy, but Coyote vs. Acme, with its script from Samy Burch (with story by James Gunn, Jeremy Slater and Burch - based on a satirical New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier) finds its greatest comedy in the repurposing of tried and true Looney Tunes jokes and gags in different contexts throughout the film. This will be the litmus test for any viewer and their enjoyment...how familiar are you with the Tunes of yore? I imagine it's still a funny movie without getting these jokes, but it's probably significantly less funny if you don't.

And therein lies the challenge for this film. It can only be a hit if word of mouth is so resoundingly positive that it makes it an unavoidable feature, a real foundational pop culture piece. But if a large part of the audience is too young and unfamiliar, or similarly a large number of the critical/social media attention market don't have the familiarity, the enthusiasm will probably be much less than, say, someone like myself who just smiled the biggest, dumbest smile throughout the entire film, except when I was laughing, which was often. The whole family went to see it with 40 years between youngest and oldest and we all had a blast with it...we'll be shaking the dust off for weeks.

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You can't use a title that riffs on the tagline/second title of one of the all-timers in the time loop genre and not be a time loop movie. Whomever named Love Wedding Repeat should go to movie jail for a decade and think about what they've done (or didn't do).

No, Love Wedding Repeat is not a romcom spin on Edge of Tomorrow's alt Live, Die, Repeat (but could you imagine if this were a wedding romcom taking place at the same time as Edge of Tomorrow? Oh to dream!). Instead it's intoning the film's actual gimmick which, in all honesty, is not bad conceptually but terribly executed. But we'll get to that shortly.

The film opens in Rome where Englishman Jack (Sam Claflin, who is not Nicholas Hoult) was visiting his sister Hayley (Eleanor Tomlinson, who is not Sophie Turner) but instead has found himself out on a non-date with his sister's American roommate Dina (Olivia Munn, who is Olivia Munn), and the two are just clicking. As they breach the distance for a kiss, they get interrupted by an old college pal of Jack's and the traditional awkward British pleasantness finds Jack swept away back to London instead of staying to spend more time with Dina.

Fast forward 5 years and Hayley is getting married to an Italian man in an Italian villa. Dina is on the guest list and Jack has one objective in reconnecting with her. He will, however, have to hurdle his spiteful ex-girlfriend Amanda (Frida Pinto) and her boyfriend-with-an-inferiority-complex Chaz (Allan Mustafa) and run interference when Marc (Jack Farthing), a coked-up classmate Hayley had a fling with not too long ago, shows up to disrupt the wedding.  Hayley asks Jack to effectively roofie Marc with a powerful sleeping aide she's been using and, due to divine intervention (or some impish children attending the weddings who rearrange the name placards for the seating at the table), the glass with the sleep aide becomes a game of Russian roulette. Who will get dosed? Is it Marc as intended? Or Jack? Or Dina or Amanda or Chaz? Or dull friend Sidney (a perfectly utilized Tim Key), or sarcastic friend Rebecca (an underutilized Aisling Bea), or Marc's best friend (and Hayley's Maid of Honor) Bryan (Joel Fry)? 

It's Bryan. And so having to handle a sleepy Bryan also falls on Jack's plate as he tries to reconnect with Dina. It's pretty much a catastrophe, and an hour later the groom winds up dead. 

But rewind...what if someone else drinks from the tainted glass instead?

Rather than play through a few of these scenarios, in the way that a time loop would, instead we get an extremely rapid -- to the point of being unintelligible -- montage sequence of other scenarios and blink-and-you'll-miss-it glimpses of what the fallout of those situations might look like. And then the second scenario plays out where it's Jack, instead, who gets dosed.

Love Wedding Repeat is a frustrating movie. For a romcom it spends most of its time keeping the romantic couple apart, and offering mostly situational comedy with ringers Key, Bea, and Fry offering a little extra sauce (Fry's sleepy physical comedy is pretty good, Key's attempts to charm Munn are deliciously weird, and Bea's hilarious quips are too infrequent). The situational comedy, however, comes with a lot of questions, and, moreover, the sense that the only reason people are acting the way they are is for the sake of the story.  I mean, obviously... but their actions aren't logical or feel grounded in either reality or even this somewhat heightened reality.

A traditional comedy would put our protagonist(s) in a tight spot for comedic purposes and eventually they would find their way out of it again. The whole point is to build up the characters, to put challenges in their way, to observe their character flaws, and to show them overcoming them. Here, it meticulously goes through the wedding day and builds up all these catastrophes, and then, just, resets, presenting them with a whole other set of challenges to overcome, this time triumphantly.

But unlike a time loop where a character succeeds at leaving the time loop, and then life continues for everyone everywhere as if nothing happened, here, we're effectively dealing with alt realities, and in one alternative timeline Hayley accidentally kills her husband. I mean, where's the satisfaction in knowing that?

There's a kernel here in the story that really could have worked, but the fantastical premise sinks it. The cast is pretty charming, but it's not even close to being enough to save a fundamentally flawed production.

Rome looks nice.

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9 to 5 opens with that iconic low-register piano key (with bass accompaniment, a tapping of the hi-hat, and Dolly herself click-clackking her fingernails emulating a typewriter) and that's all this film needs to suck the audience in. The first couple stanzas of the song further draw you in as Dolly sings about getting up in the morning, forging your way to work and then toiling throughout the day, all while we see imagery of mobile women on the streets of New York on their morning routine. It's all a celebration of women in the workplace, to which the film that follows never lets down except in the last possible moment.

Recent divorcee Judy Burnly (Jane Fonda) enters the workforce for the first time, hired in the secretarial pool at Consolidated Companies under VP Franklin Hart (Dabney Coleman), a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.  Judy is put under the wing of Violet Newstead (Lily Tomlin) the senior supervisor of secretarial, who should be in Hart's position but was passed over for not being part of the boy's club... and has once again been passed over for promotion by Hart, the role given to a far junior man (and also Hart recognizes that Violet's supreme competence elevates him, especially when he takes credit for her work).

Hart keeps his secretarial pool under a tight, regimented regime, observed by his subservient personal assistant Roz (Elizabeth Wilson), with Doralee Rhodes (Dolly Parton) being his personal secretary less for her skills than because she is pretty and buxom.  Hart denigrates his female staff regularly, has no compassion for their personal lives, intentionally underpays them and sexually harasses Doralee multiple times a day, while spreading rumours that he and Doralee are actually sleeping together (ostracizing her from her coworkers).

Eventually Doralee snaps at Hart's advances one Friday night and hogties him with a telephone cord. Violet - whose tether was already ready to snap - and Judy, with lingering trauma from her divorce, decide to take matters into their own hands, kidnapping Hart and holding him hostage at his own house while they make incredible improvements to the working lives of the women on their floor - job sharing, flex hours, in-building day care, equal pay for equal work, and talks of unionizing.

There's a ticking clock to their hostage situation, with Hart's wife on vacation and Roz sent away for a multi-week French immersive learning course. Likewise Hart has them on many criminal charges (including attempted murder), but they have a smoking gun that Hart has been embezzling from the company, but a records request will take time to process.

The kidnapping, which is part of the promotion of the film in trailers and the poster, doesn't happen until past the halfway point. Prior to this, the film spins its wheels in two frustrating side-quests. The first finds Doralee, Judy and Violet bonding while getting high and fantasizing about revenge on Hart. The bonding is good-not-great, but the three fantasy sequences are each overlong and kinda corny (although the role reversal fantasy with Doralee being the boss sexually harassing Hart was amusing, to a point...even as I recognize any sexual harassment of any kind is not really funny).  The second finds Violet accidentally poisoning Hart's coffee and getting taken to the hospital after receiving a concussion (unrelated), and there's some stealing a dead body shenanigans that feel like they're from another film entirely.

The characters here work. They are well drawn with interior lives and there are both spoken and unspoken motivations that fuel them. The glimpses as each of their lives outside of work are great and could have been explored even further rather than, say, the whole body-thieving subplot.  The juice of the movie is all in Hart's kidnapping and the changes they implement in his absence, and the lurking people at the office and outside Hart's home that may spoil it all adds layers of intensity.  You want these women to succeed, you want this horrible boss to be exposed, but you know the real risk is that should Hart have any small liberty he will gain the upper hand because of status and gender.

The conclusion of the film finds Hart failing upwards, the trio's changes deemed a corporate success, and that old cliche of still-frame postscript text providing a little glimpse into our main characters' futures. And as successful as the movie is at being quite progressive and feminist forward, it lets our characters down with a lack of imagination and thematic resonance in these postscripts by turning Doralee into Dolly Parton as a successful country and western singer, while Judy gets married to the Xerox guy (and, it sort of implies) isn't working anymore. Only Violet has true success relevant to her character, gaining the vice-president position she's long deserved.  It's also disappointing that Hart's postscript says he gets kidnapped in Brazil and is never seen again, as opposed to, you know, being exposed as a no-talent fraud and philanderer whose wife divorces him, taking everything and he winds up working at McDonalds or something.

Tomlin was always a fiery comedic performer with a very strong presence and no-bullshit personality which served her very well for a time, but the usual Purple Suits seemed to have less and less use for her as she got older (not a new story for women in Hollywood). She's perfect here. Coleman plays a slimeball like no other, where he's imposing but not really threatening, and elicits disgust at almost every turn. Likewise perfect. Fonda's role as Judy is sort of the gateway into this world, and is meant to act as the audience's shepherd through the film, but Judy's journey is a bit thin and could have been beefed up more. She's not much of a presence in the film.  

And then there's Dolly, the petite gal with big hair and big personality bolstered by a big Tennessee accent. She is very pretty, but it's always been Dolly's personality that was her greatest allure over 60 years in the entertainment business. She is so positive and kind and charitable, and that resonates from her no matter what she's doing. Here, as Doralee, that positivity, kindness and charity is taken advantage of, and abused, and watching Dolly flip into a tough-talking, no-nonsense, southern broad is remarkable while still feeling authentic. Dolly was not a pushover. Her successes were her own because of how driven she was and clearly how she could demand respect and would not accept anything else. This was her first film role, and beyond variety shows, her first big acting role, and she destroyed it. Doralee isn't Dolly, but Doralee isn't the same if it's not Dolly in the role. What a magnificent performance and performer. Rest in peace.

Following 9 to 5 there were a handful of other working women movies in the 1980s and they sort of disappeared after that, particularly once the Julia Roberts effect took hold in the 90's, and films about women were either romcoms or sappy melodramas, and there's not been a lot of mainstream movies reckoning with how American workplaces still, by and large, fail women. Even most revenge-on-your-boss movies have been male led.  In that respect 9 to 5, rather than being an archive of a certain time and place, still has an unfortunate vitality to it, especially as angry, old white men in America are attempting to claw back the inches of progress made in the 45 years since this film debuted.

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ABBA was one of my mom's favourites growing up, such that many, many ABBA songs feel baked into my very being. I wouldn't say I was ever a fan, but I really can't imagine an existence without their music.  

When I saw that ABBA: The Movie was on cable (...cable...?) I was hoping for either a so-bad-its good Spice World-style wacky musical adventure around the globe, or else a concert film that would give me the feeling of being at one of their shows in their heyday of the late 1970's when they were the number one musical artists in the world.

It's really unfortunate that ABBA: The Movie is neither of these things. Instead it's a film that follows an Australian radio DJ (Robert Hughes) tasked by his boss to go out an nab an interview with ABBA while they're on their Australian tour. 

Thus much of the movie, rather than being concert footage is instead footage of this personality-deprived non-character trying in vain to worm his way into backrooms and concerts, and, sometimes, interviewing the public about how they feel about ABBA (that most people love ABBA because they're so joyous, wholesome, nice and "clean" winds up feeling like some kind of propaganda after a while).

The concert footage we do see gets us some of that big sound with those big voices, but, I'll be frank, the stage show leaves something to be desired.  Maybe it's the fact that we never get into a groove with the live performances... I don't think there's a single live song that isn't interrupted by cutting to what the DJ is doing in the meantime. 

We get a bit of interview footage (but not ABBA with this DJ) instead fielding questions from the media circus around them, including such hard hitting questions as Agnetha Fältskog being asked about having a "sexiest bottom award" (*eyeroll*), which is then brought up again late in the film (*double eyeroll*).

There are a few of ABBA's bangers presented here, as well as a couple not-so-bangers, and a weird music video at the mid-point that finds the DJ having a dream sequence I guess. It's all nonsense.

ABBA: The Movie is not very entertaining and a terrible waste of potential. For hardcore fans only.

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There was a spate of movies in the 70's that featured characters on long drives, chases or races across the United States, things like Vanishing Point, Death Race 2000, Cannonball!, Convoy, Duel and more. Americans were obsessed with their highways and it seems like they couldn't get enough of watching them be traversed.

It turns out it wasn't just in movies, but in real life as well. The Gumball Rally was inspired by the same unofficial New York-to-LA race that Cannonball Run was (officially?) based on: "The Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash". For five years in the early-to-mid 1970's teams of drivers competed in a non-stop race from one coast to the other for little else but the glory of being the winner.  These events were covered by Car and Driver magazine as fun and whimsical adventures featuring some real personalities, and Hollywood was quick to capitalize upon the stories' popularity, pumping out both Cannoball (starring David Carradine, from the director of Death Race 2000) and The Gumball Rally.

The Gumball Rally features a dozen or so vehicles participating in the event, which begins merely with the mention of the word "Gumball" relayed across the land. The participants show up to New York, parking their flashy vehicles in a secret garage and meeting in a private room at a restaurant to discuss how the race will proceed. Lieutenant Roscoe of the LAPD has, for years, been trying to catch the participants of The Gumball Rally, the intonation that their race is a public safety issue (and, given some of the destruction we see in the film, he's right). The organizers of this affair are Roscoe's target: Michael Bannon (Michael Sarrazin) and Steve Smith (Tim McIntire), each hitting the highways in their own sporty coupe. 

The film spends a half hour establishing who the players are, with a little hint as to where they come from and their personalities, and then gives them an extended sequence where they're all putting the finishing touches on their vehicles in the garage, establishing a smidge of repartee between many of them. It's a half hour of movie time before the race begins, and I won't say it was a wasted half hour, but they could have compressed a little more to get to the part we're just waiting to see.

The racers leave the garage 10 seconds apart at 6am on a sleepy, sunny morning in New York. The vehicles race through the near-empty streets where only the construction workers, cops and newsstand agents are mobile. New York is so lovingly shot, we could have spent an hour just moving through those naked streets with rays of sun reflecting off glass, and I would have been happy. As such it's about a 10 minute sequence of the cars attempting to get out of town. It's kind of awesome.

Once out on the highways, the vistas are there, but they are less enticing than New York. The vehicles, particularly the sporty ones, are shot with a near-lustful lens... a real ogling of the AC Cobra, Ferrari Daytona, Chevy Camaro 7-28, Chevy Corvette, Porche 911, and Rolls Royce Silver Shadow among others.

Ostensibly a comedy, The Gumball Rally isn't terribly funny. While there are a few situational chuckles here and there, it's Raul Julia as Smith's ringer, an F-1 driver imported from the Ferrari team in Italy (along with some of his pit crew stationed across the country) that is the biggest personality. He is horny-to-the-point-of-distraction and there's more than a few good gags made from his skirt chasing.  The other big personality in the film is Gary Busey (paired with a suffering John Durren in the Camero) who is fully embodying ADHD in his performance, needing constant, escalating stimulation.

Having never heard of The Gumball Rally before, I was shocked with how expensive and visually appealing a film it is, excellent cinematography, some great (and once-unique) camera placements on the cars, and the sheer number of helicopter shots. There's some requisite smashing-through-shit sequences that are kind of the weakest parts of the film, yet still sort of impressive in the level of destruction (nowhere close to The Blues Brothers level of chaos, but then nothing is).  The best thing about The Gumball Rally, though, is how it doesn't try very hard at all to have character development or story arcs (really, it's only Roscoe that has an arc in this film).  It does what it needs to do, and I very much enjoyed it even if the stakes were very, very low.

I feel another project coming on... Cannonball, Cannonball Run, Death Race 2000, Speed Zone and the others of this ilk, I'm going to have to do comparison watches.

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The titular character of Lady Snowblood, aka Yuki Kashima, was born as a tool of revenge, raised to be a demon whose sole purpose was to avenge the family she never met, punishing the many responsible for their deaths. In the first film, Lady Snowblood accomplished her goal, and had become legend in the process, but by the end was grievously wounded.

While maybe not in top shape when this film begins, Yuki is definitely healthier than when we last saw her, and she's actively trying to evade the law, but eventually must give in. Before her sentence can be carried out, she's rescued by Secret Police and sent on a mission to spy on a revolutionary.  She become the housemaid of  Ransui Tokunaga (Juzo Itami), but it's not long before Ransui reveals he knows who she is. She fills him in on his important dissident work and implores her assistance in toppling some corrupt government officials.  Except they get the jump on them, Ransui is taken, Yuki escapes to find his brother and bring him some damning documents that could explode the country into chaos.

She flees to the slums where Shusuke Tokunaga lives and finds a man who loathes his own brother, and will not cooperate in taking down the government. Instead he plans to blackmail the men in power for the benefit of the slums, requesting much needed money and food. Instead, the slums are burned to the ground and it's up to Yuki to take revenge.

Unlike the first film, where Yuki is the quiet, driving center of the film, the plot moving with her wherever she may lead it, here she's frequently on the sidelines and one has to ask, in this story of class, segregation, veterans affairs, police brutality, corrupt politicians, and socialst revolution, where exactly is she supposed to fit? The story is not bad, but it's not well matched to the character, and it fees more like Yuki is swept up the the films events rather than steering them.  

A story set in two halves, neither dominates over the other, but then neither does either elevate itself. Given how brilliant the first film was, this one is quite the let down without really being bad.