3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War

 2026, Andrew Bernstein (Jack Ryan) - Amazon

Jack Ryan (John Krasinski, The Office) is back. Apparently I only wrote about one season of the Amazon show, the second season, but I have seen all four. I don't remember them; at all. At the heart of the show is the idea that Jack Ryan, the CIA analyst with bulging muscles that easily shoulder an assault rifle, is never entirely happy with what his country is doing, via the CIA. It is common in American espionage movies to not entirely trust your own country's agenda. But Jack has an unflappable moral compass and eventually people come around to seeing things his way. But they still shoot-to-kill a lot of people.

This movie begins in Dubai, with two operators sneaking into a half-constructed skyscraper. I was confused about this whole set piece, and doubly so when it returned later. Its a building under construction, so much so that half the floors don't even have walls. But the two men sneak through what must be a snazzy display centre on a lower floor, but not the bottom floor as it has glass floors showing the ground waaaay below. At first I was wondering why there would be a completed condo in an otherwise empty skeletal building but then I saw the flyer stands. Anywayz, the men find their way to the server room that is the object of their hunt. Its also unfinished -- plastic sheeting, drywall unpainted, entire walls are just frameworks. Yet there are constructed cubicles with computer monitors. Either Dubai's project management skills are shite, or this movie has checklists to fulfill that defy common logic. Its likely the latter, as those monitors are just dressing there to be shot. And this attribute defines the entire movie! Everything; every action, every scene, is just setup like they were checking boxes as to what an espionage action-thriller movie requires. And it ended up making the movie itself just a frustrating hollow shell of the genre, even dropping lower than the other seasons of the show, and myriad other depictions of Tom Clancy's main character.

Checkbox - Jack has retired from the CIA and become a private risk analyst for a big company, but something happens (the aforementioned operation in Dubai) that requires his old buddy James Greer (Wendell Piece, Superman), who is now Deputy Director of the CIA, to ask Jack to play courier. But its never just a pick-up. They spend a lot of time with playful banter about how Greer's jobs are never as easy as he says they are. 

Of course, its not just a pickup. He is there to meet an old friend of Greer, an MI6 operative, who gets himself killed before he can Exposition Dump to Ryan. That forces Ryan to give chase, on boat, shoot people, get shot at, etc. Dubai has a strict anti-shooting-people policy so that doesn't ingratiate himself with the locals. Also, he doesn't make his civilian job meeting, so I am guessing he's ... fired? But what is he chasing, what was he trying to Pick Up?

Checkbox - this is all instigated by Something Dark from Greer's Past. In the show, Greer has always been the one more ready to play fast & loose with the rules and the choices between right & wrong. Its not surprising, to us, that he had played part in developing a Top Secret black-ops team with MI6, to take down villains before they became a problem. This time it was Project Starling. Eventually they Went Too Far and were shut-down, but Greer's British counterpart, Crown (groan; Max Beesley, Survivors) kept on doing it. And the MacGuffin being sought in the half-finished server room was his .. I don't know... list? It was stuff; valuable info. Now he wants it back.

Checkbox - Crown tells them about a terrorist plot on UK soil. But he doesn't  tell them everything outright, masking it with the idea that if his team didn't prepare to stop it, the Good Guys would have never known. It gives Ryan and his begrudgingly new MI6 friends (Sienna Miller, 21 Bridges) some sleuthing and counter-terrorism stuff to do. 

Checkbox - its all a ploy! Crown drew the counter-terrorism forces in one direction, so he could blow up something/someone in the other direction. This time its the current Director of the CIA, a character from the previous series, Elizabeth Wright (Betty Gabriel, Counterpart). She is considered the proper leader that Greer can follow, which means she won't bring back Project Starling. So, Crown blows her up. I guess that is why? The problem with checkbox plot points is that the story never really cares about the why more that it is checking the box.

Checkbox - revenge. The real reason the movie killed her off.

But we still have a MacGuffin to attain. To bring Crown's organization down, they have to complete the failed mission from the opening act. But wait, wasn't Ryan sent to Dubai to get the fruits of that mission? Fake-out ! There was nothing. Greer's buddy died before he could tell Ryan what his opening crew was trying to do, let alone pass along the (not) attained info. So, Ryan and crew have to sleuth it out, discover the half-assembled building and go back to Dubai to ... checkbox the shit out of things with henchmen in black suits & automatic weapons and near deaths and... yawn. They get the info, kill Crown and can now disassemble his operation.

Except... so what? In the series the stakes always seemed higher. Remember, this is the character series that had them actually ignite a dirty bomb on American soil (The Sum of All Fears with Ben Affleck as Ryan) so it all seems like a major let down that the Big Bad is just about having a working organization still doing black-ops despite the US and British governments disavowing it? I get that the centre of the show, and the movie, was that Jack Ryan is the moral compass and if he doesn't like something, its Really Bad, but that hasn't stopped him from constant use of deadly force throughout it all. The only thing that sets him apart from Crown is that his actions are responsive instead of proactive, and he apparently cares about collateral damage.

And yet, Ryan is still charming, still bearing buckets of charisma and the banter is on-point. Personally, I prefer his side-kick, the more motivated by Doing a Job private contractor Mike November. Greer is Greer but now he's the actual Director of the CIA which means... well, absolutely nothing, but maybe the chance to make him the Bad Guy in whatever comes next. I will probably watch it, but ... yawn.

Which leaves me wondering why I invest time and energy and emotions in things that bore the crap out of me. At some point, while doing the write up for one of these movies, I will let my attention drift and focus on the aforementioned black suited henchmen. I always wonder why they are doing what they are doing? Only for money? They rarely get names, but do they have families? Friends? Histories? But that is for another movie, another boredom.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Lost Bus

2025, Paul Greengrass (Jason Bourne) -- download

Apparently I like movies about brush fires? But where as Only the Brave was about the brave men fighting the fires, this focused on a bus driver who chooses to save some elementary school kids, when he could have just escaped with his own family. Unlike the former, he actually lives, and this is less biopic and more just a dramatization of a very heroic act. 

Maybe, fire-fighting in the forest adjacent movies, like "Those Who Wish Me Dead"?

Also, apparently Greengrass is the accessible drama-meets-action director that can stir me from hiatus-is. As I am wont to do, after stepping away from films for a little while, settling back into it with a clear Hollywood production, I cannot help but see the trappings of the Purple Suits, but in this case, its not so much the annoyance at interference, but just the recognition of how a modern movie has to be made. 

OK, Paradise, California. One of those northern California towns in the wooded hills that is pretty much the middle of nowhere. The movie begins with high winds and waving, sparking power lines that lead to a grass fire at the base of the tower -- apparently IRL the power company was sued for causing this fire; and they lost. We also meet Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey, Mud), a down-on-his-luck sad-sack driving a school bus, pissing off his ex-wife and his boss constantly, trying to reconnect with an irascible teenage son, and not having much luck. He recently moved back to Paradise to help with his ailing mother, after his dad's passing. We get the idea he wasn't leaving much behind. These are all trappings of the clear Hollywood movie I mentioned. 

McConaughey does this kind of role so well -- he always seems to be a bit down-on-his-luck, but to be fair to mid-range Hollywood accessibility, he isn't given much range in this character -- drive the bus, play a fuck-up who obviously redeems himself, BUT given the man's talent, he plays it entirely believably.

Speaking of down-on-his-luck fuck-ups, I wonder if he has ever played a grimy PI ? I mean, yes, "True Detective", but what about gritty, never-shaved, back-alley or strip-mall detective?

The fire spreads, the trucks try to roll in, but the fire is in such an isolated place in the hills, they cannot reach. Fire fighting Chief Martinez (Yul Vazquez, Midnight, Texas) quickly coordinates response but there are challenges everywhere: high winds make aerial bombardment ineffective, the aforementioned accessibility issue, and the high winds cause it to move VERY quickly into populated communities. Evacuations are called for, but even the emergency coordination is chaotic & confused leading to 23 elementary students left at a school in the fire's path. Meanwhile Kevin is having a rough day -- his boss is angry at him (again), his kid is ill and his ex is yelling at him on the phone, and his mother is barely capable of taking care of herself. But when forced to make a choice, he swings his bus around and heads for the kids.

That's what the movie is about -- that fevered, hampered effort to get the kids away from the danger to a safe place. The thing about this movie is that it is well-backed, even for mid-range drama. Thus, the depiction is well sorted out, and the cinematography and lighting is on-point. The mid-morning bright sunlight quickly gives way to dusk's gloom, and then full on moonless-sky-night, as the town is enveloped by the clouds of black smoke. Everyone is evacuating, cell towers have collapsed and even the emergency management system has broken down. Its full on panic and the roads are snarled. What should be a quick 10 minute drive to safety ends up being a scramble to find an expedient path before the fire overruns them.

At Kevin's side is teacher Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera, Barbie) and their journey together is not idyllic. Crying children, flames and smoke, cut-off paths, and fire-engulphed neighbourhoods crush even her steely will to protect those kids. I repeat, the typical trappings are there -- the pep talks, the sharing of personal stuff between the two adults, the bonding between Kevin and one boy from a divorced family. At least Greengrass handles it all well, so my eye-rolling is at a minimum, and all that was easily supplanted by the colour and the lighting of it all. They are literally passing through the Fires of Hell, and you feel it.

I mean, we know they survive. They bust through the wall of flames to the almost surreal calm beyond. But the movie is kind enough to not just end there, giving Kevin a chance be acknowledged for his bravery, before he slinks off to check on his family and feel the relief he has needed all day. Kevin's problems aren't fixed, he is still who he is, and now he has lost his family home. But he survived, and he performed an admirable act. Maybe that one act can make up for many things; but he has to make it matter.

Chiplog: Cheetos Crunchy Flamin' Hot Dill Pickle flavour

It's been a while since the last chiplog, because I completely forgot about the chiplog...plus, new flavours of bagged (or tubed) snackables that are onion-free don't come along too often. But when it rains, things get wet, as the saying goes, and I have three new snacky comestibles to present (although one of them will be a total cheat since I've already eaten two bags of them and forgot all about Chiplogging them...yes, I've verbed Chiplog...and verb).

Pre-chip: I like Cheetos just fine, but if we're ranking, Hawkins takes top spot all day every day. But Hawkins, bless them, has stuck to their guns and only ever made one kind of cheesie, whereas Cheetos is constantly experimenting, for good or for ill. (I mean, Cheetos macaroni?)  I can't eat regular Cheetos Crunchy Flamin' Hot cheesies because onion powder, so imagine my surprise when the new Cheetos Crunchy Flamin' Hot Dill Pickle flavour came out and ...no onion powder. I guess onion and dill aren't the most complimentary?

Ingredients: Enriched dornmeal, vegetable oil, seasoning (so much seasoning), vinegar

First smell: That smell...it's definitely the dill and vinegar smell we're all familiar with from dill pickle chips of time immemorial...but there is that little pinch of paprika coming through as well. I can tell, even before my first bite, this isn't going to go well. I always expect cheesey flavour when it comes to the cornmeal based snacks (well, not corn chips, but I digress), and yeah, there is cheddar, monterey jack and swiss within, but I'm smelling no cheese. Dill isn't ever a flavour I've associated with cheese, or cheesies.

First taste: Woah, as a novice to the Flamin' Hot genre of cheesie, I wasn't actually expecting any kind of real punch out of this. Typically popular "spicy" things are dumbed down for the bland white person palate. But this hits immediately...the front, side and back of the tongue. It's a sting for sure.

Aftertaste: Just as the burning settles, the vinegar kicks in. If your mouth and throat are irritated by spice, that vinegar is just going to dial it up another 2-3 notches. And then the dill just kind of lingers, more as a scent than a taste. My tongue feels supercharged.

Mass consumption: Not gonna happen. I get about ten sticks in and I call it. 

Final thoughts: If you like spice, if you like dill, if you like a challenge out of your snack instead of pleasure, then this limited edition Cheeto is for you. It sort of reminds me of Blue Cheese and Buffalo Chicken Wing chips, only substitute the aromatic blue cheese for dill pickle and the texture profile of a rippled chip for extruded cornmeal twiglets and you're kind of getting the idea. Dill is not a flavour I'm intrinsically drawn towards, though I have come to enjoy it (somewhat) over the years. I've also some to appreciate heat and spice in my aging years. As my taste buds get duller and diet more limited, such flavour profiles add a bit of something new and exciting in my culinary journey. But this Cheeto dials the heat and the dill and especially the vinegar up to about an 8 collectively and it's just overwhelming. It's not enjoyable snacking.

Rating: 3.6/10

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu

 2026, d. Jon Favreau - in theatre

Has there ever been a TV show that had a theatrical movie continuing its character's journeys where the movie was effectively self-contained and new-audience accessible, plus felt like a proper movie and also did very well at the box office? (Like, I know the Sex and the City films and the Downton Abbey films were pretty big commercial hits, but were they accessible for new audiences? And the Firefly continuation Serenity was perhaps the most accessible, but it failed to draw much of a new audience).

I bring this up, because coming out of The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first Star Wars movie to hit theatres in 7 years, my brain was wracked with thoughts trying to figure out what was the dividing line between a TV show and a movie. With this film, the line is so blurry as to be almost imperceptible as a line.

In 2019, when The Mandalorian hit tv screens, and the first notes of (3-time Oscar winner) Ludwig Göransson's Morricone-inspired score whistled out, shivers went up my spine. We were finally getting live action Star Wars on our TV, and money was being spent so as to make it cinematic quality. The line was already starting to blur. And between three seasons of The Mandalorian, and other shows like The Book of Boba Fett, The Acolyte, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, and Skeleton Crew, within 7 years live-action Star Wars on our TV screens had eclipsed the runtime of all the theatrical Star Wars feature films released over almost 50 years.

Disney needed Star Wars and Marvel to launch and hook subscribers to its Disney+ service, and it worked, but at the same time, the rapid expansion of the franchise(s) diluted both of them, fatiguing the audience on the MCU, and also losing their nerve when it came to making new Star Wars for the big screen. So many Star Wars movie projects were announced that never materialized - a new trilogy from Rian Johnson, a trilogy from the Game of Thrones guys, a Kathryn Bigelow Top Gun-but-with-X-Wings movie, a Boba Fett film, an Obi-Wan film, something from Taika Waititi and so many more.

That a cinematic sequel to The Mandalorian would be the first return to the big screen for Star Wars (with billion-dollar filmmaker and creator of the titular Mandalorian Jon Favreau at the helm) seemed like such a safe bet, that it made sense why Disney would choose that path. The only problem is it's too safe of a bet that it's not all that exciting.

Leading up to The Mandalorian and Grogu's release I failed to muster any real energy for the film. The trailers were fine but revealed nothing about the plot, and, frankly, looked like more of the same from the TV show...a show I loved, need I remind you. 

If you're of a certain age, you will know what it's like to sit in a theatre, have that 20th Century Fox fanfare blast at you, the screen go dark, and the title card "A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far, Far Away..." hit your eyes, and the jarring horn blast of John Williams' legendary score punch you so hard in the gut that you uncontrollably yelp with surprise and excitement. Any time you watch a Star Wars film, that horn blast will transport you back to the theatre and raise that uncontrollable sense of excitement.

Unfortunately Göransson's The Mandalorian and Grogu theme, as amazing as it is, when the pulsating duh-dunn kicks in, well...it transports me back to sitting in front of my TV screen in 2019 (and, even more unfortunately, the pandemic-era seasons of the show). This is not something you want out of the theatrical experience, to be reminded of sitting in front of your TV. And I coudn't shake that feeling through The Mandalorian and Grogu's 2 hour and 14 minute run-time.

I enjoyed the movie... but... I enjoyed the movie like I would enjoy binge watching a season of The Mandalorian, and that's kind of the experience the film brings. It doesn’t feel right.

It's a very segmented movie, one that feels episodic not cinematic, even though it is telling one complete story.

The film opens with a big action sequence prologue, sort of James Bond-style (credit to critic Alonso Duralde for pointing out the somewhat Bond-ian nature of this film), that finds Din Djarin and his baby-Yoda adopted (50-year-old) son Grogu hunting down an Imperial warlord on an ice planet. It starts out like scenes that we've seen in The Mandalorian before, Mando moving through the shadows, exterminating Stormtroopers with ruthless efficiency, but it escalates into something fairly big, with Mando taking on a trio of AT-ATs.

And throughout the fim, yes, there are elements that felt intimately familiar, and not too dissimilar to what we saw on TV, but there were also the flourishes that announced itself as a big-screen motion feature, such as the Mandalorian entering the head of the Imperial Walker and navigating his way into the back of it, eliminating all the imperials within in heated gunplay and fighting, and then retreating back out through the head, all in a one-shot. For a Star Wars nerd like me, moving through the interior of an AT-AT is just something I've been wanting to see most of my life. Things like that make the galaxy of Star Wars feel that much more tangible.

Mando is now an contracted agent for the New Republic, with Sigourney Weaver as handler of his assignments. His new assignment is to meet with the siblings of deceased crime lord Jabba the Hutt. They alone seem to hold the whereabouts of a specific Imperial warlord that fallen off the radar. We get to see swampy Nal Hutta, the home planet of the Hutts, as well as the structures they live in and the gross living conditions they have.  the tour into the belly of the Hutt twins' "palace" borders on stomach-churning...all that writhing ("mommy, what are the slug-people doing?" "They're just eating dear.")l. One longs for the arid dryness of Tattoine. At least the sand looked clean.

The Hutts will give Mando the information he seeks, but first he must rescue their nephew, Jabba's son, Rotta the Hutt. He "fell into a bad crowd" and has been taken captive on a remote planet outside the New Republic's jurisdicion. There he finds Rotta is a champion pit-fighter, and if you've ever wondered what a jacked-up Hutt looks like, well wonder no more. Rotta, I'm guessing by design, looks like a beefcaked version of Jabba from the Star Wars: A New Hope Special Edition, where the CGI Jabba looked nothing like the Jabba from Return of the Jedi.

I won't step through all the beats of the film but lest to say, Mando frees Rotta, gets the Targeted imperial warlord, and returns home with his little green boy to relax. And that's the half-way point. But he's crossed the Hutts and they want their revenge. This time Mando gets kidnapped by a bounty hunter, and it's up to Grogu and some tiny friends (the Anzellans, a diminutive race that were the only good thing to come out of The Rise of Skywalker) to rescue him.

There's surprisingly, a long quiet stretch in this third act that is far from boring, but also far from feeling like a big Star Wars feature film. This kind of quiet interlude isn't necessarily unwelcome or by default un-cinematic, but it feels like a moment The Mandalorian TV show would permit itself in an 8-episode season versus slowing the pace of a feature film down to a crawl for 20 minutes.  Once this sequence resolves, it's a propulsive escalation back into Star Wars feature film territory, and despite my glee at many moments of this it just never quite felt big enough.

Star Wars films are space opera. There's "fate of the galaxy" at stake in every one of them, even Solo to some degree. But The Mandalorian and Grogu is contained, constrained. There's only "the job" and while "the job" gets complicated, and then backfires on our hero, there's little more else to it. This isn't a personal quest for Din Djarin or Grogu, and so there's no real arc for these characters. Where our heroes are at the beginning is where our heroes are at the end, except Grogu, I guess, has proven himself a bit more resourceful than we thought (they definitely leveled up the Grogu puppetry here, to an impressive extent)

It's an incredibly small cast for a Star Wars film, with Mando and Grogu, Mando's mission buddy Zeb Orrelios, Sigourney Weaver's Ward, the Hutt twins, Embo the bounty hunter, the Blofeld-esque warlord (Jonny Coyne), the Anzellans (all voiced magnificently by Shirley Henderson), a food vendor capably voiced by Martin Scorsese, and a kindly catfish-man Grogu meets in the swamp. 

My muted anticipation for The Mandalorian and Grogu had me hoping it would find some space operatic reason to exist. Something large and consequential in the lore of the Galaxy to make for a worthy big screen entry. At the same time I worried that the logic of a bounty hunter being part some sweeping space opera would put the character out of place. I also worried that a Mandalorian movie would get too lost in Star Wars lore, especially given that Zeb is a main character from the Star Wars: Rebels cartoon, Embo is a featured character from The Clone Wars series, the Hutt Twins first appeared in The Book of Boba Fett (a cold shiver went up my spine a the thought of Boba Fett cropping up in this movie, which he mercifully does not), and Rotta the Hutt's first appearance was in The Clone Wars animated movie that kicked off the series.  Thankfully, none of these characters requires any prior familiarity to enjoy their appearance here, there is that.

Overall The Mandalorian and Grogu looks pretty good. It looks big budget, certainly bigger budget than the TV show, for which the Volume digital backdrop was created and used heavily. Having just watched Mortal Kombat II, a very Volume-dependent film, I couldn't detect any obvious volume usage here.  The limits to Volume use on the various Star Wars TV shows seems lifted here, and it's nice to see characters move through much larger spaces (or even confined spaces that seem like sets, not digital backdrops).

Göransson is one of my favourite film and television score composers working today. He typically brings a lot of creativity and innovation to his scores, experimenting with sounds but to the benefit of whats on screen. His scoring for The Mandalorian tv show was integral to that show's success, to the point that I feel the third season of the series, though it has its faults in story structure, is mainly let down by Göransson's absence. His return here, then, is very welcome, and yet, unfortunately, it doesn't feel like trademark Göransson . It's rehashing the themes from the show and he doesn't seem to have escalated the sounds to something grander, although there are stadout segments where Göransson does shine, mostly when he deviates from the style of music he's otherwise been working with.

In the end I think that there was no winning with this film. Despite being quite entertaining, it doesn't go big enough to feel like the Star Wars cinematic experience we know, and therefore can't do much but disappoint. I can't help but think that, perhaps, the decision to bring the series to the big screen was the wrong choice for Star Wars' return to cinemas.

KWIF: The Sheep Detectives (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. I originally had a snarky comment closing out last week's review of Mortal Kombat II where I was lamenting having seen the video game adaptation instead of seeing the one about investigative ewes. I deleted the comment because I had already heard that The Sheep Detectives was actually, surprisingly, a pretty decent film, and that neuters the joke a little bit. Plus, I was going to see The Sheep Detectives anyway, so there never really was an either/or decision in the first place.

This Week:
The Sheep Detectives (2026, d. Kyle Balda - in theatre)
Mile End Kicks (2025, d. Chandler Levack - in theatre)
Dark City (1998, d. Alexander Proyas - DVD)

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I must have seen the trailer for The Sheep Detectives about a dozen times, most of them in the form of a preview before the screening of one film or another. Every time the trailer would start, I would balk at the very concept of a live-action movie about cgi sheep attempting to solve the murder of their shepherd. And yet, by the end of the trailer, every time, I was completely sold. Well, I guess not completely since the very same cycle would start anew the next time I would see the trailer.

It is, without a doubt, an absurd concept, but absurdity doesn't innately make for a film bad, and often the very absurd nature of a story's conceit is what makes it stand out, what makes it good, different and exciting.

I've been hearing a lot of comparisons to Paddington bandied about, but The Sheep Detectives really takes a greater nod from Babe, in that it's set in the real world, but when the humans aren't around the animals are speaking to each other. Yes, there are plenty of jokes where we watch the sheep talk in English and then cut to a human POV just to see them bleating at each other...and it's never. not. funny! (Director Balda is kind of restrained in his use of this gag to be honest, maximizing it's efficacy.)

Based on a 2005 German novel, this is "cozy mystery" at its coziest... I mean, we're talking wool coats for days, right? But the real surprise is that the mystery is not the most captivating part of the film. The reason The Sheep Detectives works so well is it establishes characters and it establishes a community (mainly with the sheep, but also with the humans) and it establishes a tangible world for them to inhabit. In this world, sheep are intelligent creatures. They sit and listen to farmer George (Hugh Jackman, X-Men: Origins: Wolverine) read mystery novels in the evening, and Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jack the Bear), George's favourite sheep, always solves the mystery before the end. George has a reputation about town of being a prickly bastard, but he's a kind and gentle loner who adores his sheep above all. He opens our story by narrating the letter he's writing to, it turns out, his daughter whom he gave up for adoption three decades ago (Molly Gordon, The Bear).

The sheep, we quickly learn, have the ability to force themselves to forget, which they do as a collective. Only Mopple (Chris O'Dowd, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children) can remember the past. The sheep believe that they don't die but turn into clouds. Mopple knows the truth, but lets them have their comforts. Otherwise their understanding of death is restricted only to the stories George tells them, so when George turns up dead, the sheep community is rocked.

So too is the human community of the English town of Denbrook. The kind of hapless town constable Officer Derry (Nicholas Braun, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot) is completely incapable of handling any sort of death, nevermind a murder. A wayward aspiring reporter (Nicholas Galitzine, Handsome Devil) seems intent on helping him break the case for his own reasons. The suspects are all in George's will, including the town butcher, a rival shepherd, the lovelorn innkeeper, and George's estranged daughter who just happened into town the day of his death.

In a conventional story, there would be much mileage about the sheep working through each of the suspects and eliminating them as the possible murderer. Instead, The Sheep Detectives is far more interested in the sheep community, and expanding their horizons. There is the whole concept in this community of a "winter sheep". Most sheep, they say, are born in the spring, but the occasional sheep is born in the winter, and they are shunned by the herd. And so a tiny, unnamed lamb George loves dearly, but is rejected by all. Part of the story is the herd confronting their prejudices, but in a roundabout way.  Even upon learning that their greatest ram, Sebastian (Bryan Cranston, Kung Fu Panda 3), is a winter sheep, it takes a lot before the herd truly understands the harm of their prejudice.

But that's just one facet of what these sheep need to learn. They have to leave the familiar safety of their farm and venture out into the world, where they are exposed to the realities they've otherwise chosen to forget. It's a potent moment when Lily realizes that Mopple has had to live with everything they've forgotten, but Mopple presents it as something beautiful, not horrible.

I'm not doing the best job of selling The Sheep Detectives but, to be blunt, I absolutely adored it. Funny, charming, sweet, sincere with a, yes, cozy mystery at its core to keep things moving, but just a delightful cast of characters and some of the most rewarding emotional stringpulls in some time... I cried at least three times and it earned every one of those tears. I never resented the film for them.

There is no reason The Sheep Detectives should be as good as it is, but we're so lucky that it is. A large contingent of my early-evening Wednesday screening applauded at the end of the film. I joined in. There was no one there to receive the applause, but it felt like the right way of mutually socially acknowledging that we all had a genuine emotional reaction to this film, and that we appreciated it. I do not recall the last time that happened.

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Love the pseudo-American Apparel-
style poster for this film. Perfection

Mile End Kicks first shot is inside Toronto's legendary Horseshoe tavern. The band Islands is playing a gig. I am transported back in time.

Despite the caption "2011", I am transported to 2005, to seeing Islands in their earliest incarnation, possibly at the Horseshoe, but maybe at the Rivoli or Lee's Palace or some other joint and perhaps during the North By Northeast festival. Anyway, I'm there. I'm in. It has me. It took the film all of 9 seconds to completely reel me in.

By 2011 I was out of regular "gigging", going to shows around town, and certainly out of the pretense that my photographing and reviewing of such shows (sometimes for online media outlets, most often just for personal blogging) was a career path. Grace (Barbie Ferreira, Euphoria) is 22 years old and already has a foothold in journalism.  She has four hundred articles in the local newspaper she's been writing for, including investigative journalism, interviews, and writing a sex column, as well as music reviews. She ponders the idea of writing a "33 1/3" volume on Alanis Morissette's album "Jagged Little Pill". Her boss at the paper (Jay Baruchel) thinks it's a great idea, and hooks her up with the "33 1/3" publisher who likes her take and gives her a small advance to write the book, but it needs to be done quickly.

The next we see of Grace, she's on a bus to Montreal for the summer, giving the middle finger to T.dot on her way out. Her mom doesn't understand why she has this sudden impulse to move elsewhere, and her dad...well, just seems depressed. Grace has a top 5 list of what she wants her summer in Montreal to be: write her book on Alanis, have real sex, climb Mount Royal, learn French and fall in love, probably not in that order.

She's renting a room in Montreal's Mile End from Madeline (Juliette Gariépy, Red Rooms) a hot DJ whose boyfriend Hugo (Robert Naylor) plays in a rock band called Bone Patrol. Madeline is super friendly and wants to be pals, while Grace is a bit reserved and really wants to focus on her writing. But Madeline insists she come to a loft party where she is DJing and Bone Patrol is playing. At the party, unfamiliar with the Montreal scene, Grace retreats to an outdoor space where she meets Archie (Devon Bostick, Diary of a Wimpy Kid) the bassist for Bone Patrol, and they form an immediate kinship... but when the band finally plays, Grace has a rather visceral reaction to Chevy (Stanley Simons, The Iron Claw), Bone Patrol's frontman. She chats him up and he's the most up-his-own-ass pretentious, faux-ambivalent, self-involved shitheel, but Grace can't see past his stage mystique.

Mile End Kicks is about Grace's epic summer in Montreal, becoming part of it's 2010's hipster scene and getting waaay too invested in a guy who can only ever think about himself (and even then not that deeply). There's an obvious love triangle happening between Grace, Archie and Chevy, but the will-they/won't-they isn't really the thrust of the movie. It's more of a "what the fuck, Grace?" as her logic just cannot find a way to overrule her libido when it comes to Chevy, and Archie pre-emptively takes himself out of the equation.

Mile End Kicks is about Grace building up her life, but also feeling completely helpless as it starts to crash down around her. A lesser film would have spent more time and energy on making more direct connections between Grace's life and the songs of "Jagged Little Pill", but the film doesn't need to link them firmly at all. Grace's fall from grace happens for many, many reasons, (almost all her own) and her only way out of the pit she's fallen into is to find self respect and confidence, to engage the world on her own terms rather than feel like she has to be deferential to the men she finds in the circles she's in.

There's an excellent, fundamental moment early in the movie where some of the men of the paper she's working at are having a debate over a couple of bands. It's clear she's not invited to this conversation and when she interjects her own input, she is dismissed immediately and, to put a finer point on it, laughed at. Late it the film (when she's back on her upswing) she reads an insightful and incisive text at a poetry slam about not just this explicit experience but all the general outside-the-circle-of-men experiences women have everywhere. It's a terrific 1-2-3 execution (especially when Grace returns to the bullpen late in the film).  I have witnessed these types of situations so many time (even well into adulthood) and have probably been a party to them more often than I've been cognizant of or care to admit. It's institutionalized sexism that often we (meaning men) are not even aware of. I mean I was aware of it before this film, but praise it for actually making it a part of the conversation.

The film contains three (or perhaps even four) of the most awkward make-out scenes I think I've ever seen on film. Given that Grace is our POV character, she's mostly not the one being awkward so our cringe isn't a sympathetic one but more of an "oh gods, what the eff" type of cringe. It's almost all Chevy and that boy, wow, is a fucking mess.  Either Levack dated a guy just like this or knew someone who had. The hyper-specificity here is too crazy to be made up.

The film effectively uses its setting as a real "Montreal is a main character" film, and it definitely captures what the Canadian hipster "scene" was like at the time (Toronto, a few years earlier, wasn't that much different, nor likely was Vancouver a few years before that, or Halifax a few years before that...the "it" scene sort of cycles through the major Canadian centers in five-ish-year spans). It effectively seeds in the tension in Montreal's art scene that's so distinct to it (the outsiders that come in and the French-English divide between them, as well as the Toronto resentment)

Mile End Kicks is a film about being in your 20's and fucking up, but also about learning from your mistakes and growing as a person, and understanding that you'll continue to make mistakes (just hopefully new ones, and not repeating them). It's also about empowerment, and while not being so aggressively Alanis about it, it's still a pretty bold awakening.

 ---

I had not watched Dark City for a very, very long time, though I had carried the DVD of it with me to at least a dozen different residences over the years. It would have been one of the first DVDs I bought, but I have no recollection if I ever actually put it in a DVD player and watched the film it contained.

A friend recently brought up the film, noting that clips of it had been popping up in one of his feeds ... somewhere. I recall that I liked the film way back when, and it has maintained a decent if not stellar reputation in the meantime... but would it hold up? Would I still even like it? Does the disc even work or has it succumbed to disc rot?

Turns out, mostly, mostly and yes, the disc still works wonderfully.

The most unfortunate thing about Dark City is that it opens with a narration from Kiefer Sutherland's Dr. Daniel Schreiber. Schreiber exposits about an advanced alien civilization late in its decline looking for some hope of salvation, and that hope is human. Schreiber is helping them in their experiments on humanity, and this film, then, in theory, unpacks just what that experiment is.

The second most unfortunate thing about Dark City is the affectation that Sutherland imbues Schreiber with. He gives the character an out-of-breath speech pattern, speaking in short bursts (not unlike Malcolm's asthmatic friend Stevie on Malcolm in the Middle). It's really a hat-on-a-hat as Schreiber also has a scarred lazy eye and a severe limp as well. Sutherland was making choices.

A few minutes in the proper film starts as Rufus Sewell's John Murdock awakens in the bathtub of a grimy hotel, completely unaware of where or who he is. He receives a phone call from Schreiber warning him some men will be after him, and he needs to leave immediately...it's then that he notices the dead sex worker on the ground with spirals and other sigils carved into her skin.  He moves with haste, just as a quartet of creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers show up and check out his freshly abandoned place.

The streets of Dark City are just that, dark, dimly lit. Every light seems like a spotlight only illuminating in a cone shape exactly what it's pointing at. Also at midnight, the society of creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers use their psionic abilities (called "tuning") to cause the entire city to grind to a halt, and it's denizens to go inert and unconscious. They also reconfigure the entire city, buildings twist up out of the ground forcing other buildings to shrink or retreat without causing any true damage to speak of. Reality bends to their whims...almost.  But these creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers need Dr. Schreiber to concoct new memories for the citizens of this dark city which most citizens have had done a few times over.

But it's John Murdock who has somehow repelled the new personality application and also developed the same tuning powers as the creepy overlords. He poses a genuine threat to the order of things.

As we learn all this, there's also a mystery... is John a murderer. His estranged wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) can't conceive of it, and even John himself has to test whether indeed the impulses are there or if he's truly capable of being a psychopathic killer. The detective on the case, Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) can't see any other options, because to do so would be to admit that reality is not all that it seems.  While Sewell's efforts as Murdock are genuinely quite good, there's a case to be made that this works better if Bumstead is it's main figure trying to solve a murder and unraveling the case of John Murdock, which then leads to the revelation of where they actually are and who is actually in charge and why.

Dark City is a really decent sci-fi neo-noir that doesn't always tease its mystery in an efficient or effective manner (especially since the opening voice over gives up so much of the surprise), but the exceptional special effects (for the most part) and shadow-laden atmosphere of the picture do so much of the heavy lifting to keep things engaging when the story may falter. Even 28 years later, on one of the oldest DVD pressings in my collection, the film still looks really good, the copious practical effects, sets and miniatures and the well-masked digital effects standing up very very well.

The third most unfortunate thing about Dark City then is the climax is such utter nonsense. Murdock goes tete-a-tete with "tuning" powers against the...leader? (of a hive mind?) I guess of the creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers... and there's nothing more boring that two characters trapped in a mental battle just leering at each other while crazy cgi bullshit swirls all around them.  It's such a let down given some of the film's strengths prior to that point.

The fourth most unfortunate thing is how sleepy Jennifer Connelly is in the role of Emma Murdoch. I can hazard a guess that she's been told to play the character as if she's just had a lifetime of memories slammed into her brain only the night before, so she's effectively a new, but confused person...but for some reason that gets relayed as sedate, with most every line delivered in an unaffected monotone. She's a much better actress than this performance.

But a few unfortunates aside, Dark City holds up as a solid watch. Perhaps it's not the monumental sci-fi story of it's generation (hard to be when The Matrix comes along 13 months later) but it's got very little to be embarassed about, and despite not hiding what could have been some great surprises, still has a surprise or two under its belt.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Hoppers

2026,  Daniel Chong (We Bare Bears: The Movie) - download

Kent mentioned in a recent post that he has to be "in the right mood or zone to watch something." If that is Kent's problem, make mine doubly or triply so. I have been unable to watch... anything. I click, and I click and I start, and I stop and I am just not able to invest time. And yet, I am very VERY good at wasting said time. As usual, this onset of hiatus-s is being caused by something I should be doing and procrastination, this time it being extra-curricular training. I am over 50 and the idea of doing school sends me all the way back to junior high for those few years where stress & depression just had me entirely checked out. And self-led schooling? Oh gawds, kill me now. So, while I am able to waste hours on re-run TV and video games, if I begin to invest some 1.5 hours into something else, I suddenly suffer from the guilt.

Dude, yer a mess.

But a cartoon that is sufficiently distracting and unhinged enough to drive all the maniacal thoughts away? That should work, no? Yes. It did.

Daniel Chong comes to Pixar by way of a popular cartoon series based on a popular, wtf-unhinged webcomic about three bears in San Francisco. I am not sure how A led to B but I guess he showed people he could helm something. I mean he brought it from comic to series to movie, so I guess that's something? It also enthralls me that until I Googled him, I had never heard of any of the three said properties. Even without trying, I am pretty well exposed to a lot of pop culture, and being entirely unaware of something that was skilled and known enough to follow this train is a joy, suggesting there is so much more out there I may be unaware of, things that could raise me above meh.

Its the town of Beaverton, and yes, I head-canoned to assume this is where the Beaverton Times comes from. Mabel (Piper Curda, I Didn't Do It) is a kid with anger issues mixed up with leftist ideas like protecting wildlife and (rolls eyes) saving the world. Her grandmother gives her an outlet in the form of an idyllic glade where she can sit on a rock and just watch life be lived in all nature's glory. Then gramma dies and Mabel grows up and the world goes to shit, as it does IRL. Jerry (Jon Hamm, Baby Driver) the mayor of Beaverton is gonna pave the glade to make way for the final loop in his mega-highway. Jerry claims he has the right to bulldoze the glade because all the animals have left. Mabel needs to stop him. 

The best gag in the movie is the highway itself, which is literally just a big ring surrounding the city. It doesn't even appear to have on-ramps or off-ramps, just a big concrete and asphalt ring high above the ground. Jerry's project is just completing the last portion of the circle.

Then Mabel discovers that her professor, Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimi, Hocus Pocus), her biology teacher, is actually a mad scientist who developed robot animals and a way to "hop" into those robots, so as to peacefully observe animals in the wild without disturbing them. She claims, very loudly, that its not Avatar -- its Avatar. Mabel "steals" a beaver bot and hopes to find the animals of the glade, so as to convince them to come back, which will stop Jerry's construction/destruction.

Sam, as a robotic beaver indiscernible from a real beaver, now has the ability to talk to animals and is horrified to find out they live by "pond rules", or a low-conflict acceptance that "people gotta eat". The animals of the glade have all collected in a distant section of the forest as they were driven out by a white noise generator devised by Jerry, something only animals can hear. These animals live together in harmony under the protective embrace of The Mammal King, George the Beaver (Bobby Moynihan, Nature Cat). Mabel befriends George hoping to convince him, and the others, to return to the glade, as long as she destroys Jerry's tech.

The movie is a bit of an unhinged romp, full of action and heartfelt connection, and Pixar is always at its best when it does weird shit. Yes, animals get eaten by their friendly neighbourhood predators in this kids' cartoon. And a butterfly gets squashed -- squishing is the animal equivalent of murder. In its individual bits, this is a great movie. As a contiguous whole, maybe not so much. Don't get me wrong, its fun to watch and has lots to engage with, but unlike classics like The Incredibles or WALL-E this one is not going to live in my brain forever. 

The second best gag was that when we observed animals from only a human perspective, they had cute button eyes and cute little squeaks and squawks. But from their own perspectives, they had full cartoon eyes and spoke English.

Enter the Lexxicon: Eating Pattern

aka Lexx: 3.0

1997, d. Rainer Matsutani - tubi 

in trying to defy the Trek-method of sci-fi adventure show by relying upon irreverence, sexuality, and unheroic leads to carry it, the second entry of Lexx missed the mark on actually being engaging entertainment. Thankfully for this the third episode/movie the creators of Lexx seemed to consider that maybe the best way to make a show that's disinterested in sci-fi conventions is to use and abuse them in their own way.

A standard trope of Space Journey stories is receiving the automated cry for help. The last episode started similarly with a cry for help which resolved unceremoniously in less than a minute, and in this one the Lexx crew actually receive the message, but the cowardly captain of the ship, Stanley Tweedle is too paranoid of strangers to dare to venture there. Unfortunately the Lexx, a living technology, is running low on fuel and needs to feed. It makes a decision on its own to venture towards the signal and eat whatever the planet can provide (for this show, this should be a lot more interesting a process than it is, you know something gross and/or terrorizing... instead it's just like mandibles shovelling dirt into its maw).

Meanwhile, Stan and Zev's attempt to awaken Kai from cryosleep are unsuccessful. It seems his protoblood has run out and that he's now dead-dead, no longer un-dead. Zev wants to bury him on the literal garbage planet Lexx is feeding on.  After burying Kai, they spy what looks like an inhabited station and Zev wants to explore for food. Stan is, of course, opposed, but in this case he's right to worry.

What they discover is no less than fourth sci-fi tropes mashed into one. First there's a post-apocalyptic civilization of scavengers, second they are cannibals (of a sort) and third they are all infected with an alien parasite, and fourth the parasites are controlled by a hive queen.

But this civilzation, with their weird songs, and their silly games, aren't simple drones of an alien queen, the victims are still at least somewhat present in their bodies, if very much controlled by the worm things inside them. The worms are addicted to a substance called "pattern", and pattern is made from people (it's basically Soylent Green but liquid). Pattern is made from meat culled from the hosts during their games (where winners get pattern and losers lose limbs. for making pattern..if they're lucky). 

Stan encounters one of the key people in this group. Wisp (Doreen Jacobi) is an attractive, if dirty young woman in a Witchblade-like jumpsuit. At first she seems like a naif, and the worry is that she's a born-sexy-yesterday trope ("Do you like me" she asks in a creepily seductive manner), but nope...once again subverting tropes, she is a host to the queen's babies and she's responsible for infecting any new, clean meat. And so Stan is turned.

He then meets Bog (Rutger Hauer), who is sort of the de-facto leader of all the remaining people. If he leads it's because he's the only one who knows how to make pattern. Hauer delivers a thoroughly delightful and entertaining performance, and seems to informs the rest of the cast how being infected with the worm, and the delirium it causes, should be portrayed. Of course, he's the best and most delirious of the performances.

For this third installment, the creatives seem to have forgotten (or just ignored) that Zev is part cluster lizard that not only would give her enhanced strength and probably a resistance to being knocked out with a simple conk on the head, but also that would be a reasonable explanation as to why the worms wouldn't want to infect her. Instead she's basically just bound up for most of the episode. She's still exceptionally feisty and not docile, but this feels like some Golden Age Wonder Woman bullshit.

Kai, of course, saves the day at first (having been resurrected with some sort of amino acids spewed by the worms attempting to see if he could be a host), but there's not a whole lot he can do when the queen becomes a Titan-sized Wisp who gloms onto the Lexx and tries infecting it. The Lexx needs to learn to defend itself.

What lets it down is the special effects. You can see the intent, but it all seems rushed and short-handed. Like I said, if there were more budget, Lexx's eating of the planet would have for sure been a spectacle rather than the muted close-up it is. almost every digital shot is unrefined, like the budget ran out during the second pass. I don't know if the effects of the previous two instalments were as visually awful because I was watching it in bed, on my phone, through the haze of illness and this one I was watching on the big screen tv. 

Despite the janky sfx, Eating Pattern is an enjoyable Lexx episode in large part because it leans into the genre tropes and cliches, but mashes them thoroughly together and pushes them to, like, grindhouse levels of absurdity with some minor gore and more than a little humour. Also, unlike the last episode, there's more for the crew to interact with than just one or two guest stars. Quite fun, this one.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): How to Make a Killing

2026, John Patton Ford (Emily the Criminal) -- download

I generally don't like fiction that puts unlikeable characters at the centre of the story. I have never watched Seinfeld, I didn't bother to watch Arrested Development and I had no desire to watch the rich summabitches of Succession. Yet, while I knew the premise of this movie was that a disowned heir to billions in old money started bumping off his own relatives, in order to leave himself as the only possible heir, I do like Glen Powell, Margaret Qualley and Jessica Henwick, so we gave it a go. Maybe a man murdering is relatives can be played for black comedy? Maybe the relatives are so comically evil, we don't mind them dying? Maybe he is so set upon, in life, that we forgive him his trespasses? All yes, but still, he never really becomes... likeable. And that was probably the point -- Fuck the Rich.

Since I am currently "not watching movies" and also "not writing", a good amount of time has passed since I wrote the above, and well, I am reaching "I Saw This!!" levels of escaped memory.

The movie is a death-row confessional. Becket Redfellow (Glen Powell, The Running Man), who was raised by his single mother, after she was ousted from her family fame & fortune for choosing to keep the boy, has been convicted of murder. Becket promises his mother on her deathbed that he will do everything he can to claim his heritage. Years later, while working dutifully in a men's haberdashery, he bumps into a childhood friend Julia (Margaret Qualley, The Substance), still precocious and deviously flirty, who reminds him of the promise he made to his mother. She is part of the world that Becket only got to watch from the outside as his mother seemed to still have some contact with her "friends", of whom Julia's mother was one. This reminder inspires Becket to kill his cousins, leaving him the only heir. We can only assume he ends up getting caught, given the opening of the movie.

I was very confused by the timeline of this movie. It was as if, at some point in the production of the movie, they had wanted it to be set 20 years ago. There are clothing choices, lifestyles depicted and even Becket's wonky haircut that are out of place -- he wears these cut-short sideburns, something I embraced in the late 90s all the way thru the late 2010s, but is entirely absent now. Some of the outfits adult Julia wears would not be out of place in the original The Devil Wears Prada. Maybe Patton Ford has a visual style? If so, its never truly embraced.

Becket's rise to power, through the death of unlikeable people, does not really endear us to him. And yet you are probably supposed to? I guess its just me. As he kills one cousin, a doofus flighty artist, he "steals" the man's girlfriend, giving us a mostly-likeable love interest. Ruth (Jessica Henwick, The Matrix Resurrections) is supposed to have agency but... And then Becket endears himself to the father of one of his victims, a truly likeable figure, which is weird considering he is a Wall Street investment mogul, all the while knowing he eventually has to kill the grieving man.

Black Comedy. That is what the movie is positioned as, and while there are some light chuckles, its mostly just black. If anything is played for fun, its that the FBI catches onto Becket's play almost immediately, but they seem unable to make things stick. Meanwhile snake-skinned Julia is played as an even bigger villain, catching Becket's scheme immediately, and getting the evidence of his acts, and he is just a pawn in her BIGGER plot. But its all about money & power, that some have, and others want.

There is no "rooting for" in this movie, and while I liked watching the movie, the performances by actors I enjoy, in thinking back, in writing about it, I am left exactly where I was before I started -- I do not enjoy watching bad people do bad things while setting us up to admire them. Sure sure, the commentary is that you become the monster you want to destroy, and there is some slice of "its in the blood", but ... meh.

And yes, I still think that, given billions to play with, I would not devolve into the Evil everyone believes is caused by money... well no more than I already am.  Cackle. Moustache Twirling.

KWIF: The Devil Wears Prada 2 (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. It was a real toss up: final two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again's second season, or the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada. It was no toss up. Daredevil has been, to put it bluntly, repetitive and boring, while TDWP2 is an event! It wasn't even a competition.

This Week:
The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026, d.  David Frankel - in theatre)
Mortal Kombat II (2026, d. Simon McQuoid - in theatre)
Keyhole (2011, d. Guy Maddin - tubi)
Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (2002, d. Takashi Miike - tubi)
Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988, d. Akio Jissoji - tubi)

I am not a journalist. Despite having been a writer and for many online resources for over 30 years, nothing I've done is what I would call journalism. The closest I came was a 3 year stint on editorial at my student newspaper in University (I thought this was an extraordinary and fundamental time in my life but in hindsight, turns out it was a somewhat juvenile and retroactively embarrassing era for both myself and the paper, full of (my own) sloppy work, ill-informed editorials, and errors in judgement. My desire to be more like the Harvard Lampoon or Mad Magazine than anything with journalistic integrity (which is not to diminish the work of my collaborators, but I was really not up to the task...but I digress). 

I got a degree in business, not journalism, and I cared about each equally (which is to say, minimally). It's probably for the best I never went into journalism professionally (though I tried on a few occasions). I don't have the stones for it. Much like being an artist, being a journalist requires sacrifice, and the rewards are not monetary, and you have to love it (which I don't...I respect it, don't love it so much). Plus, in the past 15 years or so, there's been a decided attack on journalism as an institution. Truth telling is now all a matter of perspective (or so the 1% overlords would have us believe). It's been a rough dozen-plus years for the media. Most of my favourite writers are now doing their own Substack or Substack-adjacent writing, and supplementing any written work with podcasting. The world is a lesser place for social media having supplanted traditional media as people's primary source of news (or, rather, "news"). There's no security to working in the world of journalism.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a sequel that doesn't need to exist. Nothing about the end of The Devil Wears Prada demands we know more. But now that it does exist, that it sets itself on top of the backdrop of the failing state of traditional media and the billionaire bros who snap up media outlets so they can control the narrative with their detached-from-the-layman world view...well, at least there's something for it say, something to explore in this moment, even if it doesn't quite have the firmest grasp on its message.

We find, when this film starts, Andy Sach (Anne Hathaway) has just won a journalism award but also, at almost the same moment, via text, finds out that she and her entire staff at the newspaper she was writing for have been laid off. Meanwhile Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) has just had an expose written about how Runway Magazine has promoted and supported a brand who runs a manufacturing sweatshop. This is a scandal, one which Miranda of 20 years ago would never have found herself in (it's telling in many ways that she has).  The owner of Runway's media parent, Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman) needs damage control, and thus returns Andy to Runway, the place where she interned 20 years ago, now as the new features editor.

She reunites with Nigel (Stanley Tucci) and Miranda (who doesn't remember her, or so she says), and is instantly swept into a meeting with their key advertiser, Dior, where Emily (Emily Blunt) now works as retail manager.

Andy finds Miranda in a subdued position relative to where she once was. Still a titan of the industry, print media is all but dead, and the online sphere for Runway has trouble competing with other scroll-and-like spaces. Andy's role is, at first, damage control, but also about trying to raise Runway's profile up.  It needs to be more than just about the pictures, people need to read it for the articles too.  Without saying it, it's attempting to "Teen Vogue" it (where in the mid-2010s Teen Vogue shifted its focus from fashion and entertainment and rapidly gained attention for it's provocative and insightful political articles.... Teen Vogue was collapsed into the parent Vogue in 2025 by its publishing overlords, according to many to stifle its anti-right wing messaging).

Andy's efforts to raise the status of the magazine is noticed in the media, but not represented in the site traffic. She needs a big gambit both to secure her place and to gain at least a modicum of respect from Miranda. She needs to land the white whale interview: Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu). The ex-wife of one of the world's richest men (a chuckling tech bro doofus played brilliantly under gobs of makeup by Justin Theroux) is now the world's richest woman, but Sasha hasn't given an interview in the three years since the divorce. Andy lands the interview (conducted by Miranda but the article written by Andy) and not only gets in Miranda's good graces once again but becomes a bit of a legend.  

The crux of the film, however, is that no matter what one good story brings for a day, a week, or a month, it's not enough. The cycles move on so fast that there's no time to rest, and media and journalism are still a dying form, unable to demand enough attention in the attention economy when there's injured baby foxes being fed milk from a bottle or video game live streams that run for two days straight to compete with. Runway is on the table to be sold...or on the chopping block to be axed.

While the first act is all about Andy getting reacquainted with a world she left behind 20 years earlier and noting both the similarities and shocking differences, the second act is about settling in, about establishing a new life in a roller-coaster world of uncertainty and insecurity. Miranda is the only one who seems like teflon-coated steel, nothing penetrates and nothing sticks...but even she is showing signs that that it's all actually getting to her too. The world is changing and she can only do so much to change with it.

The third act then becomes about Andy's perception of the situation, that the threat to Runway, one of the last bastions of traditional media, is the warning siren and that saving it means much more than just saving a magazine but providing hope for the entire industry of journalism.  It's idealist and optimistic, and it takes the audience on that ride of hope and scrappy-can-do attitude.

And then Miranda slaps her in the face with reality. It's only a matter of time. There's a boa wrapped tightly around every industry, squeezing tighter and tighter trying to milk them for everything they're worth, until they're worth nothing, at least monetarily. The solution to the troubles in this picture all rely on the good graces of an ultra-rich benefactor to whom minimal, or no returns (or even negative returns) are worth the investment for the art and integrity. You can't monetize artistry and integrity.

This, mercifully, isn't a naive film, although at times Andy is far too naive as a character, and Miranda is far too withholding to fully invest in the driving story forces at play. It does oversimplify its narrative so that it can have a satisfying ending while still being cognizant that there remains a dark cloud overhead and the struggle will continue after the last pan of the New York skyline.

The Devil Wears Prada was a really good movie that has become sort of legendary. The sequel doesn't tarnish the legend, though it fails to find its own legendary status in the process. It's a pretty picture, with tons of fabulous outfits, sets, and settings (and boy does Anne Hathaway look more amazing than she ever has), all of which are a must, and it mercifully doesn't wallow in the past. It does unfortunately seems obliged to put Andy kind of in the same place she was in during the first movie, even though she has two decades of prestigious experience, world travelling and her own life under her belt. It's natural for someone to find themselves repeating patterns of behaviour when with certain people, but I just felt like she should be much more assured than she is here. Similarly, Miranda shows next to no sign of growth, yet she feels muted compared to the ruthless ferocity which she had in the prior film. But she's also almost 70 now, and there does come something of a softening with age which we should find believable.

Already a massive box office success, the best we can say about The Devil Wears Prada 2 is that it does fine as a sequel. It doesn't at all diminish what came before, nor does it immediately discount its own existence. I find myself wishing that it were more interested in its setting, exploring the erosion of media and journalism, especially given the eyes it has on it, but that's not the audience its serving (this isn't The Paper 2 or Broadcast News 2). It serves its audience well...or well enough.

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I didn't see the 2021 iteration of Mortal Kombat (but Toasty did) and, to be honest, I didn't care to. From all reports it was attempting to be a character-driven narrative exploring the characters of Sub-Zero and Scorpion, and that there was not, in fact, any Mortal Kombat to be had. I mean, what's the point then?

I am by no means invested in Mortal Kombat as a property. The last version of the game I played was its original incarnation. But that said, I've long had a soft spot for the '95 cinematic treatment from Paul WS Anderson, a film that has aged surprisingly well in that it was always kind of hokey and wasn't taking the whole thing too seriously. The last thing we need to do is take Mortal Kombat too seriously.

It seemed like (at least from Toasty's report) MK2021 was taking things too seriously. Mortal Kombat II wants you to think it's not taking things too seriously... but it still is. What story there is within the film is wildly unfocussed and largely predictable, with absolutely no tension built along the way (for a number of reasons). The movie starts by introducing the concept of "Mortal Kombat", where two realms, instead of waging war, compete in a tournament of 10 fights. The first to win five of these fights is victor and the losing side's realm is theirs. Kitana (Adeline Rudolph) watches her father get brutally defeated by Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford) and her mother and people immediately subjugated under him. He takes her as his daughter (I can't say for certain the scriptwriter was just aping Gamora's story from Guardians of the Galaxy/Infinity War but it's basically the same) which I'm sure will work out fine for everyone as a big happy new family.

Meanwhile Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) is a washed up Stephen Segal-type 90's action star who nobody cares about anymore. He's sad about his life but Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) and Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) recruit him for Mortal Kombat, Raiden promising him a greater, more fulfilling destiny. He declines, but, it turns out, he doesn't have a choice.

And so Kitana fights for her father, reluctantly, while Johnny Cage fights for Earth, reluctantly, only it turns out Kitana is a spy for Raiden and Johnny Cage has a warrior within, so the dramatic narrative arcs these characters can take are, well, straight lines rather than curves. Their stories go from A-to-C without even thinking about venturing towards B along the way.

So if there's no real character arcs in this film, surely it will have fun with team dynamics, right? Inner conflict and romances and whatnot? Notsomuch. Or at all. The "team" here, Raiden, Sonya, Johnny, Cole Young (Lewis Tan), Jax (Mechad Brooks), and Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) spend their time together largely spitting exposition. There's no real sense of camaraderie or any sense of these characters becoming friends or connected to each other in any way (we're told that Sonya and Jax are old friends, but do we feel it? Notsomuch). 

The film spends a lot of time trying to circle back on characters from the prior movie, even though they are not central figures here. As such, unless you are really invested in MK2021 then these beats have little to no weight on their own (like, Hiroyuki Sanada returns as Scorpion, but in the underworld, where he resumes his fight against the revived Sub-Zero to no real effect of the story at hand). 

So, if it fails at developing anything meaningful with its characters, MKII must be all about the tournament and the fighting, right? Yes and no. It does feature heavily its match-ups, the one-on-one fights, but none of them carry with them the weight of what the stakes of the tournament, and the fate of the "Earth realm". The film brutally fails at finding any tension within the tournament itself. With one or two exceptions, nobody witnesses the fights, so there's no crowd reactions, no cut to team-mates or friends as they watch their friends succeed or fail brutally. There's just nothing exciting outside of maybe a few cool manoeuvres or a particularly gory fatality, and there's not enough of those to justify a feature length movie this uninteresting.

It wouldn't be so bad if the film at least had style, but it's so evident that it was filmed on the Volume or similar on-set digital backdrop technology, and that the crew were either inexperienced with it or didn't have the time to refine their shots. The actors are lit so horrendously that they have a soft glow outline around them much of the time, while the backdrops too often don't feel tangible at all (I will concede that it's entirely possible that watching this on an IMAX screen made this so much more evident than a standard movie screen, or any home viewing implement). The few sets actually constructed feel cheap, much cheaper than an $80million budget would presume.  That, visually, this film feels inferior to the 1995 adaptation of Mortal Kombat is very telling.  That film used mostly practical sets that were well lit and well shot. This film seemed hampered by its constraints and is pretty ugly as a result.  At the very least the 1995 film had a still-iconic techno soundtrack, and this film's score doesn't even seem to be trying. 

There is one sequence not shot on a set, where Johnny, Liu Kang, Sonya and Jax venture into the home terrain of the excessively-toothed character Barada. It's an exterior desert set that has scale and doesn't feel contained by walls or barriers. Since it's outdoors there's a lot of natural light, and it does everyone a world of favours that the rest of the film does not. The fight between Johnny and Barada is fun and silly and feels like the only real payoff for Johnny (or any character for that matter) in the film.

Fans of the franchise will probably get more out of this than I will, but a films at this budget really should be trying for something more than fan service.

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I'm a bad Canadian cinephile. I don't spend enough time exploring the films or filmmakers of my home country. This is in large part due to the fact that Canadian cinema, by and large, doesn't have the resources that the films of other countries do. And with the exception of Quebec, which has an industry all its own, most of our best talents get co-opted by our neighbours to the South, obfuscating a film's Canadian-ness, if anything remains at all.

There are a few notable filmmakers who have made a name on an international scale that still largely work within the Canadian system and tell stories set within the country.  Guy Maddin is definitely such an auteur, one who likes to combine his fascination with the earliest era of filmmaking with a love of his homeland. Or so I've been told. I've seen maybe one or two of his films in the distant past, and have long been meaning to catch up.

Keyhole, his 2011 effort, was maybe not the first place to start. A psychological noir set in a haunted house, the film follows Ulysses Pick (Jason Patrick) and his gang of thugs as they barricade themselves in Ulysses' home. 

Our key signal that things are askew finds Ulysses' second-in-command telling the dead to face the wall and the living to face forward. The dead, then, march out the back door to face a proper disposal.

Ulysses emerges from the rain with Denny (Brooke Pallson) slung over his shoulder. They're both drenched. Eventually Ulysses will get dry, Denny will always seem perpetually wet, despite a change of clothes.

Ulysses warns the gang the house is haunted and to beware of touching ghosts. Meanwhile he searches the house with Denny in tow, her ability to read into his thoughts aid him in his quest to find his wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini) within the twisted maze of hallways and stairs and doors. 

He is vexed by the ghost of Hyacinth's father (a very nude Louis Negin), who manipulates environments throughout the house, though does not seem to have any real control.

The journey is an abstract one, lacking decisive logic, living between metaphors. As a film, it is an exploration of Ulysses' life, his failures as a husband and father, and it questions whether these failures mean anything to him.

It's a puzzling film which it both its greatest and most detrimental asset. Bending your brain to understand what it is Maddin is trying to convey has its rewards when you can reach an understanding in what you see, but the dream logic that prevails often has no meaning, serving primarily to keep the audience off balance.

Maddin's first digitally-shot film, it's a black-and-white production but doesn't have the olde-timey feel (the heavy make-up of the silent or gangster film eras, for example) and it doesn't look particularly good. The sets, lighting and costume seem constructed on a shoestring budget (which they probably were) and lack the usual hand-crafted flair of the films of Maddin's I'm (not-so-)familiar with.

What probably lets the film down the most, however, is the character of Ulysses, who just isn't very compelling. Whether it's Patrick's performance or what he was given to work with, I was never certain why we should care about Ulysses or his journey.

Once I get into the swing of watching Maddin's pictures, acquainting myself anew with his sensibilities, I might soften on Keyhole, but as stands I found it a pretty rough watch.

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If I were to attempt to catch up on the works of Takasi Miike, it would have to be the only movies I watched in a year. The director has made around 120 films since his debut in the early 1990s and dozens upon dozens of television episodes. That prolific level of output seems unprecedented, and one has to wonder what gets sacrificed in the process of producing as such speed.

Like Guy Maddin above, I'm not particularly well-versed in Miike's repertoire, certainly not enough to speak to any overall style or sensibilities (a quick search of this blog finds no entries of Miike films...which surprises, me. I thought for sure Toasty would have one or two Miikes written up). 

Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (aka "Noboru Ando's True Outlaw Tales: Raging Fire") opens with a primal scream over a heavy metal track. The camera tracks a young man running full tilt through the streets of Tokyo (intercut with flashes of...other things, a perplexing montage of images at this stage of a film to be sure). Finally the young man, guns drawn, leaps over a small barricading wall of an outdoor stairwell and begins firing on the group of men below (clearly mobsters, based on the way the one man is dressed compared to the other men around him). The gunman dispatches everyone, having hit the boss at least once at this point. The boss does not fall, he keeps lumbering forward, taking more and more bullets, until he has his hands around his assailant's throat. The only escape the gunman has is to cut the man's hand's off. Thankfully his partner has come by for clean-up.  The next shot of the young assassin, we see him naked on a couch, the severed hands still attached to his throat.

Yeah, this is kind of what I think of when I think of a Miike film. Extremes.

The story of the film finds Arata Kunisada (Riki Takeuchi ) freed from prison. The mob boss that was just assassinated was a father figure to him, and he is distraught and vengeful. 

But this isn't a one-man-assassin squad/John Wickian tale, at least not yet. The film cuts between different mob factions and Kunisada's journey, which for much of the film's run time finds him hiding out, rather than pursuing his revenge.  But eventually Kunisada gets back on track and, well, finds a missile launcher to help him on his quest.

Having just watched the excellent Italian mob-revenge actioner Big Guns, this very much feels like another take on the same story, right down to the police sort of standing by, or perhaps even aiding the protagonist in their mission of revenge. The difference is Big Guns felt quite calculated and detailed in its execution. Rekka on the other hand feels quite rushed and unrefined. That shagginess has a bit of an appeal, for sure, but it makes for some confusing story beats, or even whole acts. (There's a detour that Kunisada takes with a possible love interest that seems completely inconsequential to the overall story, and, for the amount of screentime it takes, contributes little to our understanding of this rather one note character).

The film dabbles with character drama and mafia intrigue but isn't particularly committed to either, and by the time the big rocket-launcher climax happens, it becomes a big old cartoon that betrays whatever it was trying to do emotionally before. 

The film closes with the ghost of a dead mob boss popping his head into frame, shouting "rock and roll!" It's not a vibes movie, per se, but perhaps Miike is a vibes director, and you're either on his wavelength or you're not. I dunno...Rekka wasn't boring, except when it was.

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One thing I'm always searching for is films from the 1980s with great special effects, including miniatures and big sets and puppets and stop-motion animation. I've exhausted most of the North American releases some time ago (though there is still the rare surprise) and have to look internationally for such pleasures. The main problem is I have no idea where to look, or what I'm looking for, and sacrificing a few hours hoping for something inspired to look at can be such a gamble.

The opening moments of Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (aka "Teito Monogatari") deliver instantly. A glorious barrage of manufactured clouds, impeccably lit with purple and red hues leads way to a massive set where a group of mages start mumbling incantations, causing the set to rumble and fracture and animated lighting to strike. There are rods sticking up from the ground that receive the lightning and are rotoscoped with a glowing red tinge. This is all glorious even if the dialogue of the scene is moving so fast that I had to rewind at least three times over to catch all the exposition.

The gist of The Last Megalopolis is that, centuries ago, Taira no Masakado led an uprising against the lords of Tokyo and failed. His spirit, though dormant, haunts the city. Should anyone dare to desecrate the site where he lay, he will awaken and destroy the city. And so, the demon Yasunori Kato (garbed in an Imperial Officer uniform, he is no doubt the inspiration for M. Bison in the Street Fighter video games) seeks to do just that, but in order to awaken the Masakado, he needs the blood of his descendant to do so. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

What follows is a convoluted but enthralling tale that takes place over three time periods from the early 1910s to the late 1920s. It's heavy on incantations, sorcery and witchcraft (of a type), and a bevvy of effects to go along with it. The best special effects in the film find paper being dispatched by both the good guys and bad, sailing on the wind before crumpling itself up and then transmogrifying into a bird or a wee little rat-like beastie. It's really, really cool.

The Last Magalopolis is based off the novel "Teito Monogatari" (adapted into Manga prior to the film's release and into an anime series in the early 1990s), and combines elements of real Tokyo history with epic fantasy and spirituality. A lot of the characters in this story are actual historical figures, and I guess the production team thought that it was enough of a shorthand to not really explore these characters at all.  It is completely a story-driven film, and figures wind their way in and out of the story in such a manner that if you're not used to Japanese names it can get confusing as to who is being referred to in a given situation and why. Also, this film is not waiting for you to catch up.

It's a propulsive narrative, even at two hour and fourteen minutes, and by the end while it has a resolution, barely feels resolved... because it isn't. This is effectively the first half of the story, condensed. A follow-up film, Tokyo: The Last War would be released the subsequent year. 

Part fantasy, part horror, part historical fanfic it's a wild and dense production that perplexes and delights in equal measure.