KWIF: Project Hail Mary (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. Why was I burping so much last week? Something I ate? A stress-induced ucler? A lack of movies in my diet?

This week:
Project Hail Mary (2026, d. Phil Lord and Chris Miller - in theatre, 70mm screening)
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice (2026, d. BenDavid Grabinski - Disney+)
The Clean Machine ("Tales for all #12", aka "Tirelire, combines & Cie", 1992, d. Jean Beaudry - Crave)

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I am a pretty big fan of the Lord & Miller duo, starting with Clone High, and I regularly cite Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs as my all-time favourite film (...maybe only half jokingly). I enjoy their work tremendously, their sense of humour, their storytelling sensibilities, their subversion of tropes, their pop culture sensibilities, their fearless ability to be silly and sincere... these sensibilities all mesh so well with my own. 

But something about the trailers for Project Hail Mary had me worried that what may be their most ambitious outing to date. While they've made miracles out of franchises with the Jump Street, Lego and Spider-Verse films, this was obviously different. Primarily a one-man-show with an amnesiac scientist played by Ryan Gosling alone on a far-reaching mission to save the earth, only to encounter - and make friends with - a spider alien made of rocks.

The trailers made the premise seem quite thin. The risk of getting bored with Gosling whether alone or hanging out with an alien seemed high (especially at a 2.5 hour runtime). And frankly, the humour witnessed in the trailer seemed pretty groan-inducing, certainly not what I expect from L&M.

I shouldn't have worried so much. Project Hail Mary opens with a series of stunning if confusing visuals, which we quickly understand are the POV of Gosling's Ryland Grace as he awakens from his induced-coma. A robotic arm attempts to aiding in his withdrawal from his sleeping casing (really has a sausage casing feel to it, but with a zipper), but a panicked Grace just starts floundering and flopping around on his own. A preprogrammed message delivers him some helpful information about his arousal from his sleeping state.

Gosling, in these opening minutes, reminds us what a movie star is. He commands the screen from the first second we see his face, and he delivers a tour-de-force performance of physical comedy, without going too broad, leaning too hard into the comedy. This is a Lord & Miller special, walking the tightrope between what's funny, but still smacks of reality, versus, say, slapstick. Within the first five minutes, any reticence or doubt I had about the film was blown out of the water. The visual acumen and Gosling's performance showed that both the actor and the directors were in the pocket on this one. They know what they are doing and know the tone they are going for. This isn't Lord & Miller reaching for their 2001: A Spaced Odyssey epic, it's perhaps more their entry into...what did Toasty just call it?... "the new weird"? (Maybe not...I'm not quite clear on what that is yet...I added a tag).

We understand where Grace is, in these opening moments, stranded in space, far, far away from home, but we have yet need to understand why, and it's clear almost immediately that Grace doesn't really want to be there. That's what the flashbacks help to flesh out.

If Project Hail Mary is a keyboard, the scenes in space are the white keys and the flashbacks are the black keys. Both are necessary to play the tune, but there's more dominance to the present time. And yet, neither is greater or lesser in importance. The revelations for Grace as his memories trickle back (prompting the flashback sequences, without being at all corny about it stylistically) are just as engrossing as Grace's space adventure.  

This is more The Martian than Interstellar in terms of tone, which, makes sense since veteran tv and screenwriter Drew Goddard wrote both this film and The Martian. Project Hail Mary has just as much fealty to science, astrophysics and theoretical physics as both these aforementioned films (it's a great triple-bill, frankly), and it manages to get the gist of the science-y aspects across without necessarily Walter Bishop-ing them all the time (it surprises me to learn that Goddard was somehow not at all involved with Fringe?)

The film's centerpiece is the relationship between Grace and his new alien friend, whom he dubs Rocky. I wince at this very American trait of giving persons with non-America names nicknames because they can't be arsed to learn to pronounce their actual name, but when the human tongue is completely incapable of producing the trilling sounds of Rocky's native language, you gotta give him a bit of a pass.

The moment of Grace and Rocky's first meeting brought me close to tears. There's some shenanigans prior to their direct meeting, but this is all about anticipation without being boring about it. The ships jockeying for position, and Rocky's ship aping Grace's ship's movements only foretells Rocky's aping of Grace.

There's something magical to the idea of the first encounter with an alien intelligence, and this film captures that magic. It's not as epic as, say Arrival, but it's just as emotionally effective, if not moreso specifically because there's no military presence, there's no agression, there's no call to arms or real threats of violence in this encounter... and it's such a relief.  My chief concern throughout this whole film was that Rocky would for some reason want to link his people with humanity. The conversation never does happen but you can certainly imagine that off screen Grace told Rocky that two-thirds of humanity are decent people, but the other third are the ugliest, most fearful, greedy, war-mongering, selfish, sociopathic assholes and it's better to never meet the nice side of Earth than to have to encounter the ugliest side of it.

The mission is simple. There's a bacteria that eats light and uses it to travel and reproduce throughout the cosmos. The bacteria is consuming stars, everywhere, and there seems to be only one star that is unaffected. It's at this junction where Rocky and Grace meet, their mission is mutual, to learn why this one star is unaffected, and if possible, send the solution to save their solar systems back home.  Grace knows it's a one-way trip, but isn't very excited about it. (As an aside, I like how this story manages to sidestep all our immediate real-world crises, and instead introduce one that is actually doing quite the opposite, creating a global cooling effect. It's a savvy way to keep the audiences' minds focused on the film).

The tightrope that Gosling expertly walks is being both a bit of a goof while also regularly reminding us that he is exceptionally intelligent and capable. For all his nervous, rambling energy, his awkward handsomeness, when it comes time to science, he sciences. 

It's a film about finding what matters, finding purpose and reason. Grace, in flashbacks, is seen as the reluctant participant, being conscripted into service rather than volunteering. He doesn't have much in his life, no great friendships or romances to speak of. Ostracized from the scientific community, he finds value in teaching, molding young minds, engaging them with his knowledge, watching them flourish as a result. But it's a lonely life, and even with the end of the world staring him down, he can't find motivation. Eva Stratt is the head of the international task force that brings him onto the project, and she, similarly, seems lonely, and we start to wonder, is this the connection he seeks?

But likewise, once he meets Rocky, there's is a bond unlike any he's ever experienced. It's a friendship romance (a bro-mance, I guess, ugh) between them as they go through this epic adventure together. Perhaps the most meaningful encounter in the history of either of their species. If Grace goes on fighting, goes on living, it's because of Rocky and no one else.

In many ways, Grace might be our first major on-screen asexual (ace) protagonist. When all the other Project teammembers are partying and hooking up, Grace seems outside of it, not that it's entirely alien to him, but it's not something he's itching or longing to join in. The ending kind of backs that up.

While Project Hail Mary doesn't break any real new ground in terms of sci-fi or spacefaring adventure films, it is, from start to finish, an absolutely delightful, sweet and charming film that lacks not for excitement but isn't driven by the need to put its protagonists in peril over and over again. It trusts that it's built a compelling narrative and enjoyable characters and enticing environments that it will fuel an audience for 255 minutes like a fuel tank full of astrophage.

I'm dying to get Toasty's reaction.

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Though Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is a sci-fi action comedy that features both mobsters and time travel, there's a distinct possibility that writer-director BenDavid Grabinski's decision to open the film with a prolonged sequence of improv legend Ben Schwartz (Sonic the Hedgehog, Parks and Recreation) singing over top of Billy Joel's vocals to Why Should I Worry, a track from the largely forgotten 80's non-Disney animated feature Oliver and Company. It is decisions upon decisions as Schwartz adeptly belts out the tune with near accuracy and some nice harmonies, while clearly in the process of working on something exceptionally technical in a basement lab-type situation.  

Schwartz, we later learn is Symon, a rogue physicist who has sought out...independent financing for this little project of his, which he's about to learn, actually works, unfortunately for him.

Symon is not the focus of the film, and in fact is rather peripheral to the whole thing. He's a necessary element, but he contributes what he contributes and is at best a punchline as the film progresses. Our focus is, well, the titular Mike (James Marsden, Enchanted), Nick (Vince Vaughn, Bad Monkey), Nick (also Vince Vaughn, Dodgeball) and Alice (Eiza González, Baby Driver). Alice is unhappily married to Nick, a loan shark. Mike is Nick's best friend, and also an enforcer. Mike and Alice are having an affair, which Nick may or may not already know about. Mike and Nick work for Sosa (Keith David, They Live) but Nick wants out...he's lost the stomach for killing people.

Sosa's son, Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro, American Vandal) has just gotten out of prison after a 6 year stint, and it's party time, with no less than 3 after-parties. But Mike and Nick and Alice all bow out of the proceedings, with Nick disappearing and Mike and Alice planning a rendez-vous. Except Nick gets in the way of the rendez-vous, conscripting Mike into a new adventure, which involves kidnapping...another Nick.

See, there's a Nick from the future that saw Mike die, because he's been pinned as the rat that sent Jimmy Boy up the river, and now Sosa knows and Mike is as good as dead... unless Future Nick intervenes. But the only one who can really get in the way of Future Nick's plan to save Mike is past Nick. And so the farce and the fighting begin.

It's a really weird thing that mobsters get mixed up in time travel. It's like coffee and peanut butter...you wouldn't think they would work together...but you also might be surprised if mixed together with the right ingredients. A major ingredient is the humour, a lot of it falling on Vaughn's broad shoulders, as ever pulling the motormouth act, but tempered by having to distinguish between two emotionally distinct versions of Nick. He pulls it off quite adeptly. Future Nick is penitent and considerate, while Past Nick is a wild card, bristling with a simmering cynicism and maybe even something sinister. But both have a snark that Vaughn delivers very well, often playing off himself.

There's also a lot of comedy to the cut-aways, to the After Party, and the After After Party, and the After After After Party, where Jimmy Boy isn't having quite the time of his life, in no small part because he keeps somehow hanging out Dumbass Tony (Arturo Castro, Tron Ares) whose dumbassery keeps putting a wet blanket on the fun.  Grabinski didn't really need to keep cutting back to these situations, but it's clear he was having a blast coming up with these characters, and there's an evident mix of scripted and off-script improv to the silliness here.

There are quite a few fistfights and gunfights which Grabinski handles with aplomb. If anything they stand out from the rest of the film because they are so frenetic and fast paced and...dare I say...Wick-ian in their energy and execution. I wasn't expecting to see either Vaughn or Marsden in such finely choreographed melees but they acquit themselves admirably. Grabinski does, however, frequently use slow-mos (more outside of fight sequences than within) and they're jarring...it's a very '80's coke-fuelled cinema technique and it doesn't quite feel the same without the grittiness of film (it doesn't work so well on digital).

The needledrops in M&N&N&A are, frankly, bonkers. A real gonzo array of songs that are intentionally antithetical to the scenes they are playing in, such as the strippers dancing to "Ants Marching" by Dave Matthews Band (nothing less sexy), Steve Winwood's "Valerie" being the ironically emotional touchpoint of the film, and a somehow genuinely emotional climax set to "Don't Look Back in Anger" by Oasis.

Given some of the tertiary players in this, it's evident the film was shot in Canada (Shitt's Creek alum Emily Hampshire has a nice guest spot, while Letterkenny's Dylan Playfair is at the center of maybe the funniest sequence of the film). My guess was Winnipeg (I was right). It doesn't really make a difference, interiors are more important than exteriors here.

I was just commenting on how Project Hail Mary is a surprise film from the Lord & Miller duo, especially when Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice feels much more in their wheelhouse ala the Jump Street films. Maybe Lord & Miller are leveling up to our next great blockbuster filmmakers, and Grabinski is poised to step into their mid-level comedy action shoes? I'll be watching this one again...while nothing groundbreaking, it's tremendous fun.

Another I'm eagerly anticipating Toasty's response to.

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I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on my adventure into Quebec producer Rock Demers' "Tales for all" series.  While there's still over a half a dozen that Demers had a direct hand in, my only access to them, the Canadian streaming service Crave, only has one more in the series on tap, and two remakes.  I'll be glad to move on to another viewing project (heading back to Dario Argento's filmography most likely) but I'll also miss these tremendously weird and often thrillingly inept product. (As a side note, Almost every "Tales for all" features the title card for Demers' "La Fete" production company, and it's only now that I notice the animated sequence, which features a string of characters walking along a stark green background into a carnival tent with rollicking carney music zinging and zipping and hooting and honking in the background...well, the characters are all representative of past "Tales for all" films! Who knew?)

Lucky entry #13 in "Tales for all" is The Clean Machine, or, in Quebec, Tirelire, combines & Cie  (which translates to "Piggy banks, schemes & Co."). It finds young Ben/Benoit learning about the harsh realities of capitalism as he witnesses a neighbouring family having their belongings reposessed. Benoit, panicked about his single dad's ability to find work as a translator, decides to start his own business doing what he loves most...cleaning. His best friend Charles joins him in the endeavour, stationed out of someone's storage garage, but they need capital to get supplies.  Benoit sells his posessions for around $100, while Charles hawks his mother's pearls to a pawn shop and takes a loan from local toughie Chloe. 

Benoit's object d'amour Marie, an aspiring director and videographer, agrees to make them a commercial which she can air on the local cable access channel (her dad runs it) if she's taken on as an equal partner, and is able to shoot a documentary on the business.

The commercial works, and business is booming, but it's also honing in on Chloe and her lads' side hustle mowing lawns, so they start enacting some sabotage. At the same time Charles dodges Chloe, unable to yet pay back the loan, and he's finding his deal with the pawn shop owner for his mother's pearls getting worse all the time. Meanwhile, Benoit tries wooing Marie, but she discovers someone's been pinching from the bank account and a rift forms between the best friends.  It's all kind of downhill from there in a loose comedic fashion, but also primed for teaching life lessons to its young viewers.

In most instances I've noted what kind of film a "Tales for all" entry is emulating, and in this case, surprisingly it's an 80's highschool teen romcom (I was going to say sex comedy, sans sex, but it's not really that. But there is an extended sequence where Chloe and Marie catch Benoit in his underwear, and it plays so different them being so young versus were this a teen comedy where hot 20-somethings are acting as teenagers). This is Can't Buy Me Love or a half dozen other "I need money" teen comedies of eras past, but with 12 year olds.... 

...And that the deal breaker here. The stakes are so low when the kids are so young. You can't really get wild with the comedy (the kid performers here are fine, but they don't have exceptional comedic chops), the romance has no weight (because young, pre-pubescent romance doesn't have the same emotional investment), and the threat of Chloe and her two dumb galoots are barely a threat at all.  

I do have to say that, unlike many of the previous "Tales for all" (especially the last two), there is some real drama here. The disollution of friendships, the fear of getting found out to be a liar, the inflation and deflation of one's ego, they are all I'm sure pretty powerful things for younger viewers. And that's my problem with The Clean Machine.  It, unlike other "Tales for all", really doesn't feel "for all". This is not a film meant for the whole family, it's not really something anyone but a younger viewer is going to get much out of. Not to mention grating soundrack of jaunty clarinets and doofy sound effects set my teeth on edge.

Three Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Old Woman with the Knife

2025, Kyu-dong Min (Whispering Corridors 2: Memento Mori) -- download

Also called Pagwa in Korean, which is a reference to bruised, and usually discarded, fruit. That is a theme in the movie, and was the name of the original novel from which the movie is adapted. So, are American English translations of Korean movies now going to be named so plainly? Next up, Guy with a Gun Kills People and its sequel, Guy with Many Guns Storms Tower.

That said, there is a phenomena in Manga / Manhwa (Korean manga) where the titles are ludicrously long and descriptive. Example, translated into English, "My Little Sister Stole My Fiancé: The Strongest Dragon Favors Me and Plans to Take Over the Kingdom?" and its very minorly attributed to translation issues; the actual original title is just as long-ass.

Cough. I watch so many of these "revenge movies" I wonder who my brain desires to take revenge upon?

The world baby, the entire world.

But to be fair, this is more an Aging Assassin movie than it is a revenge flick. Except, like the latest in the Liam Neeson "Aging ____" movies, this character is properly old, likely in her late 60s to mid-70s. Sure, that's only a decade away for me, but in the world of hand to hand combat, I am sure anything over 40 is downright ancient. Of note, the actress playing said Old Woman is 62; take that as you will.

The movie begins in the past, a young woman has escaped.... something. She is beaten and bloodied and struggles to walk bare-footed through the snow when a young couple chance upon her and bring her to their run-down little diner. The young woman begins to work the diner which is frequented by American soldiers, and on one night, a soldier attempts to assault her. She kills him with a hat pin (knitting needle? chop stick shaped cooking implement?). The husband discovers them and the young woman is upset she has ruined her situation, until Ji-wo explains the diner is a cover for an assassination organization that deals with "vermin" -- they only kill horrible people that deserve to be killed. The young woman, whom he named "Nails" is trained and brought into the organization.

Strangely enough she is called Hornclaw by credits and by herself, but her original Korean name in the novel was Jogak, which means a fragment of a whole, like a scrap of cloth left over from a greater finished fabric piece.

Now older, we are given the "example" of a kill -- a crowded subway car, a middle-aged man drunkenly verbally accosts a young woman, and everyone just pretends its not happening, literally shying away from the situation. When the train comes to a halt, Hornclaw (Lee Hye-young, Can You Hear My Heart?) slides out a hairpin and ... a very light poke as the train jostles and the crowd at the door rocks. She leaves, he falls down dead. Vermin disposed of.

As a commuter, I get that little scene as a fantasy -- horrible people should be dealt with. As a pedestrian I visualize terrible drivers getting their come-uppance, as they ignore cross-walks, cut people off and never-endingly lean onto their horns. Maybe I don't desire a agency to get rid of them, but... well, maybe sometimes.

And it turns out he was a case. Someone knew this man's reputation and wanted him gone. Back at the agency, a woman at the door wails and cries begging them to take on her case, which the current leader (not Hornclaw) denies. The wailing woman's case is not lucrative enough and Hornclaw argues it, claiming they have moved away from their original mandate. He just argues that she has become old and soft. That hits home.

Hornclaw rescues an old injured dog, takes him to an all night veterinarian where the tech explains that because he is a stray and old, no one will take him in, so he will be euthanized right now, if Hornclaw doesn't give him a home. She sees a mirror of her own life -- is she no longer useful, is she just going to be put down? She takes the dog home.

Not long after, after a botched job, where she was required to put down one of her own "co-workers", Hornclaw staggers into the vet's place asking for help. He stitches her up and promises to stay quiet, despite the odd situation. That puts her at odds with her agency and their new recruit, an arrogant young man named Bullfight (Kim Sung-cheol, Hellbound) is sent to deal with her, and the vet & his family. Hornclaw does not take kindly to that.

Given my recent penchant to not properly recap, I will just say that the movie climaxes with Hornclaw vs Bullfight, and a few reveals: her agency has been cherry picking jobs to work alongside a local crime organization, which means its own leader has to go, and it turns out that Bullfight was the subject of this "revenge movie", not Hornclaw herself, as she had eliminated his father many years before, BUT that's not what the revenge was for, it was because she left the kid behind, left him to deal with his father's killing and grow to a broken man all on his own. 

There was a lot going on in the movie, which I only realized as I thought back on it for the writing. The plots and sub-plots, the layers of story and character make it more fascinating in hindsight than in viewing. Sure, it is well done, and unlike many of these "assassins with regrets" flicks, the melodrama of the non-killing acts is not grating and/or boring, but in watching, piece by piece, nothing really stands out stylistically. Did it deal effectively with the conflict between aging and usefulness? I am not convinced, as despite relying upon the idea that in Korea, the old are considered worthy of only being cast away (meanwhile, we in North America make them heads of the country or corporations....) Hornclaw was never lacking in capability. Her physical challenges put aside, she was keen and aware, and even made use of the idea that aging Korean women become invisible to society, allowing her to disappear into crowds with ease. Her emerging "softness" was not a weakness, just a memory of what the agency had originally stood for, to protect the little people from evil.

3 Short Paragraphs (Probably Not): Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

2026, Gore Verbinski (The Lone Ranger) -- download

A little under a decade ago, I heard of a label / genre of fiction called "the new weird". Its a term that's more than a little challenging to qualify but for me it meant speculative fiction set in current times, but with more than a little bit of oddness to it. Think John Dies at the End or Dirk Gently's Hollistic Detective Agency. Except, I think the actual genre probably takes itself much too seriously, compared to these two examples.

Anyhoo, this movie fits perfectly into the square peg-hole, of this genre, in my brain. At it's core, its a time-travel movie, hinting at loops, and its a Fear of AI movie. Its more than a little weird and even more so difficult to qualify. But I will take a stab at it, as I have my ideas. And if Everything Everywhere All at Once wants to join this one as the beginning of their own sub-sub-genre, I will happily watch them all.

OK, we are in one of those diners from movies set in Los Angeles, probably an all-nighter, has been around since the 50s or 60s and serves comfort food, called Norms. Then a trash-bag cyberpunk dude (Sam Rockwell, Moon) appears out of nowhere screaming about the future and the end of the world and a mission he is on, this being his 117th attempt. This is Sam Rockwell being peak Sam Rockwell, screaming and ranting and dancing about maniacally. Basically, the future has gone to shit, and he can find the right combination of volunteers, from this group of diners, they can change the future. Somehow. He never really explains how, he just starts yelling at people. This person sucks, that person has been useless, he's not sure about that one, but he needs volunteers to take another stab at saving the future.

Susan (Juno Temple, The Brass Teapot) volunteers. Susan, who we learn from a very very weird (even weirder than Sam Rockwell) flashback, has just lost her son in a school shooting. One where a company offers to clone her son, as a replacement. And other parents at that school have had the procedure done before. That means school shootings are that commonplace (at THAT school, even) that there is a process. We'll ignore the heavy-handed commentary for now, as we are just supposed to accept the weird shit on the screen.

Speaking of weird shit, the next flashback involves Mark (Michael Peña, Ant-Man) and Janet (Zazie Beets, Deadpool 2), school teachers who had to flee a zombie mob of students after Mark touched a student's phone. There was a weird hypnotic symbol on the screen and touching it activated the students. On the way out, they snag some plastic rayguns that can temporarily zap the students. And then they came to Norms.

And then Sam Rockwell reluctantly invites Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson, Ponies) into the compact, whom he has before dismissed because of the grimy princess dress and haggard look. This is when he explains the mission -- kind of. There is a kid inventing an AI in his bedroom, in a nearby neighbourhood. With a hand-drawn annotated map of the local area, he explains that getting from Norms to the kid's house will be quite a challenge. The closest he has ever achieved prior is next door. Then all the shit hits the fan and he has to reset for another attempt. He never really goes into what actually happens but you can understand why -- he has been through all this multiple times and needs to condense his actions. If this was a loopty loo movie, this would be the mid-point where the main character over-explains what is going to an NPC.

The journey from A to B, and the hand-drawn map now that you (I) mention it, is very very video game coded. The path is on rails, as Sam Rockwell knows from previous iterations which paths are safe and which paths are likely to get them gunned down by cops. To illustrate, he sacrifices one of the nonchalantly. But they make it. 

I am not going into all the weird shit, recap style, that they run into, but it gets weirder and weirder, escaping further and further from reality, until they arrive at the kid's house. He has fake parents and "lives" in a giant room at the end of a tunnel, on a hill of network cables, pecking at keyboard while staring into a screen/wall of techno-mumbo-jumbo centre on the symbol that Mark and Janet saw on the kid's phones. Oh, and Susan identifies the kid as a clone, just like her son. Confluence!! Sam Rockwell's mission is to plug a USB key into a keyboard port and stop the kid from completing the sentient AI that destroys the future. Except, it doesn't go as planned.

Until it does. Like all good adventure video games, the boss battle has to be dramatic and overwrought. Together Susan and Sam Rockwell stop the AI, save the day and in the bright sun of the next morning, everything is... perfect. They even got a pug.

And if you didn't consider the above spoilery, all the speculation upcoming definitely is.

Except that's not the end. The movie kicks off attempt 118 as the pug showing signifies that things are not fixed. But how does it? The idea is that AI is alive & well and is giving the main characters what they want, except ... how? The only way for the AI to be effecting change upon reality is if... this is all a simulation. Nothing is real. There aren't time loops, there are just iterations of a simulation, pretty much a video game, that Sam Rockwell's character, and probably a handful of others, are going through. You die, hit reload and start over again. The fact that Sam Rockwell cautions the other characters to not think too hard on random things as that's the path to Weird Shit Happening, and then they end up fighting a kaiju kitty cat that actually eats some of them is more than just Weird Shit Happening for no reason. But the movie leaves it there, leaving you to fill in your own blanks. You can just accept the ending as Weird Shit Happening and enjoy the carnival ride you were just on, or you can do what I always do -- build out the story in my head.

So, in the future little Sam Rockwell escapes from his mother's bunker and finds a VR goggle with the AI's symbol. The rest of society has collapsed and the world has pretty much ended with people having given up their IRL world for the "perfect" world of the AI. Except who maintains the power grid? Who feeds all these goggled humans? Does the AI care? What is the purpose of having the IRL world fall apart, all its people to slowly die off? Anywayz, no matter, Little Sam Rockwell is about to put on the goggles and escape when a drone appears and blows up his mother's bunker, her inside. THAT is the impetus for Sam Rockwell to grow to adulthood, find other "survivors" and put together a time machine, so he can go back and stop this from all happening.

Except, he didn't. He put on the goggles and all of this is just the latest iteration of the world that Sam Rockwell wants -- where he is a hero trying to save the world. A bit inception but, its there for us to ponder on. It doesn't fully explain how his mother / Ingrid (oh yeah, I didn't mention that, did I?) is part of all this. Are they all in this simulation, a Massively Multiplayer Online Game? I think so, I think the AI has utterly destroyed the world, has no plan but to have fun with the remaining humans until it is all alone with its automated power grid and... itself.

The idea of this movie is a lot of fun. The execution is almost all the way there. I think of how beat-perfect Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is, with its own Weird Shit Happening, providing us the perfect rendition of a carnival ride come to life. This movie wanted to be the latest EEAaO but it only partially succeeds there. There is no real tangible heart to this movie, even if you buy into the Ingrid + Sam Rockwell relationship. The visuals are fun, the situations are fun but ... well, its not as perfect as I wanted it to be. Maybe it needed a few more iterations before release.

Kent's view -- we agree but I think I liked it a bit more than he did.

KWIF: Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's week in film. Busy weekend plus work stress equals late reviews. 

This Week:
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026, d. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett - in theatre)
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (aka "Toki o Kakeru Shōjo" - 1983, d. Nobuhiko Ōbayashi - blu-ray)
Reach for the Sky (aka "La championne","Tales for all #12" - 1991, d. Elisabeta Bostan - Crave)

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[Caution, spoilers for the first Ready or Not]

When we last saw Grace (Samara Weaving), she had just exited the mansion of the family of the man she just married, her wedding dress soaked in his blood, and the house on fire behind her. She sits down and has a cigarette as the first responders rush the scene. This sequel to Ready or Not pick up from that moment, with Grace being rushed to the hospital and passing out. When she awakens, she is immediately interrogated by a police detective, given that there were a few bodies found in the house and she was covered in blood (and perhaps some suspicion of arson).  Also, her emergency contact is her estranged sister, Hope (Kathryn Newton, Quantumania) who arrives only to continue their bitter relationship.

Meanwhile, some shenanigans with the devil-worshipping rich is happening in the background. It turns out that the deaths of the family Grace married into means that the head seat of this world-controlling cabal is now open.  The calls are made, the players are introduced, and everyone, except Grace, understands that the game is on. She will understand soon enough.

Grace (along with Hope) is kidnapped and coerced into yet another game of hide and seek at a new estate, to be hunted by the rich fucks who she's not even married into this time (at least, not yet).

Ready or Not 2 (why it's not just called Ready or Not, Here I Come without the "2" in between I really just don't understand) is not that vastly different from the first movie in terms of the events in play. Grace has just come through a traumatic experience and now is thrust right into another one. She hasn't had time to process and Weaving is really good at showing that Grace is a shaky mess. She may have found some internal strength in the first go-around, but she's not a total badass this time around, especially when she's handcuffed to her younger sister and they argue more than cooperate.

Hunting them are five different families (it was six, but one of them, played by Kevin Durand, was too eager and coked-up and tried to start the game before it was officially started, and "Mr. LeBail" blew him up but good). By the rules only one member of the family can hunt at a time, but should that member parish in the process, the next family member can step in. If any one of the seekers kills another seeker, Mr. LeBail would be displeased and their whole family lineage would be eradicated. Each of the families has to hunt Grace with a weapon of the era in which their ancestor first made the pact with Mr. LeBail.  All of this leads to some enjoyable variations in hunting styles and quirks in the game to differentiate it from the previous film. The hunters include Sarah Michelle Gellar (Cruel Intentions), Shawn Hatosay (The Pitt), Nestor Carbonell (The Tick), Olivia Cheng (Entertainment Tonight Canada) and more Canadian supporting players (gotta get that tax credit!), plus Elijah Wood as the lawyer and a cameo from David Cronenberg.

Given the stakes at play, the hunters each have the same agenda, but their appetites for the hunt all vary, and so there's more than just "I'm going to kill you" attitudes on the field. 

Much like the first film, this falls into the "horror, not horror" category. It's not really scary or intense, although there's one scene in which a character is beaten so savagely by another character (who clearly is coded a sociopathic misogynist) that it's pretty uncomfortable where the rest of the film is pretty light on its feet. It is meant to introduce stakes, and that this character, if to obtain the high seat, would mean something pretty dire for the world, so there is a point to it...but it's not a fine point, and it's not used tactfully. That savage beating is tempered by being intercut with the most whimsical fight set to Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart, so you take the good, you take the bad....

Grace and Hope's strained relationship creates an additional conflict dynamic in a film whose premise is all conflict anyway, so it adds another rung on the ladder for the hero to climb. Conceptually the estrangement between them is not a bad idea, however, when the characters get into the weeds of their conflict, it's...too familiar. In fact I'm pretty sure the issues between them, and even the words they say, were almost verbatim to those between Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega in Scream 6... directed by the same writer/directors of this film and co-written by Guy Busick, the same co-writer of this film. Like, really? Thought we wouldn't notice?

Anyway, it's absurd, it's violent, and there's quite a bit of fun to be had, but the one thing RON2HIC lacks is the surprises that the first one had, so in that regards, there's some diminishing returns. I'm not sure that this franchise has further legs beyond this one (when the stakes are the fate of the world, there's almost nowhere else to go, unless it's ... I dunno... Ready or Not in Space or franchise crossover like Ready or Not vs Predator, or Ready or Not Go(es) to Hell...[ok, I think I just sold myself on three viable sequels.]) But, of course, I love "the most dangerous game" stories, so this still worked for me.

---

In our ongoing (if now infrequent) feature "Toast and Kent Go Loopty-Loo", we covered the 2006 anime feature The Girl Who Leapt Through Time through the lens of it being a time-loop movie. I think we made a fairly good case that it fit the bill, even if does not follow suit with the usual time loop cliches.

While we worked on that Loopty-Loo I learned in my (very limited) research on the film that it was effectively a sequel to the original prose story (originally serialized in 1967), one that it's been adapted many, many times into film, television, manga and even a stage play.  House director Nobuhiko Ōbayashi 1983 adaptation is my first encounter with a more straight adaptation of this very popular story.

But it is clearly not a time loop, far less so than the anime.

Teen Kazuko Yoshiyama (pop idol Tomoyo Harada, in her debut role) daydreams of her ideal boyfriend, while her small-bladdered friend Goro Horikawa (seriously, he mentions needing to pee a lot) and her tall, quiet, flower-loving friend Fukamachi Kazuo unknowingly become part of a her love triangle.  Nobody, including Yoshiyama herself, seems to understand the complicated feelings she has for both these boys beyond the friendships that she's known since childhood. 

At the end of a school day (on a Saturday?) the trio are cleaning up the science lab (which apparently has had mysterious instances over the past few days) when Yoshiyama enters the chemicals storage room only to find a flask has shattered on the ground and the resulting spill is smoking. She thinks someone was in the locked room, but no one is there. She passes out as a result of the fumes.

When she awakes in the nurse's office she relays what had happened, only nobody saw any broken glass or sign of spill. She said she smelled lavendar.  She walks home with her two boys, Goro's house first along the way, and then Kazuo's house where he lives with his grandparents where she is invited for tea. She fixates on the greenhouse, where she smells lavender, and inside she becomes a bit woozy and decides to skip tea and go home.

And then strange things begin to happen. Her movements through life start happening in a confusing pattern. In math class she doesn't understand the work, as if she's missed a lesson (and Goro sleeps through class) and in the evening there's an earthquake, and the place next to Goro's house catches fire. The next day, there's an impossible time on her digital alarm clock, she's late to school. She rushes and catches up with a sluggish Goro only to see the clay tiles of a roof come sliding down about to crush him. She rushes to save him, only to awaken to what she thinks was a dream.

And then she relives those two days again, aware that she's experiencing something unique and also becoming more aware of her feelings for Kazuo (less aware of her feelings for Goro)...only to learn that Kazuo is a time traveler from the future with telepathic powers of mind control, implanting false thoughts, feelings and memories in the people around him. Nothing problematic there (at least his objective is to learn about the plants of the past for there are so few in his dystopian future, and not to romance Yoshiyama...and in fact seems pretty distant from actually loving her back).

I guess you could call those two-ish days a "loop", but in the context of the film it's really time travel, as she ultimately winds up traveling through her own lifespan, witnessing events from her life from outside (but she can't stay long as two versions of herself cannot occupy the same time).

The surface of this rendition of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a melancholy journey exploring youthful yearnings for love, and how truly little we understand when we're that age. The film ends with Yoshiyama, now an adult scientist, focused solely on career and not at all on love. When Kazuo left and erased her memories, he fundamentally broke something inside her. 

There's an interesting conceptual idea here, that Kazuo interfered with the love that was supposed to bloom between Kazuko and Goro, and because of his interference it never happened. There's no "butterfly effect" to this in the film, but it's clearly what happened. And it doesn't need to have a sci-fi/fantasy trigger, it could be a normal situation where an outsider steps into a blossoming relationship and destroys the moment or moments where that relationship could have happened.

The time travel aspect of this film is fantasy nonsense, there's no true explanation for it, but it serves a purpose in exploring this moment in time in a play on the coming-of-age story. The fact that Kazuo has mental powers (most people from the future have some paranormal abilities, he explains) is pure real deus ex machina, but not far from usual for deus ex machinas to be employed in Japanese storytelling (at least from my limited exposure).

Director Ōbayashi had a fairly prolific career, but the only prior work of his I've seen is his most infamous work, House. It's a fever dream with an atomic bomb/generational trauma metaphor that I totally didn't jibe with, but perhaps need to revisit. Ōbayashi made his reputation on wild stylization and outre visual effect, which are on display here, though mostly reserved for the third act. Some of his techniques harken to the silent film era, others employing early blue screen technology. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time feels more akin to something Guy Madden would make, rather than Kurosawa (whom he would work with on documenting the making of Dreams). But it's a testament to the director's interests that the film truly focuses on the emotional journey of Kazuko Yoshiyama, placing less emphasis on the strange events affecting her life. 

While not monumentally mindblowing, this adaptation of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time still feels like a unique an important artifact both in the director's repertoire and of Japanese pop culture. (Also, the theme song is a banger, but it's not yacht rock despite that Doobie Bounce).

---

A dozen films into the "Tales for all" series of Quebec-produced films for older kids/young adults, and the pattern, if there is one, is that each film plays in a different genre or story trope sandbox. In some respects it feels like the "Tales for all" films are meant to be someone's first, and perhaps only exposure to the filmic medium. 

In this case Reach for the Sky ("La championne", or "The Champion" in French) is the "Tales for all" version of a young adult sports competition movie... I'm specifically thinking the likes of The Karate Kid here. The only thing is the typical sports drama is full of tension, rivalries, and intense hormone-fuelled emotions of the youth.  But Reach for the Sky features a surprising dearth of drama.

A co-production with Romania and shot in Romania with a largely local cast (this film doesn't have the same problem so many other "Tales for all" do, which is cast members all from different regions speaking different languages and thus all voice performances, regardless of which language track you choose, are dubbed) it postulates itself in its opening moments as a peek inside the famous Deva training facility in Transylvania which produced many gymnastics champions, like Nadia Comăneci.

Young Corina (Izabela Moldovan), at 10 years old, has a deep desire to be a champion in gymnastics. She implores her local coach Mircea (Mircea Diaconu, who would go on to be a pretty big time politician) to take her to the next level, to do tryouts for Deva. Despite her father's objection, she goes. She's told she's too old, and not strong enough. She fails the audition. She's crushed. Mircea, though, seems to have a stubborn pride and commits to training her with ferocity, and when it comes time to reapply, she's not only accepted but Mircea is as well, as an assistant coach to former champion Lili Oprescu (Carmen Galin).  

Lili's approach to training is firm but full of tenderness, and the kids absolutely love her. When coach Lili accepts a new job to coach the Lichtenstein youth, Mircea takes over, and he is so the opposite:  harsh, brutal, uncompromising, full of toxic rage. He flicks the children in the head, calls them idiots, and pushes their young bodies to extremes. It is, put bluntly, abuse...but the film tries to reframe it as the champion's way, what's needed to push these kids to the next level, to international-level competitors. 

In a traditional North American-styled film, Mircea would be the villain, but he is not. He's clearly not a good guy when training these kids, but the film never specifically admonishes him for it. 

In a traditional North American-styled film, we would see Corina having a nemesis, someone she is either training with who is her rival, a mean kid who torments her...or on the international level some stuck up asshole American kid who denegrates her country and her people...something to really fan the flames...but Corina has no rival at all here, save for her own internal struggle with willpower in the face of severe abuse. 

In a traditional North American-styled film, Coach Lili leaving would be another rivalry, Coach vs. Coach, and when the third act comes to the big international competition, there is the framing that Lili is, for some reason, the bad guy, but otherwise the script never gives us a reason to dislike her (we have far more to dislike about Mircea).

In a traditional North American-styled film, it would ask if our young hero could conquer their base desires and become their respective sporting champion through training, self-control, and superhuman determination? And this film does indeed ask that, but with virtually no drama or stakes other than Corina's desire to be a winner.

Not to spoil it, but she does win, despite the film, at every turn, showing us she just doesn't have the chops. At one point she quits and runs away, tired of Mircea's abuse (go girl, get out). But like many an abuse victim, she returns to her abuser, too worried about what life would be like away from him.  So the fact that she comes up with the perfect routines when it really counts is nice an all, but even the framing of it, the editing and the shot structure, it doesn't capture the drama. At no point are we really given scores to track or any nail biting tension of "hey, this is her weakest event and she needs to do X to pull out the win, can she do it"?  

It's not entirely colourless, as the peek into the severity of Romanian gymnastics training present here is, if anything, truth (or, perhaps even less severe than reality, but far from sugar-coated), so there is a bit of flare there, but otherwise it's a pretty drab picture where the stakes (beyond the unintentional concern for the health and wellbeing of these younglings) are quite low. 

Of all the "Tales for all" I think this one is most ripe for a remake/reimagining, especially given how much has been revealed about Deva since.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): War Machine

2026, Patrick Hughes (The Man from Toronto) -- Netflix

I can hear the blurb now, "Predator but with a big ass robot instead of an alien. But its also an alien."

We begin with a flashback.... or an establishing scene in the past? Whatever the filmic term is, its a Gulf War and Our Hero (Alan Ritchson, Reacher) is a military engineer pulling up to a convoy. His brother has fucked up his Humvee again requiring some quick repairs and brother to brother manly banter. They both talk about trying out for the Marines Army Rangers. And then they are ambushed. Everyone is killed except Our Hero and his barely alive brother, who he tosses onto his shoulders, and begins to walk.

Years later, he wakes up from the dream, of above, on a bus to RASP, the Ranger try-outs. Of course, he does really well, but for the not-sleeping and human interaction components. Because of his refusal to show leadership, the regiment leaders (toss away cameos from Esai Morales, Titans, and Dennis Quaid, Reagan; the latter channeling his very MAGA self) try to drum him out, but he refuses and they angrily assign him Team Leader to the final test -- a play-mission recovering a downed pilot in enemy territory. Meanwhile, in the background, on TV screens, there is news of a large asteroid passing near the Earth. In these movies, we know what that will entail.

Our Hero is 81. Its a cute gimmick in that all the characters have been assigned only numbers during training. No names allowed. Which is fine, because we wouldn't remember most of the names and the numbers are clearly displayed on their uniforms. Of course 81 doesn't bond well with his teammates but at least one of them recognizes his competence. Things go well until they find a weird scifi pile of junk in a riverbed. While 81 scouts out the surrounding area, some of the others prepare to blow that shit up, as per mission parameters. That is when 81 discovers the actual mission objective, the downed plane. Whatever that is in the river, its not what they came here for. And setting off explosives doesn't destroy it, it just makes it mad wakes it up (probably makes it mad, too). It should also be noted that because this was a training mission, they do not have real weapons.

And then begins the Predator style kill-off of each of the trainees. Of course, a bunch are kill in the initial sortie, so we can get a good look at the CGI robot monster machine, sort of a big chicken-walker without head, but with big, broad shoulders, and glowing red, which is never a good colour. The remaining soldiers are going to escape to the base of operations of their training mission opponents. There is a neat establishing scene where 81 puts together the news shots & stories with the big hole seen in a distant mountain -- this thing came down from space. 

The tension of this movie comes in knowing that the point of it is to actually kill off some, if not all, of the trainees. You get to know them, disliking some, bonding with others. But at any point, they can get blown up or shot. And the movie doesn't shirk from toying with you. Once they reach the training base, which has already been destroyed by the robot during its initial landing, they get some actual weapons -- they don't really help much. It takes some Arnie-covered-in-mud energy to take the thing down.

For what it was, this was a pretty effective movie. Ritchson is coded to be a depiction of military power these days, but also is capable of reflecting the emotional energy that is required of this character. And good action requires pacing, tension and exciting effects. I always feel like I have to apologize to the That Guy in my head that nothing about the movie broke new ground -- we've got mashups of a few other movies going on here -- but honestly, as long as they do the mechanical components of this genre well enough, I am invested. And entertained. And distracted from my own head for the briefest of moments.

Snarky aside. Red Glowing Lights say "Bad Guy" to us, while Blue Glowing Lights say "Good Guy" or at least calm & peaceful. What if you mashed up the Pink Glowing Lights from horror movies of a few years ago with this mechanical light emittance? What cinematic mind's eye would you unlock? Fuck AI Gone Evil movies, how about a Robot Possessed by Cosmic Horror?

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Shelter

2026, Ric Roman Waugh (Kandahar) -- download

Jason Statham is a few months older than me. That puts him square in my non-existent "Aging Men with Gun" category. And yet he still does his own stunts. Keanu is a few years older than us, and he was just under 50 when he did John Wick and by the second movie, part of the style is showing he is affected by the constant one battle after another. But Statham is still a machine, unphased by time but for a few gray hairs in a full beard. Fictionally, that is, as I imagine there were probably a few evenings of ice-ing the glutes after doing his own stunts. Is ice-ing the glutes a thing? I don't know, as I don't do my own stunts.

I just caught and corrected a typo -- "aging men with fun". I am sure I could find enough movies about men past their mid-life crises trying to recapture some of the fun of youth, to create a tag.

OK, this movie is a trope. A lone man (Jason Statham, Killer Elite) lives alone, but for an unnamed dog, on a remote island off the coast of Scotland. He has supplies delivered regularly and the young girl who rows ashore with a crate is instructed never to interact with him. That doesn't stop her from wanting to give him a gift. During one trip, a storm happens upon them quickly and the boat, with her uncle on board, is sunk leaving her barely alive. But the Lone Hero has rescued her and nursing her back to health. Insert tension between curious, traumatized girl and gruff loner, interrupted on occasion by cute dog. But, she is not healing well.

This forces him to leave the island and sneak into town to get supplies, where he is caught on camera. That triggers alarm bells on the British MI6 surveillance system. MI6 is currently going through an upheaval because of said surveillance spying on citizens and allies alike, with head Manafort (Bill Nighy, & Sons) asked to step down as a sacrificial lamb, while secretly asked by the PM to just continue what he was doing. Said surveillance system targets our Lone Hero, now identified as Mason, but mis-identifies him as a Turkish terrorist and a hit squad is sent to the island to kill him.

They are easily and calmly dispatched with young Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Hamnet) horrified by the violence she sees. Mason's isolation is at an end, but he is now focused on getting Jessie somewhere safe. In her brief stay she awoke something in him, something he shut down. Jessie sees a protective father figure and is definitely traumatized by all the death she only very recently has been introduced to.

So, as these tropes go, he has to get from point A (danger) to point B (London; safety, extrication from the country for Jessie) while eluding other agents sent to intercept him. The trouble is that Manafort is sending a Bourne/Black Briar coded agent after him, secretly, while the new head of MI6 is also sending her team after Mason, all the while trying to figure out why the system mis-identified Mason as a Turkish terrorist. These are all typical cat & mouse, chase mechanics, a bit of espionage and hacking tossed in for fun; something right down my alley, and it has a minimal touch which I like.

Except the ending. Something in the Purple Suit playbook says these movies always have to have nightclub scenes now. And London is a required locale when a movie is set in the UK, so Mason has to travel from rural Scotland to London. Sure, geography in the UK is not as "wow, that's so far away" as here in North America, but they dispensed with all the grim, grey nature of Scotland that the first two acts of the movie identified with. And he was able to get all the way from A to B without being seen on the surveillance system that started all of this. That kind of ruined it all for me. And aforementioned nightclub was just a glitterbomb in my Outer Hebrides fascination.  The movie could have easily gone to Glasgow or Edinburgh for its climax, but I guess they needed those colourful, bright helicopter shots to remind us this was a UK espionage thriller.

Part of me watching this oft-used and oft-watched trope had me thinking of how I could transpose it from espionage to fantasy, creating a gruff aging ex-adventurer who hides out in a mountain cabin, having abandoned a world of death behind him, while the royal family, and the mages they make use of, desperately tries to find him, and silence him for the secrets he holds.

Another Unwritten Novel for the notebooks....

P.S. OMG that is a terrible poster, and while not the primary one used, it was just so "AI Slop" reminiscent, I just had to share it.

10 for 10: what be on teevee?

[I said I wasn't going to do these anymore...like 2 years ago...but it's back!
10 for 10... that's 10 movies (or TV shows) which we give ourselves 10 minutes apiece to write about.  Part of our problem is we don't often have the spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie (or TV show) we watch.  How about a 10-minute non-review full of half-remembered scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable? ]

In This Edition:

1. Shoresy - Season 5 (2025, Crave, 6/6 episodes watched)
2. Agatha Christie's Seven Dials - Season 1 (2026, Netflix, 3/3 episodes watched)
3. Wonder Man - Season 1? (2026, Disney+, 8/8 episodes watched)
4. The Muppet Show - pilot (2026, Disney+, 1/1 episodes watched)
5. How To Get To Heaven From Belfast - Season 1 (2026, Netflix, 8/8 episodes watched)
6. Hijack - Season 2 (2026, AppleTV, 8/8 episodes watched)
7. Laid - Season 1 (2024, W Network/Peacock, 8/8 episodes watched)
8. The Burbs - Season 1? (2026, W Network/Peacock, 7/8 episodes watched)
9. Look Around You - Seasons 1-2 (2002-2005, Tubi, most episodes watched)
10. Smack the Pony - Seasons 1-3 (1999-2003, Tubi, a handful of random episodes watched)

...and...go!

---
Season  2 | 4

All the talk in 2026 about hockey-based TV shows has been about Heated Rivalry, which comes from former Shoresy writer/director Jacob Tierney. The second most talked about hockey-based TV show of the year has been, well, the Olympics, I guess, where the Americans squeaked out wins against the Canadians on both the men's and women's ice (it wouldn't be so upsetting if America was in a better space right now). Shoresy has had four good years of being the pre-eminent hockey-based TV show, so they've had a good run. This season is, like the other seasons, full of laughs and slow-motion shots of women in thongs walking away from the camera. As ever the dichotomy of a Jared Keeso project of both being progressive and salacious is present.

Shoresy is Keeso's love letter to hockey, a sport he clearly, dearly loves (the man played Don Cherry in a TV biopic mini-series and obviously relished it), and so the writer-star uses it as his platform to examine his concerns or frustrations or hopes and dreams for the sport, by way of a "whale-shit hockey league" in Sudbury, Ontario.

This season, Keeso turns his, and Shoresy's focus to the criticisms facing North American hockey players being too soft, that the Europeans, once known for being real delicate, finesse players, are now the biggest and toughest on the ice. The local league having folded, and the Blueberry Bulldogs no longer having a home, Shoresy, with inspiration from none other than Wayne Gretzky (making a cameo...or is it a literal Cameo), decides to stage an exhibition game of tough North American SOBs against the reigning Euro team.

I'm not sure I agree with the violence-as-sport aspect of the game (the one thing about the Olympics is how tamped down the fighting gets) so this idealizing of it kind of shifts me uneasy, but then, that's the point Keeso is trying to make, that we've gotten soft on the ice, I guess. Elbows up?

[11:27]

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Lady Eileen "Bundle" Brent comes from affluence, but that affluence has waned since her father's untimely death. Her mother has to rent out the manor for parties and events in order to keep up the lifestyle. But in the morning, following the latest soiree, Bundle's beau turns up dead in his bedroom, and things are more than suspicious. Like, what's with all the clocks?

Anyway, turns out Bundle is a tenacious young lady, and also quite astute, and she starts poking around the shadowy world of the elites, which leads her to a secret meeting place upstairs from a private club where a secret society gathers and plots and machinates.  Bundle suspects that the secret society is responsible for the foul play that's stricken her life, but the clues start leading her elsewhere.

I enjoyed Mia McKenna-Bruce's performance as Bundle,  her petite and doe-eyed appearance mask a fiercely independent streak and formidable intelligence. Shockingly, her mother, played by Helena Bonham Carter, appears quite the opposite... she hides in her home, tending to her plants and seems to have little interest in expanding her knowledge of the world outside her ground. The men bundle finds herself surrounded with are largely boys of priviledge, and somewhat daft, inept, pompous or oblivious, except maybe Martin Freeman's detective who definitely sees her capabilities but also sees her only as a vulnerable young woman.

At three sub-hour length episodes, not sure why this wasn't just a movie, but it ends with the promise of something more, something much bigger and more adventurous for Bundle, and if we're going to do "cozy adventure" or "cozy espionage" instead of "cozy mystery", I might be there for it.

[23:51]

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In the long stretch of Marvel projects since, oh, let's say X-Men appeared in the year 2000, my enthusiasm for a Wonder Man project was at the very least in the lower quarter of said projects. I mean, certainly quite above things like the non-MCU-related TV shows or the Fox Network shows of the early 2000s, but I just have no experience with or opinions on the character. Its star, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, on the other hand, I think is tremendous, even though the majority of his work I've seen has been in other comic book projects (Aquaman, Watchmen).

In a series created by Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton and writer Andrew Guest (Community, Suburgatory, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), it keeps Simon Williams as a Hollywood-based actor, but it seems that the majority of the show is cut from new cloth...but then I don't really know.

Here Simon is an aspiring actor who invest too deeply in any role he is given, much to his detriment. He's often fired from gigs because he wants to do too much to make his role meaningful to him and to the production. His family doesn't fully believe in him, but there's also worry, because Simon has super powers which have always seemed beyond his control.

Simon meets Trevor Slattery (Sir Ben Kingsley, Iron Man III, Shang-Chi), the actor who played the terrorist The Mandarin, at a movie theatre and they wind up at an audition for the new "Wonder Man" movie (a remake of a 80's cheesy sci-fi classic) and become fast friends. Trevor takes Simon under his very experienced wing and teaches him a new approach to acting to compliment his talent, rather than get in his way. 

It's really not a superhero show, despite being set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it is a show about performing, and friendship, with a bit of loving criticism thrown towards the filmmaking process.  The heart of the show is the bond between Simon and Trevor, and both Abdul Mateen II and Kingsley crush the shit out of it. These are two phenomenal actors playing struggling actors who become unlikely friends, and it sells... even as we find out that Trevor is actually a plant who is being pressured by a government agency to expose Simon as an unregistered super-powered individual (even that angle is a critique on how policing agencies wind up having quotas merely for optics, not necessarily for the good of the public).  It's clear that Trevor doesn't feel good about what he's doing and, while the conclusion of the series is a given, it's still a pretty enjoyable ride getting there.

It's a sweet and lovely series, way outside the usual MCU parameters. It's a surprise, and I liked it a lot, but I still fall into the camp of wanting more superheroics in my superhero show.

[42:29 - of course I spend double the time talking about a superhero show]

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Disney finally, FINALLY, did it. They bought the Muppets off of the Henson company two decades ago and outside of two rather terrific films (The Muppets and Muppets Most Wanted) they have really, really struggled with what to do with them. Their attempts to contemporize the Muppets as TV shows haven't ever fully worked.  What the die hard fans have been shouting on message boards for ages is for Disney to just do The Muppet Show again. Disney has resisted for so long.

With Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg among the Executive Producers of the series, there was a slew of creatives involved with a strong desire to recreate The Muppet Show as exact to the vintage series as possible.  Disney conceded but without commitment. They got one episode.  One episode to get it right, to recapture all the feelings of a series that ended 40 years ago, and also make it feel like more than just a nostalgia trip. Pop superstar Sabrina Carpenter, also an executive producer, gleefully offered herself up to be the celebrity guest for the return.

The sets look astounding, as if they were always there and just needed dusting off. The Muppets look great, only the voices -- to this old fan -- seem off, because of course they are. There are different people puppeting the central characters these days. The skits... well they're classic Muppets bits, vaudevillian in nature, song-and-dance numbers, joke-centric comedy that's intentionally corny, and just the lunacy of the Muppets...but the show is as much, if not more, about what's happening back stage as on stage and the way the two bleed into each other has always been the delight of the series.

By all rights, this pilot seems to have been very, very well received with high viewership over an extended period of time, which has fingers tightly crossed that Disney is finally ready to commit to the format, and just let The Muppet Show live again. 

As soon as it was over, I was ready to watch the next one... I need a next one.

[56:29]

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I probably wouldn't have given How To Get To Heaven From Belfast a second look if not for the auto-play trailer on Netflix highlighting that it's the new series from Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee. I liked Derry Girls just fine, but Lady Kent loved it, having watched it through at least twice before I waded in.

Derry Girls was a half-hour comedy about Northern Irish Catholics teenage school girls in the mid-90's during the waning days of The Troubles, How To Get To Heaven From Belfast is definitely not that.

The show is a comedy, but more like a comedy-thriller maybe as three old friends learn about the death of an estranged member of their high-school crew of outsiders. Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher) is now a detective show creator/writer, Robyn (Sinéad Keenan) is a mother of three and going mad, while Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) is still a died in the wool Catholic lesbian who takes care of her mom as an excuse not to live life. When they get together and venture to the small town outside of Belfast to pay their respects to their old friend, things are...weird. The family is really weird, almost cult-like. And Saoirse thinks she discovers that the body in the casket is not, in fact, her dead friend.

It's a twisty, spinny mystery, especially as the show very clearly and very early tells us that the dead friend (and a wife and mother) Greta (Natasha O'Keeffe) is in fact alive and being held by a woman who seems very much like a contract killer (Bronagh Gallagher).

Everything, though, ties back to a secret from the women's past, a murdered man that they buried and tried to forget about, but now seems to be at the center of everything.

It's an exceptionally weird and twisty show that constantly upends what the actual threat is to these women. The dynamics between the characters is a comedic one so there are tremendous laughs throughout, but the situation is a wild puzzle that only the showrunner knows the answer to. She provide the audience just enough information to keep them guessing at the wrong answers.

It's also a show that subverts expectations over and over again. It sets up many characters as being villainous, but usurps that expectation time and again in terrifically interesting (although just as often, sloppy) ways. 

It's quite a mess overall, but the mess seems almost intentional, as part of the fun (at one point, the show winds up in Derry, where, for promotion of season 3 of Derry Girls, they painted a huge portrait of that cast on the side of a building... that portrait not only pops up in this series, but also has Derry Girls star Saoirse-Monica Jackson standing in front of it eating an ice cream, which is mind-breaking meta).

[whoops, the timer got messed up...let's just say 1:08:30]

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The next train is arriving...handsome

In the last season of Hijack Idris Elba's Sam Nelson, a high powered corporate negotiator, was on a flight that got hijacked, and he took it upon himself to try to keep the people on the plane safe while helping the boots on the ground and the hijackers communicate and follow-through on demands. The big deal of Hijack was that the hijackers, for the most part, were unwilling participants, and that there were other plants on the plane.

Season 2 kicks off with the methodical business of a subway train in Berlin, which Sam is on, getting hijacked. It seems Sam is keenly aware that something is starting to happen and attempts to intervene...but no, to spoil the surprise at the end of the episode, Sam is the hijacker this time.

Much like last season, Sam is an unwitting participant, as are others involved. Sam must convince the metro control room that he is the lone hijacker, he must take the credit/blame/fall for this action. His only demand is that the Berlin police find Bailey-Brown, the terrorist that was at the heart of last season. Sam's been convinced that Bailey-Brown murdered his son (between seasons) and that his ex-wife Marsha (Christine Adams) is going to be killed if he doesn't follow through.

And so, over the eight episodes of season two, Sam tries to keep the train passengers in line, tries to keep the police actions at bay, tries to deduce who the plant(s) are on the train, tries to keep Marsha safe, all while trying his best to somehow find a way through all of this that keeps everyone alive. Nobody needs to get hurt, but people do get hurt.

I dunno, I've been following a lot of transit nerds on youtube over the past couple years and so I think a lot about subways and public transit systems, so seeing the Berlin network, trains and stations was really quite awesome. The first half of the season is full of upending expectations (not unlike How To Get To Heaven From Belfast, only having less fun with it) and the second half feels at times like it's stretching to fill the runtime. This would have made for a fabulous 2-hour movie, and would have still been really solid at 4 or 6 episodes, but 8 was too long, and it took too much time to get to what was actually happening (the ties to the previous season's adversaries implied that people who watched the previous season cared that much about the bad guys of that season to see them return). 

But watching Elba is always a pleasure. That's a handsome man right there. And of the large cast involved, they all do solid work, but there's not enough time with most of them to really invest in anyone but Sam and so what the other characters are doing seems...unimportant. A movie would have been more tightly focussed.

[1:20:19]

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Based on an Australian series of the same name and adapted by Nanatchka Khan (Don't Trust the B... in Apartment 23) and Sally Bradford McKenna, Laid is a comedy about sex and death, as so much media is. In this case event planner Ruby (Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All At Once) learns that seemingly all the men and women that she has had sex with are dying, and not from an STD or anything directly relational to her, other than they're dying in the order in which she slept with them.

Ruby's best friend AJ (Zosia Mamet, Madame Web) is a true crime obsessive (worshipping at the feet of Amanda Knox) and immediately wants to get down to business solving this thing, creating a whiteboard for Ruby's sex timeline.  

The gist of the show is that Ruby is a bit callous with her sexual encounters, using men (and women) in disregard for their feelings. She's in therapy but resists any action that would see self improvement.  She finds herself attracted to her client Isaac (Tommy Martinez) in spite of herself, and he in turn is into her, despite himself. But she knows she can't be with anyone else because all of her sexual partners are dying in very weird ways.  Unfortunately, that also means AJ's boyfriend, Zack (Andre Hyland), who Ruby slept with when they both were drunk at a mutual friend's wedding during the brief time in which he and AJ were broken up. The fuse is lit and it's only a matter of time before that bomb goes off.

Ruby is... selfish, self-centered and inconsiderate. She's defintely not the most horrendous person in the world but she's just on the other side of the line from being a "good person".  In trying to figure out why this is happening to her, why her exes are dying, she also needs to examine herself and the impact she has on others... and it's tough for her to escape her seemingly inescapable tendencies.

Laid, as a comedy, is a failure. Each episode has a few chuckles and sometimes a really good laugh or two, but for the most part the comedy is more conceptual, and when you're playing in dark comedy territory, you have to have a really good handle on tone, and this show never quite gets there.  Many times Ruby (and sometimes other characters) actually witness the violent deaths of one of her exes and there's maybe shock or surprise but no sense of trauma or lasting effects on them, and it's the weakest decision the show makes. That people are dying and Ruby is so centered on her romance with Isaac or AJ is just fixated on the mystery does the characters a disservice.

It's only trivian night host Richie (Michael Angarano), from the middle of Ruby's sex timeline, who doesn't die, and gets dubbed her sex loophole. Surprisingly Richie seems to become Ruby's grounding point, despite their sort of disdain for one another. 

While I didn't necessarily love every aspect of the show -- tone was definitely the most challenging part -- I was very invested in how this possibly could be happening. By the end of episode 6, we have an answer as Ruby's world falls apart, and episode 7 gets to the meat of it while Ruby's tries to pick up the pieces. Episode 8 goes for redemption, but Ruby's still Ruby...stripes don't change that fast. But it seems we have a finale, a resolution, except that there's obviously an unresolved Richie plotline and then Ruby's dad shows up the whole thing seems to have started again. Bam, cliffhanger...and the show is cancelled, and the American version didn't really follow the Australian version's plot, so ...no resolution.

The only part of this show Lady Kent seemed to enjoy was the theme, which was just James' "Laid" (of course). Stuck in my head for weeks.

[1:40:32] 

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Decent remake of the Hanks poster

I don't really remember The 'Burbs, Joe Dante's 1988 dark comedy starring Tom Hanks about a man moving into the suburbs with his wife only to get paranoid about suspicious things in his neighbourhood.  I definitely wasn't itching to see it remade into a TV series.

But much like watching Hijack because Idris Elba, it's almost irresistable to have Kiki Palmer (Nope, One of Them Days), one of the most magnetic performers in Hollywood, in a starring role and not watch it.

Palmer takes on the Hanks role here as Samira.  She got knocked by with Jack Whitheall's Rob after a short courtship, and they got married, had the baby and now are moving into Rob's parents place, which they offered up as they're on a "permanent cruise".  The home is in a large cul-de-sac where all the neighbours seem to be up in each other's business, and stuck at home with the baby, Samira understands why, there's some weird shit going down here...especially across the street in the abandoned manor that was just sold.

Turns out the house used to belong to the family of Rob's friend in his high school years. She disappeared under mysterious circumstances and the family moved away a while later leaving the place to rot. This disappearance gets into Samira's head, as new weird things start happening in the neighbourhood, and she's not the only one who thinks so. She makes friends with a wine-drinking porch crew and they kind of fuel each other's paranoia, as they each harbour their own secrets. 

The show starts as all mystery, everyone is a bit of a blank slate and kind of suspicious, including Rob. Samira's pent-up house-bound energies need to go somewhere, so she puts it into nosing around, and trouble follows.

Palmer is, as ever, a damn delight. The show does touch upon her being a black woman in the suburbs (and the requisite racism that surrounds it) in the first episode but sort of lets the anxiety of it ebb as she becomes part of the community quickly. Julia Duffy (Newhart) reminds us why she was nominated for Emmys six years in a row, and bringing Mark Proksch's weird energy vampire energy from What We Do In The Shadows into the cul-de-sac is a real gift. Whenever Paula Pell and Palmer share the screen, the most unlikely of comedy-duos emerges and I want nothing more than a big vehicle for the two of them to lead up and drive around.  If anything, the weakness of the show largely falls on Whitehall's shoulders.  He's not bad, but there's nothing in his performance that tells me why someone like Samira would be with him, and he doesn't bring anything unique to the role that makes him stand out from the other very talented performers (like RJ Cyler who plays Samira's brother, they needed more of him in the show).

I haven't watched the finale, but already, most of the mysteries are resolved around the main cast, and the central mystery which started it has morphed into another one that's just a little less sticky. It's a fun, if light watch.

[1:56:49]

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Created by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz, Look Around You started its life as a series of edutainment shorts that was all about editing, images and voice over, no real roles or characters. On Tubi the nine 8-to-10-minute shorts are compiled into two 35 minute episodes.  They seem to be spoofing something very specific from British culture of the 1980s, but such things are not alien to any child of the 1980's who had access to PBS or TV Ontario. These sorts of informational videos were filler on TV throughout my youth, the only difference here is these videos aren't teaching you anything useful...everything they're talking about is made up and/or patently absurd.

It's pretty frivolous, but at the same time tugs on both nostalgia and comedy strings in a delightful way. There won't be a lot of big belly laughs, but if you appreciate conceptual comedy, this will definitely scratch an itch.

The second season of Look Around You is an entirely different show. It's once again in the edutainment sphere, only this time as a hosted show, likely aimed at kids but for all audiences. The four hosts (including Serafinowicz and Olivia Coleman) all speak in a very gentle fashion as they explain their topic or engage with their guest or chat about the video we've just seen. It's all still styled so very early '80's and it's really silly business being played very, very straight. In one episode, Jack Morgan (Popper) is going to have plastic surgery performed by a miracle robot (operated by Benedict Wong), and in another the cast meet a horse that can predict the winner of horse races, while in yet another they discuss a super-serum that will give an athlete super-speed only for it to cause them to shrink in the process.

My favourite bit of the show is Serafinowicz's penchant for portmanteaus. He slips at least one in per episode.

Silly business. Good fun.

[2:08:10]

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I like British comedy, but I'm by no means obsessive about it...mainly because a lot of it can be very localized, and/or too broad for my tastes. Well, hows this for too broad... a sketch comedy show starring...3 women? I kid.

I'd heard of Smack The Pony long ago, but really had no idea what it was. An Only Fools and Horses spin-off? I don't know. I never investigated because I had other things to consume.

The show stars Fiona Allen, Doon Mackichan and Sally Phillips, and yeah, it's just sketch comedy, the hardest programming to review. I wasn't keen on starting from episode one, because those early ones can be the roughest of a sketch series as the cast and writers find their feet. It's sometimes better to start in the middle so you can see the peak work and get familiar with the players involved so that you're a bit more forgiving of the roughness of the early shows.

I'm not keen to binge the show, just putting an episode on when I have 20 minutes or so to kill, it kind of fills a hole, being amusing enough, and completely non-taxing. The show has little structure, and from what I've seen so far, no real recurring characters, although there are repeating bits, like dating profiles (where different characters record their absurd dating profiles). 

The show will have long-form sketches where ideas are given room to play out and grow, and there are a lot of sub-1-minute gag-based sketches which are uncultivated nuggets that feel, unfortunately, too slight to be satisfying (my favourite sketch I've seen so far involves characters meeting at an art show, kissing each other on the cheek and smearing lipstick, only for the smeared lipstick to be seen everywhere all over the place in incremental ways, really quite amusing).

More than a few British character actors-to-be pop up here, including Darren Boyd and Sarah Alexander... I'll no doubt come across more as I continue my relaxed pace of consumption. 

Enjoyable, if not earth shattering, my only real problem is the quality of the sound on Tubi. The mix of the audio has the laugh track too loud to sometimes hear what's being said in a sketch. 

[2:22:19]

[I don't know why I fool myself into thinking I could ever get these written in 10 minutes or less.]

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