1-1-1-KsMIRT: not enough and too much

K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month(ish) I step through the TV series I completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.  It's back(!), because I'm feeling too scatterbrain to think unfettered.

This Month:

Fallout Season 2 - AmazonPrime [8/8 episodes watched]
Daredevil: Born Again season 2 - Disney+ [8/10 episodes watched]
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 - AppleTV [10/10 episodes watched]
Scrubs Season 9 - Crave [13/13 episodes watched]
Widow's Bay Season 1 - Apple TV [10/10 episodes watched]
Dark Winds Season 2 - Crave [6/6 episodes watched]

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Fallout Season 2
season 1
[created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet]

The Plot/What 100: Lucy travels the wastelands with the Ghoul, looking for her father who has run off to Las Vegas to enact the next phase of the plan. Whatever that is. Maximus tries to prevent a war, and in the process, probably starts a war. Stephanie, now overseer of Vault 32, seems to have her own machinations in play, while Betty in Vault 33 finds resources dwindling and an inbred uprising fermenting. Lucy's brother Norm has awakened the management, and finds his leadership skills wanting. Something big is about to start, and it probably can't be stopped.

[1 Great] Often flashbacks in a TV show serve as information dump or as a means of exploring a character's backstory a little more thoroughly. It's often aside from the main plot, maybe thematically connected, but having little bearing on the progression of the in-world story of today. The flashbacks in Fallout have served to show us the world before the wasteland, and the life of The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) back when he was a famous movie star, war veteran and pitch man for Valut-Tec. This season, though, Cooper Howard is brought in through the back door of the conspiracy to blow-up the world...you know, for profit! And he has to navigate not only the twists of the shady people involved in the conspiracy and those trying to prevent it, but also his wife's part in all of it. It's actually pretty gripping, and since it's largely all from Coop's perspective, we only really know what he knows and so the rug gets pulled out from us both multiple times. It's pretty awesome and Goggins is fantastic.

[1 Good] Since I don't play the games, all of the world of Fallout is new to me. So I never knew that there was a war between USA and Canada, as the U.S. tried to annex my country. Toasty filled me in that this has long been a part of the lore of the games, so it's not just a reactionary bit to the Trumpian whim of terrain expansion. It's not explored too deeply in the season, but we learn that Stephanie's nefarious machinations are all in the service of Canadian resistance, and while the show tries to play her off as the bad guy, I'm firmly on her side. "Don't think of them as human beings, think of them as Americans...." That line gave me chills and really speaks more to how the teaching of American Exceptionalism others everyone else to Americans, rather than any desire for Canadian aggression towards our neighbours to the south (many of whom are really good human beings).

[1 Bad] There's nothing really bad about this show. I found myself pretty enthralled by this entire season. I was maybe a little frustrated at nebbish Norm and his inability to level up, not at all like Lucy did. But that's Norm's character flaw, he's just not very good at stuff. Lucy on the other hand wants to remain an optimist but boy does the world grind her down. It's a little tough to watch, but her confrontations with Hank (and the Ghoul) when she's finally had enough, well, pretty great.

Meta: It had been over two years since I watched Season 1 and I had forgotten how richly constructed the world of this show was, all the different threats it weaves together in a way that may feel loose but is surprisingly cohesive.  The addition of Justin Theroux as Robert Edwin House, the billionaire Coop is told is going to blow up the world is an excellent addition, and the character's impacts both in the past and future are deeply felt. Funny, gross, and richly satirical about both capitalism and totalitarianism, it's a surprisingly deep show for how ludicrously fun it is.

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Daredevil: Born Again Season 2
Season 1
(created by Dario Scardapane and Matt Corman & Chris Ord)

The Plot/What 100: Daredevil attacks a secret shipment of weapons through New York's harbour, a deal Mayor Wilson Fisk had made with the CIA (?), and now it's causing headaches. Anti-vigilante laws are enforced with brutality, anyone suspected of allying with a vigilante (or anyone Fisk just doesn't like) is rounded up and caged. Bullseye has turned "friend" to Daredevil, but his violence is too extreme for his liking (and people get caught in the crossfire). BB Urich manipulates Fisk's protege, Daniel Blake, in to revealing classified information, which she then uses as anti-Fisk propeganda. It's not going to go well for either of them.

[1 Great] I still think Charlie Cox is the perfect Daredevil, even if he's not written so perfectly.

[1 Good] Jessica Jones is back. Loved seeing Kristin Ritter back, if only for a minute.

[1 Bad] It's all just so goddamn tedious. It's a show that just keeps hitting the same points over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. It's so damn exhausing. Matt doesn't want to kill anyone, but he's always debating with people whether he should. And debating with people whether he should let them kill. His conflict is now not even a religious one but one of a guy who has to decide whether he believes in the law and legal institutions of the country in the role he performs, or, you know, puts on a costume and doles out concussions on a nightly basis. We've seen it all before. And it's a show that just teases and teases and teases out it stories and threads as if it had 25 episodes to fill. It doesn't and there's so many of these characters we don't really care that much about (sorry BB, sorry Daniel, sorry Heather, sorry Karen, sorry to the rest of you...) mostly because  they're so boring. The sombre, sober tone of the series, the smug self-satisfaction over even attempting to comment on modern times and governmental descent into fascism, it's all so off-putting.  Fisk needs to be put aside for a good long while. He's not Daredevil's only villain, but outside of the Hand in season 2, it's been nothing but Fisk, and it's gotten stale. Nothing new is said about their relationship this season. And they totally mishandle Jessica, severely underusing her and ...depowering her in fits and starts? Why? Ugh.

Meta: I really gave Season 1 a pass. I decided I liked it because I was happy it was back. I really, really like Cox in the role and was just so plussed to see him again. But, in hindsight, Season 2 only highlight that Season 1 was just as much of a drag. I recall Lady Kent and I taking a day off work, ordering enough pizza for two meals and just binging 16 episodes of a season of Daredevil. It was exciting to us. By the third episode of this season, watching Daredevil felt like a chore, like something we had to do, and it was definitely not something we were enjoying. We were counting down the minutes until Jessica Jones' arrival and that little baloon of hope deflated almost instantly.  Cox's best appearances as Matt and Daredevil were not in the 17 episodes of his own series but in an episode of She-Hulk and a cameo in Spider-Man:No Way Home. 

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Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2
Season 1
(created by Chris Black and Matt Fraction)

The Plot/What 100: Keiko Mura has been rescued from Axis Mundi, 60 years after she disappeared into a wormhole, and she's only 60 days older than when Shaw last saw her. Her world is rocked to be reunited with her son and meet her granddaughter and grandson having missed most of their lives, but Monarch, the organization she founded with her husband Bill Randa, is not what it once was, and faces some stiff private sector competition.  Not just competition, but organizations looking to control the kaiju for their own agendas, and developing the technology to do so. But the immediate crisis is the reappearance of Titan X, last seen by Keiko, Bill and Shaw a lifetime ago.

[1 Great] It's never not awesome watching giant monsters fight, and the show does a pretty decent job of showing scale when it's happening.  Obviously the show doesn't have the budget of a Godzilla x Kong feature, or even the budget that Season 1 had, so the fights are few and far between, but pretty great when they happen. 

[1 Good] There is an episode where Shaw, in trying to figure out how to lure Godzilla out of Axis Mundi, winds up receiving an S.O.S. from himself decades before when he was briefly trapped in there. Since Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell are playing the same character, there's no reasonable way that they could share the screen together, but this is the next best thing. A novelty episode but still kind of great that has some real emotional elements for both performers to work through in completely different times in their characters' life. The show does a pretty good job throughout this season finding consistency between the Russels' performance of the character. 

[1 Bad] Much like Daredevil: Born Again this show frustratingly treads water because it needs to bide its time between its big budget setpieces. This results in some incredibly stupid (and sometimes very confusing) character threads where certain characters go off and do their own thing for reasons that never truly feel justified, and then return to Monarch for reasons that never truly feel justified, only to get into arguements that never truly feel justified, and then to do really stupid things that never truly feel justified. Most of this shit is our young cast of Kentaro, Cate and May. They make my eyes roll involuntarily far too often.

Meta: Monarch is not a good show. It's wildly inconsistent and seems to lack purpose other than to be an in-world flourish to the Legendary series of Kong and Godzilla features. The characters amble so much one has to often ask what they're actually contributing to the story.  The scenes set in the 1950s and 60's are far more interesting, as the setting gives a pastiche for the series to play into and often it seems like it would be a better program had it firmly set itself in that time and explore the Kaiju with their technological limitations.  I honestly don't know if I would watch a third season should it return (maybe if they get Bill and Lewis Pullman to play, like, an adversary to Shaw...that would be enough to get me back in).

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Scrubs Season 9 (aka Scrubs: Med School Season 1)
(created by Bill Lawrence)

The Plot/What 100: Sacred Heart teaching hospital now has a whole campus, where we see J.D., Turk, and Cox all hold classes, and Elliott is pregnant so she's on light duty. The new batch of recruits includes Lucy Bennett, a midwestern, daydreamy "horse girl" who's naive and optimistic, which Cox wants to drum right out of her, lest he wind up with another John Dorian. Drew dropped out of med school a half decade ago, had a rough bit of life experience, and is back with reinvigored focus, only Cox has taken an unsettlingly deep interest in him. Cole is a SoCal-bro all the way, a prototypical rich kid whose parents funded half the wings in the hospital, so despite how annoying he is, he's teflon (he finds a friend in retired and sexually rambunctious [to the point of sexpest-ery] Dr. Kelso), and Dr. Denise Mahoney, the sarcastic, and jaded T.A. It's Scrubs but with new people, and some of the old people.

[1 Great] I was honestly surprised at how quickly the Scrubs formulae worked being reworked like this with a nearly whole new cast. I think having some of the old guard around some of the time works quite well (especially John C. McGinley whose Perry Cox is maybe the most critical ingredient to the show, though Eliza Coupe as Denise certainly could have filled the void in the eventuality of McGinley's departure). Dave Franco nails perfectly the irritatingly entitled dirtbag Cole but never fully as the villain, and the writing staff find ways to round down his sharpest edges to make him pretty much a likeable character. Kerry Bishé as Lucy is and isn't just a female J.D. And putting them side by side for a few episodes early in the season (before Braff departed) was the perfect way to highlight both. The new cast, gels pretty quickly, and it helps that they're all pretty talented performers (Coupe and Franco, obviously, go on to bigger and brighter things) who settle into their roles quickly and the writers find a voice for really fast. It's basically Scrubs-by-way-of-Community just maybe a year too early. 

[1 Good] My favourite part of the season was the blossoming relationship between Denise and Drew. Denise is a Tough.Nut and is such an Eliza Coupe role that's perfectly suited for her. Drew has a hardened past and his own embarrassing secrets, but can almost go toe to to with Denise in the cynicism department. They find very quickly that they have similar world views, and yet they're two quite different people that have a real challenge with compromise or, you know, emotional vulnerability. Watching them actually negotiate being together is the biggest joy of the season.

[1 Bad] I haven't watch original flavour Scrubs in a very long while, but did it have so much gender-based "comedy" as well. There's so much name calling and put-downs, mostly to the point of calling someone (usually a male character) a "girl" or a "bitch" or something more clever insinuating that the guy is soft and/or feminine. There's also one episode that has a B-plot rotating around Turk and Cox dealing with a lesbian couple (both played by very attractive actresses of course) and being total children around the idea. It's pretty embarrassing for the show and the characters.

Meta: Having just watched the reboot of Scrubs earlier this year, I was curious about the ill-fated season 9 that was intended to be an independent spin-off but ABC chickened out in letting it be its own thing. I don't know if it was ever going to be successful, as people had a certain idea of what Scrubs was and that centered around Zach Braff-related silliness, of which this is in shorter supply. Maybe it is just having watched the reboot, which, quite frankly, feels more like a reboot of this season of Scrubs: Med School than it does of Scrubs proper, but this went down pretty smooth (dated jokes aside). I had a really great time with this and would have liked another couple seasons with this crew.  Maybe it's because I knew half of this cast already from elsewhere or maybe it's because this season of television the writers pointedly made a decision to focus on the new crew (as opposed to the reboot, where it's more than half about the old crew, and less than  half about the new crew) but I think I like this season better than the reboot. A little bit more at least.

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Widow's Bay Season 1
(created by Katie Dippold)

The Plot/What 100: Tom Loftis is mayor of the remote New England island town of Widow's Bay. Unlike most people who live there, Tom wasn't born there but married into island life, his wife having died during childbirth 17 years ago. Tom has lofty ambitions of being the new Martha's Vinyard, and rallies the town behind his new tourism push. The only real objector is Wyck Crawford, a grizzled fisherman who vociferously insists that the island is cursed and that outsiders should definitely not come. He is correct on both counts. 

[1 Great] It's so very hard to choose one single thing that is great about Widow's Bay since it is uniformly terrific. Merging horror, comedy, and emotional drama the show very ably builds a small island community where it makes sense whenever any two or three cast members share the screen and the personalities are so well defined without being too trope-y that we kind of know exactly who these people are, until we get to know them more. Any character can be given a spotlight and ably hold it, the performers on the show all very keenly get the assignment, while the directors (including Atlanta's Hiro Murai and horror director Ti West), writers (including comedic performers Colton Dunn and Neil Casey) and crew all seem to be completely enthused to be  working on the show that lets them toe so many lines, and step over them, and step back. By the show's third episode there was already a stand-out episode, and then they deliver another, and another.  It's still very much a genre show, but it's doing it as if it were Parks and Recreation crossed with Midnight Mass, and it's even been told that creator/showrunner Katie Dippold originally gestated this idea as a script for Parks & Rec, but just couldn't make it work).

[1 Good] The music by David Fleming is incredible, absolutely nailing the assignment. He's able to strike a tone that is ominously lighthearted when it needs to be but can go strange, mysterious or intense when necessary. His score leans into the conventions of scores from the more mass-audience friendly horror of the past like Poltergeist, Jaws, the Omen, or the Exorcist without ever directly referencing any of them. He's found the vibe, the tone of those scores perfectly, and using their most cliched aspects as much for terror as for punctuating the humorous or absurd. It's a very deftly conceived soundtrack, one that makes me take notice without pulling me out of the moment. 

[1 Bad] The premise of the series is sort of a Jaws scenario, where there's danger lurking but the mayor won't sacrifice the town's economic prosperity for the possibility of danger. There's also an X-Files set-up where certain people in the town are aware of its curse, and are pretty comfortable with it, in fact, but Tom wants to just shrug it off. Within three episodes, though, Tom can no longer shrug it off. As we get deeper into the season Tom may be in denial at points, but it's clear he knows deep down what's true about this island. And then it's staring him plainly in the face...

I don't generally agree that TV was better when it was 25 episode seasons, as that type of American TV show created a lot of bloat. What we lose in going down to 10 or 8 or 6 episode seasons is the ability to focus more intently on secondary characters, or sometimes, as with Widow's Bay things move a little bit faster than you had expected. Tom's journey from disbeliever to skeptic to true believer happens in about 7 episodes and while I wouldn't want this season to be split into two to slow the pace of his progression, if the season were longer, with more time to expand its focus to the town at large it could really have benefitted from such a scope increase, even just three to five more episodes. The "bad" is, basically, I want more.

Meta: Widow's Bay is probably the best season of television this year. Just a lightning bolt of a show that comes out episode one firing on all cylinders and then injects the nitrous oxide into the tank in the second episode. Matthew Rhys has had a trio of prominent dramatic series over the past 15 years, but this show lets him step out of being miserable and deadpan and instead into a funnier misery, and he absolutely excels at it, both physically and verbally... he has great comedic timing...who knew? While he's been a revered dramatic actor for years, Kate O'Flynn, playing Tom's assistant Patricia, steps out of small-time character actor shadows and into the limelight, and completely destroys. Patricia can be weird and off-putting to start, but O'Flynn is able to elicit deep compassion and sympathy for Patricia, eventually turning from loser to unlikely hero (though Patricia is still incapable of going full badass).

Episodes 4 and 5 jockey for best episode of the season, with episode 4, "Beach Reads" putting Patricia and her high-stakes party planning front and centre, while episode 5 , "What to Expect on Your Trip" finds Tom accidentally getting dosed with mushrooms and blinking in and out of consciousness (I don't think I've ever seen an episode of tv told from a POV like this, where it just keeps jumping ahead in time, the viewer as disoriented as the character). It's like season two of The Bear all over again ... "Fishes" or "Forks"?

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Dark Winds Season 2
(created by Graham Roland)

The Plot/What 100: Jim Chee has left the feds to be a private investigator, and gets called to look in on a robbery at a wealthy landowner's home by his wife. Jim's case dovetails into a truck bomb investigation Joe Leaphorn is investigating, the clues to which lead him to believe Jim's client is somehow tied into the murder of his son. Joe's deputy, Bernadette, looks elsewhere for growth opportunities, while Emma and Sally ward off a white reporter from L.A. looking for a story around the heinous eugenics practices at medical clinics and murdered and missing indigenous women.

[1 Great] Each season is adapted from one of Tony Hillerman's series of Tribal Police books. Much like Slow Horses six episodes seems to be the perfect length to fluidly adapt the story without any padding. It does lead to the feeling that time has passed between seasons/stories, and I really enjoy how the first episode works as both catch up on what's happened to the characters in the interim as we as the place-setter for what the thrust of the season will be. The only one who doesn't seem like they're on a different path this season is Joe Leaphorn, who seems all to settled in his ways. But a pretty serious blow-up with Emma as well as confronting the man who may have killed his son sets him on a new path by the season's end, and his relationship with everyone in the show is different by the end (or at least our understanding of those relationships is).

[1 Good] People take their bloody lumps this season. It's a pretty taxing and brutal affair that Leaphorn and Chee get caught up in, and they pay the price. But determination, resiliency, stubbornness, and, in Joe's case, pure blind rage, get them through. It's a little harrowing to be honest, but the fifth episode trek through the desert is an epic 40 minutes of TV.

[1 Bad] I do not begrudge the series at all for attempting to tackle some of the horrific and disgusting practices that indigenous women have been subjected to, past and present, in America (and most of the colonized lands of the world, frankly), it's pretty necessary to put a spotlight on it. It's only "bad" in that it's unfortunate how tertiary this story line is to the show. Despite having not read the books, it's still evident that this plot doesn't come from the source, as it just doesn't fit with the rest of the events of the show and is of a different tone entirely. It gives something for Emma (Deanna Allison) and Sally (Elva Guerra) to do this season, but it almost feels more like that (needing to provide a story for the characters) than to hit hard on raising the awareness of these atrocities. Such a thing deserves its own central spotlight

Meta: Such an easily consumable, enriching and entertaining show. The three leads, Zahn McClarnan, Kiowa Gordon and Jessica Matten, are all incredible performers and have such a great rapport.  McClarnan's face is one of the most captivating on TV, while Gordon and Matten are just so damn good looking, and ridiculously charming together you just want to see more of them as a romcom (although the show's just looking for reasons to keep them apart). This season features Jeri Ryan in a guest-starring role and she's superb as a middle-aged femme fatale who may or may not be playing games with Chee. Veteran character actor A Martinez also turns up as Sherriff Gordo, Joe's friend and mentor. We also meet Joe's father (Joseph Runningfox) this season, an ex-cop and a hard man who Joe's still trying to live up to. Joe tries to fight his father's influence while also actively emulating him. It's a fascinating dynamic which we need to see more of. 

Chiplog: President's Choice World of Flavours Jerk Chicken flavour

 Pre-chip: By the time I realized I enjoyed jerk chicken, it was too late. My onion intolerance had started to kick in and most places, when I asked, would say their jerk contains onion powder or was cooked with onions. So colour me surprised when this new flavour of chip emerged (and just barely, I've only seen it at my local Loblaws once) and it features no onion. Colour me intrigued.

Ingredients: Potatoes, sunflower/vegetable oil, seasoning (sugars, salt, spices and herbs, citric acid, yeast, dried garlic, paprica and other additives)

First smell: That's a rich concotion of odours. Smelling the paprika for sure, strangely smelling vinegar and tomato even though it's not part of the ingredients (essentially a ketchup chip smell) plus a tang of sweetness in the air.

First taste: I honestly am at a loss for words with what I'm tasting. It's really like no chip I've had before.

Aftertaste: The left side of my tongue is zinging from the paprika. the garlic is sitting somewhere twoards the middle, and whatever is emulating "chicken" lingers.

Mass consumption: We'll see, but I don't think I can really heavily consume these. The herb and spice flavour combination is intriguing but whatever is emulating meat, like a soup-stock-type powder, is putting me off. I don't mind the kick of the paprika and garlic at all, kind of welcome it actually.

Final thoughts: I'm certainly not being reminded of the best (or, really, any) jerk chicken I've ever had, but I'm not an expert.

Rating: 5.0

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Backrooms

2026, Kane Parsons (The Backrooms) -- cinema

OK, not going to make the same mistake with a few other recent movies -- when something makes me feel something inside (gross, I know), I need to get it down before it goes away. 

This movie chilled me and enthralled me. And I imagine that is what some of the characters in the movie felt as well. 

This movie is an extreme example of the "don't go into the basement" -- you know you shouldn't go down there, and if you do, something bad will happen. But you go anyway, and the audience yells at you (yes, you have an audience as well) for being so stupid. But... what's down there? Danger! Of course. All the horror of the movie could be washed away by just not going down into the basement!! Well, most.

Many?

I have a pretty good sense of direction, generally better than most people I know. When I emerge from the subway, I always know which cardinal direction I am facing. But, put me into one of those underground malls, with all their weird angles, and corridors looping back on themselves and that sense of direction begins to slowly slip away. If you know the Toronto PATH, you might know what I am talking about.

So, when Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kinky Boots) finds the "soft spot" in the basement of the dying furniture which he runs, and in which he lives, and begins to explore the weird connected rooms and corridors looping back upon themselves, every fibre of my being was screaming "DON'T GO ANY FURTHER !" Oh, I know he was expecting this to be reality, that what he had literally stumbled into would follow the rules of architecture and physics, but I saw the trailers, and also, I already knew this place. The further you go into that place the more likely you are going to go beyond a point from which you can remember the way back. You will most definitely become lost; you will most definitely end up being in there for the rest of your life.

This movie is based on a series of YouTube short films by this film's director Kane Parsons. He in turn drew upon the creepypasta that originated on 4chan with a single image of weird empty yellow rooms with terrible wallpaper and terrible carpet, accompanied by a single paragraph description, mentioning a video-game concept of "noclipping" out of reality. To noclip, in a game, is to accidentally (or intentionally, once enough people learn of the "soft spot") through a barrier, such as a wall or floor, into the spaces outside of the game's content. Sometimes you noclip into a space intentionally built by game developers, but most often you are just breaking the game and end up "falling" forever. Sometimes, you are just suspended ... somewhere. I recall one game where I ended up just under the world map, where my character was swimming. I could hear water, see my character's motions of swimming, but I could not see water nor could I go anywhere. I could see the map just above my head but I could not reach it. I was lost forever. I needed to reload.

Clark should have reloaded. He has noclipped into a place which starts by being familiar (abandoned furniture store) but the further he goes, the less familiar, and the more unnerving it becomes. And there is something in there with him, something that he always ends up fleeing. And yet Clark, an angry selfish man, brings his assistant store manager (really, his only employee with a fancy title) Kat (Lukita Maxwell, Shrinking), and her handy-cam bearing boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms). It should be mentioned that it is the 1990s but the only bearing it has on the movie is the technology, the desire to use the "found footage" motif and to limit communication.

Clark also involves Mary (Renate Reinsve, Handling the Undead), his therapist, who has been constantly reminding Clark that he is stuck, stuck in his anger, stuck in his self-destructive patterns. As a therapist, who also has a book and video tapes, it is her schtick, her selling point, in that only you can choose other doorways in life, but most people keep on walking the same corridors forever. The comparisons are obvious, but handled really really well. Eventually Mary goes to Clark's store to see what he was going on about, before he disappeared. And she finds the entrance, which Clark has conveniently marked out with masking tape, and she finds Clark. It does not go well for either. Mary has her own personal corridors she has been traversing for years and years; Clark's experience exacerbates these and allows ... some closure? 

I have recurring dreams. In this writing I have probably mentioned The City before, but there was always one aspect, which is probably inherent to dreaming, and lends itself to what this movie is proposing, but there were the rooms and corridors of my dreams. There is The Apartment, which has many many rooms, connected to short hallways and stairwells. The entry room, with its big bright windows, leads to the kitchen, but off the kitchen, you reach the TV room with its 70s sunken floor and walls of VHS tapes. From there is a hallway that leads to The Kitchen, a massive room from a house that would have staff. I have never been through the door at the far end of The Kitchen. There is the underground shopping concourse, a cramped series of hallways and stalls selling all sorts of food stuffs like cured meat sandwiches and spices & herbs in bags, and dried goods I don't recognize. There are no straight lines, everything is jammed in together, people shouting, people hawking goods; I never find what I am there for, but I just love the experience of my visits. And there is The Factory, a falling down abandoned space I enter at the waterfront, but then find my way up but into what, I am never sure. Its always via weird tight hallways, stinking rooms full of junk, jammed doors, crawling over refuse to get ... somewhere.

Backrooms exposits that the rooms are memories of real spaces, but the idea that memories are built on how much you forget. Dreams are built on what you remember, but also .... on much more. The movie never explains what they are, why they are really there, who created them, what created them, but introduces it all without any real satisfying ending. We just wake up when the credits roll, confused, disoriented, disturbed and more than a little excited by it all. 

Thanks for seeing it, again, with me, Kent. Also Kent.

KWIF: Disclosure Day (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. A mid-week KWIF as this weekend brings us Supergirl and maybe other distractions.

This Week:
Disclosure Day (2026, d. Steven Spielberg - in theatre)
Toy Story 5 (2026, d. Andrew Stanton - in theatre)
Hoppers (2026, d. Daniel Chong - Disney+)

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I've always considered Steven Spielberg an "aliens" guy (as I think most people do?), even though it'd been a minute since Spielberg last did aliens. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was 2008 and only featured the aliens reveal in the end. He remade War of the Worlds in 2005 and it was over 20 years before that when he did E.T. The Extra-terrestrial. Prior to that it was Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  In a career with 35 movies 1/7th of his output was aliens related. That track record alone wouldn't make him an "aliens" guy, but it's still hard not to think of him that way because, in his presentation of aliens on film, particularly in Close Encounters, E.T. and now Disclosure Day, they seem not the works of a fantasist, but of a believer.

Disclosure Day isn't a preachy movie, and yet it's really trying to sell the audience on the idea that aliens exist and that we should be okay with it (I mean, I get where Spielberg's coming from, as we are a species that is notoriously xenophobic, that destroys what it doesn't understand, and generally rebuffs the unfamiliar in favour of the samey same).  It's a chase movie that posits that a shadowy organization, Wardex, in collusion with the U.S. Department of Defense, has been covering up alien encounters, commoditizing alien technology, communicating with alien beings, and torturing alien prisoners.  At a certain point the "need to know" on all this became tighter and tighter to the point that even the POTUS was eventually denied access (given who sits there now, probably for the best).

As the film starts, Wardex employees have turned up missing, as have Wardex assets retrieved from alien encounters. They're on the hunt for Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor, The Crown), a mathematics and programming prodigy who has escaped with thumb drives of their entire video archives as well as a particular piece of space magic technology. Daniel is on the run with his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson, The Knick), who he learns, in the process of hiding out, used to be a nun. As he discloses to her why he is on the run, that "disclosure day" is coming and all this material will be made public, Jane's faith (and lack of faith in humanity) has her bristling against this course of action.

Meanwhile local Kansas City news station weather person, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt, The English) has aspirations for becoming a news anchor. She has an encounter with a cardinal (the bird, not the Catholic) immediately after which she begins having weird episodes of speaking foreign dialects, and empathically reading peoples minds and finding the perfect path to delivering them comfort, sometimes with words and other times with telepathic images. After trying to give a weather report, only to wind up speaking in an alien language of clicks, she passes out. An MRI shows no anomalies, but the Wardex goons are waiting for her outside her hospital room. With the concerned help of her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) they get out. Margaret knows something is happening to her, but she also knows it's not a bad thing. 

She gets a phone call from ex-Wardex employee Hugo Wakefield (Coleman Domingo, The Four Seasons), the man orchestrating the whole "disclosure day" event, and he advises her to find Daniel, using her instincts to guide her. 

Daniel gets captured, Jane's on the run, Margaret ditches Jackson, Margaret rescues Daniel and they keep running afoul of the Wardex goons, as their leader, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth, The Staircase) uses alien technology to invade peoples minds and take over their bodies.

This is all happening as U.S.-Russian tensions escalate and the threat of nuclear war and/or World War III looms large. Jane and Scanlon both worry that any disclosure of the existence of extraterrestrial beings will plunge an already volatile world even further asunder.

This is very much Spielberg (with frequent collaborator, screenwriter David Koepp, and, oh yes, John Williams' latest [maybe last] film score) in Spielberg mode. When you think of a Spielbergian adventure, this slots right into that. Spielberg has long been an incredible populist filmmaker, he wants his films to be (for the most part) enjoyable to the broadest demographics. But that Spielbergian populism, at its peakiest peak, was always very American-centric. For as avid an enthusiast of World War II and aliens as he is, he seems incapable of really expanding his mindset out of the ol' U.S. of A.

So despite having three Brits as the leads of this film, only Firth plays in his natural accent (because the British accent can still accentuate the "villain" motif). Blunt is working in an American dialect I can't quite place, but there's a hint of a twang, while O'Connor's American accent comes off as somewhat flat. 

In dealing with its backdrop of international tensions, we don't get a sense that there's any extension of Wardex outside of America. There's no conceit that they have satellites all over the globe where other alien encounters *must* have happened. Not even a mention. It's like the John Smith idea that America is special and that a resurrected Jesus went there to deliver a whole second set of commandments, just for Americans, because they're special. This is a movie that doesn't tout American Exceptionalism, but it's most definitely the product of creators educated in that sort of groupthink.

Disclosure Day, in its sensibilities feels very of the 1980s, and I can't help but feel had it been a period piece (Spielberg loves a period piece) set in the '80's that it might have played better for me. I get the sense that Spielberg wanted to explore his anxiety around our lack of empathy, our fractioning, our tribalism, and all the unease in the world, and that, in his mind there's one unifying answer, that we're not alone and we should be thinking of something more than ourselves.  It's not hard to extract that message, but it all teeters on the edge of cloying.

The man is a masterful, thoughtful storyteller, but he has a mode he finds himself in regularly, and, while it's been a while, this is that mode. One where his sense of hope and optimism means that conflict is pretty neutered and there's a sever disconnect with reality (how many times should Margaret have been shot dead and wasn't? How terribly sloppy is Wardex as an organization?).  

This is a movie that does not lack for interest, intrigue or excitement, nor does it lack for some really good performances, and intriguing ideas, but for the most part Disclosure Day didn't hold together for me. It did feel like the "aliens guy" was trying too hard to convince me of something rather than let me get there on my own.

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No, I don't know what "HDR"
or "Barco" are...

As an adult person really interested in the collecting of toys (I'm an APRICOT, a term I just made up and is definitely not going to get adopted voluntarily by the collecting community) the idea has been percolating for some time about the potential for a Toy Story feature that takes place in the world of adult collectibles. I love going to toy shows and the idea of putting Woody and pals in the feeding frenzy of toy conventions, with nerdy adults haggling over pricing and condition of figures, or squatting and rifling through a dig bin, well it gives me tingles and has me smiling. But the basics of the idea of Woody confronting "collectibles" was already covered in Toy Story 2, and I'm not sure such an idea offers much more thematically than that (except to say we don't have to grow up and stop playing with toys, and I don't know that it would cover much different ground than The Lego Movie did). Watching Toy Story 5 served to remind me that it is a series about the importance of play for children, and that the toys in these movies have a singular desire to make children happy. Not the inner children of adults but, like, legit kids.

The prior Toy Story movies have centered around primarily Woody or Buzz, with characters like Jesse or Lotso Huggins driving home a particular emotional thread, but Toy Story 5 puts Jesse (Joan Cusack) front and center, pushing Buzz and Woody to the periphery, as Jesse, for as tough a cowgirl as she is, still has a particular traumatic trigger around being abandoned.  She has been basking in the glow of being Bonnie's #1 toy for a couple years now, but Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) needs more than just toys as friends, and as much as Jesse wants to help Bonnie connect with other kids, they're just not interested in much other than screens.

Enter Lilypad (Greta Lee), a web-enabled tablet device for kids that immediately takes the dominant spot in Bonnie's room and pushes all other concerns aside. Lily takes it upon herself to connect Bonnie to other kids from dance class, and for a moment, it seems like Lily is doing what Jesse couldn't. But in order to fit in Bonnie has to be her inauthentic self, and it's kind of a disaster for her. A late night chat with Woody (Tom Hanks) via walky-talky with a shaky connection brings Woody back to Bonnie's room, only to find when Lily returns  Jesse and Bullseye have gone missing, and a lovelorn Buzz (Tim Allen) desperate to find her. 

The human kids in the Toy Story franchise have largely been like deities, gods worshipped by these toys, and thus a bit more abstract. We are typically invested in the world of the toys, less so the world the kids inhabit. But this film places Bonnie as just as central a figure as Jesse, yes inhabiting two different worlds, but symbiotically. One needs the other whether they know it or not.  We get so invested in Bonnie's well being that it's soul crushing when she's rejected by others.  Yes, the toys love her more than existence itself, but Bonnie doesn't know this, they're not the real world to her, just a part of her very vivid imagination.

Picking up the threads of Jesse's trauma from Toy Story 2, she has her own anxiety spirals that as often elicit rage as desperation. She lashes out at Lily, at technology in general, and it's up to a trio of long dormant devices she finds in another home (led by Smarty Pants, a toilet training device voiced by Conan O'Brien) to teach her that technology has its place in a child's development as well, and can just be as important to them as old fashioned role-playing toys.

The undercurrent of the film is casting a critical - but not damning - eye at technology. It's a film that acknowledges the draw of technology and how it can entertain and how it can help a child develop in certain ways, but it is also keen to point out its limitations and even its drawbacks. Writer-director Andrew Stanton sharply observes that while technology may satisfy most kids attention, it won't satisfy all, and some kids (and adults) will prefer playtime to pixels, and wouldn't it be great if technology could connect them.

There is a secondary thread which finds a crate of next gen Buzz Lightyear toys washed ashore on a deserted island, and it slowly starts to arc its way in front of the path of the main story. Rather than being a distraction it's entertaining, exciting and curious, both in the actions on screen and the question of how it could possibly fit in the overall narrative of the story, which it does so pretty nicely.

Did we need another Toy Story movie? While it's doubtful anything will ever hit the resonant high and tumultuous events of Toy Story 3, each entry in the series has validated its existence with a narrative purpose that expands on the themes of the series, builds up its characters even more, and has a remarkable amount of fun in doing so. Five films in 30 years is hardly a flooded market. I'm not sure I want the series to continue if it outlives its cast, but if everyone's game in 2031, I'll be just as happy to see where it goes next.

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In prep for Toy Story 5, I decided to dive into Hoppers, the previous entry in Pixar's dynasty of (mostly) quality product.... I mean, it has been a while since Pixar felt like "Pixar!" where every release was an event worth taking note and going to the theatre, even if you didn't have kids and time to kill.  The breaking point seemed to be in 2015, when The Good Dinosaur not only failed to delight critics, but kids as well. It was Pixar's first real disappointment and the sequel-heavy future looked a bit bleak from there. Not that people weren't excited for Finding Dory or a new Incredibles or Toy Story 4 but with so little new in the tank it felt like Pixar wasn't the place of innovation it once was (I mean, Into the Spider-Verse came out the same year as Incredibles 2 and, as good Brad Bird's sequel was, the Spider-Man movie made it look somewhat antequated.)

While Soul, Luca and Turning Red are all quite good films that sparkle with some of the latent Pixar magic, films like Onward, Lightyear, Elemental and Elio have all felt underbaked or formulae-gone-wrong, just gas-less films that failed to excite critics or audiences (to the point that these four, plus the Cars sequels, are the only Pixar films I haven't seen).

Hoppers' wasn't a return to form for Pixar, but it wasn't a critical or commercial failure either. In one week Toy Story 5 has already outperformed Hoppers' entire theatrical run. But then, Toy Story 5 has history, name recognition, and the might of Disney behind it. Hoppers got a trailer that didn't really tell the audience what it was about and a title which is kind of perplexing. It looked more like a Disney knock-off movie than the next great Pixar film.  

It is definitely better than a Disney knock-off, but it has some hills to climb and it doesn't fully accomplish reaching the apex. 

The title, Hoppers when paired with its protagonist images on the poster and in the trailer, is a head scratcher. Beavers aren't exactly known for their hopping ability.

"Hopping" in the movie, however, is the term for putting one's consciousness into the body of a robot animal... something the trailer sort of forgets to talk about. In the film, Mabel Tanaka is a ADHD-coded child with too much energy to burn, and a lot of festering rage. Her grandmother takes her to the glade and teaches her the tranquility of being at one with nature, of listening to its rhythms and just enjoying the peace of the Earth. A dozen years later, grandma has passed and Beaverton's Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) wants to build a beltway through the glade to make circumnavigating the city a possibility. Mabel (Piper Curda) will do anything to stop him but feels helpless, unable to get anyone else to care about nature.

She discovers her college professor Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy) has invented robot animals that can traverse nature undetected and undisturbed, not only that but the operator is technically inside the robot, acting as the animal. Mabel hijacks the beaver robot and enters the wilderness where she discovers where all the animals that abandoned the glade are now in a concentrated space that's incapable of keeping them all. She tries to rally to animals to fight back for their land, and once again finds apathy...at first. And then...violence.

The thrust of the story is that Mabel is connected to nature and loves it wholeheartedly, and she will do anything to protect it. But her energy is off-putting and tends to deter people from her cause rather than to embrace it or see what she sees. It's a film about how utterly defeating it can be to care, how soul-crushing it seems when it feels like you're the only one who cares about a problem, and how sometimes one's efforts can not only fail, but backfire.

The problem is, as a story it doesn't offer good alternatives. It's a film that acknowledges that we need fighters in the world, and we perhaps need to have more empathy for the fighters than we do, but it doesn't tell the fighters, or the wanna-be fighters how to fight. In fact, it kind of low key shames them, puts them down, and pushes the fighters towards working with the systems that don't really work rather than trying to remake the systems so they do.  The film digs a hole for itself that it's not really equipped to get out of once it jumps in.

The standard Pixar formulae finds its stories taking place in a world that we're unfamiliar with, one which posits that it's existed the whole time only we're just being exposed to it now (the ocean life in Finding Nemo/Dory, the world of toys in Toy Story, the world of bugs in A Bugs Life, the monster dimension in Monsters Inc., the world of emotions in Inside Out etc). In presenting such a world, everything to the last detail needs to be thought through and considered. If a joke is made, the logic of the joke still needs to fit this world or world-within-a-world. In Hoppers it's the animal kingdom, or at least a regional representation. And it's kind of where Hoppers falls short in its Pixarness.  My buy-in into this world fell apart almost immediately as Mabel witnesses the mammal King George (Bobby Moynihan) leading the wilds in a rousing routine of jazzercise.

There's a clear divide that there's civilization in a city, and the place where wild animals live outside of it. But where the human dwellers may feel divorced from the bushes outside its streets, the animal kingdom considers humanity to be a part of it. There are royalty in these realms - mammal, lizards, amphibians, fish, birds and insects each have a king or queen (and yet no human king, until beaver-Mabel presents Mayor Jerry as "king" to the humans). There's just an internal lack of consistency to how this whole civilization works and while it's not fatal to the film, it does raise too many questions whilst watching to just fully relax into the story.

Similarly, I could buy into the idea of the hoppers, and even the idea that once your consciousness is placed in the animal robot you can understand other animals (but not humans) but then to have earpieces and communication with humans that cross the divide is a step too far. It's basically an invention that lets humans and animals communicate, which is a much bigger deal than the hoppers technology, quite frankly.

Toy Story 5 has a couple of animals in it and their renderings feel lightyears (pun intended) beyond the animals we see in Hoppers. The animation of Hoppers is fine but doesn't escape the conventional soft-edged trappings that CGI animated movies has largely been stuck in for over 20 years (but thanks to Spider-Verse and K-Pop Demon Hunters we seem to be finding a pathway out of) so in a way, despite being generally entertaining and with a welcome ecological message, it has a generic feel. 

[Toasty's take - we agree, I think]

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Normal

2025,  Ben Wheatley (Kill List) -- download

Once again, I am struck that I should get around to watching Kill List. In fact, I didn't even know I was watching a Wheately movie until the credits rolled.

I did not have Bob Odenkirk as Action Hero on my movie bingo card. He comes along once again with Derek Kostad to write & produce an ultra-violent action flick starring an aging, unlikely protagonist. This time he's Ulysses Richardson (Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul), a sheriff-for-hire, come to Normal, Wisconsin Minnesota (once again, Winnipeg) to temporarily fill the role until the elections happen -- the previous sheriff froze to death. That aspect of Old West Meets Modern American Policing still weirds me out -- they do not have to be trained police officers, just win an election. Anywayz, Normal is ... well, normal. Mostly; some small town weird. Ulysses comes to this job with his own shaky past, seeking to escape something. But he's a likeable, nice guy, happy to do this job and then move on.

Then he's nice to the wrong person, a likeable bank robber who, along with her boyfriend, must be in desperate straits to resort to such drastic measures. Things don't go well and an alarm is sounded, one the sheriff's office has hidden behind some junk because, well, that alarm would never dare go off. Ulysses goes into the bank to talk the couple down when... his own deputies begin opening fire with automatic weapons, and the new sheriff is just as much a target as the rest of the people in the bank. There is something in there that nobody should see, let alone an interim sheriff.

You see, the movie opened with the punishment of two Yakuza thugs, and if we paid attention, we will see that they are standing guard in the bank. It doesn't take much to get that likely the Yakuza has some holdings in the bank, enough that if its revealed, everyone must die. This is where the movie bleeds quickly into the lunatic fringe, more a farce of comedic-action than any reality we could accept. But that's OK, as it kind of works. Ulysses ends up working with the bank robbers against ... the whole town. Pretty much everyone in town made a deal with a Yakuza oyabun to stand guard over a vast fortune in gold, cash and weapons hidden away in a small Minnesota bank vault. Its weird, unrealistic but in the context of the movie, it kind of works.

So, outside, a snow storm rages (a terribly depicted spray-on snow storm) which has knocked out communication lines (in)conveniently leaving Ulysses and the couple, Lori (Reena Jolly, Meet Me Under the Mistletoe) and Keith (Brendan Fletcher, Violent Night), having to fight it out with the well-armed townsfolk all night. Meanwhile, the robbery alarm has gone all the way to Japan so the oyabun and his crew are one their way. What was expected to end in a massive bloodbath actually gets interrupted by a ... stalemate and awkward agreement between Ulysses and the townsfolk he hasn't killed yet, to stand up against the Yakuza. If the oyabun and his visiting crew all die, then no one can report the town's failure and they can resume standing guard over the fortune. 

Yah, its all a bit weird thin stretch but somehow Wheatley sells it. It doesn't hurt that Odenkirk comes across as likeable and capable, and since he has killed the mayor pretty much immediately, the surviving townsfolk are sort of lacking leadership. Except he doesn't stay and the movie doesn't sell the idea he would accept the killing in defense of so many many townsfolk. I know, I know, in these movies, the Protagonist slaughters dozens of NPCs in a matter-of-fact manner, but since the establishment of Ulysses character (his shaky past) involved him killing someone that needed killing, that a mass slaughter (in self-defense, of course) would get him past that is ... a weird spin. And that they actually let him leave with the knowledge of what is going on in Normal. So, not normal.

But, I do like my quirky violent romps.

I should mention. There is a side-character side-plot, wherein Alex (Jess McLeod, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma), the adult child of the late-sheriff is trans / non-binary. Its a toss away acknowledgement, where Ulysses apologizes for misgendering them and then immediately finds an ally in his bloodbath, given they had been advising their father against the agreement the town had, and that is what got the late sheriff killed. I really liked that they made gender a part of the character, but moved quickly past it. Yes, it does feel like an insertion, but its the acknowledgement of normality in an otherwise abnormal Normal. And they use a tender scene of acknowledgement and acceptance as the exposition dump, Alex filling in Ulysses on what the what is in Normal.

KWIF: Obsession (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. This week's batch of films is actually last week's batch of films. At least two days of this week were spent laid up on the couch with post-Gamma Knife-related side effects (migraines, earaches, discombobulation and fatigue). They've largely tapered off, but my ability to focus has still slipped, so I need to practice getting back at this review blog writing thing. This week's theme...toxic relationships apparently.

This Week:
Obsession (2026, d. Curry Barker - in theatre)
Over Your Dead Body (2026, d. Jorma Taccone - amazonprime)
Dead Again (1991, d. Kenneth Branagh - netflix)
Roommates (2026, d. Chandler Levack)

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When films are unexpectedly successful well beyond any executive or critical projections, it's usually because they're meeting a moment in the culture. They are films for their times. This is even more true of horror films, where often the film is a metaphor or moral fable disguised under more visceral gore and/or frights. Curry Barker's theatrical debut, Obsession, has now grossed over 200 million dollars domestically, and 300 million worldwide (and was made for a paltry 750,000) with no franchise or name recognition behind it, and it's done so by meeting a moment.

If you, like most people, are inundated with headlines every time you open your browser or social media, you've heard about the loneliness epidemic, or that young men are in crisis, or that young women would rather just not date these days.  Perhaps you've heard of the manosphere, or trad wives, or the various right wing movements trying (and succeeding far too much) in stripping away the rights of women, and trying to resurrect old ideas of gender roles where women are dutiful and subservient to men.  Obsessession is borne out of these trappings without explicitly addressing any of them head-on.

Bear (Michael Johnson) is not shown as being a message-board obsessed incel, but he is hopelessly pining over his friend and coworker Nikki (Inde Navarette). They are pals, doing trivia night after work, and going to parties, but Bear wants it to be more than what it is. Desperately. But he's too shy to make a move. Even when Nikki confronts him as he drops her off at her place, asking him bluntly if he likes her, he still can't admit it.

The thing men -- especially young men -- fear the most, is being emotionally vulnerable. There's the old Seinfeld joke about people being more scared of giving the eulogy than being in the casket, but I think men are more scared of admitting their romantic feelings to someone than they are of public speaking or dying. Cowards. We're pretty much all cowards. (More times than I can recall [mainly because I'm old and don't recollect well anymore], I have been told by someone they were interested in me, and I cannot recall there ever being a situation where, over the many crushes I've had in my life, having actually admitted that to said crush without them first having opened up to me. Not even to my wife [though she said it was pretty obvious, but that's besides the point]. That's pretty shameful, if I'm being honest. Shameful, and embarassing to realize that I was basically a romantic coward, afraid of opening up and afraid I couldn't handle the rejection.)

So, sitting in his car in shame over the missed opportunity, Bear tears open the novelty gift he bought for Nikki, the "One Wish Willow", a small twig that the colourful packaging says will grant the bearer one wish after snapping it. And so he wishes Nikki would love him more than anyone. *Snap* Seconds later she's tapping at his window and coming onto him. He can't believe it, but he's going to take it. Cue the montage to perky music of their new, happy life together... although moments within the sequence show Nikki helplessly unable to resist just staring at Josh.

In perhaps Barker's best directorial moment, Bear's buddy (and coworker at Andy Richter's music shop) Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) pulls Bear aside and just has to ask...how? How is this happening? How did this happen? He knows that Nikki told their friend Sarah that she only liked Bear as a friend just days before they started going out. Bear, you can tell, has a modicum of guilt, genuinely suspecting that the One Wish Willow was legit, but at the same time still can't get over his biggest want having come true. The whole time this conversation is going on, Nikki is in the background, quite out of focus, just staring at Bear, an intense, haunting, almost spectral presence.

Nikki's obsession with Bear, continues to ratchet up, getting more and more overbearing (no pun intended...or maybe it is?) and Bear's happiness starts to dwindle under Nikki's oppressive, destructive and harmful behaviour.

If we were to step back, maybe not even 10 years ago, this would be the story of a toxic relationship, about women who control their men through emotional manipulation and illnesses (feigned or real). The hallmarks of emotional abuse are there -- violent outbursts followed by extreme moments of contrition and tenderness and sexual advances. I've definitely heard about such stories, and to a lesser degree, been there myself. Yet, despite Bear being our point-of-view character, he's not the protagonist. He's the antagonist. Nikki is the victim of this story, having been stripped of her agency, and everything her body is doing is beyond her control, serving only Bear's whims with nearly no ability to advocate for herself.

In the film's funniest scene Bear calls the service line for the One Wish Willow, only for an apathetic voice on the other end to tell him the only way to reverse the wish is for someone else to wish it so...that, or Bear dies.  And in the most haunting scenes of the film, more than once, Bear hears Nikki's real voice while the "other her" is asleep, or distracted, and he knows, he's fully aware that the Nikki who is his girlfriend is not really the woman he though he was in love with. And yet, to even attempt to undo his wish, to free this woman he said he loves, takes him weeks to come to that decision, and begrudgingly so. Only when it's at its most extreme does he even truly try.

He may not be a Jordan Peterson-watching douche, but under the nice guy persona still lies a man who thinks that, maybe, it's best if a woman is his possession.

Barker's film is not scary so much as upsetting and disturbing. Barker's "monkey's paw" tale is not in any way original (I believe I saw a Twilight Zone episode recently with much the same plot), and Barker's direction is solid even if lacking much standout style. But it's the way in which the story is told, where the camera's sympathies lay that makes this different, and that is what meets this moment. This is Nikki's tale, moreso than Bear's, and Navarette is an immediate superstar in the role, having to switch moods at the snap of a finger, and go from extreme perkiness to extreme rage while still retaining that sense of helplessness in her eyes. It's an astonishing performance, frankly.

Much like when Zach Cregger's Barbarian became a phenomenon (though still paling in comparison to what this film has earned), all eyes will be on what Barker does next. Is he a one-hit wonder, or does he have the juice to make more films that audiences and critics will respond to. The insane success of this film almost suggests that whatever he does will have a lot of expectations and pressures put upon it, hopefully he can meet the moment with his sanity intact. 

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Based on the 2021 Norwegian film The Trip, Over Your Dead Body is a nasty dark comedy about a married couple who have such severe communication issues that they'd rather just plan each other's murder than talk it through.

Unlike Obsession, there's no moral fable here, it's really a War of the Roses(/The Ref)-type story where the unhappy couple in question need to find themselves in the most extreme circumstances in order to open up and connect with each other again.

Dan (Jason Segel) is a failed film director stuck working in commercials. Lisa (Samara Weaving) is a wanna-be actress who has been unemployed for too long for Dan's liking (and is possibly cheating on Dan with her scene partner in acting class). They take a heated road trip out to Dan's father's lakeside cottage "upstate" (this was shot in Finland, and I had an impossible time ignoring that fact...the setting here doesn't look like anywhere in North America I've seen), where they've planned for each other's murder (having ham-handedly established with colleagues and neighbours the possibility of hiking or hunting excursions going wrong over this weekend).

While they had prepped for murdering each other, which is a pretty raw taste to accept as comedy, it is humorous the reactions they both have once they discover the other's plans. There is some comedic mileage to be had in the scenario.

What they hadn't planned on was a pair of escaped murderers Pete and Todd (Timothy Olyphant and Keith Jardine) and the prison guard, Allegra (Juliette Lewis) who helped them get free (according to Allegra, her and Pete are in love... Pete's less convinced). And so it becomes a fight for survival for Dan and Lisa against hardened criminals, and their only path forward is together.

This is not a gentle movie. The violence hits hard, real hard. It's not cartoonish, it's traumatic. This isn't Looney Tunes comedy, it's serious damage, bruising, cuts and far, far worse all shown in pretty graphic detail. It's far too extreme, and far too nasty to be funny, so it's all the more impressive when the funny can creep through it all.

Segel has become a master at emotive comedy, his malleable face can represent such despair, depression, resolve, joy, whatever the case may be, while his eyes can convey something completely different. He makes Dan into an impotent man who can't seem to stand up for himself or follow-through on his decisions, but you also start to buy into his stepping up. Segel can sell that every time, and he can undercut it just as easily. Weaving has become a top notch take-no-shit lead, while also having a wryness that lends itself quite well to comedy. She does sarcasm and snark as well as she can take a hit and project her rage (which she got a lot of experience with in the Ready or Not movies). The age gap between them is addressed, but they are a pretty evenly matched pairing.  It's just then so disappointing that I really didn't like either Dan or Lisa all that much... I was sort of rooting for them, but where they wind up in the end is more scary than heartwarming or delightful. 

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The opening credits to Kenneth Branagh's 1991 neo-noir Dead Again features a montage of old timey newspaper headlines that tells the story of German composer Roman Strauss' arrival in America, his whirlwind romance with Margaret, their marriage, her death, Roman being accused of murder, his conviction, and his death sentence. You'll be forgiven if it seems like you missed a predecessor story (called Dead maybe), and it is pretty crucial setup.

The film proper then starts, in black and white, where we meet Roman Strauss (Branagh) on death row. He's getting trimmed, given his last rights and last supper, and being interviewed by Gray Baker (Andy Garcia) who wrote some (all?) of the articles we saw in the intro. Roman's cell is lined with Baker's articles as well. Baker asks Strauss if he really killed Margaret. He smiles, whispers something in his ear, then pulls out a knife from his last supper and charges forward. Quick cut to present day,in full colour. A woman (Emma Thompson) wakes up screaming. There's a chair propped under the doorknob of her room. Eventually nuns and others find their way in. 

Apparently this woman arrived at this orphanage with amnesia and was given care and a room, but the cold hearted priest who rules the place seems to have little compassion for her situation (the nuns, on the other hand, worry for her safety...women taking care of women). The priest calls in a favour from former tenant of the orphanage, now a private investigator, Mike Church (Branagh again), to help figure out this woman's origins. When they meet, there's an immediate attraction, both ways.  She winds up staying at his place because the sanitarium is just chaos.

With the help of Pete, a colleague in the media (Wayne Night, as an affable creep), they get the woman's story out, and eventually Mike and "Grace" (he gives her the name just to call her something) meet Franklyn Madison (Derek Jacobi), an antiques dealer with a hypnosis side hustle. In unrestrained sessions with Grace, Franklyn starts to reveal that her nightmares are actually past-life traumas, which we experience in brilliant black and white, seeing more to the story of Roman and Margaret Strauss' life together, and possible motivations for her murder at, presumably, Roman's hands.

Twists and turns, drama and intrigue. It's all very pulpy and, if I'm honest, a little cheesy, but at the same time so aware of what it's trying to do and having fun doing it. It's a throwback story with a throwback style set in two different time periods that's trying to marry both Hitchcock's earlier style with his later period one, strapping in an additional layer of the fantastical, and mostly succeeding.

Branagh's American accent is pretty dicey but surprisingly his Mike Church is a decent and respectful guy, very careful not to take advantage of this traumatized woman (in contrast to Pete, who, while relatively harmless, seems unable to contain his many lascivious thoughts from coming out of his mouth). Branagh and Thompson were newly married at the time, so there was a palpable chemistry between them that comes across on screen, the innate attraction being essential to the past lives plot (for the record, they divorced in '97). But Thompson is the dominant player in the movie. Yes, everything revolves around her, but she's not a passive character... well, eventually.

When the story starts, "Grace" is mute, unable to speak, barely able to communicate, and seems bewildered by everything. I was truly worried she was just going to be in neophyte mote, a spin on the "born sexy yesterday" trope where her mental state and lack of communication skills are irresistibly attractive to the men around her. But once she does start speaking, she's a total Emma Thompson character, smart, sophisticated, and challenging. As discombobulated as her life has become, once she's able to display her personality she's exactly who you want Thompson to be playing. And in playing Margaret in the flashbacks, she has to be a character of the 1940's, where there was more deference from women to the men in her life, and yet she still has such agency. I can't help but feel that Thompson did a pass on the script (credited to Scott Frank, Out of Sight) to make these two characters more...her. And yeah, it really works. I know exactly what this film would look like with Grace and Margaret in less confident hands.

Dead Again doesn't get brought up much. It's not a lost classic, and it's not totally forgotten, but it's just a tiny little blip in both Branagh and Thompson's incredible careers. It's a bit of a wisp of a film, fun but not fun enough to obsess over. Rewatching it won't reveal hidden depths, it's all on the surface, but it's really not trying to be anything else other than what it is.

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Canadian music journalist-turned-writer/director Chandler Levack has become a must-see filmmaker for me, although I can't seem to put my finger on why.  Her first film, I Like Movies, I found compelling and anxiety-inducing, and her sophomore effort, Mile End Kicks, was a level-up, doling out a big bale of Canadiana that felt incredibly cool, and both modern and retro all at once.  The alluring Canadian-ness, I guess is the pull of Levack, but there's definitely a vibe to her first two films (despite being tonally different) that seems unique.

So with Levack being called up by Adam Sandler himself, requesting that she direct this script about warring roommates in a college dorm, a script written not by Levack but by SNL staff writers, and starring Sandler's daughter as well as going straight to Netflix...well, I worried that Levack would get swallowed up by this big American machine and there would be nothing visible of her in this film.

If I'm being totally honest, there mostly wasn't, and yet, in tiny little ways there was.

The film's framing device finds the Dean of Student Life (Sarah Sherman) relaying to two warring roommates (Storm Reid and Ivy Wolk) the tale of the most epic roommate war of all.  It starts with high school outcast Devon (Sadie Sandler) making her first real friend at college bootcamp in gives-no-shits Celeste (Chloe East). She asks Devon to be her roommate and Celeste agrees, but warns Sadie that she's not looking for a fairweather friend, but a ride-or-die bestie. She's been burned before, or so she says.

But spending a few afternoons with someone who is utterly carefree can be exhilarating, living with someone like that can be exhausting, and typically a one-way exchange. As much as Celeste is wildly inconsiderate, messy, taking up space, borrowing Devon's stuff and low-key manipulating her, Celeste also pulls Devon out of her shell by dragging her out place, pushing her out of her comfort zone and cheerleading her on to do more. So while Devon rather rapidly becomes tired of Celeste's behaviour (and for good reasons), she also finds moments to appreciate what Celeste brings into her life. 

Levack's prior films have centered around selfish characters who the director has had overwhelming empathy for. When we watch Lawrence be his worst self in I Love Movies or Grace do her own thing to the detriment of everyone else in Mile End Kicks we're still on board with their journies. Roommates is Devon's story, and Celeste is the antagonist, but Levack can't help but have empathy for Celeste, and that conflicts with her purpose as chaos agent in the story.

At a certain point it seems like Devon is the one who is being selfish... she only knows about Celeste what Celeste has told her and never probes deeper, basically too worried that asking more intimate questions will push Celeste away rather than bring them closer, but also getting too self-involved in her new college life (and too used to being in solitary mode) to know how to relate to being with someone so different from her.  And the advice given to her to, you know, talk to Celeste is just ignored. (This is all not too dissimilar to the confrontation between Grace and her Montreal roommate in Mile End Kicks, which may or may not explain why certain things do or don't happen the way they do in this film....Is Levack avoiding repeating herself?)

And so things fall apart, to extremes. And in the end Celeste is truly painted as the villain, the nightmare, the bad guy, and when she gets her comeuppance, the script wants us to laugh at her, but Levack can't seem to let go of her empathy.  

The cast, outside of its young leads, is low-key stacked with comedic talent, including Nick Kroll and Natasha Lyonne as Devon's parents, Carol Kane as her grandmother, Jeanine Garofolo as her architecture professor, as well as other nepo-babies like Please Don't Destroy's Martin Herlihy and Francesca Scorsese. It's easy to be dismissive, but everyone delivers in this film, a testament to Levack's direction.  It's amusing enough and entertaining enough, but it doesn't find its core, it doesn't know where its heart is. There a pull between a script that needs to be a big dumb broad comedy and a director who just wants to be grounded in what's real about the characters and the situation. 

This was good for Levack to cut her teeth on the Hollywood machine, to try something different, prove that she can handle bigger budgets and scale, but hopefully she can continue to do things her way on a larger scale from now on.

Chiplog: San Carlo's la Vita e Buona Tomato flavour AND Muji Garlic Sauce Flavour / French Jura Cheese Flavour

Toasty and I were to meet up, but I thought I was early and had to bide my time (I didn't, I actually just didn't see that he replied almost instantly, and my notifications were turned off...moops) so I "killed time" by exploring the local Eataly where I came across some Italian chips with (marginally) different chip flavours... this is one of those flavours (the only onion-free one)

Pre-chip: I recall coming across tomato flavoured chips before, I think Lays brand at one international grocer or another, but they must have had onion powder in them otherwise I would have tried them before. These are onion free. I wish I could say I was excited, but I never really liked ketchup flavoured chips (not that "ketchup" and all its vinegariness is the same as tomato flavour), and I'm not the hugest fan of tomato. I kinda wish that the Italians had like a tomato sauce flavoured chip.

Ingredients: vegetable oils, "tomato taste seasoning" (celery, sugar, corn flour, lactose, tomato powder, citric acit, salt, spices, msg, onion powder [...heeyyyyyy what? Fuck!] and paprika). I think I need to have my glasses on when I'm reading labels now.

First smell: Oh, you know they smell good because I can't eat (too many of) them. Weirdly they smell like baked potato chips, with a hint of sweetness and yeah, of course that onion powder is coming through a tad too. 

First taste: Um. Yeah, tomato, with a hint of onion...and celery, and yeah, the sugar is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think I like it.

Aftertaste: The starchiness of the potato is the lingering flavour, which is always nice when a potato chip reminds you it's a potato chip. And it's a different type of potato that I'm used to in a chip, which is always a nice surprise, and what makes it worth trying international chips from time to time.

Mass consumption: This isn't an American potato chip, so it's rather lightly flavoured. It's not an assault on the taste buds, but there's just enough pleasant flavouring to keep you coming back. But I *shouldn't* eat too many of these because the onion powder will make me regret eating them... and while the flavour is good, it's not worth barfing at 3 am.

Final thoughts: I really like the potato San Carlo is using for their chip, so much so that next time I'm going by an Eataly I'll pick up a bag of just the plain salted chip. As for this tomato flavour, yeah, it's really decent. If I could actually eat these in larger doses I would actually probably put this on the *occasional* roster for when I just want a little something different.

Rating: 7.3

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Since the last chip flavour was a bust, I decided to bust out another package of chips I just so happened to come across today. Toasty needed to do a little pickup at Muji, the Japanese mini-department store (clothes, kitchen goods, stationary, travel gear, cleaning supplies, toiletries, snacks and more). Despite their drab exterior, I couldn't help but eye up the potato chip flavours on hand (and on sale!). And, well, there was a surprise in store....

Pre-chip: Looking at the back of the package of Garlic Sauce flavoured potato chips, I noted one very interesting factoid: "Made in France". I cocked and eye, noticed the minimal ingredients and wondered... are these just repackaged Brets? I'm so curious to find out.

Ingredients: Potatoes, sunflower oil, salt, garlic powder, natural flavouring (contains milk), butter.

First smell: Whoof. Garlic powder smacks you right in the face.

First taste: oh...oh no. It's like a smoky or fried garlic and... I'm only a mild garlic fan. This is not Brets. I was so wrong.The flavouring is too strong, and the chip is not as solid as a Brets rippled chip. Not what I was expecting. It hits you as much in the nostrils as it does in the taste buds.

Aftertaste: Garlic is a lingering smell and taste, but the scent lives longer than the taste.

Mass consumption: No. This one's not for me. Real garlic fans may like this but totally not for me.

Final thoughts: I had hoped they would be like Brets' Aioli or Chip Sauce flavour, but no. No no no no no. Woof. I went from being really excited to kinda repulsed in one chip.

Rating: 4.4

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Ok, one last bag...

Pre-chip: I had tried a Jura Cheese flavoured chip in the past, and, surprise surprise, it was a Brets. I have a draft post for those chips from 1 year ago (plus a day) that I never did finish writing up. I didn't even record my thoughts on the flavour...I'm assuming I liked it because I ate it all up without pausing to write about it. Or maybe I had too many thoughts and couldn't get them all down. So, I can't really compare...or maybe memories will come flooding back instantly.  I dunno...

Ingredients: Potatoes, sunflower oil, French Jura cheese powder, salt, whey powder, natural flavouring, dextrose, white pepper, and tumeric (for colouring)

First smell: there's more than a hint of ripe, sharp cheese. My dog perked up and took some deep sniffs with great excitement. 

First taste: Cheddar cheese is the typical chip cheese, but the jura powder gives a familiar smack of cheesiness with a nuttier flavour. It's also just a bit bolder and more fragrant than cheddar so the is a lot going on on the taste buds.

Aftertaste: The jura cheese powder flavour continues to feed back your taste buds as your saliva hydrates the powder, it's not quite as appealing as the slightly salty smack when you pop a chip into your mouth, so...

Mass consumption: yeah, you just want to keep eating, especially to explore the flavour at their maximum potency.

Final thoughts: I like these. They're interesting. Jura is not the most familiar cheese flavour for me so I don't quite have the palate for it yet. I know I ate the bag of Brets Jura flavour in one sitting, but I just can't do it with this one. It does seem more potent than my vague recollection of my time with the Brets' flavour last year (but my memory isn't really trustworthy at this point) so it's just a little more difficult to plow through a bag.

Rating: 7.3 

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I actually started my evening with another Eataly snack, the Favolosi Fava bean snack, lemon pepper flavour. I loved the flavouring, the bean... really dries your mouth out and is kind of unpleasant to eat.

Not the best night of snack adventuring, I must say.