KWIF: Wildwood (+5)

 KWIF=Kent's Week(ish) in Film. I've been getting on the mend health wise but wondering when my body is going to recover my typical energy levels. My happy place at the moment has been rewatching (or in the case of many, many episodes, watching for the first time) 30 Rock from the start. Wanting to be in book is not book. That said, the XMas Hallmarkies started dropping about a month ago and I've just stepped on my first one...and so it begins as it always does....

This Week at the Cine-mah:
Wildwood (2026, d. Travis Knight - in theatre)
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (2026, d. Noah Segan - in theatre)
Disaster Corner:
Airport '77 (1977, d. Jerry Jameson - dvd)
Doc, You Meant Terry Corner:
SCTV: The Greatest Show You've Never Heard Of (2026, d. Jason Hehir - netflix)
The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley (2019, d. Alex Gibney - hbo)
Oh, Hallmark:
My Christmas Cowboy (2026, d. Peter Benson - w network)

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An old dad's tale says that hitting a moose or a deer on the highway in and of itself isn't usually fatal for the driver, instead it's the horned animal's head stuck through the windshield, flailing in its death throes that kills the driver.  The old, primarily white, primarily boomer die-hard capitalists are this metaphorical horned beast, and their current unabashed manipulation of political structures and economies for only their own benefit is their death throes that threaten to take us down with them. Clunky metaphor aside, the ultra-rich, that rightfully maligned minority, is the greatest threat we face, and they're reach is inescapable, even in the realms of entertainment.

So it's kind of weird to be stumping for Travis Knight, the son of Nike co-founder and uber-rich dude Phil Knight, whose daddy basically bought him a stop-motion animation studio that he would eventually be CEO of. But the younger Knight wasn't a failed actor like David Ellison who then demanded his rich daddy buy his way into the movie industry and then continue to buy him more and more power and influence. Instead the younger Knight was already working at the studio as a stop motion animator when, effectively, the elder Knight bailed the company out of its financial troubles and kept the lights on. Travis wouldn't become the company's CEO for many years, instead working his way up through different roles. Behind it all, though, lies a genuine love for stop motion animation, the red-headed stepchild of the animation industry.

Travis Knight has said his live-action work, such as Bumblebee and Masters of the Universe were jobs he took only in part because of his nostalgia and affection for the toy properties. Mostly, he took on directing these projects as a means to learn new fimmaking tricks to apply to stop motion animation.  

Wildwood is Knight's second stop-motion feature (after the well-received Kubo and the Two-Strings, a film that's sat on my "to watch " list for far too long and Toasty really liked), and it's a project that has taken well over a decade to make. It's the apex of what Knight has been hoping to achieve in the field of stop motion, and it's definitely a labour of love, not just from the director but from all the animators involved.

The story is an adaptation of The Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy's fantasy-adventure novel of the same name (illustrated by Carson Ellis). Set in Portland, Oregon, it finds teenage Prue McKeel left to babysit her baby brother Mac with but one rule - don't leave the house. Prue, of course, heads out of the house, Mac in tow, cycling around the painstakingly recreated Portland streets. She runs into a classmate, nervous and nerdy Curtis whom she barely tolerates. It's clear to Prue that Curtis has a crush on her and she is decidedly disinterested. But at a local, totally unsafe looking park, Mac is abducted by a murder of crows, and giving chase Prue and Curtis find themselves through the ivy into the wildwoods, a whole other realm where all its sub-cultures seem to be at odds with one another.

Prue is on a desperate journey to retrieve her brother, and is promptly separated from Curtis. Where Pru wades through the sub-cultures of the birds, the bureaucracy and the farming folk, Curtis runs afoul of the coyote army led by the dowager governess Alexandra, and is imprisoned with the warriors led by the Bandit King. 

The dowager governess faced a tragedy years ago that she's hasn't gotten over. She's turned to dark magic and her last ditch stab at finding solace entails sacrificing Mac and potentially destroying all of civilization in the wild woods.

It's hard not to recall fantasy adventures like Labyrinth,as the whole "my [relative/friend] has been captured and I must brave this strange realm to find them" is basically a trope of the genre. The thing is, when done well, it always works. And here, it's done quite well, with the script from Chris Butler finding the fantasy, and the adventure, leaning hard into the tropes that work, abandoning those that don't and addressing head-on still others, and not in a winking fashion (ala Masters of the Universe) but in a fashion that makes the characters seem smarter and savvier, less naive.

The film is visually stunning. I don't know a tremendous amount about stop motion, but Knight indicated that they were shooting 1 image per frame, as opposed to the standard 1 image per 2 frames, effectively doubling the length it took to shoot (about 13 years). The scale of Wildwood is incredible, and my brain often couldn't reconcile that what it was seeing was reality... there are credits for CGI effects so clearly it was used, but I can't by sheer observation say whether it was simply erasure of wires and stands or if it was something more, like the rainfall in the opening, the fires in the big battle scene, the flowing river and waterfalls, or entire backdrops. As noted this isn't just  a few settings like in Coraline, or contained spaces like in Mad God, instead the environments here feel unrestricted, unlimited. Even more so than in some live action movies you feel how all these spaces are connected, and the great distances that connect them.

If anything, the excellence in the animation, the painstaking frame-by-frame construction almost does a disservice to the stop-motion, as it's so fluid 99% of the time that it doesn't seem like stop-motion. Coupled with the character designs, which don't seem that far askew from typical CGI animation designs of the past quarter century (I'm so old! CG animated movies I still think of as "new"...Toy Story was released in 1995) one can forget they're actually watching stop-motion. I'm guessing that was Knight's intent, to make a stop-motion film that is so fluid and immersive as to not call attention to the wizards behind the curtain. It's probably more impressive that the film manages to hide its seams, but the reality is I like the seams. I find them comforting, whereas this uncanny valley is not creating a dissonance between reality and animation, but a dissonance between one form of animation and another.

Wildwood is an animated feature, the longest stop-motion film ever at 132 minutes in length, which is the first tip-off that this isn't necessarily meant for children. In recalling the fantasy-adventures of the 1980s, Meloy's fantasy isn't dumbed down by the filmmakers who have complete control over the end product. There are deaths, there's battles and violence that rival those from Gladiator or Braveheart if not even more harrowing and under the animators' complete control. And the peril is real, and never fatiguing. It's pretty astonishing how uncompromised this film feels.

Knight may be the child of privilege, but he's also a real artist and a real champion for an art form that doesn't have capitalistic ideas as its end goal. Laika is a studio with a mission, and it's got little to do with commerce.  If only the world's richie riches loved making things more than making money.

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In The Only Living Pickpocket In New York, legendary character actor John Turturro gets a triumphant lead role playing Harry, an aging thief who has stolen the wrong thing from the wrong person, and then sold it and now must get it back and face the consequences.

It's a very simple tale that could have wound up being another nerve-jangling intensity test like Uncut Gems or even something perhaps less in-your-face but still deeply uneasy like this year's Tuner. Instead, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is a quiet, contemplative, tragedy that still is underpinned by a strange sense of optimism.

What is, naturally, a very loving "New York" movie, we see Harry navigating the streets and public transit of the city as he plies his trade, but the fruits of his labour are pretty slim, slimmer than they ever were. Nobody carries cash anymore. He looks for the marks who normally wouldn't be caught dead on subway or flouting their affluence in locations that aren't directly geared towards them.  A guy, driving into a parking lot across from a dive bar in a fully restored and souped up 1969 Ford Mustang, becomes his biggest payday in a while, but also his biggest nightmare.

Turns out the young millennial he's stolen from, an obnoxious and entitled punk kid, Dylan, is part of one of the biggest crime families in the city. And he's not just a punk kid, he's Ivy League educated, and resourceful. It doesn't take him more than an evening to identify and locate Harry.

Harry, we've seen has a cozy life outside of his profession. He cares for his wife who is immobile, still alive but uncommunicative when awake. He loves her with tenderness and preciousness and seems his most valuable relationship. He has a friend in Ben (Steve Buscemi), a pawn shop owner, and even his relationship with old guard Detective Warren (Giancarlo Esposito) seems to be more like old colleagues than antagonists. But Dylan's come to disrupt all that. See, Harry has unknowingly stolen his crypto wallet, worth hundreds of thousands, but worthless without the decryption keys, and he disposed of with with a contact of Ben's who is an unwilling participant when Harry comes to retrieve it.

Harry's reclamation project is not, ultimately, to save himself. It's well established in this film that there are always consequences for stealing from the wrong family. It's only in how you make reparations that dictate how sever the consequence are.  Harry knows his time is limited, it's only who gets hurt that drives him.

At a tight 88 minutes, TOLPINY does everything it needs to do with one exception, really detailing how the finale doesn't create further fallout.  There's no action setpieces here, there's no big performances, there's no tense music to get your heartbeat up. Instead we're spending time understanding a man and the life he's lived, the relationships he's formed, and the type of person he is now with hints as to who he once was. 

As noted at the top, this could have been pretty solemn, but Turturro carries the weight with grace and discipline, a seasoned actor who brings the same considerate thoughtful energy to even the smallest of roles, but shows what he can do when he's at the center of everything. He even gets a little dance in, signature Turturro moves.

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Disaster Corner

The prior two Airport movies were genuine surprises, far more enjoyable productions than I had expected. I had hoped that such surprises would continue. Where Airport defined the disaster genre for the era, and Airport 1975 started chasing the monster it had created, Airport '77 seems crassly a commercial enterprise with nobody involved terribly invested in the outcome.

The opening act of the film, as per the disaster flick tropes, is all about introducing the various cast members that are to participate in the disaster. There's a pilot, played by Jack Lemmon, and his girlfriend, stewardess Brenda Vaccaro. There's businessman Christopher Lee, his neglected wife Lee Grant and his partner who regrets sleeping with her Gil Gerard, among many, many others. 

The 747 plane is on its inaugural flight, privately owned by industrialist and art collector Jimmy Stewart who has it loaded up with millions in art pieces and invited business associates and friends on board. But he didn't invite the guys posing as flight crew who hook gas up to the oxygen supply and are carrying guns. They're in cahoots with the co-pilot, who all aim to hijack the plane, take the plane off course, fly low to stay off radar and land at an abandoned WWII naval depo on a forgotten island near the Bermuda Triangle where people will be waiting to off-load the most precious cargo.

The gas does its trick, and the plane disappears from radar, but it's flying too low and strikes an unsuspecting oil rig, and it crashes into the Atlantic, way off course where nobody will ever find it. It sinks but thankfully it's only a couple meters below surface. The plane is pressurized, but not forever. It will take a miracle or some ingenious thinking for them to be found before the oxygen runs out or the plane floods.

The first act is du rigueur, while the second is a pretty obvious riff on the Poseidon Adventure except with a plane. The third act is dullsville all the way as the producers of the film clearly partnered with the US navy to film their actual rescue operation procedures for such an event. The majority of the military players are played by actual servicemen, and you can tell! The exercise is a massive enterprise but obviously one the crew was told to sort of stay out of the way of. It's not even really a procedural so much as observational, like a grade school film reel sans narrator. It seems evident that Jimmy Stewart's involvement in this film was mostly because he was promised a trip on a Navy ship and a front-row view of the operations taking place. He doesn't serve much of a purpose otherwise.

The film also tries to shoehorn in Joe Patroni (George Kennedy), the only carryover in Airport 1975 from Airport, and thus the only connecting thread throughout the series. He has no reason for being here other than to spout the hoariest of exposition and doesn't really do anything of use.

The airplane sets are pretty great (total 70's vibe with circular furniture, carpet everywhere, and so much earth tones), and you do get a real sense of its layout. Famed costumer Edith Head provides the oh-so-'70's elegance to the guests on the plane where their performances (limited as they are) cannot.

Not nearly as fun as its predecessors.

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Docs soup

I don't talk a lot about documentaries because, for the most part, they are information vehicles. To write about such information vehicles is to try to regurgitate the information they provide. It's not a fun exercise and seems kind of pointless to really talk about most documentaries.

You Can See Everything has upended all of that. Documentaries might never be the same again after what Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim did with the story of theranos villain Elizabeth Holmes's weeks leading into her imprisonment (and what came after). That said, the last batch of super-successful docs were by Michael Moore where the director is as central to the pieces as the topic being covered.  While there were imitators that were successful (Super-Size Me by Morgan Spurlock, for example), for the most part documentary has largely remained in a pretty staid formulae and pretty static expectations, if not gotten worse devolving into puff pieces produced by their subjects.

SCTV: The Greatest Show You've Never Heard Of is bog standard documentary filmmaking about entertainment. Talking heads from contemporaries of the subject, or famous fans who idolize them, along with clips, some behind-the-scenes drama, and the story of "how it started/how it ended".  Here it has the added occasional bit that neo-celebrity docs do, which is have the people comment on clips of their own work. It's the most charming part of the production for me, and I could have watched hours of Catherine O'Hara, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas and Martin Short watching and commenting on their old skits.  I kind of knew most of the back-story of the show already, and much of the drama behind it.

Documentaries like this, especially with their bold titles, are off-putting to me. Who is watching an SCTV documentary that doesn't already kind of know what SCTV is? And the title suggests that it will be making a case for how it's become the "greatest show you've never heard of". It does not. If anything it exemplifies that its comedic premises and the people its lampooning are of such a specific time that a great amount of the comedy the show produced would just sail over the heads of Millennials (or younger). For SCTV, the lasting value is in the performances and how specific and weird they can get... but my recollection of attempting to rewatch the series is that it's far more misses than hits in that department.

A documentary like this produced for Netflix is puzzling for one main reason: they don't have SCTV on their streaming service. So you watch the documentary and then have nowhere to go to see more except, you know, Amazon or Youtube. It's pretty bad business and explains why they've been having trouble.  Also, not a single mention of Tony Rosato or Robin Duke who became utility players in the last season. Rude.

Cute. Fine, but not exciting. RIP Catherine, Joe, Harold and John.

The other bog standard type of documentary (besides the true crime one) is the profile documentary, which centers around an infamous person from the world of business or politics or medicine or whatever and tries to disseminate what made that person so notorious, besides the one thing they're famous for. Such is The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley.

I didn't engage with the Theranos story much before watching You Can See Everything, but as the infotainment panels in Starship Troopers would say "Would you like to know more?" My answer is "yes". This seemed the easiest access, and the second most infamous piece about the Liz Holmes/Theranos story outside the Netflix dramatized mini-series, The Dropout. 

Here, director Alex Gibney assembles some of the key players behind the scenes at Theranos both as employees and investors, as well as the reporters who were documenting their rise and fall. All of their stories are largely told in the context of Elizabeth Holmes being found guilty of fraud.  And so The Inventor is the story of Theranos but only as it pertains to Elizabeth Holmes' involvement in it. It barely touches upon Sunny Balwani and what influence he may have had on a teenage Elizabeth Holmes or the direction the company took. Obviously in the wake of You Can See Everything, there's more questions we know to ask now, but the largely white upperclass male talking heads seem to take some sort of glee about both lionizing and then tearing Holmes down. Yes, she may have been a master manipulator but this doc feels like it's got a Pepto Bysmol coating of misogyny in its stomach.

The first hour of the doc is the usual trumpeting of the person, but baked in a subtle, knowing layer of sarcasm. It speaks to Holmes' unusual rise and Theranos' big ideas and uses clips of Holmes' speeches and interviews to sell us on her "genius" before it starts stripping it all away and downright vilifying her.  It seems a additional layer of spite is dished out here because she is a woman in the unusual position of raising hundreds of millions of dollars for a theoretical product that might never have had a chance of working to the level of ideas behind it. In some ways, 7 years later, Holmes bilking all these rich, important white men out of their money seems almost...heroic.  Like, let her out, and let her do it again.  If only he lies hadn't resulted in casualties, it could be a somewhat different story.

It's not a great documentary, and even as a companion piece to You Can See Everything (acknowledging that it was not designed to be such), it's only seems to leave more questions unanswered.

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It's the most wonderful time of the year!!!

HALLMARKIE TIME!!!

I made a list, I checked it once and by the time Friday November 13th came around I was already behind on the Hallmarkie's I had flagged to watch for the season. But debuting this same Friday the 13th was a movie called My Christmas Cowboy which, despite all logic, and no real annotations, I had put some excited exclamations beside as the first big watch for the season.

The story opens in 2006 in Austin, with Meg and Billy, journalism students, tops in their class, being given a plum shot at delivering a story on the Austin news. The only thing is Meg gets a phone call, thinking it's her mom who she always talks to before she's about to present or perform, to find out her mom died, leaving Billy to carry on without her, and to gain the glory from all her hard prep work.

During this opening sequence, I didn't recognize the two leads playing Meg and Billy, but then the credits popped up over top of the sequence touting its stars: Amy Acker and Luke McFarlane. Like, fuckin'...come on! No wonder I flagged this thing as a must watch. Acker is a favourite performer from Angel and Person of Interest among others, as well as the star of an all-timer Hallmarkie Crashing Through The Snow. I was wondering why we hadn't seen Acker in one of these things in a half decade, only to see her pop up again, and with a co-writing credit. McFarlane, as well, has become not just a favourite Hallmark hunk, but a superb utility player outside the genre, in winning supporting comedic roles in Bros and Platonic among others.  This had to be good right?

Turns out not so much. 20 years later Billy is a national celebrity gossip reporter, not taken seriously enough to do real news, and while he seems to love flying by the seat of his pants (it's not quite ADHD, nor is he in "the bubble" where he's so handsome that it makes up for him being stupid) but it keeps getting him into trouble, and now the network is placing him on leave.  He decides to go back to Texas to visit his sister only to find she's moved from Dallas to the small town of Fern where they've enrolled their trouble youth in an Equine Therapy program.  

Turns out Meg is in Fern as well, where she's a producer for the local network news (Billy is shocked to find they have a local channel, as was I). When they meet, Meg is taken aback by his handsomness but remains cool to his presence. She holds some grudges against him. Billy, if he ever senses the tension, doesn't let on. He's not quite a human labradoodle...maybe more of a gleeful boxer, full of muscles and good intentions.

It also turns out that Meg's dad owns the horse ranch where Billy's nephew does his horse therapy, and they're holding their annual Reindeer Round-up celebration. It's a tradition Meg's mother started and she's damn well going to keep doing it for as long as she can. Her dad though keeps having troubles with horses, he's not a young man anymore. So in helping Meg with the round-up Billy gets close and she starts to warm up, until Billy's agent catches wind of what he's upto and brings a parade of national camera crews and all hell breaks loose. Meg's traumas rear up and throw Billy off her back for good.

Of course everything works out in the end. But it's a bad story. There's not really any Christmas involved aside from this "Round-up" (which, for all the hullabaloo is pretty tepid and lame when it comes right down to it), and the romance is pretty cold since Meg's supposed to be harboring a grudge. McFarlane's energy is the only think keeping the enterprise afloat, but his character is ill-defined, his wants and desires seem very simplistic and immediate. Meg on the other had is still moping about the death of her mom 20 years later (as is her dad... jeeezuz you two...obviously the Equine Therapy isn't helping...talk to a real therapist, not a horse).

It's not an entirely dour performance from Acker, and she's innately charming in a way that's difficult to hide, but her investment in her own script means that she sees something deeper in her character that's not otherwise obvious to the rest of us and it makes Meg a real drip to be around a lot of the time.

This movie went wrong by not just sticking with bickering news reporters with a past. The whole horse thing is so far removed from where they start the film and what their professions are, that it just seems out of place every time they're on the ranch. They also don't seem very Texan, like, at all.

If this were a manga it would be called "My Mom Died 20 Years Ago And I'm Still Sad (And I Want To Be  A Reporter But I'm Scared To Be On Camera").

So disappointing.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Masters of the Universe

2026, Travis Knight (Bumblebee) -- Amazon

OK, the last of the current Blockbusters in my drafts.

Kent. 

I was 14 when the toys came out, and not long after, the cartoon. This would have likely been the tail end when even me as uber-nerd could respectfully "play with toys". I don't recall clearly whether my younger brother started getting them, but I do recall very clearly being very turned off by the cartoon. It was clearly for kids, and clearly, to my egotistical teen mind, dumb. The muscles, the stupid toy names, the terrible Superman-Clark Kent comparison. This is all to say that the show and the toys are not "part of my childhood" and cannot be ruined like the toxic man-children say anytime someone does something interesting with their favourite properties. Nor can I be disappointed by the none-too-gentle mockery that abounds in the movie.

Unlike Kent, who found it fine-alright, I loved this movie! OK, maybe loved was a bit too strong; more like "was fully entertained". Loved is reserved for movies I know I will watch over and over, enjoying what I am watching, thoroughly. Superman is a recent example of "love" -- rewatched it yesterday while dealing with a sinus infection.

You do realize "yesterday" is subjective, as you are unlikely to press "Publish" the day after watching the movie aforementioned?

The movie opens with Adam (Nicholas Galitzine, The Sheep Detectives) and the background exposition. Eternia is the place of legend, a place of magic and wonder and beauty, spaceships and robots and a mythical creatures. His father Randor is the King (James Purefoy, Saint-Pierre), his mother Marlena is the Queen (Charlotte Riley, Edge of Tomorrow). Adam is a meek, mild mannered little (and we mean small) kid and is more interested in goofing around during combat training, with Duncan the man-at-arms, than becoming the brave & powerful soldier figure his father wants. 

And then Skeletor (Jared Leto, Morbius) and his army of freaks & monsters invades. So much for Eternia being a powerful nation-planet protected by Duncan's well-trained defenders; they fall almost instantly. Even Duncan (Idris Elba, The Wire) himself is defeated by the evil cyborg Trapjaw (not sure how he talks with that mouth, but sure) and King Randor is captured, while Queen Marlena & Adam escape to Castle Greyskull. Marlena has a plan to save her son, by sending him and the Sword of Power to her home planet -- Earth. She is aided by the sorceress .... er, The Sorceress.

This is where again the not-familiar-with-the-toys brain of mine kept wondering, "Wait, Castle Greyskull belongs to the Good Guys??" Yes, I know there are Reasons (!!!) but, still... at the very least, make some Skeletor familial connection to it. Maybe Randor and his people were colonists and that is all that remains of Skeletor's human-skull based culture?

And this opening tale turns out to be Adam drawling on & on to a (first) date about what he states is the utter truth. Seriously, this guy should be on a boat load of meds and look the part of a D&D Nerd, but instead he does his best Clark Kent impersonation and everyone falls for it, i.e. we can easily see the muscle-bound warrior under his dress shirt and chinos. Adam works in HR, and is admittedly good at it, but he constantly pisses his boss and coworkers off by being uber-focused on finding the Sword of Power. When he is not at work Googling said "sword of power", he is at home drawing and sketching like a DM working on his campaign. Seriously, the only reason I can think the movie doesn't constantly drop D&D references is to not dilute the IP. 

TBH I would hate his game as I was always a Fantasy Purist not liking the idea of mixing fantasy & scifi. Keep your peanut butter out of my chocolate please.

Then he gets a tip. He abandons his job, like literally walks out on a meeting with his boss effectively getting fired, and goes to a cool looking nerd shop. You would think that would be the first place he would look for a sword, but maybe Adam's nerd cred is low. He finds the sword as part of a Torak the Barbarian (Conan knockoff that was He-Man originator's early design ideas for this IP) display statue, and without any thought to consequences, he starts to yank & pull at the sword. Seriously, Adam is more than a little unhinged, but I guess he just imagines that as soon as the sword is in his hand, he will be magically transported back to Eternia where his father will have already defeated Skeletor and everything will be hunkey dorey.  Except he doesn't know the "magic words" and ends up running off with the sword.

Adam gets arrested. Not sure how the cops knew who he was but, sure, they pick him up. Does the roommate turn him in? The "witty banter" between the cops and Adam, who is still spouting on about being from another planet, is interrupted by the arrival of Beast Man, a big hairy monster that looks & moves like an ape had a dalliance with an orc. But that's OK because Adam's best friend from childhood, and daughter of Duncan the Man-at-Arms (or Manat, as some I know called him) Teela (Camila Mendes, Riverdale) shows up. Teela is all grown up and Adam notices... notices. She's also much more capable than he is, and she notices that. Just before big green & hairy can catch them, they jump into her spaceship and hyperdrive back to Eternia.

Eternia. The place ain't what Adam has been doodling in his sketchbook. I guess he forgot he escaped the place during an invasion? Or maybe, despite the harried escape he made, he expected his father and Duncan to have fought off Skeletor and his army? No matter, the world he remembers fondly is in ruins. Teela flies them to the "resistance hideout" in the beautiful natural caves below Eternia, far from the now Mordor-esque ruins of his homeland. 

And they are promptly tossed into jail cells by the resistance. 

You see, Teela was supposed to be on patrol, you know, doing resistance things, but as soon as the Sword of Power did ... something... sent a signal or whatnot, she made her way to the signal's origin to rescue it and/or Adam, before Skeletor could attain it. But that did not put her into the good books of the resistance leaders, including Mekaneck, Ram Man and Fisto (!!!). And, as it turns out, these are not their actual names, but the monikers placed upon them by 10 year old Adam. Fisto in particular is not thrilled by his ... name. And everyone is in on the inuendo. So, yeah, jail cell with a big Maid Robot and a stinky old man who is... yep, Duncan the Man-at-Arms, who has never recovered from his defeat and the fall of the Kingdom. He's a defeatist drunk, nothing but a failure in the eyes of his daughter.

This is not the MOTU movie meant for those upset about "their childhoods being ruined".

But that's alright cuz Maid Bot is actually Roboto the Combat Droid who just needs some gentle ego stroking and a combat unlock key, and she is back in the fight, barreling through walls with the heroes in tow. Which is good, because Trap Jaw has tracked them to the resistance's literal underground and the place is invaded. Adam at first tries to use his Powers of HR Mediation, but ... yeah, well. So, The Sorceress ("that bird was The Sorceress, I swear!") reminds Adam of his high-reverb incantation and with a good "I Have the Power!!!" (three exclamations required) his clothes are blown off and replaced with the Space Conan outfit. He whups Trap Jaw goodly and they all make their escape.

It is at this point that I find the recap-ing exhausting. Its at this point that I wonder if there was actually a plot going on. It is at this point where I remember I am terrible at writing about movies I enjoyed, especially when they didn't have a lot of ... depth.

I guess its because I didn't come into this movie caring about plot, I was just looking for some fun comic-booky cartoony action and effects and jokey banter. It really is just a bunch of said-satisfying scenes all strung together.

Skeletor. As a villain, he is great. As a character, he is great. As a "real person" he makes no sense. What even is he? Is there any biology in there among the boney skull head? No matter, Jared Leto embodies all the lunacy of this role. He cackles, he wise-cracks, he's menacing, he's creepy and he's fucking unhinged. Skeletor, that is, not Leto. Though.... 

Now, where were we? The above was written months ago. Life derailed, like Big Time, like Life Changed Forever derailed. And then "31 Days of Halloween" came along and... so, do I rewatch this movie, or finish it from faint recollections? Considering "faint recollections" used to be an actual motif of this blog, as typified by "I Saw This(!!)", I should just persevere onward.

So, yeah, where was I ? Adam did his chant, kicked Trap Jaw's ass (and jaw) and they all escaped.

So, yeah the mains escaped, but that meant all the other resistance members were captured by Skeletor's forces. And to remind us that Skeleton is Evil with a capital E (but is he, really?) he murders ... Moss Man (?) in front of the others with the "cool" names. Meanwhile, while escaping, we get the chase sequence through a magnificent forest environment, and they toss in some of the iconic toys, which I only know of because other MOTU fans went on and on and on about it. Sky Sled? OK, sure, whatever. The circling blades flying motorcycle was cool, if a little impractical.

This is when Skeletor tells everyone, via his Floaty Head in the Sky broadcast system that Adam's parents are still alive, and if the boy wants them back, he must give Skeletor the sword. In response, the Gang attacks Skeletor's castle (not Greyskull) of Snake Mountain. Wait, snakes? How are snakes connected to Skeletor and his monster army? Is he this universe's leader of Cobra?  Anywayz, attack is a failure, Daddy King Randor dies in a ceiling collapse and Adam reverts back to HR Guy after being defeated. Back into a jail cell -- these guys spend a lot of time behind bars. Meanwhile Skeletor is not having any luck with "the Power of Grayskull" (spelling correction now in place) and is being a dick-BF to Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie, Community). She suggests a magic ritual back at Grayskull, while all the jailed Gang once again escape from jail -- Cringer the scaredy green-purple tiger cat joins them.

The attack on Grayskull !

Adam does indeed succeed in getting back the sword, buuuuut Skeletor destroys it !!! And then he stabs Adam with the broken sword, sending him into a dying-visionquest-thing where Skeletor plays the part of Lumbergh asking for his TPS Report. This is one of the best most chuckle-worthy scenes in the movie, probably meant to piss off the Old Skool fanbase, especially with the off-colour comment about Adam's long sword dangling between his thighs. But no worries, HR Adam escapes the dream, pulls out the sword and discovers The Power of Grayskull was inside him all along. The sword reforms, Adam transforms again and the two duke it out, ending in Adam cracking Skeletor's ram-skull staff, killing the monster, or at the very least, reducing him back to just a perfectly formed skull.

Six months later, they have returned Eternia from its Mordor state, and all have a good laugh, standing in a circle, leaning back and guffawing.

Yah, months later, it does not stick. Its definitely a classic popcorn flick, in my repeated idiom of "one burp, and its gone" but I stand by my original statement, that I had a lot of fun watching it. But... enough to rewatch it? Nothing compels me to do so right now, which is odd, considering how many terrible movies I have chosen to do so with. What is up with that?  I wonder if there are enough of these "only seen once" flicks that I could turn into a rewatch mini-series? I guess I would have to confine it to those I claimed to enjoy, as opposed to just feeling "meh" about. Hmm...

And off he wanders into the void to ponder yet another "stupid boy project".

You Can See Everything

 2026, d. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim -in theatre

I was having lunch with some work friends earlier this week and late in the lunch we got to talking about movies. I brought up the phenomenal success of You Can See Everything - a near 3-hour documentary from arch comedian Nathan Fielder following Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks before she goes to prison - and my colleague asked with express disbelief "Why would anyone want to see that?"

Holmes was a notable success in the medical technology field for years, raising hundreds of millions of dollars for her at-home blood-sampling tool that could, she said, diagnose with near-complete accuracy almost anything a traditional blood sample at a traditional lab could. The claims were false, the company was investigated from a multitude of angles, and eventually Holmes and her co-founder/ex-boyfriend Sunny Balwani were indicted on wire fraud charges. 

It was a thing. 

Holmes became the subject of a popular HBO documentary The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley, and a very popular Hulu dramatized mini-series, The Dropout. People were already invested in this story, but also in Holmes. She is a brand, a commodity, and but also an unique curiosity of a person.

This documentary - wherein Fielder embeds himself with Holmes, her partner Billy Evans and their two children (one an infant, the other still a baby) in their ocean-side San Diego rental home for the five weeks leading up to her incarceration - is posited as Holmes and Evans idea.  They wanted Fielder, who has a unique and outsiders perspective on things (as evidenced in his reality/comedy series Nathan For You) to show a different narrative of who "Liz Holmes" is. And boy does it offer a different perspective.

Holmes has these massive, shocking blue eyes that are quite disarming. The majority of people's eyelids cover part of their iris, but Holmes' are always exposed, big blue discs with a bead of black in the centre that lead to a gaze that seems like its taking everything in. Her gaze is often accompanied by a blank smile, lower lip jutting out, teeth exposed, that seems both defensive and offensive at once.  The smile hiding something. The film spends a lot of time in immediate close-ups of Holmes' face as if it is trying to get a read on her.

Most documentary filmmakers aren't present in their films. Co-director Lance Oppenheim has only a small cameo in a re-enactment of an unfilmed meeting with Holmes and Evans before production, and a couple of name checks.  Fielder, however, is at the centre of the story, he has inserted himself into their lives and his presence shifts the narrative of this from pure doc into something else entirely.

A secondary narrative is constructed around Fielder's presence largely in the edit and post production. One of the first sequences in the film finds Holmes talking in the foreground, and in the background of the scene, through the blinds covering the window, we see the shape of a figure lurking. There's a cutaway to a close-up of that shape, and we can see it's Fielder, looking on with intensity. Throughout the film there are cuts to Fielder staring intensely at Holmes, and there are other scenes where Fielder and Holmes are staring intensely at one another. An early sequence, talking about how Holmes and Evans met, Fielder asks Holmes how she flirts, and staring intensely is her response. And they proceed to stare intensely at one another. 

The score make itself known from the film's early moments, bristling with intensity. At times it feels like Kane Parson's haunting, discomforting score from Backrooms and at other times it seems to be diving for TV movie melodrama, like Marcelo Zavos' in May December. Coupled with how the film edits the scenes and composes the shots of Fielder and Holmes' intense conversations/staring contests, it's implying that there is an attraction there, a connection, and, by way of the score, drama. There's also plenty of shots of Fielder leering at Evans, the implication of resentment or disgust is palpable. The reality is probably more like Fielder's intense staring is trying to parse out who Holmes really is, given her evasive responses to many of his questions, and her staring back at him is her investigating his responses. And those leers at Evans, well, they're absolutely justified (but that justification isn't fully explored until the back half of the movie after Holmes is imprisoned and visually absent from the film).

This is a film about narratives, the stories we tell to others and the stories we tell ourselves, and it's about how - and why - we tell those stories, and the outcomes we hope to achieve. Holmes' reasons for doing the documentary are different than Evans' reasons for doing the documentary. The story Fielder is trying to get out of Holmes is somewhat different than the story that he and Oppenheimer are telling with the film.  

The big thread is about the truth. Fielder's conversations with Holmes are often searching for the truth behind her words, past and present. She swears she never lies, and the film can't help but question whether that is the absolute truth, or if she's the greatest liar that's ever existed.  Is she manipulating everything, or is she incapable of manipulating anything or anyone.  Narratives and perspective are two sides, semantics becomes the linchpin as Fielder probes Holmes' claim that her device "can" do what she said. That she doesn't seem capable of distinguishing between use of "can" in the sense of "is able to now" versus "can" as in "has the potential to" is at the core of this film's inner conflict about its subject. Fielder shows Holmes the infamous Abbott and Costello routine "Who's on first" and Holmes just doesn't get it. He asks her "What is the name of the player on first" and she pauses, searching for the answer and says "I don't know" (that Fielder doesn't respond with "Third base" shows how invested in his investigation here, this is not a bit for him).

It's clear from this production that Holmes is neurodivergent. Evans keeps reiterating that her brain doesn't work like everyone else's, and that becomes very evident over the first hundred minutes of the film. It's also clear that Fielder is neurodivergent in a different way that makes him almost the perfect person to interact with Holmes in such an immediate and intimate capacity. He has no reluctance to ask her or Evans difficult questions.  Holmes often doesn't have an answer for him. Evans is often evasive, elusive, or defensive.

The second half of the film, after Holmes is imprisoned, picks up two years later and becomes very much about Evans and his impact on Holmes. Continuing with the manufactured narrative that Fielder and Holmes have this deep connection, and that Fielder has maybe fallen for Holmes, they dive into just who this man in Holmes' life is, and who he has become in the years she's been locked away from the world. He presents as a stone cold manipulator who has taken control of a psychologically vulnerable woman, and has found not as much a partner that needs protecting but a brand, a commodity, and a unique thinker he can readily exploit. Holmes, in many ways, presents like a member of a cult, but it's a cult of one and Evans is her cult leader. 

And so the question of You Can See Everything does, legitimately, become "is Elizabeth Holmes innocent"? Or perhaps not innocent, but "an innocent". Seeing how Evans manipulates and controls her (it's present in a very early scene where she is whisking eggs and Evans takes the bowl from her, whisks the eggs and hands the bowl back to her, with Fielder drawing attention to this situation that becomes a very specific metaphor for their relationship) it's very possible that Holmes' relationship with Sunny Balwani was very much the same (he was 37 when he met her as an 18-year-old). But it never abandons the doubt that Holmes very well could be the manipulator herself, the ultimate liar and con woman.

The film twists and twist and twists its narrative, and its questioning of narratives. In the second half there are extensive re-enactments of unfilmed events pertaining to interactions between Fielder and Holmes and Evans. These we have to trust as the truth, but also, given the context of the film, we absolutely have to question their truth. Even at times Fielder has to question his recollection of the conversations, who said what and how. Memory influences narrative, and our memories can be edited to suit a narrative we desire more than the truth.

I haven't watched Nathan For You, a show where Fielder, a comedian, offers his services to small businesses in trouble to help resuscitate their business, and his outlandish schemes are certain to fail. I have a difficult time with comedy that is fucking with the public, where people are taking the encounter as genuine, but it's all an act. As an often trusting/gullible person myself, deceit is something I frown upon. So I didn't know whether Fielder would be "in persona" here, and I couldn't tell at first if this idea of Fielder being obsessed with Holmes was something he was doing in the moment or just part of the edit (it becomes pretty clear it's the latter). Given that Holmes is a criminal and Evans is a real piece of shit, I was perfectly okay with the idea of someone coming in and messing with them, but that's genuinely not what Fielder is doing here. He's legitimately trying to find the truth, find answers, while also being as reservedly provocative as he can.

Oppenheim released his first narrative film, the excellent Primetime, last month, but is primarily known as a documentary filmmaker. While Fielder is the secondary face of the picture, Oppenheim is the steady hand behind it. Oppenheim brings to this big time documentary chops, with excellent, impactful coverage throughout, and the stylish, tone defining editing seen in Primetime is even more palpable here (the sequence of Fielder leaning over the back of the couch Holmes is sitting on while rocking a baby seat with her foot while they talk in a hard whisper to each other has three different compositions, each of them redefining the scene, and each conveying a slightly different narrative).

There are many parts to this I'm leaving out, including a delicious meta-narrative that further calls out the concept of the stories we tell and how we tell them, and how they are received. Everything that you see in You Can See Everything asks you to question what it is you are seeing, because even if you could see everything, you still can't trust everything that you see.

It is a brilliant, energizing, compelling, maddening, delightful and thought provoking experience. You don't have to be at all steeped in Theranos lore, or have any real prior knowledge of Elizabeth Holmes as a person (I did not watch The Inventor nor The Dropout, nor really follow the Holmes/Theranos narrative at all), the film is a character study, and Holmes is a fascinating character, her situation is fascinating, Fielder is a fascinating presence to be injected into the situation, and Evans is a controlling, manipulative asshat trying to control everything around him (and the experienced professionals involved don't give him an inch).

KWIF: four shiny new things (and one old one)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. After the cold and sinus infection took me down for a couple weeks, I managed to get to the theatre four times in 6 days. I still feel like I'm quite far behind on new releases that I actively want to see in theatre, but still, progress is progress.

This Week:
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (2026, d. Bassam Tariq - in theatre)
Wicker (2026, d. Alex Huston Fischer, Eleanor Wilson - in theatre)
Whalefall (2026, d. Brian Duffield - in theatre)
Primetime (2026, d. Lance Oppenheim- in theatre)
Airport 1975 (1975, d. Jack Smight - dvd)

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Way back in July 2019 at San Diego Comic Con, Mahershala Ali, fresh out of two Oscar wins in three years, appeared on the Hall H stage during the Marvel Cinematic Universe showcase, and announced he would be starring in a new Blade movie in the title role. Screenplay after screenplay was written or rewritten year over year, while director after director came and went on the project before it was officially shelved this year. One of those directors was Bassam Tariq, who made a few well-received independent films before Marvel tapped him, and then, I suppose, frustrated him. In some ways being tapped by Marvel early in your career, but then leaving them before producing a troubled film seem invariably better for one's career than actually making and releasing a Marvel film. It drives curiosity. Tariq would spend two years working on the film. Ali spent six.

What's clear from Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is that something clicked with Ali and Tariq and they really wanted to work together. Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, isn't, however, a "what if...?" situation. It's not a Blade analog. It's not a film that will bring to mind Marvel storytelling or characters, although there is definitely one part of the film where Ali uses swords and daggers in a many-on-one fight that signals just what an Ali-as-Blade fight sequence might have looked like in Tariq's hands.

In Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother Ali plays Latif, a ... hitman of sorts. He is an ex-Marine (maybe?) who takes jobs for money, but he's selective about the jobs he does. They have to be justified and leave him with peace of mind. They have to be threats to his Muslim community, and the threats seem like they may be as much within his community as outside of it. 

We first meet Latif mid-job, mid-fight. It's gruelling, but Latif is big, powerful, and skilled (Ali got very swoll, no doubt in training for Blade) and gets the better of his opponent. And then his phone rings.

Latif's wife passed away, leaving him with a teenage daughter, Fatiha (Adia), pre-teen son Qadir (Jahleel Kamara) and a baby daughter Khadijah at home. As he mourns with his family and tries to reassess his life without his wife, his handler, Mike Mahmoudi (Laith Nakli) keeps trying to get in touch, in increasingly aggressive and disruptive ways. His family doesn't know about his other life, but his mentor and imam Abdul Malik (Giancarlo Esposito) does and warns that the path Latif has chosen may cost him everything.

Khadijah's supply of breast milk is dwindling, and she cannot seem to stomach formula, so the film finds Latif in search of breast milk for his baby. He wants to provide. I didn't even know there was such a thing as a "milk bank", which is awesome, if you can access it, which Latif cannot. Eventually in his desperate quest, Mike finds him, and with thinly veiled threats, forcefully asks him to take a job. Mike's nephew Hatty (Abubakr Ali) has gotten rich off of making porn, but a neo-con group of religious wing-nuts made up of largely ex-soldiers led by the gold-toothed pastor Hwan Yoon (John Cho) is on a mission from God to punish human traffickers and destroy the pornography business, and has Hatty in their sights. Mike wants Yoon killed. Latif refuses.

The second act of the film finds Latif on his desperate quest to feed his baby while fending off not just Mike but having inadvertently gotten on the radar of Hwan Yoon's church. Things become increasingly severe as his family start becoming targets from both sides.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother opens with intensity and holds at that level with occasional spikes of respite or escalation throughout. It does feel like riding a knife's edge for nearly two hours. I think of something like You Were Never Really Here as a comparable film in tone, but Joaquin Phoenix's character in that film is dark, brooding and lonely, driven by a need to do some sort of good in the world, while Ali here is dark and brooding, and while surrounded by community and family he's still alone, and he's driven by a belief that he's doing good in the world. Religion, however, plays a huge part in this film, and a cornerstone to Latif's background is he was once a teacher of the Quran to youths (including Hatty), and he tries to instill Muslim values in his kids, unaware that Fatiha is in full teenage rebellion, flirting with Mormonism. The kicker is that for all his teachings and all his connections to the mosque and community, Latif seems like a lapsed Muslim, a man who maybe doesn't truly believe anymore.

It's hard not to see the intention in the way Tariq presents the Muslim faith here. He's not trying to put a layer of gloss over it or, really, in any way preach about it or claim it is perfect (there are pains here to show that just like any religion and any community, there are people who use and abuse the community for their own purposes), but there's a stark juxtaposition against Hwan Yoon's cult of guns and violent righteousness (and I had to appreciate that the cult was not just white men, but quite diverse, if still laden with nutjobs).  That juxtaposition extends between a "church" that kills for its beliefs and Latif's same ethos.  There are religious allegories and metaphors here, most lost on me yet did not diminish the impact of the story being told. 

This isn't an action movie, though there are sequences that really hit hard. It is far more a character study of a man reeling from loss, a man at a crossroads examining everything he believes himself to be and what he believes in, a man in his most desperate hour,  and a father who is only just learning how to be a parent.  

Ali is the best scene partner to everyone on screen...he has presence no matter what he's doing at any moment, and he knows it, so he gives his scene partners so much space and elevates every peformance around him. I'm reminded of One Battle After Another somewhat in the moments between Tariq and Fatiha, the most important relationship in the film, the fact that Tariq's life choices have impacted Fatiha so severely that she faces difficulties in finding her own place in the world...and eventually Tariq's other life comes crashing down on his family and Fatiha's really the only one who understands what her father truly is, and the realization is so beautifully performed by Adia, just an exceptionally emotional, deep and raw performance that signals the arrival of a tremendous new talent.  I think a version of this story told entirely from Fatiha's perspective would be incredible.

The only downside to Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (besides my lack of familiarity with Muslim traditions and proverbs) was the sound mixing. I'm sure it's fine for the average person but the mix of Ali's low grumble, the ambient atmospheric noise (within the film, not the theatre) and the terrific Son Lux soundtrack made it hard to hear a lot of the dialogue (including a very key line delivery at the film's climax)... even still I found it enriching and impactful.  

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother's denouement is one of the most surprising things I've seen in a good long while. The way this film closes tells us what's most important in life and it's so counter to the traditional hero's journey. It's pretty marvelous (ahem).

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It was only days before seeing Wicker in theatre that I even came to know of its existence. An ad for it popped up on YouTube and, well, it was bizarre and alluring in all the right ways. The cast - Olivia Coleman, Alexander Skarsgaard, Peter Dinklage, Elizabeth Debicki - captured my attention immediately -all are favourites- and then the man made of wicker presented himself ever so briefly and I wanted to see more.

Wicker's trailer promised a whimsy, fantasy, sex and gender politics, and the film delivered on all fronts if not always consistently. 

It's true that there is a whimsical nature to Wicker but the playful, fanciful tone of the film is underpinned with splinters threatening to prick you with every movement. For every spark of joyful glee, there's a devilish smirk as the film makes abrupt turns or jagged revelations that change continually change the texture of what your watching.

The fantasy of the film is two fold. The setting of the film isn't pure fantasy but at the same time, the village it takes place in is insular and relatively isolated, and the denizens largely seem content with it being that way. It's hard to pin down a time period for the film, but it's before electricity, everyone has a job to do (well, every man has a job to do) and they are devoid of proper names. They are called their profession... Fisherwoman, Baker, Tailor or, for most women, their identity is tied to their husband, like Tailor's Wife.  At first I thought when people called Olivia Coleman "Fisherwoman" that it was meant as a pejorative. The town folk look down on this unmarried, older woman who is completely self sufficient and largely uninterested in the societal norms and pleasantries (it's also clear she's faced a life of derision and has built up a resilient defensive shell and a barbed tongue in response).

The other fantasy, though, is obviously the center of the film. Basket Weaver (Dinklage) can do magic with his strands of wicker. Fisherwoman, having accidentally been signalled the next to be married (and ridiculed by the town in response) asks Basket Weaver to make her a husband, just to mock the town's patriarchal rites and structures.  But Basket Weaver makes a true man, a man who will look at a woman as an individual, not a possession. A man who will love and care for his partner, and be content with his life only if she is content with hers. The Wicker Husband (Skarsgaard) and Fisherwoman do marry, and Fisherwoman finds herself changed with the realization that there is an alternative to the life she has been leading, as well as an alternative to the life the people of the village attempt to enforce.

One such enforcer is Tailor's Wife (Debicki), who is the defacto town magistrate through sheer sternness and force of will. She's a sour woman who, like Fisherwoman, is disgruntled with the patriarchy of her town, and displeased having to defer to her husband. But that is the town way, so the only thing that gives her purpose is enforcing the village rite and traditions. Fisherwoman bucking in the face of those traditions, doing what she cannot, only angers her more, she's full of resentment. 

Wicker Husband breeds a lot of resentment. It's clear that Fisherwoman is being satisfied by her husband, a generous and selfless lover, so the women are curious while the men feel emasculated. Though sex is at the core of the film's trailer, it's just one of the facets through which this film examines the patriarchy. Feminine pleasure may get more attention in the post Sex and the City years but still the male gaze dominates our media.

Though just touched upon briefly, Wicker escapes the "born sexy yesterday" trope and does reinforce that Wicker Husband does have agency, and was not built to serve Fisherwoman, he actually chose to partner with her.

Wicker is a pseudo-Frankenstein tale that refuses to engage with Frankenstein tropes. It could have leaned into those horror roots, but it's got its own plans for how the story of Fisherwoman, her Wicker Husband and the rotten village play out and it doesn't have any interest in the same old thing. Instead it looks to fables and fairy tales, teaching all the characters of the film a lesson or two (but each to their own lesson). It is based off a 2008 short story "The Wicker Husband" by Ursula Wills, which was written as a fairy tale.  (The story apparently had only been self-published online prior to the film rights being acquired, which is itself fascinating how things can be discovered anywhere, anytime.)

There are many delights to Wicker, but the greatest is the design of Wicker Husband. WETA Workshop's visualization of the character is so intricate and gorgeous, the details of his face, his hands, his body are just magnificent. The sound design, every move of Wicker Husband elicits a creak or a groan from the weave as the reeds compress or expand (yes, including that part of him).

It is a romantic, funny, sharp and pointed film that's probably the biggest, out-of-nowhere surprise of the year.

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Stop me if you've heard this one before... a guy goes out for a dive to recover his father's remains, only to get snagged by a giant squid and sucked into a whale.

I know right?  It sounds so unique and exciting.

And it is. And it isn't.

Whalefall finds Austin Abram's Jay Gardner returning to his coastal Californian home town from college (in landlocked Ohio) for the first time in a while. It's been a year since his father, terminally ill, committed suicide by returning himself to the ocean. Jay gathers with his mom (Elizabeth Shue) and sisters (Jane Levy, Emily Rudd) where it's clear that everyone except Jay is coping with the loss. 

Jay's dad Mitt (Josh Brolin) was an expert diver. He was a whale spotting tour guide as well as a bit of an eco warrior. He saw Jay as the heir to his knowledge of the world, but also the heir to his perspective on life. He wanted Jay to be aware of the world, and how to live in sort of harmony with it. Mitt didn't just respect the ocean, he worshipped it. Like any father who can't see past their own perspective, their own desires for their children, he bullied Jay into learning all the things he wanted him to learn, never taking the time for Jay's interests or to listen to Jay's perspective. It was a fraught relationship and despite Jay's desire to find connection, Mitt could never seem to stop the noises in his brain from reaching his mouth long enough to make one.

A comment from his sister about the empty coffin at Mitt's grave site leads Jay to the idea to go for a dive to find even one bone of his father's remains, even after being made aware that Mitt jumped intending to go down off the shelf into the inky blackness where Jay couldn't reach him.  Yadda yadda yadda Jay winds up inside a whale.

There was an excellent, as yet unfinished comic book mini-series from (woah) nearly 20 years ago called Gutsville by Simon Spurrier and Frazer Irving about a whole town living inside the belly of a whale. I loved that story and still hope it is completed one day. Of course any story of man being swallowed by a whale is a spin off the biblical Jonah and the whale...or at best a riff on Pinocchio...but director Brian Duffield (No One Will Save You) has no designs on high fantasy inside a cavernous stomach.  No, he's much more interested in the gooey, fleshy, pulsating innards of earth's largest mammals, in the case a sperm whale.

Whalefall has two stories to tell. It has the tale of Jay's survival inside a great beast that has very little awareness that he's in there, and the story of Jay's relationship with his father. I have seen stories about people being inside of beasts before, as well as stories about the challenges between fathers and sons...so as much as Whalefall presents some familiarity, it also present a whole lot I've just never seen before in both of its plots.

Having complicated a complicated relationship with your father, or being a father and having a complicated relationship with your children (or having step-kids who have complicated relationships with their fathers) is definitely not unfamiliar ground for me and if it's done well, I'm 100% in for such exploration. I have to say, it is done quite well here. I could feel Jay's frustration with Mitt. I know that frustration. But at the same time, the movie gives space for Mitt too, not to express his frustration at Jay ... well, he does do that a lot, but examining that Mitt's frustration is as much about his own inability to escape his own trappings, his own nature, his own learned behaviour.  But it's not what everyone came to Whalefall to see.

And so being inside the mouth and various stomach chambers of the whale is a fucking ordeal.  And it's intense and mesmerising, just fully captivating, with no sense at all of what's to come next or what the plan is to get out of this situation.  And all the biological functions inside, well, I have no idea what's truth and what's just what looks funky on screen, but it's all really, really awesome...

...until it isn't.

The reality is there's a limited amount of space, and a limited amount of resources inside the body of a whale, so it really makes MacGyvering a way out of the situation pretty hard. It also limits the amount of interaction Jay can have with his environment, and so there's only so much time to be filled with the central premise. The rest has to be more emotional, more personal.  

So where Whalefall falls down is in its third act. For the first two acts, the film jumps between Jay's present and his past. Lost-style, there are kind of memory triggers, or blackouts that precipitate a flashback. It's a familiar formula and it works well. As much as, yes, the flashbacks interrupt the most exciting part of the film, they also provide a grounding tether to this fantastical situation.

The third act, though, attempts to merge these two threads, to get metaphysical, to get sort of spiritual, where Jay, defeated, and running low on oxygen starts communicating with the whale, and the whale communicates back to him, but as Mitt.  It's supposed to be an emotional catharsis, it's supposed to fully bridge the gap between these two stories, but it had the opposite effect on me, putting more and more distance between my connection to either story. This merger makes the survival tale that was grounded by the emotional story feel far fetched because the emotional story itself takes on a fantasy element. And the survival of the third act becomes more about the survival of the sperm whale, less about Jay.

Abrams, in survival mode for the second time this year, ably carries the weight of this film, even with absence the lighter touches he's brought to every other role I've seen him in. He's perhaps an unlikely superstar, but I predict his 30's are going to be huge for him.

I really liked Whalefall but was also pretty disappointed by it. These two emotions have no choice but to coexist. It's unlike anything I've ever seen before, except that it is.

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In the 1970's the retro aesthetic of the 1950's seemed like an entirely different society and culture, completely disconnected from the times. In the 1990's the retro '70's vibe seemed so deep in the past, something we had scrubbed from our memories, only for the disco era to come screaming back with a vengeance. The 2000's were 20-ish years ago, and it still doesn't feel like we're that disconnected from the times. But Lance Oppenheim's look at one of the stranger cultural artifacts of the era, saturated in pastiche, reminds us that we've moved a fair distance away.  But also not that far.

Primetime is largely shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio, black space flanking either side of the image on screen. Oppenheim uses (or simulates) many different camera formats throughout the procession of the film, including home video recorders, mini-cameras strapped to guns, and all manner of TV cameras. With only one watch it's hard to pick out specifically what the formatting is telling us, and whether the late-stage scene of a over-the-shoulder camera being dropped in a swimming pool (and not retrieved) is some form of message about network TV drowning in "reality TV".

The subject of Primetime is the trashy, gawking 2000's reality TV show To Catch A Predator, wherein a crew behind the scenes bait "sexual predators" found in chatrooms on the internet into thinking they are young teenagers interested in having encounters with gross older men. Once on the hook online, they're drawn to a location to have a physical encounter where they're pounced on by one-time journalist Chris Hansen, who then reads excerpts from their on-line chats and he publicly shames them before being tackled by police upon exiting the premises.

There was always something gross about To Catch A Predator, always something disquieting and uncomfortable about it. Not just the awareness that there are men like that out there, men ready to exploit the naivite of a teenager, but that there's people, and a network who are exploiting these exploiters for profit. Capitalism has no scruples. The show also blurred the lines of journalism and law enforcement and what responsibilities journalists actually had.

Primetime stars Robert Pattinson as Hansen, or, rather, a version of Hansen. Pattinson is delivering a performance, portraying a man who is driven by ego and prestige and a self-deluded belief that he is, somehow, helping make the world a better, safer place. It's a magnificent transformation that he makes a full meal out of, bathing in the glory of his accomplishments, but always falling in the shadow of contemporaries like Stone Phillips.

While Hansen is the lead character, Merritt Weaver co-stars as Hansen's producer, Andie Bender. Andie and Chris have a professional relationship and little else, but both fuel each other's ambitions, and neither is about to check the other for going too far. Andie is as wrapped up in the ratings race to take down Lost as Chris is. Where Hansen doesn't even consider the ethics of what they're doing, Bender seems to know that the work their doing is trash and morally questionable, but fully admits to not caring.

Skyler Gisondo plays "Decoy Dan" Plum, an actor hired to be the "teen" greeting the potential predator at the door. Where Chris is kind of unknowable as a person, keeping anything close to real at a distance in this story, and Andie is all in on her success-by-any-means, Dan just has ambitions as an actor to get his SAG card. He takes his role seriously, prepping for it as if every encounter he's going to have is a mini-play, partially scripted but with some improvisation.  Dan is the heart of this very darkly comic movie, but even he falls prey to the darkness. There are moments that pull him out of the black ink he's fallen in and Gisondo plays those moments of conflict and turmoil perfectly.

Oppenheim isn't interested at all in investing the audience in the success or failure of To Catch A Predator within the film, which is counter to the usual rhythms of these types of media based-on-a-true-story productions. Usually there's some investment into the health of the show, but Oppenheim is more interested in the toll that the show takes on the people behind the scenes.  

Primetime, as well as To Catch A Predator, hits its peak when they find a white whale, someone in the government...besides a celebrity there could be nothing more scandalous. The result of this encounter are pretty dark, and ends both the show and the film, save for a small coda.  The film is uber stylish, and quite propulsive, but starts to sputter a bit at the top of the third act, as it circles some of the character beats it's previously examined. There was more meat to be had in the fallout of the white whale but no room left to explore it.

For such a dark and twisted subject matter, Primetime is quite lively and even shockingly fun.

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By the time the sequel to 1970's Airport came along five years later, Irwin Allen had perfected the disaster movie formula with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. Derived from a novel, Airport had quite different ambitions, positing itself as much a procedural as a disaster flick. Airport 1975 had no such background, and no such ambitions. It wanted to use and abuse the disaster movie formula as much as possible.

And so we get the motley crew of passengers aboard a Boeing 747 red-eye from Washington to Los Angeles, complete with the most briefest of introductions and character defining moments.  It should be an uneventful flight, but a weather front across the western seaboard forces the plane into an early landing at Salt Lake City. 

Unfortunately for them, a small single engine personal plane is also in their airspace, and its pilot is in the midst of having a heart attack. He loses control and grazes the side of the cockpit, tearing a hole open. The co-pilot is sucked out into the open air, a console falls and kills the navigator, and the captain is blinded in the collision. It's up to flight attendant Nancy Pryor (Karen Black) to take control of the situation and hopefully find their way to safety. The encroaching mountains aren't going to be much help though.

A disaster film has three parts - the introductions, the calamity, and the fallout. If one of these fails the other two can prop it up no problem. If two fail, then the third had better be good. Here, the opening introduction to our players is pretty weak, mostly glossed over. The disaster itself is especially terrible -- the image of the very-clearly-a-prop-dummy being sucked out of the plain is hilariously awful, and our only exterior view of the collision is on the poster -- but once the film settles into the procedural aspect of getting Nancy to fly the plane (while the passengers start coming to the realization of the full severity of their situation) it's pretty gripping. And then they attempt a mid-air insert of a pilot from a military helicopter into the cockpit through the hole. Insanity.

Half kinda trashy, half genuinely entertaining, Charlton Heston is kinda sleepwalking through his part, and Karen Black plays Nancy a little too hysterical for my liking, but overall it generally does work. George Kennedy needlessly reprises his role as Joe Petroni (though he seems to have gotten a pretty big promotion since the last one), but adds the most tenuous of connections to the first film...as if that really mattered.

31 Days of Halloween: Exit 8

2025, Genki Kawamura (A Hundred Flowers) -- download

Kent saw and wrote about this way back in June. 

Like Backrooms the real horror comes from the existential dread of a strange & impossible situation. When you are lost in the woods, its not that there is actually an animal or a monster stalking you that leaves you trembling, but being in a strange situation that you are out of control of. For anyone chased by an animal in the woods, I apologize for not including you.

The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya, Gantz), who they never name, is a young guy on the subway on the way to his temp job, when he spies a salaryman berating a mother of a crying child. Like everyone else, he does nothing. He is not Hornclaw. Not long after, he gets a call from his GF -- she is at the hospital, where she has found out she is pregnant. Neither are sure what happens next, but his panicked hesitations are not reassuring for either of them. He makes his way to the exit -- is he still heading to his job, or... ?

It doesn't matter. The exit never comes. What happens is a ... game ? Something cosmically terrifying has trapped him in an endless loop. He walks the corridor, sees the same things, including another man walking in the opposite direction, only to loop around to the beginning. If he changes direction, so does the loop. Then he notices the "instructions" -- to reach the actual Exit, he has to make note of "anomalies", if he sees one, he must turn around, if none, continue forward for another loop. If he makes the right choice, he sees a number ticking up; if he makes the wrong choice, his loops are reset.

Easy enough right? For anyone playing video games, they are very very familiar with this idea. In games, you usually die, before reloading and "awakening" at an early point, having to remember what you need to do, to progress forward, before once again hitting new ground, and having to make another choice. Either each loop, The Lost Man has to judge the anomaly as to whether it actually is one, or not. Some are easy, some are... deceptive. Eventually he makes enough mistakes, resets enough time, that he is losing his mind. Not sure why; this isn't a time loop movie where you can spend a lifetime in the loop. If you did it right, you could probably do the whole 8 loops in  under and hour. Except, its not that easy.

As The Lost Man's mind frays, we switch to the perspective of The Walking Man (Yamato Kochi, The Samurai and the Prisoner), who turns out to not just be an NPC in The Lost Man's loops, but also a Main Character of his own story, his own looping conundrum. And in tow, he has The Boy (Naru Asanuma, The Night After the Divorce). We get to see him already deep in his loops, slowly beginning to come apart as he misses anomaly clues, and finally succumbing to the despair and running headlong into a false Exit, only to become the NPC that The Lost Man meets.

Despite my nature to attribute the loops to a video game, which I feel could be traversed methodically, there is the horror. The "game" doesn't want things to be easy for you; it wants you to miss anomalies, it wants you to become unhinged, to feed its own world. The Lost Man sees horribly mutated rats, he sees blood, he is engulphed in a flood.

And then there are the connections to their lives. These people are not stuck in here for random reasons; there seems to be a reason, a kind of purgatory for their failings in life. The Lost Man is hesitant about his coming child, The Walking Man was likely connected to the alluring High School Girl (Kotone Hanase, A Far Shore), an anomaly who breaks his routine. The Boy had run away from his mother. They are all tenuous plot points, not really explored but play out nicely. 

Lke Backrooms this movie is about the space inhabited. The tiles, the flickering lights (especially the ones The Lost Man doesn't notice are all scattered about, his first, and missed anomaly) the fixtures on the walls. The banality of the absolute mundane can so easily become unnerving; like a forest can become scary as soon as its not so innocent, the creaking of the trees, the cries of distant animals (BTW, that usual scary cry? its a fox).

Like Kent, I really enjoyed the movie. And yes, it was, in fact, based on a video game. 

31 Days of Halloween: Don't Move

2026, Maclain Nelson (Haul Out the Halloween) -- download

Holey Crow. I wasn't imagining things, when I commented, "This feels like what a PG-rated horror movie made by Hallmark would be..." 

Nelson is literally a director of Hallmark movies.

I knew it was going to be low-budget, but honestly, I was hoping for something along the lines of Tremors and if "sharks" are included in our monster roster for the last few years, then definitely "spiders" are. I chose not to watch the American remake of Vermines, but this looked like it could be some fun, and it had Lyndsy Fonseca.

Whoof. It was quite the stinker.

It starts on a surprisingly grim note, having Megan Forrester (Fonseca, Agent Carter) lose her son and husband to a fire in a carnival haunted-house ride. The two literally burn to death before her eyes, and she is left with scars to remind her of it forever. One Year Later, good Church Going Megan is being pestered by Pastor Rizzo (Tom Cavanagh, Ed) to join them on the yearly camping trip. She's hesitant, as only a year has passed and she is still steeped in grief, but the very talkative and friendly pastor finally convinces her. The other campers are typical low-budget casting, as in there are almost none, and include the pastor's daughter Emma (Hunter King, A Royal Corgi Christmas), her new BF Ryan (Joseph Lee Anderson, MacGruber), the Winstons and their grandson Connor, and all are being led into the woods by "accomplished" woodsman Paul DeLuca (Rob Riggle, Code 3). Oh, lets not forget Emma's ex-BF Ricky Vargas (Russel "Russ" Vitale, Trap), who convinces the pastor to let him come along.

Now, first sign of this being Hallmarkie level low-budget should have been that So Fucking White Xian character building. Emma's ex Ricky is a "gang thug drug dealer" and Latino, while her new BF is also a "gang banger" and Black. The Winstons are black, so they can die first. Ricky wants on the trip because he has to smuggle drugs somewhere, but the plot is so fucking thin, its never explained what he is trying to do. Sure, he can get he heroin onto the Church Bus but.... what then? Is he meeting other thugs in the woods? They never say. It's just "Ricky is a drug dealer," and "Ryan is big and violent."

And yes, so very very Xian. And nice. Everyone is so fucking NICE. Emma, who dates only gang bangers, is still a Good Girl whom her daddy loves and trusts, and ... well, she's not rebellious at all, beyond who she dates? She even sings campfire hymns with him. Even Ricky, who is only pretending, so as to come along, is still nice to everyone, especially when he gets to become the hero. OK, Ryan is a bit of a one-note jerk, but that's it.

So, being comedic, DeLuca is only played as a joke. But he's not funny. Not at all. He is considered a woodsy guy but gets them lost, immediately. Not sure why Rizzo didn't catch that. Anywayz, they end up in a remote stretch of woods where there is a Giant Spider stalking them. The problem is that the thin grove of trees they are in could never withstand the weight of a Giant Spider hiding high in its canopy. The trees are all barely 10 years old, thin spindly things. And the audio foley they use to represent the spider is.... all jangly and mechanical sounding. Anywayz, it runs extension-cord thick spiderwebs everywhere which INSTANTLY draws it to them but which they can step over easily. And when we get to the CGI portion of the movie, it was likely done on someone's PC, and not by someone who knows what they are doing, nor someone who knows how a spider's mouth look. If this was late-90s Stargate I wouldn't have been so petty about the effects, but ... even Asylum does better.

We accept the lack of dialogue or characterization in Hallmarkies because that is left to the Love Interest story; they are generally the only characters who say anything beyond a few words. If this was an experiment to apply the Low Effort of such film making, to another genre (as it has been successful in the Cozy Murder Mystery) it has failed. At the very least, I can say the movie didn't pull its punches in killing off the cast, like a Good Horror Movie should do, and Fonseca does give it a good God Fearing job, but.... whoof, just whoof.