KsMIRT: remember September (part 1)

KsMIRT=Kent's Month In Reviewing Television, where each month (or whenever) Kent steps through the TV series he completed watching recently-ish as relayed in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format that's definitely been trademarked by him. Yup, sure has. 

This month:
Lanterns Season 1 (HBO, 8/8 episodes)
Ted Lasso Season 4 (AppleTV,  10/10 episodes)
Sugar Season 2 (Apple TV, 8/8 episodes)

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Lanterns Season 1
Created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindleof and Tom King

The What 100: In 2016, Hal Jordan is the Earth's Green Lantern, a superhero powered by a ring that can do whatever the mind and the willpower of its bearer compels it. A Green Lantern is like a space cop, patrolling his sector of space, and protecting the planets within its sector from external threats. Hal Jordan's biggest threat is John Stewart, the man he's been tasked by his superiors to train as his replacement. John has been training his whole life for the gig, but Hal is not ready to give it up. Things only get more complicated when an alien presence is discovered in a small Nebraska town, leading Hal to believe there's maybe a bigger threat than Stewart afterall. Stewart, meanwhile, has to navigate his traumatic childhood programming, his military training, and requests from multiple angles to betray Hal's trust. Good thing neither of these men know fear. Oh, and in 2026, Hal Jordan is found in the same small town with a bullet in his head.

1 Good: I'll start with the good, and build up to the great. There's any number of ways to handle the Green Lantern mythos. It's existed for over 60 years has been built and rebuilt and twisted and expanded and contracted any number of ways over that time. But there's only been one stab at the Lantern mythos in live action before, and it was a real, real dud. A dud that left such a bad taste in pretty much everyone's mouths that even comic nerds haven't really been clamoring for another attempt. But with Damon Lindleof (Lost, Watchmen) in the mix behind the scenes (with my favourite comics writer for the past decade, Tom King also on staff, both sharing co-creator status with Chris Mundy), I knew that Lanterns wasn't going to be your typical comic-book adaptation. The early word was they were looking at True Detective as a template for how to structure the show, meaning that this version of Green Lantern was going to be pretty down to Earth. So the trick would be, for budgetary purposes, to keep it grounded but also keep it engaging. And for the most part, they succeeded. Let's get into a bit of the why...and why not....

1 Great: The cast here is everything.

Aaron Pierre as John Stewart is magnificent. While Hal Jordan has been kind of the primary Green Lantern in comics since the 60's, John Stewart was the most visible Green Lantern throughout the Justice League era of the late 1990s and 2000s. He has had his moments in the comics as well, but it was in animation that he became the Green Lantern to many. Pierre's performance here takes inspiration from the Stewart of Justice League but the show develops a new backstory, not just for Stewart, but for how the whole "chosen one" of Green Lanterndom works. I think it was incredibly important for the show to simplify the mythos but also to redefine it for its own purposes. Stewart was raised to be Green Lantern, raised to be without fear, and we see the man it built but also the effect that trauma has had on him, how disaffected he kind of is, but still not losing his compassion.

Hal Jordan on the other hand is egocentric, cocky, full of self-importance and has lost his way because of the power he possesses. Hal has a good heart, generally, with good intentions, generally, but over time he's lost sight of what his job as Green Lantern is, and now he's willing to make sacrifices and compromise his own values to get what he wants. He thinks it's justice, but it's really about an inflated ego. Kyle Chandler was never my favourite performer, just as Jordan was never my favourite Green Lantern, but Chandler is great here, as a snarky, grizzled, over-it asshole who thinks he knows best. In many cases he does, but not always.

Kelly Macdonald plays Kerry Kane, the small town sheriff (originally from Gotham, but with an accent from nowhere) who has three dead alien bodies on her hands, but doesn't care at all for the Green Lantern sticking his nose in her business. Kerry is the only one who can seem to put Hal in his place, to stop him from doing what he reflexively wants to do, to try and keep peace in her town when Hal is searching for war. But she can only hold him off so long.

There's others in the cast, including Garret Dillahunt, Poorna Jagannathan, and Laura Linney that also elevate the story with incredible, memorable performances. 

1 Bad: For a show about a superhero whose power it is to make any kind of construct from the ring on his finger, there's not a whole lot of Green Lanterning going on. It's so obviously a budgetary thing, as the effects of the Green Lantern ring have never been a cheap proposition. It doesn't make it any less disappointed that we don't see more ring-slinging in the show.  There's not a tremendous amount at all...there's very little in fact, and what little we do see is pretty tepid.

(META) The show really works in spite of not really accessing its core premise and instead relying upon procedural investigations and interpersonal intrigue and good old fashioned dramatic storytelling to keep propelling it forward instead of superhero action is both surprising and exciting.  Addressing John as a black man having to come to terms with the reality of joining the space cops, everything he's trained for, and what that would have to compromise in him is the most remarkable part of the show. How the show jumps 10 years and the way that shadows him is just one of the many great strokes of the show. I don't think Mundy, Lindleof, and King could repeat not having much Green Lanterning in a Green Lantern show, but they made it work once, it's very possible they could make it work again. 

Even without using the power ring all that often or to any great visual stakes, Lanterns still managed to employ a grander scale story and aspects of the grander mythos of the Green Lantern Corps into this small town procedural cop show.  I'm very excited for more Pierre as John Stewart, and excited to see where they'll take him next.

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Ted Lasso Season 4
Developed by Jason Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, Brendan Hunt, and Joe Kelly

The What 100: AFC Richmond, under the guidance of the team owner Rebecca Welton and chief marketing officer Keeley Jone, is starting up a womens football club, and they want the man who turned their men's club into a Premiere League team to work his magic once again. Ted moves back to London, his ex-wife and son in tow, and starts in a new chapter of this fish-out-of-water saga, with many familiar faces and a lot of new ones to greet him. One less than welcoming face, though, is assistant coach Alice Chilton, resentful of this male American taking the head coach role of this very English women's football team.

1 Great: I'd be lying if I said I was immune to the delight of spending time in the AFC Richmond world again. Even though this season is incredibly wobbly in terms of character development and it short changes the new women's club far more than it ever did the men's club in its first season, it's also pretty exciting to have a largely new cast of unique characters to explore alongside catching up with some of the old faces we knew and loved.

1 Good: I have to give top marks to Tanya Reynolds (The Decameron) as Coach Chilton as the highlight of the season. Her performance as the chilly, standoffish, but on-the-outside-looking-in Alice showed so much heart and vulnerability underneath an ice-block of an exterior. It's a very different character and performance than Roy Kent or Nate Shelley (thank the gods for that) but she very quickly became the reason to watch the show.

1 Bad: Before I tuck into the bad, I will just reiterate that I did, every week, enjoy watching this show. But the choices the writers make here, over and over again, were confounding. Why is Ted basically a passenger in his own show. Ted's storyline is basically "I'm ready to date again". That's it. Does he date anyone? No, but he's ready.
And Rebecca is given a storyline early on where she doubts her feminist credentials after Alice criticizes her for hiring a man instead a woman for head coach, which is not only out of character for Rebecca but stupid in context of everything we've seen 3 seasons prior. There's also the fact that a waiter refers to her pejoratively as a sex worker, and the episode where she's flustered into inaction because of relationship woes.
But that's nothing compared to every ridiculous plot they give Keeley this season, which undermines all of her growth from the prior seasons, and often infantilizes her. That she spends half the season doubting whether she's good at her job and the other half worrying about whether she should get back together with Roy or not is the biggest waste of Juno Temple's talents and the showrunners should be ashamed.  I would say that the season ends with her being pregnant is the final straw, but Brett Goldstein's note perfect reaction saves it.

(META) I was done with Ted Lasso by the end of Season 3. I didn't need to see any more. It didn't seem to know where it wanted to go, really, anyways, so it was best that it didn't continue. And now it has, and in this new season, I see the path forward. There is an incredible cast of actors on the Lady Grayhounds that we just don't get to spend much time with. We spend more time with May and the barflys down at the pub than almost any of the team,which is a real shame.  Its not that I don't want to see the vestiges of the prior seasons return (loved seeing Jamie Tart again, and a lot of the cameos, not all, were well integrated) but what the show doesn't do with this new team that it did with the old one, as well as the sad storylines for Rebecca and Keeley show a definite weakness in the writers room when it comes to the show's female characters.

That all said, Hannah Waddingham really came to play this season, and she has a few moments that are exceptional comedy gold, including her doing her Roy Kent impersonation.

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Sugar Season 2
created by Mark Protosevich

The What 100: John Sugar is back! Well, that's the thing, John Sugar never left. When all his other alien brethren departed, Sugar just couldn't leave Earth behind. Part of it was he's still looking for his long lost sister, but the other part is he's kind of "gone native" and is addicted to what the planet has to offer, for good and for ill. But with none of his old friends around, and nobody reaching out, and his human friends living their own lives, Sugar is lonely. He's investigating who ratted out his people's infiltration of the earth to the government, while also taking the case of a boxer whose petty-criminal brother seems to have inexplicably gotten entangled in something very huge. He also, maybe, kinda falls in love.

1 Great: Colin Ferrell does a very convincing job at being the kindest, most empathetic being to ever exits. He seems so effortlessly compassionate and ready to give anyone a chance to be their best self. If he can help elevate them he will. It's my favourite part of this very weird neo-noir detective/alien show, and it's not lost on me the point that this kind of compassion seems to only be able to come from an alien.

1 Good: I only really know Tony Dalton from his role as Jack Duquesne in the Hawkeye mini-series (and his re-appearance in Daredevil: Born Again) but I really, really liked him as that character. He seemed devilishly charming in Hawkeye, but it was a red herring... he was just genuinely charming. Here, it's very much the opposite, as the leader of an LAPD task force that is severely corrupt and up to some atrocious shenanigans, he play an incredibly evil, yet very human villain. ACAB man, ACAB.

1 Bad: I don't know if the second season of Sugar could ever live up to the first, because the first season spent more than half its episodes hiding the fact that Sugar was an alien. It was just a hardboiled L.A. detective story that was very involving up until the reveal.  Here the story is split three ways, and it's at least one way too many. Sugar's dalliance with a fetching, age-appropriate lawyer (Laura Donnelly) was obviously building to something that takes the full season to get to, while his secondary plot of researching who sold his people out also takes until the season finale to get to the point...both seem almost a distraction from the very involving case he's working on.  The show had a very hard time balancing the harsh things Sugar was going through in the main case with his other case, and then the tone shift into romance never truly fit.

(META) The final episode of the season resolves the main plot early and then deals with the other two threads it had been sewing all season. It leaves the show with a little bit of a rug pull and some answers that only pose more questions, the only thing is....they're not at all compelling.  The "alien" side of Sugar is so second fiddle to the private eye side that leaning into this for a cliffhanger doesn't yield the resulting excitement I think the showrunners were hoping for in order to get a third season. If a third season does happen, I imagine it will be at Farrell's insistence rather than any big desire from AppleTV or "fan" response (is there a "Sugar" fan community?).

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31 Days of Halloween: Cold Storage

2026, Jonny Campbell (Am I Being Unreasonable) -- download/Amazon

Including the 'download' tag as I did download it earlier this year, but before it showed up on Amazon, where we actually watched it.

Another staple of the season is the ooey gooey gorey flick which we see as a nod to Peter Jackson's early flicks. This one brings a familiar trope of a space fungus which quickly infects a bunch of people and has to be eradicated before it escapes containment. Nukes are required.

Preamble. Some guy in Australia is panicking and calls a number from a payphone as a sandstorm dials up. He is transferred and transferred and transferred till he ends up at the cell phone of Dr. Martins (Sosie Bacon, Smile), in Rome, Italy. She's confused as to why he's talking to her, but it becomes quickly apparent that something hitchhiked its way back to Earth when the Skylab crashed and its ravaging his town. US Military experts Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson, Taken) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville, The Crown) are sent to Australia (not Australian military? cuz NASA is involved, I guess?) where they find a fungus that has killed everyone. And soon after, it kills Dr. Martins after it eats through the rubber soles of her boots, her... Doc Martens... get it? She dies, they collect the fungus sample and firebomb the entire town. The sample is moved to a secure storage site in Kansas.

Years later the secure storage site is decommissioned and sold off as Self Storage, where ex-con Travis "Teacake" Meacham (Joe Keery, Stranger Things) works the night shift, along with cute newbie Naomi (Georgina Campbell, Barbarian). Something is beeping behind the cheap drywall, which leads to a US Dept of Defense storage area deep below their Self Storage. And just outside the room the two find a very gross looking "rat king", covered in the same ooey gooey green slime mould as we saw in Australia. It got out.

Things get worse. Of course they do, or we wouldn't have the movie.

Its a fun romp, but surprisingly a tight story. Usually the infection "gets out" and we get many many scenes of people getting infected, of yokels blundering into their own death. But even though the fungus does travel on a cockroach out of the storage facility to "infect" a dead cat, and afterwards the asshole who killed the cat, the story stays entirely in the confines of the storage facility. Oh, there are victims, including the owner of the facility (he bought it, cheap, from the govt) and his low rent biker friends, but mostly its about Travis and Naomi running around, trying to stay safe.

And the banter was top notch. Travis is "chatty" while Naomi is smart enough to call him loquacious. They are flirty without being a hookup, brave enough to save Mrs Rooney (Vanessa Redgrave, Black Box), as well as carry the "not a suitcase nuke" into the bowels of the facility, but not stupid. Its billed as a comedy, but everything is played straight, but does not take itself too seriously. But it has an internal continuity and direction which was refreshing for one of these movies.

As long as you ignore the fact that after Travis sends Mrs. Rooney up the stairs and out of the facility, we never see what happens to her. She does not drive away. She is forgotten, and likely edited out.

And yes, ooey gooey gore. Loads of it. The fungus, once it hits maximum yield, likes to make its host explode. Lots of splattering loads of green and red gore, but without bothering to worry about the "did we get any on us" of other movies. We can ignore that only a small amount eating Doc Martins' boot done her in, but the two "heroes", as well as (Not Just) Aging military agents Quinn and Romano could have been exposed many many times, but aren't, cuz what would the fun in that be?

KWIF: 10 for 10: Sick days

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. 10 for 10 is a semi-retired T&K blogging format consisting of 10 movies for which we give ourselves 10 minutes apiece [or try at least] to write about.  See, part of our problem was that we didn't often have the spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie or TV show we watch.  But we kinda figured that out...mostly. But I've been sick for over a week with a minor cold turning out to be not so minor and now having escalated into a sinus infection. It's hard to think or do too much.

This Week:
Secret Mall Apartment (2024, d. Jeremy Workman - netflix)
Subway (1985, d. Luc Besson - tubi)
Dark Days (2000, d. Marc Singer - dvd)
The Kid Detective (2020, d. Evan Morgan - Crave)
Tapeheads (1988, d. - Bill Fishman - tubi)
Yes, Madam! (1985, d. Corey Yeun - bluray)
Police Academy (1984, d. Hugh Wilson- hollywoodsuite)
Airport (1970, d. George Seaton - dvd)
Seven Golden Men (1968, d. Marco Vicario- tubi)
Seven Golden Men Strike Again (1968, d. Marco Vicario- tubi)

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In Providence, Rhode Island, someone (or some ones) managed to build a secret apartment in the newly built Providence Place mall, and remain undiscovered for four years. Secret Mall Apartment is the story of the apartment and the people who made it, and why they did such a thing.

The mall was built over the river that runs through the city and curves along the path of the highway. It's four stories high and looks like a fortification separating one side of the city from the other. All the entrances for the mall are on one side, with no public entrances on the other, but artist and teacher Michael Townsend found a way into the mall that was certainly not an intentional entrance. In exploring the backrooms of the mall, he was purposefully looking for some dead space that he noticed during the many years of construction. He found the space and, with a collection of friends and pupils, decided to make something of this space.

It's an interesting story, but seems hardly enough to make a feature film documentary out of, until we quickly learn that Townsend basically filmed almost everything...it was with a low grade digital camera, but it still gives the story so much more to work with. Townsend and friends basically pull of a weird artistic heist in "stealing" this dead space for their own, which turns out to be an assembly place for the friends and artists to plan their public art initiatives which involve Michael's distinctive style of "tape art" that led to major projects, such as commemorating the fallen from 9-11, and visiting schools and children's wards at hospitals and getting them involved with art.

It's a pretty beautiful story about gentrification, capitalism, and, most importantly how art can inspire and move and be impermanent while still having a big impact.

[12:09]

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It's not really cool to talk about Luc Besson these days. He's a problematic guy for reasons you can look up on your own.  I used to be a really big fan, and, well, it's hard to be such these days. If one were to "separate the art from the artist", it's kind of hard a times when watching his work, especially The Fifth Element or Leon: The Professional. 

Subway was Besson's second film, but sort of his calling card as a stylish, kinetic director. The first thing one notes about Subway is the film's sense of movement, with a high-speed car chase on the streets of Paris. Fred (Christophe Lambert, as he is credited here) sports a crazy head of Sting-like spiky dyed blonde hair and a tux, and is driving like a wild man as he searches for the perfect tape to play while a car barrels up behind him, sporting four more men in tuxes. It's not that he doesn't notice, he just doesn't care.  Eventually this chase ends with Fred crashing down the stairs of a subway entrance, a terrain from which Fred will not leave for the rest of the film.

The enticement of Subway is that Fred will meet and interact with an underground society as he eludes his pursuers. Turns out he was at a fancy party and blew the safe, stole some stuff, and he's trying to blackmail the trophy wife (Isabella Adjani) of the rich owner, more for her attention than for money.  

The film meanders and doesn't explain itself very well, purposefully. It wants to be weird and mysterious, and it is. Besson gets a lot of mileage out of the subway stations he shoots in and the underground concourses, and the behind-the-walls backrooms and tunnels, but not as much as I'd like. It doesn't give us the exploration of a rich underground culture I was hoping for. It's all a bit surface level, no pun intended.

Fred is off his nut, just an ADHD-addled everything-in-the-moment kind of guy. Somehow Héléna, bored with her life as the trophy wife, is actually drawn to this guy and thus is sort of the problematic Besson-isms. As bored as she is she should have a better sense that this guy is not the guy to turn to in getting out of a lacklustre marriage.  (As far as problematic Besson-isms, this one is kind of mild).

It's kind of a nonsense film, but it's shot real pretty. 

[26:40]

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I don't remember if Dark Days was gifted to me by friend and reader (and radio host extraordinaire) GAK or if it was merely a recommendation, but in either case I think Dark Days had the record for the dvd in my possession that went the longest without being played. Nearly 25 years, I'd probably say.

My knowledge of the film was limited to it being about the unhoused people of New York that lived in train tunnels, and that its soundtrack was full of DJ Shadow tunes.  The subject matter seemed...well, dark, uncomfortable, and every time I would flip through my DVD binders I would chastise myself for my cowardly viewing habits and remind myself fruitlessly that I would need to make a point of watching it.

The time finally came, as it seemed the perfect companion piece to having watched Secret Mall Apartment and Subway.

Dark Days finds director Marc Singer embedded with the community living underground near the Amtrak railways (it implies near Penn Station in NYC, but I don't really know). On the 45-minute making-of documentary that accompanies the film on the disc, we learn that Singer didn't meet the denizens of the tunnel with intention of making a film, he's just a compassionate and curious human being. He made friends there quickly and was visiting there for months before one of the residents of the tunnel said that they should make a film. And so, Singer decided to do so, with the help of the community there, no other professionals involved.

So the key point about the film that I was hesitant on - the exploitative potential of such a movie - was scrubbed away with knowing that the people we see on screen are also the people helping out behind the camera. They were the crew, and it was Singer's mission to use the project to help pull them out of their living situation.

But what they document, on grainy, gritty film in black and white, using lighting rigs crafted in the tunnels and track-rolling camera carts also made there, is a specific time, a specific place and a specific community of people. It's a very empathetic lens the film approaches them with, and the people we meet are just that...people.  Some are addicts, some are recovering addicts, some are ex cons, and some are runaways. They all live in the tunnel, in self-made domiciles, amidst the trash and the rats, because, they say (and justify) it's far better than living on the streets.

Their stories are, in some cases, filled with tragedy, abuse, or self-destructive behaviour. There's also regret, remorse and resilience. So when Amtrak officials decide after decades (and a death at track level) that it's time to close down the encampment and access to it, it creates a real sense of "leave them alone".  But the great triumph of the film is that most of these people do get out and re-housed and despite their attestations earlier to preferring the tunnel to the street, being in a real apartment, a real home just cannot compare. And that is the lesson... housing should be a human right.

An amazing film. The DJ Shadow tracks are perfectly incorporated, with the film edited and timed to the rhythms of the song. Just perfect synergy.

[43:24]

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The Kid Detective has a delightful conceit. Abe Applebaum (Adam Brody) used to be the whiz-kid problem-solving small-town detective, and he never grew out of it. As an adult, he's still resting on the laurels of his childhood infamy, all too aware of how depressing his life is but also all too aware that he has no ability to quit.

It's "Encyclopedia Brown all grown up" as an idea. I loved Encyclopedia Brown as a kid, and I love this idea. I've been meaning to watch this one for a good long while.

What I wasn't expecting was how sad and sometimes upsetting and tragic the film would be. Yes, there is generally a lightness to the production, but it never feels like a comedy. Abe's life is just too sad to be funny.

Abe's never really had a "big case", but high school student Caroline (Yellowjackets' Sophie Nélisse) turns up at his office and wants him to solve the murder of her boyfriend. He was stabbed 17 times and dumped in the river a few days earlier.

Being involved with a case like this shows both Abe's strengths as a detective, how he approaches things differently than the police would. But it also shows his weaknesses, primarily that he has a shitty lie detector, and often has to retrace his steps or reassess his approach when he's called out on his gullibility.

The case also brings up Abe's trauma, his best friend and assistant, Gracie, went missing when they were 14, and Abe was not allowed to participate in the case. They never found her, and part of Abe's persistence in continuing as a detective, it would seem, is in tribute - or penance - to Gracie.

A compelling mystery, but equally a compelling character study, even if it's all fiction. A fantastic performance from Brody, and a big win for North Bay, Ontario as a production destination. It really makes use of the city.

[53:11]

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Tapeheads first came to my attention back in the early days of DVD in the late 1990's, back when I would read up on all the new DVD releases and go out every Tuesday (and sometimes Friday) looking for the latest and greatest. Anchor Bay was the real attention-getter of all the DVD manufacturers as they were the ones releasing cult films, some of which I'd heard of, most of which I had not.

I didn't pull the trigger on Tapeheads then, but it was always a curiosity.  Having finally seen it, it still remains a curiosity.

Starring John Cusack and Tim Robbins, the film finds these two lifelong best friends getting fired from their security gigs and deciding to open up shop as a video production company. Ivan (Cusack) with his slick-back hair, weedy moustache, and gift of gab is the promoter, while Josh (Robbins) is the talent, having been mixing and cutting film as a hobbyist for years.

They get some gigs recording living wills, funerals, and rich peoples parties, and get suckered into taking on some music videos on spec. Through one of their gigs, they get mixed up in a presidential candidate's sex scandal, only they don't know it.

It's a film that operates at a mile a minute, switches tracks just as often, and goes for broke every chance it can get, and, well, it's a lot to take in. As a production, it's not taking its story very seriously, and yet, Cusack and Robbins seem pretty invested in their roles.  Robbins has a bit more difficulty with the tone shifts he's asked to do, while Cusack is right on the money in every damn scene he's in. The past 20 years or so of his career has seen Cusack sleepwalking through one role after another, but here is a full on eye magnet, just full of energy and personality. You may not love Ivan - he runs his mouth far too much without thinking - but you are totally drawn to him.

The scenarios the film presents are preposterous from pretty much the start of the film right through the end. I can see how this developed a cult following, as it seems like the kind of thing that would reveal itself more with repeated viewings. I'm just not enamoured enough with it to try.

[1:05:18]

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A couple years ago the Criterion Channel had a Michelle Yeoh retrospective, and it was there that I learned of Yes, Madam!'s existence, but the channel either didn't have the rights to the film or the rights in Canada made it unavailable to stream here. 

It's claim to fame is it's Yeoh's first action vehicle, as well as the inaugural film for "action babe" Cynthia Rothrock. I'm pretty well versed in Yeoh's filmography, she's been a favourite performer of mine for 30 years now. Rothrock I only know by name from the back cover of Cinefantastique magazine where they would promote their sister mag "Femme Fatales", which was like a sort of "lads mag" for B-movie film nerds.  I never read an issue (but was a regular Cinefantastique reader for a few years in the 1990s) but Rothrock seemed to be a regular on the covers.

Yes, Madam! comes from the legendary director Corey Yeun, known for his kinetic and stunt-heavy martial arts and action films. Here Yeoh plays, like, the only competent detective on the Hong Kong police force. She kicks ass and shoots straight. After taking down a big armed car robbery, she wants a vacation but is instead forced onto a new assignment where she has to take on a British Scotland Yard detective (Rothrock) as a partner in investigating a major corruption case involving local mobsters. They don't get along very well.

Their entryway into this chain of corruption is a stolen passport and a missing piece of microfilm, which winds up in the hands of three idiot brothers - Aspirin, Strepsil and Panadol (ha.ha.).  The only problem is that now the idiot brothers have both the cops and the bad guys after them.  They try cooperating with the police and blackmailing the bad guys, and neither really work out well for them.

Yes, Madam! is an amusing trifle of a film that, unfortunately, gets far too invested in its trio of comedic buffoons that it loses site of the buddy cop movie that they probably should have focused on. Yeoh and Rothrock both get left behind for large swaths of the picture in favour of our somewhat loveable idiots.

The action, when it gets rolling is pretty good. It's amazing how Yeoh turned her ballet training into action superstardom, but she's damn good at it from film one. Having never seen Rothrock in action (and I didn't really know anything about her martial arts championship background before this), she is both very charismatic on screen and so. damn. fast. She moves like lightning and with such power.  Both Yeoh and Rothrock (well, and everyone else, for that matter) are dubbed here, so the performances are a little odd, but there's a lot of charm there.

Not the greatest of action comedies, nor of Yeoh's career, but enjoyable enough.

[1:20:35]

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I watched Police Academy all the time as a kid. Not quite as much as I watched Star Wars (because I watched nothing as much as I watched Star Wars) but I watched it so often that rewatching it now (and not for the first time as an adult, for sure) I still knew all the rhythms of the film, I still knew all the punchlines, and it all still tickled something very youthful (...juvenile?) inside of me.  Is Police Academy funny? I couldn't honestly tell you. There's definitely more than a few problematic 1980's bits within it, but what '80's comedy (or '90's, or 2000's, or even 2010's comedy) doesn't feature more than a few problematic jokes?

At least Police Academy doesn't rest solely on problematic jokes. It centres around Carey Mahoney (Steve Guttenberg), a well-intentioned but troublemaking adult, being given a choice by a family friend in the police... either go to jail, or go to the Police Academy and learn some discipline. He chooses the latter with the express intention of getting kicked out immediately and being back on the streets.

The Academy, at Madame Mayor's insistence, has released its height, weight, and any other restrictions on its admissions, so a slew of oddballs turn out for Academy training much to the chagrin of Lieutenant Harris (G.W. Bailey), and ambivalence of its faculty head, Commandant Lassard (George Gaynes). Mahoney makes fast friends with everyone but Harris and his two flunkies, and decides upon meeting and flirting with Cadet Thompson (Kim Cattrall) that maybe sticking around isn't such a bad idea.

What I enjoyed the most about watching Police Academy this time around was the big climax where the cadets are set loose on the streets of Toronto, supposedly as back-up-to-the-back-up for riot enforcement, but Lassard's screw up sends these trainees right into the soup, which takes place in both Kensington Market and the pre-gentrified Liberty Village. So awesome to see what is, and what isn't familiar around this city anymore.

It's a bit cringe at times, delightfully horny and not as pro-cop as you'd think.

[1:32:21]

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It feels like the perfect complement to watching Police Academy should be watching Airplane!, and I did think about watching such a double feature while laid up on the couch, but I've just started working my way through a second-hand DVD collection of the "Airport" series and I want to save my Airplane! rewatch for after.

I've written recently about my desire to watch all the 1970's disaster flicks, but for some reason, I have shied away from the "Airport" series.  I think because Airplane! so fully deconstructed and tore apart the franchise, using every aspect of it's formula for laughs, I thought that I wouldn't be able to get through those films without just seeing them as a big joke. Well, if I can watch Avalanche in earnest after having seen the MST3K-version, then I can probably watch the "Airport" movies just fine.

Airport is the granddaddy of all the 1970's disaster films, setting the formula for a decade (or more) of films to follow. Starring Burt Lancaster as the manager of Lincoln International Airport in Chicago (I thought the home city of the airport went unnamed but I guess I was wrong), he faces many challenges, not the first of which is a major snow front passing through the city, the largest of the year. He's managing to keep the runways clean, but a landed plane screws up and turns early getting caught off-tarmac in the snow. He's also got a harpy of a wife (in classic cinematic fashion) that he's not eager to return home to.

Meanwhile Lancaster's pilot brother-in-law (who he doesn't get along with), played by Dean Martin, is getting ready to do a performance review his colleague on a flight to Rome, so there's two captains on board this flight. It's been delayed due to the snow, and we meet some of the other passengers as well as the terminal staff and crew along the way. Martin is having an affair with Jacqueline Bissett, and she tells him, before the flight, that she's pregnant. 

The highlight of the secondary character introductions is  Mrs. Quonsett (Helen Hayes), an elderly widow who stows away on flights both for the thrill of it and the low stakes if she gets caught. She's supposed to be put on a flight back to San Francisco but she slips her escort and finds here way onto the flight to Rome.

Also on board, though, is a troubled man clutching a briefcase (Van Heflin). Unemployed for some time, having let his wife down, he's planning to blow up the plane over the Atlantic, having taken out a big life insurance policy at the terminal.

So, you see the trouble right?

Frankly, Airport is very melodramatic, getting into the weeds of peoples love affairs, as well as the emotional states that they board this Rome flight with, but it's also a very propulsive film, with a lot of split-screens (sometimes five-way split-screens - or more!) showing the action from multiple views or two different points of action, or just multiple sides of a conversation. The effect is both cheesy and effective. Lancaster is ostensibly the lead and is multitasking throughout, which adds to the narrative drive.

I really dug this movie, even if the "disaster" was pretty low-scale compared to the disaster films that would take up after it. At the same time, it effectively puts you into the lives of many of the characters, and doesn't overly dramatize the stakes of those relationships, surprisingly. Eager for the next one although I suspect that without a novel as foundation for the story that they will be much more of what Airplane! was directly parodying.

[1:49:09]

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I had never heard of Seven Golden Men before coming across it on Tubi. The preview on the streamer doled out enough alluring imagery for me to add it to the watchlist, dishing out some of the same vibes I get from my beloved Danger:Diabolik (which, no doubt, was as influenced by the success of this film as it was the popularity of the comics it was derived from).

In Seven Golden Men, the Professor (Philippe Leroy) and his sultry accomplice Georgia (Rossana Podestà) are aided by a multi-national crew of six men  - Adolf, August, Aldo, Anthony, Alfonso and Alfred - in robbing the Swiss National Bank in Geneva of its vast gold reserves. Their plan is not the direct approach, but instead a complex tunnelling and transference underground while the bank (and the city) is on their midday siesta.

Aided with expert know-how and high tech equipment and more than a bit of luck and bullshittery, they pull the plan off, but the Professor can only plan so much, and once the gold is in the tanker truck, there's far more variables at play than he can anticipate, including the greed of his accomplices.

Italian films of the 60's and 70's tend to be exceptionally stylish, with their production houses full of experienced labourers, and the Italian fashion sensibilities behind them. The people are well dressed, the settings so lavishly Euorpean, the sets so 60's mod or historically ornate (or a mix of both as with the bank), and the tech so outrageously clunky and ridiculous while also being so very charming and full of big buttons, knobs and or switches... it's hard not to just admire the production values at play (as well as the many form-fitting wardrobes Ms. Podestà wears).

There's not much story to the film, however. It basically starts in media res, with the "A" team already in progress on site, with the Professor and Georgia just arriving on scene in style. It's mostly competence porn with a few scattered moments of manufactured tension, the spectre of getting caught looming.  We know there's no movie if they don't pull it off, so these moments are perfunctory and really not very tense at all, the question becomes "what happens after the job's done"?

Honestly I found the clean-up from the gig to be more intriguing than the break-in, which, despite the stylishness, was kind of dull. The double-crosses that come afterward should be more surprising, but the whole production has a bubbly, swinging soundtrack that deflates the tension at every turn. The tone of the film is far too light, and we really don't get to know any of these characters very well, so it's hard to really care about what happens to them. In the end it's not great for any of them, but they go on to start another job during the credits...

[1:59:59]

...which is not the same job that they are pulling off in Seven Golden Men Strike Again. The opening sequence is a heist in the catacombs of Rome, but they get caught, and it turns out, The Fast and Furious franchise-style, that a coalition of governments needs their heisting talents for an espionage gig.

And so, on an unnamed island in Central America (that's definitely not Cuba, *wink*), the Professor, Georgia and the "A" team have a job to undermine the communist dictator of the island. Their exact mission is the discovery element of the film, but along the way, the Professor spies a particular ship in port, and realizes it's the Russian ship that carries the gold to help fund the spread communism across the continent. So, while Georgia seduces the General and half the "A" team infiltrate the island for their unknown task, the other half of the "A" team sneak aboard the Russian ship kicking off the professor's hijacking plans.

With enough gadgetry to make a James Bond film envious, SGMSA succeeds where the prior film fails... in being interesting. Oh, the set up is absurd, and the execution of everything relies of so much blind luck, but it's all still pretty fun to watch. Georgia's seduction of the General is fantastic, and makes me wonder if this influenced Harley Quinn's subplot in James Gunn's The Suicide Squad. Many solid parallels between the two.

The final act takes on the same flavour as the previous film, which is a whole lot of double crossing going, on, only this time, it's the "A" team divided, and they're armed.

SGMSA is much bigger in scale and ambition than the previous film, and even more silly and unbelievable, but it fits the playful tone much more and I found it to be far more entertaining.

[2:10:20]

31 Days of Halloween: Moar TV - A Bit of a Shine On

Carrie, 2026, Amazon -- ep. 3-8

Stephen King has a series of books about kids with extraordinary powers: Carrie, Firestarter and The Institute. And let's not forget The Shining which sets up little Danny Torrance to have "the shine". The idea of the shining, a predisposition to magic/psychic powers, makes itself known in many King books. Flanagan is no stranger to this world of King, having directed the spectacular adaptation of King's sequel to The Shining (among others) which introduces a bigger world of magic/power. I think he is about to do the same with this series.

Again, we all know the story about how Carrie White gets a bucket of pig's blood poured over her, causing her to lose control of her telekinetic powers and utterly destroy her school prom. The show ends with that, but we still have to get there.

I was not sure I could settle into this series, but once Flanagan started his usual masterful storytelling, I was hooked. There are so many chef's-kiss story beats here: the "villains" are never entirely unsympathetic and its OK to care for them, Carrie is the most sympathetic but... also shudder, there are always real Bad Guys and real Good Guys, but so many people are... gray. I really enjoyed that Carrie was able to discover her power early on, and even experiment with, gaining a quick mastery. I was, and remain, unsure about a network of other psychically-powered girls, but I applaud Flanagan playing with the crossover worlds of King.

So, that. 

The series is frameworked around Adelaide (Kate Siegel, Hush), a woman interviewing the survivors of Carrie's conflagration, which kills most of the graduating class at prom, burns down the entire high school, and much of the town, as the fire, and destruction, spreads. As the series progresses, we suspect she is more than a "news reporter", as she also has regular voiceover/narration about the history of women with powers, their abuse and misunderstandings. 

The "organization" introduced early on, called The Others, is still only hinted at, especially with the presence of Emaline (Thalia Dudek, The Running Man), who sets herself up as the mysterious counterculture friend of Carrie, and... well SPOILER is not actually physically present -- she is just a psychic projection. We (Marmy and I) caught on early, and once you do, the clues are so obvious (at the party, all the kids drink from typical red party cups, while Emaline's is blue) but we don't know her connection to Adelaide. In the end, she presents as a greater ally of Carrie, and at odds with Adelaide. So, why? So then, what are the goals of The Others? They are obviously an angry, malevolent force, not afraid to hurt or kill people, but... what is their goal?

And there are also those opposed to The Others, represented by traumatized mother Amanda (Katee Sackhoff, Longmire), who is actually Emaline's mother. She is afraid of her daughter, and believes the only way to deal with what her daughter has become, is to kill her, and all like her. She tries to recruit Margaret White, but doesn't quite sell it. Based on the actions directed by Adelaide, tehre are good reasons to oppose these powered girls, but... if their actions are only in response to fear & violence, then... what?  Gray gray gray.

I cannot end the series without also once again applauding Flanagan's loyalty (but, not flagrant) to his cast of regulars: Samantha Sloyan, Rahul Kohli as a troubling teacher at Carrie's school, Flanagan's wife Kate, a cameo by Mark Hammill, Michael Trucco and Katee Sackhoff. But speaking of the last two, Flanagan went all out with casting of the Battlestar Galactica Vancouver crowd, including Tahmoh Penikett, Rekha Sharma, Tricia Helfer, and Aaron Douglas. He also had some fun voiceover casting with people like David Dastmalchian and Carla Gucino, but by far, my favourite cameo was Bryan Fuller as a parent in the prom crowd, who we can only assume dies there.

This wasn't my favourite Flanagan production, but it was more than enough to make me happy and it will be interesting to see if he gets another season, knowing the fleeting interest from the streaming services these days.  But he has lots of options open, as The Exorcist: Martyrs got its trailer, and he had his hand in writing Clayface, so he may get as he asks.

Wait what? Flanagan directed "Life of Chuck" ??? How did I not remember that from Kent's writeup.

31 Days of Halloween: The Last House

2026, Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk) -- Netflix

There are two survival / horror movies this season that deal with families in their houses. There is The End of Oak Street, which we will get to later, and there is this one, which continues the tradition of Netflix doing an apocalyptic, family-oriented survival movie in a sub-genre I like to call "mysterious monsters end the world."

So, dad Jason Delgado (Wagner Moura, Elysium) is out fishing off a pier in Seattle when the rain begins. He makes it home just before it gets really heavy, which is a good thing, because the rain seals him, and his family, into their home. They cannot open the doors, break the windows or even get thru the walls. The rain itself has generated an unbreakable barrier. Through white and chalk boards, the Delgados and their neighbours communicate that they are all trapped inside; except the jogging lady, who says she will run and get help. The phones and Internet go out, but they have electricity and running water.

The next morning, things are still the same. And the morning after that, and... well, you get the point. They begin rationing and mom Ann (Greta Lee, Tron: Ares) even puts aside some tomato seeds. No help comes, the rains continue, and the family settles into routines to keep their two kids sane. Talk about your bottle episode / Locked in a Room trope...

Much of the movie is focused on the survival, little on the horror. Youngest child Ruth (Emma Ho, The Baker) does see something through the windows, but its not until the jogger reappears months later, looking more-than-half-mad & starved until she is taken by the something that the realize there is actually an antagonist. The family's response is to keep the windows covered whenever it rains, as they don't know that what keeps them locked inside, will also keep the creatures out -- primarily, don't antagonize the Cthulhu-like creatures.

Being focused on the family, the movie deals with their dynamics. Jason was unemployed when the movie started, the bills piling up. He suffers the need to Be In Control and to Protect His Family but as time passes, this role frays at the seams. Ann challenges his need to take all that on, while also dealing with her own fluctuations between hopelessness and ingenuity. The kids suffer their own depressions as time passes and difficulties mount. Eventually the electricity goes; they find other ways to distract themselves. And as food gets scarce, Jason engineers traps, which they can get out through a small hole in the chimney, so they can supplement Ann's garden(s) with meat. Let's not get into the family dog situation.

Years later.  

Yes, years have passed. The house has transformed. The kids have grown. The traps are more ingenious. The routines are set. The world outside, seen when the skies are bright & sunny, has changed. All the neighbours are dead, and the houses are all in various states of decay. Their own home is starting to come apart, as the constant rain has caused subsidence of the soil beneath the house. The creatures still roam outside when it rains.

Now, we have an opening dialogue, where someone tells us of life before and after The Rains. So, we know someone survives. But how do we get from trapped in the house to ... whatever comes after. The final act is a climax, an expected change. I won't go fully into it, but it involves a desperate need to get out of the house, and a confrontation with the creatures that leads to ... well, I can only pithily suggest... a prequel for Waterworld ?

I enjoyed the movie, but I enjoy the beats and tempos of these kinds of movies. I won't say it was "good", but it was more than entertaining. I like me some PA, and how people survive so I got what I wanted. Answers are few, but I am used to that.

Now to watch some people get eaten by dinosaurs.

31 Days of Halloween: Hope

2026, Na Hong-jin (The Wailing) -- download

One of those times I am tempted to just point to Kent's post, shouting, "This!"

Wow, two-thirds of that movie were incredible. But, likely a Purple Suit yelled, "Give us a franchise !" and suddenly the movie shifted tones faster than getting hit by a sign-post when your upper torso is hanging out of a car.

Walk it off buddy, walk it off.

Hope Harbour, South Korea, somewhere near the North Korean border. Police Chief Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min, The Wailing) is brought by some local hunters whom I will call "the boys", to look at the mauled corpse of a cow sitting in the middle of a road. Everyone has an idea of what could have done it, but they all agree it must have been a tiger that came from North Korea, bypassing all the barb wired fences and landmines. The hunters assure the cop that if their friend said he saw a tiger, it was a tiger. They are fucking with him. He's a bit of a joke, wearing the shiny leather jacket and the aviator glasses trying to intimidate the hunters about their obviously illegal guns. He heads back to town, and they head off to see if they can follow the trail of ... whatever killed the cow.

I was always under the impression that South Korea had very limited access to guns, but there are a LOT of guns in this movie, enough that their appearance are constantly surprising Ko, and enough that this would surprise an American bumpkin cop. Like, there are a lot of automatic weapons, which in this case, is a good thing. Kind of.

Immediately upon arriving in town he hears gunshots and explosions and a roar. And thus begins the first hour, the first act, of this movie, which is completely bonkers and completely tight. A monster is raging through the town, a big troll-like, green skinned thing with long limbs and scraggly hair. Ko starts hunting it, seeing only the evidence of its rampage in the wreckage, dead bodies and destroyed buildings. Na does a brilliant job of lightening the absolute horror of this non-stop battle through Ko's reaction, a mixture of bravery and abject fear, and the dismissive reaction every other villager has towards him -- while he hesitantly goes forward, the rest just wade into the fray (with their tons of big guns, of course) despite everyone being crushed around them. And there is the fact that the monster is a bullet sponge, nothing even seemingly inconveniencing it. That is, until ultra-capable officer Im Sung-ae (Hoyeon, Squid Game) appears on the scene, with her tiny figure, incredible driving skills and a backseat full of... yes, automatic weapons. She blows one leg off the creature, but that doesn't stop it, but it does put it on the run. And that run ends with it being smeared on the highway by a large tanker truck.

MEANWHILE.

The boys are in the woods hunting "the" creature down, which started at the cow farm, where there are more dead cows, and the farmer himself, and ends at .... well, a fucking spaceship. This is where the movie pivots from being.... well, full of questions as to what the monster is (angry spirit? an actual troll? supernatural?) to, "OK, aliens have arrived and they are fucking terrifying." The arrival of the boys is offset by another bunch of very capable, very well equipped (again, and we are not surprised) hunters, mounted on horseback. Money and status is implied.

This is act two, and involves the boys fighting, and dying, at the hands of a diverse group of aliens: a spiky one, a dog-like one, a giant one, a smaller lithe one. This act is propulsive and deadly but ends up with only Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung, Humint) surviving, the second-cousin of the cop, and the more sobre, attentive (and still alive) one of the hunters. He was the one who involved Chief Ko. Of the aliens, the scariest one is the dog-like one, whiiiiich turns out to be the giant one -- he has two forms, one more civilized and intelligent looking (he has a face) and the other has a giant maw and walks/runs on all fours.

Act three. More of the same -- run away from the dog-like one, and Sung-ki survives the initial onslaught only to reconnect with his cousin, and the young officer Im, and THEY have connected with a doofus who found, and killed, what is obviously a child-alien. You see, while Sung-ki was running / riding a horse masterfully, from the dog-like alien, the others, in town, having killed the troll-like monster and recovered a bit, worked with a coroner to crack open the troll. Very alien like; organs unlike anything on Earth. And the doofus tells them he killed one; shot it in the head. That's when Chief Ko is convinced there have to be more and ... well, maybe they aren't as indiscriminately violent as he originally assumed. So, he gathers them up to find out where the doofus found the child, and that happens to be ... where Sung-ki is escaping; they all connect together for the Act Three chase.

This final act is both exciting and... consternating. And a bit, as Kent said, tedious. Running running running, exploding that does little damage, running, and when I say running, I mean driving at top speed along a highway system in the forested hills. They must go pretty far from Hope itself. It all culminates in them finally killing the dog-like alien, and get a brief moment to praise Sung-ki, who is hanging out of the cop car, when.... BLANG !! Yep, he's hit by a road sign because doofus swerved too close to the edge of the road. Courageous and capable Sung-ki goes SPLAT.

But wait, the "wait, what?" is not over yet. In the background, we see a spaceship burning its way through the clouds, far off in the distance, to crash into a mountainside. KABOOM. Shockwaves. And then we get to "meet" the aliens. Dog-like Giant, who has not died, is a protector of the Spiky Her Majesty and their son (maybe??), the lithe one. They know their/a child has been killed, and the Emperor has died, along with their people, with the crash of the spaceship. But Dog-like (and the now present subtitled alien language gives them names, and a topic of conversation) offers up his heart, which will heal the dead child.

The End -- The Cliffhanger that generated a WTF that rung out round the world.

Seriously, we had such an exciting, ultra-violent, yet actually funny, good start. Monsters, guns, destruction, chases, senior citizens with automatic weapons! So much is had in that first hour! And then a Purple Suit shows up with, "But what if they were aliens ?!?!?!"

P.S. Mid-credits we learn that Sung-ki did indeed walk it off.

31 Days of Halloween: Keeper

2025, Osgood Perkins (The Monkey) -- download

To remind, Kent rather dislikes Perkins, but we rather do enjoy his work. This movie was the second of two films he had out last year, the first being The Monkey and I guess we left this one for ... an unknown good reason? Given he doesn't have anything this year, I am glad we did. This flick is classic Perkins, stylish and chilling, but Kent will hate the derivative story of a cabin in the woods, a man with a dark secret, and something evil living in the house/woods. But one thing about watching horror movies is that derivative is expected; its about what you do with the subject at hand, and he does a satisfying job with this story of ancient pacts and weird shit.

Liz (Tatiana Maslany, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law) and Malcom (Rossif Sutherland, Murder in a Small Town) are on their way to his "cabin in the woods" for a weekend away. They are a year into their relationship, one that is uncommon for her if we take anything from her phone conversations with her bestie. Its Perkins, so even the obvious way the two dote on each other is fraught with anxiety. Something is definitely up here, and we are led by the nose to expect it, but its not a reveal that will be the payout, but how we get there.

Turns out the "cabin" is one of those typical west coast wooded areas stylish architectural feature homes -- and breathe. We know from Gretel & Hansel, that Perkins has a knack for making architectural inherently disturbing, but this is a lovely home with... disturbing angles. As Liz tells bestie Maggie, the house is isolated yet revealing, no doors, the only one being to the bathroom and that has a wide open window with a view. And then there is the cake. Liz says she doesn't like chocolate, but Malcom insists, and she complies, in a disturbing, far from erotic smearing of the fork bite in her mouth. She doesn't complain, and later that night, she creeps down to grab the rest of the cake and fill her face. Note, it only has one slice taken from it; Malcom did not partake of this incredible chocolate cake that his absent caretaker always leaves for him.

It has an effect on her, which she has to deal with all on her own, because Malcom, a doctor in the city, has to rush off to deal with a coma patient. Liz is not happy, but understanding. Except, the cake's effect are continual; feelings of paranoia and emotional upset, constant flashes and premonitions regarding water and bloody faced women screaming. It is hard, as the viewer, to tell which are visions she is experiencing, and just scenes for our eyes only. Things only escalate when Malcom's cousin from across the way shows up with a bottle of Scotch and is surprised to find Liz there alone; well, alone and alive. His own GF was already taken by something in the trees. He tries to coerce his way in, to have drinks with Liz, but when she hides herself in the bathroom, something else emerges and ... well, bye bye Darren (Birkett Turton, iZombie).

When Malcom finally returns, he is also rather surprised to find Liz.... still alive.

Spoiler Territory, like I should need to say, as I spoil most everything in these 31 Days writeups.

The reveal. Evil spirits or forest creatures born of a forest... witch? And murderous immortal cousins who have lived off the spoils of whatever that witch spawned 200 years prior. Asshole, sacrificing male partners is at the level of Trope, these days in Horror. Given its not too far off the male-female dynamic these days (was it ever not?) that men would use women to get what they want, oft violently, its not surprising its used for Horror. because what else can be more horrific than something so easily believed. At least in fiction, women can as often get the opportunity to turn the tables and bring final punishment on the men in question.

I do love the way Perkins does things. The interesting camera angles and focuses on things over Liz's shoulders that are both unnerving and ... entirely innocent. He plays with the viewer. And then the actual monstrous things and people; fuck, those "children" were creepy looking, but ... who knows what they really looked like, because as Malcom said, they "presented as women" to Liz; I do wonder what the men saw. I was never "frightened" by anything, as he is prone to familiar patterns of horror, but his imagery is always impactful.

KWIF: The Furious (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Not as much watching happening this past week as I'd have liked, but there was turkey and pumpkin pie and time with friends...so... hard to really complain.

This Week:
The Furious (2025, d. Kenji Tanigaki - Crave)
Blue Heron (2025, d. Sophy Romvari - Crave)
The Girl Who Cried Pearls (2025, d.  Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski - Crave)
Mad God (2021, Phil Tippett - Tubi)
The Devil At Your Heels (1982, Robert Fortier - CFB/youtube)

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I still have a strong recollection of going to see The Raid with Toasty back in 2012, and being thrilled by the visceral hand-to-hand combat that was its raison d'etre, as well as the video-gamey tower crawl aspect to it. I also recall Toasty was kind of bored by it, numb from the repetitive violence and lack of real plot.  The Raid 2 was an even more visceral and gruelling affair, one that Lady Kent compared to pornography.  It's been a minute since we've had a big crossover hit like those Raid films, but The Furious is most definitely the latest and possibly greatest.

The Furious is a pan-Asian action film that tries to build a bridge between the bone-crunching ultra-violence of The Raid and the playfulness of classic Jackie Chan action movies, and it both succeeds and fails in making that connection.

The plot finds Wei (Xie Miao), a mute Chinese tradesman with a mysterious past working in an unnamed Southeast Asian city (we could never be certain if we were talking Hong Kong or somewhere in the Philippians or elsewhere). His daughter Rainy (Yan Enyou) has been visiting him from her grandmother's in China, but they're soon to be separated again. There have been a spate of child kindappings in the city, and a reporter, Matia Pham (Jeeja Yanin), investigating the disappearances has gone missing herself.  

When Rainy is abducted, Wei, with a particular set of skills, goes in pursuit. Along the way he meets Matia's husband, Navin (Joe Taslim) who is following his wife's research in search of her.  Together, with a tremendous amount of physical exertion, they start pulling apart the criminal empire that keeps getting higher up the social food chain in the city.

The draw of the picture is, without a doubt, the fight choreography.  Within the visceral and sometimes bloody brawls of the film, there's also a classic sort of balletic nature to the rhythm and flow of the movements. Point-counterpoint-counter-counterpoint. The performers, all tremendously gifted, and the stunt team have doubtlessly taken inspiration from the way Jackie Chan uses his environments (or, rather, sets up his environments to be used) and so there's frequently a clever playfulness to how the fighting progresses.  

While our protagonists Wei and Navin are obviously going to the be the special characters of this film who take an absolute drubbing but keep on moving, Miao and Taslim still perform the injuries they receive and we do see the fallout of some of the attacks on them.  Likewise the bad guys and especially the mobs of bad guys don't go down with one punch or hit, they keep on getting up and making a nuisance of themselves.

The two best fights in the film feature Brian Le (Everything Everywhere All At Once) as Ho, the idiot son of the human trafficker, Mr. Song (Sahajak Boonthanakit).  Le is a bull of a man, and is shockingly agile, which is usually counter-intuitive for larger men. The first fight is in a two-tier loading bay, and finds Wei and Navin taking on Ho together while Song is firing a shotgun at them.  The next time they meet, Wei and Navin are already taking on the big bad of the film and his bow-and-arrow-and-knife-wielding henchmen in a multi-level police station when Ho inserts himself into the fight and it becomes two-on-two-on-one-on-four. It's a dizzyingly delightful display of fight choreography as the men all switch between fighting partners and at any given time are fending off more than one attacker while also meting out their own choice strikes.

The only thing that holds The Furious back is its plot. Our central protagonists are great, the bad guys are sufficiently nasty, and almost every performer, whether in English, Cantonese or another language all are pretty solid to exceptional (even the child actors are quite good). There's the appropriate investment in the characters to show who they are and why they care about what they're doing, why they're willing to go to such lengths, that the plot is decently involving. And yet, the action is often so playful that it's hard to fully have fun with it all when child trafficking is the main thrust of the story. 

The team behind this delightfully spans the continent, with Chinese, Indonesian and Thai performers, a Japanese director and stunt team, shot in Thailand with Hong Kong funding. I would really love to see this whole cast reunited for an adventure lighter in tone, something I couldn't imagine with The Raid crew.

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I have been trying to make a point of partaking in more Canadian content this year. Part of it is souring on America as a result of its current state, from its global influences, the wars its started, and tariffs its levied, to the continued promotion of capitalism above all and the many, many, many civil right abuses.  There's something wrong with America, and it's not new.  Whenever I watch a film or television show, old or new, that flirts with "Americana", I flinch.   Part of that is the familiarity. A steady diet for nearly half a century on American media, I have seen all this before, but now I'm all too keenly aware of the darker underbelly of Americana and where it leads. 

What I haven't had as much media exposure to is Canadian content, and in my concerted effort to ingest more CanCon, I've been finding it very rewarding to see how Canadian filmmaking is so often so different from the Hollywood system, especially if the filmmakers are letting go of any pretension of trying to present as American.

Blue Heron was being lauded by critics earlier this year, and, in the choices I made in the time of its theatrical release locally, I didn't manage to see it because I watching other stuff. But it remained on my watchlist, despite it being ...well... not my usual type of escapist fare.

The story of Blue Heron is segmented into two halves of a connected whole. The first half is set in the mid 1990's on Vancouver Island, while the second half is set modern day across the water in Vancouver. 

In the first half we open with a family of four moving into their new home on the island.  The mother and father (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa) are Hungarian immigrants, but their children - teen Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), non-identical twins Henry and Felix, and youngest Sasha (Eylul Guven) - are all very English-speaking first generation Canadians. 

Much of the film delivered from Sasha's perspective, though scenes extend out to her parents and the conversations they have in private. Jeremy has a personality disorder, categorized by an otherwise unhelpful psychiatrists as oppositional defiance disorder (it is as it sounds, he's defiant of authority figures and seems to take at least a modicum of pleasure or amusement in challenging the norms set out for him).

Americanized films live in the heightened drama of such stories, but here writer-director Sophy Romvari, working from her own personal experiences, lives in the memories and the moments of life with a family member having a mental health crisis. Sasha, being around 9 or 10, doesn't seem to have full awareness of what is happening around the house. To her, there's a sense of normalcy to it all. Jeremy has always been like this so she doesn't know his behavior is abnormal. Romvari sits with the conversations of the parents, the anxiety and exhaustion, the hurt and despair, the fear and tension that Jeremy's behaviour impacts upon them and their efforts to find help. But Romvari is also clear to highlight that there are good times as well with Jeremy, that he is, after all, family, even if he seems distanced from it.

Through one of the most effective, efficient, and elegant of time-jumping transitions committed to film, we find ourselves with Sasha in her 30s (Amy Zimmer), now making movies and trying to reckon with her memories of her brother. She arranges a case study of her brother, and has a team of psychotherapists approach the subject from a modern standpoint. Sasha engages with her brother's therapist from that era, and talks with her mother for her point of view. You could almost believe you stepped out of a drama and into a documentary.

But then Sasha goes back to her childhood home, and the eras merge as Sasha's memories are reawakened of that time, of the time the social worker came to visit and take Jeremy away.  This blending of time, of having Sasha visit her family in the past is a sort of spiritual, metaphorical journey, not a literal one, but cinematically it's so exciting. The hairs on my arms stood up on end.

Romvari's short film work, apparently, has delved extensively into crossing the streams of documentary and fiction. Blue Heron is a logical feature length extension of that idea. This film is so pointedly specific and contains such emotional truth, that it's evident the director has deep familiarity with the familial struggles, the subject matter, and the feelings on display. And yet there's a veil in front of the lens that adds a layer of distance, allows for some beautiful filmmaking, some subtly pretty cinematography, clever editing, and powerfully understated storytelling.

What makes this so Canadian is its reservedness, it's lack of desire to go big or go broad in its drama (that, and it's inclusion of the House Hippos ad as well as a choice bit or two of 90's Canadiana in its soundtrack). There are no immediate stakes, no big performances, no massive outbursts, no over-statements at all. It's a story about a time, a place and the people who inhabit it, the emotions of the time and the lingering effect it can all have.  Yet, it still makes some daring storytelling swings which pay off so wonderfully that this may be my favourite film of the year.

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The Girl Who Cried Pearls is a Canadian animated short film clocking in around 25 minutes in length that went on to win its directors their second Academy Award this year (in the animated short film category, naturally... their first was in 2008 for Madame Tutli-Puttli).

Their medium of choice is stop-motion animation and the first thing that I notice whenever watching a stop-motion animation is the fine details, and here we enter the film into a large, elegant chamber...an office or personal library of someone quite wealthy (a clear view of the Eiffel Tower out the window). A little girl is exploring the space, a particular jewellery box catching her eye, when the creak of the floorboard and a shadow in the doorway send her hiding under the desk.  

The room is beautifully decorated and immaculately curated, all of it had to be produced in miniature and an active environment for hands to get in and manipulate the figures and space as need be.  It's beautiful craftsmanship to be admired.

The shadow turns out to be the girl's grandfather, who proceeds to tell her the story of what's in the jewellery box. He tells of his poor, orphan life, scraping to get by on the rough streets, hiding out in a half-condemned house right next to a poor family. He falls in love with the young daughter who cries herself to sleep every night, witnessing her increasingly tragic conditions through a crack in the wall. At night, her tears turn to pearls, and in the morning she sweeps them into the cracks of the walls before anyone can notice.

The boy then takes the pearls to a pawnbroker, a nasty, greedy man who short changes the kid and validates the pearls with a local jeweller, and is then pressured to bring more. But the boy just wants the girl to be happy, and uses his gains to buy her a present... with no more pearls to come.

There's a twist to all this, but suffice to say there's a real beauty to the stop motion, even when we are in the poor, desperate lives of these children, the settings still feel so alive with character. The characters on the other hand are relatively expressionless, their mouths and eyes not even moving, like puppets.  The colour and texture, though, of the characters, their skin, aping the overall colour palette of the movie, is a melange of earth tones, like stepping out of an Edvard Munch painting.

It's a very unique, visually captivating production, so it's all the more a shame that it has one of my greatest storytelling pet peeves (which I share with Lady Kent) which is when a character is telling a first-person story but then relaying details of scenes where they were not present. It happens twice in the film, including it's big climactic reveal and it's just like needles in the back of my brain.

Not not recommended, but also not fully endorsed either.

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Animation is an arduous process regardless of the format but stop motion seems to be the most painstaking because of the tangibility of it all, that all the characters and environments and props and details must exist in real space, in reality, and that, most of the time, they have to be hand crafted for the project.

Phil Tippett is a master and innovator of stop motion and digital special effects, having worked on Star Wars, Robocop, Starship Troopers and many more. Mad God was a project he started in 1990 and wouldn't wind up finishing for over 30 years (when he returned to it, he Kickstarted the project for funding and completed it with the aid of band of volunteers).

The result of all that effort is a dialogue-free surreal exploratory adventure into a playfully nightmarish reality that may be a post-apocalyptic world or some kind of underworld (or more than likely a collision of the two).  There's not so much a plot to the story as there are connected events that give you a sense of this reality and the tumultuous cycles of violence and madness that it is stuck in.

As nasty and sometimes gross as the world of Mad God is, it doesn't seem to be striving to be offensive. It's playful in how it tortures and mutilates and squishes its denizens, like in a demented vaudevillian manner.  The soundtrack is mostly tranquil and atmospheric from Dan Wool, accompanying the ample sound effects and grunts and groans.

There appears to be a clear dividing line in the film though from Tippett's earliest efforts to his return to the project after learning digital effects and the result, for me, is that the second and third acts are that much less appealing than the first. Once Tippet starts incorporating live action performers into his sets and scenarios and using digital effects more extensively in the sequences, it kind of loses some of it magic.  Still, so much of it remains marvellous to behold, a rare example of pure creativity on screen.

I have to wonder about the title. Is the god angry, or crazy? Is Tippett, the creator and torturer of all these creatures within in actuality the titular character?

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Last week I wrote about The Stunt Driver, in which Jay Baruchel plays Canadian stunt driver Ken Carter as he attempts to bring to life his dream of jumping a rocket car over the Saint Lawrence River. It may sound like an absurd comedy, but Ken Carter was a very real person, and the stunt was a very real one.  That film, directed by Michael Dowse, was directly inspired by The Devil At Your Heels, a documentary film from Robert Fortier, produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

I only just learned that the NFB has made their library of films available on-line, both via their website and on youtube (and perhaps other portals as well), which meant I had no reason not to follow up my viewing of The Stunt Driver with The Devil At Your Heels.

While I really liked The Stunt Driver it's hard to escape the fact that it's not quite reality. What Dowse's narrative film does is expand some of the peripheral people in Carter's life (like his wife, Gloria, or Dick Keller, the engineer of the rocket car) as well as contract and consolidate people and events of the story to simplify the narrative.

What The Devil At Your Heels reveals is that truth is indeed stranger than fiction, and the roller coaster ride Carter went on to try and stage his big stunt is much wilder in reality than what's actually in The Stunt Driver.

As much as Dowse and Baruchel try and give you a sense of who Ken Carter/Kenneth Gordon Poleschuck actually was (with Baruchel in his first really transformative role), they capture the broad strokes (and elaborate on those strokes) while this documentary really lets you wriggle around inside the man's brain.

Director Fortier (also a major supporting character in The Stunt Driver) really got in deep with Carter, it seemed the man had few walls up when it came to talking about how he felt in any given situation. Carter was a resilient man, physically, and a daring man, one who was very conscientious about the risks he was taking, and was more than willing and ready to take them.

The drama of The Devil At Your Heels is in the timing. Taking place in five sections (years one to five), and it is very much a procedural on how to actually get a stunt of this magnitude made. It takes a lot of money and a lot of people, it takes investors and inventors, it becomes for a day or two or three, an industry all its own.

The culmination of the stunt, which is told from a more fictionalized perspective in The Stunt Driver, is shocking here, the players involved are quite different.  It's exciting and sad and terrifying all at once. Where often a documentary makes a nice companion piece to the narrative film, I think it's quite the opposite here. The Stunt Driver makes for a fun companion to The Devil At Your Heels.

The Devil At Your Heels is an utterly captivating, incredibly structured, very well shot film with Fortier perfectly embedded with his subject to create a tremendously Canadian profile of a tremendous Canadian.