KWIF: The Running Man (+3)

KWIF=Kent's "Week" in Film. I realized this past weekend that I had watched almost a film a day this August, so the goal has become to cram the last bunch of films in on the final couple of days. These are numbers 24 through 28.

This Week:
The Running Man (2025, d. Edgar Wright - crave)
Zodiac Killer Project (2024, d. Charlie Shackleton - hollywoodsuite)
City Hunter (1993, d. Wong Jing - tubi)
Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970, d. Mario Bava - tubi)

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The Running Man falls into my beloved "most dangerous game" subgenre. The man-hunts-man-for-sport (and/or entertainment) never gets tired for me, although its entries are frequently not very well done. The Running Man, like The Hunger Games or Battle Royale, is kind of a brand in the subgenre, or at least notorious enough to be a name big enough to check-point (as in "Oh, it's like The Running Man").

While I've read the Stephen King-as-Richard Bachman novella three and a half decades ago, I don't recall it very specifically, and likewise it's been quite some time since I watched the 1987 Arnold Schwartzenegger-starring adaptation. From memory, that film was definitely a product of Reagan-era economics, and was concerned about wealth disparity and social order, to a degree. It was concerned with crime, totalitarianism, and classism. 

We're now in an age where the wealth gaps are far more dramatically pronounced and we have government institutions that seem to only be serving to perpetuate that trend. We've given too much power to corporations, non-corporeal entities that have their own rights but seemingly no responsibilities. The people in charge of corporations seem to have free reign to influence government policy, and are not held liable for their actions and decisions made while running such organizations. Lands and waters are polluted and poised, people get sick or are killed, minds are manipulated and tainted by increasingly clever propaganda, and a token sum is only ever paid when they corporations are caught...and the execs still get paid.

Edgar Wright's new adaptation of The Running Man finds its protagonist, the angry and righteous Ben Richards (Glen Powell), blacklisted from the Network, which, in this dystopian future, pretty much controls all of America. They are the primary source of employment and entertainment in the country, and though they are not the government, their sheer economic power means they pretty much dictate policy. With a sick daughter at home and no income, Ben turns to his last-ditch option: Reality TV. Looking to get on any of the Network's many programmes except the brutal, life-threatening "The Running Man" program (the Network's most popular show), he, of course, is chosen for "The Running Man" because otherwise there wouldn't be a movie.

He's sweet-talked by the Network's head honcho into signing the deal to join the show. Surviving 30 days wins Ben and his family a cool 1 billion New Dollars, while he also receives a daily survival bonus, plus a bonus for killing any of the Network's security goons or the show's elite "hunters".  But from the jump, Ben sees that the Network doesn't play fair. They introduce him (and two other runners) with lies about being career criminals, disparaging their name, and denigrating their families, going so far as to have doctored clips (the use of deep fakes is central to this movie but it doesn't ever reckon with the general public's awareness of them).

Needless to say, Ben survives with the help of some activists and supporters, but it's never easy, and (once again) the Network cheats, tracking his location (duh) and manipulating the narrative of the show by coaching the hunters when, and when not to go in for the kill. The audience is also invited to participate, with the Network offering a hundreds/thousands of New Dollars for anyone who rats out a Runner and leads to a kill. It takes the audience out of being passive observers with, maybe, some moral responsibility for the perpetuation of this barbaric program, and turns them in to active participants in murder. And, of course, it's all propaganda, fuelling The Network's ideology of keeping the teeming masses stupid and hungry, and distracting them from the real cause of the problems in their lives.  It's up to Ben, who's really just doing this all for his family, to realize he's the catalyst for waking people up as to who the real enemy is.

The opening scenes of The Running Man are, to be blunt, really clumsy in how they set Ben Richards up. These scenes are meant to establish Ben as a rage-filled man, a man who fights injustice, and a man who desperately loves his family, but the writing and performances lack nuance, to the point that I was concerned that Powell was decisively the wrong guy for this part. He turns out to be fine, in the end, but Edgar Wright's script pushes and/or pulls Ben through the plot, without him doing much to instigate things on his own. He's a passenger in his own story, and through to the third act he's not consistently written. 

He's established as a man who does the right thing and then turns him into a murderer. He's established as a man who defies the order of things, but he denies being a revolutionary. He's a good person, and, for the most part, remains a good person...but Wright's script never quite finds the right balance for shifting between his anger and his kindness, and Powell seems to only be following direction. A likeable enough lead, but not clearly defined enough.

Similarly, the dystopia we find Ben running around in is fleshed out only so much. We don't get enough establishment between the different, disparate class hierarchies, but the film is very clear that the propaganda machine the Network employs is very effective across the class spectrum.

As a "most dangerous game" story, it's not unexciting or entertaining, and the film is asking people to hold the persons in charge of nefarious corporations accountable, but even still it's not the clearest message. It's still a retrograde story where T.V., and not the internet, or social media, is the primary form of audience engagement and how organizations manipulate the masses. As much as it's trying to represent modern concerns, the atmosphere of the story doesn't reflect our modern society enough.

I'm a fan of Wright's work, but couldn't exactly pin down the man's style (much of it is married to music or toying with genre tropes, neither of which is l'objet du jour here). In the piles of effects and craftsmanship needed to realize the dystopian future, I think maybe Wright's particular cinematic flair gets lost. As Toasty said in his toastypost "the movie is not over-the-top enough or biting enough to be a fun, corny romp. Neither is it dark & grim enough to reflect the Dark Urban Future it wants to rail against". We certainly agree.

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Zodiac Killer Project sounds like a cheapo Tubi-original slasher movie or possibly a Tubi-original pseudo-documentary with some weird right-wing bent (as befits the service's Fox Corp ownership). Turns out it's neither of these, though it's clear it's still a very modestly budgeted production.

Over a decade ago filmmaker Charlie Shackleton was prepping for a documentary based on the 2012 book, "The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge" by Lyndon E. Lafferty, a former California highway patrol officer whose maybe-encounter with the Zodiac Killer sent him on a decades long crusade to bring the man he considered to be responsible to justice. It was unsuccessful and Lafferty, and his suspect, are little more than a footnote in the Zodiac Killer conversation. But as Shackleton was ramping up production on his doc, he lost the rights to the book, and all his investment in the documentary was for naught.

He couldn't escape it though. In the intervening years, true crime podcasts and documentaries have proliferated on every channel and streaming service, and with them a visual language all its own has developed. In Zodiac Killer Project, Shackleton relays what he would have done, how he would have shot the b-roll footage, the "backtors" (actors in true crime reenactments whose backs are all we see), the locations, and how it all would have been to serve an entertaining narrative far more than the truth.

Because Lafferty's accusations and investigations were not limited to his book, Shackleton has some clearance to discuss Lafferty's prime suspect and the situations that led him to believe his suspect was the killer as well as many of the details around his investigation in to the suspect (what he can only touch upon is why Lafferty suspects there was a cover-up to dismiss and not investigate his suspect, which leaves a big cloud over the whole proceedings here).

In detailing how he would have made what sounds like a pretty bog standard true-crime documentary, Shackleton drolly takes apart all the tropes we know from most other true crime docs... specific types of footage or editing style, the presentation of certain information, the cheats the productions do to condense the story or make it more entertaining that may be stretching or warping the truth.  What Shackleton doesn't really do is account for the ethics of it all, of making entertainment out of these real-life horrors, and his capacity for examining why the public is so enthralled by such media isn't very deep.

The Bay area location imagery that Shackleton and his team shot, mostly of empty or vast spaces takes on a slightly meditative nature, with Shackleton's voice over occasionally calling out whether the footage we're seeing is at all relevant to the point in the narrative he's discussing.

Dryly funny with a slight intensity and more than a little reserved playfulness, Zodiac Killer Project doesn't get us anywhere new with the whole Zodiac Killer thing, but it brushes back the fur on a genre and exposes its soft, and kind of ugly, underbelly.  

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City Hunter was a manga that ran from 1985 through 1991, while near-simultaneously an animate tv series ran parallel, between 1987 and 1991. I have a vague recollection of having watched some of this anime on Canadian TV, but I may be wrong.

Jackie Chan's starred in the 1993 Hong Kong adaptation, which I think is pulling more from the anime than the manga. Chan's City Hunter is a very, very broad comedy that's trying to be a live action cartoon, one of the most difficult cinematic challenges ever. 

"City Hunter" is the nickname of infamous private investigator Ryo Saeba (Chan) an affable, womanizing, and semi-capable man-of-action. He is assisted by his deceased former partner's little sister, Kaori, who he sort of had a hand in raising and now, as an adult, she's in love with him, and he has to resist his own libido and keep her at arms length. It's a gross dynamic that, for the most part Ryo is on the right side of, but not always.

Ryo and Kaori, through separate misadventures, wind up on the same maiden voyage of a cruise ship which gets taken hostage by a ruthless white American pirate, Col. "Big Mac" MacDonald (Richard Norton). The plan is to kill all the lower-deckers and hold the richest hostage for their money. Unfortunately for them, not only is City Hunter aboard, but so too is undercover officer Saeko Nogami (Chingmy Yau) and gentleman thief Kao Ta (Leon Lai) to aid in liberating the boat.

City Hunter is a goofy movie, one that is really leaning into comedy far more than action or adventure. This is no Speed, more of a Speed 2, if Patrick Muldoon stared at Sandra Bullock's boobs and imagined them as hamburgers.  Ryo is very charming but also a known cad, so women are as apt to bat him upside the head as to fawn over him or give him a kiss. Chan isn't really known for playing much of a romantic hero, and certainly not known for playing a sexual one, so here Ryo's horniness is tempered by the fact that the character spends much of the film starving and just hoping to eat something...anything.

The usual Chan flair for action and physical stunts seems to be scaled back pretty dramatically from his more infamous efforts, I think out of service to the situational comedy. There's less physical comedy overall for Chan to perform as well. He may be a bit of a goofball but we also have to believe he can turn on the charm as well and that ladies will not only fall for it, but actively pursue it (the who Kaori side-plot depends on it).

There are some very regressive (and, at one point, brutally offensive) jokes in this film, which shouldn't be surprising for any '90's comedy. The sexism or gay-bashing aren't persistent, but they are there. On the plus side, the women of the film are largely pretty strong, capable, independent and a diverse (personality-wise) group, and central to the film. I liked them all.

Trying to do animation-style gags in physical reality is very, very challenging and doesn't often work because, well, real world physics get in the way of having these things really happen, so special effects making them happen can look really awkward and corny.  As much as this type of gag in City Hunter doesn't work, through Chan's immense charms and a remarkably game cast of performers, it winds up being a fairly fun, if not fully successful production.  The extended set piece where Chan and his opponents become Street Fighter characters after getting electrocuted by an arcade machine is a highlight of the film though (lowlight, the painfully prolongued musical number at the midway point, made worse by the fact that it wasn't subtitled ... also, if I'm not mistaken, much of the film was performed in English then dubbed and subtitled...curious).

I had fun, but this isn't essential Chan by any means.

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Five Dolls for an August Moon is a last gasp of beatnik free-love-era filmmaking and sitting just outside of the Italian giallo wave. It's a murder mystery of sorts, but a film full of characters that seem pretty disinterested in the murders, and even more disinterested in the mystery.

Industrialist George Stark (Teodoro Corrà) has invited four associates and their partners to his remote island home for a weekend holiday, but really it was all a ruse to get the men facetime with Professor Garry Farrell (William Berger) and try to convince him to sell them a secret, revolutionary new formula for a resin that will redefine...something. Whatever.  

The next morning, the houseboy winds up dead, and you know what, nobody really seems to care. They wrap the man up in plastic and put him in the meat locker. They discover that Stark's boat has gone missing and the radio has been tampered with rendering it useless. Typically this would start sending people into a panic, a murderer loose on an isolated island, nowhere to go, no one to call. But, these upperclass twits keep on partying as if nothing is happening. Except, there's plenty happening, including each of the men propositioning Farrell to obtain the formulae alone, and two of the wives having a secret affair with each other, and another of the wives having affairs with, well, everyone else. And what's up with the island girl in the mini-skirt (Justine Gall) watching everything from afar?

The bodies start piling up in an almost comical fashion, new additions to the meat locker in pretty rapid fashion, along with a couple disappeared bodies that are even more puzzling. In a typical giallo, someone would be trying to figure things out. In a typical suspense thriller, everyone would be pointing fingers at each other and things would get tense.  Here, everyone's still just drinking and trying to figure out how to get that damn formula.

The ending reveals/twists are ... to be blunt... silly. But then the fact that no tension has built up around these reveals means there's little sense of stakes here. There's an organ-led jazzy soundtrack to the film from Piero Umiliani that is far too bouncy and upbeat for the events of the film.  And that the film is largely shot with gorgeous Italian seaside daylight and perhaps a slight overexposure, there's a vibrancy to the proceedings that leaves little hidden in shadows.  I'm really not sure what exact tone was trying to be set.

Bava's an incredible director, though, so his films, even the lesser ones, still have style and impact. Here he uses a lot of split fore and background shots with a character very close in the front of frame and other characters deep in back of frame all in focus. As well, he's exceptionally focussed on the eyes and letting the eyes tell the characters' stories of lust, love, suspicion, betrayal, intrigue, etc. And with such focus on eyes, also is point of view, most highlighted by the many whip-pans the camera does to shift our point of view... not in a first-person sense but a third-person. We will see a character staring off and the camera will whip across to see what they are looking at, and if someone else is looking back we'll whip back to see their perspective. It's a curious but effective technique, even if it's not perfectly deployed here.

Had maybe the island girl been investigating these murders from the outside, and her life put at risk for doing so, this would really feel like a true giallo. As is it's a mystery that barely lifts the eyebrow, and tepidly sexy. 

KWIF: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. I also saw The Odyssey in true IMAX. It's a big movie on the biggest screen. I don't know that the viewing experience was all that much different than the first, other than I could see a lot more sand and sky.

This Week:
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, d. Jane Schoenbrun - in theatre)
Illustrious Corpses (or Cadaveri Eccellenti - 1976, d. Fracesco Rosi - bluray)
Pavements (2024, d. Alex Ross Perry - bluray)
Synecdoche, New York (2008, d. Charlie Kaufman - dvd)

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Jane Schoenbrun's latest academic-cum-schlocky meta head trip opens with heavy breathing, and camera work implying we're watching from someone's specific point of view. It's every masked serial killer since... Jason? Michael Meyers? Leatherface? The intensity is ingrained when we watch from this perspective and hear the sounds of someone's breath reverberating inside a contained space. And then into view is tents and cameras and sound gear and crew, and someone steps very closely into frame and seems to be adjusting whomever it is that is behind the camera.  This should be our first indication that this isn't going to play out how we expect.

The opening credits - set to Okay Kaya's cover of R.E.M.'s Nightswimming - takes us through all the pop culture hoopla and paraphernalia of the (fictional) "Camp Miasma" horror franchise and it's vent-headed killer "Little Death". News articles, posters, video games, toys, websites, all detailing the rise and fall of the Miasma series, much like the 80's heavyweights like Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street.  It's a series that had its day, and then it's corporate overlords kept trying to make it a thing, outstaying its welcome. 

This credits sequence is so information dense and so evocative it's easy to get lost in. As a pop culture and paraphernalia junkie, I just wanted to watch this opening on a loop five times over just to take it all in (my favourite bit is that "Little Death" released a much derided rap album). This density serves as an intentional disconnecting break from the film's initial imagery (and sounds). It's there, in part, to make us forget what we initially saw, so that when we meet Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) we don't suspect what the film will eventually be telling us.  

Kris stops in at a gas station convenience store, loads up on candy (so much candy, too much candy) and finds a random copy of "Camp Miasma VI" on DVD. When she checks in and asks the hotel clerk (Kevin McDonald) if there's a DVD player she could use, he lets her know he had a small part in the locally-shot film. We learn that Kris has been hired to be the director of the Camp Miasma reboot. The series has a problematic past in that its killer is problematically trans-coded and the studio execs want a queer director to reboot it for, well, optics.

Kris is in the Pacific Northwest to meet up with the original Miasma "final girl", played by Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson, adopting a thick Tennessee drawl... which I mean to say is she's doing Dolly Parton's accent...and laugh... RIP Dolly). Presley's been a recluse since declining to return for the sequels, and is basically a non-commodity, but Kris is infatuated with her, in particular the sex scene in the first Miasma film which was both a sexual awakening as well as kink origin story for her.

Billy, who now owns and lives on the camp grounds the original Miasma was shot, is introduced walking in on an obviously titillated Kris watching this scene. Billy is presented stepping out of the shadows, hair a vibrant golden yellow, lipstick a stark blood red, and an obscenely big hat, all making her look like a femme fatale straight out of a noir film.

This is all still very early in teenage Sex and Death at Vamp Miasma, and it's hard to fully describe what the actual experience of watching it is like. There is obscene, face forward product placement that, if it takes you out of the movie, it's acting as intended. If Anderson's just-shy-of-over-the-top drawl is almost too much, it's as intended. If you are, like I was, made to feel in awe of Anderson, to be reminded of how hot and iconic Dana Scully was in the X-Files then that too is intentional. It's all intentional and it's all part of the layers of artifice that this film puts on.

Kris is not at Billy's home just to recruit her for her reboot of the series, she's there for a more personal and intimate reason. She saw in a still frame of Billy's eye in that original film a look - at the crossroads of pleasure and pain - little death and Little Death. She's been fixated on this imagery and this idea and cannot get past it. Billy gets it. Kris has a kink that she's too ashamed to admit to, and she's a willing participant in unlocking that for her.  I don't think Anderson really cared for Scully being a sex symbol, but she certainly seems on board with making Billy Presley one. That there's a 30 year age gap between Billy and Kris hardly matters. There's no power imbalance, and nobody is taking advantage of the other. Consent is explicit.

The second act of the film finds Kris and Billy watching the original Miasma film, which Schoenbrun's spot-on riff on 80's slasher films (including making near-40-year-old Zach Cherry playin a teen sleepaway camp counsellor) is both entertainment and foreplay for them. The film-within-the-film (-within-the-film) explains the origins of Little Death, which dives into its own variation of the all-too-common transphobic origins of horror's cinematic murderers.

Schoenbrun examines the warping of young minds that comes with horror film's obsession with titillation and brutality, but from a feminine lens, not the masculine one in which most horror (particularly those of the 80's) were presented in. Schoenbrun doesn't cast judgement. That "Little Death" rises again and chases Kris (who intentionally doffs her clothes down to her underwear) all the way to Billy's rose-petal coated bed and skewers the both of them as they fornicate is all just part of the role play. It's not horror, it's leering and alluring. It's wrong, and yet, ok?

There's not a lot of direct horror in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, but there is a lot of flesh and fluids, as Billy says. It is a satirical examination of horror as a genre... both a loving and biting one. It's almost a sex comedy, but also... not really.  

I am not well versed in 80's horror, nor do I have any first-hand familiarity with women's sexual awakenings (that I know of!), and though I've done some reading of trans media analysis, I too am not an expert in that to comment extensively in the context of this film (critic Willow Maclay's review is exceptional from that context), so ...Camp Miasma is, in some respects, not in any way meant for me, a straight, cisgender, horror-averse man. But at the same time, it's also not throwing a hand up to explicitly excluding me either. 

Beyond the aforementioned themes of film and sex and transphobic media, it's also asking the audience, whomever you may be, to think about voyeurism, about what it can mean to be the watcher, or to be watched. How do these different perspectives impact us? What does it mean to look...is it leering? Is it desire? Is it judgement? And what does it mean to be looked at? Is it affirming? Is it off-putting? Is it exciting or upsetting? And where does context fit into all of that?

It's only once Kris reports back to the studio big wigs her progress on the film, kicking off the third act, that we start to understand the context which the film has actually been presented to us all along. Kris insists it's not "meta" but it very much is. The artifice is also the substance. I don't think a film has thrown me for a loop this befuddling and inspiring since Synecdoche, New York. 

It's a fascinating picture, deep in thought, with multiple themes playing in concert together (including Schoenbrun taking some jabs at the Hollywood intellectual property machine), each that could be picked apart and analysed from an academic perspective, but at the same time being playful and having fun with it all, not taking itself too seriously.  

...also, fyi...miasma: a heavy vaporous emanation...
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I have been dipping my toe into giallo movies the past little while, a very tentative dip that likes the temperature but still won't commit to jumping in with full gusto. The Italian murder/mystery subgenre of film is pretty vast with many names of directors and stars swimming in the pool (if you'll allow me to extend this metaphor), it almost feels too crowded to just dive in. Amid all the splashy titles, and the plentiful boutique physical media labels just trying to sell their wares, it's hard to know what's truly worthwhile, it's like I need a coach at the end of my lane to tell me where to turn (ok, I've lost a grip this metaphor).

Illustrious Corpses was a recommendation on the relatively new-to-me (but not new overall) podcast The Big Picture from regular Chris Ryan... a recommendation that would test whether he was a trustworthy source or not. Turns out this film isn't a giallo at all, but the recommendation was still a good one... nay, a great one.

The film opens in the real Capuchin Catacombs, looking at real desiccated corpses. It's a stark visual but not one meant to scare or frighten. The character, an older man with a real lived-in face, looks deeply into the mummified faces, intrigued and ponderous. He leaves and is promptly assassinated. It turns out he was a prominent judge. Assigned to his murder case is Inspector Amerigo Rogas (Lino Ventura, another very lived in face, but with a little more mileage left to go).  He monitors the big, stately funeral, and suspects, maybe, mafia connections were to blam. In the streets, youthful protesters decry the dead man as being connected to the mob.

As Rogas investigates, there's another murder, another judge. And then a third. Rogas starts piecing together that the three judges were connected by more than profession, there is perhaps a vengeful aspect to this string of killings. But as he digs into these men, he starts uncovering information that might not be directly relevant to the case, but certain powerful people want to keep buried.

Soon Rogas' hunt finds the tables flipped. There's potentially a conspiracy afoot, and not only isn't it something he cannot solve, he may not be able to get out from under.  

I may have mentioned in my review of Dario Argento's The Five Days  that my knowledge of Italian history is verrry slim, so the backdrop of Illustrious Corpses, the political tensions involving student protests, labour shutdowns, neo-fascism and a burgeoning communist undercurrent are all pretty new concepts to me, but director Rosi certainly captures the mood. The vociferous chants of protests are a common soundtrack to the picture tell of a country ready to explode, and more than once we catch wind of a government doing everything it can to keep such an explosion from happening, even if it means scuttling a murder investigation or three (and committing a few more of their own).

What starts out as a high profile murder investigation soon bursts into full-blown '70's conspiracy thriller, and it is pretty incredible. Ventura's Rogas starts out so cool and assured, so observant and above it all, and we slowly watch that confidence, that comfort, that sense of being untouchable erode away and, eventually, collapse into the sea.

Director Rosi and his cinematographer Pasqualino Del Santis frame everything in beautiful, massive, old spaces, as if Italy itself is constantly threatening to consume our primary characters. We often see Rome and Venice in film, but Rosi takes us to many different locals, each with their own charm, some decadent, some rugged. The camera's gaze, often, is snapshot worthy, even if the innate colour tone is almost always some shade of brown (with maybe a hint of blood red).

This was a total surprise, as I had settled in for a delightful picture about a crazed murderer and instead felt the wave of historical anxiety and tension Rosi so ably builds overtake.  It's up there with the best of the subgenre, a real damn surprise.

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Pavement was never my band. I enjoyed the few songs I heard of theirs back in the heyday(s) of my indie-rock years (about 1993-2011), but never actively pursued them, never owned an album. I was always just happy to hear a new tune every few years, but always felt listening to too much of them would perhaps sour what I did enjoy.

I have to say, watching director Alex Ross Perry's 128 minute avant garde "documentary" on the band was the most time I've committed to the band since first hearing "Cut Your Hair" back in the mid-'90s.

In Pavements we have:
- A behind-the-scenes document of the 2022 reunion tour;
- An archival footage retrospective;
- A making of the cliche-laden Hollywood biopic;
- A behind-the-scenes telling of Alex Ross Perry's attempt to launch an off-Broadway jukebox musical adaptation of the band's music; and
- The opening of a celebratory museum gallery tribute to the band and their history.

It's a lot to string together into anything approximating a cohesive narrative, but editor Robert Greene gets pretty close, and in the end, for all the fake productions attempting to mirror reality (the Hollywood biopic is completely fake, the musical is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek cheeky production, and the museum is not entirely fake but constructed for the purposes of the film), it winds up somewhere honest and tributory without being overly sentimental or fawningly admiring.

At once pretentious and silly, there perhaps too much facade to Pavements and not enough introspection/retrospective to function as a satisfying introduction for anyone not familiar with the band, or, for someone like me who only ever flirted with them, never committing. 

It's pretty clear though, frontman Stephen Malkmus was never going to approve of anything remotely standard, nor was he going to sit for anything approximating a conventional interview, and had little interest in assessing his band's, history or his own.

As is, I think this one is for the fans.

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In referencing Synecdoche, New York in the above Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma review I was reminded how long it's been since I last watched the film, a time which predates this blog.

The impact of Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut never left me, although the majority of the details had long since faded. Was the comparison even apt between these two films? Am I just a fake critic who really doesn't know what he's talking about? A. Yes and yes. 

Much like Miasma, Synecdoche... is a very personal journey through the working thoughts of a director's brain. I don't think if Kris in ...Miasma or Caden Cotard in Synecdoche... are fully meant to be stand-ins for the directors of their pictures, but both are certainly speaking for the director.

While the themes are somewhat different, I still see synergy in how they approach their stories, layers of surrealism to inform the viewer that what they're about to see, that the world the characters in the film inhabit is a skewed depiction of reality.  Schoenbrun is more obvious about it in ...Miasma than Kaufman is (at first) but when Kaufman wants it to be known, he hits you with a literal house on fire.

The story of Synecdoche finds Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a successful theatre director, inhabiting a life that's falling apart, but he's kind of oblivious to it, a passive player in a way. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is an artist who leaves him to exhibit in Germany, taking their daughter with them. She had been pretty disconnected from any engagement with him (though as we learn more about Caden, the disconnect seems to have started on his end). Caden also has had a string of maladies plaguing him that seem to reiterate his view that death is waiting specifically for him.  He flirts with Hazel (Samantha Morton) at the box office but he can't seem to take action even when Hazel couldn't be more direct about how she feels about him. His young actress from the play, Claire (Michelle Williams) is utterly infatuated with him, and at first he knows it's a line he cannot cross, but he crosses it when Hazel moves on from him. 

Caden gets a sizable grant to produce the play of his dreams, a very personal work, a play about death coming for us all, but the only story he knows to tell is his own, and so the world around Caden is largely shaped by his own reality, a mirror within a mirror within a mirror, without any real sense of identity or direction. Soon the world within starts to bleed with the world without and the become intractable. The one area of his life he proactively controls, he loses control of, and he needs someone else to step in and take over as him... and it seems the most comfort he has ever had in his life is when someone else tells him exactly what to do.

Time, in Synecdoche, New York, is the main thematic element. Kaufman lets us know without any exposition that time is passing in Caden's life and he's missing all of it, stuck in routine, stuck in ruts, stuck in his own mind, stuck in his own obsessions. The opening scene takes place over the span of the month, but plays as if it were one continuous scene. It's not obvious, but it's there. When Adele leaves, Caden thinks she's been gone a week or two, but Hazel tells him it's been a year, and she's not coming back, and the fashion magazine moments later tells us it's been two years.  Time in the film keeps moving like this, and Caden keeps losing track of it because he's so insular, so fixated on his own fixations.  The film spans Caden's life as he begins middle age to his very old age², and it seems to go by so fast.

In creating a lasting work of art, Caden misses out on actually living his life. His work misses the larger patches of what's going on in the world (things are bad outside of the confines of the warehouse he's operating out of, as implied by the increased military presence on the street, with no context given because Caden can't be bothered to pay attention to it). I'm not certain if this is Kaufman's specific point, but there's a reading that only drawing on one's own life for the sake of art can lead to one's art consuming one's life (as well as an obsession with not dying might result in losing out on actually living).

This is both a deep and purposefully obtuse movie. Kaufman is a very intelligent writer who obsesses about his own mindset and his career and the immediate world around him, and perhaps this is a self-criticism, but also with the awareness that he can't see another path for himself. Death is the inevitable. The end is prescribed at the beginning. 

I didn't really understand Synecdoche, New York when I first saw it. I understand it only a little better now, but I love the puzzle of it. A marvelous film.

---

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Colony

2026, Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan) -- download

Called Gunche in Korean. 

Yes, another zombie movie from the guy who did Train to Busan and its sequel, except this time he's riffing off the fungus among us idea from The Last of Us which I guess, I didn't write about. But, that's pretty much what I said for his first zombie movie, but that he was riffing on World War Z that time.

Despite its acclaim, I do recall saying that Train to Busan was not a very good movie. I also recall that I changed my viewpoint all from changing the subtitle track. It was a fun movie. Not great, but in the zombie sub-genre, what ever really is?

Again with the family. Part of me wonders whether other cultures family tropes stand out more clearly to me because they are slightly different from ours, more focus on some parts, less so on others. Almost every Hollywood movie is going to give you the divorced family trope, the family drama trope, the father doting on the daughter trope. They are background, familiar setup that we ignore as we get to know characters. But in other cultures, it is not an inherently known dynamic being displayed. to us from outside the culture. 

I mean, what's so amazing about the two family dynamics shown in this movie? Nothing really. A divorced couple, Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Hi-hyun, Blood: The Last Vampire) and her ex-husband Han Gyu-sung (Go Soo, The Flower in Prison) are amicable; he's even trying to find her a new job, despite her being difficult -- there's probably something cultural to unpack there; or it could just be general run-of-the-mill misogyny. And there is security guard Choi Hyun-seok (Ji Chang-wook, The Manipulated) and his disabled sister Hyun-hee (Kim Shin-rock, Hellbound). He dotes on her, she wants independence. Nothing spectacular going on here, but they are character highlights to the movie, dominating how things go.

What goes on is that a loony disgraced biologist (Koo Kyo-hwan, Parasyte: The Grey) calls in a biological terrorism threat and then shows up at tech conference hosted by a bio-tech conglomerate in a highrise that also happens to have a multi-level shopping mall. He injects himself with "the vaccine" while injecting the CEO of the company, who happened to have dismissed him for unethical experimentation, with The Virus. Instant white-goo vomiting zombie. And you know how it goes from there. One red dot becomes two, two becomes four, and so on. Between elevator floor trips, much of the conference floor is turned. 

Yeon takes a nod from Rec and quarantines the building, trapping everyone inside, while inept authorities outside try to figure out how to deal with the emerging threat. They all know if it gets out, South Korea is doomed. They also have a cop on the inside who is instructed to keep the loony biologist safe, as the only source of a vaccination. So, for the survivors, it becomes a struggle to find said loony, and escort him to the roof, where evacuation will be had. On the outside, scientists working for the government are trying desperately to understand what this is all about, and one happens to be the new wife of Han Gyu-sung. FYI, he doesn't last long, as is the first sacrificed to zombie tragedy, so now the two wives have to work together to solve the problem.

So, yeah the zombies themselves. The title of the movie implies everything. There is a fungus among us that controls ants, turning them into zombies, but this movie mashes it all up with natural ant behaviour, in that a colony all communicates with each other easily, all working as one, and the loony scientist believes the next stage of human evolution will be as one big colony of "perfect communication". The zombies spray their white fungus goo everywhere, it quickly growing, forming a vast network that allows the zombies to transmit data to each other, learning, evolving. And loony scientist gets himself bitten, putting himself (I guess, along with injected vaccine) at the centre of the network. What they see, he sees, what he knows, they know. Fun little functional piece.

Its a good little movie, nothing spectacular, with production values enough to make it compelling.

Series Minded: Resident Evils

 [Series Minded is an irregular feature here at T&KSD, wherein we tackle the entire run of a film, TV, or videogame series in one fell swoop.] 

Resident Evil (2002, d. Paul WS Anderson - crave)
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004, d. Alexander Witt - crave)
Resident Evil: Extinction (2007, d. Russell Mulcahy - crave)
Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010, d. Paul WS Anderson - crave)
Resident Evil: Retribution (2012, d. Paul WS Anderson)
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016, d. Paul WS Anderson)

PREAMBLE

I remember when the first Resident Evil film came out. Fans were not happy. But fans, especially the ones who rage extensively online (yep, even in 2002 it was a thing), are so rarely happy. Anything but a very literal translation is usually met with some form of derision. Resident Evil, the movie, apparently, wasn't anything like the video game (not that I would know). For instance, its protagonist, Alice, played by Milla Jovovich, was not a character in the game (how dare they), and the movie takes place just as the outbreak is starting, sort of like a prequel.

Look, I've never played the game, probably never will. Of the many hobbies I have and things I care about, video games are far, far down the list (a few notches below crockery and just above marbles). Any adaptation of a video game has to work as a standalone movie for me, it can't be all about easter eggs and knowing winks or shortcuts in storytelling because the fans already know certain things. I always heard that the Resident Evil movies were not very good movies on top of being not-great adaptations of the games (including from Toasty who had some positive things to say about the first one (less so the second) here, and the third one (less so the fourth one) here, and then the final two here.)

Yet, in spite of being not very good, the Paul WS Anderson-era of Resident Evil bore six(!) films, earned a pretty decent amount of money every time, and apparently managed to build its own fanbase of appreciators.  Something can't flourish for this long without there being some redeeming quality to it, right? Right?

I'll be honest, I've never really wanted to watch these (although I've always been curious about the one [edit: Apocalypse] where in the trailer Jovovich is running down the side of Toronto's City Hall ...that image has stuck in my mind) but two of my podcasts are recapping the series leading into the new Zach (Barbarian, Weapons) Cregger-directed Resident Evil adaptation this fall, so I figured...why not just dive in...?

ONE

I really did not like this first movie of this Resident Evil franchise. I was bored and annoyed for most of the film. This is a bad sign for my viewing the rest of the series, which, from a quick gander at Toasty's reviews, does not seem to get a whole lot better (holding out hope for Extinction). 

Anderson is not a terrible director, but he's also not a great one. He's got a proficiency in B-movie genre fare that most others do not. His films look alright for their budgets and have ambition in the scale they're trying to operate in, but they mostly fall apart in the story. He's good at fashioning moments, bad at developing characters. Here he's playing with a horror genre (zombies) and turns it into an action movie that's basically aping Aliens. There's nothing scary here, and little real tension.

First, we're given a mystery. Someone has let the T-virus loose in the underground labs of the Umbrella Corporation. And then we meet Alice, who wakes up naked on the floor of a spacious tiled shower in a massive, creepy, mostly empty mansion with no memory of who she is. Another mystery...Alice, who the fuck is Alice? And then some spiky-haired douche (but not really a douche, appearances can be deceiving...poor Eric Mabius and his resting douche face) turns up at her door, says he's a cop (but he's clearly not...another mystery!), before a team of draped-in black special ops-types with heavy weaponry and night vision goggles come busting in (Colin Salmon, Michelle Rodriguez, and other zombie fodder). 

They take Alice and spiky hair along with them as they board a train car inside the house! There's a train inside the house, guys! There they find another amnesiac, Spence (James Purefoy) on the train, which takes them deep into the Earth into a supposedly massive underground complex.  The virus is loose, all the scientists and technicians and security that were there are now zombie-like flesh-eaters, as well as there being other security devices and experiments that are exceptionally dangerous.

Even though it's not a direct adaptation of any Resident Evil game, the film is basically like watching a video game. It follows the ever-dwindling group of characters as they traverse through the labs, fighting zombies and zombie dogs and "the Licker" (a so-so cgi effect in an otherwise largely practically-made film), among the escape rooms and other threats they face, all with the objective of escaping on the train before the lock-down timer goes off and they're trapped in quarantine forever. Hey, watching people play video games can be entertaining. This one, not so much.

The stuff about "who set the virus loose?" is painfully obvious, the "why" barely matters to the plot or characters. If Alice had her full memories from the get-go, nothing about this story would be different, and so the reveals of her past and what she knows feel perfunctory, and lack anything of interest or insight into her character. Beyond Jovovich being a performer Anderson's camera loves (Jovovich and Anderson would eventually marry), there's nothing to invest us in on Alice as a character (or anyone else for that matter)  which makes it really bizarre to me that there's five more of these films with this character.

The good: Michelle Rodriguez, just a powerhouse presence.
- The digital map explaining the mansion facade, the train, and the underground lab complex.
- The laser tunnel sequence. Makes absolutely no logical sense, but the highlight moment of the film.
- The last shot, teeing up the sequel, a great shot, even if the sequence leading up to it is basically the same as 28 Days Later. Cribbed or parallel thinking?

TWO

Resident Evil: Apocalypse finds Alice leaving an abandoned Umbrella facility where she's been experimented on and now has superpowers (super strength, heightened senses and reaction time). The city is being evacuated because the plague is starting to run rampant. Apparently there's, like, only one bridge out of Raccoon City and there's a big fortified gate that can shut it down, so the Umbrella Corp. does just that, leaving many of their own people inside. One of the Corp.'s chief scientists (an overqualified and under-utilized Jared Harris, wheelchair bound and with the tiniest of eyeglasses) is on the safe side of the wall but refuses to leave as his daughter is trapped inside.  Using the city's ample surveillance network, he searches for Umbrella assets with the promise of helping them get out of Raccoon City if they rescue Angela.

Instead of giving Alice the assignment and letting her pick up new allies in this riff on Escape from New York, the story decides to spend a whole bunch of time with new characters like halter-top/short-shorts-wearing gun-nut cop Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), S.T.A.R.S. agent Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr) and spunky civilian Lloyd Jefferson Wade (Mike Epps). Much like the first film, none of these new characters are given much of a personality, and since we spend so much time away from Alice, we really get no character development with her either. 

Alice was barely developed at all in the prior film. Here anything that changes her is strictly plot and/or world building (and maybe extruded from video game lore). Near the climax of the film, Alice has to fight the Nemesis beast (think a hulking, fleshy, zombie Robocop), who she discerns is spiky hair from the previous film, and she has an emotional breakdown (well acted by Jovovich, but nonsense in context...her and spiky hair spent maybe 8 hours together and barely got to know each other, why is she so attached?).  By the end of the film Alice is dead and I feel nothing. But then she's resurrected and, again I feel nothing.

Apocalypse gets too hung up in all the wrong places. It wants to explore it's newly created mid-catastrophe environment but it's not in the slightest interested in the characters exploring the space or how they might be feeling in this situation. But, by the sheer fact that it's working in an open environment and the massive increase in scale, I actually enjoyed this more than the last one despite being a worse directed, acted and edited film.  

I'm always delighted by seeing Toronto on screen and how it is used in movies. Here it's "standing in" for Raccoon City, but key T.dot landmarks like the C.N. Tower, City Hall, and our streetcars (not landmarks, I know, but iconic) are everywhere. Toasty speculated that Raccoon City might just be alternate-reality Toronto... perhaps a world where Toronto was annexed by the U.S. by force (one of the city's buildings is shown sporting an American flag), handed over to a massive corporation by a corrupt government as an experimental testing ground, and militarized (as well as flooded with guns...). 

The good: The garbage chute escape.
- The City Hall descent.
- The ending newsreel that exposed the Umbrella Corp's evil deeds in Raccoon City, but then quickly dismissed as a hoax in the media (obviously Umbrella has the money and cache to influence the truth)... the most honest part of the film. 
- Toronto.

THREE

Extinction opens not just rehashing but reusing Alice's awakening-in-the-shower-with-no-memory scene from the first film and then puts her in the laser hallway, which she escapes and then through into a clinic's hallway where there's a host of dangers that eventually kills her. Her body is taken above ground in the middle of the desert where a chain link fence holds back a significant amount of zombies. Her body is tossed into a pit full of other Alices.  Like traversing through a video game, Alice must learn the patterns, die and try again.  That's one way of introducing to us that Alice is a clone.

The world has wholly become an apocalyptic wasteland. The T-virus didn't just kill all the people but pretty much all life (vegetation included) on the planet. Where the first film was a James Cameron homage, and Apocalypse was largely a John Carpenter nod, this is George Miller Mad Max pastiche all the way.  

Alice wanders the deserts. We learn mostly to evade the Umbrella Corp, who is trying to track her. We're really not sure what else she's doing out in the wastelands. Meanwhile, LJ and Carlos - who we met last film (no sign of Jill Valentine though) - are back, travelling the deserted highways convoy-style, looking for food and refuge, the safety of what remaining survivors they can find is their primary concern. They're led by Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), who has no specific objective other than survival.

Meanwhile, evil Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen), introduced at the end of the last film as a head scientist at Umbrella, is back too. He answers to some dyed blonde dickhead who always wears sunglasses indoors (Jason O'Mara) . Isaacs has gone rogue and is doing projects off-book and consuming massive amounts of Umbrella's resources. 

By the end of the first act, Alice has met up with the convoy, where she has to use her telekinetic powers to save the survivors (where'd those powers come from? Well, that's Isaac's experiments, changing the T-virus into a genetic enhancement, but only Alice clones seem to respond to it without it going horribly awry). The use of her powers trips alarms and gives away their location. There's a fight in Vegas wastelands where Isaacs unleashes a horde of experimental zombies and only a few survivors remain afterword. But now they know there's a helicopter and Alice found a book that tells of Arcadia, a location of, possibly, a zombie-free community in Alaska. So they need to make a full frontal assault on the Umbrella labs entrance in the desert to capture the chopper and for Alice to...I dunno, get revenge on Umbrella? Still not sure her motivation 3 films in..

Director Russell Mulcahy of Highlander fame attempts to inject some actual horror into the proceedings, but Anderson's script is still too invested in sci-fi, action, superheroes and world building for this to be truly scary. But this time around the director leans into his actors and lets them have moments which inform us as to who they are and who they are to each other, if not necessarily presenting a specific arc for any of them. Mulcahy gets better performances out of his actors than in prior films, but some of the tertiary performers and voice-over work is still quite terrible. Mulcahy's film also eschews the "electro-rawk guitar" soundtrack that still sounds so cliched and '90s for something more traditional and atmospheric (decent work here from Charlie Clouser).

The film ends with Alice facing off against a mutated Dr. Issac with Alice discovering the reservoir of clones. (Anderson clearly cannot get enough of his not-yet-wife)

The good:  A murder of zombie crows are pretty much the only scary thing in 3 movies.
- Ali Larter makes for an effective stoic leader.
- The scene where you can see the plentiful highway traffic moving in the desert background...oops. Made me laugh.
- This one is much gooder than the prior two, I will have to agree with Toasty on that one.

FOUR

Ten years post-Matrix and here we have Anderson's totally unapologetic Matrix-riff as Alice and her clone army, clad in pleather and spandex, armed with samurai swords and automatic handguns, assail a tower complex which is Umbrella's Tokyo-based headquarters. So much slow-mo, so much bullet-time-on-a-budget. The blonde dickhead with sunglasses (no longer Jason O'Mara, instead Shawn Roberts aping the vocal fry of Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith), is the big final boss, having injected himself with the next evolution of T-cells. Only one Alice manages to escape on the plane with him before he explodes Toyko. He injects Alice with a serum that nukes her T-cells (and thus depowers her...just as the superhero boom is taking place? How curious). The plane crashes. Alice survives.  

This first act could have been the finale of a whole other movie but I imagine they didn't have the budget for all the Alice duplicates for a whole film (and even still, here, it's a pretty dodgy effect anytime there's more than one Milla on screen).

So Alice takes small plane to Alaska where she seeks the Arcadia refuge she sent Claire and the others to in the chopper. There she finds a plethora of planes and nobody but an amnesiac Claire. Again, they could have built a whole movie around "Alaska" and what happened to the survivors from the previous movie, but Anderson sets it up and closes it out (sort of) in a matter of minutes. 

Alice and Claire fly from Alaska to L.A., unbeknownst to them they are being tracked by satellite. In L.A.  they spy a small band of survivors on the roof of a very large building which turns out to be an old prison. in the middle of L.A. Kay.  Alice even without her super reflexes still manages to land the plane (The building is surrounded by zombies so it's the only place they could land...taking off again is a later problem).

There they meet a rag-tag group of survivors, including a wannabe actress, a big shot agent and his assistant, a creepo, a superstar basketball player (his fancy watch billboard is just across the way) and a prisoner who claims to be special forces and erroneously confined...and with the knowledge of how to get out. Turns out the prisoner is, improbably, Claire's brother Chris (Wentworth Miller) and not a dangerous offender, which would be more interesting if it was, like Riddick. If you think there's some tearful reunion or the sight of her brother would help with her memory problems or there would be any emotional or character-building resonance at all, you haven't been paying attention to Paul W.S. Anderson's career.  

Anyway creatures get in, people die. Surprise surprise but the one's with plot armour make it out alive and to the Arcadia which is an Umbrella mobile lab on a container ship where all the survivors are now in stasis tubes for later experimentation. Oh and blonde dickhead with the glasses is still alive. He has a big brawl against our gang of survivors but is defeated, he escapes on a VTOL but accidentally blows himself up. Ha ha. Alice and friends commandeer the Arcadia only for Umbrella to send out an absurd number of VTOL assault craft to their location. The end.

The score shifts only away from the 90's rawk guitar of the first two films (but deviating completely from the third's more traditional score)  with Tomandandy bringing their electronica sounds to the rawk guitar but toning the edgelord vibe down just a smidge. It's not outright awful, but it still feels remarkably dated for a 2010 movie to sound like this.

The good: Conceptually I really, really liked the opening sequence of an army of Alices. In actual execution it's pretty shaky. But a nifty opening that acts as epilogue to the prior film and prologue to this one.
- Happy Claire is back...I guess. Except in giving her amnesia they've stolen the grizzled wastelands veteran archetype Ali Larter brought to the character last film. She disappears for extended sequences here for no reason.
- Always happy to see Wentworth Miller, but Chris turns out to be such a big nothing of a character. (wait, these are the good?)
- Boris Kodjoe brings a lot of innate charm as pro-basketball player/athlete Luther West. It was a shame to see him killed, but then pretty awesome to see he survived. But we don't ever see him again in the remaining films so he's probably dead like everyone else.
- The interior of the Arcadia was pretty damn cool. A great set (which they obviously redressed three times over to look like three separate rooms, but hey, no shade cast...literally and figuratively).

FIVE

Colour me shocked. Resident Evil: Retribution's opening sequence was insanely awesome, a five minute slow-motion special effects extravaganza that tells the tale of Umbrella's destruction of the Arcadia and Alice's survival (of course) backwards. I repeat, backwards. It opens with Alice floating in the water and slowly pulls her to the surface and inverts her splash into the Pacific, back up to the boat two-guns firing. The Arcadia just being bombarded by a fleet of VTOL as the reverse slow-mo shows us all the massacre and destruction and the fight Alice nobly put up as it backs all the way to the closing shot of the previous film (also Jill Valentine [Sienna Guillory] is still alive but now working for Umbrella, but I didn't actually recognize her because of the 100% different look). This may just be the highlight of Paul W.S. Anderson's career. This could be the accompanying visuals to, like, a Radiohead or Bjork music video (we get a decent Tomandandy composition over it though). But I am also shocked that this ostensibly kills off Claire and Chris Redfield and undoes what little victory Alice managed to have at the end of the last film (just as the fourth film undoes what little victory Claire and the survivors had in escaping  on the helicopter). But do we ever actually feel the weight or horror of these crushing blows? Hell no, that would involve Anderson having to invest in the emotions of the characters, and he's just not interested.

Then, as these films do, Alice explains, in brief, everything that came before...all the twisty-turny plot bits from four movies, in large part to remind us that cast members from the first, second and fourth films exist.  As such this film will see the return of Michelle Rodriguez, Colin Salmon, Sienna Guillory, Boris Kodjoe and, of course the blonde dickhead with glasses is back. After Alice's recap, the open sequence plays again, only this time in forward motion at regular speed, and it's, like, a 60-second sequence that moves far too quickly to be impressive.

Alice is captured, wakes up inside an Umbrella facility which is a massive sealab somewhere off the coast of Northern Russia. She's set free by Ada Wong (Li Bingbing) with the aid of blonde dickhead with glasses who, surprise surprise, no longer works for Umbrella and is now trying to take it down (we only learn at the very end of the film that the AI "Red Queen" is trying to destroy all of humanity).  A team of special ops agents including Luther, Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb) and Barry Burton (an overqualified Kevin Durand) invade the facility to blow it up and hopefully rescue Alice and Ada beforehand.

Unlike the prior 3 films which just layer plot point upon plot point, this one goes back to the simple action-movie premise of "escape the facility alive", and has very little in the way of plot, and just the tiniest smidge more characterization, but only for Alice, who discovers that all of the testing simulations in the facility involve clones, sometimes clones of her, and sometimes those clones are mommy to a precious little deaf girl. So now Alice is a mom, even though not really, and once again it's unclear how or if the memories of clones are transferring to Alice (though it sure seems they are).

If Anderson is aping other directors' works with each film, here he's in his Zack Snyder mode, where most of the action sequences seem to be operating in slow motion. Anderson's compositions aren't as pretty as Snyder's, but they are just as illogical (why did so much of this need to be in slow-mo? What is the dramatic impact of it being in slow-mo?). Is it all just to pad the film out (this is about 10 minutes longer than the previous films which all clocked in at a tight 90 minutes or so).

In the end, Alice and her "daughter" and a few chums escape, head to Washington DC where blonde dickhead with glasses (Shawn Roberts still doing that Agent Smith impersonation) is sitting in the Oval Office and injects Alice with the T-virus again so she gets her powers back. He says she's the ultimate weapon in humanity's last stand against the Red Queen, and we pan out to see the city completely beseiged by zombie creatures of all sorts. I really don't know how one woman is supposed to turn the tide against all that.

This was the worst entry since the first, just action sequence after fight sequence, greenscreen nonsense around every corner, not a lick of character development here. Bringing back all the greatest hits characters from prior films amounts to little or nothing at all. If anyone, Jovovich included, has more than a dozen lines of dialogue, I'd be shocked. There's next to nothing here, no purpose for it existing beyond it resolving the end of the prior film and setting up the next one. Alice could literally have fallen in the water off the Arcadia and woken up in Washington and we wouldn't have missed, really, anything.

The good: That opening sequence. 
- I want to say it's nice to see Michelle Rodriguez back, but she's sorely misused (though not as badly as Colin Salmon who might as well have just been a mannequin for all he contributes).
- It was good to see Luther back, RIP.
- I love a sealab, and I love a sealab blowing up.
- Maybe my favourite parts of any Resident Evil movie is the skeletal wireframes that show us the set-up of the Umbrella Complexes.

SIX

Like the other films, Alice provide an opening monologue for Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. But instead of being a catch-up of the prior films Alice provides us some key background details on the origins of the Umbrella Corporation and the invention of the T-cells and how it all started getting out of control. It's information barely even hinted at before now explained in 4-minutes of voice over after 14 years and five films without it. It provides a certain context to what came in the past films, and would have been information any decent production might have provided us in the first, or at latest, second film in the series.

Also like the other films, The Final Chapter begins by usurping the end of the prior film. Washington D.C., where we ended Retribution, was "a trap" according to Alice, and is now almost completely obliterated (it looks only marginally worse than what Trump's done with the place). Alice and a few creatures and the air raid sirens seem to be all that's survived (so, you know, her "daughter" and the other survivors from the last film...all dead).

Much like last film where suddenly blonde dickhead with glasses turns out to be Alice's unlikely ally, now the Red Queen finds Alice and asks her to help unleash an anti-virus which will stop the infection globally. It's located in the wastes of Raccoon City. The Red Queen predicts within 48 hours the remaining 4000-iish humans left on Earth will all be dead. So Alice is given her maguffin as well as her quest and her time constraints. And the promise of ending the T-virus plague also means ending her own life.

After the cut, we find Alice has been driving for 12 hours and still has 418 miles to go (... if Raccoon City is Toronto, that's only 477 miles away...what has Alice been doing all this time? And if she's travelling on Interstate 64, she's going the wrong way. Also, I have to presume that most of the remaining 4000 humans left are Umbrella goons). She's picked up by Dr. Isaacs (turned out she killed his clone in Extinction) who's just out roaming the wastes in a convoy of pretty rad-looking mobile battle tanks. She escapes and with 17 hour to go arrives in Raccoon City, which has a big crater in the center of it from the nuke. 

She's knocked unconscious, again, and wakes up to find Claire Redfield and a handful of highly agitated survivors. With Issacs' battle tanks and the crawling hordes of zombies behind them on their way, there's yet another threat level to Alice getting into the Hive and recovering the anti-virus, and, unexpectedly, answers to everything she's ever wanted to know (also, as Toasty pointed out, involving a whole lot of retconning of the answers sort-of given in Apocalypse and the way the Wesker/Isaacs relationship was portrayed in Extinction... I could be upset if I, or even anyone involved in making this stuff, actually cared).

At first I thought Anderson might be channelling I Am Legend with a "last (wo)man on earth" tale, and, frankly, that could have been a pretty good take for this film. But Anderson's ADHD kicked back into high gear and there's side quests galore and a cast of new (and old) survivors who get no development but exist only to be killed. Yet, somehow, this is much more focused than any of the previous films. Well except for the fact that Anderson's opted for a Paul Greengrass-esque hyperactive editing style (gone is the slo-mo of Retribution, now tracking the fight choreography and action is the challenge).

The ticking clock gives The Final Chapter a decisive through line, and returning to Raccoon City and the Hive where it all started finds the series coming back full circle. It's by no means an opera but, in the process of Alice getting the cure and defeating the Umbrella Corporation, she finds her origin story and the answer to her true purpose all along. I mean, she been a pretty blank void for five films, having answers as to why and giving her a sense of progress for the first time is quite rewarding.

The good: hey, character development!
- Claire's back!
- A clear purpose for this story.
- Answers, background, details!
- A plethora of neat set-pieces, actually. 
- A somewhat satisfying resolution.

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FINAL THOUGHTS and 

I honestly wound up liking this whole experience far more than I thought I would even if only two of these movies even come close to touching an objective quality of "good". The fact that Anderson wrote the whole series and had pretty tight control over it means that, in spite of everything, it's got a pretty singular voice to it (if not necessarily vision)...one which cares very little for its characters or happy endings or internal consistency/logic.  It's never not an action series, and it only seems to flirt with its horror elements occasionally, and probably flirted with bringing in actual video game elements just as much (and when they were brought it, whether specific zombie creatures or characters, they're almost all ...whaaaaaat? Character designs from the video games seem quite out of place in the world of Anderson's Resident Evil.)

I found the films and their weird pacing and flow both challenging and charming. Almost everyone Alice encounters dies, even when it appears as if she's saved them. The way in which Anderson undoes all of Alice's good work is kind of hilarious actually (it would be more upsetting if we had any real reason to care about any of them). There's an insane amount of gun violence in this film, a real "guns solve everything" mentality to the pictures (even though, clearly, guns solve nothing), and it was always at its most interesting when the characters had to use hand weapons or makeshift weapons than guns. The underlying moral is corporations are a lot scarier than zombies are...a sentence which gives me a weird sense of deja vu.  I'm not sure I'll ever come back to these films, but I did indeed get some entertainment out of watching them.

RANKING

1. Resident Evil: Extinction
2. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
3. Resident Evil: Afterlife
4. Resident Evil: Apocalypse
5. Resident Evil
6. Resident Evil: Retribution

KWIF: The End of Oak Street (+1)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. 

This Week:
The End of Oak Street (2026, d. David Robert Mitchell - in theatre)
Your Name. (2016, d. Makoto Shinaki - in theatre)

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Youtube essayist Patrick H. Willems, in a recent video asked "why aren't there more dinosaur movies?" If the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World films can continually make upwards of a billion dollars with each release, despite being of questionable quality, why are there not more films with dinos in them?

While David Robert Mitchell, director of It Follows and Under The Silver Lake, hasn't exactly decided to address Willems directly with The End of Oak Street (this film would have been in post-production by the time Willems released his video), it will for certain be an answer to that question.  In its first weekend, the film was still surpassed by summer juggernauts The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. It's looking like it will at least break even, but it's not even coming close to Jurassic Park numbers.

Mitchell's film finds the Platt family struggling to survive when their neighbourhood is mysteriously transported form 1982 to an age of dinosaurs. Up until this moment, mom Denise (Anne Hathaway in her fourth film role) has been plugging away at a novel which hints at her dissatisfaction with her home life. Dad Greg (Ewan McGregor) is struggling with alcohol consumption and employment, and works delivering pizza. Their eldest, Audrey (Maisy Stella) faces graduation and the realization that her interest in astronomy will likely go unfulfilled as community college seems the only post-secondary in reach. While the youngest, Brian (Christian Convey), worries about getting beaten up by his bully's older brother, and crushes on the new neighbour girl. 

Once teleported to an entirely different time, it seems a time for the family to come together. Will they bond as a unit or will Greg's perpetual optimism and Denise's pragmatism in the situation only serve to pull them further apart?

The most unfortunate part of The End of Oak Street is that the premise was given away in the marketing. The first teaser didn't give away much, and it was tremendously intriguing. The second trailer kind of gave it all away. So, if you know, you come into The End of Oak Street without the mystery. And so when the Platt's grumpy neighbour complains about the "prank" the kids pulled on him which turns out to be a massive pile of dino-poop, we already know exactly what it is. And when Denise is visiting her elderly friend who is helping edit her book, she's shown a prehistoric plant in her back yard, but they're utterly confounded by what it is. And then there's the lights at night, which may have a mysterious origin, but we know what the effect is the lights are going to have long before the characters do.

These sequences are all handled in quite the Spielberg-ian fashion, but the film spends time pondering these mysteries when we, the audience, are already a few steps ahead. It's not painful to sit through, but it doesn't feel like a satisfying tee-up for what's to come. It might as well have been a single flash with no lead in for pretty much the same effect. It's not like these mysteries weigh on the characters for any significant amount of time or impact their life all that much.

Once the Platts are sent back in time, though, the film kicks off into high gear immediately. Mitchell, for the next 15-20 minutes keeps the creatures hidden, barely glimpses of shadows or tails or spinal plates in the distance or behind buildings or fences. It's cheeky and fun toying with the audience until the reveal of the first full creature, a feathered dinosaur with a sharp beak that is beautiful and terrifying. These feathered creatures seem freshly untethered, like the big open space of suburbia is the ideal hunting grounds they've just been waiting for, and...it gets grisly. They're fast and vicious.

The family have their reasons for coming and going from their home, including searching for their lost dog Starbuck (someone's a Battlestar Galactica fan in the house). The world outside is oppressive and violent, and survival seems impossible. Mitchell's film gives us quiet moments to contemplate how utterly fucked we would be if we were suddenly cast down a few rungs on the food chain. Human weapons, our capacity for violence, aren't at all up to the challenge of what nature had in store millions of years past.

This isn't the Jurassic franchise, for which my own enjoyment ran out a long time ago (but I'm clearly in the minority). It's better. There was the capability to build a franchise out of this but Mitchell chooses to keep it self-contained, to provide an ending that is mostly satisfying if, perhaps, everything works out a little too nicely for this slightly troubled family. The effects work here, for a modestly budgeted picture, is pretty incredible. Even ignoring the creatures (and can you really ignore the brontos having sex or pooping...no, no you cannot) the setting of 1982 homesteads surrounding by vibrant prehistoric flora is incredible. 

Hathaway is having a banner year, and while this is a film that casts equal weight to all the members of the family, Denise is the richest character in the picture, and that's in large part thanks to what Hathaway brings to her performance. She is a woman torn by love for her family, disappointment in her partner, and a desire for something more, something of her own. The move in time demolishes the pathway to being someone else, and instead keeps her at home with her family, and she has to grapple both with resentment and with her instinctual desire to protect her family. So little of what is going on within Denise is said explicitly on screen, and instead resides in the movement of Hathaway's eyes and the lines on her face. She's always been a really tremendous actor, but it seems she's leveled up.

Somehow the Jurassic movies have been deemed "family" movies (this perception is part of their success), despite having a nasty streak within them. The End of Oak Street, in dipping its toe into an Amblin-esque production, has this same bent to it. It is ostensibly a family picture (in that it is a movie about a family) but it's got a bit of menace to it, a severity which will disarm and upset and surprise and thrill. I know I let out more than a few uncontrollable chortles as the events on screen. 

The End of Oak Street doesn't look like it will be setting any new trends. The next big dinosaur movie will be a Jurassic one and we won't be likely to see others in the meantime. But its good we have this, it's good we have options.

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In my younger years, I used to be virulently anti-anime. I lumped a whole culture of films into one simplified basked because, basically, I hated Akira. Loud, flashy, somewhat impenetrable, somewhat nonsensical. Style over substance. This seemed to be anime to me. It took me a long time and many Studio Ghibli films to get over that perception. And, to tell the truth, I'm still not over it. Not fully.

My youngest, now almost of voting age, is big into anime and manga. Given the physical media I have -- thousands of comics and graphic novels and hundreds of movies and tv shows -- yeah it's kind of disappointing that they turned to basically the one area of entertainment I had basically written off and had virtually nothing of in my collections. But we all find our own paths and interests and rebel against our parents in our own ways.

They were really psyched that Your Name. was getting a limited theatrical run, and they asked if I wanted to go see it with them. Since I have shifted my opinions on anime (somewhat) yeah, I was game. They had seen it before, and obviously it meant something to them to go see it on the big screen (unfortunately we had to see it in the local closet cinema, since the bigger venue showings were in the 19+ VIP theatres). I had asked them what the film was, genre wise (besides "anime"), and they couldn't tell me. Was it romance? Drama? Comedy? Sci-fi? Sort of yes-ish to all. They just couldn't pin it down. Having seen it, I get it now.

Your Name. is a body switch comedy, at least to start. Mitsuha wakes up and is somewhat astonished to find she's in her own body. She feels like she's been living in a dream world, and as she goes about her day in her small village - going to school, hanging with friends, nothing much to do - she's told over and over again that she was behaving differently the day before.  And then she goes to sleep and wakes up in the body of Taki, fumbling her way through his life in Tokyo, going to school, hanging with friends, going to his job waiting tables. It's a delirious dream that Mitsuha enjoys at first, the big city life she's always dreamed of, but working so hard is unfamiliar to her.

And then we see the flipside as Taki lives a day in his life after having acting very different the day before when Mitsuha was in charge, followed by a day in his life in Mitsuha's body (and naturally he just can't stop fondling her breasts, which Mitsuha's younger sister catches him doing... every. time. Funny!)

My initial thought, upon watching the plot play out in this first act was how fantastic a premise this is for a complex exploration of gender and sexual identity. Immediately the finale was playing out in my head where Mitsuha and Taki either are trapped in each other's bodies, willingly, and return to their proper homes living as the other gender...or they return to their own bodies but decide to transition.... And then I remembered that Japan isn't the most progressive of nations about these things, certainly not in 2016, and that it would never happen, even if that's the most exciting and impactful this story could possibly get. There is hints though that Mitsuha is a bit gender questioning (before she's even aware of body switching, she does wish she was a boy living in Tokyo, and she also seems pretty into the fetching Ms. Okudera from Taki's work...but neither of these thoughts are explored in any depth).

There's also perfect romantic comedy in this set-up, one which I was not expecting and was excited to see play out. But that's not the film director Shinaki was making, and he lets you know by montaging (montage-ing?) the hell out of what seems like weeks of instances of Mitsuha and Taki switching bodies and living each others' lives. We get voice over from Mitsuha telling us the rules they set up for each other and how they communicate with each other. But it robs us of all the comedic set ups, and building out the supporting cast, as well as inhibits the growth of romantic tension. At the end of a montage, we learn Mitsuha has set Taki up on a date with Ms. Okudera - a woman in her mid-20s to Taki's 17(!) and then both Mitsuha and Taki have conflicted feelings about said date. This is how we learn the body-switchers like each other, but there's only been like 5 minutes of communication between them as presented through montage. It's not satisfying in the slightest (plus "voice-over over a montage of scenes" always gives the perception of a troubled production and extensive reshoots).

The reason Taki and Mitsuha are body switching is as a result of a passing comet. And when the comet passes, neither Taki nor Mitsuha are switching bodies anymore...but they both have fallen for each other. Taki tries to call Mitsuha but cannot seem to locate her. And, like a dream, their memories of each other start fading. This is the "romance" part of a rom com. The "meet-cute" of Taki and Mitsuha was basically looking in a mirror and seeing each other's lives from inside. Now they need to find each other but so many complications get in the way (far too many).

Taki becomes obsessed with finding Mitsuha, sketching everything he can remember of her town. His friend Tsukasa  joins him on a trip to try and find the town where Mitsuha lives (he never learned that while he was pretending to be her?!? Or is it just the fading dreamlike memories...this movie is very inconsistent with how their memories work). Ms. Okudera joins them (which, given that they're teens and she's a full fledged adult, seems wildly inappropriate. There's like an Y Tu Mama Tambien set-up here that doesn't happen at all). 

And now ***SPOILERS***

Taki does find the village...but it was decimated by a meteorite that fell off the comet 3 years ago! Not only were Mitsuha and Taki body switching, but they were time traveling and never realized it. I guess they don't have calendars or write down dates in school? This film asks for a lot of suspension of disbelief, which is fine for the higher-concept stuff, but then they push you to believe that neither one would have, I dunno, put their details into each other's phone or notebook. Or learn where their exact address is. And then, when the comet passes all the little notes Mitsuha had been leaving in Taki's diary on his phone just spontaneously delete themselves? I have to call bullshit on that one. It's like the film is saying that all evidence of Mitsuha didn't exist, except the fact that Mitsuha went to visit Taki 3 years earlier (he hadn't body switched with her yet, so their meeting meant nothing to him) and she gave him a woven ribbon that he's been wearing as a bracelet every day since. Director Shinaki cheats, and he really didn't have to.

Through drinking some spit-sake (is this a real tradition? Yup... kuchikamizake) Mitsuha made and some mystical shenanigans, Taki transcends time and space and reconnects with Mitsuha, and the third act then becomes Taki-as-Mitsuha trying to save her and her town from the looming disaster.

There is some beautiful animation in these sequences, particularly in the wild trip Taki takes upon drinking the saki, and all the visuals of the comet.  Also director Shinaki manages to effectively cross cut between the Taki-as-Mitsuha and oblivious-Taki-from-three-years earlier to create a grand sense of time and scale and the weight that rests on the shoulders of Taki-as-Mitsuha. But in spite of its scale and beauty, it is a complete distraction from what is central to the story, which is the connection between the characters and the romance that has erupted between them. When the climax of the story should be effort to bring these two characters together, it's overly focused on one huge obstacle in their way.

In a grand moment of cosmic collision, Taki and Mitsuha have a moment where space and time allow them to physically connect and it's proposed they write their names on each others hands so that when the dream state starts to rob them of their memories, they never forget each other's names. Taki writes first, and in a cosmic joke, Mitsuha barely gets to draw a line.  And stupid-ass Taki writes "I love you" instead of his name. The town is saved but they both forget each other.

In an exceptionally effective coda, five years later (from Taki's time, 8 years for Mitsuha) Taki has been searching for something that he can't explain. He knows he was obsessed by this town that got struck by a comet but he can't remember why, and in more cheats from the storyteller, neither can Ms. Okuder or Tsukasa.  The reunion of Taki and Mitsuha is quite satisfying with a sweeping era-appropriate rock ballad (which is in stark contrast to the horrible early 2000's alt-rock stylings of the songs and score earlier in the film, which undermine the film and make it feel like we're watching a sub-par CW teen soap opera).

***End Spoilers***

As I was discussing these critiques of the story my kid was explaining to me various tropes of anime, and how this falls in line with them.  This is not a badly made movie, but it's also not a well-told story. The director manipulates the characters and manipulates the edit thus manipulating the audience, hoping you won't notice. Just like with Hallmark movies where I can grade them on a curve because I've seen so many of them, I'm sure if I were more well versed in anime I might hold this in higher regard (or maybe not, I dunno) but as just a stand-alone movie going experience, it had its moments, but mostly left me wishing it were something other than what it is.