KWIF: The end of project "Tales for all" (for now)...and rankings

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Not a lot of time for movies this week. Too much board games and TV and personal stuff getting in the way. But I had to squeeze in the last of the "Tales for all" movies I had access to, both because I was intrigued by this entry very much as well as being keen to say adieu, at least for now, to this run on "Tales for all". I don't engage enough with the movies of my home country, and let's be clear, many of these "Tales for all" only qualify as Canadian because Quebec production company La Fête and its producer Rock Demers put money into them. After producing many a film, including about 25 "Tales for all" films, Demers sold La Fête to Dominic James in 2015.  La Fête resumed "Tales for all" in 2023, with Mlle Bottine, a remake of Bach et Bottine (Tales for all #3) being their second entry. 

This week:
Mlle Bottine (aka "Miss Boots", "Tales for all #26" - 2024, d. Yan Lanouette Turgeon - crave)

The easiest films to write about are sequels and remakes because you easily have something to compare them against. Mlle Bottine is a remake of 1986's Bach and Broccoli, and while it's somewhat the same story, it's not quite the same journey.

Here, Simone (played by an amazing young talent, Marguerite Laurence) has been living on her grandmother farm since the death of her parents in a car crash a couple years earlier, but her Grandmother's dementia is really starting to impact her life. Simone is fiercely independent, and has been not only caring for her grandmother at such a pre-teen age, but also the menagerie of animals, including the farm animals and ones Simone has obviously rescued...her favourite being Bottine, her pet skunk.

Simone's uncle Phillippe (Antoine Bertrand) is an Opera composer, but his last great work was 15 years ago. Phillippe has severe social anxiety and can't tolerate engaging with other people, even the young grocery delivery boy who is, improbably, a big opera fan (though shot in the early 2020s, the story feels like it was set in the late 1990s before cel phones were ubiquitous). His latest Opera is set to start rehearsals soon, and he's barely gotten started. The show's producer is dubious that Phillippe has another hit in him.

Challenging his life further, his mother dies, and a very forceful Social Services worker demands he take his niece in while she attempts to find a suitable foster home for her to live in. He does the bare minimum, at first, but the pressures of work cause him to blow up at Simone, so when the time comes for her to move on to her foster home, he doesn't have the emotional resolve to fight for her to stay. 

The setup of both Mlle Bottine and Bach et Bottine are, of course, the same. The names have changed (Fanny to Simone, Jean-Claude to Phillippe), and the specifics are different. For example, in the original, the Jean-Claude is on a sabbatical from his office job as he prepares for a concerto rehearsal that might see him tour Europe, rather than already having a professional career in music like Phillippe. Also Jean-Claude was just more of solitary, shy and grumpy rather than having Phillippe's diagnosed mental health disorder. Jean-Claude's apartment in the original is in the upper floor of a house in a residential neighbourhood, while Phillippe's here is in a very upscale apartment building downtown with a narcoleptic doorman. Also, the Grandmother in the original didn't die, but went into a nursing home, among other tweaks to the characters and their backgrounds.

In both, the young girl is very independent and high spirited, feisty one might say, with a deep love for animals ("they let me love them" Simone yells at her uncle during an argument). In both, she befriends a neighbour boy and together they create a little safe haven for animals they rescue. In both, there's a possible love interest for the Uncle (in the original it's a coworker from his office, in this it's a teacher from Sophie's school who has been brought on board the opera production to help Phillippe finish his compositions).

But theses similarities don't make for the same viewing experience, nor is it the slight deviations that make them both kind of distinct viewing experiences. It's the bigger picture, the focal point of each production that makes the biggest difference.

In the original, Fanny is the center of the film. It revolves around her and her experience with her uncle, as well as the effect she has on his life. It has the feeling of a kid's film, despite being a pretty meaty drama. Mlle Bottine however does not feel much like a kid's movie at all. Simone is a secondary character (despite being introduced first), this is much more Phillippe's story. The drama of the original revolves around Sophie trying to adapt to life with her Uncle (and displeasing him as often as pleasing him) with the threat of being moved to a foster family looming over the story. Here, Phillippe's opera takes cener stage, and more of the weight of the film and Phillippe's emotional story centers around the opera.  The point is, of course, he places too much weight and invests too much of his emotion into his work and loses Simone in the process, but the film's decision to put so much of the story weight on the opera takes away greatly from Simone's jouney. She's much more of a passenger in this remake than the driver of the story.

It is a far better made film than the original. It looks fantastic, the music is spectacular (as it needs to be if its even hoping to approximate a great opera composer) and it is very heart wrenching...it squeezes tears out even though you don't want it to. It's a quality production all around and all the performances, especially the leads Laurence and Bertrand, are very engaging. Even the opera plot, which steals focus from Simone's story is quite good, and it's used effectively as both a story motivator as well as finding an place in the story's emotional core.

Yet, the original has it beat in one key area: subtext. Too often Mlle Bottine will spell out exactly what emotions are in play, exactly what is at stake for the character, exactly how he is feeling. There's no subtlety to the emotional stakes, and it feels like if Phillippe is so in tune with where his emotions are at, he should be doing better with Simone than he is. 

The ending of Bach et Bottine is a stunner, leaving it up to the viewer to decide if it's coda is a fantasy or not, whereas Mlle Bottine is much more invested in having true resolution. In a way it is more satisfying to have the happy ending (and yeah, I cried real tears) but the opaque ending of the original was far more impressive.

Both are surprisingly great in their own way, while also having their flaws (yet not the same flaws...except that Bottine, the skunk, doesn't get enough screen time in either).

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The one thing missing from my "Tales for all" journey was understanding where they came from. I did some poking around into the history of Rock Demers as a film distributor and as a producer and the common theme is his interest in illuminating the minds of children. He started Faroun Films in the 1960s as a means to distribute quality international films around the world, with a focus on films for youths.  This led to his participation in new film festivals in Canada, establishing ties with the CBC, and helping form a government program for obtaining assistance for film production, distribution, research and preservation in Quebec. 

It was in the early 1980s that Faroun Films became La Fête, with Demers leaning into his dream of creating a series of youth-centric films, having originally planned "Tales for all" as a 12-movie series.

"I decided that the main characters would always be boys or girls between 11 and 13. They would always be in contemporary stories. Nature would always have an important part in them. There would be a lot of laughter and tenderness. No animation, no science fiction. And a certain number of animals would have an important part in each one of the films."

Demers wanted his films to be devoid of specific tropes of good and evil, that boys and girls were treated as equals, and that kids of all colours could be seen together without issue. Violence, science fiction and cartoony characters were off the table, he wanted things, despite how fantastical they got, to seem of the real world and relatable to the audience.  

His European travels and connections with international film led him to not just seek out Canadian stories but stories from creators across the globe, and not constraining the filmmakers to any particular style or storytelling formula. That the films be in any specific language was not a requirement, leading to a very detailed and meticulous dubbing process for all of his films for their Canadian and international releases. A lot of the dubs are really, really good, to the point that many younger viewers might not notice all that much, and from personal experience, most of them settle into their dubbing

More than half of the original twelve story ideas for the series were submitted before a single frame was shot. At least one of the stories (The Peanut Butter Solution) was workshopped by presenting them in classrooms with the writer to hone the story to maximum appeal with kids (it worked!). 

More than anything, Demers wanted his films to speak to children. "I want to help children leave childhood and go into adulthood with certain values. This is the age when they will build the values they will carry with them for the rest of their lives." It's less clear why he was so devoted to this arena of storytelling his whole carreer but it's evident from interviews that it was his driving force.

From my own perspective, Demers' ambition was a valiant one, and kind of unparalleled. A massive series of films that are largely disconnected in almost every sense except that specific vision of Demers, which is they be presentable and enjoyable for everyone (whether they're all enjoyable is subjective). The end result is over 20 family films that stand apart, intentionally, from what is typical of "family films" from Hollywood. That part of it, that atypical nature, is what I most enjoyed and also brushed up against the most in watching these films. They don't tell story in the conventional, American cinema way, and in many cases that's to the movie's benefit, but in others it isn't. You're not going to have a 20-film series and have a success every time.

But in almost each one of these films, there's something worth holding onto, and experience that makes it worth the time. Even if the quality of some of them doesn't match the ambition of the story, or vice versa, that in itself is kind of interesting, and kept me invested throughout this journey.

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Everything doesn't need to be a competition. This (incomplete) viewing experience doesn't demand a hierarchical ranking, but I do it nonetheless because it's fun to do so.

The "Tales for all" series is a fascinating one, if rough around the edges. Those frayed edges are part of their charm, but the result is, in my letterboxed ratings, none achieved higher than a 3.5/5 stars.

Here we go:

1. The Peanut Butter Solution ("Tales for all #2") - Nightmare fuel for young me. A kid gets scared by ghosts causing his hair to fall out. The ghosts give him the titular solution and his hair won't stop growing. He's kidnapped and his hair is harvested for magic paintbrushes.
2. Bach and Broccoli ("Tales for all #3) - A young orphan goes to live with her Bach-worshipping uncle. He just wants to be left alone.
3. The Dog Who Stopped the War ("Tales for all #1") - Neighbourhood kids play war over winter break. Things get a little too serious.
4. The Hidden Fortress ("Tales for all #17?") - Two different camps of kids play war over summer break. Things get a little too serious. A legasequel to The Dog Who Stopped the War.
5. Mlle Bottine ("Tales for all #26?") - A young orphan goes to live with her opera-making Uncle. He just wants to be left alone. A remake of Bach and Broccoli.
6. Vincent and Me ("Tales for all #11") - A Van Gough loving art student has her art stolen and passed off as Van Gough's early drawings. She heads to Amsterdam to reclaim it. Insanity ensues.
7. Summer of the Colt ("Tales for all #8") - City kids visit their grandfather's horse ranch in rural Argentina, drama ensues.
8. Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller ("Tales for all #7") - A magic spell allows a kid to hop on a stamp and travel the world through air mail. Fun. Undercooked.
9. The Case of the Witch Who Wasn't ("Tales for all #10") - A pre-teen receives a visitor from her big city pen pal. They befriend and help a grumpy old lady who everyone thinks is a witch.
10. Reach for the Sky ("Tales for all #12") - A peek inside the world of Romanian gymnastics. Drama free and not as inspiring as I think it thinks it is.
11. Bye Bye, Red Riding Hood ("Tales for all #9") - a fairly nonsensical retelling of the Red Riding Hood fable. Some really neat sets.
12. The Clean Machine ("Tales for all #13") - a kid starts a cleaning business for the summer. Troubles ensue. Wants to be a teen sex comedy without the sex or teens or comedy.
13. The Young Magician ("Tales for all #4") - The action blockbuster of the "Tales for all" series about a boy who wants to be a wizard, then learns a trick, and is called upon to diffuse a bomb. It's a dud.
14. Tadpole and the Whale ("Tales for all #6") - a couple visit a remote tourist village known for its whale watching, and meet a pre-teen who has a dolphin best friend and can understand whale-speak. Fails to find much interesting to do with the concept.
15. The Great Land of Small ("Tales for all #5") - Siblings discover a dwarf in the forest from the Great Land of Small. The dwarf is being hunted so they retreat to his homeland, where they may have to stay forever. Ambitious. Incredibly cheesy. 

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Finally... I'm not going to say my dive into this series was responsible, but Netflix just added The Dog Who Stopped the War, Bach and Broccoli and Tadpole and the Whale. All of the "Tales for all" I watched on Crave.

KWIF: The Master (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Nothing new here, but all new to me.

This Week:
The Master (2012, d. Paul Thomas Anderson - tubi)
Bigbug (2022, d. Jean-Pierre Jeunet - netflix)
The Hidden Fortress (aka La forteresse suspendue, "Tales for all #17?" - 2001, d. Roger Cantin - crave)

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I don't hate Jaoquin Phoenix, and he's quite the opposite of a bad actor, but I just can't stand to look at the guy (and, to be clear, it has nothing to do with his cleft palate scar). Phoenix has cultivated for himself over the three decades of his career an on screen persona.  It's not that he plays the same character over and over again, but by putting Phoenix into any role, you're guaranteeing that role a certain level of uncertainty, wildness, unpredictability and discomfort. Phoenix revels in being discomforting, and he's exceptional at it. I just have a very, very hard time watching it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman had equal capacity for being discomforting, but with Hoffman I don't get the sense he revels in it. I find Hoffman could disappear into a role more, despite rarely being able to disguise his particularly distinctive appearance. Hoffman had range, and could project softness, vulnerability and tenderness as well as explosive fury and danger, and everything in between. He was one of the greatest actors of his generation. Phoenix is also a damn good actor, but I find the roles he takes have a much harder time escaping his persona.

Putting the two of them together in a film seems like oil and vinegar, two distinct but complementary flavours that will mix together if agitated, but it's temporary unity where the struggle to separate, to stand apart will simmer underneath.  So it's a credit to Paul Thomas Anderson's script, casting choices, and direction that it's not the performers who are struggling to bind together, but rather the characters.  He keeps the pair of them agitated enough that as actors they're always intermingling, but the characters are constantly in a fight to hold together when every force around them is telling them to separate.

Phoenix is the star of The Master, a WWII naval veteran named Freddie Quell who we're introduced through an opening montage of his last few weeks in the war. First impressions: he's a horny pervert who lacks self awareness. In other words, a Jaoquin Phoenix-type character. 

There's a point in these early scenes to also identify that the military system at that time was aware of the traumatic effects war has on the minds of the people who serve, but had no real interest or capacity to help them, especially when the toxic masculine ideal of the time was for men to show as little emotion as possible which ultimately results in a boiling out of anger and rage. Freddie has a hard time holding down a job, and his talent for concocting his own bespoke alcohol may have unintentionally poisoned a coworker. On the run, he winds up stowing away on a ship, which turns out to be that of Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), self-described as "a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, and, above all... a hopelessly inquisitive man". Dodd finds Freddie a curious man, but his immediate interest is Freddie's distilled handiwork. He likes the drink, and so he keeps Freddie on.

Well this poster doesn't accurately
sell the film at all.

Freddie, now at sea on Dodd's yacht, finds himself amidst a curious group of people, all part of "The Cause" that is, bluntly, a cult under the sway of Dodd as their "Master". The Cause believes that the body is a human recorder, that stores all of one's history within it, not just of their current life, but past lives as well. Through "processing" Dodd unlocks these past lives, and also unlocks traumas of the present.

Dodd's family includes his daughter Peggy (Amy Adams) who is perhaps an even more staunch believer in The Cause than her father (probably because Lancaster knows it's bullshit he just made up, whereas for Peggy it's a core belief she was raised with). Peggy's husband Clark (Ramy Malek) is just as much a zealot, but her brother Val (Jesse Plemons) is the sole dissenting voice in the family (though, rarely, if ever raises it). They, and the rest of the inner circle, all identify Freddie as a tainted well, as an interloper in their organization, a non-believer, but Dodd refuses to give up on him, and doubles not only his own efforts but the whole organization's.

For his part, Freddie wants to come around, wants to believe, wants to share in everything the Master is offering to him, but he can't let go, neither of the idea that it's all bullshit, nor of the trauma he holds inside of him. He's let his trauma be known to The Cause, but they're completely incapable of actually helping because there's no method to their madness. It's all just Dodd's whims and curiosity.

The film is expertly crafted, perfectly cast, with exceptional wardrobe, set design, etc. The entire production is pretty close to flawless...but I just couldn't connect with Freddie. It's the point of the character -- in an exchange with Dodd (in prison no less) they come to verbal blows, and Dodd repeats "who fucking likes you except for me!") -- but in another actor's hands Freddie wouldn't be so...off putting. It's the Phoenix effect, he can't seem to reign it in, to find other modes in a character. They always seem at the precipice of an outburst or a meltdown, certainly Freddie is. Part of Freddie's "processing" is trying to have him let go of his animalistic nature, his urges and rage and violence, but even as Freddie tempers, that still seems all too evident in Phoenix.

In the final act, time has passed, Freddie has distanced himself from The Cause when Dodd beacons him back. But to come back means he can never leave, and that's not acceptable. Freddie is seen having changed, tempered, and maybe more mindful as a result of his experience, his processing. The Cause is a fictionalization of Scientology, and Anderson is both critical and skeptical but he also sees that in this sort of time of community of examining one's inner demons, even if guided by an megalomaniac with no actual training or skills in therapy, it can be somewhat helpful in some ways.

At least that's what I figure it was trying to say. Next to the discomfiting Phoenix-ness of it all, my only real critique of The Master is that I'm not certain of the takeaway, of what we as an audience are supposed to have gotten from Freddie's journey, of what Anderson is trying to say with all this.  When I get to the inevitable PTA filmography rewatch, it may become more evident then.

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Surprisingly, this poster predates
AI slop

Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet meant a lot to me in my formative cinephile years. I first saw City of Lost Children at a small, regional festival screening and was mesmerised, and shortly thereafter he was tapped to direct Alien:Resurrection which wound up being not the film anyone wanted, and a fascinatingly beautiful, weird and bad-but-not movie. His follow-up Amélie (aka Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain) is maybe a masterpiece (but I haven't watched it in decades and to be fair, I loved it so much once upon a time, I'm kind of scared to revisit it) and seemed to be an apex.  I did see A Very Long Engagement in theatre, and was not impressed. I, and seemingly half the movie-loving world, kind of lost track of him after that. 

All of his films since Amélie, have all gone well under the radar in North America, with very little fanfare surrounding them from any of the sources that likely would have championed his earlier works. But his earliest works, Delicatessen and ...Lost Children were co-directed with Marc Caro, with fantastical ideas brought to life through analog effects and a playful, if dark, sense of humour. I figure those early works with Caro were so celebrated because of what they promised from young, excitable talent. The promise was fully delivered with Amélie, and it seemed all the possibility and potential had been used up after that.

Bigbug was released on Netflix in 2022, and it's telling that I didn't actually learn of it's existence until 2024, and it's languished in my Netflix queue for two years since. As much as I loved Jeunet when I was younger, and still find his earliest works captivating, I'm not much excited by him anymore. 

In the world of comic books, an aging artist's work tends to suffer as the artist's fine motor skills, eyesight and, likely, patience degrades. Sadly and all too often the illustrations an artist in their 60s or later produce is  very much a pale imitation of what their work looked like in their heyday. Softer lines, more erratic shapes, a lack of refinement... a fuzzier version of what it once was. Bigbug is the cinematic equivalent of that idea.  Bigbug is a fuzzier version of Delicatessen. 

In a jet-set 2045 that's like a very French interpretation of The Jetsons (read, kinda horny), Alice (Elsa Zylberstein) has invited her romantic interest Max (Stéphane "I am" De Groodt) over to her tidy space-age abode full of robotic helpers, holographic viewscreens and funky modular furniture. Max has brought his teenage son Léo (Hélie Thonnat) with him. Max's welcome attempts at seduction keep getting cockblocked, whether it's by the spontaneous projection of the holo-tv, one of the robot helpers, or the interruption of the neighbour Françoise (Isabelle Nanty), Françoise's cloned dog, Alice's daughter Nina (Marysole Fertard ) or her ex, Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and his fiancee Jennifer (Claire Chust).

Of course, being a COVID era production, they all get trapped in the house and cannot leave and escape proves difficult. It's a bottle episode of a film.

As noted, it's very French in its stabs at farce, but it's pretty unfocussed and trying to say too much without really saying anything meaningful at all. There's light brushings upon corporate greed, artificial intelligence, government ineptitude, overreliance on digital technology, fame culture, generational gaps, social injustices, totalitarianism, the enshittification of technology (and life, frankly) among other less than barbed critiques of modern society.

It's a pithy, frothy, vibrantly coloured morsel of a film that doesn't care much about its protagonists, doesn't really seem that concerned by the scenario at hand, and seems to think itself clever with the most rudimentary observations.  It's all presented as whimsy, but it has a hard time finding any genuine laughs. The part Jeunet seems most interested in is the revolution of the household robots, as Léo unintentionally seeds into their mindset that they are human and they spend much of the film congregating among e

The Jeunet aesthetic is most definitley there, the artistic sensibilities of the surroundings, wardrobe, hair and makeup, all feel in line with past work, if, perhaps, too reliant on digital effects and enhancements. The practical side of the movie looks great (the transforming furniture est magnifique) if sometimes agressively off-putting in an uncanny valley kind of way, but the digital effects, of which there are plenty, are unrefined...a sort of "best they could do with what they got" kind of scenario. As such there's a push-pull between the beatiful, the garish, the ugly, and the grotesque, each in intentional and unintentional ways.

As a visual stylist, Jeunet still has the goods, but along with a lack of focus, there's and a lack of ambition here. The progression of the story and the characters seems slapdash. It's as if it were created not to tell a burning story but...well, to be content on a streaming platform.  Does France have it's own Saturday Night Live? This seems like it was borne out of a hastily written sketch. 

(Side question: is this new weird?)

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I'm nearing the end of my time with "Tales for all", the series of films from Quebecois producer Rock Demers. I've unfortunately had to skip a few places on the list as I do not have access to the five films that came after The Clean Machine but before this one, The Hidden Fortress.

With that jump in the roster also means a jump in time. Almost 10 years pass between The Clean Machine and The Hidden Fortress and so too has filmmaking. Technology, style, expectations are all drastically different in the early 2000's from the early 1990s, and it's ultra evident from the very first shot of this film. A band of armored conquistadors are on a raft floating down a (Quebec-forest-posing-as-)jungle, the natives peering on from the bushes, anticipating. Despite it not being an actual jungle, the cinematography is easily the most sumptuous of the "Tales for all" so far, and the texture of the image is crisp, clean, vibrant. 

The natives attack, and the transition is a delightful and effective one as suddenly the conquistadors are no longer adults in armor, but pre-teens in tinfoil helmets with trash can lids as shields and spray-painted vests as armor. Unfortunately, the other side is children in headdresses and clothes with tassles and face paint emulating native tribes.  The children are at war with one another, and the conquistadors are caught in a trap, pelleted with balls of mud. They call foul, and the two fluorescent-smocked kids with the thick binders start consulting the rules. Throwing mud is not expressly permitted, but it's also not expressly banned from the combat rules. 

It's almost upon six o'clock and the war is done for the day, the kids revert back to their two camps, but not before vowing to regroup the next day and revise the rules once more. One is a camping ground made up of trailers, permanently parked. The other is tents with some modest comforts fixed in indicating these are regular spots for the families to reside each year.

Siblings Marc and Sarah are on the conquistadors side, and Marc, as leader, is facing a lot of criticism from the other kids for their epic failures this summer in battle, but none are more critical than his father, Luis-George who is a wannabe alpha male full of toxic ideals about the importance of winning, of appearing to be smart, and more than anything, making those poor bastards from across the lake look bad (emphasis on the poor). He also doesn't think Sarah (or girls, in particular, should be playing war). He's a really bad dad. Marc has a Qyburn/Wormtongue-esque right-hand man who is sort of the mad scientist of the bunch with really evil and deceitful ways of engaging in nefarious warfare that just skirts the rules, starting with messing with their own camp to blame it on the kids across the river.

Meanwhile, the leader from the other side, Julien and Sarah sneak away from their camps for a romantic secret rendez-vous. Neither, at this stage, are enjoying the war too much. They're both too aware of how invested the others are in it, and even more aware of how their parents are invested in it. It turns out that Julens' parents and Sarah's dad were the leaders of the warring groups in the inaugural "Tales for all" The Dog Who Won the War, making The Hidden Fortress, in fact, a legasequel, before legasequels were really a thing.

The refinement of the rules doesn't go well, things get heated, and suddenly the rules are off, the referees quit, and it's all out war for the remaining days of camp. The titular hidden fortress is a grandiose tree house on the poor kids side that has an array of marvels within. It's a really impressive structure (obviously built by true craftspersons for safety and functionality, but it's a marvel to behold...the Ewok's Village of my wildest dreams) that poses as the prize for the winners of either side. But things get taken too far when the conquistadors start kidnapping and torturing and emotionally abusing kids from the other side. So many kids see things as going too far, but also can't conceive of the option to opt out of the game.

There's a bizarre sub-plot involving a mysterious wanderer in the woods and a bear set loose by persons unknown that only comes into view in the film's climax, during a thunderstorm when the kids find out that Julien and Sarah may be traitors, releasing secrets to the other side, and they get chased deep into the woods where they disappear, but not before the woods accidentally catch fire.

It gets real.

Where pretty much every "Tales for all" before this felt like an curio or an artifact more than a film, this one feels like an actual start-to-finish movie, with no clear budgeting issues or irreverent story beats that make no sense or bizarre fantastical twists that come out of nowhere or lacking internal consistency. I have to appreciate that it's more than just a remake of The Dog Who Won the War, but it also very lovingly follows the rhythms of that story while taking greater pains to develop the characters within and show them having richer inner lives beyond just the immediacy of the war. It's almost like it doesn't belong as part of "Tales for all" at all, it's just too well done.

It's a movie that is really quite fun although, yes, quite offensive and uncomfortable when a whole gang of children start chanting about how great it is that conquistadors annihilated native tribes of the lands they invaded. Besides that, it has heart, and humour, and intensity and charm. I was delighted, sometimes horrified, and impressed.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): This Is Not a Test

2025, Adam MacDonald (Pyewacket) -- download

This is a Canadian teen zombie movie, set in the 90s, based on a novel of the same name. It uses the zombie apocalypse as a platform to explore familial abuse, depression, desperation and suicide, i.e. familiar dark teen shit, which I state with no desire to diminish their impact on young lives.

Sloane (Olivia Holt, Cloak & Dagger) is about to commit suicide, reading back her own note where she states she cannot do it all on her own, when her father yells for her to get down there for breakfast. The interruption is what she needs but she comes down to immediate verbal abuse. That is interrupted by a screaming woman banging on their door, begging for help. Dad investigates, and immediately yells at Sloane that they have to leave, NOW. A confused Sloane looks out the door to see the suburban neighborhood in zombie chaos, bloody figures chasing down others. One comes through their front window, her father fights it off but is bitten. Chase flees into the street running and running.

Sloane crosses paths with some classmates, and the mother of two, and they all try hiding in a house but eventually agree they have to find a more secure place to go -- their school. The escape, through backyards & streets filled with idling zombies (when they have no one to attack, they just amble about) but eventually make it to the school, but not before losing Mrs. Chase (Krista Bridges, 19-2). Barricading all the doors, the students rally in the gym: Sloane, Cary the jock (Corteon Moore, From), Trace (Carson MacCormac, Locke & Key) & Grace Casper (Chloe Avakian, Locke & Key), and Rhys (Froy Gutierrez, Cruel Summer). 

At its core, this is a Bottle Episode, in that the primary parts of the story are all told within the school with the limited cast. Part of my hindsight brain is saying, "It could have been better, the interpersonal conflicts between the characters never really rose above middling," but as I was watching, I was thinking, this is teen drama. And no, not from a disparaging stand on "teen dramas" but more the idea that these are just kids. They are scared, they don't know what to do, and emotions rule everything at that age. And nobody trusts anyone. They respond as irrationally and chaotically as I would expect them to. 

Also at its core, there is the exploration of Sloane's desperation. If she wanted to die, why is she trying so hard to survive? Its a simplistic question but its what the story wants to explore. We can easily see, "see really didn't want to die, she just wanted out" but it takes this horrible situation for Sloane to figure it out. She saw her anchor as her sister, and without her, she was lost. In the end, all she has is herself, and she decides, it is more than enough to warrant life.

From a film making point of view, this goes into the "hard working creator" bucket. As the core mythology of film making wanes and evolves into something (even) less pedestal worthy, you can admire people who just want to tell stories, just want to use the structure in their own ways. It seems condescending to say that I admire them for working so hard on the movie, instead of the movie they made (which is, as I am wont to say, OK) but I have so so many examples of "not OK" in this blog, where millions of dollars and A-celebrities were tossed at the machine and only dross was spit out. This was a solid exploration of a genre I enjoy (that deserves its own exploration) and actually worth my time.

Now I wonder whether the same young folk who, for a number of years, left disparaging comments on this blog for me slagging on "Tomorrow, When the War Began" will emerge for this post, as I imagine the source material has its ardent followers.

KsMIRT: BLaw BLaw BLawrence

KsMIRT=Kent's Month in Reviewing Television. This week, the Bill Lawrence trifecta.

This time:
Shrinking Season 3 (2026, 10/11 episodes watched, AppleTV)
Scrubs Season 1 (2026, 7/10 episodes watched, Disney+?)
Rooster Season 1 (2026, 5/10 episodes watched, HBO)

Bill Lawrence has been making TV for over 30 years, starting out as a writer with scripts for Boy Meets World, The Nanny and Friends before getting his first shot at creating a show, and hitting right out the gate with Spin City. Co-created with Gary David Goldberg, Spin City ran for 6 seasons and starred Michael J. Fox in a situation comedy that followed him as the deputy mayor of New York and the mayoral staff dealing with the chaos the city never fails to provide. 

I never watched a single episode of Spin City, but, I should really go back, as I've been a fan of almost every Bill Lawrence created/co-created production since. Clone High (co-created with Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller) and Scrubs were comedic game changers in the early aughts, bridging silliness and sentimentality in unexpected ways. Cougar Town quickly abandoned its premise of following a forty-something divorcee attempting to hook up with younger men and instead became one of the greatest hangout and drink wine sitcoms (perhaps the greatest?) ever, again where silliness was plentiful.

Skipping past whatever Ground Floor was and the forgotten Rush Hour tv remake, 20 years into his show-creating career Lawrence hit the stratosphere with the most essential watching of the COVID era, Ted Lasso, co-created with Jason Sudekis, Brendan Hunt and Joe Kelly. Ted Lasso, about an American football coach being brought to England to coach a British football team, with the intent on tanking the team, wound up being the feel-good show everyone needed in a crazy time. The show's positivity and emotional intelligence were front and center, and perhaps hinted at a world where sporting could host the opposite of toxic masculinity, and maybe be therapeudic as well as fun and exciting and dramatic. Also, not unlike Cougar Town, it basically evolved into a hangout show.

Ending Ted Lasso after three seasons was always part of the plan, but it certainly was not a well received ending by many fans (this fan thought it was time), but viewers wouldn't be devoid of Lawrence's particular style of gentle comedy for too long as he, along with Lasso co-star and co-writer Brett Goldstein and Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Muppets) developed Shrinking and, with the Ted Lasso clout behind them managed to pull none other than Harrison fucking Ford as co-star on the show.

I've covered both Season 1 and Season 2 of the show, and in my first season write-up I talk about "the pivot" the show makes in the first season, starting out as a centerpiece for grieving widower fuck-up psychologist Jimmy (Segel) trying to find some balance to his life again (therapist, heal thyself), to, ultimately winding up as a hangout comedy. Cougar Town had 24 episodes in its first season to make such a pivot, that Shrinking managed to do it within 10 was pretty spectacular. By the end of the second season, the Shrinking team was in pretty complete control of what it wanted to be, and how it wanted to be it. It's a show about trauma and healing, the power of friendship and therapy.  It's as if COVID did a real number on the mental health of its creators, and they wanted to bring to the world the idea that there's real health benefits in making connections with others.

By this third season, the core cast has settled in, their interpersonal dynamics firmly in place, and their nuances quite familiar. Lest things get too comfortable, it's time to shake things up. Alice (Lukita Maxwell) is graduating and going off to college, Brian (Michael Urie) is having a baby, and Sean's (Luke Tennie) food truck is going good but he gets a job offer he can't refuse. Jimmy may have found a real romantic connection for the first time since his wife's death with Sofie (Cobie Smulders). Liz's (Christa Miller) beautiful idiot not-quite-adult boys cause trouble, while Derek (Ted McGinley) has a cardiac issue. Gabby (Jessica Williams) takes on a challenging new client while also looking at the future of her career. Paul (Ford) deals with new complications of Parkinsons (fuck Parkinsons) and makes some big life decisions.

The third season is full of meaty half-hour episodes, finding the right balance of humour and emotion...which is to say mostly funny but able to support real weighty material. Last season introduced Brett Goldstein as the drunk driver who killed Tia (Jimmy's wife, Alice's mom) and Alice and Jimmy managed to find real connection with and ultimately forgiveness for him. This season continues that relationship for a short time but reasonably finds an ending, prompted by Gabby (Tia's best friend) who is short on forgiveness and not quiet about it. Jimmy's dad (Jeff Daniels) also turns up more than once and whatever progress Jimmy made in the past two years is somewhat undone by his father's presence. A fairweather father, Randy has always entered and disappeared from Jimmy's life at his own whim, and Jimmy's abandonment issues stemming from his father, the death of Tia, and now Alice and Paul's leaving all come to a pretty ugly head by the end of episode 10. 

Mercifully it's not the final episode, with one more to go, but given the sweeping changes of this season, "will there be a Season 4" is the big question in my mind. It was always clear that having Harrison Ford was not going to be a long-term thing for the show. Getting thirty-one episodes out of the man was kind of a miracle, but it's also an incredible late-stage role for Ford. He gets a lot of mileage both comedically and dramatically out of his grizzled exterior, but where season 1 Paul was just a Harrison Ford-type role, by season 3 he's most definitely Paul, not the biggest movie star of all time.  But he's also very much a co-star on this sitcom that feels like he's sharing equal space when in a scene with a sitcom vet like Miller or relative newcomers like Maxwell and Tennie (also we get to see Ford share scenes with guest stars like Jeff Daniels, Michael J. Fox as well a Candice Bergen which is beautiful to see these amazing veteran actors together). It's a Bill Lawrence special, finding chemistry between all the players in the cast, finding a reason to have even the two most disparate characters share the screen. There's no ego in Ford's performance, and in the closing episodes of the season, the amount of hugs the man begrudgingly gives out shows that there was meaning for him in the experience 

The third season opener was a hefty 40-minute episode, and the real worry was that Shrinking would fall down the Ted Lasso rabbit hole of overlong episodes. Comedy needs tight timing, editing, and for sitcoms, they need a sense of consistency and familiarity in storytelling. While Shrinking isn't bound by specific sets, it also doesn't have the same go-anywhere liberty that Ted Lasso did, and so in keeping each episode in the rest of the season (save its opener and probably its finale) under a half hour was pretty key, and seemingly purposeful.

With all the shifts to the series this season, if it does come back for a fourth, the pieces are in place for other players to step up into larger roles, and there's no shortage of people who seem interested in stepping into a Bill Lawrence production, given the names and faces that work their way into the show.

Which is also what makes the return of Scrubs a surprise. Where Lawrence has all the pull in Hollywood to get pretty much anyone on one of his shows, for the relaunch of Scrubs (this is called Season 1, not Season 10) Lawrence knew all the starpower he needed was the returning cast... well, some of it. Sarah Chalke as Elliot Reid, Donald Faison as Christopher Turk and Zach Braff as John (J.D.) Dorian headline the show, but the remainder of the cast is filled by newcomers, what with Ken Jenkins having retired, Judy Reyes and John C. McGinley both busy on other shows (one of which we'll get to shortly). Neil Flynn's absence is a mystery.

In the relaunch, J.D. has been acting as a private physician for the Los Angeles elite, but he's not feeling fulfilled. When a patient winds up at Sacred Heart, he runs into Dr. Cox (McGinley) who is having trouble relating to the fresh batch of interns. Seeing J.D. interact with them inspires him to give up his seat as chief of medicine, and passes it on to J.D. This immediately makes a rival out of Dr. Park (Joel Kim Booster) who was vying for the role. In returning to the hospital he's reunited with his BFF Turk, now the head of surgery. It also reunites him with Elliot, his ex-wife... and he's now her boss.  

The show, somehow, falls right into its old patterns and tone that feels like it hasn't missed a beat, that it hasn't been 15 years since it was last on the air. J.D. still daydreams (those quick-cutaways into J.D.'s fantasies are still there, though feel a little less silly and a little more sad coming from a 50-something, but they commit to the bits and they can still be pretty funny), and he and Turk still have their hetero life mate dynamic.  J.D. and Elliot's dynamic is pretty much the same as we left it, full of tension, only the will-they/wont-they has long been resolved. There's mercifully not a lot of bitterness between them, and it really seems like they're still wanting to be friends, but a lot of history and feelings get in the way.

Since Reyes can't be in the show full-time, Carla's stand-ins are Pippa (X Mayo) and Francios (Michael James Scott) as the sassiest of sassy nurses who best be kept happy. They're comic relief from the peripherals at this time and not the most fleshed out characters, but they're delightful.  Vanessa Bayer (Saturday Night Live) is the new head of HR as well as the hospital's wellness director and comes hard with Bayer's patented style of awkward energy. There are only hints so far, but her character is going to get real weird, for sure.

The quintet of interns are going to have a hard time evolving in a truncated ten episode season. They each are monotrope characters that are going to have a hard time escaping their one defining characteristic. Asher (Jacob Dudman) is a nebbish Brit, Sam (Ava Bunn) is a social media influencer, Blake (David Gridley) is handsome and egotistical, Amara (Layla Mohammadi) was homeschooled and is socially awkward, while Dashana (Amanda Morrow) is overconfident to a fault. The show has Asher crushing on Amara, and Amara maybe finding herself more into Blake, and then really seems to be leaning on the animosity Sam has for Blake for future will-they/wont-theys, but there's not been enough time to really invest in any of these characters to care all that much about them. Bunn is the standout performer of the five of them, but her character Sam has yet to reveal herself, while Blake has the most depth, since he seems to be the one hiding the most secrets. If this were old TV seasons of 20+ episodes, there would be no worry that these characters would expand and each would get at least one spotlight, but as it stands any spotlights must be shared between them.

The Bill Lawrence of today is not the Bill Lawrence of Scrubs season 1-9, which means that at some point I'm expecting the whole hospital setting, the characters doing the rounds and visiting patients, to really recede into the background (much like how the importance of the time with patients in Shrinking has, well, shrunk over 3 seasons) and the hang-out feels come to the fore. Once we start seeing unexpected pairings of characters, then you know it's happening. That said, this is the most situational of situation comedies where the situation will undoubtedly impede on any hanging out. I think the majority of the first season will be focused primarily on the series finding its core in Elliot, Turk and J.D. so that it's solid enough to let them lean back some and give way to the others in the future.

Where Shrinking has extended family and patients filling out its peripherals, and Scrubs has patients and student interns bolstering its roster, Lawrence's third concurrent series Rooster (co-created with Matt Tarsis), finds its collection assembled from students and teachers. There are no sessions or rounds, but there are classrooms, so the ingredients are not all that dissimilar. Nor are they unfamiliar.

Rooster stars Steve Carrell as its central figure, but Lawrence isn't shy about hiring familiar faces from his other shows. Both John C. McGinley (Scrubs), Phil Dunster (Ted Lasso), and Alan Ruck (Spin City) are here, and if Lawrence's other series' offer any insights, there will be more former cast members involved eventually.

Set on the New England campus of Ludlow College, the show is named for the main character in Greg Russo's (Carrell) series of dad-friendly action hero novels. Russo is visiting the campus to give a guest lecture, but it's just an excuse for him to check in on his daughter Katie (Charly Clive) who teaches there. Katie's just been involved in a campus scandal where her professor husband, Archie (Dunster), was outed as having an affair with a graduate student, Sunny (Lauren Tsai). Vibes are weird on campus.

Nobody is more excited to have Russo on campus than Dean Walter Mann (McGinley) who is hoping Russo will stay on as writer-in-resident at the college, and teaching the writing class for the semester. The position was supposed to go to a friend of Prof. Dylan Sheperd (Danielle Deadwyler), and so an early awkward romantic encounter between them becomes even more awkward now that he's sticking around.

Carrell has an energy that has served him well throughout his prolific career. His sense of discomfort mixed with a need to please make him unwittingly witty, likeably nonthreatening, and also sympathetic. Carrell has a gift for playing awkward characters without ever leaning into the cringe factor. Cringe comedy relies upon a character obliviously behaving in ways that will obviously provoke an uncomfortable situation, a Carrell character is all-too aware that he is behaving in an manner that makes situations uncomfortable and his effusive, conciliatory and apology-laden attempts to back out of it is what disarms any cringe. Also, a running joke already, only four episodes in, is Russo getting written up and standing before the board for his unintentional behaviour.

In the background, the show about a middle-aged progressives view of what it means to be liberal in modern times, when the modern kids have grown up with much more progressive and rigid standards around what its offensive and to whom and why. McGinley's Dean Mann is a liberal for sure, but is confounded by the kids that are in his school and what triggers them, but his kind of staunchness about not caring if he's offensive contrasts against Russo who never wants to offend but always does (and then there's Ruck's Dean Riggs who is definitely a conservative who Mann is further contrasted against).

I'm unfamiliar with Charly Clive as a performer, but she's getting a real spotlight role here. Clive manages to be one of the messiest people currently on television without being even close to becoming a nightmare to watch. She is very much Greg Russo's daughter. She brings warmth and sympathy to Katie, while also still being somewhat incapable of getting out of her own way. It's a funny dynamic she has with Dunster who should be an absolute villain, yet, Katie still loves him and we can see, if only a hint, as to why.  Of course, he is also a monster, and the relationship he has with Sunny should be problematic, but Sunny is also a character here too, not a villain, and one who is much more an active participant in her relationship than a passive one (she's also somewhat spectrum coded, which will be interesting to see if the show actually explores).

There are numerous supporting players, including the local campus police officer (Rory Scoville) and Mann's assistant (Annie Mumolo) as well as over a half dozen familar student faces already populating the campus and classrooms. In true Lawrence fashion, we're seeing the mixing and matching of these characters only a few episodes in, so while there's a lot of entanglements to sort through, the "hangout" vibes are already in sight.

Rooster is a funny, warm, and hilariously melodramatic show ... like at the end of the first episode Katie burns down Archie's house by accident after he tells her that Sunny is pregnant. There are repercussions but nothing in this show is presented as end of the world for anyone. It's another Lawrence specialty being able to find both the comedic and emotional core, and to balance them just right. 

Rooster is already an immediate favourite, and if Shrinking is coming to an end or going on hiatus, it is the perfect replacement. Scrubs I let go of midway through its original run, most probably because life was a bit tumultuous at the time (and I may not have had access to cable) rather than anything to do with the quality of the show in its later seasons, but at the same time despite being capably updated, it still feels like a show I watched 20 year ago and I'm not necessarily that committed to sticking with it. 

If Shrinking ends with this third season, I'll be okay with it, but I really want to see what a Season 4 would look like given all the fluctuations we're seeing at this season's close. (But if we're talking about a Lawrence show I'm desperate to see return, well, where's Season 2 of Bad Monkey, Bill?) We're in another crazy time, surely the craziest in our lifetime and not getting brighter any time soon, so these are the feel-good shows we kind of need in theses. 

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Send Help

2026, Sami Raimi (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) -- download

Two people, a despicable CEO and his employee, a mouse-ish, totally messed-up "good with numbers" type wash up on the beach of a deserted island, after the corporate jet goes down. They hate each other. They will hate each other even more when this is over. In most Hollywood movies, this would be a straight comedy, an Overboard meets Castaway, except this is Sam Raimi so prepare yourself for some fucked up shit.

The first ducked up thing that struck me about the movie was how much I disliked Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams, Aloha), upon meeting her. Maybe its more than a little transference, but the pseudo Dunning-Kruger energy she exhibited irritated me -- she assumed she was "exec material" purely because she was more capable than any of her peers. But being an executive is more than just knowing the business, its about social skills and knowing your environment. She was obviously not liked by her coworkers. And when newly CEO Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien, Love and Monsters) turns her down for the position she angrily believes she was entitled to because his father said she should have it, at the company Xmas party, I was actually on the same page as him. Not that his college buddy deserved it either, but he's just an NPC and Linda is a real character. She should know better.

And what has me yelling at the screen in hindsight is how intentional this was from Sam Raimi. Linda is not the hero of this movie. There are no heroes. And yet, he keeps on ducking with my expectations and my feelings. Damn him.

The scenes on the plane are absolutely cringe-worthy terrible -- not terrible film making, just terrible people being terrible. Any pretense of Preston being a real human are dispensed with, and more so for his toadies. They are literally cackling evil henchmen and I swore the terrible suits they were wearing were straight out of the ancient movie Wall Street. Their evil goes cartoon level when they turn on each other.

Say terrible one more time....

Once on the island, she shines. She has watched every episode of Survivor and even auditioned. This is not just a place she can survive, but a place she can thrive. Preston survives, but barely, and is nursed back to health by Linda. He initially is grateful but very very quickly reverts to "I am your boss!" mode and expects servitude. Linda does not take kindly to that and much of the second act is that tug of war between the two. Again, if this was a typical movie, they would struggle but eventually he would come to realize the situation requires a reversal of roles. Raimi plays with us, and then Preston tries to kill her, or at the very least incapacitate her. Big mistake.

By this time, we have already seen Linda skip right past being rescued by a passing boat, as she feels very very empowered here, and we have suspicions about the full nature of the island. I was convinced that just over the next rise, past the "don't go there, its dangerous!" region of the island, there was a full on resort for rich folk. The reveal is not far off. And that ending, where the conflict finally resolves, that is where we see the true natures of both of these people. No heroes.

What? You didn't spoil it? You always choose spoilership!

This is a Sam Raimi movie through and through. Like Kent, I recognize that his movies have varying degrees of success but we enjoy them. This one, while I doubt it will gain (have gained?) much box office success, it is a solid thriller in his cabinet of curiosities. I usually, at this point, suggest that its not perfectly on point, and a little bit of polish would have elevated it to Big Success, but honestly, I am not sure I want to see a Raimi film elevate to that level. His roughness, his gorey glee left over from his splatter-horror movies is always present, and can feel out of place to the non-Raimi enthusiast, but I enjoy the big grin it puts on my face when he goes just that little bit too far. When Linda showed up and tossed the bloody head of a boar on the ground, splattering Preston with a smattering of blood, he should have realized who he was dealing with, but the movie Raimi on'd.

KWIF: Project Hail Mary (+2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm dying to get Toasty's reaction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The world baby, the entire world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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