ReWatch: The Time Machine

2002, Simon Wells (Balto) -- Netflix

The problem with having a movie blog that is over almost 15 years old is that I am not always sure I have already written about an older movie. This is most undoubtedly a "rewatch" as I know I saw it before but I do recall it being so bad, I never felt the need to rewatch, but I wondered if I had already succumbed to curiosity, like I did this time. Yes, my memory is that fallible these days.

I might need a tag "wait was it really that bad ?" 

This was a terrible movie. It is still a terrible movie. It is Hollywood spectacle for the sake of spectacle and doesn't even try to make a lick of sense. Part of my brain went down the silly path of "they weren't very smart back then" postulating that the Purple Suit brain was even less formed back in the early 2000s than it is now. Its like looking at a medieval painting and marveling at how unsophisticated they were in manners of artistic ability. But no, there have always been silly, terrible, badly made movies, with budgets, and there always will be. Besides, despite what my 20sumthin coworkers say, "the early 2000s" was not that long ago.

Its 1899 and Dr. Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce, The Rover) is a college professor in New York City... so, four years after HG Wells published his novel on time travel. As with all Funny Professors, Hartdegen is socially awkward and would rather work on weird gadgets and scientific theories than interact with people, who have boiled down to his house main, his friend & fellow teacher David Philby (Mark Addy, Game of Thrones) and his latest fiancée Emma (Sienna Guillory, Meg 2: The Trench), a woman who finds his weirdness and forgetfulness charming. He intends on marrying her but on the night he proposes to her, she is killed by a Central Park mugger. 

Dr Alex becomes obsessed with Changing the Past. He isolates himself from everyone and works on one of the prettiest renditions of The Time Machine in cinematic history -- a big steampunk thing of brass tubes and shaped glass. But Time Travel doesn't help, as no matter how much he alters events so she isn't killed by the mugger, she is killed somewhere else by something else. The past is rigid. So, he decides to go into The Future to see if they have figured out why you cannot change the past.

He makes a brief pitstop in 2030, where he talks to an AI Librarian (learning about the HG Wells novel, nudge nudge wink wink; Orlando Jones, The Good Lord Bird) and then pops over to 2037 they have Blown Up the Moon (!!!). Then he bumps his head and ends up in 802,701. In this Far Future, everyone is brown and primitive. I cannot decide if this is just being faithful to the novel or low-key racist or scientifically likely. Anywayz, when, almost a million years ago, they Blew Up the Moon it pretty much ended civilization as we know it. Except for AI Librarians who not only have really good batteries but also storage & display media built to last a million years -- yeah, uh huh.

Anywayz, the lovely primitive cliff dwellers, Eloi, are being attacked and taken on regular cycles by the cave-mannish Morlocks. Despite being obsessed with saving Emma, only months before, Alex sees pretty primitive Mara in her revealing skirt and friendly ways and.... googley eyes! He's also suddenly less socially awkward, which is made even weirder by the fact he has been pulled out of Victorian times into a birds next hanging off the side of a cliff. Then, one day, on a visit to the Eloi wind vanes that don't serve any real purpose, the Morlocks attack, jumping out of the sand, grabbing Eloi and jumping back into the sand. This effect makes no sense. As said, not much of the movie doesn't. But its exciting and I guess follows a Rule of Cool ?

Do they burrow? Are there looser sand pockets? Do they have psionic mole abilities to push sand out of their way? Why does it fill back in after they jump in/out?

Anywayz, underground Alex discovers two things: the Morlocks eat Eloi and there are Über-Morlocks, evil white-skinned, intelligent and telepathic Morlocks that still look human... somewhat. They control the other Morlocks and keep them from eating every last Eloi, which would deplete the food supply.  I guess there are no other animals worth eating? Anywayz, Mr Über-Morlock (Jeremy Irons, Dungeons & Dragons), who is the best cinematic depiction of Elric of Melnibone I have seen (Google it) explains to Alex that the reason he cannot change the past is because The Time Machine was invented because of Emma's death, so it cannot bring him to a place where he could undo itself. Timey Wimey Grandfather Paradox shit. 

Then Alex and Mr. Über-Morlock fight it out, send The Time Machine into an even FURTHER future where Alex sees the Morlocks ruling over a (even more) broken Earth. He kills Mr. Über-Morlock and then goes back to Mara (note: only saving her, all other Eloi are Morlock Snacks) and decides to live Happily Ever After in the The Future. He blows up The Time Machine.

Huh? There are still hungry Morlocks, even if Exploding Time Machine energy wiped a good amount of them away. And there are other Über-Morlocks, just not in this region. I guess this was lame franchise attempts? 

I am sure there is a "How Did This Get Made?" episode of a podcast or treatise on the production of this movie somewhere on YouTube or in a (gasp!) print magazine. No matter how far we come, as Hollywood evolves we will always have incredibly terrible Hollywood Spectacles that are made the way they are for one reason or another. And I will probably end up watching them, and probably more than once. THAT is the bigger question.

KWIF: a double dose of 1985 (+1)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Well, the world sunk deeper into the shitpile this week. Everything is rank, and I feel like I've gotten numb to the horrific smell of it all, but I know deep inside I'm in full-on existential crisis. So I'm watching a lot of media that is outside of political talking points and instead is focusing on what is being done and said by whom, and why...exposing agendas and providing points where people can fight back (it all starts with awareness and education). And when I'm not doing that, I will watch a movie to escape. 

This Week:
To Live and Die in LA (1985, d. William Friedkin - Tubi)
After Hours (1985, d. Martin Scorsese - Netflix)
The Case of the Witch that Wasn't (aka "Pas de répit pour Mélanie" - "Tales for all #10", 1990, d. Jean Beaudry - Crave)

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Longtime friend and reader (and radio host extraordinaire), GAK, directed me a couple weeks back towards To Live and Die in LA, a mid-'80's underappreciated seemingly coke-fuelled gem in the self-aware ACAB subgenre, with director William Friedkin seemingly resurrecting the tone of his 1971 hit The French Connection but with 1980s Los Angeles vibes.

And, I'm glad I took that recommendation (frankly, GAK rarely, if ever steers me wrong), because...wow. What a wild movie that, somehow, 40 years later, still had more than a few great surprises in store.

In 2022, Girls5Eva coined the acronym "B.P.E.", standing for "Big P*ssy Energy", not realizing that it already had a meaning from way back in 1985: "Big Petersen Energy" (and not just because we can see the outline of William's petersen clear enough in those tight, tight jeans to tell if he's circumcised or not (he's not).

I don't know what to call Petersen's performance here. The most common attribution I see on Letterboxed is "coked-out" but that doesn't feel quite right. It is a "much" performance, and yet it's not too much. He's hopped up on something, but it's not cocaine. It's high, aggro energy, and the dial on the asshole vibes just keeps getting turned up on his Secret Service agent investigating a counterfeitter that killed his partner. But Petersen's Agent Richard Chance is not out of control, he's searching for something and it's not quite vengeance, and it's definitely not justice.

Adrenaline. Chance is a adrenaline junkie, which leads him to push himself and his partner harder and deeper into the case than his superiors have signed off on, and ultimately leads Chance into not just skirting the law but creating outright chaos on the streets and freeways of L.A. All to get what he wants. He thinks he's doing his job, but really he's chasing a high.

Peterson runs (and runs and runs), he rolls and action hero poses with his gun, he casually hooks up with his informant, Ruth (Darlanne Fluegel) and just strutting with B.P.E. in every damn scene. His Secret Service agent seems, in the opening scene, to be a decent guy, trying to do the right thing, then he does a base jump off a bridge and chases that sensation over all else and it consumes him. 

After his partner dies, he gets a new partner, Agent Vukovich (John Pankow) who winds up being completely under Chance's sway, much like Ruth. In each, it seems like they probably started a relationship in earnest, but as Chance becomes more and more fixated on the thrill of the chase, of taking down Willem Dafoe's Rick Masters, the more callous he becomes towards everyone else. He basically negs Vukovich into helping him operate outside the law and with Ruth he start to wield his "throw her back into jail" leverage in more and more unseemly ways.

The most amazing thing about Petersen's performance is how unlike him this performance seems. A typical Peterson performance is pretty subdued, I frankly never would have thought he had something like this in him. It's disgusting and fabulous at the same time.

The Dafoe of 40 years ago does not feel all that dissimilar to the Dafoe of 20 years ago, 10 years ago or today. That man had his thing figured out early and he's so astute a performer that, while perfectly capable of making Rick Masters a larger-than-life character, it's apparent that he and the Williams figured out that Petersen's performance should be the scene stealer.  It's the magic trick of the film that by the end you basically feel like Secret Service Agents Chance and Vukovich are worse guys than Masters. At least Masters seems to have respect for women.

I would just love to scream out the biggest surprise of the film, but it's still an amazing thing to discover, and still such an atypical move for any film to make, I don't want to spoil. I loved it, I cheered out loud, it gave me a mini-adrenaline rush that would make Chance envious.

All of this accompanied by Friedkin's oversaturated lens that makes L.A. feel like an alien world (which fits with Petersen's practically inhuman vibe). There's a grit and dirt to this L.A. that, unlike, say the grimy shadows in New York of The French Connection, here the sun is baking down and exposing that grunge everywhere you look. This skeevy feeling story is only bolstered by a fully of-the-era Wang Chung soundtrack that is somehow  atrocious and really, really rocks. 

The Miami Vice influence is so goddamn strong that you can see why this may have gone under the radar as a knock-off or try-hard. But it doesn't just try, it succeeds, and you could make an argument that maybe it does it better (you would probably lose that argument but you could still make it). Radical.

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From the West Coast of 1985 to the East Coast, Martin Scorsese takes us on a trip into the wild nightlife of Manhattan's artsy SoHo district.

Me and Mr. Scorsese's films don't really get along. Whatever wavelength that man is operating on, I just don't have a receiver for.  He may be one of the maestros of modern American cinema, but I remind myself that I am not an American, and that may have something to do with it. (Toasty and me, we row the same boat.)

But maybe there's something else to it, and After Hours may be the key.

After Hours was sold to me as a comedy, an grandiose one-crazy-night spectacle of chaos I would most assuredly delight in. I was not amused.

I think in most any other director's hands, After Hours would be a farce, but between Scorsese's fingers he can't help but try to squeeze for blood in this stone to prove it's human. What I mean to say is Scorsese doesn't seem capable of comedy, he can't see past the humanity in a scene or sequence, and so what should be a broadly comedic set piece winds up feeling far more dramatic than what the script intended.

The few Scorsese pictures I've seen are relatively humourless affairs (The Wolf of Wall Street seems the closest he can get to comedy, and that's appears more a satire than a straight-up chucklefest...but I haven't seen it). After Hours was clearly drafted as a comedy and even casted as one. You don't have people Teri Garr, Catherine O'Hara, and Cheech and Chong in a film like this unless you're aiming for funny... and yet, Scorsese's aim is so far off it's like he didn't even know where the target was. The few chuckles I did get in this thing seem almost accidental.

The situation finds a somewhat hapless, lonely, professional word processor Paul (Griffin Dunne) meeting a flirtatious young woman, Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) at a restaurant one lonely evening. They talk about the book "Tropic of Cancer" and she tells him about a friend of hers she's staying with selling plaster bagel paperweights, and to call her if he wants one. So when he gets home, he calls, and is invited over. Along the way he loses what little cash he has on him when it blows out of the cab window. At the apartment, Marcy is missing and her friend, Kiki (Linda Fiorentino) is shirtless making a papier mache sculpture which she then enlists his help in. Things get a bit flirtatious there, I guess, and Paul makes move on her but she passes out from exhaustion. Then Marcy shows up, and ultimately she turns out to be more on the manic end of the manic pixie dream girl spectrum than the dream girl end, and he runs out fleeing in the rain.  Things just escalate from there, until he ultimately winds up running from an unruly mob looking for blood and into the den of a woman who seems like a spider who just trapped a fly.

All of this should be played as heightened and crazy as possible, but Scorsese keeps subduing his actors, having them find the humanity in the character, in the scene, and it constantly deflates the comedic tension. Instead the feeling is more...anxiety, and a bit of pathos, which aren't very funny emotions.

All the women in this film that Paul meets are on some spectrum of insane, and it reflects rather poorly on Scorsese that this is the case. (I don't know of a Scorsese story that is female led, now that I'm thinking of it. A quick look at his filmography, the only possible contenders: Boxcar Bertha, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and The Age of Innocence... I haven't seen any of them.) I can't make any sweeping statements about what Scorsese's viewpoint on women are, and I wouldn't fully judge him based solely on this film alone, but the women here are sketches and had they been allowed to be dialled into a broad comedy, they would be (mostly) pretty funny, but here we are. 

Paul, as a character, is at first driven by his libido. He's looking to hook up with Marcy...or Kiki...or whomever, but eventually that drive is overruled by his desire to just go home, but he can't seem to leave SoHo. Is he in some form of purgatory because he had lusty thoughts? Despite thinking too deeply about how Paul would be feeling in any given moment, it doesn't seem to be thinking that deeply about what got him there in the first place. It seems like Scorsese's wants to play into comedy tropes that he knows from watching so many movies, but he just can't let himself...he can't fight his instincts. I mean Marcy winds up dying from a drug overdose, and then Paul can't help but pull the sheets off her naked body (whether it's to ogle or look for burns, I don't really know, but either way, it's just too much for the moment). Paul does call it in, but he does also leave the scene, and leaves up "Dead Body" with arrows signs up in the loft, which is almost funny.

After Hours seems like one of Scorsese's biggest struggles. He's attempting a genre that is not a natural fit for him. He has this script that is, really, really quite tight, so much so it seems impossible to fail. But it does fail, and it all comes down to the director. It seems every actor is giving Scorsese exactly what he wants, but he doesn't know how to establish a tone outside of gritty realism at this stage. For Scorsese, heightened realism is maybe a half notch higher than what he normally does, at least at this stage in his career and that's still way too earthy for this material.

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The Case of the Witch Who Wasn't, or, rather, "No rest for Mélanie" mercifully finds the tenth entry in the "Tales for all" series back in Quebec with a legit French audio track rather than the weird dubbed melange of languages dubbed fully into one French or English without any real sense of syncing.

While the English title might hint at something supernatural in play, the French title is certainly more appropriate, as the story finds Mélanie's pen pal Florence, visiting her on her farm for the summer and the two wind up trying to "tame" the grumpy old witch lady, Madame Labbe.

Their method of "taming" her are acts of kindness, bringing her flowers or a hanging plant, knitting her a scarf, putting a bow on the collar of her pet pig Rose. Eventually they befriend Madame Labbe, just in time to find her hog tied on her bed after being robbed and Rose being stolen. The girls, along with Mélanie's brother and some other area kids, start investigating the break in and tracking down the thieves. Meanwhile, Mme. Labbe has become despondent and is not eating or caring for herself, and when she catches ill, the doctor says she'll likely have to be put in a home. 

Mélanie basically treats Mme. Labbe as she would treat her pet llama, or their dog or any other farm animal. She knows Mme. Labbe is human, but she reacts to her and how others react to her as if she were a possession. It's truly bizarre, but then I expect nothing less out a "Tales for all" at this point. It's like watching an alternate dimension where people in these films don't act or react like people do on our earth.

The most bizarre, and the most challenging aspect of the film is not the "taming" of Mme. Labbe, nor is it the intense moment of discovering her tied up after a robbery, or the amateur sleuthing of young children, it's the handling of Florence's arrival to town.

Florence is black, which the film doesn't treat as a capital "I" Issue, merely a lower-case "i" issue. At first, Mélanie's response to Florence's appearance is one of shock, only because we learn that Florence had sent Mélanie a picture of her white friend and has basically been writing to her details about her white friend's life...catfishing her to some degree (it also turns out Mélanie had left many details out about her life and family as well, so it's a two way street...of lies!).  And then the microagressions come out. On the face of it they seem like the good intentions of a nieve production company, but from a very modern standpoint it's absolutely cringe-inducing some of the questions poor Florence has to field. (Oh, and not to mention the scene where Mélanie accidentally takes something from the antiques shop they were investigating and when the cops roll up behind them Mélanie hands the stolen item to Florence to hide in her dress. Mélanie is not an ally.)

There's obviously a far more interesting story to be told from Florence's POV here, but that just wasn't something that the late 1980's were capable of, and so instead Florence's visit to rural Quebec winds up being a rather tertiary aspect of this trying-to-be-sweet movie.

But it's not a sweet movie. It objectifies people in a very weird way and it features a lead character whose sketchy behaviour ultimately has her rewarded with everything she desires in the end. If it didn't make me so uncomfortable, I'd be kind of impressed by it.

 

KWIT: Shucked

 KWIT=Kent's Week In Theatre...is this actually a thing now? I mean, I said 2026 was going to be a theatre year for me... but I wasn't really serious...was I?

Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto - Friday, March 6, 2026

Unless someone (like me) tells you directly (as I'm doing now) what Shucked actually is (I will get to that in a moment), then (to me) there's really nothing appealing about a country music-infused song and dance show whose story is built around corn and whose humour is seemingly corn-based puns.

Seriously. This is how the Mirvish website promotes the show:
Join Maizy, the spunky heroine, as she battles to save her beloved crop with the help of a con man posing as a "corn doctor." Get ready for a wild ride filled with toe-tapping country tunes, side-splitting jokes and a whole lot of heart. Will Maizy save the day and find true love, or will the corny jokes be the only thing popping?

That description alone makes me feel like I've eaten a whole large bag of buttered popcorn at the theatre...heavy, bloated and a little sick to my stomach. (For some reason I had a difficult time finding someone to take my second ticket after my original theatre companion had to bail....)

When I read that description, it gives the impression that Shucked consists of, I dunno, like, puerile granny humour and Conway Twitty songs sung by a cast ensemble. It sounds utterly unpalatable.

And yet, this thing was a multiple Tony-award nominee and won for best featured actor so there's got to be more to it then that...right? I mean, the blue rinse crowd is not the main theatre crowd anymore, and grannies are, like, my mom's age, or even younger and don't share "granny" sensibilities anymore. So what actually is this thing?

What you really need to know about Shucked is that it's not *just* corny jokes and bad puns (although there are plenty of those) but that it's a show densely packed with jokes in the vein of a Tina Fey/Robert Carlock production like 30 Rock or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (or the new, really good The Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins).  There's just so many jokes in this thing that if the first one makes you groan and the second one make you roll your eyes, the third one might crack and smile and the fourth one's gonna get you. Wash, rinse, repeat. When there's so many jokes, in such density, that even a 25% success ratio means you're still laughing quite a bit, and that's a pretty good time.

The structure of the show has two storytellers (Maya Lagerstam and Joe Moeller here) who narrate, interrupt, intervene and interact with the story, but aren't actual characters in the story. They are, pointedly, a black woman and gay man, speaking with southern twang, and these aspects are addressed as part of the isolated and improbably multicultural southern town of Cob County.

The story proper starts with a wedding, as Maizy (Danielle Wade) is about to marry her childhood sweetheart Beau (Nick Bailey), but during the wedding, the corn starts dying and the wedding is halted. Beau may be dim witted but he knows corn, yet he can't solve the riddle of why it's turning blue and dying. Maizy then comes up with a plan to venture out of the walls of Cob County and find outside help, even though everyone essentially tells her there's no reason to, and Beau tells her if she leaves, it's over between them.

Maizy empowers herself and heads out...to Tampa, where she meets Gordy, a largely unsuccessful flim-flam man from a family of scam artists and swindlers. He's posing as a podiatrist (advertising himself as a "corn doctor"), which is a silly scam to run, and he's in deep in gambling debts. When Maizy mistakes his advertising, Gordy sees not only an escape for his troubles, but also, from Maizy's jewelry, that Cob County may just be sitting on a minefield of rare gems.

And so the story heads back to Cob County where personalities clash and tensions raise and romantic entanglements get complicated. Jokes are told, songs are sung, and it all wraps up in a happy ending of course.

Shucked is not a spectacle of a show. The set is largely static with a few rolling corn field sections that rotate to become the "TAMPA" sign. Occasionally some barrels are rolled out or a mobile quarter-porch set, but this is not a visual show. It's a flat-out comedy, so the jokes and interplay and comedic set-ups are it's highlight.  

Beau's brother, Peanut (Mike Nappi), has a real deep, slow drawl, and often steps aside to tell a string of "Well I think" jokes which feel very Jeff Foxworthy "You might be a redneck" inspired. Again, just one type of humour employed in a show that crosses a bridge between Hee-Haw and Letterkenny. There's a sense that the show is making fun of small town southerners, or "simple folk", and at times it really, really is, but there are stabs, especially in the second act, at showing the merits of tight knit communities. "We may be simple" Beau says to Gordy, "but that doesn't mean we're stupid. That's a simple mistake stupid people make."

The book is by Robert Horn with additional compositions/lyrics by Grammy award winning powerhouse country music songwriters Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally. There are the cast ensemble songs and the story framework songs which feel like traditional musical numbers with just a little bit of twang to them, and then there are the solo numbers, the real nu-country power ballad type songs which are rather exceptional, if you like that sort of thing (though not my style).

But if the show's fullest intent is to be a comedy, then it is the songs where it falls flat for me. There's not a lot of humour in them, specifically in those big power numbers. They are, frankly, too earnest for the tone of the show. Shucked is not really all that interested in real emotions, so the big numbers are somewhat disingenuous.  I think these songs needed to be more in the Lonely Island vein where the first two verses and the chorus are the big, emotional numbers, and then the third verse takes a turn into something absurd, and the absurdity builds through the rest of the song, before abruptly coming back home to the emotional core it started with, but now completely undercut by whatever the absurdity was. 

Alas, what we have seems like musical numbers meant for people to listen to in earnest after the show. I'm sure it's been successful at that.

Shucked was an honest surprise, not remotely as cringe-inducing or saccharine or groan-evoking as I was expecting. It had a lot more bawdy humour than I was expecting, and much more cussin' than I was expecting (I still never expect swearing in musicals... one song is even titled "Holy Shit", the refrain of the song), but it's still not very provocative or challenging, I think to its detriment. It never actually deals with small town prejudices, and although it's clear that the one narrator is gay, there's nothing outwardly LGBTQ+ friendly about Cob County, it's pretty monocultural, and it likes it that way.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Redux Redux

2025, The McManus Brothers (The Block Island Sound) -- download

We have a tag for "multiverse" with most of it being dominated by Marvel's attempt. I have found that most pop fiction breaks the genre into two areas: parallel worlds, where we are only exposed to and only care about two, and a multiverse based on branching timelines leading to endless possibilities. But my favourite has always the idea of an infinite number of universes that are not inherently based on timelines -- all exist at all times. I still think Sliders portrayed the best example of this.

Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia article on the scientific idea of the multiverse has a brain-breaking number of versions / theories. As for a Wikipedia article on the "multiverse in fiction" it redirects to one only about "parallel worlds" which tells me, there is some work to do.

Irene (Michaela McManus, Law & Order: SVU) is on a journey. She arrives, seeks out a dilapidated house, fishes for a box from under the bed and pulls out a lock of hair labelled "12". Then she seeks out Neville, the owner of the house and kills him. Sometimes she kills him in the house, sometimes she kills him at his place of work where he works as a short order cook. After each murder she climbs into her mechanical coffin, flicks a switch and BOOM, she's in a new parallel universe. 

Irene has been doing this for a very very long time. She has a routine where she kills him on payday, to get money. She has a giant ring of keys to get a rental truck in which to carry her multiverse hopping coffin. Some keys work in the next universe, some do not. She has a gun, either carried with her, or retrieved next time she kills Neville, from his own stash. 

Neville (Jeremy Holm, House of Cards) is / was a serial killer and Irene's daughter was his last victim. In each universe she arrives at, he has done the same thing AND in each universe Irene herself is not present, because each subsequent universe's Irene had killed herself in grief over the loss of her daughter. Irene is a broken woman showing the wear & tear of her journey on her face, and on her body, as the murder doesn't always go smoothly. Most trips she gives herself one small reprieve, sleeping with a man she meets at a Grief Support Group, the same man every time. 

That said, I just realized there must be a time component to this universe hopping -- as she always arrives just before that Thursday when Neville gets paid, before she meets and sleeps with Jonathan.

Then, on one trip, she meets and frees Mia (Stella Marcus, feature debut), who was to be "13". That's new. Mia's a broken runaway and, of course, Irene cannot help but she her own daughter's plight in Mia's face (and fate). Irene sees this as a one-time occurrence, freeing Mia to go back to whatever life she had, but Mia is quickly wrapped up in Irene's journey as she is forced to take to her with her on the next hop. From there it only gets more complicated.

The world building of Irene and her universe hopping coffin is next to nil. We don't know where she got it. We are introduced briefly to others who have such equipment, a sort of network of rundown smugglers. We know Irene can go onto the next universe but also can go back to one she has previously visited -- she offers to take Mia back to hers. Irene calls her universe 0-0. But that's it. The movie is primarily about the tragedy that is Irene and what this technology has allowed her to do / become. She doesn't want that for Mia but 15 year olds with terrible lives have other ideas. 

Surprisingly the movie actually does provide a satisfying conclusion to this journey. I won't spoil it but it provides a reason for both to stop hopping. Revenge can finally be done with. As with all indie movies, this is rough around the edges. But like all good indie movies, you can see the dedication in the actors and film makers present everywhere. Sure, certain choices are made for the sake of budget but few distract away from the story. This was a solid movie that made me think, and want more, but still be satisfied with what I got.

Series (re)Minded: Scream VI & Scream 7

[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. Kent tackled the first five entries of the Scream franchise three years ago and now follows-up with the next two entries in the first-ever Series (re)Minded] 

Scream VI (2023, d. Tyler Gillett, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin - Crave)
Scream 7 (2026, d. Kevin Williamson - in theatre)

The only reason I was aware Scream 7 was out this weekend was because my teen asked me if we could go see it. I said "Sure, when does it come out?" thinking it was months in the future. "Friday," they responded and I was a bit dumbstruck. "I haven't even watched Scream 6 yet." (Turns out neither had they).

At this point with the Scream franchise I get very unenthused with its formulae. I was already pretty tired of it by the time I did my "Series Minded" write-up of it three years ago.

"There are definite elements I like to the series, but the samey-ness of the series gets tedious when watching back-to-back-to-back(-to-back-to-back-to-back)."

"The "whodunnit" of the sequels are diminishing returns."

None of that has changed. I had gotten tired of the killers who are obsessed with the mythology of the franchise (or the meta "Stab" franchise, in-universe) in my binge watch of the prior films, and the sixth entry didn't change that tune.

Scream 6 opens with Samara Weaving waiting for her blind date at a bar when she gets a call. We know where this is going. When she's dead in a back alley at the hands of a Ghostface killer, he steps back, looks at his handiwork, and then pulls off his masks revealing it's Tony Revelori (I knew I knew that voice). I was ready to accept a different type of Scream movie, one where we already know who the killer is, and know that he's after the survivors we met in the prior film.  That's different, way outside the nor...oh and now he's dead by another Ghostface. Fine, back to business as usual.

It doesn't take long before sisters Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Tara (Jenna Ortega) and friends are deep in the mix of murder. I did like what Sam was wrestling with in the film, a bit of bloodlust from her own genetic mental health disorder, but also being the subject of conspiracy theories that, as the biological daughter of Billy Loomis, she's actually the mastermind behind the last batch of Woodsboro murders. Pretty much every other character here, though, doesn't have such inspiration backing them up.

The film makes it clear early on that Sam cannot even be a suspect in any of this so the conspiracy is toothless, holding no weight beyond our sympathies. The film doesn't give the characters much time to feel any of the weight of what's happening to them (again) though.

It took me a while to remember what happened in the previous film, but the script gives us more than enough prompts and reminders to piece it all back together. Generally I liked the "core four" of the film (Barrera, Ortega, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding) both as characters and performers enough to root for them not to die.

The film manages to drag Courtney Cox's Gail back into the scene, but it feels as disingenuous here as it did in the previous film, and even more empty without Dewy as part of the duo. They position her as "the legacy character to kill off" but don't fully commit. In fact the film doesn't fully commit to killing any of the majored players.

Kirby (Hayden Pannetiere in another boss-ass haircut) also returns (last seen in Scream 4) likely as a sub for an absent-due-to-contract-disputes Neve Campbell, but I was psyched, and while she's not an active part of the film as much as I'd have liked, she's still my favourite character of the franchise. I want to see a Kirby

KIRBY!!! <3<3<3

spin-off series, each episode hunting down a serial killer in a new amazing haircut.

The reveal at the end of Scream 6, like all but the first Scream seems as flawed as all others in the series (save the first film) where the script and story are basically pointing fingers at everyone meaning that trying to suss out suspects as an audience member is a futile effort. Once they get to the reveal, it doesn't really matter who's under the suit(s) or why they're doing what they're doing. It all feels pretty contrived.

 I said about the reveals and the story being so intricately tied to the characters and obsession with mythology, well, that continues to hold true. But what's the alternative, that it's just a crazy killer, or two (or three) that almost randomly want to kill Sydney/Gail/Sam/Tara/etc?  Because that's what Scream 7 ostensibly does, and it sucks just as much as you think it would.

(I really don't like saying anything "sucks", as it's so pedestrian and inconsiderate a critique, but truly, the reveal moment of Scream 7 does, in fact, suck.)

There's really no way for the franchise to succeed in its killer reveals at this point. It's either got to be connected, or it's got to be random, and the former is played out and the latter is utterly uninteresting. Just one of the many reasons the franchise needs a very, very long rest.

Due to some really gross political posturing shit, Barrera was unceremoniously kicked off the series, and I think Ortega left in solidarity. (Ortega has a good career going, she could take the hit, Savoy Brown and Gooding could very much not and return here as Gail's assistants). As such, the studio backed up the dump-truck full of cash to Neve Campbell's door and got her back on board. It was really their only move, other than capitulating to being dumbshits and hiring Barrera back).

They also brought creator Kevin Williamson back, both as writer and director, and he...sort of...phones this one in...a bit. 

Williamson's latest sticks to the tropes of horror but tries to abandon franchise formulae which, at times, makes Scream 7 feel like it's too far apart from its own series, and yet, escaping the franchise formulae also seems virtually impossible.

Here, the Ghostface killer has come for Sydney in her new home, targeting her daughter, Tatum (Isabel May). When the killer makes the calls, though, it's calling now using a facetime-like app and we see the scarred visage of one Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard). The big question that the film wants you to puzzle over, that really wants you to invest in is..."Is it really him?"  But eagle eyed viewers will note neither Sydney nor Gail ever truly believe it despite what someone else in the film might try to convince them of. (My kid had a very good point in that the Stu Macher here seems more like how he might be characterized in the "Stab" movies, in-world, rather than the actual Stu, who Sydney knew personally for years. Sydney *could* have played a "tell me something only Stu would know" game with him, but that would give the game up too quickly...and this film, and this series, is all about playing games).

Where Scream 6 very much felt like a franchises coasting on fumes, but still moving forward, Scream 7 is the series in neutral coasting down a slight slope, about to come to a complete stop at any moment, no inertia left. The cast of Scream 7 is doing their best to sell that there's still some juice left, but it's only half convincing when everything around them seems so tired.

Campell, looking fantastic, completely comfortable in Sydney's shoes, and owning a no-bullshit attitude, looks strong pushing this stalled-out franchise just a few more feet forward. She works well with everyone on screen on screen. She's still a star, but clearly doesn't give a shit about what that means.

I'm at the point with this series where the very idea of anyone putting on a Ghostface costume is just the height of absurdity. I balk a the whole "Ghostface" thing that opens every film, the phone call and the impossibility of being in two places at once or even as two people, coordinating and orchestrating. Ghostface has moved beyond two doofuses surprising people in a killing spree to being far stronger and more resilient than any regular human. The Ghostface that kills most of the people in a film is not the same as the one, two or more people revealed to be the killer at the end of the film, and it's so hard to ignore.

The series has also lost its ability to really have meaningful kills. Being stabbed once is like a slight nick, easy enough to keep going, while being stabbed four or five times doesn't mean much if you've got the right plot armor. The certain characters that get to still be alive after violent stabbings in each of the sixth and seventh entries of the series just undermines the stakes of the series. You basically know who is going to get it and who they wouldn't dare kill off before the first act is finished.

The most daring thing the next Scream film could do is to disconnect itself entirely from everything else in the franchise, just a Halloween-style psycho killer out on the prowl, but, I dunno, in a shopping mall like Dawn of the Dead. Being meta by mixing plots, rather than remixing itself.

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Ranking Screams

1. Scream
2. Scream 4
3. Scream 2
4. Scream (5)
5. Scream 6
6. Scream 7
7. Scream 3

KWIF: Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Last two weeks, actually. With the Olympics last week and all the new TV shows popping up this week, as well as fending off a bug or two, I didn't get to many movies, but the ones I did get to...well...a couple of them are real gems. I'll let you determine which of the three I maybe didn't like as much.

This Week:
Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (2025, d. Matt Johnson - in theatre)
Lady Snowblood (1973, d. Toshiya Fujita - Crave)
Bye Bye, Red Riding Hood (aka Bye Bye, Chaperon Rouge; "Tales for all #9", 1989, d. Márta Mészáros - Crave)

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What an exceptionally bizarre and niche idea to take something as exceptionally bizarre and niche as Nirvanna The Band, the bizarre and niche musical-ish duo of Matt Johnson and Jay McCarroll, who had a short-lived, two-season bizarre and niche show on the bizarre and niche Viceland TV network, and turn it into a bizarre and niche movie that may well be the biggest (in ambition and scale) comedy movie of the decade.

I'm sure anyone reading this, like most of the population, have no idea what the heck Nirvanna The Band or Nirvanna The Band The Show are. Hell, I barely knew myself. If you know co-creator Matt Johnson from anywhere, it's likely from making Blackberry a few years back.

No, Nirvanna The Band is not a Nirvana cover band. McCarroll plays piano and Johnson...well, he talks a lot about what he's going to do over McCarroll's piano playing, and all the admiration and reverence he's going to receive from the audience without really having any other specific set of skills or talents put on display.Their deepest ambition is to book a gig at the famous Toronto resto-bar/performance space The Rivoli, but they don't actually attempt to book a gig at The Riv (as we locals call it) by contacting the bar. No instead they think they can somehow trick their way into performing there. The logical fallacy of all this is I don't think "Nirvanna The Band actually has any songs to perform should they get there, so what they're actually going to do with their platform should they ever achieve it remains a mystery.

Having never seen Nirvanna The Band The Show, I can infer from the story of Nirvanna The Show The Movie that each episode of the show is a Pinky and the Brain-style set-up of of Matt coming up with a scheme to get the band into The Riv that night, Jay reluctantly following along, and it all falling apart. The Show, if it's at all like The Show The Movie (and it must be) is all shot verite style, with a mix of Johnson and O'Carroll interacting with real people and actors in pre-planned if highly improvised situations. The Film just takes it to...well, not just another level, but to astonishing extremes.

It starts with Matt coming up with the plan "Seventh Inning Stretch" where the two will jump off the CN Tower and parachute into the Skydome (as it will forever be known) announcing that they have a gig at The Rivoli that night (and the stunt will be so spectacular that The Riv must give them the stage for the evening right)? 

Ambitious, but certainly there's countless things getting in the way of Matt and Jay in succeeding with this plan. Well, would you believe that the only thing that gets in the way of the plan is the Skydome's roof closing, and Matt and Jay's timing being off such that they land on the roof instead of in the stadium?

I couldn't believe it either. And yet, it looked very much like two people (though absolutely not Matt and Jay) were skydiving in downtown Toronto and landed on the roof other Skydome.

With today's level of digital and AI technologies, it's not hard to deepfake this sort of thing, and yet, there's a level of gritty craftsmanship here at play that definitely make it hard to tell what's real, what's staged, and what's trickery.

The main story of Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, however, involves a second scheme Matt comes up with, which is to pretend to be time travellers from 2008 flung into the future, using Back to the Future logic, only for things to go awry and Matt and Jay actually travel back to 2008, mess things up, and then return home to find Jay has become a massive celebrity leaving Matt behind.

It's profoundly silly and insanely entertaining. The Movie is incredibly propulsive, moving a pretty rapid clip, not giving the audience a lot of time to sit with all the questions they might be having (the movie, so self aware, is savvy enough to address many of them anyway, if only to side step). At the same time, even if you have zero investment in Matt and Jay as a duo (like me) the film slowly starts investing you into the stakes of their friendship (I mean, there's really no other characters in the film beyond the camera guys and Matt's alt-future roommates).

As one of the most Toronto films ever made, it's bizarre, sure, but maybe not so niche. It's an extremely accessible film if (like me) you've never actually engaged with Nirvanna The Band in any capacity before. But I'm now hooked, and I'm ready to dive into Nirvanna The Band The Show and their precursor web series of the same name... if only there were anywhere that I could watch them (the presumption is that Crave, who partially produced The Film, will pick up The Series for when The Film hits streaming).

Much like, say, Strange Brew or Brain Candy, other Canadian comedy films derived from TV shows that preceded it, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is also a surprise gem of a film, but much more immediately recognizably a triumph than maybe the other tv-to-film comedies that came before it. (Do I need to watch that Trailer Park Boys movie now...?)

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Lady Snowblood is a big name in classic Asian action cinema (and classic manga), one that I'm sure was jotted down on one of my many "to watch" lists decades ago but, without ever truly understanding what the movie was about, and as such was never prioritized.

How unfortunate for me.

The film is the grandmommy of revenge dramas, or "revenge-o-matics" as Quentin Tarantino likes to call them, and in fact Lady Snowblood was QT's primary (but far from only) inspiration for Kill Bill.  There's little doubt in my mind that Lady Snowblood has inspired dozens upon dozens of films in the 50+ years since its debut.  Having such an influential legacy can actually tarnish a classic film when it's watched for the first time, as one might only see story ideas, action sequences, shot framing or other such ideas that have been used and probably bettered in the years since. 

Not so with Lady Snowblood.

The opening sequence, taking place at night, the moonlit road that much brighter because of the snow, is beautifully shot and staged. It finds our titular character in her tight kimono and sandaled feet shuffling quickly into place, a carriage quickly approaching. She gets in its way and proceeds to dispatch the entourage rapidly and bloodily, before fighting the man in the carriage. His skills are not even close to competing with hers.

This visually striking, blood-and-snow-soaked extravaganza is a marvel, but also the low point of the film. The action is stilted and Lady Snowblood's portrayer, the stunning Meiko Kaji, doesn't seem very adept at wielding the utensils of her character. 

But as I said, this is the film's weakest point. From there we delve into her wild backstory, which predates her even being born. It has it's roots in Japanese history from the later-1800s where the country's troubled leadership was directing it to build a grand army and conscripting the young men of villages across the land, disrupting the labour force dramatically. Yuko's mother's husband, a teacher, was killed when it was suspected he was an army recruiter, and her older brother was also murdered. Her mother was kept and abused and enslaved, but dreamed of nothing but revenge. She managed to dispatch one of the men who killed her family and was sent to prison for murder, cutting her revenge story short. She knew the only way of continuing her revenge was to have a child who could carry her burden, and so she aggressively pursued the prison guards and managed to get pregnant. She died shortly after childbirth but made her fellow inmates promise to have her child, who she likened to a demon, trained to pursue her vengeance.

We see Yuki's training from a young age to adulthood, a brutal inhuman life, but then, as has been reinforced by her trainer, she is not to be human. She is a demon of revenge. The first act is comprised of all this history, and it is told moving forward like running water, rather than cutting back and forth between the past and modern day, with elements referencing directly the Manga in a stylish way that seems incredibly ahead of its time.  The fact that it moves through the darkness of Yuki's mother's tale and her own training without being overly sensational and distanced from making the abuse seem alluring is remarkable for the era.

When it returns to the modern day, the story moves constantly in unexpected zigzags. It never moves towards the typical narrative choice, and at the same time is not playing with expectations that it will. It so secure it its storytelling that it feels assured in its atypical manoeuvres, and it's thrilling to experience.  I very quickly learned not to anticipate where it was going, and I don't imagine I can ever have that experience again. But it just highlights that what this story does, and how Toho and the director present it, hasn't been repeated, at least not to an extent that can deny the power of this production.

What is most surprising is how the film tries to humanize one of Lady Snowblood's targets. A unwell drunken degenerate of a man, with a sweet daughter who cares for him despite what she has to do to make money so that he can drink and gamble it all away. You would think Yuki's disposing of this man would be a blessing for the poor girl, but it's not the case. The man even seems to have a death wish, until death stares him in the face. There's some rather meaty drama amidst all the arterial spray.

Yuki's gets involved with a reporter, who begins to tell her tale, sensationalizing her and spreading her story across the country, more fable or urban legend than fact, but distinguishing between the two, at that time wasn't always the case. The stories are told to draw out her prey, and it works, but it's all so much more complicated than either thought it would be.  Magnificent twists and movements abound.

The doubt I had in Kaji's physical prowess really only held away in the film's first sequence. I don't know that she ever proved herself an agile swordswoman, but subsequent scenes she's definitely more confident in her wielding of the blade, and is just as often posing with it as she is using it.

Visually, I love this era of vibrant red gushing blood samurai story, but this one stands out as special, because it doesn't approach the world with a gawking lens. It's not revealing in its nudity and abuse, it's matter-of-fact in its presentation. It's honest about how harsh the world is and the truths of the time its set it, but it also gives way to its revenge fantasy elements without letting them overshadow those truths. 

It's fantastic, and I wish I'd seen it 100 times by now.

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The 9th entry of Quebec producer Rock Demers' "Tales for all" series once again finds funding as a co-production, this time with Hungary, and filming there as well rather than in Canada. This once again leads to a release with no native soundtrack. You can watch the French or the English dub, it doesn't matter, because the entire production is dubbed as not all performers are speaking the same language.  (I don't like watching dubbed movies, and find it frustrating when the dub is so obvious, as it is here... the preferred alternative is watching the French dub with English subtitles, but I was too tired for subtitles for this viewing).

Bye Bye, Red Riding Hood, as you may have guessed, is loosely based around the classic fairy tale. Here, the film opens with five-year-old Fanny in her city apartment bedroom, decorated entirely in red, trying to fall asleep only to be roused by her parents arguing and her father walking out on her mom. We then hard cut to "Mother" (no other name given) taking Fanny through the airport and confirming that they're going to go live in the woods, near her Grandmother's.  

This hard cuts to a forest montage and Fanny is now twelve maybe (played by Fanny Lauzier, who was the young star of Tales for all #6 -  Tadpole and the Whale), and she's a free spirit roaming the woods with her pet lamb, when she comes across a wolf who, it seems, can telepathically communicate with her. It appears the wolf means her no harm, and in fact wants to be friends...but his tone of voice, sinister and sleazy, gives his intentions away.

Fanny's woodsy home with her "Mother" (who works as a meteorologist) is in a artistically brutalist construct of all odd angles and bizarre stairs to nowhere and brightly coloured nonlinear shape accents. There is no meaning to this bizarre structure, only that it's likely a building the production company found interesting and decided to use (you need some visual flair when 90 percent of the film takes place in the forest I suppose). 

Fanny's traipses through the woods aren't exactly established as "adventures" as they're poorly structured and really not edited to be framed as such, but on one journey to her grandmother's house, she encounters a magic tree, and on another, she gets lost and is rescued by a man in a grey hat and trenchcoat who she thinks might be her father. On another adventure she meets a gang of similar aged school children out on a field trip and she sparks up a friendship with a dashing young boy who is very curious about this red-clad woodland girl who doesn't go to school. 

Fanny's grandmother, despite what you might think, is not her mom's mom, but rather her father's mother, and she does not get along with Fanny's mom at all, so they don't communicate much. Also Fanny's great-grandmother is there, an old crone who never moves from her spot sitting in a carved out seat in the trunk of a tree grandmother's house seemed built around. Great-granmother has inexplicable mystical powers, including the ability to see what's going on outside her trunk-chair, as well as send telepathic communications across great distances. 

There is a general sense of the fantastical in this production, but it establishes no rules for them, so the stakes are never clear, nor are the paths to resolution. This whole production seems like it was crafted on the fly, without a tremendous amount of forethought.

Fanny seems charmed by the man in the grey ensemble, in part because he lives in a weird hovel with a tremendous amount of birds (he's an ornithologist) and he saves her in the woods more than once from getting lost or a heavy storm, but when she determines that he's not her dad and then finds out that he's hooking up with her mom, she inexplicably loses it and runs away... where she's lured into the wolf's den and he refuses to let her go, and needs to be rescued by her young male friend from the city but only after Great-Grandmother telepathically calls out to him to help her. After she's rescued, they set all the man-in-grey's birds free and steal his truck, heading into to the city where Fanny does some petty thieving.

Eventually she returns home, and Fanny is sent with a picnic basket of soup and other goodies to Grandmother's house because Grandmother is not feeling well, not realizing that the wolf has swallowed her whole and taken her place (but not before the wolf and man-in-grey have what seems like a metaphysical exchange which implies the two are connected but it's nothing the film ever elaborates upon). When Fanny arrives, we get the what big hands/eyes/mouth thing, when Fanny too is swallowed whole. The wolf is a furry TARDIS, bigger on the inside than it appears no the outside, and fanny and grandmother reunite next to the wolf's beating heart (a charming set piece to be sure).

Mother and the man-in-grey arrive, and the man-in-grey shoots the wolf, killing it and releasing Fanny and Grandmother, only Great-grandmother dies for some reason. It's sad, I guess. The story picks ups with Fanny - wearing heavy make-up and styled to look like an older teen I guess - back in a very red room in a city apartment...with no real explanation or even insinuation as to what this scene means or what the seemingly happy Fanny is going through. Are we to infer that this was all just in her head? Is that why the story seems to be so dream-like?

The story is one hundred percent nonsense, so very little of the characters' actions are explained, there's no logic to anyone's motivations, and personalities and intentions shift on a dime. It seems like there was an intentional story here, about a lonely little girl making the best out of life, and a single mother trying her best, but it all got lost when trying to film what may have been an English script but performed by a Hungarian and Quebecois cast.  

When it eventually gets to its interpretation of the classic fable, Bye Bye, Red Riding Hood seems like a completely different film. It's like if the characters of the film were performing in a play, it in no way seems organic to the story being told.

There is some really nice imagery here. The damp, lush, Hungarian forests are shot with reverence, even if the colour sense is pretty muted. Some sets are really quite impressive (Great-Grandma's tree-chair is outstanding, as is the wolf's innards, and lil' Fanny's very red bedroom), but there's not a tremendous amount of cohesion happening here.

Even dream-logic would imply a sense of logic, and there is none here. If the film's finale intends to intone that the whole film was but a dream, well, that isn't explicit, plus there's little more frustrating in storytelling than such a "twist". A deeply flawed and odd film.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Anaconda

2025, Tom Gormican (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) -- download

I love the premise of this movie. Adult fans of the original 1997 Anaconda movie (starring J Lo, Eric Stoltz, Ice Cube and Jon Voight) are living unfulfilled lives leeching off the fond memories of the home movies they made in their adolescent years. Failing actor Griff decides they need to all get back together and shoot their own spiritual successor to the '97 movie, telling his friends he has attained the rights. They go to the Amazon to make their low low low low budget movie only to encounter a real anaconda snake, thus giving us a meta reboot/sequel.

I recall loving the first movie, a cheesy self-aware monster movie. I don't recall seeing the three proper sequels, nor the crossover with Lake Placid. I definitely did not see the Chinese remake. This one interested me peripherally because I love meta stuff and the cast was solid. 

Alas...

Wasted talent. So much wasted talent. 

Yeah, so Griff (Paul Rudd, Antman) just got fired from the TV show he was guest starring in, having put waaay too much of himself into the role -- essentially the opening scenes of Wonder Man (stillll not writing about TV but that show was fucking great) -- and ends up back home in Small Town Somewhere, where everyone has shitty normal lives. Doug McAllister (Jack Black, King Kong) makes "wedding videos" while constantly trying to insert his filmatic flair into people's personal memories. His friend Kenny (Steve Zahn, Sahara) is a loser. Their friend Claire (Thandiwe Newton, Westworld) is a lawyer who just got divorced. And then Griff shows back up, desperate to reignite.... something, gathering them all together to look at the cheesey, ham-fisted home-movie action flicks they shot when they were kids.

The whole problem with this opening act is that only Zahn pulls off being small town -- everyone else are just too larger than life actors to be believable as the small-town schmoes. I mean, they are all more than capable actors able to play those roles, but this movie doesn't allow them. I mean, c'mon, who is going to believe Thandiwe Newton as a sadsack with a sad life, even if you ignore her entirely flat American accent. And Jack Black as the (mostly) Straight Guy?

So, Griff convinces them that he has the rights to Anaconda the original movie and convinces them to put together whatever money they all have and go to the Amazon to film a re-make, re-boot, sequel... something. They even arrange a proper "snake wrangler"... well, proper is a strong word but he has a snake. That is, until a startled Griff kills it. And it should be said that there a B-plot about Ana (Daniela Melchior, Road House), a local Brazilian woman on the run from some tough guys with guns who has convinced them she is their riverboat captain, AND an actual anaconda of monstrous proportions is eating said tough guys.

And, there is not much else worth recounting. The rest is a cheesey, ham-fisted attempt at comedy mixed up with fish-out-of-water mixed up with actual horror. There are some moments where the selling points of the script are there, for example, when this crew runs across an actual crew filming an actual reboot to Anaconda but they, in turn, are eaten by Big Snake. And Ice Cube shows up to mirror his original role while playing himself. All fine & dandy ideas, as if the original script of the movie was full of serviceable ideas which were just ... wasted. Not enough precision to make it funny, not enough skill to juxtapose actual horror with insightful silliness. And only one, truly, absolutely ludicrous scene involving Jack Black with a "dead" pig strapped to his head, which had me giggling uncontrollably and then... sigh, back to bored. It was the sheer stupidity of that scene that had me laughing. And not much else.

Double Dose: The Wiz(ard of Oz).

 (Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...or genre or theme or property...you get it...pretty simple. Here, it's a return to Oz, but not Return to Oz...that will probably come later.)

The Wizard of Oz (1939, d. Victor Fleming - crave)
The Wiz (1978, d. Sydney Lumet - rental)

I am on the record multiple times on this blog as saying that I do not like the 1939 adaptation of L Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz. I even insinuated at one point that I perhaps detested it.

Harsh words.

Untrue.

In the latest rewatch (full disclosure, I rewatched while listening alongside a podcast's audio commentary) I couldn't help but continually be dazzled. It is one of the most vibrant films ever made, it has an allure, the primary colours of the yellow brick road, the Emerald City, the ruby slippers and red poppy field and all the rest of it that is impossible not to find alluring and utterly watchable.  As many times as I have seen it throughout my life, I still can't exactly remember how it plays out its story (likely muddled by the multitude of other interpretations no doubt) so there's also a sort of memory game that I play when I watch it.

But, I also find the songs verging on interminable. They've been such ubiquitous songs in my life that they have run their course into tunes I don't think I really ever need to hear again.  There's no magic left in them for me, they've been played out.

Likewise the performances are legendary but have also been mimicked and mocked and impersonated so many times that they've become a victim of their own success. I imagine should I ever watch The Godfather I'll probably have the same reaction.

I recognize with The Wizard of Oz there is an inescapable delight, but for me, also, an exhaustion.

So being prompted to watch The Wiz for the first time, ever, was a bit of a revelation.  Watching The Wiz was never something I've ever really wanted to do, in part because its previously generally maligned reputation preceded it, but also the last thing I ever really want to watch is yet another spin on Dorothy Gale's journey down the yellow brick road. There are dozens of Oz books beyond the first one, but Hollywood seems solely fixated on reinterpreting aspects of the 1939 film, and not paying any attention to the Baum novels beyond his first.

Yet within opening minutes of The Wiz -- a film produced by Motown in association with Quincy Jones, based off an award-winning stage musical that debuted earlier in the 1970's -- it was very clear that the film has a different take on what the story is about.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy's journey is literally a journey, a fantastical adventure through another land where the character's sole focus is returning home, while making friends along the way. In The Wiz (soon --or already? -- to be released in a Criterion Collection edition) Dorothy (Diana Ross) is 24 years old (Ross was a decade older than that) living in a Harlem apartment with her aunt and uncle, afraid to leave her neighbourhood, afraid often to leave the house, working as a kindergarten teacher afraid to move beyond being around children, afraid to even risk love by going on a date or speaking to a nice eligible bachelor. Dorothy is riddled with a crippling anxiety in a time where such emotional disorders weren't adequately qualified. Her anxiety keeps her not only constrained, but detached. She thinks of Em and Henry's place as home and their nudges for her to go out in the world have her fearful that it would mean she loses home, but then "home" also doesn't feel like home, a feeling she doesn't understand.

So when her precious cairn terrier Toto runs out of the apartment into a blizzard, and she gets caught up in a ridiculous snow tornado (snownado), aided by the gentle guidance of Glinda, she's sent to the upside down of Oz, where a very familiar, and yet wildly unfamiliar adventure awaits her.

The Wiz was critically panned for years and a bomb at the box office. It was no doubt a massive disappointment, in no small part because of it's massive budget (doubling that of Star Wars but not recouping it at the box office). The money is absolutely on screen. Massive set pieces are decorated to the nines, the costuming is all exceptionally unique. Noted legend in the visual effects game Stan Winson was on the project and so much of the realm is intriguingly chaotic and unexpected. The world of Oz in The Wiz is like the Stranger Things upside-down reality version of New York, a bit more of a nightmare than a fantasy. It's almost a wasteland, with husk of buildings surrounded by rubble, or walls of trash lining the streets, and cabs who are perpetually off-duty the moment you hail them, and street vendors stalking, stalking, stalking you. There is a sequence in Oz's parallel subway system that is genuinely creepy and had me absolutely giddy watching its unsettling practical effects play out.

Oz here is everything Dorothy fears, all the worst case scenarios come to life, except... she meets the Scarecrow (Michael Jackson) whose brains are made of garbage. She meets the Tinman (Nipsey Russel) whose wife has done away with him, but he yearns to have a heart to still love her with. She meets the Lion, an outcast, full of braggadocio but nothing to back it up with.  She makes these fateful companions who become friends on her journey to find her way back home, hoping that the Wiz will help them. 

But first they must defeat the wicked witch of the west who runs a sweatshop with an iron fist. The wicked witch (Mabel King) is not a major part of this story, she is yet another vignette kicking off the third act, and otherwise not a presence in this film. The adversary Dorothy has to face is her own discomfort, and when she finds out the Wiz (Richard Prior) is nothing but a simpering charlatan, she realizes that he wasn't needed at all. Dorothy teaches her friends to have compassion for their own perceived deficits and to prove to them they have the strengths they fear they lack. But it takes Glinda (Lena Horne) to show Dorothy that her desire to return home is not the same as her desire to find home, and teaches her that "home" is a place that exists within herself, the center of her being, something she carries with her wherever she goes, an idea that can comfort her no matter what happens or where she is. Diana Ross then delivers her big moment, tears streaming down her face, filled with a new sense of self. It's not the same as the Lion's gaining courage, but instead she's found comfort within herself and a sense of her own being.

It's a journey not taken by Dorothy in Victor Fleming's classic, the only message in that film is stamped right on the package "there's no place like home". The Wiz delivers a journey that's much richer and deeper.

Of course, The Wiz is not without its flaws. At 2h 13 minutes it's a full half hour longer than the classic film, and those extra 30 minutes are dearly felt. The songs are, generally, really quite good, with that Quincy Jones magic spinning around the creations conceived for the stage production five years earlier, but also, some of them get belaboured in the long-playing disco era where the instrumentals just keep repeating and the dance breaks become long enough to literally take a break to grab a snack or go to the bathroom.

As exceptional as the production values are, I found the makeup on both the Scarecrow and Tinman to be immediately horrifying and that reaction didn't abate much throughout watching the remainder of the film (and then watching the film again alongside a podcast commentary track). I get the design sense behind them but they're not great (and yet every background dancer in every scenario looks phenomenal).  

The film's key problem is that director Lumet is not a director for this scale of production, with this many moving pieces (literally). His direction of the music numbers and extended dance sequences is ... uninspired. Often with static cameras at vast distances away taking in as much of the scenery as possible without really anything in the way of camera work or editing to capture the momentum or excitement of the moment. He's telling the audience to look at the spectacle but not inviting them to be a part of it. It just so happens I like to look at spectacle so I was still enamoured with the composition, but there is definitely energy lacking.

I can understand why The Wiz didn't catch on. It's not an overtly uplifting film and Oz isn't the most obviously fantastical place. Dorothy, played by a 34-year-old woman, is constantly in tears and seems petrified all the time (it's really effective in hammering home her anxiety disorder, frankly), not making for the most inviting or inspiring protagonist... and yet, I believe the journey she takes. I believe her when she sings her heart's song that she has grown as a person and is ready to live the life she's been too timid to find before. And the weird, unfamiliar, slightly dangerous and exciting nature of Oz makes it such an incredible place to visit, especially compared to the vibrant familiarity of The Wizard of Oz.

If The Wiz were a Wicked Part 1-style smash hit, I'm sure I would be as sick of it today as I am of the 1939 film, but even after almost 50 years, The Wiz feels like a forgotten gem, an underdog, a secret (mostly) success nobody wants to talk about and certainly nobody wants to license songs for their commercials. It only makes it more enticing to me. I thought I was running out of big spectacle films to discover from the 70's and 80's, I only needed to branch outside of science fiction to find more.

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3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The King

2019, David Michôd (The Rover) -- Netflix

So, in 2013-ish Joel Edgerton and director Michôd collaborated on the screenplay for The Rover. At the same time they revealed they had worked also together on a script for an adaptation of Shakespeare's "King Henry" plays, often called the Henriad, which cover the reign of King Henry IV and the rise to power of his son, Henry the V. I fully admit I know very little of the plays, only knowing Branagh's 1989 film. I also know very little of the historical period. But it fascinates me that this movie displays as a historical drama, yet retains the fictional character of Falstaff, from the plays, as played by Edgerton himself.

Enough of the meta. This movie just looks & sounds goooood !! Its grim and gritty, yet so very fucking precise in its use of language (close, but not quite Shakespeare-ian) and imagery. And very oddly curtailed in its "historical" depiction. Usually these kinds of movies cover a long range of time keying on points from the history blogs, the sound bites of a figure of notoriety. This movie focuses on Hal's coming to power, and his famous battle with the French at Agincourt. That's it. It helps that its based on plays and not history.

So, Hal (Timothée Chalamet, Dune) is a bit of a layabout. He doesn't care for his father at all and spends his time in Eastcheap drinking and whoring with John Falstaff (Joel Edgerton, Train Dreams), an ex-soldier given to fat and hanging out with the wrong sort, leaning on his royal friend to get him out of tough situations. Meanwhile after fighting the Scots, King Henry's vassals are less than happy with his paranoid responses, one named Hotspur going so far as to insult the King to his face. That leads to the King (Ben Mendelsohn, Captain Marvel) naming them outlaw and sending his son to deal with the "rebellion", his younger son who he has now named as heir, because of Hal's rejection of everything.

Hal is actually incensed, knowing his little brother to be weak, ineffectual and desperate to please their father. He interrupts the grand battle between armies by challenging Hotspur to singular combat. The two fully armoured knights clash, grunting and striking each other in the mud until Hal comes out victorious, stealing glory from his brother. You get the feeling that despite Hal being a drunken fool, he knows how to fight and is keenly aware of his father's failings. Not long after, his brother still dies, trying to prove himself in Wales. And soon after that, King Henry IV dies in bed, covered in sores and regretting everything. Hal is forced to accept the crown.

Hal bears his crown with a heavy heart but a stubborn desire to Be Better. He doesn't want to be his father, a man continually at war with everyone, but also doesn't want to be seen as ineffectual. When, during his coronation, the French send him a single tennis ball, he doesn't react with violence to the insult, as all expected of him. But it becomes clear to us, the viewer, if not Hal himself, that there is a lot going on he was never aware of and there are constant outside factors influencing every aspect of his reign. This is probably when Hal could have used the friendship and guidance of Falstaff, but he leaves the man to his drink and his debts. Until he needs him.

It doesn't take a keen mind to see Hal is being manipulated, primarily by his lead advisor, Sir William Gascoigne (Sean Harris, Mission: Impossible - Fallout), a man always quick with loaded advice, and a very very affected way of standing, as if posing for the camera. It is William who unmasks an assassination attempt leading to the execution of two nobles, one who was Hal's friend in childhood. And it points all swords at France, a challenge not even peace-seeking Hal can ignore. 

Dude, you are being played.

Hal apologizes to Falstaff and brings the drunken knight along as a chief advisor, and they all set sail for France. They are armed with the attempts on Hal's life and some complicated, probably fabricated explanation as to how the King of France is not legally entitled to be king. But in front of the king is his foppish and arrogant son, The Dauphin (Robert Pattinson, The Batman), a cruel man who taunts Hal. They "easily" take the first castle but when they meet the Dauphin's army proper, he has The Higher Ground.

The Battle of Agincourt, the definite point in history. This is where Falstaff's brilliance comes into play. He is a man who suffers from his experiences in wars past, but wants what is best for his friend, and king. He also wants as little death as he can allow to happen, devising a plan where the lightly armoured English will feint an attack on the outnumbering, but heavily armoured French, allowing everyone to go down in the mud. It goes as planned, but at the cost of many English including John. Peace is drawn up and Hal is to marry the French princess (Lily-Rose Depp, Yoga Hosers) to seal it. He asks one thing of her -- always speak truth, because if there is one thing Hal needs it is an advisor who isn't entirely self-serving. 

The movie ends with Hal realizing how everything, the insults by the French and the entire war, was put into play by Gascoigne, to better the man's holdings. Hal dispatches the man in a less than dramatic fashion.

Again, I say the movie just looks good. There is budget and intent in the depictions. The lighting and colouring remains grim even in the lighter scenes, of which there are few. Given the movie is less a recollecting of historical facts, it is not surprising it is more a collection of artfully built vignettes.... much like a play generally is. Dialogue is at the forefront and it also is very precise, but not entirely period nor Shakespeare. If anything, it does feel a bit muted, with the tale of a heavy crown obvious, but not really impactful.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): We Bury the Dead

2025, Zak Hilditch (These Final Hours) -- download

I swore I saw These Final Hours but maybe I am more remembering that Kent did, as the plot doesn't sound familiar. Hilditch returns with another end-of-the-world, but more the end of "a" world as the US naval vessel "accidentally" sets of an experimental atomic/nuclear weapon off the coast of Hobart, Tasmania. Who isn't killed by the initial blast dies from the actual purpose of the weapon -- a pulse of energy kills every living thing it passes through, as it flows inland. 

This movie isn't about the US nor the consequences. This movie is about a single woman, Ava (Daisy Ridley, Cleaner), an American herself, who joins the "body retrieval" process as the Australian government is overwhelmed in the grim recovery & identification of the dead. She has volunteered because her husband had come to Tasmania on a corporate retreat, and they had recently had an argument; she needs closure. There is also the unsettling fact that while the pulse caused instantaneous brain death, it is known that some undetermined time later, some people "come back online", essentially awakening as shambling, teeth-clacking zombies inside their decaying, very dead bodies. Obviously she's a little off-kilter if finding her husband in this state is her goal. There is also the challenge in that the resort where the retreat was taking place is in an area that is currently off-limits, too close to the still-burning city of Hobart.

As readers here know, I am a "zombie movie guy". These days, I prefer when movies explore the genre beyond survival-horror-action, even if that is often the most exciting of the story structures. This movie never intended on being "exciting" and I am not surprised by the spate of 1-star reviews, by audiences, at RT. For me, the draw was the "clean up" after a mass-casualty event, something that is not / cannot generally be covered in virus or zombie-apocalypse movies because... well, everyone is dead. Alas, the movie only kicks off with that idea, the elevator pitch, while most of the rest of the movie is two-fold. 

One, the road trip through the hellscape that is south Tasmania, from relatively safe protected-by-soldiers areas of the island, to the proper wasteland littered with bodies and wreckage, ending in the juxtaposition-ing of a resort-spa populated by only the dead. which allows the character study of Ava and why she is so desperate to get to where her husband most clearly died. 

And two, the zombies themselves -- who or what is coming back online, what remains of the person who was originally there, if the brain was entirely wiped. The soldiers mollify the clean-up crews saying they are slow, plodding and harmless. But we, regular viewers, know how far that will go. Soon after leaving the safe areas, Ava, and her side-kick Clay (Brenton Thwaites, Titans), discover some definitely faster, angrier undead full of clacking teeth and malevolent intent. A lone soldier (Mark Coles Smith, Hard Rock Medical) they bump into explains that the longer they are online, the more agitated the undead act, as if tortured by their own returned existence. And yet, something of what they were does remain, as they try to return to whatever they were doing before the bomb went off. The existential horror of being aware inside a very dead and decaying body (its been weeks) is palpable, and yet, to extend the horror, this is what Ava was hoping for -- to find her husband, to find him "returned" and demand answers to questions about their relationship. The dead may have unfinished business, but so does Ava.

Many of the one-star reviews complained how the movie had no proper ending. I am not sure what they were looking for -- Ava was there to confront her husband, corpse or otherwise. And she did. And had her closure, for better or for worse. We all knew it was a fool's errand, no matter what she found. She would not find solace, not find forgiveness except within herself. And then the movie gives a little melodramatic tacked-on sub-plot involving the bumped-into-soldier and his ... wife. She was very much pregnant when the bomb went off. She is very much pregnant as the broken man ties her to the bed, hoping for his own sort of closure. The shock of the final scenes, where a baby is born from a corpse, a baby that should have been its own form of corpse but is warm and squalling, is yet another level of horror. Its not meant to answer any questions, just leave us with more.

Final thoughts? I was left with many, and the conflict between movie-making (telling a story, giving us plot) and the world-making of a different, new type of zombie apocalypse. The character development, the study of a woman in grief is at least managed but I felt it should have been harsher. I did like that this one made me think -- they are not just the mechanical zombies of most movies, with only death on their mind. And the horror of a callous US government is so obviously very current. I wonder how far these movies go with quiet-drama instead of full-on horror, and why.