n Bored Paragraphs: Morbius

2022, Daniel Espinosa (Life) -- download

Kent mentioned the other night, when we were OUTSIDE doing a SOCIAL THING like SEEING A MOVIE, that this blog is akin to us talking to each other about movies, but in text format. I mean, that was the intent of the blog after one particularly fevered conversation after seeing Source Code (ed. note: apparently my brain is retconning the whole thing as Source Code was 4 months after the blog started). But I think, for me at least, it is more like me telling you (random fictional reader) what I told Kent when were chatting about movies (during random fictional social engagement). You see, when I am face to face, even when I am "in practice" (the last few years [decade], even pre-pandemic, social interaction has taken a nose dive) I am not all that verbose; well, maybe more so after a few drinks. But in words, I can blather on and on, even about something I wasn't all that interested in. Sometimes. Sometimes, this comes down to, "saw movie, was good."

Preamble (said blathering) explains proper preamble where I talk about the weirdness going on around the reviewing of this movie, which to me, was more interesting than the movie itself.

So, there was some sort of review bombing going on with the Morbius rating on Rotten Tomatoes. While I don't hold the reviewers of the world as a hallowed group determining the validity of movie making, peeking at IMDB and RT ratings are usually a good place to to see how the world considers a movie. At the time of this post it was 17% Critic, 71% Viewer. So, the audience forgave it more than the critics did? Not at all surprising with superhero based movies, but then you peek at the actual viewer ratings and there is tomfoolery going on there. What the heck are "morbillion dollars" ? Apparently some sort of Internet movement did their own form of review bombing giving the flick more high ratings than it truly deserved. And the "reviews" are truly weird. You cannot take them seriously. But instead of bad actors panning a flick because its "woke", these weirdos are inflating the worth of a truly mediocre flick.

Michael Morbius was one of those Marvel characters I really enjoyed as a kid, atypical from the usual spandex supes, a tortured anti-hero, a "living vampire" whose cure for his disease went terribly wrong when he mixed it with "vampire bat blood". He turned into a pale, stalker of the night in an incredibly tacky disco outfit but still chose to fight bad guys as many of the other Marvel monsters of the time, who included Werewolf (by Night), Frankenstein and actual Dracula. Gawds, I loved those terrible, silly comics!

So, why they choose him for the next non-Marvel Studios character to bring to the screen, after the lackluster Venom movies? I thinks they may be creating some sort of anti-hero squad, based on the coda for this flick. But either way its a weird weird choice, further solidified by casting Jared Leto in the lead. To be honest, I wasn't as bent out of shape as many were, for his casting. I am not a fan but neither am I bothered by him, and his off-screen antics. Whatever; he's Old Hollywood and a bit of a weirdo creep. But he definitely does dive into this role, with just the right amount of levity to bring some character to the movie. Alas, the rest is just... astoundingly bland.

I often fall asleep during a movie, if I have a glass of wine or a beer, but usually only if the movie is something I have seen before or something not worth paying attention to. I nodded off, for a few seconds at a time, at least three times during this watching. There wasn't enough terrible for it to become a mocking, drinking-movie, as we originally intended, but... I am fading again, just thinking about it. There was just .... nothing remarkable about it; it was just such a deficit of a plot that I couldn't keep my attention focused.

So, as in comics, Morbius (it's a Greek name?) is a guy with a disease that will soon (apparently, still takes decades) end his life, so he fucks with his own DNA by adding in vampire bat DNA. Why? Oh, I don't fucking remember. It wasn't even a workable attempt at pseudo science, just a Z-grade monster movie use of coloured water in test tubes and a lab full of blinking lights, as representations of science. Of course, it goes wrong, turning him into a blood sucking, black & purple smoke spewing (what was up with that? was it just ... visually atmospheric or was he ... shedding?) flat nosed monster (why the growling obviously aggressive monster? bats are just bats, even vampire bats are just animals without evil) that apparently can fly (although, he doesn't get skin wings). He inadvertently gives the same "cure" to his best friend Milo (Matt Smith, Doctor Who), who shares the same disease, but has no qualms drinking humans dry to stay alive. They fight, one dies, some tragedy, Michael lives.

Yeah, some tragedy. The real tragedy was the Adria Arjona character. Usually female leads are meant to provide some sexiness to a movie (still sad unto itself), something for the male gaze, and she serves that up well enough, but even so, what was her role? Officially she was supposed to be his assistant, but I don't recall a single thing she did, nor said, other than (SPOILER!) die and become infected. What? Infected? How does that happen? Did I fall asleep when they explained his blood was now infectious?

In the end, this "origin story" is nothing more than a prelude to some sort of Multiverse influenced, Sony studios based anti-hero setup that will include Venom, Vulture (Adrian Toomes) and maybe a few others yet to come? Thinking about that stuff is entirely more interesting than ALL this movie.

The Batman

2022, Mat Reeves (Cloverfield) -- download

I had no interest in seeing a new Batman movie. To be honest, and this is kind of hard to admit, but I was actually looking forward to seeing a proper Bat-fleck movie, as his whole Frank Miller look appealed to me, and I liked his Bruce Wayne façade. It was all proper "superhero". I saw this new movie being just a desire to resurrect the success of the Nolan Batman-s, which were also a resurrection of a previous incarnation, and in some ways it was. But from almost scene one, I was caught. Sure, this was "dark & gritty" but (almost) twenty years later D&G, but its also so fucking cinematic.

The opening narration sets the tone. This is not superhero Batman, this is the Dark Knight detective Batman. And the whole movie is a proper detective story, drawing an, "Even without Batman, this would be a decent crime movie," utterance from me once we were deep in. A crime happens, there are clues and suspects, he investigates and begins to unravel a bigger conspiracy, like all these movies do. But that narration, establishing that his day-to-day (night-to-night?) is more about the street level crimes, the thugs and drug dealers and criminal element preying on the average citizen. The DNA of that narration is noir, and more directly, the Rorschach journal entries from The Watchmen.

I am just starting my first rewatch. I, like with Dune, am taking it slow, so I can notice things, make note of things, think about things, for this post. And after that, I will probably watch again, so I can just enjoy it again. Notice things like focus pulls, and the parallels, and those intricately designed scenes that are just so wonderful. For decades after Bladerunner came out, there were stills of scenes from the movie that people framed and depicted like individual art pieces. If it wasn't for our over-saturation of imagery these days, I can see how the phenomena would take again.

There are just so many shots where I paused to look at the colours, the lighting, the angles and scope. Even the most mundane shots, like headlights on motocycles or coffee cups on cafe counters were so ... considered. And these days I really enjoy when I can be pulled out of my distraction prone/need to be distracted state.

a bit later as I finish.

Maybe it's my over exposure to crime fiction, or more likely my over exposure to superhero movies and how the average lives of average people, even politicians and the movers-and-shakers of a city are so second fiddle to the other things, but the Big Conspiracy doesn't seem all that big to me. One crime boss takes down another crime boss, while wrapping up the corrupt officials of the city into it. When you look at the world IRL and what the ex-President of the US got away with, and continues to get away with, some rich and powerful assholes doing what rich and powerful assholes do is not all that surprising or foundation shaking stuff.

The more The Batman reveals, the more he realizes he is being led, eventually culminating with the final unveiling, the final piece in the puzzle (riddle) and the capture of The Riddler. The parallels are obvious, one broken orphan up against another broken orphan who sees some sort of kinship. Riddler is a character torn from the headlines, a man created and destroyed by his past, one who finds fellow compatriots online, and organizes a larger conspiracy, one that breaks The Batman out of his mould as street level crime fighter, and into ... a next phase?

We end the movie with a character that has been brought into the light, much like the city has been around him. He is no longer (only) the feared vigilante, but a superhero who saved many lives. From fear, to hope.

I never thought I would like anything with Robert Pattinson (Twilight), but he does this movie justice. Mind's-eye Batman has always been in his early-40s, a powerhouse of muscles and ability. But Pattinson brings him to us maybe mid-30s, more lithe, less invulnerable (despite that suit that can take automatic fire point blank) more akin to Daredevil and the Old Boy hallway fight, full of grunts, pain and growls. He is also such an obviously broken man, more the mask than the billionaire playboy.

Selena Kyle (Zoe Kravitz, High Fidelity) - Catwoman. Her role is lacking, but she exists more to be the mirror that Bruce looks into. She is all sex appeal and capability, but I do wish they had done more with her as a character.

Sleazy crime boss Ozwald (Colin Farrell, After Yang) - The Penguin is a marvel. Underneath all that prosthetics, Farrell just inhabits the role. He emotes more in his few scenes than most characters do in the whole movie.

Gordon (Jeffrey Wright, Westworld), the inveterate cop, the One Good Man is just so fucking perfect. He is wry, focused and never far from pointing out the humour in the ridiculous situation he is putting himself in, by allying with The Batman.

As the movie came to a close, with a boom, I found myself seeing those purple suited producers again (perhaps Oz is the embodiment of them?) and the parallels to the Nolan films. The final plot, the Biggest Reveal, is so final Nolan act, with destruction on a grand scale, and body counts to fit. I wanted to be more bothered by these parallels, like the car chase scene which even begins under the Chicago-style train supports, but then I noticed how much Reeves made it his own. That car! The race through city environs and onto the highway system, out of the canyons of the megacity that is Gotham. This was Reeves applying the hallway fight to a big, bruiser of a car. It was stupendous.

In the end, I am left with a movie I marvel at, am VERY pleased with, happy to have something that pulls me away from my phone. I cannot wait for my next few viewings where I will settle into the enjoyment of key scenes I love all the while noticing more and more of the details.

P.S. We pretty much agree?

3+1 Short Paragraphs: The Bubble

2022, Judd Apatow (This Is 40) -- Netflix

Still writing posts during rewatches of Dune and The Batman, and getting nowhere with my latest Spider-Man movie post, which probably means a rewatch is warranted as well*. Its weird that I feel I should rewatch the movies before I write about them, because I want to give them what is due (but really, do I ever?) and yet here I am filling in the gap with a movie I watched pretty much before all of these (Dune is the exception) and I am just going with it. I guess that says something about how much I care about it.

* I used to think that having a (usually strong) beer late in the evening was lending itself to forgetting everything about a movie three days after watching it, but of late, I think its just stress-brain.

This movie was all about the teasers that came out EVERYWHERE long before the movie was released on Netflix. These teasers were for the movie that is being made in The Bubble which is about a group of actors and supporting crew cloistered in a country estate hotel in Britain during a pandemic, desperate to make a movie despite all the challenges. Said movie is the latest in a popular monster adventure franchise called Cliff Beasts. These are terrible, Asylum level movies but based on the energy the cast, crew and producers are putting into making the movie, I would hazard it is more akin to Jurassic Park in this world. Nobody wants this latest sequel but the producers are desperate to make money during a pandemic, even while they vacation off-camera in locales utterly unaffected by any pandemic restrictions, more likely because money.

I am now pretty sure that movies from and about the pandemic are going to have a very very short shelf-life in our movie watching legacy. This came out at the (fingers crossed) tail end of our own very real pandemic but already it seems so out of touch. It wanted to poke fun at the protocols and lazy restrictions put in place, and all the hoops actors and crew were forced to jump through just so the money grubbing production companies (the studios) could continue to make money, not giving a rat's ass about humans getting sick. But all the trappings around it just fell flat for the most part, reminding me why I don't watch more Apatow flicks. 

That said, there were some pretty good performances by pretty great people. Iris Apatow, Judd and Leslie's daughter, is great as a vapid social media star cast in the movie purely for the youth demographic -- she does a Tik Tok style dance with a dinosaur, which we also get to see depicted by a couple of wry guys in terrible green mocap suits. Pedro Pascal is Dieter, a method actor who spends most of the movie under the influence of one thing or another, desperate to get into anybody's pants. David Duchovny, Peter Serafinowicz, and Leslie Mann also put in some fine performances, i.e. I had nothing to complain about their characters, but they did nothing more than what they were paid to do. And Karen Gillan is Carol, the closest thing the movie has to a main character, not really interested in doing the movie since she left the franchise, but needs the money and exposure after some disastrous choices. Gillan is Hollywood, and ... well, she left me feeling flat, much like the movie did.

3 Short Paragraphs: Asking For It

2020, Eamon O'Rourke (debut) -- download

OK, let's get this out of the way. It's really weird that a write-up about a movie with a group of women standing up, violently, to people transgressing against them abusing them, or male scumbags in general, is somewhat marred by reading about the director assaulting someone a trans woman in a bar in Brooklyn. Somewhat, in that the confrontation is only being played out on Twitter, and while the director has apologized to her, he also has his people running damage control. Its also weird that this movie stars Ezra Miller, as an incel MRA scumbag, while he runs around being a scumbag himself.

Small town girl Joey (Kiersey Clemons, Sweetheart) is date raped by a college friend, and is left to suffer alone, unable to share with anyone close to her. As she works her small diner in a post-traumatic haze, she's approached by Regina (Alexandra Shipp, X-Men Apocalypse), who shows her a world where she can feel safe again, and maybe even get some revenge. Not so much legal justice, but plain out violent revenge. Add to the story a rabid "men's right activist" (i.e. raging misogynist; Miller) and a trafficking ring that thinks its untouchable (run by a small town's police force) and you get a flick that harkens back to the 70s revenge porn / girl power schlock fests.

This movie was butchered by the critics. And with some good reason. Its character depiction is amateurish, as they are more just motivations and reactions than people. But considering the violent fare I am watching these days, that is par for the course. Also, a white man helming a movie about women of colour reacting to the apathy of the patriarchy is just a wee bit exploitive, again somewhat harkening back to the 70s. And yet, with as much as the cast had to work with, they did give some genuine performances which left me appreciating it.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

 2022, d. Sam Raimi - in theatre

My daughter pointed out that this movie, which debuted this past weekend - Mother's Day weekend - can effectively be called Doctor Strange: MOM.  And being a mother, though you might not expect it, is a large part of this movie. Of course, I heard it as "Dr. Strangemom" which I then subtitled "or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Multiverse".  I mean, it's probably coincidence. Marvel always likes to release a film on the first weekend of May, coinciding with Free Comic Book Day, just so happens Mother's day (the second Sunday of May) falls a little earlier than usual.

Dr. Strangemom is not a great character story, but it's kind of an impressively epic superhero spectacle.  It just won't make much sense unless you're somewhat invested in MCU lore (or at least an old school comic book fan), in which case... this is freaking amazing!  But even then it's "freaking amazing" with an asterisk.  It's just so chock full of fun nuggets and big BIG crazy visuals that it's hard not to be continually impressed and entertained, even if you're not fully connected emotionally with, really any of the characters or their journeys.  

I've been going through Sam Raimi's filmography over the past two months (alongside the Blank Check podcast), and finding his work frequently ambitious but often hindered either by his sensibilities (he likes slapstick and melodrama almost to a fault) or by budget, or studio constraints.  We've seen very little from Raimi in this almost decade since his flawed venture into Oz the Great and Powerful but Dr. Strangemom seems like he's been given carte blanche to make a big, zippy, gross superhero action adventure movie that allows him to employ all his bag of tricks, the only caveat is it has to weave all around the MCU.  A lot of critics have been dismissing that this is somehow a big put-upon thing, that the demands of the MCU does Raimi a disservice, when it seems to me he kind of really enjoyed playing with these toys and having the budget to let his imagination run wild.  

With each scene change, I was more and more engrossed in the movie... the story, yeah, fine, but moreso how crazily ramped-up Raimi made things.  By the third act, Dr. Strangemom basically becomes an MCU-ified continuation of Army of Darkness.  Even if you're not familiar with Raimi's "Deadite" series, you're still going to notice that this Marvel ain't like other Marvels.  It's not even like any of the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies, it's far more ambitious.  The kind of pulpy, gross out gags in this are utterly delightful, and seriously gross (but they happen to non-humans so it's okay).  I "ooooh"ed so many times.  Raimi's sense of the macabre is always one that has tongue planted firmly in cheek... if there was a cheek remaining.  I'm giving all the credit to Raimi, but Loki and Rick and Morty writer Michael Waldron should be credited with creating a script that played to Raimi's strengths and ...yeah, there's a real Rick and Morty vibe to all this lunacy.

I had a damn good time.  This is probably the second closest a superhero movie has gotten to feeling like a lived-in comic book universe (next to Avengers: Infinity War).  It just assumes you get it.  It doesn't cede much time (for better or worse) to setting up any of its characters, and the various surprise character appearances, well, it just assumes you've been paying attention to all the other Marvel stuff.  This movie does nothing that fans of comics haven't seen for decades now, but it does it with a massive big screen budget and it actually succeeds at replicating the delightful feel of a shared universe story.  

I'm not a Doctor Strange fan.  I've read scant few comics featuring the character, and he's low down on the list of MCU characters I get excited about.  I like Cumberbatch. I think he's great in the role. For me, as a non-fan, the character is served best in guest starring roles like Thor: Ragnarok, Infinity War and No Way Home where he's kind of a douchey third wheel.  This, his second feature, still puts him as part of an ensemble, and a story where he's the central figure, but he's definitely not in control.  It works for the character because there's ample opportunity to cut away from him and spend time with someone else throughout.

I get that not everyone is as invested in comic books or comic book movies as I am.  I just finished listening to a podcast about a Kevin Costner baseball movie and I vehemently don't give a shit about either of those things, but there are people that passionately do, so I understand how annoying it can be for non-fans to see this nerd shit taking up so much of the cultural real estate.  But nerd shit has been my life for decades, and this, well, it makes me happy, because it's some real nerd shit.  It's not going to last forever.  Eventually there will be a revolt and nerd shit will be pushed to the background...or the industry will collapse due to unsustainable practices and there won't bee 200 million or even 100 million dollar spectacles anymore, so I'm going to enjoy this ride for as long as it lasts.  

 I'm going into spoiler territory now...

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----SPOILER TERRITORY----

This isn't a perfect film, and I'm not above critiquing it.  As I said, the characterization in this film is thin.  There's a running thread of Stephen Strange thinking about whether he's happy or not, but it's only a running thread in that it's brought up, briefly, four times throughout the film, stopping it dead in its tracks for maybe sixty seconds before the next crazy thing takes place.  By the end, I think we're supposed to feel that, perhaps, Stephen has found happiness by letting go of his fixations and his ego, but it's a bit of a stretch.

Strange is paired up in this film with a young dimension-hopping woman, America Chavez, whom I love from the Young Avengers comics.  The appropriate word to describe comics' America is brassy.   She's not at all brassy here.  Here's she's pretty much the maguffin, the thing everyone's chasing after that Strange needs to protect.  A lot of this comes down to whether Stephen can be trusted to protect her, or if he's that guy who will destroy something so no one can have it.   America, for her part, gets one, maybe two moments of character revelation otherwise she's just a walking talking plot device.  Cool powers though.

If you were thinking "but hey, isn't this a Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch" team-up movie... oof, yeah, some bad news for you there, bub.  The antagonist of the film is, surprisingly, the Scarlet Witch.  Coming out of Wandavision she has been dabbling in dark magics, desperately trying to find her mystically conjured children from the TV series, and needing America's powers to travel dimensions to get them.  But she's corrupted, and the film had me hanging on a wire wondering how she was going to redeem herself, because almost from the get go she goes pretty dark, pretty deeply.  Wanda's story has been a tragedy at every turn, from Age of Ultron onwards, and and Elizabeth Olson's been quite exceptional at balancing the emotional toll all of that has had on her.  But here, the scales have tipped and it'd be very heart wrenching if Strange and Wanda had any real emotional history at all.  As it is, the film relies upon us having the deep affection for Wanda, which perhaps we all don't, especially if you've not seen Wandavision.

Wong gets a beefed up role, appropriately, as he is now the Sorcerer Supreme.  It's unfortunate though, that the two Benedicts are separated as they have had really fun chemistry (and are apparently good friends off screen).  Rachael McAdams is also back as Strange's former love Christine Palmer, here getting married and moving on, triggering Stephen's regret and remorse (and if you've seen the Disney+ What If? series you know that Strange kind of has a bit of an unhealthy obsession about Christine, and the journey here is him coming to terms with that and moving on.  McAdams gets to play a more proactive alternate universe version of the character, and there's a couple great moments that justify her presence.

Chiwetel Ejiofor is back as Karl Mordo, who we last saw being set up as the next big bad for Doctor Strange, and effectively carrying out an anti-magic crusade.  This film brushes past that set-up and maybe even implies that it was resolved off-screen.  Instead we meet a Mordo from an alternate universe who, you know, still kinda hates Stephen.

I could fan gush about the Illuminati, teased ever so slightly in the trailers and deconstructed by a 1000 youtubers to the point of basically getting the roster completely accurate.  Even with that level of scrutiny, the quick reveal of each member just bristles with potential and excitement.  Just like Marvel managed to reclaim Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man in No Way Home, they do the same with another MCU figure or two here and it's delightful.

A final note, the film uses the term "Incursions" to describe when two multiversal worlds collide.  There was a huge, epic Avengers story where, effectively, the multiverse was collapsing upon itself and worlds would collide unless one was destroyed.  Like prior uses of big Marvel events (Age of Ultron, Civil War, Infinity War), it's unlikely that Secret Wars will happen the same way as in the comics, but it seems like seeds are gently being planted.

----LEAVING SPOILER TERRITORY---

Ranking the MCU:
(including D+)

    the top tier - my favourites, all just good stuff

1. Avengers: Infinity War
2. Captain America: Civil War
3. Guardians of the Galaxy
4. Thor: Ragnarok
5. Spider-Man: Homecoming
6. Captain America: First Avenger
7. Hawkeye
8. Captain America: Winter Soldier
9. Avengers: Endgame
10. Black Panther
    
11. Spider-Man: No Way Home
12. Loki
13. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
14. Ant-Man
15. Avengers
16. Wandavision
    
        the second line - stories I like but perhaps don't fully resonate
17. Iron Man 3
18. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
19. Black Widow
20. Doctor Strange
21. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
22. Ant-Man and the Wasp
23. Captain Marvel
    
         third wave -- flawed but still fun, stuff I'll still go back to
24. What If...?
25. Spider-Man: Far From Home
26. Eternals
27. Falcon and the Winter Soldier
28. Moon Knight
29. Avengers: Age of Ultron
30. Iron Man 2
    
        the bottom - the ones I don't know that I even want to watch again
31. Thor: The Dark World
32. Iron Man
33. Thor
34. The Incredible Hulk

Moon Knight Season 1

2022, d. Mohamed Diab, and Benson & Moorhead  - Disney Plus
created by Jeremy Slater
 

Moon Knight holds a weird place in my comics fandom: there's a strange, deep-rooted affection for the character from my childhood even though I never read a single issue of the comic.  Oh, as a tot I once bought a single issue of the series, but the issue disappeared, only to be discovered, after a frantic search, in a garbage can... torn in half (my mother objecting to the comic's content).  I have a vague image in my head of what the cover of that issue looked like, but I've yet to ever actually see that cover again.  This nominal trauma cemented into my brain that I was a Moon Knight fan, only to find out some 20 years later, reading a random issue of a more recent series that I knew absolutely nothing about them.  I read some of the original run, but nothing much sticks in my memory save Bill Sienkieweicz's dramatic linework and the character's multiple personality disorder.

As such, watching the new Moon Knight Disney+ series, I was in the strange position of having no idea what to expect out of a superhero property, yet still having some expectations.  I really can't speak to the character of the comics, but my impression always was he was a brutal vigilante, falling somewhere between Daredevil and the Punisher on Marvel's scale of ruthlessness in the war on crime.  To show how little I know about the character, I had next to no awareness of Moon Knight's connection to Egyptian mythology, so the show tying itself so heavily into it came as a bit of a shock.

The series introduces us Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac), a London-based museum gift shop employee who has a super-keen interest in all things Egyptian.  He's a real submissive, beta character type, showing little confidence in himself, except when it comes to his knowledge of Egyptian stuff.  He cheerful and outgoing, only awkwardly so.  He sleeps with a circle of sand around his bed and his ankle chained to his bedpost.  He calls his mom to leave voicemails regularly. You know, Steven is just your average shlub. 

The sand and ankle restraint are there because Steven thinks he sleepwalks, not realizing that, in his downtime, Marc Spectre, a different personality takes over.  Steven is completely unaware he has dissociative identity disorder, and never aware of what he's up to in his nocturnal sojourns.  Things come to a head though when he wakes up, not chained to his bed, but in a field outside a remote village in Austria.  There he encounters, face-to-face, cult leader Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) who seems to run the village. People willingly submit themselves to him and allow him to cast judgement upon them by way of a scales tattoo that, if balanced one way or the other means subservience or death.  

Steven's escape from the cult leads to the show's most engaging sequence as the intensity ratchets up. Steven continually blacks out, only to wake up in an even more intense and chaotic situation.  The effect here is highly entertaining and well orchestrated, one of the freshest action sequences in a long time, despite some choppy special effects.

Eventually Steven learn's of his other persona's existence and that Marc Spector is the Fist of Khonshu, the Egyptian moon god, and protector of travellers of the night ... and also married, as Layla (May Calamawy) comes looking for Marc after he disappeared on her some time ago, to serve him divorce papers.  The plot of the series is Khonshu's directive of stopping Harrow from freeing Ammit, who, through her vessels, will judge everyone on Earth not for their sins, but possible sins.  But the real story of the series is Steven and Marc coming to terms with who they are, two vastly different identities in one body, and the many, many secrets Marc holds that are key to understanding who, and why, they are.

Among the many things I didn't know about Moon Knight was how long it would be (6 episodes, turns out) and how tied into the MCU it would be (not at all...perhaps the first MCU product in a long time to not acknowledge its a part of a larger universe of events and heroes).  

Following the intriguing first episode, I found it to be an uneven experience.  The aspects of Steven discovering his other life is the emotional core of the series, including his relationship with Layla, but the psychological drama didn't seem to marry well with the adventure-heavy aspects of squaring off against Harrow.

The manifestation of Khonshu in their minds (voiced by F. Murray Abraham) led to revelations that there are avatars for many of the Egyptian gods, and there's a whole (underwritten) structure to their existence.  Khonshu is seen by the rest as a wild card, not to be trusted, so they do not heed his warnings of Ammit's impending escape.  Khonshu and his powers, and by proxy the powers of the Moon Knight (or Mr. Knight if Steven's in charge) are kind of whatever the script needs them to be and not well defined in the show either (like...he can fly? Khonshu can rewind the sky?) There are a few leaps here that feel awkward even in the reality of the MCU.

The fourth episode is largely an old fashioned, straightforward tomb-raiding adventure and finds its own rhythms within, forgetting almost entirely it's a superhero show.  Likewise the fifth episode finds Marc and Stephen's body near death, and they're trapped within a mind-prison that threatens to ferry them into the afterlife for good.  It's a twisty, unexpected, and emotional journey as Steven learns of his own creation, the show unflinchingly delving into Marc's abuse as a child at the hands of his mother.

The final episode sits with these revelations but puts Marc and Steven at peace with each other, and in a much better place to aide Khonshu with his mission, and then, hopefully, be free of his manipulative influence.  

In the finale of the series, it feels like a whole piece, only it leaves with one thread dangling, ready to be tugged on, which it then does in a mid-credits sequence, revealing itself to not be stand-alone.  Effectively, this is not "Moon Knight", but rather "Moon Knight Season 1".

As an MCU piece, it's shockingly singular.  Its predecessor Disney+ shows all spun out of the movies, and future series that have been announced all have connective tissue with what came before, so it's amazing that this tale of gods didn't make any effort to tie into, say, the Eternals (just to learn that a planned Eternals cameo was excised late in production).  It works well at being its own thing.

 It's also largely disinterested in superheroics.  What does their life as a vigilante look like?  We don't know, it's never examined.  The Moon Knight costume only appears in three of the show's six episodes, and not for long stretches (although it does the highly annoying Spider-Man 3  thing where it flits back and forth revealing Oscar Issac's face in case we forget who's supposed to be under there).  Isaac, for his part, is good at playing both Marc and Steven, at giving them each defining physicality and mannerisms (beyond one having an American accent and the other having a not spot-on British accent, but obviously there's reason behind that), but perhaps because Steven is our POV character, I found Marc to be a bit harder to invest in.  Hawke is good at being sage, but menacing, but it's a role that doesn't need much.

This really could have been a movie though, and old-school, self-contained, solo film.  They could have hit upon most of the main points that are here but in a much condensed fashion.  But at the same time, the weighty episode 5 would have lost much of its potency.

n Paragraphs: Uncharted

2022, Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) -- download

I noticed something when writing my last post. My writing about movies reflects my personality of the last ... decade (or more?) in that I find it much easier to complain about something, to be snarky, to be mean, than to say something positive. When not complaining, my pathways seem to go down the "it was güd... the end" route and that's about it. So, I decided to not double-down on that choice in my writing style, and try to write about this movie in a more positive light, even though I was rather lukewarm about it.

I am rather surprised I don't have a "PS4: Uncharted 4" post somewhere in this blog, as I remember distinctly writing about constant switch from wise-cracking treasure hunter solving puzzles, to assault rifle firing "super soldier" mowing down hundreds of bad guys. The games don't acknowledge he is a mass "murderer" but I always notice it when I play such games. This movie actually draws upon some elements from this most recent game (deleted saying "final" as nothing is ever final in the video game world) in that the story is related to Drake's brother and does some flash backs to their childhood together. Also, these games are some of the most cinematic games out there, and were just begging for a franchise, for years !!

Speaking of that, and I will get this out of the way, so I can focus on "the positive". Nathan Drake, in the games, starts out at the age of 33. Tom Holland is 26, but he still looks early twenties, thus teenage Spider-Man is easily accepted. He's a minute lad. Back when production for this movie started, it only mentioned that Mark Wahlberg was attached, and the inevitable uproar began. While he fit the look of Nathan Drake (not as well as Nathan Fillion but that boat has flown), he was definitely just too old. When Tom Holland was announced, most, including myself, assumed they were going to build the movie off the flashbacks, from when Nathan meets Sully, the character Wahlberg ended up being cast into. We ended up with a mish mash of all that. So, what we end up with are two characters with actors cast into roles that just don't match up in our mind's eye. Usually, I don't give a rat's ass about such, because if an actor can embody a role, it doesn't fully matter what they look like. BUT we both know that Mark Wahlberg only ever plays one character -- Mark Wahlberg, and that just ain't Sully. And you know, that a studio bank on Holland is going to expect one thing from Holland -- bright eyed and bushy tailed, like his through much of the MCU. Again, not Drake.

OK, that said, as an origin movie this is a pretty good setup. The game series didn't begin with an origin story, as you were just tossed directly into the fray from the first scene. But this movie draws upon all the necessary elements to introduce the character of Nathan Drake, his challenging past and how he gets into .... let's call it what it is -- treasure hunting. Notice, I didn't call it tomb raiding. They don't get into exactly why Drake is so knowledgeable on history, just more a preamble where Nathan and his brother talk about their deceased mother, her diaries and their descendance from Sir Francis Drake. They will tighten those ties up in a later movie when they actually go hunting for the lost city of El Dorado, via Francis Drake's connection to it. Yeah, I am spoiling later movies. But we begin the movie with Sully coercing Nathan into helping him find the location of the lost Magellan expedition, and the billions in gold they were reputed to have hidden.

Hindering Drake and Sully from solving the puzzles, finding the maps and recovering the gold are an evil heir to the wealthy Moncado family (Antonio Banderas, Zorro) who is not too sexy in this role, his henchmen, including mercenary Jo Braddock (Tati Gabrielle, The 100) and fellow treasure hunter Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali, Grey's Anatomy). And about a hundred black suited henchmen, including That Guy with the Beard, for Nate to get rid of. 

But this is a newer, softer Nate who doesn't grab the nearest sub-machine gun and down the mooks in a spray of bullet. In fact, he apologizes to the goon who IS trying to kill him, after he kicks him off the crate dangling mid-air out the back of a large cargo plane. That plane scene! The game loved its action oriented platforming (jumping from one precarious platform to the next) in the most gut-wrenching way. So we are not surprised when the back of the plane opens up, and all the crates tethered to each other go dangling out the back, held aloft by a lone parachute. Its not realistic in the least, but its a lot of fun. 

Eventually they do find the treasure, of course. And eventually they lose the treasure. Because, that ALWAYS happens in these movies. It erks the friggin' heck out of me (softer Nate swearing) but every time a treasure hunter finds giant pots of actual gold, you know that they are going to lose it. The bad guys hoist the hundreds of years old ships on some strong netting and some magic, as what else would allow an ancient wooden relic to hold together as it swings through the air hundreds of feet up? Alas, excitement! Shooting! Sword fights! Crash, bam boom. Glug glug glug, bye bye gold. I mean, they even use the backpack of gold to knock a bad guy down. Poor Sully, all that billions into the drink, to be claimed by the Philippine Govt.

But the movie is a lot of fun. Not as fun as the Pirates movies which this harkens back to, but there is a good amount of non-period swashbuckling, quips and bad guys getting their come-uppance.  And yet, as I squeeze in a bit complainy because that is me, I was not all that enamoured with it. Nate was just a bit too much Peter Parker and, as usual, Wahlberg is just himself. And all the mysticism of the games is dispensed with for a tired, familiar puzzle solving, treasure heist with some, admittedly, beautiful backdrops.

The Pentaverate

 2022, d. Tim Kirkby (Look Around You) - Netflix
created by Mike Meyers

Even by the third Austin Powers movie, Mike Meyers' sense of comedy had waned, or, if not waned, not kept up. His last invested work of comedy was the ill-advised and much derided pseudo-brownface comedy The Love Guru, and excepting a few small parts, the odd Shrek cash-in and a weird spate of recent Dr. Evil talk show appearances, Meyers' public output has been next to nil.

So The Pentaverate is a big deal, but if we were already a bit tired of his Klumps-ian penchant for playing multiple roles in the same production, what to think of a vehicle where he plays, based on the title and initial peeks, at least 5 key roles (in reality it's at least 7)?

I went into The Pentaverate very, very, very, very...very (that's 5) hesitant, bracing myself for the worst. The worst, typically, being an ageing comedic performer having lost touch with both what's funny in general, and what made them funny in the first place. (I've just reminded myself that a new Kids in the Hall sketch series is set to break very soon, and I'm similarly very, very, very, very....very [5] nervous). Thankfully, this is not the worst worst-case scenario.

The setup is the Pentaverate is a secret organization that attempts to guide the world for good, and when it cannot, it at least attempts to rectify the bad. We're introduced to them via Keegan Michael Key playing a physicist working on cold fusion. He's kidnapped by the Pentaverate, indoctrinated into their history, and ask by the four (all Meyers as a Russian oligarch, an Australian Murdoch-ish news media baron, a British Attenburg-ian thespian, and a former rock music manager) to join as their fifth member (the previous fifth [Meyers] having been recently murdered, as the investigating Maester played by Jennifer Saunders later declares). Oh also his death has been faked and if he turns them down he has to die.

Meanwhile, in low-fi Canada, local Toronto network reporter Ken Scarborough (Meyers, playing just a sooper nice guy, eh?) is fired from his longtime gig for being, basically, too nice and too boring. He has one last shot at making a compelling story, so he hits CanConCon (Canadian Conspracy Convention) and gets embroiled in the mystery of The Pentaverate, guided by a fanatical conspiracy nut from Long Island (Meyers again) whose beliefs about the Pentaverate cannot be disproven, even with evidence, which Scarborough gathers as he infiltrates the security force of the organization.

I was immediately taken with this show's style, it's weird medieval elements denoting the organization's age, the sprawling New York skyscraper whose interiors are both brutalist and retro futuristic, taking inspiration from 70's scifi things like Logan's Run and the Black Hole. It's not a cheap looking show, and in certain respects it could very well have been a mid-budget motion picture reedited and carved into 6 unevenly-sized episodes (with title sequence intros from Jeremy Irons breaking kayfabe frequently).

The music struck me instantly, and the first title sequence I recognized Orbital's classic electronica track "The Box" which seemed perfect. The duo did the soundtrack for the whole series, and it's rather incredible. Meyers, for his part, is excellent at inhabiting character and playing off himself. Perhaps he's such a perfectionist that this is really the only way he can ensure he gets things just perfect to his sensibilities. As he shows up in different prosthetics again, and again and again, I had to ask if it was the right move...wouldn't it be better if someone else played a few of those roles. By the end, I don't think so. He relishes each of these intense make-up jobs equally, and I don't know that another performer would treat any of these roles with the same care and zeal. I really respect his performances here. They're pretty great.

I didn't talk about Debi Mazar in this
post, but she's kind of incredible

Which all makes it very hard to say this isn't terribly funny. It's got some good bits, a few great bits, a few decent bits that should have been better or maybe were better until they got overplayed. An over-reliance on poop and dick jokes, and cheeky humour of the old Austin Powers sort, plus Meyer's penchant for fourth wall busting which is a 50/50 gamble whether the joke is worth breaking the reality of the film. What Powers had, at least, was a very specific type of film to parody. Here his influences are varied and not cohesive (outside of a lot of 70's genre media like The Six Million Dollar Man and The Prisoner), so he's reliant upon his own setup to build jokes off of. It isn't a terrible setup but it's also not fully congealed... there's more than a few plotholes and question marks around the Pentaverate's operation.

I admire that Meyers went into this with a message, a critical eye looking at conspiracy theorists and the question of who benefits from propagating them. There are more than a few exchanges that aren't denigrating the followers so much as asking them to quit avoiding the truth, to stop living in the fog of deception. He also has a wistful wish to return to trustworthy news, and even a plea for kindness and civility, and an end note that diversity matters (hopefully that was practiced behind the scenes). I really appreciated that the messaging doesn't get lost amidst all this silliness, nor really swing like a bludgeon. There's not really any punching down here, there is a lot of punching up... but you know what could have used a bit more punch up....?

I like this, not love, but like. I'm always a sucker for Canadiana and Meyers seems especially wistful about it lately. If there's any overt agenda here it's convincing the audience that Canadians are pretty great, (even if we talk a little funny) and maybe if we had a little more Canadianness in the world it would be a bit better.

Double Dose: Cheers To The Long, Good Movies

(Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...or genre or theme...pretty simple.  Today:  two very different crime movies with the words "Long" and "Good" in the the title, but not "The Long Good Friday")

The Long Goodbye : 1975, d. Robert Altman - Criterion Channel
The Long Kiss Goodnight: 1996, d. Renny Harlan - netflix

I'm an Altman novice, so I don't know if the ambling, naturalistic, many-people-talking-at-once dialogue is a signature of his or not, but I liked it...to a point. Within this shaggy detective genre, one generally gets the sense of purpose to the shaggy detective's actions, but here it's somewhat obfuscated by Altman's style. It has all the beats of the Raymond Chandler story it's based off of but it executes them in such a nonchalant way that it becomes difficult to know what's important and what's just ambiance, at least upon first watch. 

Gould as Chandler's legendary private dick, Philip Marlowe, is a conundrum. On the one hand he's seemingly given up on life, talking big to cops and mob bosses, completely unconcerned for his own safety (I get where Natasha Lyonne Russian Doll character Nadia is taking inspiration from). He has zero romantic or sexual drive (which is actually kind of an admirable choice for the character given the gaggle of often nude hippie women hanging out on the patio next door) and he doesn't seem terribly affected by all the abuse of women he sees (and there's a discomforting amount of abuse towards women here). His asexuality here finds the femme fatale, played by Nina van Pallandt, not only lacking any of the expected menace, but also lacking the allure. Such is Altman's take.

I need to source the veracity
of whether this Jack Davis
poster is real or really just a 
Mad Magazine excerpt

Altman seemed very disinterested in making a typical noir, or even neo-noir. There are few shadows here. While the plot is everything (it's certainly not a character study) it also seems like it's nothing. Gould is so laconic in the role he seems passive in his investigation even when he's being proactive. This take on a Chandler story was obviously inspiration for The Big Lebowski, where the Coens saw opportunity to push the shagginess further, and heighten the ambling nature of its protagonist.

John Williams soundtrack here might as well not exist, so little impression does it make. There's an original song that gets both played and sung frequently throughout the film, which I found distracting. It's not a particularly catchy tune and Altman really tries to force feed it as part of this world. Also Altman's general use of music is quite unsophisticated, especially in the opening sequences which intercut between multiple scenes and different songs which should be diagetic but aren't.

Visually the film is exceptionally well composed, with Altman constantly interested in at least two beats of action happening at once. His use of glass -- as barrier or reflection -- is part of the theme about transparancy... you can only see through people so much before your focus shifts to what being reflected back at you. There's definitely craftsmanship at play here, I'm just not certain all of it is successful.

There's no transition to really hang these two films, together.  It's just a cheeky pairing so I'm just going to start writing about The Long Kiss Goodnight, which I remember liking quite a bit... 25 years ago when I saw it in theatres. I think I watched it once following that, either having dubbed a copy from a laserdisc rental to vhs, or having just bought outright a vhs copy. DVDs were only 2 years away which would make my cassette collection obsolete immediately.

After a rocky start with a shaky voiceover, Geena Davis is pretty great as the badass with amnesia who forgot she was a badass until she's hit on the head again and things start coming back, you know Fred Flintstone-style.

Sam Jackson is even better, doing his Sam Jackson thing of being the best motherfucking scene partner on the goddamn Earth.

Shane Black's script is punchy and charming as Shane Black scripts tend to be, though some gay panic and overuse of the word "bitch" mar things a little. And of course it's Christmastime. And Black sets up "9-11 was an inside job" 5 years in advance.

Renny Harlan's direction is fine, not flashy or daring, but mostly gets the job done. I mean, the three big moments - the window jump, the water turbine torture sequence and the grand finale with the Christmas lights are all memorably badass. Plus they blew up the Peace Bridge, which is some kind of statement.  Exactly what, I haven't parsed yet.

Love mid-90's Toronto and Hamilton subbing in for Jersey, and seeing Honest Ed's (RIP) as a backdrop for Atlantic City was a good laugh.

This was a good time.

Guns: Ambulance & Line of Duty

2022, Michael Bay (The Island) -- download

2019, Steven C Miller (Marauders) -- Netflix  

I have a tag, guns, which I rarely use. Mainly because most movies have guns, so it needs for the movie to ... use them liberally? Maybe. I just have to feel it. Maybe I need a Bechdel Test for guns, where if you remove the primarily gun play scenes, would you still have a movie? For most, the answer is maybe, but they would be MUCH shorter.

In watching these kinds of movies, I continually ask myself why. Why am I watching this movie, especially with  the latest from Michael Bay, considering I have a pretty much hate-hate-love relationship with all of his movies. He's a terrible director, and this is no exception more so it doubles-down on why I dislike him, but I actually looked forward to it. So, why subject myself to them? Why am I passing over good movies for either bad-enjoyable or even bad-OK ? At least bad-bad is usually only watched ironically. What has changed in my mind that craves distraction more than absorption and satisfaction? I don't know if you have any answers, because I sure don't.

So yeah, Ambulance by Michael Bay. I actually forgot it was a Bay(splosion) flick until I had it downloaded into Plex, just remembering it was a heist movie where the bank robbers end up using an ambulance to escape. TBH, I assumed I was going to watch one of those movies with a complex heist plan, followed by a harrowed escape in their faked-up ambulance. Adding in Jake Gyllenhaal, and it should have raised up a notch. OK it is all that, kind of, but mostly its a Bay(splosion) shoot-em up full of about a million quick cuts, slow-mo focuses on car chases, yelling, YELLING and guns. Lots of guns.

Jake (Enemy) is Danny, career criminal. His (adopted) brother Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, The Matrix: Resurrections) left the family business for a career in the military, and his wife needs critical surgery, that his military plan won't cover. So he returns to Danny for help, and Danny immediately drags him into an "easy win" but we have all seen enough of these movies to know that they are never easy. It goes wrong, because a cop goes into the bank to clumsily ask a teller out, and becomes a hostage. Danny and his team shoot their way out, all Heat style and Danny & Will and the cop, now shot in the belly, end up in an ambulance crewed by Cam (Eiza González, Godzilla vs Kong), a tenacious ambulance tech with a dark history.

The rest of the movie, most of the movie, is them driving around wrecking the countryside (LA), plowing through fruit stands to the right, and café tables to the left, being chased by police cars prone to crashing on their way to ... I don't think even they know, they are just escaping. And behind all of this, we have Danny and Will yelling at each other, occasionally pointing a gun at cam. Will is a Good Guy, and Danny is a Bad Guy, but they are brothers and dedicated to each other, and Will doesn't really have any illusions about what his fate is, but his wife needs the money, and Danny ... well, Danny just lost his entire crew, so Danny is just thinking about the next ten minutes. And Cam has never let a patient die, ever, so she is in it to save the cop bleeding out on the gurney.

So much is ridiculous, in a fashion only Bay(splosions) can do. Cam does surgery on the cop's belly wound via laptop and mobile phone, via two doctors offering her direction from the golf course. All while being chased by cops, all while swerving back and forth constantly. And the laptop battery goes dead. Duh duh duh duhhhhhh.

Eventually, with all hope running out, they end up at a hospital, to save the cop's 9th life with dire choices having to be made. I won't spoil it for you. 

*snicker*

Meanwhile, if it can be done, Line of Duty is actually dumber. But not in a bombastic or exciting stupid way that all Bay(splosions) flicks are, but just in a did-you-just-write-that (?!?) kind of amateurish way. The basic premise is that a knocked-back-down-to-a-street-beat (which apparently confines him to sitting on the sidewalk outside a convenience store talking sports with a kid) cop (Aaron Eckhart, I, Frankenstein) ends up going the extra mile to save a kidnap victim while dealing with an "internet journalist" (basically a delusional streamer; Courtney Eaton, Mad Max: Fury Road) who follows/helps him along the way.

With just a bit more money and talent, this could have been up there with Bay(splosion) level stupidity, but instead it was just down on the ground dumb. OK, forgive me, but I am being far more snarky than I was while watching the movie, which does have a fairly good amount of tension and decent chemistry between the two leads. But the dumb, or at the very least questionable plot choices, kept leaping out. 

For one, I wasn't quite sure about these streamer journalists, who claim to want to tell the Real Truth but keep on using the usual skeezy reporter tactics, which may say the writer had no respect for them as characters, but we are definitely supposed to be rooting for them. One line about "don't get the jab" made me wonder if someone wrote this hoping to bank on the anti-everything, don't trust The Man, Internet Wackjob crowd, but I am pretty sure the same crowd would hate these two girls. 

And while comedic when Penny, the cop, commandeers a vehicle the first time, after he has done it the third time, it just felt... weird, almost like it was an excuse to damage different vehicles. When I started noting them using the same intersections for different scenes, just shot at different angles, with different set dressing, well, I knew what calibre of creator I was dealing with.

And don't get me on the CGI effects. At some point, doing terrible CGI is no longer about budget, but about pure laziness. Just actually burn down a building FFS -- that fake fire and CGI embers were just mind boggling bad.

And don't get me started on the title card. What is up with that font and colour choice???

And yet I enjoyed the movie for the most part. No, not genre movie enjoyment, where I forgive all the terribleness because I enjoy the presentation of the specfic genre, but more the idea of No Name brand potato chips -- not great but still filling a belly. I enjoy tense thrillers and Eckhart gives enough to make his character palatable. He plays the tortured cop well.

The agenda of the movie is clear enough -- #NotAllCops -- in that despite the horrible circumstances that put Penny in this situation (he shot a kid), he is not one of those cops from all the TV news reports. He is still a Good Man wanting to serve his community. And the Internet Journalists are supposed to represent the most cynical of us seeing him for what he is, and supporting him.

P.S. Why the guns tag ?  Despite that being the lede for this writeup, I didn't mention the plot point at all. You see, the (second) Bad Guy (Ben McKenzie, Gotham) who has a rather dispensable reason, is All About the Guns, doing the (again) Heat inspired wading into gun fire scene shooting down cops and trying to kill Penny for shooting his brother (not the kid, just an earlier throwaway scene that sets Penny on this Rescue the Girl road), while Penny and Ava hide behind cars with other innocent people inside. So yeah, shooting shooting shooting. Guns.

I guess it says something about the emotional state the last few years have put us in. I need to see more heroes, I need to see more people setting aside their political agendas and believe in Good People again. Penny is going to save the girl, not because she's the daughter of his Police Chief, but and not just because he needs to save a kid, instead of shooting one, but because someone just needs to HELP, despite the consequences. And Will, the bank robber, goes against his own brother, sacrifices his own freedom, and likely his life, to get the money his wife needs, while also saving the life of the cop in the back of the ambulance AND the tortured med tech. This is why I watch these movies with all their flag waving and hoo-raying; I need my heroes.

Krull

 1984, d. Peter Yates - DVD

This classic poster sells the
movie as a sci-fi- fanatasy-monster 
movie epic. Note how much emphasis
there is on the Glaive.

I know I watched Krull at least once as an 80's kid, but I really didn't like it. My reason then was simply that they sold the movie on the coolness of the Glaive - a large, 5-armed, throwing star- but the hero doesn't use it until the last 10 minutes of the film. Rewatching it decades later (pretty sure I made a failed attempt at a rewatch in the early 2000s) and I still don't like it. My initial reasoning still stands, but with so much more added to it. It's tediously slow and nonsensical, and clearly not a labor of love for anyone. This is a full-on studio-controlled picture, trying to rip off Star Wars and Superman and Excalibur and cribbing from Tolkien and probably countless other fantasy novels. There's not an original element to be found. So by the numbers is its adventure story that, in my head, I was quoting Monty Python and the Holy Grail at least once a minute. "It's only a model."  "Let's not go there, it's a silly place." "You must answer me these questions three." and on and on.

The films score from James Horner seems to be an exercise in finding his best John Williams impression, starting with matching the very Superman-esque credit sequence with a similar triumphant Williams-ish composition. Many of the tracks feel like Star Wars-lite and overall its trying, and failing, to help director Yates capture a swashbuckling feel out of a knights-versus-aliens conceit.

There was a lot of money put behind this (30-40 million in 1980's dollars apparently) and it shows...there are a LOT of costumes and big, impressive set designs, none of which look cheap. But its the wrong approach to linger on any of it too lovingly. Star Wars was too busy plot-wise to gaze wistfully. The Death Star blowing up was seconds, the evil mountainous lair here is minutes long in its tedious destruction.

The opening sequence of a giant rocky structure passing along a star field, only to make apparent that it is a spaceship, is actually extremely well done. It's approach on a lush-looking planet to it's landing as a new mountain range is as inspired as this film gets. Moments later, we meet cheezy medieval types but with fantasy mumbo-jumbo talk, followed by some boring nonstarter of a romance, and then the aliens invade...on horseback. It's a very abrupt revelation, where this went awry. The idea of an alien race attempting to conquer a weaker, swords-and-armor type world is a pretty great concept, but this film can't even keep the conceit clear for ten minutes. Again, it's quite clear nobody really cared.

This poster sells it as a sci-fi
-horror film. Note the prominence 
of the Glaive in the title

The performances are not great.  The lead character, Colwyn, played by the very pretty Ken Marshall, tries real hard to adopt an Errol Flynn vibe, but the tone doesn't fit.  The whole idea to go "swashbuckling" seems to have been Yates' idea, and everyone just went along with it.  Lysette Anthony is the Princess Peach of the situation, (again, either it's such a bog standard trope or that's where Super Mario Brothers got it from) and she's got this awful dubbed over voice because apparently the execs thought she sounded too young.  Ace character actor Freddie Jones is the comic relief in the Orko-like inept and cowardly spellweaver.  Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane (his voice also dubbed) both have small parts as land pirates recruited by Colwyn.  I think people in this are trying, but not necessarily caring that much. 

The He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon, a year later, would find a more appealing balance of fantasy and sci-fi, and I have to wonder if this movie had even a slight bit of influence on the show or if the parallels I see are really just standard genre tropes.

As much as I don't like this movie - and I really don't like it - I'm quite fascinated by its existence.  It's hard to ignore a massive budget genre movie from this era because they're so rare, and when they fail one must really ask why.  I have laid out my assumptions, but I just want to keep digging.  This DVD my friend found in a box on someone's curbside does have a commentary track, and I'm quite certain some lazy Sunday afternoon soon, I'm getting into it.

Top of the Heap

 1972, d. Christopher St. John - Criterion Channel

Part of Criterion's Beyond Blacksploitation programming.

A Youtube Black culture critic/essayist I follow, F.D. Signifier, said recently "There's no such thing as a 'conversation' about the Black experience between a Black person and a non-Black person...what that is is a lecture. What that is is me telling you about the Black experience...." which isn't to say that there can't or shouldn't be engagement, asking questions, receiving answers, but that's not a coversation, or a back-and-forth about the Black experience. He noted that just as he can't speak on certain experiences of white or queer or trans people, a non-Black person cannot speak to the Black experience.

What this all is to say is that Top of the Heap is most definitely a film about a Black experience (saying 'the Black experience' assumes it's a singular experience which doesn't seem right) and while I picked up on much of what the character George (writer/director Christopher St. John) is going through emotionally and culturally, I'm certain I'm missing much of the subtext (I'm still parsing out what the astronaut fantasy sequences are exactly conveying).

George is a police officer, but he's struggling with his position. His common refrain is "I can do whatever the hell I want" but it's a defense mechanism, both daring someone to tell him otherwise and also to convince himself that he's not as stuck or trapped as he feels.

George's mother has just passed away, and George can't face it. He's also just been passed over for a promotion to captain, which has almost completely disengaged him from his job, but he still can't help but be so straight-laced. He and his partner bust a couple of low level drug dealers who are just having a roast chicken dinner with some cocaine and counting their money. They infer a bribe to let them go invoking brotherhood but George goes into a deep sweat internally deliberating the choice between an inherently racist system and the job he's sworn to do to uphold it. The men completely disregard any authority he thinks he has and things come to a head until his partner turns up.

He's cheating on his wife with a young, broke lounge singer, and it's clear his wife is still looking for some semblance of love or affection from him, but finding little. His daughter, now thirteen, was busted making out with a boy by her mom, and George doesn't see the big deal (until he comes across an arrested 13-year-old prostitute which causes him to reconsider his almost feminist stance on female sexuality and discovery, and is a real unfortunate backtrack the film makes), and then he finds her high on pills. Between his job and his philandering he doesn't have time for his daughter (this is the only scene we see her in) but his guilt sends him out to perform vigilante justice beating the ever living shit out a drug dealer (not even necessarily the one who sold his daughter the pills).

There are multiple instances where George is disrespected by white people (including a tense encounter with another police officer) until they learn he's a cop and then he receives instant respect. Conversely, Black people treat him like a brother until they find out he's a cop, and then he's an other... working for The Man.

The film here is largely the stress George faces in his duality, hating his job despite being praised for how good he is at it, and that he doesn't seem to fit in with his community. In his waking dreams, he's an astronaut, a captain (the rank that passed him by), untethered to his daily existence, and yet, still unable to escape the Earth, his mission shot for the cameras in a studio warehouse. In the end, he's warned both in his real life and in his waking dream to get out, but where he was successful in his dream, he fails in life. The weight of his badge and gun, family, his choices, gravity all holding him down.

The film opens with George wading into a small scale riot between protesters and construction workers, he gets the cool close-up-from-below and a spunky "bullshit" line reading with a horn sting behind him as introduction. This is a fake-out of badassery that betrays the pensive, thoughtful film that's to follow, and is quickly subverted as he is tossed into the mud and a piss-filled balloon explodes on his face.

The music of the film is not great, and the dubbing is out of sync most of the time (and maybe even trying to correct the dialogue in post), so there are a lot of weaknesses in the production, but the story breaks through boldly and makes for compelling viewing. The narrative structure, as a tour of George's psyche, is practically flawless.

As engaged as I was, I still couldn't help but feel there's a part of this that I'm missing, aspects of the narrative that pass me by. But, if that's the case, it's because they're not meant for me to understand or relate to, and that's more than ok. This isn't a conversation for me to take part in, and it's not even a lesson. This movie isn't trying to approach or explain itself to a white audience. It shouldn't have to, and it doesn't care to. And it wouldn't work nearly as well if it did.

3 Short Paragraphs: #Alive

2020, Cho Il-hyung (Jin) -- download

This is the Korean version of the 2020 American movie Alone (or Pandemic) written by Matt Naylor, who also worked with Cho on the script for this movie. They both explore the idea of being trapped inside during a zombie apocalypse, losing loved ones lost outside, losing hope on ever surviving, but then regaining it once a connection is made with another apartment dweller.

Oh Joon-woo is our hero this time, a slacker kid in his parent's apartment playing video games online, oblivious to what is happening until gamer friends start commenting on it. Of course, he's playing a zombie video game. Trapped inside, unable to get hold of his family, and running out of food and water (and alcohol), he deliriously decides to hang himself but is interrupted by a laser pointer. There is a cute girl living across the way, and together they decide to survive until help comes.

Considering its following the script of the American movie, I did like how the differences between western / American culture came into play. Doors in the US open into an apartment, so shoving a fridge against them can be a great door stop, but in South Korea they open into the hallway, said hallway being more a balcony along the edge of the building. That fridge was less a deterrent. The other main difference, that Koran apartments (at least this example) have a window from the kitchen looking onto the balcony, was less logical, as a primary script element is that Joon-woo covers up the windows to hide the fact he is inside, from the zombies attracted to fresh prey. But he never hides from that window; sure it is barred but its still a clear view into the apartment. So, seeing the same movie, for the most part unchanged was interesting, but seeing the cultural differences was the primary reason for viewing. Beyond that, it was a entirely acceptable zombie movie, nothing spectacular nor creative, which puts it leaps and bounds above most.

I Saw This!! realiTyVgames

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent(me) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  Florida governor bad.

One thing we haven't written much about on this blog is realityTV, specifically competition shows.  I know I'm not a huge fan, and I suspect Toasty is similarly averse to the genre.  I think in recent years I've started watching more competition shows than ever, by which I mean, a couple, versus none.  I recall dabbling in early seasons of Survivor and Trading Spaces and American Idol and Project:Runway but at a certain point I realized that these competition shows were just empty calories, and not even all that delicious calories...like eating veggie straws when you could just have had potato chips, or caramel corn, or a fruit salad. I'm feeling peckish and losing the thread here.  In recent years, we've watched all of Nailed It! on Netflix, easily the most entertaining baking competition show out there, because the whole point is bad bakers trying their best, and having fun while doing it.  We've also watched Lego Masters which, given that we're obscenely ridiculous toy people in this household (I'm watching a youtube video about action figure news as I write this), is not that suprising, but I was surprised to find how engaged I was with the show, which is not very much about the personality politics and all about building cool Lego diaramas.

So, we partook in a few other reality competitions in the past couple months... more in such a short time than ever...let's just talk about it....

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LOL Canada - AmazonPrime

I started in on Last One Laughing Canada out of sheer curiosity.  Given that I'm a comedy lover, I wanted to know who from the Canadian comedy scene would wind up on this reality competition show (and would it be funny, or just sad?).  Well, a completely godawful introduction let me know, and, I was quite surprised that I knew everyone involved, save one ( Brandon Ash-Mohammed) and liked pretty much everyone. The crux of the show is putting 10 comedians in a room for 6 hours (edited down to about 3 hours over six episodes) and telling them they can't laugh, or even smile.  The last one left wins a pile of money for charity.  There are rules, but the basics basically is no laughing, no smiling, one warning, then you're out.

The "LOL" formulae was developed from a Japanese game show but now seems to be an Amazon brand which has, currently, 9 different international versions on the streamer, including Australia, German, France, Spain, and India, with a Quebec version forthcoming (surprised there's no US or UK version yet).

With host Jay Baruchel the competing comedians were Drew Barrymore's ex-husband Tom Green, Kim's Convenience co-star Andrew Phung, Whose Line is it Anyways legend Colin Mochrie, Kids in the Hall's Dave Foley, comedian (and ex-pat living in the UK) Mae Martin, "America's Sweetheart" Caroline Rhea, one of my favourite live stand-ups Debra DiGiovanni, The League's Jon Lajoie (whom our dog Taco was named after) and Letterkenny's K. Trevor Wilson joining Ash-Mohammad.

The thing about comedians is a lot of them don't laugh at comedy, they analyze it, they deconstruct it as they see it, like a magician trying understand how another magician's trick works.  A lot of them have a severe poker face.  But the flip side is there's some of those comedians that just love to laugh, so those ones are out almost immediately.

What I wasn't expecting was Tom Green. It's been so long since I have engaged in Green's absurdist shenanigans that I forgot how good he was at that sort of thing.  He got a lot of miles out "delicious cheese sandwiches" (maybe too much mileage). And here he's kind of in his element, just able to be his weird self. Lajoie was easily my favourite competitor, as he had tactics for not laughing, which were tremendously funny on their own.  Mmm. Mmmhmm.  Ash-Mohammad's seductive sunscreen application was something absolutely special to behold, and Mochrie is such a seasoned improv pro that almost everything he does is so good.  Foley seemed to be completely disinterested in the whole thing, even after he was ejected, while Rhea came prepared to laugh, which was kind of the antithesis of the show (rolling out in her teen daughter's wardrobe was a pretty good bit though).

I laughed a lot, and enjoyed spending time with pretty much everyone, and I found the format worked quite well as a competition, really drawing the viewer through from episode to episode, but the unstructured room with hack comedy props is little too malformed for high quality comedy.  The good thing is at 6 sub-1/2 hour episodes it didn't overstay its welcome.

LOL Australia - AmazonPrime 

As I started this post writing about the Canadian version, put the Australian version of Last One Lauging - hosted by Rebel Wilson - on in the background, kind of as an experiment to see if the show would still work even if I didn't know the personalities involved.  I only know a couple of the comedians, mainly host Wilson and absurdist Sam Simmons (who I wrote about here during 2013's JFL42 festival, the one year I deigned to write about stand-up comedy on the blog) but the format proved itself to be just as attractive and entertaining, even if the personalities involved were a bit more alien. 

It's still a fairly funny show, but there's definitely some cultural differences that bubbled up to the fore.  For starters, the Aussies are much more brutal and cutting, like they were treating the room as a place to roast each other, really dig into their careers and, in some ways, let their petty jealousies bubble up to the surface in unflattering ways, that, I guess were meant to be comedy (the thing about roasting is it's only funny if everyone's laughing together, otherwise it just feels mean, and the whole point here is to not laugh, so nobody's laughing).  The Canadians all seemed genuinely respectful of one another, even if they didn't quite know each other.  The elder statesmen, the ones who had gone off to temporarily bigger careers in the States, they were still generally kind to the younger set.  Australia is roughly the same population density as Canada, but where they're situated in the world they're the big English-speaking market (with New Zealand being their Canada), so there's no where to go as an elevation unless you're willing to make the huge leap to the States or UK.  As such it's a tinier, more insular market, everyone knows each other on this show, but there's much more of a competitive spirit between them all.  And throw in $100,000 prize (not for charity, but for the winner) it's certainly a bit more cutthroat.

Another standout in comparison was the Australians' reliance upon dick and bum jokes.  So many bum jokes. I think half the gags here were about bums.  There's got to be some sort of cultural obsession with the ol' hiney Down Under (well, I guess "down under" is basically a butt euphamism as is, so perhaps it makes some sense).  There was quite a bit more lewdness in the Aussie LOL, and maybe an overreliance on cheap theatrics.

It was funny to see that there's a few archetypes that bubble up.  There's the seasoned improv vet, (Mochrie in Canada, Frank Woodley in Australia), the almost-as-seasoned absurdist (Green vs Simmons), the one who distances themselves from it all (Foley vs the almost entirely unengaged Ed Kavalee, making Foley look positively enthusiastic by comparison), the young buck going deep against the vets (Ash-Mohammad vs Nazeem Hussain) and the anti-laugh tactician (LaJoie vs  Dilruk Jayasinha).

Even comparing the hosts, Wilson was much more passive than Baruchel, who seemed to want to insert himself into the happenings as much as possible. The Canadian version also had some games and special guests inserted into the proceedings which made for a bit more entertainment and sense of structure, where there was little else but chaos in Australia.  

But then Sam Simmons was on the attack from moment one in the show, and didn't let up for anything.  My recollection of him as a live performer was that he would do anything, shamelessly, and his sense of comedy crossed the entire spectrum, but here he was mostly focussed on shock-and-awe.  By the end of the show the room looked like a bodega had exploded, like a rock star's hotel room after a coke-fuelled bender, and most of that chaos could be attributed to Simmons.  His go-for-broke, no shame comedy started minutes into the show as he stepped out from behind the change room curtain, music blaring, to perform a wild dance wearing a leather jacked with over a dozen stretchy rubber dick-and-balls stitched on it, which he then proceeded to tug and stretch and fillate in a manic fit along with the hyper music.  And that's where he started his onslaught.

Just past the halfway point, there fell a spastic sense of desperation among the remaining competitors which only seemed to heighten as more were eliminated.  It was less funny and more interesting from a sociological standpoint, as these people who feed off laughs started going absolutely mental, seemingly for hours going "is this funny?" over and over.  That sort of desperation was only flirted with in the Canadian one, but the same sense of "this is a form of torture" seemed to overcome them as well.

I didn't come out of it with a healthier appreciation for the Aussie comedy scene...there was a lot of weaksauce efforts in that room of unfamiliar personalities, but the few standouts really stood out.  Woodley, Simmons, Becky Lucas, and Dilruk Jayasinha I think were tops for me. 

I don't think I'll give any of the other foreign language versions a try.  Comedy is so much in the delivery and the delivery is shot when you're trying to do it through subtitles.

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Best In Miniature - CBC Gem

Another Canadian competition show, though a lot less calmer and gentler than LOL Canada, and much more in the vein of Lego Masters (and I'm sure all those damn baking shows that other people seem to love), where the production cares much less about personalities and backstories, and instead is much more focused on skills.  In this case it's people who create miniatures, dollhouses and accessories.

There is an amazing amount of skill, experience and creativity involved in miniaturing, and the competitors, ranging from only a couple years to decades of experience, each show their own personality in their art.  The competitors hail from the US, Canada, and the U.K., and they seemed to have some form of on-line presence and be largely familiar with one another through social media, some having even bought pieces off the others.

The first episode's challenge is building a dollhouse and it immediately shows the strengths and styles of each of the artists, but also very, very quickly exposes their weaknesses.  Subsequent episodes feature a mini-challenge, where they have to create a small piece in less than an hour, which they are then judged on by the show's experts (one a miniatures expert, the other a design expert), and then they have a specific challenge working in one of their rooms for up to 10 hours.  Each room has to meet some specific design challenges that are foisted upon them, as well as feel a part of the overall aesthetic of the house.

I was impressed, constantly, every episode by everyone, some more than others, but just agog with how cool and amazing and talented these people are at making such a broad spectrum of items.  While some had specialties, most were still able to adapt and create what was needed even if they weren't intimately familiar with the how to.  Plus as the competitors were winnowed down, the more fine and precise the work got, the more impressive it all was.

I enjoyed this show tremendously, very little of which had to do with personalities, except in how they came out in their art.  It was such a low-stakes, low-drama, competition that it was a soothing, relaxing and utterly transfixing watch.  I would like more, but I may also just watch again.

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Is it Cake? - Netflix

Shows based of memes are maybe not the best idea, and Is It Cake? is a fudging mess of a game show.  The format of the show is so bizarre and kind of so antithetical to the way almost any other competition show is done that I have to wonder if it's just ahead of its time, or if it's really just a train wreck.

Hosted by Saturday Night Live's Mikey Day, the premise of the show is three bakers compete in creating a cake that looks like something else, then each cake is put up on a podium against 5 other non-cakes of the same item, and a panel of three "celebrity" (some are minorly famous, some are like specific famous, and some are just internet famous) guests have to come to consensus in 20 seconds on which one is cake.  

But that's just the high level structure...it gets really, really weird the more you dig into it.

The show starts with 9 competitors.  After a round of "Is it cake?", where a variety of random items on podiums - one of them cake - is displayed, and eveyone gets a chance to choose.  If there's a tie, the fastest answer wins.  Kind of a weird system there.  But then, the winner gets to choose two others from the stable.  They each then choose one of the non-cake items for them to replicate in cake form.  The other 6 competitors just go to a bench on the side and...sit there, for 8 hours, while the three competitors bake and make their fake cake.  So bizarre.

AFTER the judging, if the judges were fooled by more than one cake, the judges then have to pick the winner based on how real the cake looks up close and how good the cake tastes.  Then the winner gets a chance to win some prize money by playing "Cake or Cash" where two items looking almost exactly the same are presented, only one is cake, the other is cash.  If they guess which is cake, they win cash.

The following episode, the winner of the previous episode picks two more contestants (from the pool who haven't already been chosen), they play a round of "Is it cake?" with the random items, pick their item to cake fake replicate and go through it all over again.  It's clunky as clunky can be as far as a competition show goes, and yet, it's kinda stupidly entertaining.  It's absurd they have people sitting around for 8 hours while people bake cakes, but that's what happens.  

The contestants, however, are all rather supportive of each other, and all very into discussing techniques, and approaches, and flavours and whatnot.  It's always nice these competition shows where the competitors really are just happy to trade knowledge and appreciate each others' skills.

Likewise, it's fun watching Day's hacking into things that are - and are not - cake.  And the brief moments of deciding whether something is or isn't cake is still a challenge even though you've just watched 20 minutes of the cake being made, the show edits it enough that when it comes time to guess it's still fun for the audience (but it comes at the expense of getting into finer detail on how the cake was made).

Every episode I couldn't believe I was still watching it, and yet, I wanted to watch more after each episode was over.  It's incredibly stupid (and a HUGE waste of food...where does all that cake Day mangles wind up?) and it's such a silly premise, but I enjoyed it despite myself.