Commeting on Comic Things 1: Ms. Marvel Season One

Disney+, 6 episodes, created by Bisha K. Ali

Ms Marvel (created by Bisha K. Ali) comes to TV carrying much on its back.  As the first mainstream Muslim superhero both to headline their own comic book and TV series, Kamala Khan faces both the scrutinization of her own cultures, whether it's American Muslims or people of Pakastani origin or descent, or the exceptionally vocal bottom-feeding nerd-base who feel that any form of representation in the superhero genre of comics or TV is somehow a direct attack upon them and their fragile male egos and lack of any cultural identity.  But let's not talk about them anymore.  They take up too much of the conversational landscape as is and we need to neuter their voice, not amplify it.

The series, much like the comic book, centers around Kamala Khan, a Muslim-American teen who is a complete and utter superhero fangirl, idolizing the Avengers, but more explicitly, Captain Marvel.  Her Pakistani immigrant parents don't really understand the fixation, and wish Kamala would put more of that devotion into her schoolwork (despite doing quite well in school, though, often daydreaming).   In the comics, Kamala's origins as a superhero were tied to the Inhumans (this was during a time where Marvel corporate were really upset with not having the rights to make X-Men movies so they basically scuttled mutants and tried to promote Inhumans instead...it really didn't work) but here her origins are tied in large part back to her family's roots in Pakistan, and the Clandestine, a group of djinn who have been trapped on Earth for nearly a century.

Kamala finds, in a box of her estranged grandmother's posessions, an incredibly fancy bengal which she takes to wearing everywhere.  It's never expressly stated but its clear that Kamala is a bit transfixed by the grandmother she never knew, and that she desires some form of connection to her.  It's a superhero story, so of course the bengal is the source of Kamala's soon-to-be-discovered powers, and it embroils her in a content-crossing mystery.

It's a pretty drastic deviation in origin, but given how poorly the Inhumans TV show was received, doing almost anything further with them (other than the cute cameo in Doctor StrangeMoM) was not in question.  As well, tying Kamala's origins to Pakistani history (the show discusses extensively the impact of the partition of India, something that I wasn't really aware of.  This, very much like the Watchmen TV series are using the genre as a forum for education on events that seem to have otherwise been buried in the public consciousness) seems to be of personal interest to showrunner Ali, which carries with it both enthusiasm and passion for bringing this history into the story being told, and it works, mostly.  There's a strange time-travel detour Kamala experiences at the end of episode 4, which sets up the story of episode 5 (tying together the origins of the bengal, Kamala's grandmother's connections to the Clandestine, and the effect of the partition on her family), but this Russian Doll-esque detour doesn't quite pay off.

The opening episode is its strongest, incorporating a lot of creative use of animation in its live action world which, unfortunately, does not persist throughout the rest of the series.  I got a sort of Into the Spider-verse vibe out of this inaugural hour, and the show could have used more of this genre-bending spunkiness throughout, as subsequent hours trend a little closer to the expected.

The series ties Kamala's origins and powers overtly (but not explicitly) to the Ten Rings (see Iron Man 3, Shang-Chi), to heretofore unmentioned mutants in the MCU, and to the cosmic elements of Captain Marvel.  How exactly all these are connected remain to be seen (certainly the forthcoming The Marvels feature will manage the latter), but it shows that Marvel is not at all slowing down in its world/universe building and laying down a connective framework.  

There have been complaints raised towards the show of some cultural inaccuracies or misgivings, and though I've read about them, I'm not really in a position to comment.   I think the show is in that tricky position of having to be the first to represent its cultures in this big a forum and it creates the impossible task of having to be all things for all people.  There's no way to satisfy everyone.   The only thing I personally have difficulty accepting in the series is how different Kamala's powers are from the comics.  In the comics, her abilities are a sort of malleability where she can change her face or "embiggen" her body (stretching her body to 20 feet tall or throwing an elongated giant fist).   In the show, here more cosmic-oriented powers come in the form of temporary hard-light projections (sort of a Green Lantern-like vibe).  It's a real "power-up" for Kamala, the possibilities seem much grander, and as such we kind of lose the street-level hero sensibility that made her so endearing in her book.

But the show wins thanks to the impeccable casting of Markham-based Iman Vellani.  I'm always going to root for the local kid making it big, but it helps when they actually are supremely charming and talented.  Watching Vellani conduct interviews being so well composed, and endearingly upbeat, she's the perfect choice to embody Kamala.  She's a real treasure, and it's her presentation of Kamala that is so innately consistent with the comics that makes this show feel like Ms. Marvel despite all the deviations.  Vellani is a comics fan herself, and a fan of Kamala, so when it came time to portray her, she knew this character inside and out.  I'm looking forward to much more from her, as Kamala Khan and beyond.

 

3 Short Paragraphs: Last Seen Alive

2022, Brian Goodman (What Doesn't Kill You) -- download

Going through another bout of "why am I doing this?" as I re-read a bunch of the drafts for recently watched movies and struggle to see myself actually saying anything. Not of value, as with only a few readers, the value is already negligible, but sometimes I feel like the only thing coming out of my head is "movie good" or "movie bad" and all the other words might as well be "lorem ipsum". But I will persevere through this mood, as I always do, hoping to not end up in another hiatus, and eventually write one post that satisfies my inner critic and maybe even spawn a reply or two.

I parallel this mood with this movie, an incredibly pedestrian thriller starring Gerard Butler (Gods of Egypt), Russel Hornsby (Lost in Space) and Jamie Alexander (Blind Spot). It makes me wonder if Goodman was sitting back watching the dailies for his movie and wondering why he is even making movies. I mean, he's been having a serviceable career playing "generic cop 32" or "generic bad guy 93" in a LOT of movies, and its admirable that he spins his experience into story telling. Buuuut... yeah, that's me letting judgement fly in the face of my barely ever serviceable writing. 

So, Butler and Alexander are a couple in trouble; he is driving her to her parents place for some Time Off, and while pulled over in a gas station, she goes missing. All the expected Blame the Husband focus happens, frustrating grumpy Gerard to no end, and he begins investigating himself. With no real mess or fuss, he is led to the backwoods encampment of meth dealers, where his wife got dragged into the criminal mixings of one of her childhood friends. Butler goes all vigilante on them. If Goodman does anything in this movie, it is that despite Butler's basic image as a Big Tough Guy, his character is definitely out of his depth, and blunders from one clue to the next with no plan other than a desperate desire to rescue his wife. The movie ends with wife rescued (not really a spoiler, is it?), marriage possibly repaired and paychecks made for a lot of post-COVID actors and film makers.

p.s. what IS that face he is making in the poster?!?!?

3 Short Paragraphs: Kimi

2022, Steven Soderbergh (Haywire) -- download

Kent wrote about it here.

Sitting in an airport, killing the 3+ hours before my connecting flight. Might as well watch some of the movies I brought with me, on USB, to watch in NS while on vacation, because I knew there would be down-times when I was not able to amuse myself with the dearth of anything to do in rural / semi-rural NS. While I was there for a family reunion, there could be only so many times of chatting with cousins upon cousins upon cousins while sitting around campfires on my ninth beer. Sometimes I just had to escape back into technology. Too many people drain me quickly.

Plot wise, its a very straight forward crime thriller, but isn't that what story telling is all about? If you can tell a familiar story from a new angle with just enough creativity, it all feels new? Kimi is the movie's Alexa analog, from an emerging company just about to go public. It flaunts its difference as using humans to supplement its AI interpolation of requests -- if Kimi doesn't understand something, its shunted to a human operator to research and correct. Angela (Zoë Kravitz, High Fidelity) is one such operator, an obviously VERY wealthy (can't be the operator salary, but her apartment is one of those astoundingly opulent Hollywood industrial lofts) young woman stricken with agoraphobia and anxiety, stuck inside her place after an assault and the pandemic. Stuck inside, and in her routines (one such thing that stuck with me, is how she waves her hands after putting on hand sanitizer, a sort of vertical flightless bird action), it is all interrupted when she overhears an assault happening via a Kimi recording, and has to weigh her social responsibility vs her fears. It doesn't help that the company wants to cover it up, cuz that's what Big Evil Corps do when they are about to be sold for billions.

I really enjoyed this movie. Elements of this movie still stick with me, such as the aforementioned detailed of her hand waving, but also little, creative character elements, such as the rather nerdy looking hit men or the eastern European hacker/sysadmin. Sure, these are stock & trade characters, but Soderbergh does something... extra with them. I honestly think that is the sign of a damn fine director, and I have never really pondered whether I liked Soderbergh enough to think a whole lot about his style, but that he can turn something pedestrian into something that just smacks of style and substance. That said, it could come from my lack of watching things with substance that would make me say this, when people steeped in being That Guy might just think Soderbergh was wasted on this.

3 Short Paragraphs: The Man from Toronto

2022, Patrick Hughes (The Hitman's Bodyguard) -- Netflix

Ohhhh, he directed THAT movie. That explains the tone and temperament and choice of a lead actor. Also, the fact that it started its life at the beginning of 2020 and arrived on Netflix mid-2022 says something about it -- this is a purple suit (Netflix = red suit, maybe?) all the way. Baaa Bummm. That he is working on a remake of Gareth Evans' The Raid does not bode well. 

The Man from Toronto is a comedy thriller about an inept man mistaken for an assassin, and then forced by said assassin to follow through on the deception. A familiar, and good premise; but yawn inducing delivery. Maybe Gareth Evans should redo it. Teddy (Kevin Hart, Jumanjii) is a terrible, inept person. He's convinced he is an entrepreneur, making terrible promo videos in his garage for products nobody in their right mind would buy. His delusional attitude gets him fired from his job, yet does not get him kicked out of his relationship by his overly forgiving wife Lori (Jasmine Matthews, The Tomorrow War). He has a moment of clarity and decides to give her a spa weekend away, but fucks it up by going to the wrong rented cabin (dude, fuck the fading toner, read the fucking email on your phone) where he is mistaken for an infamous assassin, The Man from Toronto. Teddy tries to play along and should be dead, when the FBI raids the cabin. End of movie. Or it should have been; instead, the FBI convince Teddy to continue to play the role of the assassin so they can track the real one down. The real assassin (Woody Harrelson, 2012) decides to make use of Teddy in his bid to complete the job. Hilarity ensues.

Not really. 

Its cute. It has some cute moments. Woody Harrelson's TMFT should be absolutely amoral and scary, but the movie wants to humanize his asocial behaviour as just a quirk and parallel his redemption in our eyes along with Teddy's. But Kevin Hart is Kevin Hart, which means I find him annoying AF. They do the now-usual romp around the world, to appear worldly, but each of the sets feel like backlots or green screens. And unfortunately, Toronto never really gets to be a character, which is a shame, because we look so good in the background of all the movies pretending to be Chicago, NYC, etc. The entire movie is as tired and uninspired as that poster.

3 Short Paragraphs: Jurassic World Dominion

2022, Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed) -- download

I actually looked forward to this pile of dreck, but much in the same way I did Moonfall. Is it considered "enjoy ironically" even if you genuinely enjoy them while understanding how terrible they are? Its not about mocking them nor turning them into a drinking game, its more just accepting how terrible it was going to be and enjoying watching them through the eyes of a less rigid viewer, with little critical judgement. I choose to hand-wave all the badness away until its over, once I have had my in-the-moment experience. But its not like I can do that with everything that is bad; for example, with most of the Bruce Willis dreck that hits the Direct To circuit, despite them often hitting the Violence or Scifi notes I often enjoy. Even if seeing all the terribleness that Trevorrow provides in this movie, I can see that he and the people involved give a shit, do a good job, and know the art of making movies. And, of course, they have much much more money to throw around.

This is the conclusion to the second series in this franchise, in which we never learn from our mistakes comes to a not-really-truly finality. I mean, each movie has a finality which is ignored so there can be another movie. The Jurassic World franchise started because someone ignored that Jurassic Park was a disaster and recreated it, with More Safety Measures. They failed and dinosaurs ate everyone, and some escaped. The island was shut down. In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, foolish humans return to the island to save the dinos before a volcanic eruption destroys the island. Instead, just before the island itself blew up, they capture some and bring them to a Evil Rich Guy's estate and things go badly. That should have ended things, but instead some dinosaurs ran away, or swam away from the original island disaster. Now dinosaurs are In The Wild.

Seriously, despite the idea of saving rare wild animals, if they were wandering around the mainland US eating people, crops and livestock, they would be put down. But nope, the conceit of these movies is Saving the Dinosaurs. This one gathers all the mains from the first franchise together with the mains from this franchise, to AGAIN find a place where the dinosaurs have all been gathered "safely", this time a Nature Reserve that has even More Safety Measures. There is a conspiracy by a Rich Evil Guy to capture Clone Girl (sub-plot from previous movie) as well as hide the fact that the giant (like, more than a foot long) locusts are his mistake. Everyone has to combine skills and morals to shut this guy down, and as with all the movies, inadvertently feed him to the dinos. 

They all have their issues, but this one seemed to just be resting on its "its the old gang back together" laurels and didn't have much else going for it. Yeah yeah, dinosaurs are running wild in the US but the movie is more concerned using that idea as just TV news bites in the background, and just spends all its running time recreating scenes from previous movies with flagrant nods & winks. By the time I got to the end of this movie, I was actually wondering if Trevorrow ironically enjoys making these movies, as he even finds a lame way to squeeze in the "I know this, it's UNIX !" scene for the updated audience.  There were some inspired bits, usually focused around concepts not present in any of the other movies, such as the Morocco dino-smuggler market where we finally see that Bad People Eat Dinosaur (I almost wrote dino-snuggler, but that *cough* would be too far for any movie).  In the end, this one sits less with me than the previous two, but maybe in a year, I will do a re-watch like I did for the original three during one of our lockdowns. Maybe during our next lockdown.

Director Set: Fosse Bear

Perhaps my favourite podcast over the past few years is Blank Check with Griffin and David, which finds actor Griffin Newman and the Atlantic film critic David Sims covering the entire filmography of a director (one film per episode) specifically those who were given a blank check at some point in their career to make whatever passion project they want.  It's an entertaining, inviting, insightful, thoughtful and incredibly well researched podcast which goes into deep (and sometimes juvenile) conversations about the director and actors and productions of the films they cover, frequently to the point where the podcast episodes are longer than the films. 

The series they just concluded was covering the five films of Bob Fosse, the legendary broadway dance choreographer and director who waded into film with musicals, and tried to escape the ghetto of being seen only as a musical director.  Fosse was also the subject of the recent FX Fosse/Verdon in which Sam Rockwell portrays the director's many flaws, including womanized, chain smoking, and being an aggressive boor in all his endeavours.  Despite his incredible talent and successes (Oscar, Emmy and Tony all in one year) he was self-hating, self-conscious, insecure, and troubled man, obsessed with his own mortality as a subject.  The series co-stars Michelle Williams as Gwen Verdon, a broadway superstar, Fosse's longtime collaborator and confidant, and for a time, wife, and it paints her as the underpraised ingredient in much of Fosse's success.  Gwen's cheerier, civilized demeanour was often weaponized as a counterstrike against Bob's more curmudgeonly attitudes, whether it was in the rehearsal space, on the film set, in the editing room or just in life, she was basically the "Bob whisperer" who knew how to temper his edges or get people to understand what he was asking of them.  On top of that, she would accentuate, embolden and enrich his productions with her own talented eye for movement and framing, she was a co-creator in many of his productions and many of his successes would have been much less without her direct involvement.

Cabaret - 1972, DVD

Lenny - 1975, Tubi

All That Jazz - 1979,  CTV

Fosse/Verdon - 2019, FX

Before the Blank Check mini-series on Fosse, I have to admit I only heard of him prior to that in relation to Fosse/Verdon, which from the ads for the show at the time I figured was a show only about dance.  I had no idea he was a filmmaker, nevermind a celebrated one at that.   Through the podcast, I watched some of his films, skipping his first - Sweet Charity, Fosse adapting his stage production to screen - which the Blank Check crew said is not great -- and Star-80, Fosse's final film which sounds to be a completely misguided attempt at understanding the real-life murder of a young starlet from the perspective of her murderer.  It sounds difficult and gross, and an easy pass.  I started watching Fosse/Verdon in the mix of watching Lenny and All That Jazz and listening to the podcast, and I have to say it becomes a bit of a blur.

Lenny is a biographical interpretation of the life of 60's shock-comic Lenny Bruce.  Lenny was known for pushing the boundaries of what could be said in polite society, talking bluntly about sex and race in his act and often getting arrested for it (once his profile reached a certain size).  Lenny was also a man who married a woman he loved and then cheated on her regularly, was addicted to his vices, and believed himself to be an artist that was carrying society on his back, progressing it forward, step by difficult step.  Watching Fosse/Verdon and All That Jazz, biographical representations of Fosse's personal history and journey through achieving success and fame, it becomes clear that, despite not caring about stand-up comedy, he related very personally to the Lenny Bruce story.  

All That Jazz is a masterpiece, as Fosse tells his own biographical story about working on both Lenny and a stage production of Chicago (pressured by Gwen as something he owed to her), following his heart attack.  It's a surreal musical drama that lays Fosse bare in front of the audience (via his surrogate played by Roy Scheider), telling of both his sexual abuse as a youth which informs (not excuses) his sexual abuses, and makes known just what a cad and a prick he can be, and how self-hating but also self-obsessed he is. It is not so much the ruminations of a "tortured artist" but rather the introspection of someone who suffers some serious mental health issues but in an era didn't have the insight or the language to talk about it.  In the end of All That Jazz Fosse kills off his fictional self after flirting with Death (literally) the whole time.   It bears a striking similarity to how he ended Lenny. Fosse really wondered how he was alive, and seemed to make overtures of being a changed man in All That Jazz but knew his predilections would overcome whatever changes he tried to enact.  It's also even more meta in that his then-girlfriend, actor/dancer Ann Reinking, plays his avatar's girlfriend in the film, so the lines between reality and fiction in this autobiography are very much blurred.

The distinction between what I've seen in Lenny, All That Jazz, and Fosse/Verdon are all a messy blur in my brain.  The latter two each feature semi-fictional interpretations of Fosse's time making Lenny which only makes the imagery of all these things a bigger jumble.  But through all these, one gets a pretty clear picture of the man, a complex person who battled demons, and was sometimes one himself (and sometimes he was his own demon). From what I hear of Star-80 it's almost as if Fosse were thinking what if he weren't so talented, would he have wound up an abusive, murdering womanizer.  It sounds like an extension of what Fosse was exploring in Lenny and All That Jazz but also a misguided film and perhaps ruminations that he should have kept to himself.

Where Sweet Charity was Fosse bringing something he did on stage to the screen, Cabaret was something vastly different for him.  He didn't want to just put the stage on screen, he wanted to make a proper (and precise) movie.  The musical sequences are clearly his forte, and certainly something he labored over to get just precise, but they're also my least favourite parts of the movie, and something Fosse took pains to disconnect from the narrative.  All the fakey-fakey accents and self-smug "cleverness" in the bawdy house lyrics are just eyerollingly droll to the point of nuisance.  The songs and performances are, however, cut into the production in very clever ways, which the Fosse/Verdon series provides background on, showing how much Fosse laboured over every single edit (with Gwen stepping in and being the co-conspirator not just in choreographing the stage dancing but choreographing the overall rhythm of the film).

In between the singing and dancing we get a very surprising mid-30's-set, 70's-shot LGBTQ-friendly love story set against the backdrop of the rise of Nazi party and anti-semitism in Germany.  It's disarmingly progressive how much Cabaret embraces its gay, bisexual, and trans characters, but it's also a virulently ugly setting to have it all in, and the 30's-set Germany seems to have a perpetual dark cloud over it (in colour tinting alone) that seems to just grow darker as the film wages on.

I definitely admire Cabaret for what it did, so boldly out of step with both the era it's story set in, and the era it was released in.  It's still disarmingly forthright today, and if not for a few touches, feels pretty modern still.  I get that in comparison to the majority of musicals that preceded it, this is vastly different in how it tells its story and incorporates its song and dance.  At the same time, I really couldn't fully enjoy it (I struggle with pre-Lucille 2 Liza Minelli as a performer), but I will settle for appreciating it. 

With Lenny, another intriguing but somewhat unsuccessful film, I think the documentary format is an amazing choice on Fosse's part and it makes it stand out, decades later, from most other biographical dramas, as does the jazz-riff camerawork and editing. It's not always successful at telling its story, and it's not entirely concrete on what that story is. It starts off as a love story but that falls to the side and becomes more about the career than the man. All told, we never really get to learn who Lenny Bruce was, so much as the highlights (and lowlighs) of what he did in his life.

If you didn't know who Lenny Bruce was going into the film, you'd almost think, at least for the first hour, that it was more a film about Honey (an outstanding performance from Valerie Perrine, needing to go absolutely everywhere emotionally and delivering on it). Despite being a bit of a stand-up comedy fan, I didn't know Lenny Bruce, well not his comedy. I knew *about* Lenny Bruce, the legend,  -court cases, pushing the boundaries of obscenity, and the drug use - all pretty much what the film is trying to teach you. If we're to learn anything about him, what he was like as a person, the film doesn't do a great job at it. It's just mythmaking, and not terribly humanizing.  I found it very hard to reconcile all the different sides of Lenny we're presented with because those dramatic scenes are so short and spread across quite a span of his life. It's not really until you see All That Jazz that you get the connections between Fosse and Bruce, and see where the two relate that Lenny feels properly contextualized.

Not knowing the routines, Dustin Hoffman seems to be keyed into those performances in his specifically Hoffman way. It's more like a cover band...no matter how good the emulation, it's never going to be the same because there's something individual in a performer that can't be fully replicated. It's maybe one of the better actors-doing-standup performances in a movie, but that's a low bar, and much of what I'm responding to is how Fosse shot it with real crowds and cutting to genuine reactions (which are sometimes laughs, but also sometimes offense, or boredom). I think Hoffman enjoyed the challenge. But, as with the film, Hoffman doesn't really find Lenny, the person, in any meaningful way. 

In the end, I would probably have preferred a real documentary about Lenny with real clips of his performances and excerpts from his many tape recordings (including his court trials) the film tells us he did. 

My relationship with Bob Fosse is now about a month old and I feel like I know him all too well. He borders on stereotype. The talented cad, the asshole auteur...but the question is why do I want to root for him so? Goddamit, Bob, everything's telling me I shouldn't like you, and yet the more I get to know you, the more fascinated I am with you, and I'll let you just have your way with my eye and ear holes.

All That Jazz, I'm sure, is an utter puzzle if you don't know anything about Bob Fosse's life or career, but a good film will make you want to know more and investigate and parse out the meaning. Knowing much (though far from all) about Fosse puts me on my first viewing, maybe, four rewatches of ATJ ahead of a Fosse newcomer. but there's still so much to puzzle out. The layers of meta commentary are so deep they caused me a delightful headache.  Ann Reinking's involvement and the dialogue between her and Scheider-as-Fosse feels like some highly dramatic form of role play therapy.

The recurring, flirtatious conversation between not-Fosse and Death (Jessica Lang) makes "Joe Gideon" the most death-obsessed cinematic character this side of Thanos. It all culminates in a heart-stopping show-stopper fever dream musical dance number that riffs on "Bye Bye Love" with a magnetic Ben Vereen and Reinking and Fosse's real life daughter (maybe...) in costume as the two halves of his heart (again, the meta layers).

If there's any drawback to All That Jazz, it's the limitations in editing techniques. Transitions between scenes could be terribly jarring and confusing. But boy, is it ever entertaining, and also really provocative and thoughful. Such a unique, personal piece.

I don't know dance, and watching Cabaret and All That Jazz (and even the Emmy winning special Liza with a Z) I didn't really find the dancing all that special (I found only the stand out to be where Reinking and Joe Gideon's preteen daughter put on an in-apartment dance number for him) but watching Fosse/Verdon and their distinctly not-Fosse Fosse-like dance sequences to be direly lacking.  Compare anything in Fosse/Verdon to All That Jazz and suddenly Fosse's genius as a choreographer (often with Verdon's direct input) comes to light.  Doubly so for Fosse's cinematic chops, which the TV series quite pales in comparison to.  

It's an engaging series in spite of its artistic deficits when compared to the subjects its studying, but then it's hard to replicate genius.  I don't know that Sam Rockwell can deliver a bad performance even if he tried but he captures Fosse in a way the feels symmetrical with how Roy Scheider played him, but never feels impressionistic.  Rockwell knows how to inhabit a role, to live it, and he provides Fosse, the caddish depressive he is, with a real soul.  Williams is doubly good.  Like Rockwell, Williams has never not delivered everything to a role.  She has such control over every aspect of performance that she makes Gwen Verdon live again.  Even though she's playing her across 20 + years of her life, most of which in a time where Verdon was much older than Williams was at the time of shooting, she manages through physical embodiment more than any makeup to represent a woman of her generation.  Watching Williams in certain scenes her body language reminds me so much of my grandmothers, and other women my grandmother's age.  There's a certain way certain women of that time carried themselves and responded to their environments that Williams absolutely nails, but  never calls attention to.

I feel tapped out on Fosse after all this, but, there's surprisingly little left to wade into.  Which means it's a pretty light chore to return to Fosse and look more deeply the next time.

Double Dose: of the Multiverse

(Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...or genre or theme...pretty simple.  Today:  two films about the multiverse)

Teen Titans Go! vs. Teen Titans - 2022, d. Jeff Mednikow - DVD
Everything Everywhere All At Once - 2022, d. The Daniels - in theatre, twice

I'm thinking that, like Toasty and I have been doing over the past couple years (though certainly a lot less this year) with Time Loops, that we need to do a feature reviewing the films that take place or deal with the multiverse.  I love the multiverse.  It stems from being a comic book nerd, and even more specifically a DC Comics fan where the concept of the multiverse has been a thing since Silver Age Flash met Golden Age Flash over 60 years ago.   I got deeper into comics in the fallout of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the first mega-epic "summer blockbuster" Event Comic in which DC collapsed all of their multiversal Earths into a single earth and restarted their continuity to make their comics more new reader friendly.  I was a new reader, and it was very friendly, but I was equally facinated by this whole history of multiverses that seemed to shadow the new publishing efforts.  DC has spent the past 35+ years dealing with the fallout of Crisis and expanding and contracting and rebooting and reviving their history over and over again with one "Crisis" after another, and I've been there for pretty much all of it, just soaking in all these sweeping changes that are what have made DC equal parts frustrating and invigorating.

Everything Everywhere All At Once isn't some big, epic, universe-destroying multiversal epic, it's more of a small-scale, personal, quite, martial-arts epic which, after decades of DC and Marvel multiverses (and we're just in the opening salvo of the MCU multiversal epic) was a very welcome change of pace.

Directed and written by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, creators of the wonderfully weird and surprisingly sweet Swiss Army Man,  the root of EEAAO is in family drama.  Michelle Yeoh stars as Evelyn, a late-middle-aged wife and mother who is bogged down in the midst of a tax audit of the family laundromat, facing the expectations of celebrating her father's 80th birthday, and sensing the increasing emotional gulf between her and her daughter.  She doesn't even know that her husband, the perpetually upbeat Waymond (former child actor and stunt coordinator Ke Huy Kwan), is going to serve her with divorce papers.

One might wonder, given the set-up, where the Multiverse aspect will come in.  Having seen the film twice, the multiverse is set up from the first frame, but doesn't become obvious until Waymond, suddenly taken over by another multiversal version of himself, and advises Evelyn that she is the multiverse's only hope.  Disbelieving, discombobulated, and already overwhelmed, Evelyn starts to learn that through an earpiece and a team assissting in another dimension, she can tap into alternate realty versions of herself, and take from them their skills and knowledge, including martial arts, acting, cooking and more.   As she taps into these skills, we see glimspes into the lives of these other Evelyns, of roads not traveled.

The result yields some of the most ridiculous, creative and inventive fight sequences in recent memory, all of which are best left undescribed and left for the viewer to discover.  The Daniels, as with Swiss Army Man have a knack for pairing deep emotional truths with wildly absurd situational comedy and comedic action.  It's triplefold here, as Evelyn realizes that she's been experiencing for a long time a deep sense of remorse over what her life could have been, and dissatisfaction with what her life is.  As such, she's not been present, and her low-grade depression has been amplified in Joy, her daughter, who seems to feel lost in every universe.  Evelyn faces Jobu Topaki, the great destroyer, who threatens to consume all realities until there is nothing, a nihilist of the nth degree, and somehow Evelyn is supposed to be the key, to find a way to save everyone and everything, when, until now, she hasn't seemed to have accomplished anything.

Michelle Yeoh, an on screen crush of mine for decades, is given perhaps the most gratifying spotlight.  Despite central Evelyn's rather frumpy appearance in floral button down shirt with mauve polyester pants, no makeup and unkempt hair, the Daniels' camera is still infatuated with her.  It just loves her, and she commands the screen in a whole new way.  Her multiversal selves allow her her glamour shots and her situational comedy, and she once again is given a spotlight to show off her balletic fight choreography skills (see also Shang-Chi, Crouching Tiger, and Wing Chun for a trip through the decades of Michelle's amazing screen presence).  That we get an extended wuxia fight sequence between Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis (in a direly unflattering yet amazing mustard coloured turtleneck), two 60-ish women in a gloriously choreographed battle, is something incredibly fresh, and special.  I almost cried beholding it's awesomeness.

This movie is absolutely brilliant, despite its many influences looming large (Jackie Chan and The Matrix the most obvious) .  It doesn't just rest on its absurd asides, it needs them as counterbalance (and sometimes enhancement) to the emotional journey that Evelyn is taking.  As almost unforgivably silly as the "hot dog fingered reality" is, or as dangerously goofy as the "Raccacoonie" world sets out to be, during the climax of the film there's genuine beauty in these bizzare alternate realities, and, once again an emotional core to what are at best nominal side-stories that also flesh out the general thesis of the film, which if there's a moral, is about being kind and empathetic, not only to others, but to one's self.  

Far, far less poignant, and maybe embracing the silliness much more at a surface level is the Teen Titans Go! vs Teen Titans direct-to-video feature.  This pairing was teased at the end of the theatrically released -- and somehow good -- Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, and sure enough, it's delivered.

Now, a bit of background.  Teen Titans was a cartoon series that ran for 5 seasons from 2003 to 2006.  It was a quasi-anime styled action-adventure supehero series that fluxuated between episodic and serialized storytelling, but no matter how light it may have got, it always took its central conceit seriously.  It was a very good show, filled with surprising character dept, and plots that were both mature and yet all-ages friendly.  I don't know what exactly happened to turn the core cast of characters (Robin, Starfire, Cyborg, Beast Boy and Raven) from this children's drama into a pseudo-spongebob style animated goof fest, but it's been the bane of any self-respecting Teen Titans' fan's existence for a decade an a half.  Rubbing salt into the wound is how much more popular the goofy, cartoony Teen Titans Go! has been.  

The Go! team get top billing here, so they are the stars of the show and it finds them being transported to a battle arena where they face their earlier dopplegangers, much to everyone's confusion.  Meanwhile, Raven's soul gem has fractured allowing Trigon, her father, to break free.  He teams up with his doppleganger Trigon together they spell big trouble for the fate of the multiverse.  

Throughout its 77-minute runtime, this movie has a lot of fun with the disparity between the two different styles of animation and tones of the respective shows.  Also the fact that it's the same cast voicing the same characters across the two different versions of the characters just adds more layers of humour and interest.  But at its core there's an actual journey for some characters, as the junior crew of Titans take influence from their more sterner older crew (Raven specifically has a lot to face in relation to her issues with her dad, which the film does a surprisingly decent job at portraying) and seem to evolve as a result.

Thanks to some dimension hopping technology, the two Titans crews bandy about the multiverse meeting many, many different interpretations of themselves, including a 60's animated style, a George Perez 80's style, the modern DC Animated Universe style of characters, and, my favourite, the late 2000s Art Bathazar-styled Tiny Titans (a big favourite of all ages in this household...their appearance was literal fist pumping moment).

So yeah, I don't love Teen Titans Go! (can't quite stand it actually) yet the filmmakers knew that tamping down the aggressive kid-appealing yelling and annoyances that TTG! is known for, and providing a bit gentler of a reentry point for the long ago Teen Titans fan would make for a wholly entertaining and palatable film, not to mention, in the climax, a dazzling display of the glories of animation.

It was in this film, however, with a big multiversal fight, that I did begin to wonder if perhaps there's too much multiverse happeing in the world, and that maybe the concept might burn itself out if tapped too frequently.  Given that it's the centerpiece of the MCU for the next two phases, and DC have a big Flash movie centered around the concept, it's only going to become more prominent.

 

Trainwreck: Woodstock '99

 2022, 3 episodes - Netflix

I was 23 years old when Woodstock '99 occurred.  Leading up to it I was pretty wholly disinterested.  I had just graduated from university and had life to figure out, and some revival of old hippy shit with a gaggle of bands and artist that just weren't my music (I was deep indie at the time).  I did look on with a curious eye, recalling quite distinctly the moment where MuchMusic VJ Rick ("the Temp") was investigating the portapotty situation on day 2, which was a vile sight to behold (footage also used in this doc).  And yeah, clips of day 3 when idiots were embracing the "mud" which was so obviously comprised of portapotty runoff.  It was a literal shit show.

"Shit Show" would be a far more appropriate title than Trainwreck.

This three-part documentary, tackling sort of the behind-the-scenes and in-the-crowd perspectives of the three days of the concert, including the lead in planning and the post-event fallout, but still only scratching the surface.  It's a film letting its talking heads control much of the narrative and not necessarily having its own particular statement it's trying to slam home, other than "what a mess, right?"

If it's making points it's that the concert was put on by former hippie Boomers (who, as we all know, became rampant capitalists) who had no concept of what 1999's pre- and proto-Millennial youth were like tempermentally (they certainly weren't faced with the same unifying threats of getting conscripted into war and crusades for civil rights that defined late 60's youth turning them into peace-and-love advocates, it was the first wave of the "me-first, gimme-gimme, everyone's a winner" generation just reaching adulthood).  The event organizers, on camera, admit to not really knowing the music acts they were signing up, particularly aggro nu-rock acts like Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Kid Rock.  Though to go by this documentary one would think there only were less than a dozen acts centered around these three and the closing act Red Hot Chili Peppers, with acts like Jewel, Fatboy Slim, Wyclef Jean, Bush and Sheryl Crow also noted or interviewed, but treated as curious asides to these main four acts...in reality there were around 100 acts at the festival, but clearly the specific agg-rock headlines were the draw.  If this doc focuses on these four bands, it's because of the demographic they attracted -- an overwhelming amount of hetero young white men, full of anxious rage and absolute entitlement -- which is subliminally what the documentary is about.

A talking head defines 1999 as the peak of hypersexualized, hyperviolent, hypermasculine fratboy culture citing American Pie (in which an unsuspecting young woman is, without consent, triumphantly broadcast having a sexual encounter with another teen) and Fight Club as two landmarks of the culture of the era, neglecting to add that Girls Gone Wild should also have been in the mix.  For those who couldn't attend, there was a 3-day, $60 pay-per-view, and the outsourced crew filming it followed a very GGW track (at least in how this doc chose to represent it) focusing intently on the nudity and the fratboy hijinks.  A member of the crew is one of the talking heads, and the doc seems to skirt around condemning or criticising their choices. The doc also does this backhanded absolution with most of its talking heads, including the festival founders and producers who still seem be willfully oblivious to their role in the shitshow that went down.

But their role, others readily would like to point out, was integral to the event's downfall.  Shortsighted and capitalistic decisions were made - about the venue, about food services, about trash and human waste maintenance, about under-resourced medical staff and about security - all of which, alongside the decisions around the acts chosen, contributed to the hellscape of assault, substance abuse, injuries, arson, property destruction, and (unmentioned in the doc) death.  In their choice of venue (a military airbase), it was a wide and exposed tarmac, an environment that only accentuates the aggressive heat that weekend, and no shelters were available or provided to escape the sun.  Their decision to not allow food or drink (but no worries about drugs) on the premises meant that the kids in attendance were forced to purchase overpriced food and water (4$ a bottle) from the outsourced vendors.  Heat stroke was rampant.  Trash was not adequately picked up or disposed of, so the grounds, after day one, looked like a landfill, and during the concert on days 2 & 3 the airspace immediately above the crowd was a skyline of trash being lobbed about.  The portapotties weren't appropriately serviced, and at a certain point the free drinking water became contaminated with runoff.  The decision to hire untrained youth as "Peace Patrol" instead of any formal security, meant that security was direly lax, and certainly not an adequate percentage of the concertgoing population.  The fratboys very quickly realized that there were no rules and really no consequences for their behaviour, and as conditions on the grounds deteriorated, the attitudes of the youth became more and more extreme.  There was always going to be a white male entitlement that the festival was naturally going to serve, but in not actually serving them that entitlement became discontented rage.  

From the moment the festival starts within the documentary, there's is a pervasive discomfort that is never explicitly stated in the production, but is overwhelmingly there.  That white male youth crowd -- taken advantage of financially, their wellbeing disserviced, and confined with women who thought they were in a space where they could be liberal and free (read: topless... the producers seemed to want to hammer home that topless women were sort of inescapable) -- well, there really was only one way this was going to play out.  Sexual assault and exploding trailers.

The festival promoters tried throughout the festival (and in recalling the festival) to downplay every negative thing that happened, if acknowledge it at all.  By the way this doc details it, you would think that there was only a handful of assaults, and that, in context, was somehow acceptable, and that the real bad thing was the riot that ended the festival.  The truth is that even one is unacceptable, and that there were likely an exponential amount of assaults (many occurring on camera as women crowd surfing or sitting on shoulders are pawed at and groped in virtually every crowd scene) which the doc really doesn't account for.  Like during the Black Lives Matter movement, the media context was more on the property destruction, and not the actual human toll.

There's a whole undercurrent, a whole subtext to Woodstock '99 that this doc only implies but doesn't deign to explore, which is what sunk in for me.  In a cowardly fashion, it mostly tries to play the fesitival off as a laughable comedy of errors, but it should be talked about as something much uglier, much more severe.  What does it say about this culture, these people...of America 1999, versus America 1969, versus America 2022.  It could have, if it wanted to, drawn direct lines to where we are today...what the pre- and proto-Millennial white males have become in Trump era politics and what white mob mentality back then has translated into today.  There are many Chads and Karens of Woodstock '99 that seemed to think it was a great time, totally worth the destroyed lives, trench mouth, and broken bones, and would totally do it again.

Likewise, the film doesn't, at all, talk about how the hippie generation became the greedy consumerist generation and how that shaped the youth of the time.  There's a lot of critical cultural examination that is just glossed right over for the sake of sensationalism.  

It's a fascinatingly upsetting watch, in many regards.  If you only feel the nostalgia, then you're watching it wrong.

3+1 Short Paragraphs: Lightyear

2022, Angus MacLane (co-director Finding Dory) -- Disney+ 

The Toy Story franchise should be coming to an end, some 30 years (!!!) after it hit the animation world with a bang, and yet... here we are with an origin story (??) for Buzz Lightyear. The premise of this movie is that we are watching the movie that was released in the early 90s that spawned the toy line from which Andy gets his Buzz Lightyear action figure. It makes me wonder if it was an animated movie, or a live action movie, but do animated movies really exist in a world that is animated? Either way, brilliant idea, but I was just wishing that the movie had a more early-90s scifi feel to it. Oddly enough, and a bit of a let down once I learned it, is that this premise was already used for the traditional animated TV series called Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins, which has the toys watching a VHS of said show, which itself is the inspiration for Buzz. So, they kind of ripped off their own idea?

So, THIS source movie has Buzz Lightyear, a ranger in Star Command, on a mission exploring unknown reaches of space, awakened from cryo sleep when the ship detects a nearby planet with life, ala the opening scenes from Alien. The planet does have life, and the few space rangers awakened to explore, soon discover it is hostile, mostly bugs and plant tentacles. Buzz attempts to control of the hostile response, as he is a man of action (!!!), but instead critically damages the hyper crystal that powers the ship, leaving them all marooned. He then takes it upon himself to lead each test of the locally made replacement hyper fuel, out a strong sense of guilt & duty. But each test runs into dilated time, and Buzz continues to return only a day later, but years pass on the planet, with all of his fellow, now all awakened rangers and explorers, growing up on the always hostile planet. Its a story opener, a long one, which is steeped in classic scifi story makeup, with not quite the emotional impact of the opening segment from Up but it tries.

The rest of the movie, and I don't recall if it was final act, or final two, is about Buzz's triumphant return to the planet, near a hundred years from when he started the tests, and she is a very very changed place. Everyone he knows is dead, and their ancestors are fighting a rather recent war against robots who showed up out of the blue. He ends up teaming up with a bunch of ranger rejects to save the day and have a final battle against Zerg, the leader of the robots, along with some Secret Spoiler Heavy Reveals. 

Part of me wanted to see a less Pixar animated style movie and something more serious, along the lines of the photorealistic animation Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or the shorts seen in Love, Death + Robots on Netflix. The tone in this movie kept on shifting from traditional Pixar humour to hints of more serious drama, which is in the Pixar wheelhouse, but I am not sure fit well enough into the Buzz Lightyear mythos. All in all, I did enjoy myself, just wanted.... more?

n Paragraphs: The Gray Man

2022, Anthony & Joe Russo (You, Me and Dupree) -- Netflix

I have been suffering a dearth of watched movies. Not for a lack of movies worth watching, nor for a lack of movies-started (at least 5 in some state of "resume"), but for the lack of focus & desire. Blame work, blame video games (Animal Crossing) but more so blame my brain. I am currently in another bout of "why am I writing this?" and still not sure if I have an answer. The other symptom of this state is that I barely remembering what I just watched. Blame work, blame COVID, blame focus, blame alcohol, but I have a great inability to retain what I just watched.

But let's give it a go, as I currently in Vacation Mode, had a few days of constant rest and even my anxiety is diminishing. And we polished off a few blockbusterish flicks.

The latest not-a-superhero-movie from the Russo Bros, is pretty much the crime-spy-thriller style that Captain America: Winter Soldier was framed around, right down to the over the top action and massive destructive set pieces, collateral damage out the wazoo. Its Bourne meets Bond meets Summer Blockbuster. And its good, for its genre; I might even go as far as a Very Good.

Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton, Armageddon) recruits Ryan Gosling (Young Hercules [*snicker*]) out of prison for his CIA funded off-the-books wet work group called Sierra; Gosling will be Sierra Six, or just Six. Years later her is tasked to take out someone, botches it because he doesn't want to kill a kid (number 4 in the disruptive assassin playbook) and ends up discovering that since Fitz retired, Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page, Dungeons & Dragons), the new guy in charge of Sierra, has been doing his own thing with it, i.e. killing people for money with Six as the weapon. Six goes on the run. Carmichael sends his other best off-the-books assassin, Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans,  Knives Out), after him. On the run, Six romps around Europe, trying to find Fitz's niece, who Hansen is using as leverage. Along the way, they blow up stuff good and shoot lots of people, mostly bad guys.

This is the movie that the Other Ryan (Reynolds) wants in his action adventure romps around Europe blowing stuff up and shooting bad guys, Six Underground or Red Notice, to be. It does a great job of welding on light humour with big, bombastic action scenes. And its all wrapped up in a very good Bad Guy vs Good Guy story where we hate (but laugh at/with Hansen) while smirking along with Six while rooting for him non-stop. But not the heavy handed humour which bleeds into farce. 

And the supporting cast! Fellow CIA agents Miranda (Ana de Armas, Knives Out) and Suzanne Brewer (Jessica Henwick, The Matrix: Resurrections)  rock amazing outfits & action scenes (Miranda) or bad suits & worse haircuts (Brewer). I liked to think of this movie as Paloma's next gig, just with another name, after her success with Bond in No Time to Die. Henwick's Brewer is such the opposite, suit wearing and following the boss down illegal rabbit holes while absorbing his abuse. Billy Bob is surprisingly less than sleazy, while Page is bureaucratic evil at its height, the true BBEG despite Hansen's outrageous homicidal proclivities. 

They are supposed to be franchise-ing this movie, but while I will watch each, I am not sure every flick needs to be done so, unless they watch to do the old school cross-over and have Six bump into the new Bond?

Most Dangerous Game

 2021, d. - AmazonPrime

Under most circumstances I would look at a film like Most Dangerous Game, clocking in at 131 minutes, starring the other Hemsworth brother (no, the other one) and popping up on AmazonPrime with zero fanfare, and just balk at the idea of watching it. But, I like the man-hunting-man genre something fierce. Battle Royale, Series 7, Surviving the Game, Hard Target, The Hunt, Avengers Arena, the Hunger Games... it's a genre that hasn't yet been played out despite the rhythms of these things being fairly consistent across the genre. There is only one of these every few years, and I'm there for it each time.

But still...131 minutes. The original film adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game only clocked in at 63 minutes.  But this isn't a remake... there is a remake of that story is coming later this year. Even still where does this Liam Hemsworth starring version get the stones to run at over two hours? And why does it just start cold with a conversation and no opening production credits or anything. Why does it so often feel remarkably like a TV show stitched together into a film? A well-produced TV show, but a TV show nonetheless.

Why do the end credits give writing credits by episode numberss? Waitaminute....is this a Quibi? It is, it is a Quibi. One escaped into the wild. I began to think the elusive Quibi didn't actually exist... but her's proof...proof!

It's a silly movie with a lot of bad dialogue and obvious exposition, and it drops a whole mythology set up to make it feel like it deserves more than just this one "season"(?). But, I was also very much entertained.  It effectively created tension, and, as absurd as it got, I never lost interest. Plus always happy to see Zach Cherry and Sarah Gadon... plus Christoph Waltz is very fun, especially when you're not sure if he's really the bad guy or not throughout the whole thing. 

Waltz is the man offering Hemsworth, apparently dying of a terminal illness, the means to support his family after his passing, by participating in a contests.  For every hour he survives, money in the bank.  If he survives 24 hours, he's a free man.  But if he breaks the rules, if he goes out of bounds of play, he will be hunted for the rest of his short life.  It's pretty basic, and the "film" adds complications and layers that are mostly fun but also not terribly necessary.

If you like this kind of thing, you'll like this thing, kinda.

10 for 10: oh no, it's back!

 [10 for 10... that's 10 movies which we give ourselves 10 minutes apiece to write about.  Part of our problem is we don't often have the spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie or TV show we watch.  How about a 10-minute non-review full of half-remembered scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable?] 

When I last posted a 10 for 10 I said that would be the last one.  The format had not lived up to its purpose, which was supposed to be some form of clearinghouse for my backlog of reviews to write.  The problem was that each "review" was supposed to be done in 10 minutes based solely off what I could rcall, but my stupid brain couldn't just leave it at that...I had to go and do some wikipedia-ing or IMDB-ing or some Letterbox-ing to try and recall both the movie and my thoughts, which would eat up time, lots and lots of time.  Doing ten movies in a row is exhausting when otherwise I would only get one or two reviews written in a sitting.  But now, I have almost 30 movies and 20 TV shows in the backlog so I need to temporarily resurrect the 10 for 10 in order to slim that list down by a fifth.

Let's do it.

1. Gambit - 1966, d. Ronald Neame -
2. The French Connection - 1971, d. William Friedkin- Disney+
3. Le Samourai - 1967, d. Jean-Pierre Mellville -  Criterion
4. I Want You Back - 2022, d. Jason Orley - AmazonPrime
5. Zola - 2020, d. Janicza Bravo - Netflix
6. Persona - 1966, d. Igmar Bergman - Criterion
7. Death on the Nile - 2022, d. Kenneth Branagh - In theatre
8. The Castle of Cagliostro - 1979, d. Hayao Miyazaki - Netflix
9. The Green Knight - 2021, d. David Lowery - Crave
10. Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers - 2022, Akiva Schaffer - Disney+

ready, timer set, go:

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1. Gambit

No, not some script reading of the unmade Channing Tatum movie based on the X-Men character, as one might expect given my predelection for entertainment but rather the Shirley Maclean/Michael Caine crime/comedy/caper that I'd never heard of and only watched with the expectation of turning it off 10 minutes in.

Well, I didn't turn it off ten minutes in, but I also didn't actually finish it, but not because I didn't want to. I paused it about an hour in to make popcorn and do some errands, when I came back the film had turned off and was suddenly no longer available on demand from my cable company. Wha' happened?

The opening 20 minutes is so bizarrely captivating that it's thrilling and yet puzzling and disturbing. When the other shoe drops in near-Shyamalan fahion it should be infuriating, but it's actually a relief and MacLaine is utterly delightful. What seemed to be a swindle tuns out to be more of a romcom... And I was there for it...

And yet ... sullying the whole ordeal is some brownface (Europeans playing Arabian), yellowface (MacLaine needlessly plays someone who's supposed to be 1/4 Chinese) and cultural appropriation. It's not the most egregious (it's kind of Raiders of the Lost Ark-level) but it's also not a good look for anyone.

There's a remake scripted by the Coen Brothers readily available on Amazon Prime...but it's apparently pretty awful...plus I would prefer to finish watching this one..  

[7:34 - much of this was pre-written on Letterboxed]

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2. The French Connection

Clearly, the template upon which The Wire was built. 

This is a legendary movie, for action, intensity and just changing what adult-oriented cinema could be.  It's been on my list for a very, very long time as a must watch.  Finally getting to it last October (yeah, 9 months ago), I was, not bored, but also not happy.  

I'm not the biggest Gene Hackman fan.  Something about him has always been very off-putting to me, from those early days of watching him play a Lex Luthor that didn't at all resemble the character from my mid-80's comics to so many viewings of fucking Hoosiers in various classrooms that I seemed to have repressed any memory of those films.  There are films that I really like that feature Hackman (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Quick and the Dead) but even then, there's always something the makes you distrust or dislike the guy.  Popeye Doyle is one of his most famous characters, and it's so quintessentially the Hackman type.  Doyle isn't complicated... he's quite clearly a disgusting, racist, lech of a man, and clearly no stranger to abusing his authority. I don't even think he's a good narcotics cop (and clearly others don't either), nor is he a charming or likeable person. 

Yeah, that's Hackman's total wheelhouse, and he plays him well, but also he's not why we're watching. Friedkin's breathless chases, long sequences where we can't hear the dialogue, the gritty procedural sensibility long before procedurals were a thing, it's clear why this film was so celebrated, and it still feels like a prototype for modern storytelling. The ending is brilliantly terse, which obviously left some people dissatisfied, and prompted a sequel. I haven't seen it but it sounds wholly unnecessary and, frankly, I really don't want more time with this character of Popeye Doyle.

[10:50]

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3. Le Samourai

I'm just starting to piece together the whole French New Wave cinema thing (this is foray #2)... and it's been, well, slow going.  So, if I'm to understand the FNW from just Breathless and Le Samourai it's just American genre films done in a slowcore fashion, right?  WIth scripts are just, like, 20 pages long.  Lingering shots, no dialogue.... I'm being reductive.

I enjoyed Le Samourai somewhat.  This must be a bit of what Jim Jarmoush was doing with Ghost Dog and Limits of Control, but I dont know that I found it  satisfying. I certainly found myself calling bullshit on the visual deceptions the director pulls on us (oy, where Jef pull that gun from?), but everything else is so damned purposeful I couldn't not be impressed. 

The juxtaposition between Jef Costello and Le Commissaire (no talk vs all talk) was pretty grand, and dammit if Alain Delon just ain't so damn handsome.  He's really appealing to look at and I want to watch him some more.

Whereas with Breathless I was never bored but also not very invested, with Le Samourai I was invested but kind of bored a bit. I'm still getting used to this whole French movement in film, but I'm more intrigued now. This whole pastiche of "cool" in the wave though I don't buy into at.all.

[6:31]

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4. I Want You Back

I like Jenny Slate.  She's done many, many things I have enjoyed her in.  I like Charlie Day, he's a very likeable guy (he's the most sympathetic of the Always Sunny crew). The idea of pairing them into a RomCom seemed, well, kind of ideal.  It should work...and it does...but it's not nearly the comedy I was expecting with these two as the leads.

The premise finds both of them having recently been dumped and encountering each other by happenstance, finding a sympathetic ear.  Unable to move on from their exes, they concoct a plan to each befriend the other's ex and try and intervene in their new relationships or perhaps nudge them back.  Of course along the way they start to maybe realize that they are perhaps better suited for each other than their exes, but the timing of those realizations comes at differing times, leading to much frustration.

What could have been a really toxic comedy about awful people instead leans much more into their sympathies and makes them largely non-threatening.  Of course, in befriending each other's exes, they also wind up actually becoming friends with them, which leaves the deceit weighing heavily over everything.   There are the requisite farces and beyond-logic elements which most rom coms fall into in order to move the chess pieces to where they want for the romance or comedy, and they're mostly forgivable here (Slate volunteering, randomly, to help put on a middle-school play seems the most egregious of these, but without it you don't get her charming interactions with young Luke David Blumm, which is borderline inappropriate but something both characters need). Great supporting cast with Scott Eastwood, Gina Rodriguez, Clark Backo, and  Manny Jacinto. 

[11:56]

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5) Zola

Perhaps the first full length feature to be adapted from a series of tweets?  It seems like an absurd thing from the outside of Twitter (I gave up on the platform half a decade ago) and even considering threaded tweets that can run dozens of messages in length, that's still hardly even a framework... and yet, here's Zola, an absolutely amazing, harrowing and hilarious movie about sex work industry, trust, and just what a strange world it is out there.

The story starts with stripper Zola (Taylour Page) befriending Stefani (Riley Keough) in Detroit and then being asked if she wants to come do some work with her in Tampa.  Needing the money and, perhaps, a break from her life, she takes the offer and heads out with Stef, her needy boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun), and her "friend" "X" (Colman Domingo).  Of course, things go off the rails rather quickly, but Zola is smart and streetwise, and knows how to handle both herself and other people.

The film is super stylish and gorgeously shot.  It's sound design is out of control, with the ambiant noises seeded in as part of the soundtrack, and, if you're keen, layered in twitter tweets to identify when the film transitions into Zola's next tweet.  It's also super sex worker positive, by its very existence it's advocating for safer work environments and better protections against predatory people.

All the actors are great, Page proving she can hold the film down on her own if she had to, but everyone else rises to the challenge.  Domingo was the breakout surprise, and really should have been up for a best supporting Oscar (among others this film should have been nominated for but was fully overlooked).

[14:39]

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6) Persona

Some deem this to be the apex of French New Wave cinema, a haunting, meditative exercise in questioning one's own identity (and given the mid-sixties time period, I'm not sure if it's just solely a psychological questioning or also a sexual questioning).

Persona dabbles heavily in the surreal, with Bergman employing a style of editing and filming and storytelling deliberately obfuscate anything approaching traditional narrative.  It begins with an "ageing" actress (likely late 30's in the old cinematic reductiveness) suffering from a seeming illness or psychological disorder and needing regular care, receiving a star-struck nurse. 

For much of the film, the actress is struck mute, and it's largely the nurse talking to her, relating to her, but as the film progresses, and the nurse reveals more and more of herself, it's like the lines between them, become erased.  Which one is the nurse, and which is the patient?  Which is which?

I liked this film's foray into looking at mental health, but it was still such an uncommon topic and still very primal in its form that the film's ideas of it are a bit of a curiosity. I'd be interested in a professional's breakdown of this.

Outside of that, I found it frustratingly clever, and tediously engaging.  It's been dubbed a masterpiece for a very long time, and it is a stark void to stare into.  Interpretation is an easy exercise, but almost impossible to come to conclusion upon.  In an era with so much entertainments, it's hard to really give a film like Persona its due.  It's meant to be something to ruminate on and roll around in your brain occupying space and time.  I want to malign it because I didn't tremendously enjoy it, but at the same time I see what people find so fascinating about it.  

[12:33]

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7)  Death on the Nile

Everything in me wants to just say "go read the Toastypost on Death on the Nile", I don't have much more to contribute.  But I've got up to 10 minutes to fill here so let's start by saying it was fine.  

I watched DotN in late February, the utter peak of winter misery in Toronto, and I found DotN's lavishly glass riverboat journey to be an utter salve for the winter blues.  The scenery was absolutely beautiful (and I suspect largely computer manufactured but nevertheless beautiful) and it made me want to take a hoity toity fancypants 1920s colonialist riverboat adventure... I must absolutely stress I'm not advocating for nor declaring any wistfulness towards colonial times and the absurdly detrimental impact that the various European expanses into foreign lands (of which, genealogically, I am a product) usually with malicious force.  But let's just say we could get to a time where people of all races and nationalities could have their individual freedoms and travel the world together, and everyone had shared means to do so... well, an isolated trip down the Nile circa 1920 seems absolutely lovely...even if it's a boat full of murder!

Take one look at the cast list, which includes French and Saunders, Gal Gadot, Annette Benning, Russel Brand, Letitia Wright, Armie Hammer, Tom Bateman, and more...well, you're going to already have a guess as to who the bad person might be.  But, it's not always the whodunnit, in one of these movies, but the howdunnit, and it proves entertaining enough.

It really is just fine.  Save it for winter and enjoy.

[11:30]

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8. Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro

My daughter wanted to watch a Studio Ghibli film, but I steered her in a different direction, towards Lupin III  and Hayao Miyazaki's first feature film.  It's not that I have a deep knowledge of Miyazaki's work, nor any real familiarity with Lupin the Third, but I've long been curious about the latter, and very keen to further explore the former.

I was worried in the opening beats of The Castle of Cagliostro that I was in for a painful experience, as the film features a very TV-esque opening credits and a rather frenetic, overly cartoony sequence that blindsides the audience if you're not already familiar with Lupin and his cast of characters.  It then drops you into a very tedious lull of exposition around counterfeit money and the manufactured history of a fake foreign land as set up for the main adventure. 

However despite its slow and awkward start, the film is like a boulder rolling downhill, just picking up speed and energy as it goes. What seems simple at the start begins to add layer upon layer without really adding much additional complexity making it easier to follow as it goes on, rather than harder. It seems like it's borrowing structure from James Bond, but it's own influence on later pop culture seems even stronger. Like did this inspire some of Super Mario Brothers? And certainly half the superhero movies of the 80's and 90's owe it a debt. And in retrospect it seems like every movie that's tried a clocktower sequence has been trying to replicate this and failed. Did Jackie Chan ever try to buy the rights to Lupin III, because he seems to be completely in his wheelhouse. 

While it's not really the best story and there's certainly some problematic gender relations going on and the music sounds cheap .... the animation is just...wow.  Liked so hard.

[10:00]

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9. The Green Knight 

Beautiful. Entrancing. The imagery is just stunning. Sets. Wardrobe. Hair. Make up. Digital effects. Panoramas. Locations. Lighting. Score. It all comes together into gorgeous composition after gorgeous composition. I don't think I understood much of it, but I definitely want to watch it again to see if I'm supposed to. 

Because it's been a few months since I watched it, much of the film is not fresh in my mind, but at the same time the name just evokes very specific images and scenes quite vividly in my mind.  It's pretty potent.  The story itself, based off the epic medieval poem by an anonymous writer, is full of fable and fancy, but seems mostly allegorical, though the true nature of what it's saying eludes me.  Perhaps I was too distracted by its beauty to see it fully for what it was.

Just like I like my slow sci-fi, I think maybe I'm into slow fantasy too.

[5:56]

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10. Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers

I was well into my teen years when Rescue Rangers appeared as a TV show, and by that point I was quite past any real affinity for Disney's cartoon family.  In the DC vs. Marvel of it all, was a Bugs over Mickey, Looney Tunes over Disney kind of guy.  Before that my experience with the chipmunk pairing was as ancillary characters in other Mickey Mouse productions.  In other words, I don't have a strong affinity nor nostalgia for these characters.

What I do like is comedy, and I've been a fan of The Lonely Island for over two decades (going back to The 'Bu on Channel 101), so with Akiva Schaffer helming the picture and Andy Samberg co-starring (2/3 of the Island crew) with John Mulaney (one of my favourite stand-up comedians) it was a must watch, because there's no way this was going to be some lame Smurfs, Alvin and the Chipmunks or Garfield type effort, it was bound to get off kilter.

Of course, it is still a Disney production so it's not going to get too ribald, but what I think Schaffer, the writers and the crew on this managed to do was put so much into the film that it can't help but be entertaining.  

Not since Who Framed Roger Rabbit  (okay, forgot about the Lego Movie) has there been this many different IPs owned by different companies (Warner has tried it with their own various IPs in Space Jam and Ready Player One, Disney with Wreck It-Ralph and others) in one film, and it, quite literally makes all the difference.  When Warner or Disney makes a film with all their own properties, it just seems kind of an unabashed exercise in cross-branding within the company.  When something like this happens, where different properties from across companies comingle, well, that takes a whole shit ton of effort, and it's worth it, if only for the recurring "Ugly Sonic" gag.

The plot, like Roger Rabbit is a mystery, one which the estranged Chip 'n Dale, former co-stars of the 80's cartoon Rescue Rangers both have a personal interest in solving.  The film gets into the dissolution of their partnership and their post-Rescue Rangers careers -- one went into accounting, the other into the void of lessening celebrity vehicles, like reality TV and convention appearances.  The convention floor is one of the great set-pieces of the film, but just one among many.

The reunion and reconciliation of the duo is really the thrust of the film and that sort of storyline is kind of a paint-by-numbers affair at this point, but it's all the madness happening around them, and the specifics of the story, and the creative use of animation and animation styles that really send the whole thing sailing over the wall from an also ran into a maybe recurring revisit.

It's a fun picture with a good heart and plenty of laughs.  Hard to go wrong with that.  Maybe just missing a couple Lonely Island bangers. 

[14:52]