3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): No Sudden Move

2021, Steve Soderbergh (Kimi) -- download

While I didn't really take any proper hiatus, as I intended, there are a few flicks I have watched, or rewatched, since working at Cleaning Out the Cupboards, which included finishing some really old, half-done posts, that I won't be writing about. Maybe less hiatus, and more "finishing draft posts" ?

Anywayz, in returning to / resuming (watching and) posting, I have a ton of To Be Watched. In fact, I have an entire Draft Post which contains 10 years of movies I intended on watching, but never did. I also have those massive "add to my list" that are in every streaming services. And I have movies I have downloaded, and sit unwatched. Strange that I can remember, from the That Guy days, when I had seen every movie present in the cinema, and every movie I intended on seeing from the Video Store Shelves. That all said, this was from the "downloads" bucket.

Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle, Volcano), fresh out of prison, needs cash and accepts a babysitting job from mobster Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser, Journey to the Centre of the Earth), to work along side Rene Ronald Russo (Benicio Del Toro, Snatch) and Charley (Kieran Kulkin, Scott Pilgrim vs The World). Business man Matt Wertz (David Harbour, Black Widow) is to pull something out of his boss's safe, while the three gunmen watch his family, all wearing wonky eye-masks, making them look like The Beagle Boys. But this is a Soderbergh movie, so there is a LOT more going on, a whole lot more.

Of course, the job doesn't go as planned, and Goynes figures out they are being setup, which leads him to working out his own caper with Russo and Wertz. The whole thing centres around a mcguffin, the paperwork that was supposed to be in the safe, paperwork representing the designs for the catalytic engine, and a little Googling will tell you, this is the time when the Big Four (GM, Ford, Chrysler, American Motors) were going to be indicted under an anti-trust investigation, accused of purposely delaying "anti-smog" technology. The caper represented Studebaker-Packard trying to get the plans for the catalytic converter, assuming to be ahead of the game. Goynes works it out, to get the paperwork and sell it to the original buyer's contact Mike Owen (Matt Damon, The Great Wall), while also dealing with the bad business that sent him to jail in the first place, and has put him at odds with a lot of the gangsters in Detroit.

As is typical in neo-noir, the whole plot is convoluted, has lots of players moving about the board, and in typical Soderbergh style, has a turnabout at the end. In watching this all play out, I realized that Goynes, like many of Soderbergh's thugs in other movies, is a very smart guy. I like to think of myself having a decent brain, but I would never be able to see how things are lining up, and put a whole bunch of details and double-turns together in order to find a favourable outcome. In other words, I would make a terrible criminal, and I could never write plausible crime fiction. But it does make for satisfying caper flicks, and while very little of this movie tells you it is being a caper, more just criminals reacting to circumstances, its enjoyable once you see the players have played the game. And again, like in all Soderbergh flicks, there are little details he puts in that I really enjoy, such as the fact that Goynes is seeing walking everywhere, being fresh out of prison, having no cash, and not a lot of friends that would drive him around, but also affording us the fades from opulence to decrepitude, that the already gentrifying Detroit is going through, before it all fell down entirely.

Kent's post.

Paul T. Goldman

6 episodes. 2023, d. Jason Woliner (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm...) - CityTV/Peacock

Paul T. Goldman is a true crime documentary about a man who uncovers that his wife might be part of an international sex trafficking ring.

Paul T. Goldman is a biography of Paul T. Goldman, the man who believes that his wife is part of an international sex trafficking ring and then wrote a book about it. And then a screenplay.

Paul T. Goldman is that screenplay about a man who discovers that his wife is part of an international sex trafficking ring and then becomes a secret agent trying to bring it down.

Paul T. Goldman is the making-of of the film of the screenplay based on the book about the man who believes that his wife is part of an international sex trafficking organization.

Paul T. Goldman is a very intimate examination of one "Paul T. Goldman", the pen name of Paul Finkleman who married a woman who manipulated him, tried to steal his money and property, and in the proceedings of getting divorced, uncovered secrets about her. In his investigation of those secrets he started coming to the conclusion that his soon-to-be ex-wife was a local madam and also involved in a larger, international sex trafficking ring. His deep dive into his wife, her lover, her ex-husband and the people she was involved with led to meetings with the FBI, all of which sparked in Paul Finkleman the idea to dramatize his life story into a semi-autobiographical (but mostly fictional) espionage thriller Duplicity, under a new, cooler pseudonym. 

In promoting his book, Paul started expanding on the adventures of Mr. Goldman into new novels, and ultimately a screenplay.  Once the screenplay was written, active twitter user Paul Finkleman, under his Goldman pseudonym, started @ing anyone and everyone he could with any Hollywood association.  This included Human Giant, Thunderheart and Parks and Recreation director, Jason Woliner, who, unlike most, was intrigued by this man.  Woliner did his research, filing through the "Goldman" twitter account and youtube pages.  He read Duplicity,  and reached out in 2012, clearly intrigued by Paul Finkleman/Goldman.  This six-episode series from Peacock is the result of a decade-long partnership between Paul and Woliner attempting to get something made, after a few false starts.  What results is a baffling and fascinating character study that recalls stories of complicated oddballs like American Movie or American Splendor (the latter especially with its masterful blurring the lines between fiction and reality).

Finkleman/Goldman is best described as a cross between Pee Wee Herman and Buster Bluth (from Arrested Development). He's an adult, brimming with relentless positivity, mostly because it seems he doesn't understand the way the world works enough for it to bring him down. He smiles so hard and so often that, in portraying the cinematic "Paul T. Goldman", director Woliner needs to cut and constantly tell him to stop smiling.  

But Paul's biggest trait is he's naive, and he approaches the world honestly (even in attempting deceit, he's shockingly honest) and expects the world to be honest back with him, so he's remarkably susceptible to lies and manipulation. And as we learn over the course of Paul T. Goldman's six episode, he is lied to and manipulated often. 

His naivete is also painfully embarrassing to witness in action, as he talks up being a crusader against sex trafficking, but his only experience with sex trafficking is this situation he's found himself in, and the validity of the situation is constantly called into question. I mean, it's fishy, for sure....  Paul puts himself out there for anti-sex-trafficking speaking gigs where he recounts his story which always starts with him looking for love with mail-order Russian brides. One audience member (in a speaking engagement set-up for by the show, and paid for an audience to attend) questions Paul "Isn't mail-order brides a form of sex trafficking?"

The show uses editing to pointedly highlight Paul's love for telling his story. He basically tells it to everyone he meets. An early sequence shows Paul jumping through his recounting, practically verbatim, between multiple people. When he's acting, shooting his own script, he puts himself up against other professional actors with no hesitation, and delights in every moment. But as soon as the cameras stop rolling, he launches into the "behind-the-music" details of the scene they were working on, as it comes from true life.  The patience that the actors, including veteran character actors like Melinda McGraw, Dennis Haysbert, James Remar, Dee Wallace, Frank Grillo, and Rosanna Arquette.

Paul is an awkward, friendly, honest, cheerful and outgoing guy. He should be likeable, but he's not exactly. You kind of want to smack him for being so honest, so trusting, and yet these are not qualities we should damn. You also kind of want to dislike him for his incessant self promotion and even some of the ridiculous extremes he's gone to in his life, but it's also very hard to dislike him. At the root of the entire story, the heart of it all, is a lonely man looking for love. The final episode Woliner loops back in with Paul's father, and the statements Paul makes about the love he feels his father has withheld from him. It's the point Woliner puts on it (but not too fine a point, he's not hammering us over the head with it), and paralleling it with the heaps of (perhaps too much) love Paul has doled out to his own son.

The journey of Paul T. Goldman includes interview footage from 10 years ago, the casting process for the filming of the screenplay, the recording of the Duplicity audiobook, talking heads with members of the cast and people in Paul's life, and a lot of candid moments with Paul himself (Woliner tries to hide from the camera as much as possible, but cannot escape it at times). It's a surprising wild adventure.

I Saw This!! Cleaning House

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent 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.  Which is weird, considering I need to clean house, so I can have a brief hiatus, so I can just watch, and not with the intent, I have to write about it.

Also, I have Cleaned the Slate, and Cleaned out the Cupboards, but have I ever Cleaned House?

The other weird thing is that I gathered these all into a I Saw This!! post as it is usually used to write short bits about a bunch of stuff I am forgetting. But I wrote enough for each, to warrant their each own original post. Why? Who knows. But as you know, this blog, for me, is as much writing about writing the blog as it is about the movies, TV and other pop culture sources we watch to feed the blog. Just not after midnight.

See How They Run, 2022, Tom George (This Country) -- Disney+

Loved the trailers, chuckled out loud at a few quips and pratfallish jokes, was expecting a movie full of fun, whit, those kind of movies that I am waxing nostalgic on these days, the kind rented from Video Stores on Friday night for the entire family to watch. I guess I got much of that, but not a whole lot of the humour hit home for me. More puns were needed, I guess.

The elevator pitch for this movie must have been fun. It's a WhoDunnit based around one of the most famouse (wow, Freudian 'e') WhoDunnits, "The Mouse Trap". For those who don't know, this famous play has been running in London's west end, from 1952 until The Pause ... paused it. The movie has a murder take place during the celebrations of its 100th performance. That brings in Inspector Stoppard (I assume he's a Tom; Sam Rockwell, Moon) and the incredibly eager fledgling Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan, Hanna; ten bonus points for spelling her first name correctly the first time!). The humour comes from the interactions between the two police folk, and a few of suspects, especially once every one starts comparing the act of investigating a murder against the tropes and trappings of the WhoDunnit they are all so intimate with.

Unfortunately, "not cheeky enough" is also my determination, to quote Kent's post. I just wished that every joke fell as charmingly and disarmingly as Stalker's observation, "It's all downhill from there," after describing the victim being hit in the face with a ski. You see, the character cannot help herself from jumping to conclusions (the running gag which mostly loses steam) but also quipping about every thing. To be honest, more quips! That said, the underlying stories (Stalker trying to break through the glass ceiling, Stoppard's familial woes) are interesting, but just not interesting... enough.

Troll, 2022, Roar Uthaug (The Wave) -- Netflix

OMG I loved this, but more for the campy, tongue firmly in cheek manner in which he chose to direct the movie, than the actual plot. You see, its a rather intentional by-the-numbers plot but its the Michael Bay Norway Method he chose to execute the movie that makes it so much fun. Oh, and the fact that we get to see a troll kaiju stomping through Oslo.

That said, I cannot help but compare it to the earlier flick with pretty much the same premise, Troll Hunter, in that real life & giant trolls make themselves known to the world. In much the way most kaiju movies begin, circumstances awaken a troll, in shadowy and unclear visuals, which forces The Government (of Norway) to reach out to a panel of experts, including paleontologist Nora Tidemann, whose father is a disgraced scientist who was convinced trolls were real. Not sure why a paleontologist is of use to this investigation, but of course, she's the only one to notice the big arm in the blurry protestor footage (they were digging a tunnel through protected mountains) so they bring her along when they follow the path of destruction and big ol footprints. 

Its on its way to Oslo! Call in military! Find a way to defeat it! Smashy smashy helicopters who get closer than they should! All the familiar kaiju fight maneuvers and failures are dragged out, as the big thing galumphs his way towards the city, which they, of course, are able to miraculously empty out before the big guy stomps his way through. There is a back story as to why he is on his way to Oslo, and a redemptive arc for her father, who was right all along. And some tragedy. And lots of Baysplosions. 

Uthaug has a LOT of fun.

Bullet Train, 2022, David Leitch (Dead Pool 2) -- download/Amazon

Speaking of having a lot of fun, Brad Pitt (Fury) tries his hand at being John Wick, but without all  the angst and dead puppies, but with all the violent, colourful characters and massive body count.

Pitt is Ladybug, another aging, angsty hitman attempting to hang his guns up. His handler tasks him with retrieving a mcguffin from a bullet train leaving Tokyo, which ends up full of other colourfully named assassins, and yakuza thugs, in a plot/conspiracy all tied together in a confusing, often frustrating knot. This is Leith wanting to do what Tarantino has done in the past, albeit with even more glitz and confetti, but more often just leaves us as confused as Ladybug spends most the movie.

To be honest, despite the morass of badly convoluted plot points, which leave me not even attempting to recap, the movie is a whole lot of fun. Well, fun scene by scene. Veteran Pitt is able to carry the movie along, ever convincing as a reluctant killer on a streak of incredibly bad luck, and even worse luck which he transfers to others around him, which... well, strangely benefits him. But yeah, all colour and action and reserved quipping. But it does not succeed in what it is attempting to be, which is to become a new cultural phenom generating sequels, which considering the Japanese novel source material, is readily available. 

Director Set: Select Selick

Perhaps my favourite podcast over the past few years is Blank Check with Griffin and David, which finds actor Griffin Newman (The Tick) and critic David Sims (The Atlantic) 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. They just ended their review of the films of Henry Selick.

For those who don't know, Selick is the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas.  I should clarify, if there's any confusion, he is the director of "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas".  So heavy is the Burton influence, and imposition of his name over the title that it's a film easily mistaken as a Burton film.

It's true that the film owes so much to its association with Burton, it's really Selick's direction, his sense of style, and his innovations in the world of filming stop motion animation, that make it stand out so boldy.  The things we ascribe almost exclusively with Burton - the morbid humour, the gothic sensibilities, the fascination with the ugly, gross, freakish and abnormal, the just plain weird -- those are traits that Selick shares with Burton, and maybe perhaps trumps Burton in his fascination with them.

In all of Selick's films (well, I can't speak to the live-action/animation debacle of Monkeybone, which I didn't watch) there is an underworld, or at least an alternate world, for the protagonists to venture through.  They seem perhaps a darker place of existence that may at first appear to be something brighter because of their sheer difference.  In Nightmare, there are many alternate worlds operating outside of the "real world", and through Jack Skellington, we inhabit probably the darkest of them all (and yet it's still full of joy and glee).  In James and the Giant Peach, James goes from a live action world to an animated one, where he befriends clothed bugs as they travel across the Atlantic in a gigantic piece of fruit. In Coraline there's the other realm, one that mirrors Coraline's own familiar, tiny world, only where everything is just as she (thinks she) wants it - happier, more attentive parents, more fun/less annoying neighbours, joys and delights meant for her.  In Wendell and Wild, the titular demon brothers live in an underworld realm that's largely inhabited by their father, a giant with an amusement park built on his belly.

In each of Selick's four stop-motion animated films, there is a character longing for a different reality, a different existence and then it finds its way to them.  In Nightmare, Jack wants something more than what he has, more than scares and frights, he wants joys and delights, even though they are sometimes two sides of the same coin so he takes the joyous of them all as if he is entitled to it.  In James..., James' orphaned existence with his sadistic aunts is even a few notches below that of Harry Potter on the misery index. Coraline in Coraline is lonely, sad and angry, and her parents can't bother to even look at her when she's talking to them...so when another realm presents itself, even with creepier undertones presenting, she's eager to be there.  In Wendell & Wild, we have two demons who are subjugated by their father, and long to be above ground, and they're willing to manipulate a traumatized 13-year-old longing for her own escape to get it.

Each stop-motion picture finds Selick dealing with a particular challenge.  For Nightmare, he's making a full-blown musical, and it really pushed the envelope in terms of complex camera work to get a really sweeping cinematic feel.  With James... Selick has an extended, 20-minute, live-action set piece that has real-life James (Paul Terry), experiencing every misery in the gross environment of his aunties Spiker and Sponge's (Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margolyes) ramshackle cliffside manor.  It's a very contained set, but also finds Selick using his tricks of design and forced perspective on a live-action scale.  Coraline found Selick working with 3D during the brief window of 3D-mania, and (having seen it on the big screen in 3D, I can attest) may be the only great 3D movie of the era.  Watching it in 2D recently, you can see there are moments that would have popped so much more in 3D... it's something even digital animation couldn't do that perhaps only stop-motion could, taking advantage of that extra dimension.  With Wendell & Wild, Selick wanted to step outside of telling a kid's story, securing a PG-13 commitment from Netflix before getting started, and so the question is, what can (and what should) he do with that increased latitude?

In every instance, Selick had either a collaborator, or some guiding point.  The discourse on Blank Check was that Selick is a bit of a difficult personality, and can get pretty heated with studios and interference in his work, so obviously it would take a special kind of relationship to get a project off the ground, and then completed.  With Nightmare he had Burton and Danny Elfman (not to diminish the contributions of Caroline Thompson who reworked the screenplay and songs and was dating Elfman at the time).  With James... he had the guidance of Roal Dahl's book, and Neil Gaiman's book for Coraline. For Wendell & Wild, he found an enthusiastic partner in Jordan Peele, who helped rewrite and refocus the script as well as produce and co-star in.  There is the stamp of all these collaborators on these projects, and there aren't huge leaps going from the works of Burton to Dahl to Gaiman to Peele.  They're not direct parallels, but they don't skew too far from one another stylistically.

So few and far between were major stop-motion pictures, and so potent was Burton's name associated with Nightmare, that most major, non-Aardman Studios (Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit) stop releases, were probably attributed to Burton by the public at large for decades.  I know I thought James... was Burton-affiliated somehow (I guess he was producer).  The next big stop-motion release after James was called "Tim Burton's" Corpse Bride" which Burton is actually credited as co-directing, further solidifying the confusion around Nightmare.  As such, most Laika studios productions -  Coraline, Parnorman, Boxtrolls - were perceived as being Burton-related by the masses, which, if not to the detriment of the film itself likely was detrimental to the directors and studio.  At the same time, Nightmare unfortunately created a sort of template for what an American stop-motion animation film should be - for kids, but a little creepy and weird.  That's the milieu that Selick operates in anyway, but it has hindered productions that aren't that, like Laika's Missing Link (which took in $26 million in box office, compared to the similarly themed, CGI Smallfoot, which was a massive $214 million success).

Nightmare has become such a cultural juggernaut over the past 25 years, spanning Hallowe'en to Christmas, it resurrects itself every year as a double-dipping holiday staple.  It's so visually striking it's inspired all manner of wardrobes, and dammit if it's not one of the best musicals of the past 30 years.  There are songs in James... but nothing remotely as earwormy as even the least of Nightmare's tracks.  In fact, watching James... for the first time recently, I kind of resented that they would even try including songs at all.  It's not a musical, and so they feel a bit half-assed in their insertion.

I dig Nightmare for the scale of the production...it spans multiple realities and intones so many more (I would love a sequel that visited some of the other holiday lands).  It's a visual feast in an exceptionally playful reality with so much to look at in its surreal designs that it can't help but inspire, delight and awe.  James... feels like a pitiable younger brother in comparison.  It's extended drudgery of an opening live action sequence is at once curious and off putting.  It doesn't feel natural at all and it's not friendly or welcoming to the viewer in the slightest.  Once James escapes into clay-mation land, hanging with the bug people, one has to wonder if the poor boy has hit his head and is bleeding out on a rock somewhere, dreaming all this.  In the end it proves it's not a dream and it's all the more confounding for it.  It's a much smaller reality than Selick's other works, though still full of invention and creative design, but it's more tedious than exciting as a story.

Coraline takes Gaiman's pre-teen reader and brings it popping to life, taking whatever liberties it sees fit to be as movement oriented as it can be.  As a character I find Coraline more striking than any of Selick's other designs.  The blue hair, yellow raincoat and mudders are just a wonderfully iconic visual combination (to the point that a doll with blue hair, and yellow raincoat is quickly identified as Coraline).  There's a cleverness to Coraline, in the characters, in the story, in the realities, that is hard to turn away from.  The individual pieces are all so eccentric, in performance, personality and visual design, and Selick doesn't shy away from being cheeky at all (with Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders playing a pair of aged, reclusive former burlesque performer) which makes the production so much livelier that it feels like anything could happen.  Even in the creepy factor, most animation of the past 30 years doesn't have anything as startling as people with buttons for eyes...the opening sequence where a doll is unstitched, restuffed, and resewn, is mildly upsetting (the stitch ripper on the mouth is only a few seconds in!).

Wendell & Wild has a lot going on. It starts with parental death and childhood trauma in its first five minutes, but also has a cracking "afro-punk" soundtrack including X-Ray Spex, Death, the Specials and TV on the Radio. The film is dealing a LOT with demons (metaphorical ones, yes, but I mean here literal demons), but they’re not very nefarious, nor are they very bright or all that threatening, but it’s amazing that all this underworld talk is paired up with the setting of a Catholic school, complete with James Hong’s delightfully scheming headmaster, Father Level Bests, and his old biddy servant nuns (“the penguins” he calls them). That our protagonist, Kat (Lyric Ross), has “the mark”, and develops powers as a “Hellmaiden” as also does the kindly nun, Sister Helly (Angela Bassett) is just mind boggling in the who Catholic context. In almost any other film, we’d be sitting with that dichotomy, but there’s no time to think too much about it here. The Hellmaiden thing is sort of a spoof of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, but again, the film doesn’t have enough time to linger on it. There’s a whole warning about the nefariousness and rot on society that is the prison-industrial complex to get through… and murder, and Kat learning to trust other people (including her new trans friend Raul), and herself again.  It's quite a bit diffrent aesthetically, with Selick messing around more with flatter, more 2-dimensional visual constructs, and scaling back the cleanliness of animation to try and escape any uncanny CGI valley comparisons.

I would love Peele and Selick to team up again, maybe on something even more adult, more in Peele's wheelhouse.  Maybe a proper stop-motion 3D horror film (still need to see Mad God), as it seems like Selick's interests are evolving to wanting to do something more adult in the format he's dedicated his life to.  

If I were to rank these, the difficulty comes in the top two for me, which is whether Coraline is the better film than Nightmare.  I don't even know which I enjoy more.  I've seen Nightmare enough times now that the familiarity doesn't hold my attention as strongly, which I find Coraline has maybe one or two small 3-5 minute sags in it.  I would like it to be just a little tighter.  Nightmare is kind of a phenomenon for a reason, and it's still an incredible viewing experience in spite of the phenomenon, and I think that may be why it gets the edge at top spot, but I don't feel good about it.

Next is easily Wendell & Wild.  It doesn't quite hold up as solidly as a story as Nightmare or Coraline but it's never dull either. Only seeing it the once so far, I wonder how it will withstand multiple viewings, whether it appreciates with knowing where it all goes, or if part of the initial charm is watching it work to sew all its disparate threads together.  James and the Giant Peach is not terrible, but easily the weakest of Selick's work (outside of Monkeybone).  It had its charms but it seems more spartan than the rich worlds Selick otherwise provides.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Paradise Highway

2022, Anna Gutto (Home for Christmas) -- download

This is one of those movies that has me wondering how it got made. The director, and writer, Anna Gutto, is more known for being a playwright, with some acclaim in her native Norway. The movie itself is a co-production of America, Germany and Switzerland. Something about it said, "There is a story here, behind the production" but the Internet has been no help. And unfortunately, its a rather bland Straight To movie, with only some minorly interesting bits, but fit perfectly into my Saturday Morning Waking Up movie watching routine. Its not Thriller nor Action enough to warrant a lot of attention in North America, nor does it smack of passion project. So, either we have a failure of intent, or a decent example of the working-through-it aspect of creating films that I generally support, i.e. it was made to make a movie, gaining further skill, further introducing the director to American audiences, and proving that she and her team have serviceable enough skills to do other things in the business.

Sally (an almost unrecognizable Juliette Binoche, Godzilla) is a trucker, doing illicit smuggling on behalf of a gang her convict brother Dennis (Frank Grillo, Boss Level) is beholden to. That is, until the cargo she is smuggling turns out to be a young girl heading in just the horrible direction you expect. She is forced to make the right choice, and goes on the run with the girl. Meanwhile retired FBI Agent Gerick (Morgan Freeman, Oblivion) is helping greenhorn Agent Sterling (Cameron Monaghan, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order) figure out what is going on, to disassemble the human trafficking ring. Sally and the girl, along with her network of equally gritty women truckers, are trying to hide out long enough to figure out how to do right by the traffickers, and save her brother and the girl's life.

You can see a decent melodrama trying to claw its way out of this movie but it continually waffles between hard bitten human drama, without much real bite, and typical D-grade crime thriller. Binoche plays Sally admirably, with them shoe-horning in her as being from Quebec, to explain the accent sneaking through on occasion. Meanwhile, Freeman is just his typical aging cop role, spending much of the time swearing or looking at the ground contemplatively, as if the dust will show the clues he needs to find Sally. Grillo is just Grillo, which should tell you everything you need about his character. Nothing really unexpected happens, nor is it melodramatic enough to be impactful or satisfying.

Commenting on Comics (Toasty Ed.)

Sandman, 2022, Netflix

Paper Girls, 2022, Amazon

Ms Marvel, 2022, Disney+

Taking Ken'ts suggestion, I will try to shy away from commenting too much on the Toxic Fandom related with these shows; well at least, two of them -- not sure if Paper Girls was on anyone's radar enough to generate Internet Popular Outrage Over Nothing.

Saying there would never be a screen media adaptation of The Sandman, the seminal non-superhero comic that started in the 90s, is like saying, "They could never adapt The Lord of the Rings." In other words, it was entirely legit to say such a thing, as they are such beloved entities, how could anyone do them justice? But it happened, and despite some minor quibbles, I am a huge fan of both. Both are grand and sweeping in their own right, but also very very different from their source material. And that's just fine.

I remember picking up one of those early issues of The Sandman from Mukey's bed in university res. I didn't much like the art work, but once I read a bit of the story, I was hooked. I also liked the idea of where it came from, in that Gaiman was tasked with writing stories to connect DC's superhero properties with the horror & fantasy properties that they also owned, such as House of Mystery, and the ones that blurred the lines, such as Hellblazer. And thus began a life long love for this title, and all its multitudes of spin-offs, until my comic book reading days faded.

My participation in this early example of "fandom" was pretty deep for the time. We owned all the comics, and a lot of the merchandise (such as the collector cards), read the novelizations & anthologies (where I also scored an unpublished Dream short story by an author friend of mine), bought the toys and we even had a black leather jacket painted with an iconic image of Death. We had become fans of Gaiman enough to adore that episode of Prisoners of Gravity where he keeps on talking (and talking) as they reduce him to the lower third. I even got to play the part of The Corinthian for Mukey, as he did his own versions of the comic covers for an art school project. This is all to say that the images of his characters were pretty solidly imprinted in my head.

Decades later, the characters are still there, while the stories have faded somewhat. So, when the adaptation was announced by Gaiman, I was respectfully a skeptic. Sure, they would do what they would do, even with his blessing and guidance. All adaptations for screen have to be tweaked somewhat to lend themselves to the media. Most are butchered. And most creators are wearing blinders caught up in the fun of making it happen. But I can honestly say, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it. It resurrected the memories of the stories for me, of how much I enjoyed the plot thread, even along with the episodic nature of monthly comic books, and the disparate characters. I really, truly enjoyed it.

Morpheus (Tom Sturridge, Velvet Buzzsaw) is the god of dreams... no, not god, but definitely a god-like entity, but more the anthropomorphic icon of dreams, along with his other siblings called The Endless. In the show we meet Dream, Death, Desire and Despair. There are more yet to come. Dream (or Morpheus, or Oneiros) is captured in 1916 by a sorcerer seeking to capture Death and force her to return his son. Instead he gets Dream, and takes from him three of his talismans: his pouch of sand, his bright red gem, and his intricate helm. With Dream captive, the sorcerer gains long life and some minor powers, and for over a hundred years, he tortures and torments Dream seeking even more. In the waking world, the lack of the King of Dreams is seen by "the sleepy sickness", as some fall into dreams and do not awake, while others go mad from the inability to sleep. In The Dreaming, Morpheus' realm, things just fall apart without their liege and many nightmares & dreams escape into the real world, *ahem* The Waking World; it's all real.

Things really kick off when he escapes.

A lot happens in these 10 (no, 11 !) episodes, as it should in a serialized comic adaptation, but they do a good job of tying together the overarching story (Dream rebuilding his realm, and collecting his missing vassals) but still giving us the little nuggets of individual characterizations and individual comic issue moments. 

We meet all the familiar players including the delightfully dysfunctional Cain & Able, and get to finally hear what Goldie's *meep urkle* sounds like. Squee! Matthew the Raven, voiced by Patton Oswald, the man who blurs the line between being the voice of imaginary creatures and himself, is spot on. Some choices are surprising, such as Kirby Howell-Baptiste (Veronica Mars) as Death and Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones) as Lucifer. Others are like characters lifted from the book, such as Boyd Holbrook (The Predator) as The Corinthian or David Thewlis (Wonder Woman) as John Dee. And some are just delightful in their entire reimagining, like Jenna Coleman's (Doctor Who) Johanna Constantine (TINE as in VINE).

All in all, I was satisfied a depiction, but I couldn't leave this post without slightly commenting on some of the changes. Am I bothered when genders or races of fictional characters change? Not really. While I am the first to be disappointed that Death was not depicted as a petite, spunky, white-skinned (as in, alabaster white) goth chick, my internal image is based on 30 years of established iconography and that's a little hard to alter. But the portrayal of the character, and not the image, was faithful, in her gentleness, her compassion and her dedication to her mission. Dream is forever mopey, morose about what he went through, and Death is there to call him on his bullshit, and that is what solidified her in the role for me.

So, what about Sturridge as Dream? Not spot-on but entirely satisfying, once I got over his pursed-lips pout. But the pout had to be depicted, or what would Death have to tease him about. He does alter the character ever so slightly, in that this is a human actor portraying a character often seen more as mist and shadows than a person. But he does the "growing humanity" very well, as his time away from The Dreaming has more of an impact on him than he ever realizes.

All in all, loved it. Season 2 please!

Meanwhile, I cannot say much about the authenticity of Paper Girls as I only got through a few of the comics. 

It's the 80s and a group of girls delivering newspapers by bicycle get caught up in a Time War. IIRC the comic book took a bit longer to establish their inadvertent friendships connected by the early morning delivery of rolled newspapers (something I did myself in the late 70s), but the show almost immediately dispenses with it, diving into the time travel antics. THIS is where the girls get to know each other, as do we.

Its kind of a wonky show. Given that it spends almost all of its time dealing with anachronistic portrayals, I guess that comes with the property. But, and I cannot put my finger directly on it, its a sort of low key mood. I almost dropped it, but very glad I persevered, as it was rather rewarding, in that I got what I usually want more of -- a new experience.

Gawds, could I be any more vague? The show has a rather dream like quality to it, in that some things happen and you are never sure quite why, given that they are making choices most formula TV doesn't, which I guess is by staying rather faithful to the comic.

We have Erin "new girl" (Riley Lai Nelet, Altered Carbon), Tiff (Camryn Jones, Perpetual Grace LTD), KJ (Fina Strazza, Above the Shadows) and Mac (Sofia Rosinsky, Fast Layne). Erin is the Asian girl, dealing with being new to town, and family challenges. Her future is not bright. Tiff is the motivated, smart girl with a plan. KJ is rich, with a desire to not only be defined by that. Mac is the tough kid from the wrong side of the tracks, angry and punky. Her future is not bright, at all. Three of  them already have a contentious comradery, which they quickly incorporate New Girl into, but the time travel antics not only force them together, but also challenge their ties. How the fuck do they get back? How do they survive the very real dangers of a real time travel war they got dragged into?

Now completing this post months later, the vague reasons as to why "i liked it" are even more vague.

Kent described the show as propulsive, as in always moving forward. Not knowing the source material as precisely as him, I did wonder about the forward motion in a few bits of a few episodes, but I also understand the need for TV to slow down, take its bearings, let the plot breathe a bit. It also took this time to have some time travel shenanigans, as the girls met or observed their older selves. There was none of this "touch and we end the universe" BS, just border of adolescence/teen girls being exposed to their own futures, for better or for worse and trying to digest & cope. This is where the cast really shined. The show is not polished, often very low key, but I am sooooo glad I pushed through it.

Kent's post.

Meanwhile, with nothing really ever low key at all, we get the vibrance and wonkiness that is Ms Marvel which was a delight to watch!

By all means of the current meme fueled culture debated, this show is woke. We cannot argue that a MCU show about a Muslim Pakistani-American teenage girl becoming a superhero is not trying to identify and fill a gap. But I honestly thought this is what made it so utterly, fucking charming. How many more superhero stories do I need to see about white, 30sumthin, American males? Like the real world, the MCU is bigger, and broader, and brighter! Let me see it! And very little of American pop culture ever gives us the Pakistani backdrop, with that niche filled by India. 

Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani, her literal first role [WOW!]) is a teen girl living in Jersey City. She's more than a bit of an Avenger / Captain Marvel fangirl, writing fanfic, doing cosplay and plastering her bedroom with posters. Her parents play the typical "tiger mom" role and don't understand or support her obsession. And she finds a "bangle" in her grandmother's possessions -- more a bracer than a traditional bangle from the Indian subcontinent. But it gives Kamala light powers, the ability to form objects from light, making her a somewhat Green Lantern for Marvel. In the comics, she is exposed to a substance that gives her actual body powers, but in this case, it mostly works. Almost immediately, she is beset by learning to master her powers, hide them from her family, and deal with the infamy using them comes with. And the darker forces from her family's past come seeking the bangle.

Initially, with the bright and colourful opening, this is unlike any other Marvel series. Its vibrant, fun and Iman Vellani is just utterly brilliant as the character. Not being an Internet Troll, I don't care if I cannot relate to the character; the MCU was not just made for my personal demographic. But the way she plays her character lets us really see the challenging world through her eyes. She's just good at playing the character. Later on, the series does kind of lag as the weight of the MCU and making connections, and playing out the expected "bigger picture" situations take over, but she continues to carry the story forward.

I doubt we will get it, but I would love to see a second season, as the character can only be better after we have dispensed with the required origin story.

Kent's post.

KWIF: After Yang (+4)

Kent's Week In Film #4: 

After Yang - 2022, d. Kogonada - Crave
Athena - 2022, d. Romain Gavras - Netflix
Marry Me - 2022, d. - Crave
Man Hunt - 1941, d. Fritz Lang - Criterion Channel
Scarlet Street - 1945, d. Fritz Lang - Criterion Channel

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There have been many films (and TV shows and books and comics and video games) in the past 10 (20/30/40+) years that have delved into artificial intelligence, androids and sentient mechanical beings and their various states of existence and influence.  It goes back as far (if not further) than the novel and film Metropolis (like 2001: A Space Odyssey, the novel and film were simultaneous products) where an android is given the visage of woman who leads an uprising of the working class into destroying the city's machines which both keep the city functioning but are also a tool of division.  

One of the common questions about androids is "do they want to be human?"  This question is asked about the android ("Techno", as they are called here) Yang by his adoptive father to the clone girlfriend he didn't know Yang had (or was capable of having).  She laughs in disbelief, "it's such a human thing to ask... we always assume that other beings want to be human. What's so great about being human?"  Instead she comments that Yang struggled with his identity in a different way.  Yang (Justin H. Min) was brought (bought) into Jake (Colin Ferrell) and Kira's (Jodie Turner-Smith) family after they adopted Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) as they wanted to make sure she grew up with knowledge of her Chinese culture.  Yang was created for the purpose of being a sibling (the company making the technos is called "Brothers and Sisters Incorporated") to adopted Chinese children, but Yang questioned whether or not he was actually Chinese, not wondering about his humanity.  It's just one of many resonant elements in this remarkably deep film with a threadbare plot to service them all.

After his years of service with Mika and family, Yang experiences a critical malfunction and cannot be restored.  Mika is understandably distraught, even in knowing Yang is a techno she still knows him as her brother, her friend, her teacher, her caregiver.  He's always there when Mom and Dad are not.  Jake seems dispassionately committed to figuring out how to revive Yang, it's only as we explore the depths of Jake's efforts that we understand his dispassion, his drive is concealing deep grief over the loss of a member of his family.  Yang was not an appliance, he was a son.  Kira seems to busy with work to even think about her grief (or anyone else's) most of the time, but it's also a mask to conceal her sadness.

In the extensive lengths Jake goes to try and repair Yang (which seems to be much further than what most people do with their Technos) he authorizes a dubious technician to crack open Yang's core, and retrieve his memory bank (the technician believes it to be spyware).  In meeting a studier of Technos at the museum, he's given an apparatus to view Yang's memory bank, brief 3-second snippets of time that start to reveal that there was far more about Yang that he didn't know than did.

After Yang sad, beautiful, mesmerising rumination on what constitutes family, what defines identity, coping with loss, and how memories are formed and triggered. It's also about our perception of others, how we see them, but not necessarily know them. It's also examines parenting and relationships, all set in the backdrop of a future society of androids and clones and self-driving cars. It's an aesthetically beautiful film, which seems to be hopeful for a better future (one changed by androids and clones and other unseen advancements, I'm sure), but one that doesn't forget there's a very human aspect that follows our society wherever we wind up, still dealing with paranoia, intolerance, money and death. 

I had become aware of After Yang mid-year in 2022, intentionally steering clear of learning too much.  I'm not sure sometimes what inspires me to keep in the dark about a film, when most of the time I have no problems reading review after review and watching trailers multiple times.  But After Yang seemed like something I should keep a surprise, but there was nothing imploring that I do.  Having now seen the film, it's not like there's any great story surprises or spoilers to be had, it's just a beautiful, deeply felt film that's one of the best films of the year.

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Unlike After Yang, I hadn't even heard of Athena at all in 2022.  It was only upon listening to a best-movies-of-2022 podcast (one of many) that Athena was even mentioned.  The short version was it was about civic unrest in Paris, but featured a stunning introductory single-take sequence.  Although the critic was citing that "single take sequences" have been overhyped and seemed to imply there's been a critical blowback to the artisticness of the long single-take, I've always been a sucker for one, and impressed by them.

Athena, it turns out, is an absolute stunner of a socio-political action-tragedy that grabs ahold of you from moment one and doesn't really ever let go. After video is released of the death of 13-year-old Idir as a result of an apparent police beating, his brother, Abdel, a decorated soldier, pleads for peace and letting the police sort it out. Revolutionary brother Karim has no time for the inevitable lies and cover ups and has coordinated an attack on the police station (armed primarily with fireworks) that retreats to the largely Muslim populated neighbourhood of apartment complexes called Athena, a concrete jungle that serves them well as a fortified stronghold. While there, Abdel implores the young men to stop the violence (falling on deaf ears) while helping the families leave before being arrested himself with others trying to provide safe passage for the retreat. Their other brother, the drug dealer Moktar, is trying to get his supply out of the complex before any federal raids happen, and seems to find the dissension as a result of his brother's death more annoying than anything. Karim is a rather cunning strategist of the violent protest (but not yet deadly), a general navigating and commanding the different arenas of conflict. As the night shakes on and the stakes rise (and the protests spread throughout the country) word starts to leak that Idir's death may have been at the hands of far-right agents looking to light a match on the powderkeg, so Karim's demands for peace involving the immediate arrest of the officers involved may not even be a possible solution.

The film's power comes largely from its orchestration, shot as a series of long single takes (the first, an epic 12-minute sequence spanning multiple locations and a highway chase in a stolen police van is worth the price of admission alone), typically following a single character, that offers constant movement, and building tension as we see the conflict and strategising from multiple sides (so technically accomplished is it that Netflix released a sort of "how'd they do that" companion documentary with the film.)It's not operating with a conventional narrative, and as such there are a lot of gaps in understanding the character dynamics or, in some cases, motivations (at least on first viewing). But it's a relentlessly taut and constantly engaging movie, a literal edge-of-your-seat thriller, one playing with complicated themes that it handles too thinly perhaps, but never deigns to tell you that its protagonists are right or wrong (though revealing Idir's killer as a pre-credits sequence does seem a bit of a *ahem* cop-out).

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Marry Me is not without its charms but, frankly it starts with a pretty stupid conceit and never seems all that interesting in exploring the conceit with any sense of reality.  It's a film not without its charms (I feel like Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson are charming in their sleep) but the charm of them together still doesn't make up for the real lack of exploration of the effect their very different worlds have on each other.  

I mean, megastar Jennifer Lopez (or whatever her analog is called in this film) is marrying some young, hot, South American superstar in a big public concert extravaganzaa, except just before the actual wedding part of the performance, it's leaked that buddy is having an affair with JLo's assistant.  So she calls off the wedding, but the show must go on.  Owen Wilson is an average divorced part-time dad and middle school math teacher who is scoring points by taking his daughter to the concert thanks to his best friend, Sarah Silverman (love SS, but not understanding their friendship at all in this one).  He's holding SS's "Marry Me"sign when JLo, in a very vulnerable state, pulls him on stage and they get married.  Her agents convince OW to stick with the marriage in public for 3 months, but in that time they get to know each other and the usual romance things happen.

Except that JLo's character here is one of the world's biggest stars, and her crazy marriage stunt would put a blinding spotlight on OW that's so huge he'll be seeing spots for a lifetime.  He wouldn't be able to go anywhere or do anything normally...well, ever.  TMZ would be following him where ever he went, just waiting for him to do anything they could dis or dish on. His very average, comfortable way of life that JLo seems so endeared by, would be ruined within 6 months and this film only sort-of acknowledges that.  But, whatever, it's a romantic fantasy right? But then....who is this fantasy for? The audience for these types of movies are typically women, and yet the fantasy is a Super Successful, Super Rich, Super Attractive spontaneously marries a very average guy with perhaps a bit of above average charm?  How many women is this fantasy catering to?  Or is this meant to be bait for women to take their boyfriends/husbands to a romantic movie and engage them with the fantasy?

There's one pretty good song, one or two decent songs, and a couple real stinkers in this, so it's a mixed bag on that front.  The big stage performances are...okay, but you can tell they were filmed during COVID times with the audience camera trickery. And there's just some of the worst camera work I've seen in a mainstream movie in a long time...for as amazing as the wardrobes are in this, it's a really ugly-looking movie.

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Man Hunt was released mid-World War II, and is the first of legendary director Fritz Lang's anti-Nazi films shot in America.  The story finds a notable British big game hunter scoping out Hitler with a long-range rifle only to be assaulted by security before he can shoot.  He's interrogated over and over, where he assures he never intended to actually shoot Hitler, that it was just an exercise in scope-hunting, the thrill to see if he could.  Of course the Nazis want a confession that the British government had tasked him with assassinating the fuhrer to incite war, but Captain Alan Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon, the Jon Hamm of the 1940's) will never sign a lie, no matter how much they torture him.  So instead of beating him to death, they plan to stage an accident, that he fell off a cliff.  They push him off at night, only when they go to retrieve him the next morning they discover the ground below is boggy and that the soft surface allowed him to survive.  The man hunt begins.

The film has a fairly tense opening act (though a little tame by today's intensity standards) as Thorndike struggles to escape Germany, survive the hunt, and evade capture.  Even upon reaching English shores he's not safe. They know enough about him to make his life complicated. But in fleeing his pursuers he happens into the home of Jerry Stokes (Joan Bennett), a lower class British woman who is completely charmed by this invader in her home.  The second act of the film kind of side steps the tension of Thorndike's pursuit for, instead, a soft-touch meet-cute wront-side-of-the-tracks romantic sub-plot that is far too congenial to fit with the remainder of the film.   Bennett's awful cockney accent threatens to ruin every scene she appears in (and often does).  Pidgeon doesn't even attempt an accent, just stiff posture and a few utterances of "old boy" here and there to do the trick.

I did a quick scan through British writer Geoffrey Household's "Rogue Male", a novella serialized in The Atlantic in 1939, which tells the tale rather grippingly from the first person perspective and not a hint of a romantic subplot (the second act is more fraught pursuit across the English countryside). Likely the romance was an injection of the American studio system's requirements on the story, but, if not for the tonal shift, it could have still worked pretty well.  The third act is rushed but makes its point well...Nazis fucking suck, which needed to be reiterated a lot in America in 1941, and, well, still does.

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Lang would work with Joan Bennett again, twice, actually, with 1944's The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, both also with Edward G. Robinson.  While I have not watched the former, Bennett's performance in Scarlett Street is phenomenal.  As much as she was running around like a lovesick puppy with Walter Pidgeon in Man Hunt she's a different kind of love sick as her Kitty March here basically is just a complete dame for Dan Duryea's callously charming, and slap-happy Johnny.  But Edward G. Robinson's Christopher Cross (not of "Sailing" fame), a lowly bank teller, unhappily married to a widowed policeman's wife, one day comes across Johnny slapping Kitty senseless and he gets a little moon-eyed for the dame.  A little late night drink, and the two make assumptions about one another (he believes her to be an up-and-coming actress, she believes him to be a very successful painter).  

Johnny coaxes Kitty into getting money out of Chris by feigning interest in him, and the turns of events get pretty wild from there. It's not often that old films can surprise me, because usually if they're of any quality they've been aped, redone, or ripped off so thoroughly that there's no surprises left to be had.  But this one kept turning and I loved every minute of it, up to the point where Chris does something that seems way out of character for him.  Where it goes from there deals with the repercussions of it nicely, but I'm not sure it was in his nature in the first place.

The story is good, but the characters here, Kitty, Johnny, and Chris (and even Chris' wife Adele, Kitty's best friend Millie and other supporting cast) are all very well drawn characters, who have a much more complex view of the world than we usually see in classic cinema.  Kitty is the tough talking dame, but she's the epitome of all-talk, no action.  Johnny calls her "lazy legs" because she just can't be bothered to get up (she spits grape seeds on the floor and flicks cigarette butts willy nilly among other uncouth behaviours), she even quit modelling because it was just too strenuous.  Chris, meanwhile, is the consummate sensitive artist, a dabbler in painting but portrayed as cow-toeing to his wife, being emasculated doing dishes and cleaning up, as she harps on about the life he doesn't give her and the kind of man her dead husband was (his picture still hanging over the couch) in comparison.  Even Johnny has more going on that just being an utter shit...he has dreams, but clearly no faculty for achieving them.  He gets lost in his vices, and uses Kitty's obsession with bad boys to treat her poorly when he feels like it, but drop her a lump of sugar also when he feels like it.  He's not a smooth operator, but smooth enough for Kitty.

This one was wild.

Double Dose / Horror Not Horror: Ti West in '22

 (Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...or genre or theme...pretty simple.  Today: it's the first two entries of Ti West's X-Factor trilogy, both of which came out in 2022 to increasing acclaim....)

("Horror, Not Horror" movies are those that toe the line of being horror movies but don't quite comfortably fit the mold.  I'm not a big horror fan (Toast is the horror buff here), but I do quite like these line-skirting type movies, as we'll see.)

X - 2022, d. Ti West - AmazonPrime
Pearl - 2022, d. Ti West - Rental

Horror is supposed to make you uncomfortable. It's supposed to upset you in some way. It's supposed to be a view of the world in its darkest light, which I suppose in the end is there to make us feel, in some small way, better about where we are.  It's also supposed to excite, and, for a long time, titillate.

The marriage between sex and violence was firmly established in the 70's with exploitation films, but also in the news, with the very American phenomenon of serial killers targeting sex workers.  Exploitation, slasher and modern horror movies, it could be said, started as a reaction to the violence, and a fascination we as a society have with these crimes, and the criminals who perpetrate them.  Sometimes these films, like in a Peckinpah, Di Palma or Scorscse, the film is more interested in what makes the perpetrators tick, providing the audience a POV into the warped world, and some other times these film are just trying to bring the back-of-the-brain lingering sense of unease and dread out to the forefront.

Ti West's X is a step back from either of those lines of thinking towards an examination of an era, of a particular period in time, and ruminating on the marriage between sex and violence, but also reminding us  in the background that there's another key participant in this throuple, religion.

We open with a farmstead, and a lot of blood. A sheriff and his team both in awe and repulsed by the gory scene they're stepping through.  Cut back 24 hours.  It's 1979 (the date filling the screen with big, bold American flag stylized numbers, reminding us that this is AMERICA) where we meet Maxine (Mia Goth), a cocaine-fuelled stripper being promised the world by her exceptionally congenial, smooth-talking boyfriend Wayne (Martin Henderson, Torque) as they head out to the same old farmstead to shoot an adult movie.  Maxine is convinced she's going to be a superstar. In the van with them is easy-going porn starlet Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow, Christmas with the Campbells) -- who stylizes herself after Marilyn Monroe -- and her sometimes beau Jackson (Kid Cudi, Entergalactic) -- a Marine who served in 'Nam -- as well as cameraman RJ (Owen Campbell) - who thinks he's going to make "a movie" out of this trash -- and RJ's girlfriend he dragged along with him to do sound, Lorraine (Jenna Ortega, Wednesday), who is trying her damnedest not to freak out once she learns what kind of movie they're making.

They arrive at the somewhat dilapidated farmstead where they're renting the bunkhouse.  Wayne encounters the octogenarian owner, Howard (Stephen Ure, Mortal Engines) who greets them with a shotgun and suspicion before he recalls the arrangements he made.  He warns them to keep out of sight and to steer clear of his wife, as she gets confused and easily excited.  They quickly get busy with the production.  While Bobby-Lynne and Jackson are performing, Maxine tours the property, swimming in the nearby pond (which houses a croc, leading to the best shot of the film) and then spying Howard's wife, Pearl (also Mia Goth) who welcomes her inside with lemonade.  Pearl looks at Maxine intently, making her uncomfortable.  She downs her lemonade and goes to head back when Pearl start pointing out how pretty Maxine is, and how pretty she used to be, pointing at photos on the wall, where the resemblance between young Pearl and Maxine is uncanny.  There's some sourness in Pearl's wistfulness, and the whole situation unnerves Maxine, especially when Pearl starts stroking her flesh.  Maxine sneaks away when Howard returns from town, warned by Pearl of his jealousy.

Maxine shoots her sex scene in the barn, and Pearl sneaks out and watches, clearly curious about her new visitors, and titillated by what she sees.  She brushes her hair and puts on an older lady negligee and tries to seduce Howard, who pushes her away, telling her his heart can't take it.  Meanwhile, the evening sets and the crew sit around having a frank discussion about the nature of sex in cinema, the conversation mostly led by Lorraine, whose great trepidation about making a pornographic film, has turned into curiosity and she wants to be in the film.  RJ protests, and Wayne takes him outside to have a chat about the liberated woman.  RJ can't handle it.  He goes to leave everyone behind, when he encounters Pearl, who tries to seduce him, but he is repulsed and is brutally murdered for his response (though it was likely his fate either way).  Pearl, it seems, when not given what she desires, will take her pleasure in other forms.

By this point we're an hour into this 100-minute film when the first murder happens, and barring the ominous music that plays throughout, the tenor of the opening hour is not one of horror.  It's a more thoughtful and considerate examination of 70's attitudes towards sex, and sex on film.  As cited, films like Deep Throat and risquee European entries like Emmanuelle, were actually drawing mainstream crowds, as these types of adult films were being made with scripts and a strange air of respectability.  There was a small window of time, pre-Reagan, when attitudes towards sex were becoming increasingly liberal.  But throughout the background of X, there is, on every TV set we see, a televangelist preaching his sermon, demonizing the sins of the flesh.  This is the conflicting nature of America, founded by pilgrims who were escaping an increasingly liberal Europe for a new land where their puritanical nature could rule, but also creating a land where liberty and freedom to be left to do as one pleases are founding tenets.  There's inherent conflict between the religious puritanism and the rights and freedoms Americans should have (rights and freedoms for some, not for all).  We see this conflict in Pearl, as well as in Lorraine, both drawn to sexual liberty, but being constrained by their religious upbringings.  

t's a great looking film, with nearly every scene West shoots full of intention and purpose.  There are some interesting edits, some rapid cuts back-and-forth between different things happening simultaneously, sometimes showing a parallel, sometimes juxtaposing.  It's all quite clever without announcing itself as such.  Very little feels forced here, and despite being pretty predictable in the broadest sense it's a pretty surprising film.  I was expecting Texas Chainsaw Massacre but it's far more laid back than that.  

I think the first hour (and the film in general) would have worked better had it not had the ominous music.  There's a lightness to the crew making The Farmer's Daughter that is undercut by the score, and while there is a tension to Howard and Pearl's interactions with the younger players, it shouldn't be so heavily underlined that they're where the threat lies.  X is promoted as a horror movie, and yeah, once the killings start, it's less pleasant, but also maybe feeling inevitable.  But it's also not your typical slasher movie and it doesn't play your typical cat-and-mouse slasher movie games.  At least half the deaths are somewhat comedic in nature, whether it be the surprise, or just the after-gags.  The reality is Pearl and Howard are a rather frail 80+-year-old couple.  They're only a threat because they're not that threatening.

But is X horror. Yeah, it is, but a very different horror film

I enjoyed X a lot, but Pearl is another beast entirely.  We open on the farmstead we just left in X, except the house is being viewed from the barn, the barn doors creating a frame making the scene more of a 4:3 ratio rather than a widescreen.  The house is pristine, gorgeous, vibrant, like it's freshly painted, with the grass so green. The music kicks in and it's a grand, sweeping Gone With the Wind type orchestration, full of drama and glory.  The credits start popping up on screen and they're in a full-blown old-timey script, long and flowing looping letters.  As the camera pulls focus through the barn doors into true widescreen, it's a Technicolor daydream.  Every colour seems primary, and so, so vibrant.

Pearl (Mia Goth) is in her room admiring herself in a dress, twirling, dancing, joyfully, until her mother appears, stern-faced, disapproving, admonishing her in German for taking one of her dresses without permission, and that she has chores to do out in the barn. Pearl comes out the front door in her pigtails and overalls, a very Dorothy Gale look professing some sort of innocence, a stark contrast to Goth, naked under her overalls and insinuating sexuality in X.   Pearl dances around the barn as she pitches hay and talks sweetly to the animals, professing something more out of life.  You could swear she was about to bust into song.  In comedically waddles a goose, quacking away, and Pearl's eyes and expression change.  The pitchfork in her hands turns from dance companion to weapon (not forgetting how she wielded it in X), and she stabs the goose, and we see her take the pitched goose through the technicolor woods (looking SO much like a studio set, and yet it's not) to the docs where she feeds the goose to the gator in the pond.  

In a short span of time Pearl distinguishes itself tonally from X, but the connective threads are pretty much everywhere, sometimes overt, other times subtly.  Whats clear is these films are companion pieces, not independent works, though they both satisfyingly exist on their own.

Pearl continues with its technicolor daydream from start to finish, with its score from Tyler Bates and Tim Williams staying with the sweeping orchestral, era specific sound, with only a hint of downtempo menace at very specific and apt timing.  Though so bright and colourful, it's not a happy film (it's a follow-up to a horror film after all, providing an origin story for X's chief antagonist), as Pearl is dealing with her severe (very German) mother, an infirm father, a husband who left her to go to war, and the strains of a pandemic (Spanish Flu), all of which are constraining her to the farmstead when she desires nothing more but to go out into the world and dance.

When she goes into town (primarily to retrieve father's medicine) she steals time to go to the moving pictures, loving the dancing movies the most.  She meets the projectionist (David Cornsweet), a dashing, handsome bohemian who flirts heavily with the pretty little lady.  She later fantasizes about him, while also being angry about it ("NO! I'm a married woman!" she yells, almost child-like to no one).  She learns from her sister-in-law that there's an audition in town for a role in a regional dance troupe, where they'll go from town-to-town across the state bringing joy to the townspeople and hospitalized.  Pearl knows Mama will never allow it, but she's doing it all the same.

She's constantly fighting with Mama, but at at one point her mother tells her about her reality, about the dreams she had that never came true.  Mama is pragmatic, a realist, despite wanting more, she can't even contemplate anything other than where she is, and she resents Pearl's youthful ambitions.  But also, Mama sees what Pearl does when she thinks no one is watching, she knows there's something wrong with her daughter and she fears what she might do out in the world.  Pearl steals away into the night to visit the Projectionist, who shows her a little film he picked up in Europe, which is an old-timey stag fillum, and he fills Pearls head with dreams of taking her to Europe and putting her up on the big screen in movies like that.  Pearl is not repulsed by the idea or the film, but mostly she just likes the idea of leaving and being a star.  Pearl puts every hope she has into the audition, she must get the part, and as the audience, even though we suspect (or know from X) what lies beneath, Pearl's aching desire is so emphatic we want it for her to.  And the audition is a spectacular moment in film,

In some ways Pearl is a coming-of-age story with fits of violence, where this young woman is faced not only with the crushing realities her mother has been trying to prepare her for, but also with the aching realities of self.  In the last 20 minutes of the film, Goth delivers a 5-minute monologue which lays out, plain as day, every truth Pearl knows about herself in devastating depth.  Yes, she's a psychopath, but she doesn't want to be, and she doesn't know how to deal with it.  It's just another part of her life that she's trying to escape.  

To answer the question, Is it horror? No, it really isn't. At all. It's a suspenseful drama, a character study, a stylistic exercise, and a piece of a larger puzzle all at once.  There are so many parallels between Pearl and Maxine that it would almost suggest something paranormal (except no such suggestion is ever made).  There are character traits, ambitions, and moment that resemble each other, and somehow in X, Pearl sensed that all in Maxine, she basically saw herself, and was horrified, more by who she no longer was than by what Maxine is.   There are such strong connective tissues between Pearl and X, big and small things that will likely more clearly reveal themselves when the third part of this trilogy is released, but the link of sex, violence, religion and Americana seems to be at the heart of it.  

The technicolor daydream of Pearl is so beautiful to watch, so inviting in a way that no other horror (or horror-adjacent) film that I can recall is.  Toasty has been following West's career on the blog and noted with his review of X that West kind of stepped away from horror filmmaking for a while.  X as a return to the genre posits that he clearly has something more on his mind, and Pearl quite confirms that he's out to reinvent if not the genre, than himself as a filmmaker.  I can't wait to see what MaxXxine has in store.

  

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Confess, Fletch

2022, Greg Mottola (Paul) -- download

Kent just posted about this one, and pretty much says everything I would have said, but ... better?

I am not sure why I downloaded this one, but I do religiously watch all my Trailer sources (IMDB, YouTube, Plex, etc.) looking for interesting things, much of which I will never get around to actually seeing. But I agree with Kent, that this one was pretty much buried promotionally. I am wondering whether just seeding things into the New section of whatever streaming service you run is the low effort, to go method these days, as the purple suits know its more likely to hit faces than actual promotional campaigns. But whatever the reason, I like John Hamm and I thought these stories were more hard-boiled detective stories, despite knowing that Chevy Chase was in the "original" adaptation of this character (a movie I have no recollection of, at all), I thought this could be fun.

And I was right. It was. Hamm is the best ! Fletch is not a hard boiled detective, more a soft boiled "investigative reporter", but by the time the movie starts, he is not that anymore, nor do I know what he is really doing beyond living off his Italian girlfriend. There is a sub-genre of crime fiction which focuses on people blundering into events, and then bringing them to a conclusion. Fletch definitely is doing that here, ignoring the fact he is purposely inserted into the drama he has to unravel.

Irwin M Fletcher, noting that all write-ups of this character have to spell out his full name, is sent to Boston by his GF to recover some art work, to pay off her father's kidnappers. And in the airBNB'd house, he finds a dead body. He calls the police, and then patiently awaits their arrival, and despite/because of his affable but irritating nature, he also becomes their primary suspect. But he doesn't let that deter him from personally investigating the whole thing, which of course does tie to the reason he is in Boston to begin with. Its a loosely convoluted story with the expected misdirections, given its pulpy source material, easily tied up and digestible.

Hamm makes this movie. Like the character he plays, he effortlessly moves from one scene to the other, and while Fletch never quite actually solves things, he does (again) blunder into solutions. I don't recall exactly why, but I do recollect being equally irritated by him as charmed, which is definitely intentional. I would definitely watch another if this was a series.

Fernando Di Leo's The Milieu Trilogy

Caliber 9 ("Milano Calibro 9" - 1972)
The Italian Connection ("La Mala Ordina" - 1972)
The Boss ("Il Boss" - 1972)
directed by Fernando Di Leo - The Criterion Channel

I hadn't even heard of these films before, so what exactly prompted me to spend five-and-a-half hours watching 70's Italian exploitation cinema? Well, I do love an exercise in cinema, and with the trio of films being added this January to the Criterion Channel as part of their ensemble of Di Leo's "Italian Crime Thrillers", being dubbed a trilogy, and, well, being cited as by Tarantino as influential to his career... yeah, I took the bait.  

At this point I need to realize that pretty much every movie that Tarantino ever saw was influential to his career, and that no single film or filmmaker is going to reveal any specific insight into what makes him the filmmaker he is.  It's the sum total of everything he consumed that does that, and the more time I spend with Tarantino's film criticism, from his new book Cinema Speculation as well as his podcast "Video Archives" (with Roger Avery), the more I see that he's just got a unique brain with a memory for film (shots, music, performances, lines, trivia, history etc) unlike almost anyone else on the planet.  He's just a hardcore nerd about these things, and his ability to dissect cinema into its subcomponents and tease out what may make a film unique from almost anything else of its ilk is a talent that may be uniquely his own.

And so watching these three films of Fernando Di Leo, I can absolutely see Tarantino totally digging these crime thrillers with an appreciation of the various performers, the director, the composers, knowledge of Italian cinema, and knowledge of Italy of the 70's (at least through the lens of cinema).  If I had all that stashed in my brain I might appreciate these films more than I do.  But honestly, coming out of a near 6-hour marathon, I felt like I could have put my cinematic viewing somewhere else, somewhere perhaps more rewarding (like the trio of Fritz Lang films added to Criterion Channel, or tackling some of the more intriguing films from various top ten of '22 lists).

But, some might say, every film viewed is a learning experience.  Of the "Milieu Trilogy", the first, Calibre 9, was the most interesting, and, at least to my eye, the most visually accomplished.  An intriguing, surprisingly, and unfortunately relevant subplot has a police chief and his new associate arguing over what manner of crime they should be focusing on. The chief is stuck in his old mindset of reactionary policing, busting up gangs and tamping down on the civic unrest (student protesters, reactionaries - of what, I'm not sure) whereas his new transfer wants to address the crimes of the rich, the withdrawal of wealth out of the country, and the abuses perpetrated on the working class.  It sounds like a very modern arguement.

There's equally an interesting conversation on the criminals' side where an old mafia don laments that there is no mafia anymore, just gangs fighting one another, stealing from each other, lacking the honor and respect of the old ways. There is an argument in Di Leo's third film, The Boss, made by a different police chief to his superintendent that at least the mafia used to maintain a sense of order, a sense of keeping everything in its place. These gangs, the protesters, all of it is just chaos.

Unfortunately, in Caliber 9, of these two topics of conversation, only the latter is actually of relevance to the story as it plays out.  It's really a tale of criminals and their distrust of one another, the lack of loyalty and honour that was supposedly found in the mafia is gone.  Here, $300,000 US of the Americano's money goes missing in an elaborate exchange. Most of the middlemen have been interrogated or killed but one is released from from prison 3 years later, and immediately the Americano's thugs are up his ass even though he professes no knowledge or involvement the theft. What follows is a spinning yarn of cops, thieves, mobsters, gangster and all the conniving and fighting that goes on amongst them all.

Gastone Moschin is a compellingly stoic lead, with a very Statham-esque aesthetic.  One wonders how a mug like that can pull the devotion of a beauty like Barbara Bouchet but that's all part of it.  There are a lot of great cinematic moments, some really neat scenes in Caliber 9, but the perhaps necessary dubbing of the entire film, some frequently poor lighting, an occasionally tonally out-of-step score, plus a few really hammy actors kind of bring an otherwise engrossing film down a peg or two.

The second film of the triology, The Italian Connection, largely dispenses with the social commentary.  Here, a pair of American hitmen are assigned to take out a pimp in Milan to send a message to the local mob. The local mob leader also send their men after the pimp. The pimp is completely in the dark as to why he's being hunted so, but he quickly learns nowhere is safe, no one can be trusted, and his only defense is to go on the offensive.

Without the social commentary of Caliber 9, this entry in the trilogy feels like a huge step down from what came before.  There are more internationally recognized actors (including Henry Silva, Woody Strode, Adolfo Celi, and Luciana Paluzzi, the latter two both prominently from Thunderball) so it does feel like the talent pool has gone up, and Mario Adorf is a lot less hammy promoted to lead here (he was as a secondary villain in Caliber 9).  But it's all a bit of a mess (so much of the Italian dubbing is clearly over English dialogue, there's a really muddled focus for the first hour, a lot of leering and gratuitous nudity, plus some really crummy dialogue), especially for an action-oriented thriller. The characters don't really pop like they probably should (Silva and Strode were apparently the inspiration for the hitmen of Pulp Fiction but beyond being a 70's black-and-white odd couple, I don't see it), and the fighting looks quite silly most of the time. There is a good, propulsive chase sequence to close out the second act, which comes close to redeeming the film (if Adorf were Jackie Chan, it'd be a completely different story, as appealing a performer as Adorf is in a Bruce Campbell kinda way, he's not much of an action star).  A great jazz funk score from Armando Trovajoli though, is the best part of the film (both Caliber 9 and The Boss are scored by Luis Bacalov, who pulls elements from the former back into the latter, and the score works much better with The Boss, where it's also a highlight)

 

The third act of this trilogy, The Boss, seems thinly drawn when in its wake has come so many epic tales of mobsters, gangsters and the mafioso. The intention of the film is clearly to show the breakdown in the organization of crime in Italy at the time, as well as to heavily implicate government, police and institutional corruption in the current state of the country.  Like Caliber 9, we spend many asides with the police, who are just as ineffective here as the were in the first part of the trilogy.  Hamstrung by corruption both within their forces and the systems of government above them, they hope that the criminals effectively "take care" of each other, doing what they cannot.  In this film, for sure, it's all out war between different mobs, fuelled by Henry Silva's enforcer's over-the-top actions in taking out one branch of the local mob.  This leads to a revenge kidnapping, and then a lot of tit-for-tat, before Silva, as our main character, decides to just liberate himself from all of it.

An undercurrent in all three of these films is the student protests, and I don't know enough about Italy circa the early 1970's to know what the students were protesting.  In The Italian Connection, there's talk of Maoism and a very confusing statement about "Where will we put 600 million Chinese people when they come?"  Are the protestors anti-communism or supporting communism?  Whatever it is, the message is clearly of its time and place, and whatever influence it has on the story seems trapped there.

All three of the films, but The Boss especially have a particularly difficult time with women. Mainly leered at as sex objects, they're also slapped around, beaten and killed off quite callously.  In The Italian Connection, Paluzzi plays guide to the hitmen, capably navigating the streets and the people, only to be dragged to a meetup by the hitmen to draw fire.  Also in the Italian Connection are a lot of sex workers who seem to garner no respect (though I think we're to think that Adorf's pimp treats them respectably...for a pimp, making him sort of a good guy, at least comparatively).  In The Boss, pretty much the only female character is the mobster's daughter Rina (Antonia Santilli) who gets kidnapped, but turns out to be a "drug addict nympho" who doesn't seem to mind at all sleeping with any of her captors, and seems to not be fussed being slapped around alot.  She also spends most of the film in some form of undress. The misogyny is always the worst part of exploitation films, but films in recent years have trained me to wait for the turn in these characters, something to draw them out of the exploitation, and very much it's waiting here for something that never comes.

While perhaps not a complete waste of time, but it also wasn't that rewarding watching these.  Caliber 9 is the most interesting and has the most to say, while there are action films far better than The Italian Connection and mob war movies far better constructed than The Boss to partake in.