KWIF: Hard Target (+3)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film, where each week (or so) I have a spotlight movie, of which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I have watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts.

This Week: 
Hard Target (1993, d. John Woo - Tubi)
Timecop (1994, d. Peter Hyams  - Tubi)
Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris (2022, d. Anthony Fabian - Crave)
Cowboys and Aliens (2011, d. Jon Favreau - Tubi)

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It's been 30+ years since I saw, and was disappointed by Hard Target. There's been no urge to revisit it since, but it popped up as part of Tubi's recommendation algorithm during a particularly lazy Saturday afternoon, so... why not? I have become a real fan of the man-hunting-man-for-sport subgenre of action film [I should probably make a "most dangerous game" tag] in the past decade, so it made sense to revisit what was perhaps my first exposure to that type of story.

Being in my mid-teens when this debuted in theatres, I hadn't yet been exposed to John Woo, so his storytelling language was quite alien to me at the time, and I balked at its absurdity. I did know who Wilford Brimley was, though -- Cocoon, Ewoks: Battle for Endor and Quaker Oats commercials were all a big part of my childhood -- and the positioning of him as an action movie sidekick was downright ludicrous to me.

But with fresh eyes and much, much more cinematic experience under my belt, Woo's filmic language delights with modern, post-ironic reception. All his hallmarks are applied to this not-so-potent yet ultimately entertaining melding of "The Most Dangerous Game" and First Blood. Doves, slow-mo, fetishizing gun violence, both sides of a wall shots...that sort of thing.

There is interesting background elements to the story, both in its passing concern for veterans let down by the system, and a police department on strike leading to both a spike in criminal activity and the appropriate conditions for a manhunt-for-sport operation. it doesn't actually have much to say about either of these things...if there was commentary baked into the script, Woo's stylistic interests filtered it out of the final product.

Van Damme was still learning how to act, and his efforts at being cajun are nonexistent, but he had his screen presence locked down by this point. It's easy to forget how charming he was given how borex he seemed in his later 90's output offering diminishing returns on his schtick. Brimley seems to delight in the southern bayou accent and it's really enjoyable to see the perennial 70-year-old (regardless of how old he was, Brimley seemed to be 70 for decades) riding horseback and shooting arrows. 

Lance Henrickson just chews up the scenery having a palpable blast as the film's big nasty. He's as great a 90's b-movie villain as any, successfully going super huge, appropriately acting as if he is the king shit and utterly untouchable. Arnold Vosloo (using his actual South African accent perhaps?) is maybe not as commanding a presence as Henrickson, but he's suitably intimidating, and effectively cold-blooded as Herickson's right hand man and he does liven the film up.

What lets me down is the film's take on man-hunting-man, where Van Damme's Boudreaux never atually signs up for the manhunt and therefore doesn't actually "win" the game, which is the big thrill of the subgenre. He's more an amateur detective who stumbles upon the hunt and becomes a target as a result. It's disappointing and lacks real tension. 

There's also the matter of third-act escalation, of showing Boudreax's proficiency as a tactician and fighter. When he says to female lead, the likeable Yancy Butler, as he's leaving her in Brimley's care, "Without you, I'm hunting them", and the film implies that his familiarity with the terrain will give him some great advantage against the two dozen men now hunting him, nothing comes of it. He's still on the run, he's still somehow dodging hundreds of bullets, explosives and evading helicopter gunfire on horseback. It never successfully turns him into the hunter. Brimley feels more of the hunter and tactician.

Even still, it's never overreaching as it seems to know just what it is, and what it can be.

The Flash Scale: better than The Flash
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Double dosing on Van Damme that lazy Saturday, I actually watch Timecop first. I always had a favourable opinion of this movie but I haven't revisited it since the 90's. It was based off a Dark Horse comic book, in as much as the comic book of Timecop really was designed to serve as proof of concept to sell as a film (not the last time we'll see this).  Back in 1994, if it was tangentially related to comic books, I would watch it, and be kind of defensive about it. I had a real bias, back then (because I don't now, right? Right?). I've long been telling myself I needed to see it again, but I'm always wary about revisiting things I liked in my teenage years, both for the headslap moments of "I liked this???" and triggering those sense memories of being an utterly awkward person.

Well, no sense memories were triggered, and, I'll be damned if Timecop still isn't pretty damn fun. I mean, I'm still such a sucker for time travel shenanigans, and I liked how this story doesn't do branching timelines, it's just one linear timeline that gets all fucked up by time travellers, and there's a U.S. government agency chasing down time criminals from creating ripple effect into the future... and doing a pretty piss poor job at it.  Van Damme plays Max Walker, who stumbles upon a half-assed conspiracy by Ron Silver's presidential hopeful to steal the past in order to steal the presidency.  It's really dumb, but dumb in that delightfully formulaic 80's and 90's storytelling kind of way. 

The space-time physics and technology and whatnots are all ludicrous, but it doesn't stop the film from being a bale of fun. Van Damme is at his peak Van Damme-ness here, delivering his strongest acting performance in any film, and still in his giving-a-shit phase of his career where his ego hadn't completely taken over. Ron Silver was always the perfect go-to shitheel bad guy and he's just chomping down on every scene he's in. Mia Sara plays Van Damme's wife, and together they sell the relationship in a way that most action stars don't really wind up having sexual or romantic chemistry with their counterpart. It's astonishing to see a film like this with a steamy sex scene, mainly because we don't get those too often anymore, and one that doesn't seem male-gazey,  delivering equal time to each participant's body, and selling the idea of mutual pleasure. (It's a sex positive film. My favourite exchange in the film, after Walker and his tagalong from internal affairs Agent Sarah Fielding set back into the past: 
Walker: "Don't get sentimental and try to visit yourself."
Fielding: "Actually, I'd kind of like to call myself and tell me not to sleep with Bobby Morgan after my party. It's really disappointing."
Walker: "A smart woman would call Bobby and give him some advice.")

It's a pretty punchy script overall, and it closes its own causality loop very nicely, making for a thoroughly satisfying done-in-one film. There's no need for a franchise.

The Flash Scale: better than The Flash
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One of the latest subgenres in storytelling is kindness porn: stories about nice people who actively inspire niceness in others through their own kindness and positive spirit. In film the apex of this is the Paddington movies, in comic books it's Squirrel Girl, on TV it's Ted Lasso.  While there are people who have been completely receptive to the subgenre, the surprise successes and seeming longevity of "nice media", there are also those that bristle at it, demean it, rebuff its advances, often mistaking the pleasantness for treacle.  But kindness porn isn't treacly. It often is very aware of the darker forces in the world (and in self) but it doesn't so much reject the darkness as look for a crack for which it can pry open and let the light.  Kindness porn, I think, foremost, is about empathy and acceptance.

Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris finds a widowed cleaning woman in post-war London taking admirable care of her client's homes, and, sometimes her clients themselves. She is a kind woman with the ability to persevere in the face of adversity.  She's giving but not selfless, she's gentle but not naive, she treats others how she would like to be treated, even those who don't treat her such in kind.

When she spies one of her richer client's Christian Dior gowns, she falls in love. Her mission in life becomes to have one of her own, even if it cost five hundred pounds...a small fortune for the working class. Working hard but also with a few strokes of luck, Mrs. Harris' mini-fortune comes to fruition and she's off to Paris to engage with the snobbish world of haute cuture. But also, Paris is the city where the laborer is king, and despite her initial rejection by the house of Dior manager, she is welcomed in by many.

From there it's not entirely sweetness and roses, but it does, ever so gently, get at the heart of the matter, exploring classism both from the angle of someone wanting to partake in something the elite see as theirs, and also taking jabs at the elite and the way they dehumanize and other the working class. 

Mrs. Harris doesn't quite have the same magical charm as Paddington bear, but then, she's not a talking bear with a marmalade sandwich under her hat. As well, there's something uneasily capitalist about the film that revolves around buying a dress. On the one hand it's smacking down the elite, but also raising their status symbols aloft in the other. 

The Flash Scale: better

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speaking of unispired

Although Timecop kind of did it in the early 90's, the 2000's became the heyday of putting out comics for the explicit purpose of selling a screenplay. Comic book properties were hot stuff, and it's easier to present a studio exec something visual than a wad of words on pages.  Entire publishers formed out of being a gateway for getting from script-to-page-to-screen.  As much as Marvel's success in building a shared universe pulled the studios focus away from buying just any comics property for their next major motion picture, but I think, at about the same time, Cowboys and Aliens decimated the studios faith in comics properties as a guaranteed through-line to success.

Muckraking comics reporter Rich Johnson originally exposed the publishing shenanigans that led to a glut of Cowboys and Aliens trade paperbacks being literally given away (or dumpstered) at many comics shops as a ploy to reaching the tops of the bestsellers charts. I remember my local shop stuffing one into my bag when I wasn't looking (after declining to take one myself). I never read it -- the taint on that thing was swift -- but it still lingers in a box with other trades somewhere.

Despite the ploy being reported in comic news, it didn't matter to studio execs who bought the script and greenlit the feature, with Jon Favreau, fresh off of Iron Man 2, directing and Lost's Damon Lindleof and Carlton Cuse doing a rewrite on the script. Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford -- both known for their portrayals of icons of cinema -- were brought on as leads.  This was as sure a slam dunk as anything and yet audience reaction was unenthusiastic and critics were unimpressed. It bombed at the box office.

This was something a studio just threw money at, nobody's heart was in it, and that apathy is palpable. Everyone involved just did the work but brought nothing more to it.  The story isn't engaging or entertaining in any real way, it's a going-through-the-motions plot that doesn't provide anything particularly cool visually or conceptually to inspire the audience. Likewise, the characters are big nothings, there's so very little to invest in with them, and nobody has any sort of badass swagger.  Craig seems almost embarassed to be in the picture, and Ford is clearly cashing a paycheck. The tonal dichotomy between an alien invasion and western isn't something impossible to bridge (Nope, for example) but this story didn't crack it.  It's bad.

The Flash Scale: worse than The Flash

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Hypnotic

2023, Robert Rodriguez (Red 11) -- download

There is a type of movie, usually starring Nick Cage or ... well, Ben Affleck, a particular type of action/thriller with a light scifi bent that are.... well, just not very good. But they are usually well enough constructed to scratch an itch. But that's about it.

Of note, Ben Affleck has not really been in a lot of these movies but he sure feels like he has done a lot. There was Paycheck and there was... yeah nothing else. And Paycheck was 20 years ago?!?! 

Danny Rourke (Ben Affleck, Paycheck) is a cop in therapy. Years prior his daughter was snatched out from under his nose, in a public park, like they always are. A suspect was caught but he claimed to have no memory of doing it, nor was any evidence of her remains ever found. Rourke is a broken, distracted man. But during the surveillance of a bank heist they were tipped off to, where they witness seemingly average, normal people doing out of character things, he is teased by a photo of his daughter in a safety deposit box. He chases after the suspect, who gets away by having two other cops shoot each other.

The gimmick of the movie is that there are people with ESP-like, magical hypnosis abilities, able to make suggestions with mere words that force people to do whatever things the "hypnotics" like. Rourke has been dragged into a conspiracy involving his daughter and the most powerful hypnotic in existence, who has left the government agency that once controlled him.

Exxeeeept, that's not the movie. Spoilery spoilers forthcoming.

The third act begins with the reveal that the first two thirds of the movie are just a "construct", a vast pantomime created by the "hypnotics" to draw Rourke out of his self-imposed delusion of being a cop with a lost daughter. Oh, he has a lost daughter, and that's who they want, as she was genetically engineered to be the most powerful hypnotic ever. Think of the construct like a VR simulation but they use props and other people to more easily convince the hypnotized that they are in a reality of the hypnotic's choice. But Rourke, a hypnotic himself, breaks out of it and saves the day.

This is Rodriguez on auto-pilot, a not very well executed movie, but would be someone's second or third choice at  the video store, when all the other, better, more popular movies are already rented. I am thinking he could have done better, made it with a tighter script, a bit more style & mind-fuckery but couldn't be bothered.

Hand-waves a weak comparison to how Toasty often writes these post, churning them out with just the requisite amount of writing, grabbing his paycheck and going home, except without any paycheck. And then continuing to write about himself, as if that gimmick forgives the lack of effort.

We Agree: The Flash (was bad)

2023, Andy Muschietti (It) -- cinema

So, I guess I have a new benchmark for bad movies? And I don't mean Bad Movies, like the creature features and disaster flicks that I so love, but terribly executed blockbusters that are just not well done. And also not incredibly well executed flicks that I just don't care for, because I don't like the execution style (e.g. Thor: Love & Thunder; I have since tried to rewatch this movie, twice, only to solidify my dislike for it). This movie just made so many, so very very many, bad choices.

Of note, I will write this up in my drafts with a smattering of my thoughts, and then once Kent has posted his ... post, I will (have) add(ed) in some direct response/reactions to his commentary. Probably just a lot of shouting, "This! I meant this!"

Andy Muschietti looks like the supporting character in a bad action movie, either the sleazy side-kick drug dealer, or hench goon to an Eastern European arms dealer. Not sure why I have to share that, but there it is. And he does his cameo as someone who has their hotdog stolen by the Flash. Speaking of cameos, yes that was Nicolaj Coster-Waldau getting his pizza stolen by the Flash. I know he was in Mama but I guess they are not ... friends?

I don't like Ezra Miller, and I am pretty sure that was before they came out as a sleaze bag. I didn't like their meant-to-be-sympathetic villain in the Fantastic Beasts movies, but was only mildly amused by them in the Justice League movies. They were pretty much playing themself in Asking for It and The Stand, which is to say a messed up asshole. So, I am not sure I would have been able to connect with them as The Hero on any level, especially since the whole motivation of this movie is for us to sympathize with him (this stays, as the character is a Him) despite having obviously flawed choices.

Now if I was a Big DC Superhero Fan, I might be able to sidestep whom they have cast as Barry Allen, for the sake of seeing your Hero on the big screen. But, despite being an avid comics reader for three decades, I was never really immersed in any of the DC characters outside of Superman, Batman and The Sandman. I know I have read tons of Bronze Age comics but I cannot say I really know much about The Flash nor Barry Allen. He was probably just the supporting Justice League-r in whatever  I was reading, and I definitely did not read any Flash comics directly. I also did not watch the CW show. I don't know his proper character so cannot be offended by this portrayal, and yet...

I am relating this to say I have no particular expectations for the character, but yet I still think of the character style choices of Miller as just fundamentally flawed. At least in Justice League movies, he was just somewhat irritating, but they wanted a younger, eager character so I went with that. But here, he just seems... off. As Kent says:

"...this character, who is twitchy, anxiety-addled, seemingly neurodivergent (except when he's not), is inconsistently written and likewise inconsistently played. Whatever type of person Barry Allen is supposed to be, Miller either struggles to find him, or struggles to convey him."

And don't get me started on Barry 2.

OK, I have jumped quickly into the I Don't Like-s without really saying what the movie is about.

This is The Flash after the Snyderverse Justice League movie, after they have pulled together as a team and saved the world (at least once). But the movie opens with Barry Allen again late to his Crime Lab job, which they kind of hint as being related to his superhero duties but also to him just being... late. Hah hah, fastest man alive is always late. But then, related to his superhero duties, he is whining about being the "cleanup man", always being called in to support the League instead of leading the way. The movie solidifies this via a 20-odd minute sequence focused on saving babies, and a therapy dog, from a collapsing building, while Batman chases down the Bad Guys and their weapon of mass destruction. He is initially sent in to deal with the water & power. The babies are collateral damage.

I am thinking here that one of the Purple Suits told Muschietti that he had to do a Dead Pool style opening sequence, focused on the irreverent comedy. Oooo!!  Babies in danger! One's going to be splashed with acid, another is going to be squashed! Barry has to do a weird Rube Goldberg in ultra-slowmo to save all the babies, and the dog, and the nurse, within the seconds he has. Also while snacking. Barry's "snack hole" seems to be a running gag all through this movie -- see above cameos.

But this sequence was just bad. It looked bad, it set a wrong tone, it just did all the things badly. Did I say it looked bad? This is a decade-ago level video game cut scene CGI. The movie literally begins by establishing our hero as a clown. And it contributes nothing to the rest of the movie.

This leads (in no way whatsoever) to Barry once again lamenting about the past, and his mother's death, and his father's unjust persecution. The evidence at hand all seems circumstantial, but its enough to convict, and despite Barry's chosen profession, he is not able to point out the flaw in the justice system. Instead, Barry runs away into The Past. Well, no not quite, into The Bad CGI Time Arena !!

You see, The Flash is able to run (in his incredibly stupid looking way) so fast that he ... enters the multiverse? Oh, I have no idea what they are trying to convey. Is it a mythical place? Is it a cognitive representation of the access he has while in the Speed Force? Is it just sciency-fiency gobblety gook to cause Barry to "break the Universe" for the sake of his mom? Yes folks, yes it is. Barry sees his chance, and despite knowing its a bad choice, he tweaks the past allowing his mother to survive. Not sure how though; just because his father never goes to get tomatoes, does that stop Random Murderer on coming into the house? Does his father fight off said Murderer? Do they even explain what said Murderer was all about, like all proper Uncle Ben moments do? Nope, Barry changes the past which changes the (a) future but he returns to... ten years in the past. Why? No reason but Plot Thickening. 

You see, Barry has fucked things up, as changing one point in the past doesn't just change the future but also changes the past even further. Everything is messed up. And altered. Or so he learns from Batman, but not his Batman (Ben Affleck) but the Michael Keaton Batman, who actually did a pretty good job making the world a safer place, and has retired. BUT the Justice League never appeared, Superman is not on the scene, Arthur Curry was never born, Wonder Woman is probably still hanging out of Amazon Island (the place where all the brown boxes are born) and nobody is around to fight with Zod when he shows up ready to fuck the Earth up. Oh, they do find a Superman alternate/sub-in in Supergirl, the scowling, traumatized cousin tortured in a Russian gulag for years, but that doesn't matter. This Universe, or at the very least, the Earth in this Universe, is fucked. And there is nothing that the Barry's, and Batman can do about it.

So, Barry has to go back into the Time Arena of Incredibly Rubbery CGI, to Not Save His Mom. Barry 2 is not happy about that, nor is Scary Barry. But, hey, contemplative other Supermen from other Universe Nickelodeon Spheres are watching. So he leaves the tomatoes on the shelf, albeit with one minor tweak, and the world is fixed. Kinda. Sorta. Maybe. I still like George Clooney Batman.

Did I like anything about the movie? I actually liked Scowly Supergirl, in what little characterization she had. As Kent said, "she's a presence more than a character." I liked seeing the updated Keaton Batman fighting with 2023 choreography. I liked seeing the Nick Cage Superman sphere. And I did chuckle a few times, at moments they wanted me to, and I was moved a few times, at points they wanted me to be, so I guess I was more entertained than disappointed? I mean, how could I be disappointed when I went knowing it was going to be terrible? It was, in fact, more terrible than I expected but... "it's good-bye and good riddance to the Snyderverse." So hey, we got that.

Where the quotes came from, in the Kent-iverse.

The Flash

 2023, d. Andy Muschietti - in theatre

The DC Comics fan in me, the one who had spent over two decades investing in nuance, continuity and legacy, has a really hard time saying bluntly what needs to be said about The Flash, because more than anything I wanted it to be amazing. I've lived a large portion of my life dreaming of big screen adventures of DC heroes other than Batman and Superman, and with very few exceptions those dreams have been dashed. So I knew The Flash wouldn't be amazing, because I knew the foundation the film is built upon is loose shale fortified with cheese curds.

I'm not angry about it because I've long gotten over the fact that the Snyderverse doesn't work for me. I'm not even disappointed because I could tell from the trailers -- which sold this as a Batman movie featuring The Flash -- that there was definitely something wrong with the film (the final trailer, which I saw about two weeks before the film's release, finally sold it as a Flash movie, and I had a visceral 'no thank you' reaction).

My problem stems from Ezra Miller's casting, which even before their controversies, didn't work for me. They are fundamentally wrong for the character as written, and the character, as written, is fundamentally unrecognizable as Barry Allen, or any other Flash for that matter. I can get over changing Barry Allen as a character -- he's about as boring a figure as they get in comics (I'm much more of a Wally West fan) -- but this character, who is twitchy, anxiety-addled, seemingly neurodivergent (except when he's not), is inconsistently written and likewise inconsistently played. Whatever type of person Barry Allen is supposed to be, Miller either struggles to find him, or struggles to convey him. And, physically, whatever Miller's weird floppy hand thing they've chosen to do when running as the Flash looks really, really, really stupid (just as it did in Justice League). Mindboggling choice on their part. One of many.

Then they introduce a second Barry Allen. He's a 10-years-younger alternate version whose mother never died because The Flash has figured out he could mess with the timeline, and then did, only to accidentally wind up in an alternate past. Miller plays this second Flash like Pauly Shore in every 90's Pauly Shore vehicle, buddy. Your mileage may vary on how amused by this performance you will be, but your tolerance for Pauly Shore is a good benchmark for expectations. The smart tactic would have been, at the very least, recasting this second Barry Allen (understanding that the film was too far gone once the Miller controversies hit to really make big casting changes.... Even still....)

Beyond that fundamental casting flaw (singular. Miller is the only casting problem, just doubled up), the other fundamental flaw of the production is that the DCEU/Snyderverse hasn't earned a story that revels in, and relies upon its cinematic history so deeply. The heroes of the DCEU haven't been explored enough to start tinkering with what we know about them and their place in this universe, and the film revelling in all the differences of the new timeline Barry has created has no resonance, unless, I guess, you were really, really, really invested in the Snyderverse. Even as a big DC fan, this all rang very hollow and unjustified.

Michael Keaton certainly seemed game for resurrecting a variation of his Bruce Wayne, while Michael Shannon has not been quiet about how much he disliked returning as Zod (I would say his apathy shows, but he's barely in the film enough for us to care about his performance). Ben Affleck was always good casting for Batman, but this is taking on the Joss Whedon Justice League as his worst appearance (the performance is fine, but what's being done with the character, not so much). Sasha Callie's Supergirl is good, but she's got maybe a dozen lines of dialogue at most...she's a presence more than a character.

If the good special effects of The Flash aren't notable, it's because the bad special effects are. The cgi characters, almost universally, look terrible. I've heard the uncanny valley of Polar Express cited and I'm not even sure it looks that good. Director Andy Muschietti says it was a deliberate choice. I call BS on that and say that Warner Bros pulled out of investing any further cash into finishing the effects once they learned about Miller's extracurricular activities. Not all press is good press.

When Miller is acting against themself, it's clear there were two people in the room, but one always gets a digital Miller face slapped over top, and it's as noticeable as Henry Cavill's digitally removed moustache in Justice League. It's unsettling. CGI babies, a weird time arena, ghoulish and weirdly conceived alternate earths as viewed through various CGI Supermans (why Supermans and not Flashes?)...it's a frequently ugly film, and yet the problem that bothered me the least.

From the nerd side of things, the Flash's powers were wildly inconsistent. The drawbacks and constraints of using the powers -- the charge they build up, or the need for fuel, or the effect on moving people, or rapid healing powars, among other traits -- were scattershot in their application. I noticed, and it bothered me.  The conceptualization of the speed force, the visualization of the Flash running, what it means to move that fast and the effect it has on one's body or one's surrounds, it doesn't hold together. With dozens of writers having worked on a script for this film for almost a decade, there's likely a hodgepodge, piecemeal effect of disparate parts that don't invariably fit as it iterated over time.

The costume designs, while nominally an improvement over those found in Justice League are, to be frank, still ugly. The Flash costume is very rubbery and glossy and bulbous and makes me uncomfortable (reminding me of Schumacher's fetishistic Batman and Robin costumes). Supergirl's costume has weird darts jutting from her hips to her crotch as if pointing to it for some unknown reason.  Consistency for consistency sake but Keaton's Batman still can't turn his head after 35 years of iterating costume designs?  And what was up with the nose on Affleck Batman's costume...?

I didn't enjoy myself with this movie. I started the film with my arms crossed, and sunk even deeper into my chair as it progressed. I like time travel and multiverse stories, so I did really want to get caught up in the adventure of it, but at every turn I was faced with an actor who wasn't working and reminded of a universe I don't really like.   I think about superhero films like '78 Superman or Ang Lee's Hulk or Iron Man which put you into the position of the hero in certain moments, that give you that sense of what it's like to fly or leap or smash or be in the suit of armor, a moment or two that is like a visceral experience. I never felt connected to Flash's speed. They try to replicate the great visualization of Quicksilver in the X-Men movies early on, but to lesser effect.  Flash's speed has so many different visual iterations that there is no connection point to it as a viewer.

I hate to say it, but I have to...The Flash is bad. If I'm being generous, it just doesn't work for me. If I'm being mean, it's good-bye and good riddance to the Snyderverse. 

KWIF: Men, and Man...dy

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week (or so) I have usually have a spotlight movie which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts.

This week, which really spans the past 3 weeks, is just two films, as I rewatched Across the Spider-Verse in theatre twice more, and I've been series watching both the classic Planet of the Apes pentology and the sextet of Lone Wolf and Cub. I'll write each of those up in their own time.

So for, this week, it's:
Men (2022, d. Alex Garland - AmazonPrime)
Mandy (2019, d. Panos Cosmatos - DVD)

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Men is often very stunning visually, capturing vividly a gorgeous, tastefully decorated old house and very lush, wet and vibrant terrain despite seemingly perpetual overcast skies.

Men is also pretty ugly and uncomfortable to look at, at times, with makeup and digital face transplants and cgi... erm... sequences... of... things... happening, all juxtaposing against the beauty of the scenery. 

All of Alex Garland's films so far (and also including his mini-series Devs) are so full of intentionality, of thematic purpose, it's just that the purpose here is maybe a little muddier than his other works. Men trades so heavily in metaphor that it almost exclusively exists in metaphor. Where Garland's other works are entertaining outside of the metaphors, Men has little else but it to offer. This feels akin to Aronofsky's mother!, another ambitious and unsatisfying horror fable.

Having Rory Kinnear be every man in Men (save one) only for it to go unacknowledged in the film is making very much a "they're all the same" type comment (and perhaps as much a product of pandemic shooting as conceptual conceit?). Yet there's more nuance here than that blunt "all the same" statement, in the different ways Kinnear's men carry themselves, and the film's awareness of the systemic misogyny that's baked into them. The finale of the film -- an ugly, epic "birthing" sequence that is at once upsetting in it's unnaturalness in concept as its cgi unnaturalness -- is meant to hammer home the sort of generational handing down of toxic masculinity with little growth.  As the scene, and its cycles play out, what started out as frightening to Jessie Buckley's Harper eventually just becomes more of men's tedious bullshit that is being forced upon her. She walks away but the birthing keeps following her, as if to say "you must watch this , you must bare witness to my trauma for I cannot handle it myself" (and maybe also to say that there's a perpetual infant inside every man that comes out in the ugliest, and often most violent of ways).

The straightforward question of this film is "is this really happening?" Or "Is this really happening as we see it?" But even though there's a pretty chaotic aftereffect scene that hints at some reality to the events that happened, this question of "is it real" actually doesn't matter at all. It is what Harper has been going through, whether metaphorical or literal, or a bit of both.

Harper just wanted an escape after her husband's suicide/accidental death. She had filed for divorce and was immediately emotionally blackmailed by her husband. He threatened to kill himself, he put that on her. It's just one of so, so many things a patriarichal society puts upon women, and not the first of men in this film trying to put their figurative shit upon Harper, as if she owes them something, or that shes the solution to their problems, or that if she's not the solution there's something wrong with her . 

Margaret Atwood said "Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them." You can substitute "laugh at" with "reject" or even, in some cases just "make them feel anything", so trained are men to suppress emotions that aren't the "masculine ones" (that also tend to correspond with certain sins, like greed and pride) that often any strong feeling can be unfamiliar and induce any manner of irrational response.

The message here isn't so simple as "men are bad", but instead that there's an ugliness to how men are raised and how men perpetuate this ugliness, not just generationally but among themselves, and how that then spreads to how women have to think or behave or react in a society that forces them to coexist amidst this, in essence, traumatic psychopathy.

I think its an interesting movie that doesn't always get its intentions across cleanly. People will (and have) bristled at it's message, because on the surface it does seem a trite metaphor. I think given the past 10 years of politics it's a lot more loaded as subject matter than the film actually considers it to be, but the title is provocative and evocative in maybe the wrong spirit. I didn't come out of it thinking Garland was smug and self-satisfied with solving misogyny, but instead I see a storyteller wrestling with a concept too big and complex to really be contained in just a film, but trying anyway.  And what is art for, if not to wrestle with with the big concepts.

---

After watching Panos Cosmatos' episode of Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, subtitled "The Viewing", I was immediately reminded that I had missed out on Mandy, Cosmatos' second feature after the dreamy and weird Beyond the Black Rainbow. I genuinely love Cosmatos' style, and what his productions endeavour to do, which is try to capture the essence of classic 80's horror movie videocassette covers, but as an entire film. In the case of Mandy it's that PLUS making 80's heavy metal album covers into a live action movie.

As a result, Cosmatos' sensibility is imagery first, story second, which is certainly not to say that his works slouch in their storytelling, but capturing the aesthetic, the mood, the vibes, is really what its all about.  It's also to say that his movies are just a trip to behold (to quote Toasty on his viewing of "The Viewing"..."Ouch. My mind just got fucked.")

Mandy can ostensibly be broken down into two halves, with the first focusing primarily on Andrea Riseborough's Mandy, her life with her loving husband Red (Nicolas Cage), and her kidnapping by a cult at the behest of its smitten, disturbed, pampered, psychotic, fragile Manson-esque leader Jeremiah (Linus Roache). The second half then becomes what Tarantino likes to call a "revenge-a-matic", where Red is out for blood, and it gets bloody.

It's a wild, jarring film that constantly makes you question what reality it exists in. It makes you wonder if the people we're seeing are human or not, if the setting is Earth or some other plane of existence. It's a film where characters are drugged, either forcefully or self-administered, which means perceptions are skewed. We're constantly jumping between points of view, different characters' experiences of the world, and as such it's hard to tell what truth we're actually witnessing.  It's all very intentional.

It's totally a "vibes" movie, though not quite as completely as Beyond the Black Rainbow was. Once the revenge film kicks into high gear and Red goes on his most metal of crusades, it's just a hair away from being an action movie, yet still running high on fumes.

If anything pulls it out of its vibes, it's Cage. I'm ever so mezzo mezzo on Cage. I don't buy into his greatness, because I've seen enough of him that isn't great. When he goes "full Cage", it needs to be the right place and the right time. Here, there's a couple of "full Cage" scenes which just pull me right out of the film, where Cage isn't acting so much as improvising, emoting, and, you know, doing that thing he does.  It doesn't fit the vibes, man.

That said, in the first half, as Mandy's loving partner, Cage is perfect, delivering a very subtle, supportive performance, which is just him at his best. And when he gets to dive into those fight sequences, his years and years on both blockbusters and low budget action features really comes through in his ability to sell the physicality.

Of Cosmatos' three productions, this is maybe his most accessible, and probably most entertaining, and yet, because of the Cage of it all, it's kind of my least favourite of the three... and yet that's faint condemnation. I still thought it was a blast.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore

2022, David Yates (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) -- download

It doesn't say much for this series that I didn't even remember there was a previous movies, having muddled (muggled?) the first two all together. Let's assume the writeup of the second was swallowed up in the Great Hiatus of 2018, but really, I was probably just so apathetic I didn't bother writing about it. And three sittings later, as I finally finish this one, I feel the same. But write up, I will, for I am deep in the sunk cost fallacy.

I did see, and write, about the first one, and looking back, I wasn't all that impressed. So, why watch the next two? To see if they will get better? Because I am a Big HP Fan? No, not at all. I do like the world that is created, and do like seeing it expanded upon, but the story is ... well, its all muggled up (fully intentional). Reaching the third in the series, they have a new He Who Should Not Be Named named Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen, Polar) who is a Bad Guy and is Dumbledore's (Jude Law, AI) ex-BF. While I don't recall exactly what it was, in the last movie Grindelwald did something that jeopardized the veil between the wizarding world and that of the muggles, and he hurt a lot of people. Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne, Jupiter Ascending)), his muggle/non-mag baker best friend Jacob (Dan Fogler, The Walking Dead) and a bevy of others, including Dumbledore, are focused entirely on revealing Grindelwald's agenda to the world, despite the world not really giving that much of a hoot -- they are muggles after all.

And there is a Beast, a Qilin (or Kirin), an utterly innocent creature that Grindelwald murders and takes one of its offspring. Unbeknownst, Newt secreted away the other. Grindelwald intends on using the creature as part of a conspiracy to have himself named Emperor of All Magic.. OK, its just Supreme Leader of the Confederation of Magic (Great Leader? Supreme Mugwump?). Of course, they foil his plan, have a wand battle (wouldn't it be cool if they held them like lightsabres and fought like Jedi?) and declare someone else Head Honcho.

Again, didn't do much for me. Not that I was a big HP Fan to begin with, but I like the elements. But again, I am here for Jacob and Queenie (Alison Sudol, Other People's Children). If there was a series just about him and his bakery and all kinds of magical escapades in Brooklyn, I would be all-in. Funny also, how the first movie started under the conceit of "HP in America!" which was quickly dispense so they could run back to Europe and all its Old Architecture. I guess they decided that being more worldly was better than just "add America". I did like the brief addition of Bhutan, a country which is always associated with the mystic arts, in pop culture.

Note: what terrible posters, all around.

Rewatch: Atomic Blonde

2017, David Leitch (Bullet Train) -- Netflix

Weird, I didn't write about this one. And even though I generally "rewatch" things so I don't have to write about it (i know i know, self imposed baggage & rules about writing something that is supposed to be fun, and not to be avoided) I feel I have to. One, because it was inspired by another rewatch -- Extraction, because the entirely expected sequel comes out this week, and it has an absolutely spectacular chase-fight scene shot to look like a single take but built with from transitions, all handled by the director himself (Sam Hargrave) with a camera strapped to his chest. In watching a little YouTube about these/this scene(s), I learned he also did it once before in Atomic Blonde which I did remember, despite not writing about it, being a spectacular fight. And Two, because I felt the need to include it in the tag "women with guns" after writing about The Mother. 

Of note, I have been gravitating to the extreme end of violence in my rewatches of late. As long as there are guns blazing, I am calmed, as my mind off-screen has been anything but.

Atomic Blonde is a spy thriller set at the end of the Cold War in Berlin, mostly East. British agent Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron, The Old Guard) is relating to a pair of superiors (Toby Jones, The Detectorists), one an American (John Goodman, Treme), about an op gone wrong in Berlin. She bears the barely healed marks of the failure literally on her face. An agent she knew, but denies, was killed before he could get the classic "operative list" MacGuffin out of East Berlin. She is sent there to connect with the station chief David Percival (James McAvoy, Wanted), who has gone mostly native, buried deep in the black market. From the moment she arrives, she is under siege, having to navigate the twists and turns and double-backs between Russia and the Allies, as Berlin builds to a powder keg, which we in the 21st century know ends with the fall of the Wall.

The movie shifts from convoluted spy games, to sexy 80s-music-pumped intrigue to bone crunching violence. Percival is obviously playing his own game, but she still has to work with him, as he is the connection to the defector (Eddie Marsan, Wrath of Man) who supposedly has the MacGuffin list memorized. Lorraine is playing her own game, the way she wants to play it, but weighed down by the exhausting fights & betrayals. 

I want to like this movie more than I do. I probably didn't write about it the first time because I wasn't sure what I wanted to say. Still not really sure. But it is beautifully designed & shot, Theron is phenomenal and in the long run, I am there for the Hargrave fight scenes. The scene in question is up and down stairs, through doors and walls, using guns, knives and the environment as a weapon; Broughton is tall but lighter than the men she is fighting and they allow that to play through. And you can see why she immerses herself in baths full of ice cubes, barely hiding the bruises and cuts under makeup.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Mother

2023, Niki Caro (Whale Rider) -- Netflix

What does it say about my personality that I make an effort (and even tag it, you doofus) to watch action movies focused on Women With Guns? I really cannot feel that bad considering there is already an established trope along the same lines. But wherein I usually dislike most of its male oriented genre, I do tend to see most in this category, even the ones I know will be less than stellar. Do they make more of an effort with the female helmed properties? Maybe? Not likely? Or maybe I should stop dissecting it, and just enjoy what I enjoy.

Also, why do you have to start pretty much every WWG post with a dissection of the tag? "Do I?" you ask? Well... click through the above tag and you will see, I don't. So, mnneyyyahhh.

So, directed by Niki Caro from a screenplay (and story) by Misha Green, mostly known as showrunner for Lovecraft Country, the movie tells a typical tale of a retired assassin who is drawn out of her isolation, back to her old, more violent life. But it begins before that, in a safe house where she is being harangued by FBI agents tasked with protecting her. She relates her recent past from military sniper to enforcer for arms dealers, a typical story of a killer who cannot come back to "the real world", but she abandons it all when she finds they are smuggling people as well as guns. Unfortunately her partners find her, kill all the FBI agents (but one), so she has to make her own safety in Alaska. Buuut before that, she has her baby, a baby fathered by one of her violent partners, but she doesn't know which one, and that is important because it doesn't matter; the child is hers not theirs. BUT she cannot take the child into hiding, so they fake its death and she tasks the surviving FBI agent with her child's protection. And then she leaves.

Of note, she makes use of that magical portal that transports people in stolen vehicles from one US border to the next, conveniently bypassing Canada altogether.

Years and years later. The FBI agent protecting the assassin's daughter has discovered evidence that the arms dealers are aware of the daughter, so she comes out of hiding to protect her daughter. Act two ends up with her rescuing the girl from her captors and secreting her away back to Alaska, the one place she now knows she can protect the girl. And then the Bad Guys come for them.

Despite my unbalanced paragraphs, things do happen, interesting things where we get to see Lopez being all badass despite her age. Despite her age. I hate how that has to be a thing because its not at all apparent. She's over 50, and while not in the ageless zone of Tom Cruise, there is no denying her athleticism. Men seem to be allowed to begin their action careers after 50 -- Liam Neeson was mid-50s when he did Taken and that was not yet part of his aging men of violence era. But let's hand wave all this consideration away and just say she does come across as convincing, even as the sociopath her character is meant to be. 

But the crux of the film, that she has no character name, just The Mother, is the female aspect of it ("female aspect of it" ?? CRINGE), one that was intentional, and while not the experience of all women, is something that must be unique to women (which is honestly coming from a male who has no desire to child bearing). If Neeson's Bryan Mills was protecting his daughter because he could, and because he had failed her so often before, The Mother is compelled because of motherhood. Or that is the implication. Whether it be biology or ritual or societal convention, that is what is portrayed in her, the mother lioness that will do anything to protect her young, even die. But was it successful in that depiction? Was it different than any other aging assassin protecting a weaker person? Other than a few teary scenes, I am not sure. Maybe I have to subscribe more to the societal convention to see the weight this movie wants to portray? In the end, I think I just ended up with a middling to lower-middling action thriller to add to The Tag.

Alt-Media: The Consumer - Pt B

Despite this blog, for me, being about Movies & TV, I have written a handful posts about video games (yes, that's the Tag, not just the posts about video games proper). But I don't believe I have covered much of other media. I read at a snail's pace, and usually only when commuting. My days of actually sitting in a corner and reading are gone the way of That Guy, and reading before bed causes immediate zzzzz's. I am also not that properly versed with podcasts, them being (in my old man voice) a rather new media that The Kids are listening to. But, given the Ken't description of this blog being about us sharing consumption habits with each other, why not a mixed media [series of] post[s]?

Started here. 

This one is where I cover some podcasts I listened to. I am not Of The Podcast World. I don't listen to True Crime shows, I don't listen to audiobooks as I drive my car into work (for one, I don't drive to work). I don't, despite trying desperately, enjoy live-play D&D podcasts -- I find pretty much every fucking single one of them are more "comedians playing D&D" than "D&D players recording their game" and that irritates the fuck out of me. But in general, I don't consider myself subscribed to the medium.

But...

Something Rhymes with Purple, SomethinElse

I suppose I could include "watched a shit ton of British Panel Shows" in this post, but I was never fully invested, as Marmy plowed her way through most of them on their own, finishing what she could find on legal streaming services (usually Amazon) and then finding YouTube channels that had almost entire show runs, and even at almost that is impressive for these things have impressively long runs. 

One was a show called 8 Out of 10 Cats Do Countdown, which itself is a mashup of two already existing panel shows. Countdown is a show where stodgy people do mental challenges. The 8 Out of 10 Cats bit is a more irreverent show about current events hosted by British comedians. The mashup has the hosts & guests of the latter doing the challenges of the former. The challenges are broken into two categories: words and math.

For the words bit, they have "dictionary corner" where an astute lexicographer (she who works on dictionaries) named Susie Dent checks the dictionary, for both the mashup show, and the original, since she was in her 20s. She is now in her 50s. Whatever her connections to the dictionary world were she is now truly a panel show host. But she is entirely, deeply, fully invested in the world of words, so much so that I am utterly enamoured with her. So, I began listening to her podcast.

Her podcast, which is technically the podcast of Gareth Brandreth, another staple of the British Panel Show landscape who is also enamoured with words, which will be forever solidified upon seeing him on even one episode of anything, where you will experience him talking, and talking and TALKING. Sure, he has an endless supply of anecdotes and is connected to pretty much everyone in the world. but fuuuuuuck does he like the sound of his own voice. And in THIS podcast, they two discuss words, always around a cohesive topic.

For example, they would do an episode of portmanteau's (e.g. breakfast and lunch, becomes brunch). Or an episode of loanwords vs calques. Bazaar and café are loanwords, words adopted from another language and so in common use they become part of the hosting language. Meanwhile, a calque is when the word being loaned is translated, usually literally. For example, ear worm translated German ohrwurm for the term describing a far too catchy song.

She explains it better, which is why I could listen to her explain such all day. The podcast is fun, as the two do share a common passion and can elucidate it to us (oh, pleeease [can a voice in your head roll its eyes?]), its almost as much fun seeing the relationship between the two played out in the recordings. Brandreth is somewhat insufferable, but so often he has to defer to her, as she is clearly the expert. Meanwhile, Dent is always charming, demure and very very British, even when talking about the word fuck or about how much the cast of 8 Out of 10 Cats are utter shits to her [it's part of the gimmick of the TV show, and she obviously is playing along, but I guess it still gets to her]. For the vast majority of the world, two very British people talking about words would be utterly boring (dude, sometimes it can be) but I just love the passion for the structures of language that they share with each other. I am also rather amused at, how despite both being rather world travelled, how unexposed they are to anything outside of the UK. 

The Cipher, BBC Radio

The above is probably the only non-fiction podcast I have listened to extensively. The rest are "audio dramas", which are not quite audiobooks, which I have always defined as someone reading the text of a novel out loud, even if the modern version of that has added some dramatic effect to the recording. But audio dramas are more akin to what radio dramas were like Back In The Day. A number of people tell the tale, with added sound effects, music and any additional required audio to round out the story. Almost all I have listened to have been specfic to some degree, and all Thrillers by nature.

The Cipher tells the tale of a teenage girl (Anya Chalotra, The Witcher) who begins the story solving a riddle, a challenge, a puzzle going around The Internet. She's good at puzzles and has been working with some others in chatrooms on various aspects of the puzzle. And then she solves it, and is drawn into a much deeper, more chaotic conspiracy that, well, leaves the premise of the show behind.

This is the most recent radio drama I completed, and it pointed out something to me, that is inherent to this form of media. For each show, there has to be a hook, as with all fictional media, but then the hook has to keep on coming up week to week, for each episode. Many feel a need to keep on hooking you. TV can do character episodes, filler episodes, different stylistic choices to break up the flow or stretch out a season. But podcasts seem more beholden to retaining the audience. Each episode ends in a cliffhanger, and some dramas, like this one, have to keep on changing up the game to keep the tension & excitement alive. Not sure it always works, but it is always thrilling. 

The Cipher starts as a tale about a girl solving a cipher but literally ends up being about aliens, robots, Iceland, and genetic manipulation, almost as if they wanted to do a Lost style WTF show where each episode answers little (or nothing) but adds two more questions. The presentation, directing and voice acting is top-notch and. honestly that is what kept me listening. That can truly be make or break.

Solar, CurtCo Media

Preceding the above, was this one, that played on one of the inherent natures of Radio Drama vs TV or movie, as a media -- there can be no cast of thousands, little use of background characters. If they don't have a line, they are not known, and budgets & time reduce the number of bodies available. Oh, there are always "background voices" such as TV reporters, voices on recordings, occasionally a supporting character yelling (henchmen, cop, etc.) but more often the cast is reduced to just the main characters and the strong dialogue between. 

Solar is broken into conversations, over a radio, between the two remaining astronauts onboard a spacestation that suffered a disaster, having lost contact with Earth. The remaining cast is from recordings and dramatized flashback sequences. The gimmick is that the AI in control of all these recordings has a damaged awareness of time, so everything is being delivered to us out of sequence.... for the most part. We get a disjointed story of tension, loss, tragedy and recovery that was always compelling.

Another interesting aspect of these podcasts is the need (desire?) to have at least one Name. The former had Chalotra and Chance Perdoma (The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) and a brief cameo from George Takei. This one has a few, with Stephanie Beatriz (Brooklyn 99), Alan Cumming (The Good Wife) and Helen Hunt (Blindspotting) leading the cast. 

One thing I wish these dramas would do, to separate themselves from TV Land, and be happy with the "one season and done". Tell a complete story, answer all the questions, end it and move onto your next thing. Instead, they often leave with vague open ended scenarios that kind of end the story, but also leave it open to another season, should they get... funding?

Solar was about the deep space mission to the sun, about the disaster that happened there, and the two survivors unravelling the mysteries, dealing with conspiracies behind the mission and trying to survive. The core question was, what was the true purpose of this mission? But I never felt that anything was really answered, and while a second season explaining more would be appreciated, by its very nature, it would end being more about another crew, another mission and ... just add more questions. Meh.

Last Known Position, QCODE

For example, this entire story is told from the point of view of the last survivor of a seabound expedition to find.... well, it becomes pretty obvious even if you don't pay attention to the "cover art" -- a kaiju in the middle of the ocean. Or, at the very least, a sea monster. BUT, as expected, it ends with them finding it and then... well, it could go many ways.

But I get ahead of me, as I am wont to do.

Mikaela Soto (Gina Rodriguez, Jane the Virgin) is a deep sea vehicle (mini sub) pilot hired by a billionaire to help him, and his very limited team (see the comment on limited casts above), find ... something. Well, technically they are hired to find the remains of a plane that went down, a plane upon which the billionaire's (James Purefoy, Hap and Leonard) wife & daughter were onboard. They are all on a mostly automated mega-yacht, a boat filled with tense assholes of one specialty or another. They are all dealing with the vague nature of their expedition, but the money offered is too good to deny.

So, from a plot structure point of view, we know the season has to end with them finding it. Sure, we can be happy without many answers as long as the characters meet the tentacle-y sea monster and confront it to some degree. But what if it is popular? Do they defeat the sea monster or are they all killed, but one to tell the story, and if the latter, what then? Of the handful I have listened to, this one did do the best at leaving room for an entirely different, but connected, new season, something I would be open to listening to, should it come about, a new season based on world-building the possibility of a sea filled with kaiju. Buuuut I almost wished they had gone the short story route and just ended once the monster did its monstrous business.

Quiet Part Loud, Monkeypaw

Meanwhile, this podcast kind of ended properly on an end note. The goal of the series was to defeat a monster, and they did that. But you know how monster (horror) stories go -- the last few seconds hint at it's return, a head rising out of the water, or the body of the fallen villain has disappeared? So, yeah that. Hints. 

Quiet Part Loud comes from the production company led by Jordan Peele. It is one of the few that really used its soundscape (literally) to its advantage, as it was all about a monster that hid in transmitted audio. Rick Egan (Tracy Letts, Lady Bird) is a right wing radio-show host who fell from grace after something tragic happened as he tried to generate anti-islamic hysteria against a trio of teenage boys, all to benefit his fame. He now makes a buck doing the con circuit (RWNJs [Right Wing Nut Jobs] never go away) while trying to maintain a relationship with his daughter Becca (Milly Shapiro, Hereditary). He hooks up with a random woman (Christina Hendricks, Firefly) at a bar, who drags him into a conspiracy involving an ancient entity that lives and thrives in hateful communication. It wants Rick to rise up again, through his broadcast voice of hatred & xenophobia, which leaves Rick torn between getting back on top or fighting real evil. You see, Rick is not a true evil xenophobe, just a standard model asshole who knew the RWNJs could win him some fame.

Through recordings that Rick is making to himself, which he believes will be edited into a podcast, as well as phone calls and other recordings, we get the story via the media which is the food and means of survival to the creature. It is ancient, initially living on the voices of those who spewed hate, eventually finding its way to radio (and hinted that it was primarily responsible for the first two world wars) it was briefly defeated and now hopes to find its way back to power over podcasts, amidst the current, very loud wave of hatred. Rick, along with the kids he originally denigrated, have to find a way to contain and destroy the creature.

The sound production is, as expected, top notch. The mostly unknown (to me) voice actors are spectacular and the tension is the kind that would have me stop mid-walk to get past a story point. If they do find a way to a Season 2, I will be there.

Chrysalis, DUST

Finally, we have a podcast that had a very interesting origin. It started life as a Reddit post, a spontaneous bit of writing by someone, to get a story idea out of their head and "onto paper". It generated enough positive feedback, he continued with the story which was not quite enough for a novel but was picked up & expanded into a radio drama. Given its origins of written word, it often glides between the realms of audiobook being read out loud, over to proper dramatic radio drama, and back again.

The story is of an AI that awakens from slumber in the glass-ed rubble of a destroyed Earth. An alien attack happened which ended the planet some unknown number of years prior. When this AI awakens, it believes itself to be the "last human alive" given its nature of having once been the memories of a man. That aspect is not explored, unfortunately, as the story moves towards the mostly contained AI (a server farm buried deep beneath... London?) and its drone based ... senses, towards it expanding itself into a massive, SUPER massive entity hell bent on revenge against the alien lifeforms that ended Earth.

The story is not often story, more postulation of how an AI would expand itself, while still struggling with its state, and what it is. But the writing does an admirable job of making all the exposition dramatic and compelling. Then again, this is the kind of stuff I do in my own writing, which is pretty much me telling me about the cool stuff going on inside my head, and not really ever  telling a story. I have ideas and conversations, but rarely plots. But, obviously enough people thought this was interesting, to have produced a radio drama from it.

The story has the AI discovering the alien race that destroyed Earth, learning of its origins as part of a galactic empire, and of its methods of interspace travel, using everything it learns to become a vengeful force that no one can stop. And then it shifts to the other side, where we learn the attack on Earth was just a minor blip in a failed imperial expansion, in a vast society where one lonely planet not connected to the stars would not be, and was not, missed. Sure, the deaths of billions of people is horrific but the society thinks of people on the galactic scale. Until "the last human" arrives and forces them to consider the actions of the ancestors and deal with it.

It ends properly. There is confrontation and resolution. Oh you could shoe-horn in another story, but, finally, we have something that ended.

KWIF: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (+3)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week (or so) I have usually have a spotlight movie which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts.  

This Week:
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023, d. Joaquim dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, and Kemp Powers - in theatre)
Shazam!: Fury of the Gods (2023, d. David F. Sandberg - in theatre)
Your Sister's Sister (2011, d. Lynn Shelton - Crave) 
Blackberry (2023, d. Matt Johnson - in theatre)

---

I worried that Into the Spider-Verse was an anomaly, that its unique and pliable animation would be a one-shot thing, that any repeated effort to replicate it, either by a sequel or another studio emulating it, would be met with failure. Likewise, I worried that the animation, should attempts be made to replicate it, would make it less special.

There haven't been any other films to attempt what Into the Spider-Verse did with animation in the 4 1/2 years since. The truth is, I don't think that anyone else could. The sheer intricacy of the animation, the sheer variety within the animation, the sheer density of information on screen, you can only do that with a massive budget, and it needs to be attached to a property, like Spider-Man, that will all but guarantee making its money back. As such, stepping into Across the Spider-Verse, I wasn't quite prepared for my return to the Spider-Verse, and the opening sequence, in which Gwen Stacey talks of her friend Miles Morales, his origin story, and how it ties to her own origin story, all while she's playing the drums with increasing intensity... it's pure audio-visual stimulation. The kind that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The kind that make you sit up straighter and try to pay even closer attention. The kind that you try to take in not just with your eyes and ears, but through all your senses. You want to just absorb it. But, eventually with this film, you need to stop trying so hard to absorb it, and instead, let it absorb you.

There's no easy way to describe the animation of Across the Spider-Verse, except to say that, if you saw Into the Spider-Verse, it's like that, but more. If you have sensory input issues, like if a lot of visual information is hard for you to digest, these would be difficult movies for you.  There's a lot of distinct visual cues going on, such as Gwen's earth being accentuated by a muted neon watercolour backdrop that kind of moves and bleeds and changes tones and crispness with the emotion of the scene. It's replicating the art of Robbie Rodriguez from the initial Spider-Gwen comic books, but you don't really need to know that reference to feel the impact of its beauty and intensity.  We spend a lot time with Gwen (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld) up front, taking a great supporting character from the first movie and fleshing her out as the co-star of this film.

Gwen's deal is her police captain father doesn't know she's Spider-Woman, and he thinks Spider-Woman killed their earth's Peter Parker, who was Gwen's best friend. The death of Peter hit Gwen so hard that she kind of pushes everyone away lest she experience that kind of pain again. But, even in  the year since the end of the story of the last film, she still thinks of Miles Morales all the time. The connection between Gwen and Miles isn't just happenstance. We learn in this movie that all Spider-persons are connected through shared "Canon events", incidents of loss and triumph, trauma and success that connect them all despite the sometimes drastic variations of their realities (one spider-variation is a sentient dune buggy, named "Peter Parkedcar").  But Gwen and Miles seem to have an additional connection, an attraction, but maybe even something deeper, and they both seem to recognize it.

After a parchment Vulture from a da Vinci-esque reality makes it into Gwen's, she's aided by Miguel O'Hara (Oscar Isaac) and Jess Drew (Issa Rae), a futuristic vampire Spider-man and a motorcycle-riding mom-to-be, respectively. Since the events of Into the Spider-Verse (as well as Spider-Man: No Way Home, it's mentioned off-handedly) the multi-verse is in turmoil and Miguel heads a vast web of spider-agents who help try to repair chaotic fluctuations. Gwen is reluctantly recruited and given a "watch-thingie" that helps keep her stable when traveling to other dimensions. 

Miles (Shameik Moore, absolutely outstanding voice work here), meanwhile, has become more comfortable as Spider-Man, but still yet to hit his groove. Balancing school, his family and his Spider-manning hasn't been easy, and despite having initially made some multiversal friends who showed him the ropes, he's since been learning on his own. He encounters a being named The Spot (voiced by Jason Schwartzman), who can open up portals from one nearby point to another. Miles sees him as a nuisance, but The Spot attempts to convey how closely tied the two of them are. The Spot, see, was created as a result of the collider incident from the prior film, and blames Spider-Man for it. Miles dismisses The Spot as a nothing villain-of-the-week, which only fuels The Spot into a deeper anger, driving him to level up his powers, leading to dimension-crossing and dimension-threatening abilities.  Gwen, now working for Miguel's agency comes to visit Miles' earth, as much to see Miles again as to do her job of keeping track of The Spot, who is about to become a real problem.

This leads to a trip to the world of Pavitr Prabhakar (from the Spider-Man: India comic, and voiced delightfully by Kiran Soni), in which Miles disrupts a "Canon event" and is brought back to Miguel's headquarters for, basically, a dressing down, and, ultimately, an eye-popping, mind-blowing, sensory-overloaded chase sequence as Miles attempts to escape back to his home to stop something bad from happening there. 

I won't get into the grit of what happens in this film, as it's such an incredible world of discovery and inventiveness, but as much as it is an appeal-to-the-senses film, its greatest strength, and what makes it even superior to the first movie, is its connection with the characters. Miles' mom and dad, nurse Rio (Luna Lauren Velez) and cop Jefferson (Brian Tyree Henry), who were present in the first film, are vital characters here, as is Gwen's dad, cop George (Shea Wingham).  The connection between parents and their children is a major theme of the movie.  There's something to be said with how much parents trust their children by how much the teenagers in this film trust their parents. They keep their identities secret from their parents, knowing that, for as complicated as things are, it could only be more so if they knew who they really were. It's not just exclusive to being a Spider-person, it kind of goes for all parents and children. To Miles and Gwen, being Spider-Man and Spider-Woman is a part of their identity, and there's a fear there that in revealing that, their parents will try to control, constrain or even quash that identity.  As parents, Rio, Jefferson and George all have to face their own limitations of how they understand their children as individuals, that the dependency their kids had on them since birth diminished.  Just as the teens need to learn that being independent doesn't have to mean severing ties with their parents, their parents need to learn that giving their children independence doesn't mean letting them go.

Inside of all of this are the desires the teens have, to flourish and grow as a person, to find their own way, but also to find guidance. Other Spider-people who have had more experience are easy targets for this desire, but mentoring means nothing if there's not also respect, and trust.  The idea of trust is another theme throughout the movie, and it's as much the adversary of the film as The Spot is. Knowing who to trust with secrets, knowing how to trust your own instincts, trusting others with your emotions, (even Rio trusting Gwen with her son's affections), they come in and out of play, but they're very important to both Gwen and Miles' journey. 

The connection between Gwen and Miles leads to a very tender and gorgeously rendered Spider-persons version of a "walk-and-talk" romantic interlude. It's possibly my favourite scene in a movie that is pretty much wall-to-wall with amazing scenes. Even Pavitr comments on the romantic tension within minutes of meeting them, and the film does an amazing job with conventional romantic storytelling beats.

It's got some of the most eye-popping, incredible action sequences, as well as this amazing love story, this absolutely radiant story of family, and still it manages to be wildly funny. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller wrote the script with David Callaham and it's such a well-balanced picture. It has the patented Lord and Miller humour, the awareness of genre tropes which also doubles as self-awareness in characters.  That type of humour can get utterly grating (see Family Guy) but Lord and Miller have always had a knack for using that meta/self-awareness in both a disarming and natural fashion that much more often than not feels smart, or clever but with no self-satisfaction beneath it.  There is a density of rapid-fire quippage happening during every action scene that basically demands rewatching because it's impossible to catch it all the first (or even the second) time around.  There's also an impressive amount of spectacular Spider-Man references to films, comics, and other media of the past, none of which should hamper the enjoyment of this film if you don't get them.

The soundtrack is wonderful, both the song selection and the score from Daniel Pemberton, which starts from beat one. There's a lot of frenetic energy to the animation, but there's also rhythm and timing brought back to it all with the music. Even at 2 hours and 20 minutes, it's still an incredibly tight, and dazzling, package.

This is the second film in three weeks that is the first of a planned two-parter. Where Fast X really seemed to just be playing around mindlessly with its toys with no real stakes or direction, Across the Spider-Verse just keeps escalating, using everything it's been building to lead to a genuinely thrilling "To be continued".  I cheered when it came to its conclusion.  I could feel it coming and I was ready for it, even as I was just as ready to continue on with the story.  That's what makes it such a good "To be continued" is it feels like the creatives know exactly where it's going and where its leading to, and, going back to trust, they've earned the trust that this massive journey has a destination in mind. 

It's like getting a delicious foot long submarine sandwich and eating half and feeling completely satiated. You know the other half is there to enjoy later, but you're feeling good right now. 

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Shazam!: Fury of the Gods did not succeed at the box office. There are many reasons for that. It could be due to the shake-up of the DC Cinematic Universe. It could be that there's increasing superhero fatigue (I think Guardians and Spider-Verse do dispel that concept somewhat). It could be that Zachary Levi's social media presence started to sour people on him. It could be that the first Shazam was a modest hit and that more shouldn't have been expected out of a second. Or it could be that the story of this film, as presented in the trailers, feels utterly lifeless, and no amount of goofy mugging and rapid-fire quipping from Levi could save that.  If anything, in watching the film, it's Levi's goofy mugging and rapid-fire quipping that seem to be its greatest detriment.  At one point, the Shazam family discover the meaning of "SHAZAM", that each of the letters is representative the power of a god, and it's pointed out that Billy Batson, when in his Shazam form, seems to utterly lack the wisdom of Solomon.  Levi's portrayal of the superhero is at odds with the arc of Billy Batson, which is a kid who's afraid of losing the only family he's ever really known. There should be weight to it, but Levi plays everything pretty upbeat and goofy, and none of what's weighing on Billy emotionally seems to be conveyed on screen.

As entertainment, Fury of the Gods is fine. It's a fairly good looking movie with some decent set-pieces, and charming little moments, and has a generally amiable cast that seem game for everything asked of them. I mean, Helen Mirren is really giving it a go, bless her. This looks to be an expensive film, more so than the prior Shazam! by anywhere from 30-50% depending on the numbers you find.  But from the moment this film was announced, with Mirren, Lucy Liu and Rachel Ziegler as the antagonists (the daughters of Atlas seeking to steak the powers of the Greek gods back from the Shazam family) the fan response what, in a nutshell, "what?"  Like, were we really cramming for Shazam vs a dragon. This is so 2017 "let's Game of Thrones this $#!&".

This is a weird poster

To generate any excitement among the fan community about a property, there has to be something familiar to the fan community. Captain Marvel has a rich rogues gallery of bizarre and entertaining villains, and if "the daughters of Atlas" are among them, I've never heard of them. The end of the first movie teased Mr. Mind (a talking green alien worm) teaming up with Mark Strong's Sivana to lead the Monster Society of Evil and fight Shazam in order to take over the world. That's the movie everyone wanted to see. Something bonkers, like classic Shazam comics were. I don't know how Sandberg arrived at this "daughters of Atlas" idea, out of all the Captain Marvel history he could have latched onto, but it was the wrong choice.  Writer-director Sandberg pokes fun at that expectation in the post-credits teaser, which, I hate to say given how much energy was put into the rest of it, was my favourite scene in the film.

I respect the intention behind the Shazam family and Sandberg, more than anything, uses this film to lean into the concept. But Captain Marvel/Shazam has existed for 80 years, and the "Shazam Family" as seen ehre has only been around for a about a decade and not really explored all that much. Sandberg's doing as much heavy lifting with them in these two films as the comics have since their origin, and I wonder if the Shazam Family basically handcuffed what he could do in these films. 

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If you're not familiar with the term, mumblecore is a term used to describe low budget, typically intimate, naturalistic, lightly-dramatic films with small casts in limited locations that focuses relationships that favours dialogue (often improvised) over plot. They were quite the rage in aughts and early 20-teens.  

The late Lynn Shelton, director of Your Sister's Sister, is one of the bigger names in the mumblecore genre, Mark Duplass, who co-stars here, is another. It's sort of a super-team-up of mumblecore royalty. God, just typing that makes me want to hit myself in the nuts.

The film here finds adrift 30-something Jack (Duplass) set to meet up with his best friend (and recently deceased brother's girlfriend), adrift 30-something Iris (Emily Blunt) at her family cottage. He arrives a night early only to happen upon Iris' older sister, Hannah (Rosemary Dewitt), a lesbian who just separated from her partner. Jack and Hannah get to know each other, and get drunk, when Hannah agrees to Jack's hypothetical propositioning of her. They have awkward sex, and things get even more awkward when Iris shows up the next day and they try to keep the secret of their rendez-vous from her. Then Iris confesses to Hannah about being in love with Jack (inexplicably), and you just know eventually it's all going to come out, including the part about Hannah poking holes in the condom to steal Jack's sperm.

I struggle with how I feel about this film. I was both intrigued enough to watch it twice, and yet kind of annoyed by the whole thing. If it were a 60's production it would be a farce, but it's a mumblecore which carries with it as a genre its own nuisance baggage. I think what bothers me most is Duplass, who I've enjoyed in many things, but his general vibe is low-key asshole. So for him to be, supposedly, a woman's best friend, and yet get a few drinks in him and he's propositioning his best friend's lesbian sister...I mean, that's what I expect out of a Duplass character, but that's not who this character needs to be for us to feel like he's worthy of a romantic interest for Emily Blunt (maybe Emily Blunt from The Devil Wears Prada, but not sweet, meek Irish here.  Jack has a speech late in the film which conveys some sense of self awareness of not being worthy of Emily Blunt, or of being a potential dad+uncle to a baby...but it doesn't change the fact that I feel like Duplass was the wrong choice for this role.

I thought the ending was pretty shrewd on Shelton's part, though. Despite the mumblecore model, there's always a sense of control to Shelton's work here, a sense that she's getting what she wants out of every scene, even when it's heavily improvised.  What surprised me most is how well Shelton dispersed awkwardness. What could have easily turned into cringe comedy or uneasy drama is tampered by largely emotionally aware characters, and a handling of scenes with warmth and intimacy.

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I cannot honestly remember the last Canadian film that got me out to the theatres. I'm wondering if it was Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music In The World, which feels like half a lifetime ago (a third at least). I've definitely watched some at home, and I'm certain I must have seen something in the cinemas. But even if there was, none of them had the *must watch* drive behind them that Blackberry had for me. 

Don't ask what it was that was stimulating me so much about it... I tend to find the pseudo-bio genre almost a deterrent rather than a draw, more often than not.  I like Jay Baruchel generally, but he isn't a "gotta see it" kind of screen persona.  Same with Glenn Howerton.  But this is a distinctly Canadian film, and there's a distinctly Canadian punchline in the trailers that, no matter how proud (or jaded) you are about our country, it lands pretty good.  The saga of the Blackberry phone's rise and fall (alongside hockey-obsessed Jim Balsillie's vying for an NHL team) are not quite children's stories here, but if you're over the age of 40, you definitely have an awareness of some of the story.

What writer/director/co-star Mat Johnson (Nirvana the Band the Show) delivers is -- if I'm going to do that thing that Toasty hates -- the punched-up, purple-prosed melodrama of The Social Network by way of the over-the-shoulder, in-the-room hand-cam comedic awkwardness of The Office, with more than a little of the peppery biting satire of Glengarry Glen Ross. It of course goes beyond that to become what the various parties bring to the production with Johnson clearly having an overall sensibility in mind for this and accomplishing an incredibly well-balanced delicate tone that is more comedy than drama, but is always taking its characters seriously. Baruchel's premiere shtick for two decades now has been "confidently anxious", and he manages to transition his interpretation of Mike Laziridis from overly anxious beta nerd to overly confident beta nerd over the course of the movie, as if he learns the wrong things from Balsillie's hubris.

As great as all the players are, it is Howerton's Balsillie that steals the show. Egotistical, brash, conniving, convincing and shrewd, only he could do what Research In Motion needed to get them where they got to. Everything that RIM did couldn't have been done without him. But at a certain point, the status and the success blinded both Balsillie and Laziridis from what made them successful, which was doing something different in the field of mobile technology. The iPhone was seemingly lightyears beyond Blackberry, and they, as a company, refused to adjust, too confident in what was already a problematic product.

Blackberry is a gloriously entertaining, decidedly Canadian, rise-and-fall story that is sometimes ridiculous but almost always riveting, with a killer soundtrack that felt like a mix tape I made in the late 90's.  Quite loved it.