I like disaster movies. The original movie of which this is only kinda sorta not really a sequel to was before the words Climate Change were shouted in derision by midwesterners, when tornado ratings were only one letter and the emergence of F5 tornados (at that time) were rare and almost fictional. It wasn't even really a disaster movie, as those usually are on greater scales, but more a tense thriller in the face of real human tragedy.
This movie does pretty much the exact same thing but with YouTube stars, the Internet and the idea that bigger, nastier tornadoes are a thing, and it will only get worse.
Maybe you should give a spoiler warning?
The movie opens with a group of friends chasing a tornado: Kate, Javi, Kate's boyfriend Jeb, Addy and really nervous Praveen. They want to deliver a compound into a tornado, something Kate came up with, that is supposed to dissipate it. They also have a load of the little Xmas bulbs from the original movie. Wink wink, nod nod. Now, if you are like me, you are now thinking, "I don't remember seeing recognizable face Kiernan Shipka in any of the trailers."
<cue your favourite Impending Doom musical piece>
Kate's tornado whispering lets her down, her magical compound doesn't work and everyone but her, and Javi from the safety of his monitoring station (the Xmas bulbs give his a great view of how terrible the tornado is), is sucked up by the tornado.
Five Years Later. Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones, Where the Crawdads Sing) is now a boring weather person... weather scientist? She lives in NYC far away from any seasonal tornado activity. She has lost contact with Javi (Anthony Ramos, Transformers: Rise of the Beast) and even sends her mom to voicemail. But then he comes asking for help. He has a new science plan, one based around placing a triad of sensors which will allow him to 3D map a tornado in action. He still just wants to save lives, or so he claims. In these movies when people have flashy investors you are meant not to trust them. He needs Kate and her ability to sniff out tornados. Despite her PTSD, she agrees.
The first disaster she encounters is not a tornado but a YouTube-r. Following the beat of the other movie, but kind of flipping the table, Kate is with the maligned corporate storm chasers, but there is a new version of the home-sy group --- the Tornado Wrangler (Glen Powell, Hit Man) and his fully equipped team of Good Ol Boys & Girls. Pumping out yee-haws and non-stop country music, they chase down twisters for the Likes.
Of course, they end up at odds with Kate and her new team, but Kate has her magical ability, a gut feeling, an innate understanding of tornadoes, her.... tornado whispering.
The beat of a movie like this has to be Tornado > Character Development > Tornado > Character Development, as the tornadoes cannot just keep happening randomly or there would be no chasing. So, as things develop we get to learn a few things about Javi's company (they are bad guys) and a few things about the Tornado Wranglers -- they are not such bad guys, and Tyler, the oh so pretty face of the Wranglers, is smarter and more empathetic than expected. Both of them take a side quest together which pisses of everyone but does allow Kate to make things better with her mom. Also, figures out why the magic tornado wrangling pixie dust never worked.
With a guy like Glen Powell playing the ultra-macho, tornado wrangler you expect romance to be the main thing on the table. But no, apparently they chose a fan-frustrating no-kiss aspect for the movie, but at least they get to play all flirty-dismissive throughout the movie. His cowboy hat big teeth country music charm does not work on her. Well, it kind of does, but only once he skips past the YouTube camera and works to save people.
Its a fine movie, not great, but for its genre it does a decent job. Powell is the stand-out here, and since the movie doubled its budget in returns, another successfully stepping stone on him becoming the new Leading Man of the Hour?
Because we never have enough projects in this Blog, I am creating one of my own, wherein I indulge my desire to rewatch a movie (because sometimes a rewatch is easier than absorbing a new movie) but also fill in a blank left by the Great Hiatus of 2018. It will be more interesting to me to see what I will be willing to rewatch, than see what I missed writing about.
This was pre-pandemic, pre John Krasinski providing us a much needed "Some Good News". Instead he provides the world some really bad news in the form of monsters. IIRC this was the first of a handful of "mysterious monsters end the world" movies, most recent being Arcadian. Others included The Silence and ...Bird Box, also eaten by the Great Hiatus. I can guess there were a few more riding the coattails but I didn't see them.
It begins "in media res" on Day 89. A family is surviving together on a rural farm with three children. The daughter (Millicent Simmons, Wonderstruck) is deaf, the oldest son (Noah Jupe, Ford v Ferrari) is ill (do we ever learn what his condition is?) and their youngest is just a toddler. They all know to stay quiet, for even the slightest sound will draw ... the creatures. But toddlers only know their next sensation and a battery operated toy proves his doom.
When it picks up almost a year later the family is still dealing with the loss, but they have survived. Everyone but the oldest son blames themselves to some degree. But they are trying to move on, and mom (Emily Blunt, The Girl on the Train) is even pregnant again, and preparing herself for rearing a crying baby by devising a box, lined with padding, and hidden under a further padded place in the barn, provided air by bottle. I am not even sure the family is named, despite having credits, but what does it matter, there is only The Family and the ever present silence.
Krasinski excels with the small moments & elements of this movie. Even the way he holds his finger to his bearded face to shush a despondent old man in the woods is so very very ... tangible. The soft sand they have poured in paths around the farm and out to their common destinations, for example the path leading to the nearby town, provides a quieted path. The steps of their old house is painted with the places where boards will not creak. They even have a place where the deafening roar of a waterfall allows them to utter without fear, a single place of safety.
The rest of the movie is just tension. Being a movie of silence, music is all but absent, and we the viewer are probably holding our breaths as much as the characters. The opening act established that anyone can perish, no character is safe. And when we are provided a possible weapon against the creatures, perhaps we can even breathe a sigh of relief.
I found myself asking the same questions I did the first time round: what's up with the rest of the world, even what is up in the rest of the landscape they live in? We do see signs there are other survivors, in the lighting of fires atop high places, but there is no way the rest of the world just went ... quiet. We see the monsters are vulnerable, just well armoured. Armies would have been able to fight them. Someone must have.
The second movie doesn't answer any questions and the third is a Day One. I wonder if it will provide any hint as to the future.
2005, Tim Story (The Blackening) -- Disney 2007, Tim Story (Barbershop) -- Disney
OK, these movies are from one of the many pre-MCU eras of superhero movies; this era gave us a bunch of middling attempts at & sequels of Marvel movies (Spider-Man's, Ghost Rider, Elektra, etc.) and pretty much the same at DC (Batman Begins, Superman Returns), albeit smaller numbers. There were even a few non-publisher movies (Sky High, Jumper, Push, Hancock) which played with the genre. They all scratched an itch for comic book lovers, but few were satisfying and even fewer were successful. Oh, there are always anomalies, but...
And in some ways, we are back to that era, except the competing movies are all MCU. Or it one long sub-par era interrupted by a brief decade of quality, popular Marvel movies?
These are terrible movies.
But I remember that, at least, when I originally saw Fantastic Four I was not entirely disappointed. Afterall, its an origin story, so they get a lot of leeway. The casting was acceptable with Ioan Gruffud (King Arthur) as Reed Richards, Jessica Alba (Sin City) as Sue Storm, Captain America (Chris Evans, Cellular) as Johnny, and the ever confusingly aged Michael Chiklis (The Shield) as Benn Grimmm. I was not against Alba being a blonde, and not in black & white. Oh, and Julian McMahon (Charmed) as Victor Von Doom (sing the doom song!).
Chiklis was 40ish playing the Ben Grimm role, which is the age he was likely supposed to be when he played "The Commish", when he was only 28.
OK, so Reed Richards, not yet so fantastic, wants to expose some biology to a cloud of cosmic energy, but in order to do so, he will need to get onto Vic VD's spacestation. Reed and Vic are old college buddies, and Vic agrees to allow Reed and his (astronaut?) buddy Ben Grimm come on board as long as his chief researcher Sue Storm gets to help -- she's also Reed's ex. Also her brother is up there as well. I don't remember why. Anywayz, things go wrong and they are all exposed to the energy from the fast moving cloud (???) of cosmic.... stuff.
If Reed was dating Sue Storm in college, let's say six years ago when Reed was mid-twenties? Jessica Alba is six years younger than Gruffud, and McMahon equally older than Gruffud. I suppose if you do the the typical waffling of ages in Hollywood, Sue was entering university while these guys were there?
Back on Earth they discover they have powers, while things go very wrong for Victor, as I guess he was walking a thin line with his Board of Directors, and his spacestation going kaflooey has made things worse? Meh, he should have just gone all Musk on them and did whatever the fuck he wanted.... well, maybe he did? Anywayz, yeah, superpowers and Ben puts them in the spotlight by saving someone on a bridge.
I forget, is the flustered not-quite-remembering things supposed to be casual charming? Yeah yeah, I know, "shaddup you."
So, I guess if Elon Musk was cursed with superpowers, he would turn out to be Vic VD ? While Reed is scrambling to find a way to "cure" them, cuz his best friend is a big orange rock, Johnny is all jazzed at being as hot as he thinks he is in real life. Meanwhile Sue is mainly tortured because there was a reason she broke up with Reed in the first place. But Reed actually does invent a way to cure them, it just needs an awful lot of power, of which, Von Doom has at his finger tips -- literally. He briefly makes Ben human, just so he can piss off the others, and then they have to duke it out with him, as he goes all.... well, literally supervillain. Through the Power of Working Together (Ben rocks out again) they stop Von Doom dooming (pun intended) to being a solid hunk of metal.
Its a serviceable superhero origin movie with the requisite amount of shoe-horned in comic book behaviour, and minimal attempts to be all Hollywoody. I mean, Von Doom is hand-wringing Evil just because (again, Elon anyone?) and despite Reed actually understanding what he has to do to revert them back to being human, they decide to stay Super. But is fun and charismatic.
And while the same director did the next movie, oh wow, it is terrible, like proper terrible.
It starts with a "oh woe is us, we are celebrity superheroes who just cannot catch a break and have normal lives". I mean, they obviously decided to be superheroes, so Y B Normal? Sue wants a proper wedding, Ben and Johnny argue like 10 year olds, and Reed doesn't want to take a break from science in order to actually get married. That is until the Silver Surfer crashes their wedding.
Reed had already broken his "no science-y stuff until married" promise to Sue by building something for an Angry General (with a Hot Adjunct [Beau Garrett, Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce], who rebuffs Johnny) to track something causing Climate Change around the world. Angry General (Andre Braugher, Brooklyn 99) doesn't really want to work with Reed, but, y'know, you need to track the Bad Thing in order to shoot at it. But it doesn't really go well, and the wedding is ruined, so Angry General just goes to his second choice -- Victor Von Doom, who is no longer a solid hunk.
Sorry, getting ahead of myself.
They have discovered that if they touch, their powers exchange, leading to annoying Hijinx: Sue gets Johnny's and burns her clothes off (cue the construction worker wolf-whistling), Ben gets Johnny's powers and Johnny becomes an orange rock, etc. Except for scenes when they don't exchange their powers, because hijinx were not important to the scene.
Also, they track the surfboard based cosmic energy to Deep Space, where there is a trail of destroyed planets, and to England where a run-in with the Surfer (the aforementioned Bad Thing) damages the big ferriswheel and drains the Thames. Technically the river is still flowing so I am not sure how they drained the entire that quickly. Sorry, but this kind of stuff in shitty movies bugs me -- if anything, we should be seeing some sort of diminished flow for a good long time.
Anywayz, it is THIS sort of "doesn't go well" that has Angry General switch over to Doom. That said, he doesn't really do anything and Reed's cosmic energy sucker really does the work. Not sure why, but Angry General still acts like Doom did it. I think he just prefers to be angry.
Anywayz, they store the Surfer (voice of Laurence Fishburne, Hannibal) in a facility in Siberia. Wait, what? Why Siberia? Isn't that on Russian Federation soil? Despite the cold war being mostly over in the early 2000s, don't we still not trust Russia at that time? I mean, at least they could have said "Northern Canada" ? But the Fantastic Four are not jazzed with the idea of imprisoning the Surfer, even though they know he is connected to the destruction of a bunch of planets. But Sue bonds with him, so they free him.
Meanwhile Doom-y has stolen the Surfboard of Power and flies to... China? I guess that is why they had it be in Siberia so they could do a quick flyby of the Great Wall, so Doom could shoot at it with his new surfboard based powers.
Note, every time he writes "surfboard" a voice (not me) says "whoah man" in a surfbum sort of California accent.
No matter, again they fight Doom in a street (Shang-hai this time) and kind of easily defeat him, but (doom song) Sue is mortally wounded. No matter, Surfy is there to infuse her with cosmic mojo and revive her.
Oh yeah, Galactus has arrived. The whole point of the movie is supposed to be the arrival of Galactus but "he" plays such second fiddle to everything else in the movie, and BTW, he is just a big cloud of energy. Anywayz, SS sees the Power of Family and decides to sacrifice himself to defeat Galactus.
The End. Well, no quite yet. They finally get married in Japan, only to be interrupted again because "Venice is sinking into the sea". Uh, folks, I hate to break it to you but Venice has been sinking for years. Its a big issue, it makes the news regularly.
The End. Well, not quite -- mid-credit scene shows Surfy is still alive. Why do we care? No seriously, maybe Kent can tell us why we care? Let's live in a fantasy world and assume there was going to be a third movie -- how would the Silver Surfer play into it? What would be the classic FF villain of the week this time?
KWIF is Kent's Week in Film, in other words (or the same words, just more of them) these are the films Kent watched this week.
This Week: Alien: Romulus (2024, d. Fede Alvarez - in theatres) Jackpot! (2024, d. Paul Feig - AmazonPrime) The Five Deadly Venoms (197x, d. Chang Cheh - youtube)
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I've expressed my opinions about the Alien franchise many times on this blog already, so I won't retread that ground, so let's just say I'm a fan, but not a fanatic.
For some, the apex of the franchise is 1986's Aliens, but I don't think any entry in the series has been more potent, scarier or effective than Ridley Scott's 1979 original. Aliens, by turning the Xenomorph into an action-movie villain effectively demystified the creature, showed it off too much for it to remain scary. The creature is an effective and efficient killing machine, and it's definitely intimidating, but it ceased being scary.
In Alien3, the idea was to put the franchise's central figure into a situation where the dangers of an alien are almost secondary to the prisoners Ripley is stuck with. Alien:Resurrection was almost horror by way of the French whimsy in the Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro style. Prometheus was less an "Alien" movie and more of an "origin of the species" story, while Covenant was a hot mess of religious subtext. (The Aliens vs Predator movies are dumb fanfic movies and best left ignored).
Romulus then, by placing Fede Alvarez behind the camera, is intent on injecting the horror back into the series by ostensibly turning the latest Alien entry into a sort of conventional horror exercise of young hot people getting picked off by a murder monster.
If it sounds like I'm being dismissive, perhaps I am, so let's start out on the other side. What I primarily liked about this movie is what I like about most Alien movies: the world/universe- building around the Wayland-Utani Corporation. The quiet-but-present undercurrent of anti-capitalism has been steady throughout these films, and it's very much the trigger for not just character motivation but the reason behind the events in the entire film.
What never happens in an Alien(s) story is the Wayladn-Utani Corporation's comeuppance. It is never held responsible for the part they play in the deaths of many. Ripley and pretty much every other character in the franchise is just one of the workers whose backs the giant company rests easy (and profitably). Too big to fail. Too powerful to be held accountable.
Here, our lead is Rain (Cailee Spaeny, Civil War), a late-teen and an orphan living on a Wayland-Utani mining settlement planet, working off her conscripted number of hours. She had completed the original hours she was consigned and was looking to book her pass off the dreary, perpetually dark planet, but her hours were effectively doubled by the corporation without notice. The indentured servitude, she immediately realizes, is for life.
She meets up with friends around her own age who have a plan. As low-orbit space freighter scavengers, they picked up the signal of something big on their last mission which is sure to have the hypersleep pods they would need to traverse any distance from this miserable planet to another, sunnier, seemingly mystical utopia. They don't really need Rain so much as they need her "brother", Andy (David Jonsson, Rye Lane) -- a hacked, glitchy, second-gen Wayland-Utani Android who Rain's father had programmed to be her protector and best friend. His latent ability to access Company systems is integral.
So up to space they go, Rain seeing the sun for the first time, the promise of a brighter future ahead, and they discover their target is not a freighter, but a space station... that is slowly descending into the planet's orbital rings where it will be destroyed. They will have less than a day and an half to get in and out with what they need.
Of course what they don't realize until too late is it was a research station, and what it was researching is still on board. From there, if you've seen an Alien film, or a horror film, you know what is going to happen. But, the fun of these types of horror franchises is in how it happens and how differently it happens.
Alvarez has a couple set-pieces in this utilizing the facehuggers in a way none of the other movies have before. They skitter around the station like coconut crabs, flinging themselves at their victims faces, trying to wrap their tails around their necks and stick their intubating tube down their throats (it's never explicitly stated in any of the films, but they must be attracted to the carbon dioxide as we exhale, or the warmth of our breath... at one point Alvarez pays homage to his own film, Don't Breathe, as he has our protagonist navigate quietly through a room of these things). It's effectively creepy, made all the more so by the largely practical effects and sets.
In following the rhythms of a horror film where a band of teens or early 20-somethings are picked off one by one over the course of a night, it unfortunately destroys the known gestation period of the xenomorph from its incubation to chest-bursting to rapid growth into a full-fledged creature. What used to be a lengthy period of worrying about a comrade for hours on end instead finds a baby xeno bursting from someone's chest mere minutes after it was implanted and seemingly minutes later it's emerging fully formed from its secondary cocoon. That's my minor quibble.
The larger quibble is just how fatigued I was by the often two or three threats at once that Rain or her companions were facing. If they weren't layered then they were contiguous, one-after-another with no time for the character(s) or audience to really rest. I had such high hopes when the opening sequence of the film featured a slow pan around a space ship, devoid of any sound in the vaccum of space (where no one can hear you scream). I had wondered -- as the camera pushed in through a window, slowly, to a computer console awakening, the analog switches-and-knobs fetishized to the n'th degree -- was a slow, tense feature in store for us? Alas, no. Not at all. It's pretty frantic and at times exceeded my very flexible suspension of disbelief.
David Jonsson's Andy is the best part of the feature. I loved him in Rye Lane and he's doing so much of the dramatic heavy lifting here. He's asked to shift his personality a couple of times in this and the transitions are so well done. You need a damn good actor to manage those types of switches that change the audience's perceptions from sympathetic to fearful and back again, which Jonsson does masterfully. It helps that Andy is the most developed character in the film. Seriously, I didn't feel like I really got to know the rest of the cast outside of Rain, and I didn't really care for any of them. They were all consummate horror movie fodder. When we look at the team building of almost any prior film, they all way exceed Romulus' cadre of blank fresh meat.
There is a returning character from the original film (well, ish), who returns by way of CGI, and it's utterly ghoulish, and completely unnecessary. That role could have been anyone playing the character and it wouldn't have mattered a lick to the plot. As is, together with including the opening scene referencing the Nostromo and this CGI zombie, both I found very distracting, pulling me out of the film rather than enhancing the experience by tying it to films past. The production did have the family's blessing in resurrecting the character, which is not nothing, but it remained unnecessary fan service.
Romulus, like so many legasequels, retreads familiar ground, at times feeling like it's cribbing from every Alien film that's come before, sometimes tonally, sometimes in dialogue, sometimes in references, and sometimes just lifting enire sequences and concepts from the past. Some of it works well in tying Romulus to the series overall (there are some surprising nods to Prometheus even), but some of it just feels too *winky winky* fanservice.
It's a pretty glossy movie. It looks good overall. I wish it had taken its time more, slower, more lingering shots. I wish it felt more like a 1970's movie than a 2020's movie, but it seems purposefully designed to draw in the teenage crowd looking for air conditioning and a few cheap scares with some nostalgia triggers for the olds in the audience, and I think it succeeds, despite my not liking it as much.
My rankings below. To note, of all the Alien(s) films, the only one I think is outright bad is Covenant.
Jackpot! is an action-comedy set in Los Angeles circa 2030. Back in the day it was common to say that any movie set in the future was science fiction, but really a lot of near future set movies are more speculative fiction. There's nothing really speculative about the premise here. Unlike, say, Idiocracy which mined and extrapolated and exaggerated fear of a nation getting dumb and dumber, Jackpot! is pure conceit with no relevant commentary or even satire.
In the world of Jackpot!, if you win the state lottery (with massive payouts akin to the Powerball Lottery) then legally anyone can kill you within the first 24 hours and claim your prize, the only rules are you're not allowed to kill anyone else in the process, and no guns.
It's a stupid, unrealistic premise. If you're not going to go the route of satire (which it teases in its intro then abandons almost completely), then only way to make a premise like this work is to go big...very, very big.
Unfortunately, director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, Ghostbusters: Answer the Call) didn't go big enough to sell the ridiculousness of the premise. There is a decently produced sequence when Awkwafina's Katy (wasn't she also Katy in Shang-Chi?) is announced as the winner of the 3.2 billion dollar lottery while on a casting call, and the other actresses immediately start gunning for her. The fight spills into a martial arts class which then busts its way through the wall into a yoga studio, when John Cena's Noel arrives on the scene soliciting himself as an independent contractor who will serve and protect the winner for a percentage of the earnings.
The scene has some energy to it, feeling like a brawl but with wacky makeshift weapons. It immediately brought to mind Jackie Chan, and for the rest of the movie I couldn't shake the idea that the only way this works is if it's a Jackie Chan stunt show. It is unfortunately not.
It's standard for a genre film to have a lead character who is new to the conceit, it gives the other characters the opportunity to exposition dump for the them and the audience. But here it's absolutely far fetched that after four years of chaos and murder that Katy has never heard of the lottery, and it hurts the story, stretching further one's already fraying suspension of disbelief.
The remainder of the movie feels direly cheap. Like TV movie-budget cheap. The other action setpieces have little charm and show their limitations circling around the same locations for five minutes. The final sequence where a mob of people descend upon Katy...it's almost all the same cast we've seen throughout the film, as if to say L.A. is made up of a few dozen people, and not a sprawling metropolis.
I enjoy both John Cena and Awkwafina, they are generally likeable, funny and charming, and they are quite affable together, and when Simu Liu emerges, there's residual "Shang Chi buddies" chemistry between him and Awkwafina, but it all doesn't add up to much. The comedy of the film lacks punch, the action of the film is weak, the premise is absurd, the satire is nonexistant, and it just looks terrible.
This is not a winning ticket.
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Considered a classic from the heyday of 70's kung-fu cinema and the Shaw Bros. catalogue, The Five Deadly Venoms (aka The Five Venoms) retains a delightful playfulness that still resonates even to a new audience.
A master, nearing the end of his life, wonders the fate of five of his students, each of whom he taught a specific discipline of kung-fu: centipede, snake, scorpion, lizard, and toad. They have all long departed from him and changed their identities, but he worries given the potency of their power that they may have turned to evil. Hi final student, Yang Tieh who has learned each of the disciplines but is by no means a master, is tasked with discovering the identities of these former pupils and, if necessary, stopping thier criminal behaviour at all costs.
Yang, venturing into the city, becomes embroiled in a conspiracy of crime and corruption among the law enforcement and judiciary. At the heart of it is the Five Venoms, but learning who is who, and who is involved proves twisty and complicated.
It's not masterful intrigue by any stretch, but it is a fun bit of puzzle solving and mystery that brings the audience along for the ride. And when the action starts, it's all about how each of the Venom styles is portrayed in combat. The overblown sound-effects only enhance the delightful camp of it all.
The fights are well-structured but not the most tightly choreographed, but it doesn't matter. The unique styles and "venom strikes" each are very evocative of their respective creature make for entertaining viewing, and the revelations, as they emerge lead to some pretty surprising plot turns.
I think with any kung-fu feature, if it can engage an audience beyond just the martial arts display then it's a good one. This is a good one.
We find this show charming enough that we continue to watch even though it usually ends up disappointing us entirely. I stated it in the Season 3 post, and I will state it now -- they always end up losing steam, fucking their own continuity and appearing to get bored with writing their own show.
Never wrote about season 1 or 2.... wonder why.
What 100. They've returned from another apocalypse to another, different, timeline, but without powers. Dad (Colm Feore, Face/Off) runs a megacorp, but no matter, they all go their own, usual, dysfunctional directions. Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman, The Beekeeper) is (barely) an actor, sober Klaus (Robert Sheehan, Mortal Engines) lives in her basement, Five (Aidan Gallagher, Nicky, Ricky, Dick & Dawn) is in the CIA, Diego (David Castañeda, The Tax Collector) delivers packages, Lila (Ritu Arya, Barbie) is a housewife, Viktor (Elliot Page, Close to You) runs a bar in Nova Scotia and Luther (Tom Hopper, Black Sails) is a stripper. But then, five years later, another Impending Doom draws them together for more weirdo hijinx, more and more dysfunctional sibling disputes, the deaths of countless henchfolk and eventually the end of the world... again. But for good this time?
1 Great. For me, the best things about the show have always been the whackadoodle characters and situations. This season we get Jean and Gene Thibodeau, played by IRL couple Nick Offerman and Megan Mullaly. I am not entirely convinced they are a couple but maybe the same person from alternate timelines. All the hijinx of the previous seasons is jamming in alternate timelines into this one. In fact, they run an organization/conspiracy/cult that researches and finds examples of it, such as books, movies and music that are two entirely different copies of the same thing. Think of finding a copy of Bladerunner where William Hurt played Deckard instead of Harrison Ford. These two characters are out there, a little extreme, but ... onto something.
2 Good. The characters. The mains are what always have me forget how dissatisfied I was with each season and still come back for more. They are so utterly broken and dysfunctional, you would think the cringe factor would turn me off, but there is a caring between them even when they hate each other. And all the actors pull it off so very very well. My fav is still Five, the non-named perpetual youth. Actor Aidan Gallagher is 21 and probably, finally, playing something akin to Five's body age. In actual lived aged, the character is in his... 70s? And the acceptance of Elliot Page as Elliot Page, and therefore Victor, is wonderful -- they had their chats about it last season, and have moved on, while not discounting that Victor was Vanya in season one. Probably a rare example of tight continuity in this showed being acknowledged.
3 Bad. Said general lack of continuity. This show has me constantly yelling at the screen, as each season (except the first; I remember that being tighter) just loses steam before they reach the final few episodes, losing focus, cutting plot elements to the wind and generally just being bad writing. Now that Kent has revealed, to me, how much of a shitshow the writing room was on this show, and how it basically torpedoed the season cutting it down to almost nothing, it explains things but doesn't get my forgiveness. No more than in any other season does this one's last few episodes shit the bed, story telling wise. Five and Lilah go on a time journey through the multiverse TTC with intent to find their original timeline where their Ben was killed. After one upset that thread is ignored entirely and while its a beautiful standalone plotline, where the two spend years and years together lost on the TTC (note, that is actually a recurring thread in my own dreams; maybe I will bump into them someday), its forgetting the point of it being introduced in the first place. And Daddy Hargreaves. He did not create an Umbrella Academy in this timeline, there not even seemingly any example of these kids here at all, and yet he interacts with them as if he is aware of it all. And BTW isn't he supposed to be an alien or something? I could go on and on about my frustration but I will just some it up with a loud, "aaaaaargh !!"
Wrote about Season 1 in the old TV format. I cannot recall if we didn't bother watching this week-to-week for a reason or just forgot about it until it appeared, in full, on Disney. Most of the shows we write about here have a seasonal continuity, but in procedural police shows, everything after season one, and the background being set, the season often ends being mostly a "and this happened" and "that happened" tied together by some tenuous threads or theme.
What 100. Will researches his mother's family, while also dealing with the vision of his younger self and the guilt of not being able to save one of his foster moms. Ormewood deals with the consequences of being an asshole to his entire family. Angie deals with the consequences of getting too involved with a victim. Amanda's past comes back to haunt, shaking Faith's ... faith in her. Its a mixed bag season focused on family and not an easy thing to summarize, as character based procedurals tend to be.
1 Great. Honestly, its the theme of the season -- making family from the people you love. Will Trent (Ramón RodrÃguez, Battle Los Angeles) was the product of a serial rapist/killer, rescued by a cop but lost to the state foster system. In there, as a child, he connected with Angie (Erika Christensen, Parenthood), and they dealt with life's worst. She's a recovering addict, in an on and off again relationship with Will. They are both each other's greatest strengths and weaknesses. Ormewood (Jake McLaughlin, Quantico) is a classic overt-machismo cop who cheats on his wife and is distant from his kids, until his wife has a breakdown and leaves him. Faith (Iantha Richardson, This Is Us) is Will's single mom partner raising an adult son she had as a teen. Her surrogate mother is also her boss Amanda (Sonja Sohn, The Wire), a harsh but loyal woman. They are all damaged goods to one degree or another, but make a tight knit family, also adding in Nico (Cora Lu Tran, Paradise), once a crime suspect, but now mainly house & dog sits for Will. Said dog Betty is also a stray from a crime scene that Will adopted.
2 Good. The episode to episode procedural crime investigations are usually solid independent stories, always leaving enough breathing room to allow for full season threads to run between them. As Will investigates his past he finds an uncle from Puerto Rico, and begins to learn Spanish -- must be fun for an actual Puerto Rican actor to pretend he's terrible at Spanish. Angie deals with the fallout for claiming to have killed an abusive father, letting the daughter go free, and it could unravel her entire life.
3 Bad. The shows desire to tie up loose ends from Season 1 leads to some... well, filler episodes so we can dispense with a few side characters. Also, the season opener is supposed to be a heart-wrenching episode, but ended up leaving me asking, "Why the fuck did you fridge what could have been a cool add-on character?"
Further to what I started saying above... its hard to write about a show like this, beyond "I liked it as I was watching it, but it does not leave anything impactful beyond that I like the characters."
I have a thing for LA based on pop culture depictions, but not the big usual ones you would expect. Sure, the Griffith Observatory is cool looking, and Venice Beach is probably an experience, but I have always had a fondness for those long commercial strips with run down motels, usually depicted in washed out pastel colours, usually with more people living in them than staying the night. I am sure there is some movie(s) or TV from my deep youth that is the source of this fondness but my memory is of an age where it is more a vibe than it is anything.
Vibe. You are using that word a lot lately. What does it mean to you? When something feels right without an ability to articulate it, this is a "vibe" ?
Darren Barrenman (Chris Pine, Star Trek) lives in such a motel, more precisely he lives in a small trailer on the lot of such a motel. He is the pool man for a postage stamp sized pool that, based on its positioning, adjacent to his trailer, only he and his friends are likely to benefit from his constant care. Darren is one of those LA weirdoes also common in these movies, likely based on real life LA weirdoes. He's mostly in his own headspace, fancies himself a social activist trying to stomp on gentrification and save the iconic spots whatever his grotty part of LA / Hollywood is losing, even going so far as to send daily type-writer written letters to Erin Brocovich. He knows she is not Julia Roberts, that she is a real person, but he still has a picture of Julia Roberts, and not Erin Brocovich.
Of note, it is also indicative of your pop culture education of LA in that you have no idea of the actual geography of LA, where anything is, in relation to anything else.
Darren makes regular trips to present in front of city council, usually with an entourage of other LA weirdoes, including his friends (a little ditty about) Jack (Danny DeVito, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and Diane (Annette Benning, Being Julia), Diane being Darren's therapist and Jack trying to do a documentary about Darren. Darren is just a pain in the ass to city council. They also live in the motel. He never makes much of an impression, beyond annoyance.
Then Darren meets June Del Rey (DeWanda Wise, The Harder They Fall). She displays herself like a femme fatale and plays the part of a "dame with a case" to Darren, and in the movie, which fashions itself a film noir. She even dresses the part. Its not very noir, but I am sure Darren thinks it is. In fact, he keeps on hoping there will be Chinatown parallels for his "case". No one is more surprised than us that there are, kind of. Anywayz, her boss, Councilman Stephen Toronkowski (#snort; Stephen Tobolowsky, Groundhog Day), has a secret, he's corrupt, she claims. This is Darren's chance -- unveil the conspiracy and save... well, save whatever "iconic landmark" he's trying to save this week.
Now Darren fashions himself (phrase re-used intentionally? yes? ok, you go with that) a detective. He thinks that by donning a brimmed hat, an ill-fitting double-breasted jacket, along with his usual sandals, he looks the part. He doesn't. He even does stake-outs (hiding in the bushes) and tails cars (he runs after them, hiding in the bushes) and interrogates people with his mixed personality of confrontational and exudingly polite. And he does uncover a conspiracy, just not the film noir one he thought it was. And yet.... it kind of was? We are left intentionally confused and surprised as Darren is.
Its a fine movie, if a little under proofed. The number of A and B listers partaking shows that Pine has a good relationship in the industry and everyone is really putting in their all. Unlike a lot of movies I watch, where its clear few people are truly engaged with the lackadaisical script and cardboard characters, this one has a cast fully invested. I think it just needed longer in the oven.
OK, enough GBBO binging for you; terrible mixed metaphors.
KWIF is Kent's Week in Film, in other words (or the same words, just more of them) these are the films Kent watched this week.
This Week:
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024, d. Gil Kenan - Crave)
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024, d. Guy Ritchie - AmazonPrime)
Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014,d. Mark Hartley - Tubi)
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I *really* wasn't expecting much out of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire following its nostalgia-soaked-to-a-fault (let's call it "nostalgia-slimed") predecessor Afterlife. That film was cringe-inducing and I did not like it, and I vehemently did not want a repeat experience.
Frozen Empire did modestly well at the box office, repeating a pattern for all Ghostbusters films since the original. There is a brand name there, but it doesn't have the same cache as a Spider-man or James Bond. There's a loyal, devoted, multicultural, omnisex fans out there who are just eager to have more Ghostbusters in their lives, but they're a niche group (who aren't the same group as the toxic manbabies who shouted down everything 2016 Ghostbusters (aka Answer the Call) and threatened to kill the property in the process). Bigger than, say, the Avatar fanbase, but smaller than the Stars Trek or Wars die-hards, they're not enough of an entity to keep the Ghostbusters brand alive and active in the public consciousness between films, even when we've had the shortest gap between Afterlife and Frozen Empire in 30 years of ghost busting.
Something like Star Trek and Star Wars has a strong enough fanbase and large enough franchise universe to build entire major streaming services around. Ghostbusters isn't that. It needs to entice the public in, seemingly each and every time. As much of a nerd for nerdy things as I can be, I'm one of those people who needs to be enticed. With a promising teaser trailer, Frozen Empire piqued my interest, but then the subsequent trailer had me wary of it just being more nostalgia-slime, and the middling reviews at time of release seem conflicted on whether the film was or wasn't caked in it.
Having waited for it to go streaming on a service I already pay for, I was quite happy to find this second entry in this new Ghostbusters era had moved past non-stop, nonsensical nods to it's 1984 originating film, and instead embraced and incorporated the characters into its narrative in a much more organic way. Mostly.
The Spengler family, consisting of mom Callie (Carrie Coon) and siblings Phoebe (McKenna Grace) and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) have moved from buttfuck nowhere to New York City as practicing Ghostbusters, living and operating out of the classic firehouse and taking charge of the classic Hearse, Ecto-1. Their ranks now include Callie's boyfriend Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) who's still sussing out his place as part of the family. The firehouse is owned by rich industrialist and former 'buster Winston Zeddmore (Ernie Hudson) who also is the bankroll behind the Ghostbusters, now a bigger organization with more scientists and researchers.
The mayor of New York City is former EPA agent Walter Peck (William Atherton), who still has a bee in his bonnet about the 'busters. The thing is, here, as in 1984, he's not entirely wrong to be concerned, but his resistance to understanding the greater threat is what makes him such a dick(less). But after a particularly problematic ghost trapping, Pheobe is sidelined because she is a minor. As she's left to her own devices, she encounters a cool, fiery phantasm and the two become friends...and potentially more than.
The second problem hits when the containment unit at the firehouse starts, seemingly, bursting at its seams. Winston has a solution, but the introduction of a mysterious artifact, and ancient lore about a powerful force via the curio shoppe owned by Ray Stanz (Dan Akroyd) winds up setting off a chain of events that could spell utter doom for NYC (and the world).
What works so incredibly well during the first two acts of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is the sense of lived-in reality. Where each prior Ghostbusters film felt like it had to reset or start from scratch (by the time Ghostbusters II came out 5 years later, the team were already written off as relics and cooks and has-beens) this one comes out the gates with the Ghostbusters being a routine presence on the streets of New York. Maybe not the most welcome presence, but the calls were coming in pretty steadily from people who just didn't know what to do with strange things in their neighbourhood.
The film feels quite comfortable with its newer cast, as well as its older cast. Akroyd, Hudson and Atherton all feel organically placed in the narrative. Even when Annie Potts' Janine Melnitz seems to keep popping up out of nowhere, she still feels like she belongs. Bill Murray's appearances as Peter Venkman, though, feel like contractual obligation. There's no sense of purpose to Venkman in this story, and the quips are...kinda lazy this time around.
The cast is rounded out with three great comedic presences in Kumail Nanjiani, James Acaster and Patton Oswalt --all having their own essential role to play in the story of the film-- but two returning characters from Afterlife -- Podcast (Logan Kim) and Lucky (Celeste O'Connor) -- are unnecessarily shoehorned in, but GilKenan and Jason Reitman's script does find clever ways to make their move to New York make sense (as long as you don't think too hard about it).
For all the easy-going nature of the first two acts, and reintroducing the New York City of the original Ghostbusters in such a seemingly effortless and welcoming fashion, and even building a pretty compelling mystery leading to the big bad of the third act and the titular "frozen empire", once the third act launches, it all starts coming unglued. The film starts rushing through all the different character arcs it had set up, tieing them together often in forced ways and resolving many of them with a tossed off line of dialogue. The action of the piece results in a nonsense flash freezing of New York that should have killed tens of thousands but seemingly has had no lasting effect beyond some ashphalt damage and iced coffees.
The problem with the final act is it goes too big. Every Ghostbusters goes big with a threat that only the power of proton packs can resolve, but this seems a little insurmountable beyond deus ex machina. This film even has the dreaded laserblast into the sky that was all the rage in the 2010s. It needn't have been this visually catastrophic. It doesn't take much to fuck up a New Yorker's day. Even a summer hailstorm, as opposed to ice spikes violently shooting up from the ground (yet somehow impaling no one), would be as effective a device (just look at what happened in Calgary on August 5).
It also does that thing where a character who is otherwise inept at everything levels up so monumentally in literal minutes that it snaps the long thread of disbelief we give these productions.
With many reservations, though, the film is generally a winner. It's charming, and comfortable, and entertaining. It embraces its past in a participatory way rather than winks at the audience. Still doesn't know what to do with Slimer though. And it's still trying to make those Stay Puft minions a thing.
A few weeks back some right wing nutjob (doesn't even matter who), an actual elected official in America (because some people just want to watch the world burn) was delivering a speech on how America entered the second world war to fight communists.
I shouldn't have to explain this, but the threat in World War II was Nazis, not communists. The communists, in fact, were allies. This shouldn't have to be explained, but in the "right wing" (so poorly named, given how they're almost always wrong) they taken to embracing Nazis (particularly the "nationalist" part, not so much the "socialist" part) as part of their voter base and ideology, and are trying to rewrite history to edit out Nazis being the worst-of-the-worst bad guys of the past 100 years (out of a whole pile of contenders).
So in times like these, with people being so unclear about who exactly we were fighting in a major war of not so distant past, it's good to have a film like this that reminds us, in no uncertain terms, that the only good Nazi is a dead one.
The plot of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, loosely based on real people and events (at least the end credits have pictures of some of the real people whose names are the same as those of characters in this film) find Britain in dire straits as the Nazi uboats in the Atlantic have been throttling their supplies from western shores (they only mention those American dilly-dallyers, as if Canada were a non-entity, and not already across the pond and in the fight... but I digress). With the threat increasing and the military might growing, the only hope is to target the uboat manufacturing and supply depot of a Spanish controlled island in West Africa. Unable to mount any sort of direct campaign, they instead rely upon a small crew of ...ungentlemen... devoted soldiers whose "by any means necessary" tactics make them too much for regular service, but necessary for this off-the-books job.
It's a handsome people parade as Henry Cavill, Henry Golding, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Babs Olusanmoku and Eiza Gonzalez strategize and mount their assault against an unsuspecting enemy.
These are ruthless men who seem to relish in their task of killing and destruction, and are both efficient and effective. It almost makes them hard to root for...except for the fact that they're killing Nazis, so we root like each kill is a point-winning spike of the volleyball at the Olympics.
The film barely puts our protagonists in any peril. At any point, when it seems perilous, every person seems to have an out already at hand. It flies in the face of conventional action movie narrative, but it's oh-so-essential when the point is to remind us that the Nazis are the bad guys and we just want to see them dead. The bloodlust is downright vampiric.
In the past decade or so it seems like the reputation of Cannon Group's films has become rather...elevated, certainly far beyond their rep at the time they were releasing films throughout the 1980s.
I think this 2014 documentary, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films was the inflection point, the catalyst reminding a middle-aged audience of a whole pantheon of weird, wild, raunchy, violent, and largely substandard film that, as teenagers (mainly teenage boys) were giving them everything they could want.
The documentary is the story of Israeli producers and brotherly cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. It paints them as lovably difficult scamps who forcefully injected themselves into cinema, first in Israel and then in America, through sheer determination, salemanship, and an ethos of fast-and-cheap but giving people what they want. Oh, and promises unkept and lies told along the way.
The doc is reverential towards Golan and Globus and their films...or at least the content of their films that made them a success story to start with. The documentary for the first hour is 1/2 talking heads and 1/2 clips of the nudity and sex scenes from the various Golan-Globus films. That extensive stretch of boobs, boobs, boobs is just as gratuitous (probably moreso) than any of the actual films. And to cut to the actresses in some of these films, some who are proud, but many who felt exploited or even abused, and then to intercut their description of their abuses with the scenes that resulted from said abuse seems utterly distasteful and disrespectul on the part of the director and producers (that Brett Ratner is a producer on this is not surprising).
The second hour shows the shift that Golan and Globus made when they came to America. Sex sold, but violence sold even better. So the clips in the second half are much more surrounding the violent side of Cannon's productions. Then many many explosions and bloody body parts being severed.
When I think of 1980s hyperviolent cinema, I'm mainly thinking of Cannon productions. Films like Missing in Action, American Ninja, the Death Wish sequels, Cobra... they were all escalating factors in America's appetite for, and consumption of violence. And so much of it was... unsavory. Very racist and classist and downright ugly.
That the film basks in the glory of nudity and violence is pretty much its only point being made. It does sort of highlight the rise and fall of the ambitions of Golan-Globus, and that their success came from sex and violence, only hinting that the marriage of the two would become repugnantly disturbing (and has no restraint in showing you what it's talking about). Golan-Globus' downfall was in sacrificing their fast, cheap, and give-them-what-they-want attitude in favour of seeking prestige by giving notable directors free reign resulting in duds like Godard's King Lear, Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance, or Zeffirelli's Otello, or their attempting big-budget blockbusters on a constricted budget ending up with Superman 4: The Quest for Peace,Masters of the Universe, or the Indiana Jones riff Alan Quartermain. But if the doc winds up painting a portrait of Golan-Globus (which it barely, barely does) it's not as flattering as it thinks it is.
At one point a talking head makes a comparison between Golan-Globus and the Weinstein brothers. They basically state that Golan-Globus were trying to do what Miramax ultimately did. Unfortunately this was meant as a compliment. But the comparison is apt, and the sort of boy's club revelry tone that it sets leaves very little in the way of constructive criticism, and any constructive criticism that is laid down is completely undermined by tits and guns.
Is it watchable? Of course it is. But that doesn't mean it's any good. And that's the Cannon way.
Because we never have enough projects in this Blog, I am creating one of my own, wherein I indulge my desire to rewatch a movie (because sometimes a rewatch is easier than absorbing a new movie) but also fill in a blank left by the Great Hiatus of 2018. It will be more interesting to me to see what I will be willing to rewatch, than see what I missed writing about.
Technically, this was a rewatch of "Deadpool 2: Super Duper Cut".
2018, David Leitch (Bullet Train) -- download
To (pseudo) quote Kent, and NTW, "You're exhausting."
Not sure if it was a good idea to watch the extended version as a reminder of the movie and to build a post for what was lost. This one is just a smidgen too much of an untethered Ryan Reynolds, and yes, kind of exhausting. Of the fifteen extra minutes of footage, about 4 minutes are worth the maximum effort put in to produce a "director's cut". And the alternate music chosen is... painful.
Anywayz, still loved it as a whole and for some very specific points, but again, not as much as the first movie. I think the first is pretty much a perfect movie for me.
The movie begins with Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds, Bolt Neck) post Deadpool doing his best, fucked up version of being a superhero -- killing all kinds of bad guys from around the world. This opening is where a lot of the extended footage goes, so Mr. Pool can kill and kill and kill and chop and quip his way through tons of Bad Guys. Someone on the team must have really liked that iconic "smashing through the glass" scene in Ghost in the Shell (both anime movie, and IRL movie) as they pretty much recreate it. And a weird twist is that because the scene is extended, they have to replace the Dolly song with a longer one. Doesn't work.
Anywayz, one of the Bad Guys that Deadie misses killing (still not sure why he runs away from them; he shouldn't have any problem with a bunch of thugs) comes back and, well... the cheese spreader misses, the bullet kills Vanessa (Morena Baccarin, Greenland). Cut to James Bond-ian opening credits featuring Celine Dionne doing her song "Ashes" while the credits react to Vanessa being killed in the same snarky manner as the first movie's credits. Its really, truly effective, but I have to say I still prefer the Jordan Smith version of "Ashes" as it carries more pathos and less diva. I believe that appeared in the yet-another different version of this movie, the Once Upon a Deadpool PG version.
Enter Deadpool trying to kill himself montage (some extra stuff), ending with his apartment filled with barrels of something fiery and KABOOM.
Didn't the explosion kill a lot of people in his apartment building or is the disrepaired state we saw the place, in "Deadpool" implying its an abandoned building he is squatting in? That might be me trying to forgive the fact that he really is truly a sociopath who wouldn't care if he killed dozens in collateral damage.
Enter Colossus (Stefan Kapicic, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare) stuffing his body pieces into a bag and dragging him back to the X-Mansion. This is the aspect of the plot I don't really care about, and yet, is essential to the story that Ryan Reynolds is trying to tell, probably something to do with contrast -- Colossus really wants to redeem Deadpool, have him become a proper "hero". Deadpool resists but eventually, seemingly, submits to the will of Colossus and is allowed on a mission as a "X-Man in Training". He gets a training tshirt.
Don't forget your favourite relationship in the whole franchise -- "Hi Wade!! Hi Yukio!"
Said first mission -- The Home for Wayward Mutants *ahem* "Essex House for Mutant Rehabilitation", basically a place for mutant children to be dumped, and abused by a sociopathic headmaster & staff. Deadpool makes some rough attempts at calming Russell (Julian Dennison, Godzilla vs Kong), the angry fireball-using kid, down but eventually he figgers out what is happening to the kid(s) and kills one of the staff. I think he also gathers that the (run) DMC ("Dept of Mutant Corrections") that showed up have mutation-suppressing technology and that could work on him, allowing him to die. So, bang, one dead pedophile, one disappointed Colossus and the two of them are off to the IceBox.
So, Russell is condemned to a maximum security prison for... lighting a few fires? There's no legal activities, no court, no sentencing, just .... clink, you're in jail ? And he's a minor !!
Also, the IceBox is supposed to be in the North West Territories, so would that make the city this movie takes place in actually Vancouver? Nah, as it appears to be in driving distance of said city, likely the IceBox is in the Rockies and the city is some west-coast California fictional city.
Prison. Deadpool with no powers, and many kinds of cancer just reappearing in his body. You would think they would grow back slowly in his healed body, but whatever, plot. We get lots of usual prison antics, and Russell seems to have taken Deadpool seriously in the opening bit, because he thinks they are friends. Deadie makes sure he knows otherwise, so Russell befriends the monster at the end of the hall -- Juggernaut. They don't say Juggernaut but we all know its Juggernaut.
Then Cable (Josh Brolin, Old Boy) appears to blow shit up with his electro-splosive gun that Goes to 11. Shit does blow up and the two of them are knocked outside, where Deadpool... almost dies? Anywayz, one loverly vision of Vanessa telling him its not his time yet, and he has to save Russell.
Why doesn't Cable just dust himself off and climb back into the prison to finish the job of killing Russell? Cuz plot.
So, now we get the fun-tage act of the movie where Deadpool decides the best and only way to save Russell is to build a team. Over an undetermined amount of time, but it must have been long, he recruits, interviews and assembles his new team X-Force. He also hires/buys a helicopter and crew? This whole act, including the giant action set-piece that follows, is the most fun the movie has. There are injokes, Marvel references, horrible deaths, micro-cameos and the best character in the entire movie -- Domino (Zazie Beetz, Joker), who's power is luck -- and apparently a substantial lack of empathy cuz the collateral damage she "causes" is scary. But she is the perfect antidote for Deadpool's quippiness with her own droll brand. The action set-piece involving a fight between Cable, Deadpool, with some of Domino's help is this movie's (s)equal to the opening sequence from the first movie, i.e. lots of slowmo and weird/fun angles. It ends with Deadpool literally torn in half by The Juggernaut (Ryan Reynolds, 6 Underground), after he fanboys / breaks 4th wall, out. Domino collects up the pieces.
Or at least one half. What does happen to the "pieces" of Deadpool after he begins healing? Do they quickly decay and melt away or are there parts of him rotting all over the city. Also, and its referenced briefly in-movie, does his head grow a new body or do they just jam the pieces together and watch them reattach? Probably not or we wouldn't get our whole shirt-cocking baby-legs joke segment, but that makes me (him) wonder why everyone still collects up pieces when all they need is a head and whatever is attached.
So, in the last act, Russell has escaped with the help of The Juggernaut. Everyone knows he will go kill the headmaster who abused him. Cable shows up because he wants help. He also monologues the reasons why, and Deadpool convinces him to at least give Russell a chance -- if he Deadpool stops him from killing the headmaster, he stops him from becoming a kill-addicted psychopath in the future that murders Cable's family. Cable is not fully convinced, but....
Its just an OK act, focused equally on the "CGI fist fest" between Colossus and Juggernaut, and Cable & Deadpool killing a bunch of basically unarmed medical attendants -- sure some have shotguns, and they are all labelled "pedophiles" and are guilty by association, but reminder (!!!) sociopath !! Domino is also in the background realizing her whole reason for being in the movie was to end up here, as she was raised in the orphanage. So, she gets to murder some staff as well, while saving kids.
I am kind of meh about this whole fight, but it is fun to see Colossus just let loose. It all ends with Deadpool finally, truly dying, sacrificing himself for Russell. It does affect him, it DOES stop him from becoming a murder-y fire-fist in the future, and Cable is impressed. So much so that he uses his last bit of time-juice to go back and slightly alter the scene -- Russell is still saved, still doesn't become murder-y, but Deadpool lives.
Happy ever after.
Closing montage of more referential material of Deadpool with a now-fixed timey-wimey device "setting things right" including killing his alternate version from thatWolverine movie, and killing Ryan Reynolds before he plays Green Lantern. Light chuckles. Again, like Kent, by now I am just exhausted. Also, the whole "kill Hitler" scene doesn't make sense especially since the whole point of the movie is that you shouldn't kill people as kids just because they are evil as adults.
Its a fun movie, a LOT of fun. I really do prefer the edited-down version, despite having a historical fondness for "director's cuts".
Oh, we can't wait for your post about the uber-mega-super-long "Rebel Moon" movies !!! Squeee....
K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month (or mebbe twice each month?!?) I step through the TV series I completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.
This Month: The Decameron (2024, 8/8 episodes, Netflix) 2024 Summer Olympic Games (July 28-Aug11, CBC Gem) Umbrella Academy Season 4 (2024, 6/6 episodes, Netflix) M.A.S.K. Season 1 (1985, 8/65 episodes, Tubi)
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The Decameron The What 100: In the thick of the plague of the Black Death (mid-1300s-ish), a disparate group of nobles and their servants descend upon a Tuscan villa upon invite from its lord as a safe haven for them to escape the death and decay. Instead, within its secure, well-stocked walls, they find jealousy, rivalries, and the strains of class and status to be potentially as deadly as the threat outside. Oh and the lord of the estate already dead, leaving claim to its riches yet another thing for these petty elites to vie for, or die trying.
(1 Great) The series opener is a delightful farce that has nearly every character covering up or hiding something from the other characters. Amidst a very, very dark period in human history -- with communicable disease everywhere and awareness of sanitation, cleanliness, health care and such pretty rudimentary or based in superstition -- the noblepersons of the story all move and talk with a sort of wilful ignorance of potential doom around every corner. Their attempts to ignore it with frivolity and maintaining some sense of "status quo" is where the farcical humour comes from, but the show makes it clear the characters, for all their nuances are also very scared. And so they hide. But the great divide of "class" and hierarchies, artificial lines that get pretty blurry when everyone faces a disease that you can't really hide from, means that the characters need to come together beyond titles or face certain doom.
(1 Good) It's not far beyond the first episode that The Decameron reveals that it isn't going to be like, say, The Great, where its well-to-do twits get to continue to behave awfully towards each other with few repercussions. The dangers outside the gates of the villa, the secrets the characters hold from one another, the aspirations and manoeuvring against each other all rapidly catch up to them. Once the show starts subverting its own premise, it doesn't stop, and the story of these characters zigs and zags in weird and wholly unexpected ways. It's not always satisfying when expectation are dashed, like when certain arcs or story threads are cut off at the knees by other plot elements (the machinations of one character against another, often have unintended consequences to the others in the villa). There is a lot of watching characters strive for growth and fail, or they are revealed to only be feigning it, but over its 8 episodes The Decameron shows it holds no one sacred and creates a comedy that explores human nature with a pretty caustic eye.
(1 Bad) Following our own plague which killed millions globally, and with increasing economic disparity more and more prevalent, as the series ticked on it became evident that it was not interested directly commenting on these topics from a modern lens. Where it could have very easily made very modern allegories out of the current culture wars, or political division, or dipshit internet "remedies", it resisted most every urge to do so. So the question I had to ask myself was this: if the series isn't using its setting to directly make a sort of statement of current affairs, then what's the point? But I think it's a show that is instead interested in its characters and their humanity, and exposing the audience to the many varied and often uncomfortable truths about how we can behave so poorly towards one another when a situation calls for us to come together. It's a pretty chaotic show that never really finds time to settle into a situation, so it does make it hard to see the goal it's trying to achieve.
META: Without doing having really done the research before watching the series (and still not doing much after) I know The Decameron is based on an old Italian short story collection (thanks to Lady Kent for that tidbit) and I knew that it was infamously adapted into a sex comedy anthology film by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1971. I had watched The Little Hours a few years back which takes one of the shorts and expands it to a feature-length indie improv comedy.
I tried to watch Pasolini's film and got I think three or four short-stories in before I called it quits (it was made in that era of Italian film where every production had to be dubbed, and it's dubbed terribly, and the English subtitles on Amazon would only appear after a character spoke, which killed any comedic timing it might have had...and it was pretty dubious on whether it had any comedic timing to begin with...there's a lot of rough acting happening there). The Netflix "adaptation" of The Decameron clearly hadn't taken much inspiration from Pasolini, as there's no trace of "sex comedy" here (and 1000% less erect penises). There is comedy, and there is sex, but the two aren't connected and the sex certainly not as graphic as the Italian production. I can see a lot of film nerds being upset that it doesn't even try to be raunchy like Pasolini's film, but they're just being snobs.
The performers of this The Decameron are of an international scope, including Arrested Development/Veep's Tony Hale, Girls/Flight Attendant's Zosia Mamet, Derry Girls' Saoirse-Monica Jackson, and quite a few "that guy/girl" faces. (My favourite performance was Douggie McMeekin as Tindaro, an hypochondriac erudite idiot with no social skills whatsoever. Meekin reminded me of a young Bruce McCulloch from Kids in the Hall...real Gavin vibes). All the performers spoke in their native accents which is a bit disorienting given that it's supposed to be Italian countryside, but that settles pretty quickly, and I don't really think there's a weak performance in the bunch.
2024 Summer Olympic Games The What 100: Do I need to explain the Olympics? Every four years, the elite international athletes in their designations descend upon a new host city to compete for the top three positions earning medals (gold, silver, bronze) for the glory of their home country. Each Olympics the IOC and the host city examine the sports in competition and sometimes add, remove or modify what the requirements are.
(1 Gold) A relatively new sport in the Olympics is the climbing discipline. In Tokyo, they combined all disciplines (speed, bouldering and lead) into one medaling competition, and in Paris they separated out the speed climbing from boulder+lead into two competitions. Boulder consists of four horizontal climbs with few natural holds, while lead is climbing ten stories (at least) where the grips progress in difficulty. They're all basically intensely physical puzzles to be solved by the competitor and it's surprisingly fascinating to watch. But it's the speed climbing that's the real "wow" stuff. The men's 50m freestyle swim is the fastest in the pool at around 20 seconds, and the men's 100m dash is the fastest on the track at sub 10 seconds, but the speed climb is now a sub-5-second run and watching these competitors do the wall it looks like Spider-Man and it never gets tired. It's a head-to-head, process-of-elimination climb with pressure sensors measuring the start and a tap out to finish. Super, super exciting, and again, adding more contemporary competitions to the Olympics really energizes it.
(1 Silver) Breaking. I generally find the scoring disciplines (diving, gymnastics, synchronized swimming, figure skating, etc) frustrating because it's clear the judges are looking at very technical, very precise things versus what Joe and Joeanne Everybody, who only ever watch these things once every four years, see as an impressive routine. The breakdancing discipline, making its first appearance at the Olympics this year, is a head-to-head competition. Live DJs, hype men, a lot of swagger, and bodies flying around in pair a fully improvised dance routine. The scoring is up to 9 judges grading both routines and assigning a winner, and it's a bit of a mystery. It's partly the technical accomplishment, the inventiveness, but also how it meets the rhythm of the dj set. The sheer physicality and body control of both the men and women breakers is beyond even what you see in gymnastics. Breaking is just an exhibition sport this year and not a permanent addition (it will not be in LA in 2028), but it adds some much needed contemporary energy to the Olympic. And congrats to Phil Wizard from Canada on his gold medal. (I'm not going to pile on Raygun. Vox has the commentary worth reading there)
(1 Bronze) I saw that "handball" was a competitive sport at Paris, and I paid it little mind. I know what handball is...it's just racquetball without the racquet, right? I mean, there's other racquet sports like tennis, badminton and table tennis, so sure, handball, why not?
But no, handball is not a ball-against-the-wall type game, but instead it's an indoor court sport that seems to be a mix of basketball, soccer and hockey. Six men per side and a goalie, as they carry and toss around what looks to be maybe a volleyball-like softer, smaller ball from one end of the court to another. The scoring is ultra-frequent to the point that being a goaltender in handball must mean your goals against average is awfully small. I'm undecided about whether handball is an improvement on the other sports it's hybridizing or if it's a terrible sport. But then I see the flying throws that the players make, which look like John Woo-style flying-and-shooting when replayed in slow-mo and I'm just delighted.
Meta: I was torn between writing about specific Canadian athletes and their amazing accomplishments or talking about specific sports. I went for the latter, but let's acknowledge the former:
Summer McIntosh's amazing 3 gold + 1 silver dominance in the pool (200m butterfly, 200m IM, 400m IM, 400m freestyle respectively), with Josh Liendo and Ilya Kharun taking Silver and Bronze in the same 100m Butterfly race.
Ethan Katzberg and Camryn Rogers taking dual gold in men and woman's hammer throw was spectacular.
Melissa Humana-Parades and Brandie Wilkerson's amazing run to silver in beach volleyball (Canada's first medal in beach volleyball ever)
Katie Vincent's canoeing skills won her gold (200m single) and bronze (400m doubles, with Sloan Mackenzie)
Christa Deguchi taking gold in Judo (57kg)
And the Canadian mens taking the gold in 4x100m relay is an unreal result.
Congrats to all the medallists.
Good on the IOC for banning military aggressors from the competition. Russia and Israel were both absent from the games for obvious reasons. Russia is not as dominant a force in the summer as they are in the winter, but they are so routinely a threat that their absence really opens up the field especially in some of the field athletics. Also, Russia is often the subject of doping scandals which have been few and far between this year (unfortunate bullshit in the media about transphobic "testosterone checking" in women's competition though).
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The Umbrella Academy Season 4
The What 100: When last we saw the Hargreeves children they once again either saved or destroyed the world, which seems to be their lot in life. Having rebooted reality once again, they start the season without their powers and six years later each living a less shiny life than before. Victor runs a bar in Canada, Ben is just getting out of prison for a fraud scam, Luther is a low-rent stripper, Klaus has developed a fear of everything, Allison is a struggling actor, Five works for the CIA, Diego is a delivery man, married with kids to Lila, who secrety works with Five at the agency. They have their little lives usurped when Victor is kidnapped, and they are asked to rescue a girl whose disappearance is connected to their new alt-reality version of Sir Reginald Hargreeves, their adoptive father, and to getting their powers back.
(1 Great) I hadn't realized how much I'd grown to adore this gang of misfits until the six-years-later catching-up sequence in the first episode of this season. What's worked so well for this series has been continually putting these characters into different setting yet they invariably remain or return to pretty much being themselves with only minimal amount of character growth. The show works best when the cast is playing off one another, in a group even moreso than in smaller pairings or sub-groupings, and they are together quite a bit early on before they're broken up and sent on their side quests.
(1 Good) The initial threat at play here finds Drs. Jean and Gene Thibideaux being absolutely ruthless in their acquisition of anomalous paraphernalia that lends credence to the conspiracy theory that our universe is not the only universe, and in fact, is not the natural order of things. Drs. Jean and Gene are the founders of The Keepers, their numbers growing, who believe in The Cleanse that will restore the natural order to time and space (which all centers around the disappeared girl the Hargreeves kids are looking for). As far as stunt casting goes, you couldn't get a more perfect pair than husband-and-wife duo Megan Mullaley and Nick Offerman, both sporting radically 70's looking garb and hairstyles, with Offerman veiled under thick, thick muttonchops connected to a hearty mustache.
(1 Bad) I have no doubt the fourth season was supposed to be longer than six episodes, because it's absolutely evident in the janky storytelling. The prior seasons were 10 episodes each, and if at times I found those seasons to maybe drag on a little too long before heading into endgame... here it's absolutely too compressed. Perhaps if the season were actually rewritten as a six episode arc then maybe it wouldn't feel it so badly, but it's clear the journeys the characters were intended to go on were meant to have a longer lifespan, and it's felt pretty deeply in most of the arcs, which feel either fast-forwarded through or abruptly resolved before heading into the grand-scale, world-destructing endgame we come to expect from a season of The Umbrella Academy. When Klaus goes on a side quest to pay off his debts to his drug dealer, or Diego and Luther get to visit the CIA, these feel like radically unnecessary diversions away from the main story and character plotting. In the second half of the season, it feels like whole sections of story are missing, and a lot of sudden movements, like what Sir Reginald's wife gets up to, or David Cross' insertion into the Drs. Jean and Gene story just feel so abrupt and out of the blue. Five and Lila have a time-traveling detour that should have supported a whole standalone episode of its own. Ben finding a girl who actually likes him, only for it to lead to the destruction of the universe should have been a devastating tragedy that's slowly discovered as we come to adore the pair together, instead we get it all exposition dumped to us and it's not satisfying in the least.
META: I did like so much of what was happening this season, but it is so rushed obviously parts are missing. I think it could have been a fantastic finish to the Umbrella Academy with even two additional episodes, especially in the way it establishes the Hargreeves childrens' relationship to the universe and/or timeline. Instead, it leads to so much headscratching as it skips and jumps its way to its conclusion. Where its sibling show, Doom Patrol, ended with me tearing up multiple times, there wasn't enough air in this season to give it time to emotionally resonate that it was even ending until, well, the end.
There's (unsubstantiated) suspicion that Netflix knew of showrunner Steve Blackman's propensity for creating a hostile or troubling working environment for writers and support staff (as reported in Rolling Stone this past June) and that resulted in the truncated season as well as virtually no promotion of the final season (and his other deals at the streamer have also been cancelled).
It's always hard to learn that an end product you like or enjoy has a complicated or even troubling background to it, but if there's a fly in your soup and you're only informed of it after you've eaten the soup, did it ruin all the other ingredients that went into the soup? Or is the fly all you can think about?
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M.A.S.K. Season 1 The What 100: After Reagan's administration deregulated the airwaves, animators and toy companies were free to collaborate ostensibly making 1/2 hour toy commercials for kids. Following the success of Masters of the Universe and G.I. Joe (among others) every toy line in the 1980's was pretty much dead on arrival if it didn't have a cartoon to promote it. M.A.S.K.was Kenner's answer to Mattel's G.I. Joe AND Transformers lines, with an elite squad of warriors with cool transforming vehicles fighting an organized enemy with a snake-themed name. M.A.S.K.'s toy gimmick was its vehicles had two modes, the standard-looking vehicle and a "battle mode" (of varying quality). Its characters had special masks which inexplicably gave them superpowers. M.A.S.K. lasted for two seasons, with the second season ("Split Seconds") leaning away from international espionage and into sports racing?
(1 Great) My first reaction to the theme watching the first episode of M.A.S.K. was a recoiling "eugh". The 80's "rockin' theme song" trope was in full effect. And these kinds of jingle-rock meant to appeal to children and not offend moms always kind of offended me. But getting over the "trying to please everyone" aesthetic of it took a few listens, as it earwormed its way into my brain. It's kitschy in its own right, but I dig it. Is it "great"? Yeah, it kind of is.
(1 Good) The Condor's "Mach 1" effect is pretty nifty, and the only aspect of the animation that actually made me say "that's pretty cool".
(1 Bad) Pretty much everything else. It's competent animation from DIC but not impressive in the slightest. The vocal performances sound like they've been slowed to .75 speed and recorded in cavern, and are really uninspired. There's a real "Canadian" quality to this overall that just feels like an on-the-cheap production. I hate the Matt Tracker's kid and his stupid robot unicycle/best friend T-Bob. Shows built around kid sidekicks getting in trouble and needing rescuing are an easy "no thanks". Every episode of M.A.S.K. seems to center around some international locale or "exotic" artifact that invariably leads to the M.A.S.K. team to encounter people of different cultures handled with all the dignity, respect and inclusiveness that you would expect from a 1980's cartoon (so yes, it's that bad). Even one of the key team characters Bruce Sato speaks with the stereotypical "sage Asian" voice talking in proverbs. It's all so cringe-inducing. And finally there's their adversary V.E.N.O.M., who seem to be the same three idiots every episode. Admittedly, my viewing is limited but dear God they are the most unintimidating villains I've ever seen. Threat level 0. They are also no fun at all. Main bad guy Miles Mayhem (a portly, military general-styled, gray-haired mean grampa) doesn't even do the the usual villain maniacal laugh like Skeletor, Cobra Commander, Megatron or Dr. Claw. Just no fun at all.
Meta: After watching nearly 100 episodes of the 1980s G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero cartoon, I wanted to dive into something I had no familiarity with. M.A.S.K. I mainly knew from comic book ads. I never had the toys as a kid because they were in a 2" scale which was much smaller than G.I. Joe and Star Wars which was all the justification I needed. But having absolutely no investment or nostalgia in M.A.S.K. made it really, really hard to pay attention to the cartoon. It was boring, and pretty stupid, but not in the same knowingly entertaining way that G.I. Joe is. It doesn't even have the puritanical earnestness of Masters of the Universe, it really just feels like "crank out an episode, sell some toys" and has zero flair or panache. (Just to note, nostalgia also doesn't make a show better, because my favourite 80's toy line is Super Powers and the Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show is pretty awful, and more often than not, revisiting TV shows and movies you have nostalgia for can result in flat out killing that nostalgia).
