KWIF = Kent's Week in Film.
This Week:
Inside Out 2 (2024, d. - Disney+)
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023, d. - Netflix)
Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins (2021, d. - Netflix)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, d. Tobe Hooper - Tubi)
Memories of Murder (2003, d. Bong Joon-Ho - Tubi)
The Hidden (1987, D. Jack Sholder - BluRay)
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As much as I use movies for escapism, I feel like approaching every new movie is very much the same scenario as that Force Cave. What one experiences, and how one reacts, is entirely shaped by what you go in with. Because of course it is.
With Inside Out, I literally went into the film with my child who would have been six-years-old at the time. I couldn't help but see my child as Riley, despite their being younger than the child in the film, and I empathetically experienced all those primary emotions the film presented in their primordial state. I was familiar with them all as exhibited by my child. If I wasn't a father, I don't know if my reaction would have been more stilted, kept at a distance, as Toasty's was.
I approached Inside Out 2 with reluctance. Pixar has developed a pretty uncomfortable dependence on sequels, which, despite not being overwhelmingly diminishing returns, it's just unfortunate that the new ideas aren't coming as quickly in the company's second 15 years as they did in their first. I wondered what a second Inside Out could bring to the table that the first one didn't. Surprisingly, the answer points to Toasty's complaint about there "only being five emotions representing everything for everyone".
In the summer between grade school and high school, Riley hits puberty, and everything changes. Introducing Anxiety, Envy, Ennui, and Embarassment. These new emotions come in boldly and brashly, taking over the controls, supplanting the more rudimentary emotions that got Riley this far, and it couldn't be more disastrous as Riley's core beliefs start forming about herself.
Anxiety (an exceptional vocal performance from Maya Hawke) exiles Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, and it dominates Riley's personality, leading her to do many an awful thing, like abandoning her friends at hockey camp to go hang out with the high schools girls she idolizes, where she perpetuates lies to seem part of the gang. As Joy and gang try to work their way back to central control, they start to see the dramatic changes in Riley's mind with Anxiety in charge. The sar-chasm was a particularly inspired touch.
I did not watch Inside Out 2 with my child, now a year older than Riley in the film. I wish I had. The film made massive box office this past summer, and I know it clearly resonated with my child's peers (their friends were going back to theatres for second and third viewings), but they seemed disinterested, probably because it wasn't anime. My child has General Anxiety Disorder, and so watching a film where anxiety governs the actions of a child certainly has resonance for me. I also witnessed the horrendous turmoil that the surge of pubescent hormones had on them and their peers. It was two years of excruciating, soul crushing, heart-wrenching capital-"d" Drama that swung many of those kids I've known for decades onto dark paths of bullying and fighting and running away from home because they just can't process what's happening to them.
Inside Out 2 sort of dumbs down those conflicting, raging, hormonal emotions into individualized, personified beings that mess around with an increasingly complex inner world. It doesn't provide answers so much as awareness, it provides a mirror to view those emotions one may not understand, and encourages introspection.
The Inside Out films are about connecting and relating to the emotions of adolescence, both for those going through it, and for those watching others go through it. For those who are sans children in their life, it may provide a portal to connecting to those past emotions, or it may just not connect. It is a series dealing with the inner emotionality of a girl, and it doesn't cover all bases. It may not represent those dealing with young boys, or trans children, or neurodivergent children, or account for cultural differences. Again, we can only view these through the lens of what we take with us.
I took with me my parenthood, and it delivered an experience I could very much relate to.
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It's good, maybe even great.
I gave up on Transformers after the second one (yet, I still reluctantly watched the third, and enjoyed it?), but since Bumblebee I've also started reading the Skybound Transformers series by Daniel Warren Johnson, and it's created a little (all)spark of fandom in me that wasn't there before. The comic has just passed its first year of publication, so it wasn't a thing when Transformers: Rise of the Beasts came out, so I didn't have any desire to see this in the theatre. Or watch it on VOD. Even when it first cropped up on Netflix, exported from Paramount plus, I still waffled. It certainly wasn't priority watching.
Honestly, I put it on as something to fall asleep to. I guess to its credit I didn't fall asleep.
Taking place in 1994, Rise of the Beasts finds.... you know what, I'm not going to bother explaining the plot in any great detail. It's overly complex and kind of dumb. It has transforming robots chasing after two halves of a Maguffin that can open up a wormhole in space (we're back to LASERS IN THE SKY in 2023!?!) and draw forth the Galactus of the Transformers universe, Unicron. It wants to eat our planet. It's ups to Optimus Prime and his small band of Autobots to team up with some transforming robot animals to save the Earth.
The film is messy. It's overstuffed with robot characters who have a bit of personality but not much else. There's no character journeys here As with all previous Transformers movies I've seen, even Bumblebee, these films seem afraid to make the robots the lead characters of these films. Instead they opt for human leads for us to invest in. Sometimes it works, but not often.
It works here... to a point. Anthony Ramos' (Hamilton) Noah Diaz is a veteran who has returned from the service but is finding employment hard. His mother is pulling double shifts, and his little brother has a sickle cell disorder and the bills are piling up. That this film gets so heavy with systemic racism, veterans issues, economic disparity and the failings of privatized health care in its opening act was absolutely impressive. Ultimately, with Noah's brother's health failing he has no other choice but to turn to crime for money. He goes to steal a Porsche which winds up being Mirage (voiced by Pete Davidson, Bodies Bodies Bodies), a playful, trusting Autobot who takes a shining to Noah.
Meanwhile Dominique Fishback (Swarm) plays Elena Wallace, a grad student working at an intern at a museum where she has proven herself to be the smartest person in the room but her whitelady boss takes all the credit and gets all the reward. Once again, this film is very much pointing at systemic racism, though it never really examines it beyond that. It's not like it's dealing with parallel issues between the Autobots, Decepticons and Maximals.
In this opening act, the human drama was really good, and both Ramos and Fishback were very likeable in their roles, but as soon as they come to play with the Transformers, there's a pretty big disconnect between what the humans are capable of doing versus the big shape-changing robots, and that disconnect gets bigger and bigger the more shape-changing robots appear on screen, and we have two very crunchy/squishy humans in their midst.
As noted, the robots have so little to contribute. They're the good guys and the bad guys, but these films seem afraid to focus on them as complex beings. Optimus Prime is a total asshole in this one, and he learns a lesson about trust and allyship but it feels sooo forced. Bumblebee gets seemingly killed shortly after he first appears, which, with this being an legit sequel to Bumblebee seems like a slap in the face ...if it actually meant anything emotionally, which it does not. Beyond Noah's relationship with his brother, there's no emotional connection to anything in this film, and even his relationship with his brother doesn't really connect to his motivation to venture with giant robots to Peru to fight a planet-eating threat.
The film has an incredible dad-rap hip-hop soundtrack. Every track is a bop from back in my heyday of the genre. But it's all just artlessly tossed into the film, when it could have been so, so, so gooood by timing the beats to actions or connecting to the sentiment of the scene. Alas, this is not an Edgar Wright or Quentin Tarantino production.
It's passably watchable as entertainment, but not impressive in the slightest.
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| Oh, and just like stupid prequels/origin stories of old, Snake doesn't get his iconic looking helmet until the final scene |
Of all the hundreds of G.I. Joe characters, Snake Eyes is at best in the middle, but more likely the middle bottom of my rankings list. I never connected with ninja stuff in general as a kid, and, in the 90's, he was forced down our throats as "the cool one" or "the extreme one" like Wolverine or Ghost Rider. I frequently rebel against any effort to tell me what's cool. Not sure if you noticed.
What's definitely not cool is this G.I. Joe origin for Snake Eyes. It's a spectacularly muddled mess of a film that misses the mark of pretty much everything it is trying to do. Origin story for the silent, scarred, commando ninja: modest fail. Complete reset of the G.I. Joe franchise: total fail. 80's ninja throwback movie: utter fail. Modern action-fantasy franchise movie: epic fail.
Its a film that doesn't exist to tell a specific story, but instead do everything it can to build a franchise out of that story, and it's like Hollywood never learns. The Mummy. Green Lantern. Man of Steel. Iron Man 2. Madame Web. Hobbes and Shaw. etc. etc. With this film, the moment it tries to plug in G.I. Joe and Cobra, what tenuous treads that were holding the thing together fall completely apart.
From the onset we learn that Snake Eyes' father was killed in front of him and he's been angry and vengeful ever since. He's developed into handsome Henry Golding (Last Christmas), but also a fierce fighter besting everyone he comes across in illegal fighting venues, until one day he is given an offer: work for this stranger and he will be given the man who killed his father.
So he works for the stranger's criminal enterprise, only to quickly betray him by helping Tommy, a spy, escape. Tommy is who Joe fans will know better as Storm Shadow. He is intended to be the leader of his ninja clan, Arashikage, who are also allies of G.I. Joe and protectors of a sacred stone of power. Snake Eyes is actually a double agent, working for the stranger to infiltrate the clan and steal said stone. The stranger, it turns out, is Tommy's uncle who was cast out of the Arashikage for being a selfish dick...or something.
Snake Eyes wrestles with acceptance in the ninja clan, and the dangling carrot of the man who killed his father. But barely.
The film conveys through dialogue the fact that Snake Eyes is torn between his loyalty and his thirst for vengeance, but it never actually feels like the character has this turmoil, mostly because it's too busy with dumb setpieces and inane character decisions to let the emotions settle.
Spoilers, if you care, but the final act has Snake Eyes betray the clan, steal the stone, hand it over to Tommy's uncle, who is going to wield it to destroy the clan, and then give it to the the Baroness of the terrorist organization Cobra. Snake Eyes is then given his dad's killer, only to learn he is a Cobra assassin. In other words, Snake Eyes has just done the bidding of the group that killed his father. So after freeing the assassin (what?) he turns around to try and save the Arashikage with Tommy, who now hates him so much.
Scarlett joins the fight out of nowhere (what?) and Baroness is betrayed by Tommy's uncle so she sides with Scarlett and Snake temporarily (what?) and Snake says "Yo Joe" for no reason (what?) and Tommy uses the stone to kill his uncle and is told that he's broken a most sacred Arashikage vow, and now can no longer lead them, and he's so mad and hates Snake Eyes now so much and Scarlett recruits Snake Eyes to G.I. Joe but he's got to go find Tommy first, and he's now allying himself with the Baroness, and this movie is so, so dumb.
I didn't even get into Akiko, the head of Arashikage security who is absolutely terrible at her job. She falls for Snake Eyes and does some very stupid things blinded by her attraction. Pretty much everything everyone does in this movie is because it's in the script, not because it feels true to their character. Even after spending two hours with him, I never got a sense of who Snake Eyes was as a person, what his ethics were. Nobody should trust him, yet, everyone does, and it's pretty much all of their undoing. Snake Eyes could be considered the villain of the piece, not by intention, but by action.
It's an ugly looking movie for the most part. It's shot like a cheap European direct-to-VOD action movie. The only thing that saves it (well, nothing actually saves it) are gorgeous sets and some cool motorbikes. This made my brain hurt.
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I've avoided this film my whole life. The title in itself just sounds completely unappealing. Who voluntarily wants to see something with that title? I know there are people who do, I'm just not one of those people.
I've been pelleted with Leatherface imagery for much of my life, and that just doubled down on my "no thank you" stance towards this film.
So what prompted me to watch this? It was Electric Boogaloo, the documentary on Canon films. In there it mentioned how the Canon-produced sequel to TTCSM was more of a satirical horror film in the Evil Dead 2 vein, and that piqued my curiosity. But in the weeks since, I forgot they were talking about the sequel and not the original.
Four college kids are in a van, going to rural wherever to visit a family-owned property. Along they way they pick up a weirdo hitchhiker who does some weird stuff before being kicked out. Then they stop at a gas station with no gas, before heading up to the abandoned house. The kids start exploring the property and two of them are killed by a disturbed man in a butcher's gown, a wig and a mask made of flesh. Then other go searching for them and are killed with a chainsaw, until only one of them is left. She is chased after, caught, and forced to sit through a torturous dinner scene with the guy from the van, the guy from the gas station, the human leather-face chainsaw murderer, and a feeble and decrepit old man who seems barely alive. She eventually escapes, frustrating the leather-faced one.
I wasn't bored, necessarily, but I found the whole movie to be tedious. I was intrigued by it initially, as the opening moments with is screeching flash-bulb imagery have been so iconic in the horror genre, but I've just never witnessed their origins. The sequences in the van, the easy, rambling conversations, then the weird encounter with the hitchhiker are well done if not necessarily well performed. There's a lot of capital-"a" Acting happening there.
I by the time the kids encounter Leatherface, I wasn't feeling the build of tension, and at no time was I ever really scared by the events. I guess watching this film after sort of knowing about it for over 40 years, it all just seems inevitable.
The final act is 25 minutes of Marylin Burns (as Sally) scream pretty much non-stop. I'm sure if I were in a theatre witnessing this for the first time in the 70's or 80's, as a younger person less experienced with cinema, this would have been pretty intense. But now I just found it annoying. The prior kills were just so abrupt that they weren't really shocking or gruesome, and we're not really given much to invest in these characters so watching them die seems like a formality of horror filmmaking (this is how I feel about most slasher and torture porn horror). Sally's screaming ad nauseum is so grating... at a certain point what is it accomplishing? It's the only trick in her book. It is impressive work by Burns though, I must admit.
I mean, as a piece of horror history, I get its place. But what's its point? To horrify and disgust? Fine, but it didn't do that for me.
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I had no idea what to expect from Memories of Murder. It's an evocative title, but meaning what, exactly? Is it a character study, a drama about someone who has killed? Is it a psychological suspense film about a therapist and their disturbed patient? Is it a genre picture, where someone can enter peoples memories and finds a murderer within? I wouldn't put any of these past Director Bong.
But Memories of Murder is instead the director's tribute to grotty 1980's and '90's suspense procedurals, like Witness, Bad Lieutenant, Blue Velvet, or half the Coen Bros output from the era.
It's 1986 and a woman if found dead after an assault, left in a drainage ditch in rural Korea. The crime scene offers few clues. A short while later, after a rainfall, another woman is found, but the local police forces are so inexperienced they're unable to keep the evidence untainted and the crime scene clear. A suspect, a mentally impaired young man, is brought in for questioning, and coerced after days of abuse, into giving a confession. A new recruit from Seoul does his own investigation, leaving the dirty cops to their dirty deeds. The boy, once brought into the open, it turns out, has an alibi they didn't bother to check.
They try to catch the killer, knowing he will strike next during the rainfall, and some actual detective work yields the potential for clues, but they're just too many steps behind. It's never quite clear if the killer knows they're looking for him, but it still feels like a cat-and-mouse game, mostly as it involves two very different Detectives with two very different procedures for solving crimes. But over time Detective Park's corrupt, gut-feeling tendencies start to give way to Detective Seo's evidence and tactics based procedures. Conversely, Detective Seo, once he locks in on a target, embrace Detective Park's shadowy tendencies and it's up to Park to be the rational one.
It's not that we have not been aware of the corruption within policing institutions in the past, but it seems only in the past 5 years has it becomes part of the conversation, out in the open. Policing institutions are given so much latitude to abuse and circumvent the rules set out for them, and even calling it out changes nothing. This film, from 21 years ago is keenly aware how these abuses in the name of justice come about, and unlike a lot of American "copaganda" it's not forgiving in the slightest for it.
It presents our Detectives as humans, for sure, but people who are allowed to let their bases impulses be acted out with impunity, and feel justified for it. It shows how the police look at everyone outside of them as something else, not equals, but others. They see a population fill with potential perpetrators, potentials suspects, potential victims.
The tone of Memories of Murder is grim, but also blackly comical. Before Detective Seo arrives, the police are buffoonish. We can see the ineptness and laziness at play. It'd be funny if it weren't so upsetting. Plus Detective Park, ostensibly our protagonist, is pretty terrible. A misogynist, an abuser of power, and maybe even a little dumb...he's not a likeable character, and yet in the body of Song Kang-ho (a mainstay of Director Bong's work), he's compelling. You want to hate him fully, but there's just a little something there that you're kind of charmed by, even though you should know better.
If this movie has a more direct parallel than the 80's and 90's movies it's inspired by, it would be Zodiac. I have to wonder if David Fincher was directly inspired by Director Bong's work here, because they feel like kin.
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Sgt. Beck (Michael Nouri, Yellowstone) has been chasing a man all over town, a seemingly everyday, average, genteel citizen who all of a sudden snapped and starting assaulting, murdering, robbing and terrorizing Los Angeles, often with a smile on his face. Eventually the law catches up to the man, and he winds up in the hospital in a coma, with no answers to give for his sudden shift.
FBI Agent Lloyd Gallagher (Kyle MacLachlan, The Flintstones) turns up at the precinct and has Beck assigned to him. Turns out Gallagher was looking for the same man man...shortest lived partnership ever. Except that when the accused turns up dead in his hospital room and his roommate is missing, going on his own similarly violent and impulsive spree, things for Beck and Gallagher seem to be just getting started.
The film's not shy about it, it's an alien parasite hopping from body to body. Yeah, sounds absurd, but holy hell is it a fun 97 minutes of nearly flawless filmmaking telling the story. There are no false moves in The Hidden, at no point am I screaming "come on" at people who should know better, at no point is the suspension of disbelief I've granted the film stretched even close to the breaking point. It seems like every question that should be asked by a police detective is being asked, and even when the answers are skirted by Gallagher, it's clocked by Beck.
MacLachlan plays Gallagher like a true weirdo (like a warmup for Twin Peaks), and Nouri's glib yet analytical nature isn't ever fooled, but his intuition is telling him something.
It's not the prettiest film, but Sholder never reaches too far. He's not trying for anything fancy, he's just telling a fun story and he does it very, very well.
In Men In Black, Vincent D'Onofrio delivers the greatest alien-in-human-disguise performance in cinematic history. In The Hidden we have the prototype for that very performance with Willaim Boyette's turn as the alien-in disguise. Boyette's physicality and verbal ticks and little nuances are all just divine. Three other performers - Chris Mulkey, Claudia Christian and Ed O'Ross - all deliver exceptionally fun performances as the skin suits.
In my memory, having last seen this film in the mid-1990s, this was a much more serious production, not the rollicking buddy cop romp where they're chasing an alien terminator through the streets of L.A. But yeah, it's a romp, just a straight up better-than-a-B-movie/not-quite-an-A-movie grand time of film, with perfect vibes.
Pairs well with: They Live, but honestly, I think it's an even superior film.
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