3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Cleaner

2025, Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) -- download

Die Hard but she's a window cleaner. I mean, really, its essentially that. She even has a person on the inside she has to protect and is in contact with a cop on the ground, and the cop has to deal with trigger-happy SWAT agents, and the Bad Guys say they are there for one thing, but are really there for another thing. No duct crawling though.

Joey's (Daisy Ridley, Murder on the Orient Express) the window cleaner in a big building in downtown London. I guess its possible that buildings owned by Musk-level moguls have permanent cleaning staff for their 75+ stories of windows? But none of that matters; all we care about is that she is doing the job, she's shit at the job (good a window cleaning, shit at working), and that she has a brother on the spectrum. There's a history there, wherein their father beat on him for being "a freak" while she just sat with her feet dangling out the window. So, now she's making up for it by taking care of him and being very very insolent with people.

The fact she pisses people off, including her supervisor, is why she is stuck outside the building when the Bad Guys, disguised as catering staff, infiltrate the party on the top floor. The CEO brothers are announcing one thing or another, about how their company cares and is not polluting everything. The Bad Guys are eco-activists, but not ones who have ever crossed a line (i.e. hurt people), but they have a point to make. Their leader wants to push the envelope, threaten the CEO Brothers (truly, they are the real Bad Guys here) into giving a confession to all their dirty little secrets, which will be broadcast by a hacker with a cool haircut. Exceeeept, some of their number are a bit more extreme and actually just want to blow the building up, to make a nihilistic point.

I wonder at my trend of late, to be pretty verbose in the setup of the movie and its characters, but.... I trail off in the rest, not presenting a proper "recap".

But Joey is not just a window washer, she's also an ex-military type who was booted from the army for being an insubordinate ass. And the angry people inside are ... well, eco-activists with guns. Its not surprising when she starts kicking their asses. What is surprising is when their leader Marcus Blake (Clive Owen, Gemini Man) is killed and sociopathic nutjob "antihumanist" Noah (Taz Skylar, One Piece) supplants him as leader of this little escapade. Noah also happens to have been Joey's coworker in window cleaning. Noah doesn't so much as want to expose the evils of the corporation as he wants to kill a lot of people. Meanwhile Joey has linked up with the negotiator on the ground, who has to deal with eager policemen with lots of guns, and ... well, you know how these movies go.

Interesting note: Joey's brother Michael is played by Matthew Tuck, an actually neurodivergent actor in his first role.

I fully admit, and I did in the first paragraph, this one was derivative to the max and if we were still in the video store era, it probably would have been a tier-2 or 3 shelf movie, something people would take if all the new release or "good movies" were gone. But I rather enjoyed its nonsense. I highly doubt they are trying to position Daisy as the next female action star but it at least gives her another in her cabinet of curiosities. Die Hard was also considered a B-lister, and really it still is, but it was embraced and while I don't expect this one to become a regular rewatch-er, it was decent enough.

Didn't you just bemoan the state of so many movies just being "all right" ? We do need another "John Wick" surprise or at least something so terrible it becomes a giggle fest.

ReWatch Snippets: Indulged

Literally, the same paragraph from the original snippets post applies:

"In a desire to embrace the mental state which leads me from NOT watching a movie proper, but after flicking through the "channels" for a bit, end up rewatching a movie I have seen before, and not always enjoyed that much. So, why? What drew me back? Let's see if I can put a bit of it to words."

I am not sure I will always tell the why but maybe the words I use will tell me why. 

The Accountant, 2016 Gavin O'Connor (Producer Mare of Easttown) -- Netflix

The sequel is coming out, so I thought I would remind myself of the movie. What I recalled. Christian Wolff is a hitman that works a side-gig as a forensic accountant, and he meets Dana Cummings for a bit role. He has lots of guns and kills lots of people, and yet the movie is somewhat quiet and thoughtful. What I didn't remember. Wolff is autistic, and he's not really an assassin. But he does have a massive armoury outfitted like he was an assassin. He does work for criminals, doing the accounting they need, and does the forensic accounting on the side to explain away his money. Anna Kendrick's role is kind of the love interest but not really, though there is attraction there; in the end, he gives her a painting she likes, worth millions. JK Simmons also plays a bit part, as a Treasury Agent who is fed enough information (by an anonymous source) to make him a good cop, but also keep him off Wolff's real trail. Also, Christian Wolff is not his real name, just that of a famous mathematician. Jon Bernthal comes in as Christian's brother, also violent, but a good brother in the end -- he forgives his brother for killing all the men in his employ.

Oblivion, 2013 Joseph Kosinski (Spiderhead) -- Amazon

Jack and Vic are an effective team. In a future where the world was destroyed by aliens, leaving not much but gritty ruins, the pair monitors the integrity of ocean sucking machinery which is supposed to be making fuel for the space colony that the remaining humans have escaped to. But Jack is more attached to The Earth that Was than he should be, or is allowed to be. Until he learns the truth, that he is not fighting the remaining alien invaders, but the remaining human survivors. And he's a clone, one of many protecting the ocean sucking machinery which makes fuel for the Evil AI in the Sky, from the remaining humans.

Its such a beautiful movie of greys and grit and clean white plastic, and for me is an enduring scifi movie full of things to be constantly rediscovered. Still don't like the ending which implies Jack Clone Two is going to hookup with Jack Clone One's wife, who I guess consummated their "marriage" (its complicated clone stuff) before he left to blow up the Evil AI in the Sky. I mean, yes they are very similar, but are "people" that replaceable? I don't think I would like the answer.

The Girl with All the Gifts, 2016 Colm McCarthy (Bagman) -- Amazon

Also rewatched The Last of Us TV series (still not writing about TV), based on the video game that came out around the same time as the short story from which this movie derives. Its hard to know if one spun off the other, as both deal with an apocalyptic plague after the cordyceps fugus jumps to humans turning the infected into ravening zombies, and both stories have a young girl who could be the hope for a turnaround, as long as you are OK with them being murdered ... for science. If I want to get pedantic about zombie sub-genres, and I usually do, its more "infected" than "zombie" as in both instances they are still living creatures that can die from too much traumatic force.

The first two acts of the movie really do it for me; an eerie introduction to the hungry kids who were found as newborns after eating their way out of their infected mothers, and the subsequent road story as the main characters escape from the collapse of their "safe" zone. The third act, which is properly apocalyptic, just bugs me for some reason... too nihilistic even for me? From the loss of the friendly soldier Kieran to the gnashy teeth of adolescents, to the true End of the World, I just felt depressed.

The Fall Guy, 2024 David Leitch (Bullet Train) -- Amazon

I just needed some light fare, and the movie warranted a rewatch purely for all the little fun bits and the charming cast members. I confirmed that though the movie's central plot is toss away, it is more than made up for by the wink-wink-nod-nod nature of the entire movie's construction. That the movie is based on a hammy 80s TV show and the plot is as much. That pretty much every big scene in the movie is a stunt within a stunt. That the first time I did not even know Teresa Palmer was in the movie, and this time I still did not recognize her as such. Hannah Waddingham is great, Stephanie Hsu is great, Winston Duke is great. Its a great Hollywood Hollywood movie and deserved more attention.

Casino Royale, 2006 Martin Campbell (Dirty Angels) -- Amazon
Quantum of Solace, 2008 Marc Forster (World War Z) -- Amazon
Skyfall, 2012 Sam Mendes (1917) -- Amazon
Spectre, 2015 Sam Mendes (Jarhead) -- Amazon
No Time to Die, 2021 Cary Joji Fukunaga (Beasts of No Nation) -- Amazon

Is it OK to say I watched this run of James Bond movies for Daniel Craig's brutally violent and ruggedly macho version of Bond? And yet, at the same time, I am turned off by his callous probably way over the misogynist line treatment of women. I mean, in the first two movies he gets two women killed, and there is no fine line on that he is purely using them to reach his goals. He seems to have a wink of regret but that is about as far as it goes. This doesn't even change much when he unabashedly loves a woman. James definitely has some clinical issues with women. Its good that there are at least a few that don't fall to his wiles, my favourite being Paloma, of course. Swoon.

I liked that he died in the last one, in that it gives this Era of Bond its own continuity, even if they shared an M with earlier movies. Despite recent murmurs of an attempt to break the mould (of who could play the next Bond), I don't think the current climate would stomach it, and my favourite suggestion (Idris Elba) might age out of the possibility before we could embrace it again. 

Slither, 2006 James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) -- Amazon

"Leaving soon," the tag line on Amazon said. "Why not," I asked. Still love this gross, goofy, irreverent horror-comedy. I remember having a pang of sympathy for Grant ... Grant (yes, his name is Grant Grant) a few rewatches ago, but this time I just see a sad, controlling man who gets what's coming to him. 

Paddington, 2014 Paul King (Space Force) -- download
Paddington 2, 2017 Paul King (The Mighty Boosh) -- download

We were about to watch the new one, so we again thought, "Why not." Also, the political climate of late has added a solid lump of anxiety pain in the pit of our stomach and these movies are so full of moments to brightly smile at.

Repeatedly so. Non-stop. During the first one I just smiled and smiled and smiled. Not at the comedy meant for kids, like him cleaning out his ears with their toothbrushes, but the sweet nice stuff like the painting on the stairwell, or ... holey freholey, I never wrote about these movies when I first saw them!! So, stopping here, as these two deserve their own, must more written about post.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Reptile

2023, Grant Singer (music video director; feature debut) -- Netflix

Reptile is most definitely a movie with style, which is not surprising considering the director came from the music video world. The colour palette, the way it framed the characters and, of course, the metaphors depicted, which would have most viewers, myself included, looking for one of those "_____ ending explained". That Guy is shaking his head at This Guy who recognizes that movies are alluding to something, that what is on the screen is not always taken as matter of fact, but doesn't always catch the meaning, in full.

That said, many of the negative critic reviews suggest they didn't "get it" or there wasn't really anything to get. I am more likely to think along the latter lines, in that the movie was a tad overcooked, with lots of symbolism, but with too little payout to warrant the stylings. And yet, I really liked it.

Tom (Benicio Del Toro, Sicario; wearing his usual leather blazer) is a cop in the town of Scarborough. They don't state where this town is (some people say Maine, but it just didn't have a Maine-feel to me; I am thinking more upstate NY), but it is most definitely an affluent rural community not far from a "big city". Tom has a history, something to do with shady cops -- either he ratted on them, or he stayed quiet while the rest were indicted. Either way, he gained a reputation and had to leave for quieter locales. The force there is small, they are all friends, they attend each other's birthdays, they call Tom "Oklahoma" because he likes country square dancing.

Summer Elswick (Matilda Lutz, Zone 414), a young real estate agent, is horrifically murdered in a house she was trying to sell. There are the usual suspects, and some shady characters, but almost immediately Tom starts finding things that don't add up. Her boyfriend, Will Grady (an incredibly sad-sack Justin Timberlake, In Time) is heir to a wealthy & influential real estate family. There is a desire to end the investigation quickly, and the most likely suspect is Summer's ex-BF. Only when the precinct believes they have the real suspect does Tom begin to unravel the deeper mystery, and crimes, that this sleepy little town has.

The movie presents like a horror movie. The angles, the tones, the general untrustworthiness of all the supporting characters, and the constant very eerie music. But the mystery is actually quite straight forward as murder-mysteries go. I was really carried along by the tone, and the sense that a lot of symbolism was happening, not all caught by me, but at least acknowledged. But part of me wonders whether the movie didn't embrace its symbolism enough. The title of the movie is Reptile which gives way to a few thematic ideas: cold-blooded killers, skins being shed, lurking danger. There is a bit of such, but only thinly offered.

There is a final scene in the movie, Tom laying his hand in a wax bath, a treatment often used for hand injuries, and then pulling the "second skin" off is the aforementioned "____ ending explained" bit. Not sure it was required.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Only the Brave

2017, Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion) -- Netflix

I thought I might as well fill in some Kosinski gaps, but not exactly sure why. Other than Oblivion (and probably Tron: Legacy but obviously not enough to generate rewatches), I cannot say his directorial stylings have captured me. Maybe now that he has broken from the mould created by his first two movies (visually impactful scifi), with things such as a Top Gun sequel, and this one, he can return to something I would more enjoy?

Anywayz, I am also not much of a biopic viewer, though I do have a good number in the "the hopper" (my downloads folder) unwatched and neglected. I also am not sure I knew this was a "based on a true story" movie, more thinking it was just going to be an exploration of something in the zeitgeist for the last decade or so -- wild fires and the men who fight them. But no, this is a sensitive, compassionate movie about the Granite Mountain Hotshots, who lost 19 members fighting the wildfire in Yarnell, Arizona in 2013. 

Hotshots are highly trained, front-line Wildland Firefighters. At least that is the term in America. They started as a "handcrew", basically a support team in fighting wildfires, preparing the land ahead of the fire to reduce potential danger. The movie is about their dream to become proper Hotshots, to tear the "trainee" sticker off their vehicle. They are led by Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin, Old Guy) and Jesse Steed (James Badge Dale, World War Z), and the movie depicts the add-on of a few new recruits, including addict Brendan McDonough (Miles Teller, The Gorge) who wants to clean up his act after his ex has his baby. Marsh takes a chance on him.

Much of the movie is about getting to know the guys, which in most movies can be tedious, but Kosinski gives us a no-nonsense setup. There's not a lot of gloss on these "good ol boys", Arizona being a land of cowboys and country music, but they all seem likeable enough, dispensing with the toxic masculinity for the most part. There was something solid about seeing their lives, without the movie taking turns into melodrama for the sake of excitement. 

But peppered into the movie are the fires they fight and the dangers presented. We keep on getting a wee bit of dramatic effect with visions of a bear made of fire rushing out of a massive landscape on fire. I expected it to be just that, a bit of CGI for the sake of metaphor, but it did end up connected to an experience Marsh had, something I imagine every wildfire firefighter experiences -- an animal fleeing the fire, its coat ablaze, into the darkness beyond. Marsh uses this memory to connect with and apologize to Brendan, that they are all fleeing something overwhelming in their lives, but the Hotshots turn around and step into it.

Again, going into the movie, not knowing the historical fact behind it, I was not expecting the deaths. But when the final act started, I saw the signs. It put a cold spot in my gut. I liked these guys, they were succeeding, they were overcoming odds, they all had so much to contribute. And in a flash, pun intended, the next thing we hear is "confirmed; 19". All the protective measures, all the training, all the experience could not protect them from the beast of a fire.

Brendan escapes death, having been put on reduced duty (assigned lookout at a critical point) due to his recovery from a snakebite. But the movie does not end with the deaths, as it also has to deal with him being a survivor when all his friends and mentors are dead, when all their families see him still alive. If the movie ended with so much death, it had to give us a bit of hope & life to close things out.

I was thinking, going into this movie, that I would close out my Kosinski collection, but honestly... not feeling  it. Sure, I enjoyed the movie, but not enough to deal with the dislike I have for the legacy of Top Gun. And nothing stands out for me in his directing that would compel me to watch it, nor the coming F1. Experiment over.

Note: Some really good supporting performances from Jeff Bridges (The Old Man) and Jennifer Connelly (Dark City). 

KsMIRT: Give the new recruit severance on paradise's shoresy

 KsMIRT = Kent's Month In Reviewing Television, in which I (Kent) review the television series I watched in the past month, which these days is not many. I don't know about you but I'm finding that starting into any new TV series to be daunting prospect. I think smartphones, social media, and video games have utterly decimated our ability to sit patiently, to relax into a passive activity like watching TV or movies. The new media is so build on providing tiny dopamine hits, whether it's in-game rewards or social media rage bait, or the constant promise of something more if you just keep scrolling/clicking/spending. So most of the TV shows I watch are subsequent seasons for things I already know I like, and in most cases, I'm either binge-watching through at a rapid clip, or waiting impatiently for the final episode so I can move onto something else.  

This Month:
The Recruit Season 2 (6 episodes, Netflix)
Shoresy Season 4 (6 Episodes, Crave)
Severance Season 2 (10 Episodes, AppleTV+)
Paradise Season 1 (8 Episodes, Disney+) 

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The What 100: Having survived (barely) his ordeal in Prague, Owen becomes the Agency's fall guy. He's given nothing to do but while away the hours in his, literally, empty office. But when a package is delivered (though not for him) his boredome gets the better of him and he finds a new greymail case that takes him to South Korea, and finds him getting in the usual trouble with, well, everyone. The case finds a Korean intelligence officer effectively blackmailing the CIA into helping him recover his kidnapped wife, perpetrators unknown.

(1 Great) Just as with last season, Noah Centineo is the deserved lead of this show. He has a real capacity for switching between super-competent and fecklessness that this show absolutely requires. His character, Owen, is quick-witted, for sure, and capable of stepping well outside his comfort zone, but the show gives the character side moments to breathe, to take in the events that have happened to him (or are still) and Centineo captures the weight of these moments quite well. Owen is a man with a moral compass working in a field that not only doesn't respect morals but sees them as a hinderance to getting the job done, and we see Owen get ground down over these past two seasons. Why he persists is still unclear. He has something to prove.

(1 Good) I really enjoyed the fact that this season stepped outside of Vancouver and surrounding are for its production and actually ventured into Seoul. Theres a totally different vibe to that city that you can't replicate with, say, using some "little Korea" area in Vancouver as sub-in. But the series is a globe trotting one, and Owen is seen hopping around multiple locations, but none of them have the liveliness and vibrancy of Seoul. Teo Yoo as the greymailer and Young-Ah Kim as the deputy director of the NIS were both excellent and brought the exact measure of wit, charm and intensity that the rest of the show is constantly balancing. 

(1 Bad) The Recruit is not a reinvention of the espionage (or espionage-lite) genre, but it also isn't playing by the standard rules. It is a show that operates at a rapid clip, that jumps between its characters and their various settings with not a lot of segue, and asks the audience to keep up. It's not a complicated show, but it does throw a lot of information at you rapidly, and you need to keep up. Alongside Centineo, it's part of the draw, this propulsiveness. But at the same time, it is a bit taxing to follow all the characters, and how they fit into the larger narrative (but it is a process of discovery as it all fits). It's maybe even more to ask the audience to suspend their disbelieve as it expects you to think Owen is not completely falling apart given all his globetrotting (the jetlag must be insane). But part of the show being so Owen-centric, so focused on his pursuits is the excellent supporting cast wind up being very secondary in interest, and the level of investment in them is pretty small.  

META: 6 Episodes? Only 6 Episodes? A downgrade from last season's 8 episodes. I hadn't realized that it was only going to be a 6-episode season, and by all rights, it seems like it was truncated during production. The finale of the season is so very abrupt, and while it closes out the greymail case at hand it gives us no real closure on Owen or most of his supporting cast. If we were in old school, pre-streamer television, where a season of a series would run 22 episodes, this would have been a very satisfying middle arc, with a third act that gets real personal for Owen and shows us why he's doing what he's doing, and keeps doing what he's doing (and likely has something to do with his father. But no, Netflix's hesitant second season order shows no commitment to the series nor any confidence in its performance.  It took Netflix a month to renew it after the first season dropped and it similarly took it a month to cancel it after this second season. In a post-cancellation letter, show creator Alexei Hawley asked "Is two seasons and a movie a thing?"  I think a big-budget, big-screen version of this might work even better than a series. It was fun while it lasted.

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The What 100: It's summer in Sudbury ("Sudvegas") and the Blueberry Bulldogs are celebrating their perfect season and championship win, maybe a little too hard. The boys who haven't gone home are busy tubing during the day and partying at every Sudbury landmark at night, and won't rest until they get accepted into the not-so-secret secret club Weird Sudbury. But Nat signs them up to be mentors, which curtails their party-hearty lifestyle. Meanwhile Shoresy has called it a career and doesn't know what's next, as Nat tries to convince him to coach, and his attempts at being an on-screen personality for a Bro-Dude sponsored sports show has mixed results. He also get serious about moving his relationship forward with Laura.

(1 Great) One of the subplots of the season was Shoresy's continued wooing of Laura Mohr. That Shoresy started out life as a faceless, crass, shit-talking nuisance on Letterkenny, and has somehow manifested into a viable romantic comedy leading man this season was both wildly unexpected and pretty damn cute. As with the good below, one of his young mentees he also takes under his wing showing him how to show a lady that not only are you interested, but you're willing to put in the effort. It's a great counterpoint to toxic masculinity which says you are owed a woman's affection, and here it's telling a male audience that you have to earn it.

(1 Good) Each episode of Shoresy comes with some exceptional laughs. Keeso is a big fan of repetition as comedy and knows how to employ it.  But the greatest bits of the season came from the Bulldog's mentoring of a quartet of young high-school players graduating to bigger pastures. The elder generation of hockey jocks wrestling with the progressive aspects of the younger generation (such as the fact that they don't fully change in the dressing room or shower so as not to make any one uncomfortable) is a pretty sharp examination of societal norms. If we're seeing things from Shoresy's perspective, everything these kids are saying is absurd, and yet, when the kids explain the reason behind it, there are kernels of sense (like Letterkenny, I appreciate how the show is willing to wrestle with topics rather than decidedly make a stand).

(1 Bad) The show continues to twist me in knots though, as it, much like Letterkenny, toggles between respecting women almost to a level of worship, and objectifying and sexualizing them. The main female cast is almost uniformly adored, but any non-speaking role, any of the girls that the celebrating Bulldogs are picking up night after night, are just slow-motion ogled by the camera. It's a carry-over from Letterkenny that has been even further exacerbated this season with the excuse that the Bulldogs are slutting it up something fierce. Hockey players pull and a lot of these four seasons of Shoresy have "locker-room talk" which is part of the territory, but the show makes a choice to "lads mag" it up with its ogling and it just never sits right.

META: Look, I'm not a jock, never been a jock, and actively disliked the whole jock mindset most of my life. Shoresy is a show about jocks - obviously hockey jocks, to be specific - and yet, as we wade into trade wars and aggressive political stances with our suddenly unfriendly neighbour to the south, perhaps the "slug each other in the face when we're disrespected, and crush each other into the boards for a while, then shake hands and say 'good game' when all is said and done" is maybe more of what we need right now. "Elbows up" as they say. Fight on the rink then leave it on the ice.  The thing about Shoresy that I like is it has a code. Just like Letterkenny before it, there's a code of ethics involved, a sense that, no matter who we are in life, we should be decent people and treat each other with civility if not always respect. We are not islands upon ourselves, we're parts of communities, parts of teams, and we have a responsibility to each other. It's not a bad message, if I'm being honest.

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The What 100: When we last left the crew from Lumin Industries, the innies got out into the real world thanks to hijacking the "Overtime Protocol". The world found out, and Mark, Irving, Hilly and Dylan were heroes (if just for one day), their outing rippling down to the severed floor, now led by Mr. Milchick, with some performative changes. But nobody, not a one, seems happy to be back, and the changes underground seem to only exacerbate the idea that they are imprisoned. 

(1 Great) The first season of Severance was pretty fixated on the world building with a measured hand in developing the characters. The time split between the innie and outie worlds found the innie world to be a surreal Lynchian workplace daymare, while the outside reality could only follow Mark (Adam Scott) for very specific narrative reasons. With the "Overtime Event" exposing the external lives of Irving (John Turturro), Helly (Britt Lower) and Dylan (Zach Cherry), we actually get to deepen our understanding of these characters. Irving's Innie has become utterly disillusioned with all that he once held dear, and his outie has become similarly obsessed with Burt's outie (Christopher Walken, whose shifting between charming softness, simmering danger, and seemingly violent intensity is just masterful). Dylan, for his "good behaviour" (read, betrayal), gets to meet his outie's wife, but in the process becomes even more obsessed with his outie's life than ever. Helly wrestles with her identity as an undercover Eagan, hating her outie, while Helena Eagan becomes obsessed with the liberties Helly has experienced not being known as an Eagan. Mark, on both sides, obsesses over learning that Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman) is actually his (presumed dead wife) and seeks to re-integrate. Even the exterior worlds, such as they are, of Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman) and Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) get explored this season, with Milchick's new role proving more and more uncomfortable and Cobel's rebellion against Lumin shedding the smallest glimmer of light on what is actually going on. In this much more character-focused season (where we get a whole episode dedicated to Ms. Casey and another - shot in Newfoundland - that gives us a sliver of insight into Harmony's story) the world building takes a backseat. This is not to say there isn't any, as there is plenty, but it's not as front-and-center as it was in Season 1.  It's a pretty wise move, to further invest us in these characters, rather than just playing with revelations of the setting, and I think it pays off well this season, but will pay off more in the long run.  The side effect of being character focused is it's juggling more story balls. Mark was the center of the world last year, and now he's sharing the spotlight he once held with five others, so the end result is a season that feels less focused because it is... and yet it's all building upon what was established last season. It offers some answers, but not in any way that is satisfying, despite being tremendously enjoyable.

(1 Good) The world of Severance continues to intrigue me. It's clear now that Lumin Industries is a far-reaching, global brand with its hands in many, many pies, but we're offered only a miniscule tidbit of what its business really is. They have, at the very least, a pharma wing (as Helena Eagan tries to explain her Innie's public outburst on utilizing a non-Lumin branded medication...always schilling). We see in the Harmony Cobel-centered episode that Lumin gave birth to many towns, and subsequently destroyed them, leaving hard feelings and addictions in its wake.  It is clear that there's a cult-like aspect to the Eagan family that casts allusions to some Scientology practices (such as how it grooms its children through structure programs) but isn't going for a direct parallel (this religion is as much about capitalism, control and subjugation as it is about worship in a much more direct manner than most real religions are). I love that the world of Severance seems kind of stuck aesthetically in the 1980s and yet everyone has smartphones. This season is less fetishistic of its retro-futurism, and presents its irreverence (such as the goat people) in a clumsier manner than last season, but it's still so very, very stimulating to behold and try to puzzle out. It's this type of reality where you really don't want too many answers, because one answer that's less satisfying than the multitude of possibilities your brain might tease out.

(1 Bad) There really isn't a "bad" this season, except, for me, the return which, after 3 years, didn't quite live up to the explosive promises of the end of season one. I think I like it better this way, because the end of season one felt like a fire had been lit and it could have raged, but the showrunners are content to let it smoulder. They introduce in the first episode new work-mates for Mark (including Alia Shawkat and Bob Balaban) but it's a total fake out and they're gone within the same episode, which is too bad. They were certainly exciting additions for a brief moment.

META: It's been almost 3 years since season 1 and the wait, somehow, didn't feel all that excruciating.  The show, as I described in my review of Season 1, is slow sci-fi, and with that subgenre comes patience. I've waited patiently. I think Kier would be proud.  The reality of Severance is still so...well, if not enticing then curious, and I find it so compellingly bizarre.  The message of the show, the "work-life balance" and the bullshit of corporate "employee first" initiatives is the satire in the background this season. It's nudging metaphorically at the tools that big organizations use to keep their employees placated so they don't revolt, but it's happening nonetheless. Corporations have a mandate to make shareholders money, and not to make employees happy. Throw in organized religion, which is all about control, and often about money, not actually about the people. I love this show. It's been said the creators know where it's going and where it will end. I'm eager (not Eagan) to see.

In my post-season engagement with podcasts and episode breakdowns, I was reminded that there's an aspect of the show that's dealing with emotional pain, and that a major aspect of Lumin and the religion of Kier is about managing or eliminating emotional turmoil. By the final episode we get a glimpse of their master plan, a rudimentary understanding of the "mysterious and important" work that the Macrodata Refinement team on the severed floor is doing, and why Mark is so central to it all. It's not 100% clear, but it is most definitely insidious. Ready for more, but willing to wait.

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**WARNING: SPOILERS FOR PARADISE***

The What 100: The president has been murdered in his home (not the White House though). Secret Service Agent Xavier Collins breaks protocol and waits on calling it in, assessing the situation for himself. This gets him suspended, leaving him to investigate without any official support. 

And, oh yeah, did I mention, the world has ended, and this all takes place inside an engineered safe haven of 25,000 people inside a mountain in Colorado? No, oh. That's part of it.

(1 Great) Episode 7 of the series takes us through the final day inside the White House before the world ended. It builds on so much of what we've seen before in the series, as well as fills in so many of the gaps. James Marsden's President Cal Bradford is a heavy drinking patsy of the elite, placed into power through his mining tycoon father and rich donor pool, but a man who is torn between doing the job he *should* be doing serving the people, and maintaining the favour and goodwill of his allies. In the final hours, both before the disaster that befalls the Earth, and the last days of his life, Cal reconsiders his position, and what is right. There's the moral choice but also the responsibility of being the bearer of bad news, and the fallout that comes with it. It's pretty meaty, if only in subtext. Episode 7 mostly focuses on Sterling K. Brown's Xavier as he negotiates his role keeping the President safe and securing his evacuation while, at the same time, trying to get his family to safety as the infrastructure collapses.  Episode 7 is a very well-thought-out, and very well-executed, a uncomfortably intense end-of-the-world scenario that has layers that keep peeling back until we return to the modern day. 

(1 Good) Billionaires *are* the worst, aren't they. We're going to get a flood of entertainment that will be reinforcing this over the next few years, and we need to keep that pressure on. Billionaires are not superheroes, they are the villains of the piece.  The narrative of this show is unravelling the origins of Paradise and how they tie to the death of the President who was at the helm when the world ended.

(1 Bad) We're dealing with Americans who develop an idyllic small town where the elite and the specifically chosen get to live. It seems both kind of magical and also totally *the worst*. It is an interesting society whose sci-fi sociological aspects are explored primarily in the background (this is not "the bad", in fact it's pretty compelling). It should be a society that need not worry about violence if it's such a carefully chosen community, and yet the president has an pretty sizable security detail, and there seems to be other behind-the-scenes security that seems excessive for a community of merely 25000 people. They don't carry sidearms besides stun guns, and one Secret Service agent laments the fact that she can't hold a proper gun (and later says "Feels good doesn't it?" when she gets one).  But of course there are guns. It's America, there are always lots and lots of guns. And a major plot point in this series revolves around not just a gun, but all the guns, and it seems so ... ugly... when our hero, our chief protagonist, the best of the best guys Xavier runs around waving a gun in someone's face demanding answers.  I wish the show were more inventive and thought of another way to run the same scenario without needing to be militarized up. It is a commentary in and of itself, and it is also commented in the show the fact that this cache of weapons exists at all. I just expected better and expected more out of our heroic characters than to fetishize the almighty gun. Bleh.

META: Toasty told me about this show last week and immediately had me intrigued. To paraphrase what he said "it's a show that starts off thinking it's about one thing, solving a murder, but then reveals it's totally something else". And he's not wrong. The murder of Cal Bradford is such a small, if central element of the series. It negotiates many characters, their back stories, their past lives and present lives, their dynamics with each other, their families, and the impact of their families on who they are today all while pursuing the perpetrator of this murder and exploring this new community coming out of the ashes of the end of the world.  The sky is digital, and it's one of the first things that tells us nothing is as it seems, but hardly the last. It's not a conventional murder mystery. You're not necessarily going to be able to figure out the answer until they reveal it to you, but it doesn't matter because the journey overall, and the world building, is pretty engrossing.  It hints at where a second season could go, and while it doesn't demand such, I would definitely watch, understanding it would be a much different show, particularly in structure.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Knox Goes Away

2023, Michael Keaton (The Merry Gentlemen) -- Amazon

Two movies directed by Keaton, two movies about hitmen. I wonder what's up with that.

Another movie about a hitman diagnosed with memory issues, though John Knox's CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) is definitely the worst. By the time he is confirmed to have contracted it, he is in the last few weeks. I said, in my write up of The Killer's Game that it generally has something to do with having consumed "mad cow brain" and articles do say, "only through an injection or consuming infected brain or nervous tissue." But a bit further reading says just the consumption of infected meat can cause. The little detail in the movie of having an opening scene with the two killers, John (Michael Keaton, The Founder) and his partner Muncie (Ray McKinnon, Mayans MC), eating steaks in a shitty diner, was nice.

Memory issues are on my mind of late (until I forget) because dementia is around me. Being of an age where most of my peer group have aging parents, its not surprising their are such things happening, but also being of an age, my brain is no longer storing more than it should. I notice that more and more I am having "those moments" where I lose names of people or things, especially when put on the spot. I just blank out entirely, lose the word, sit still and struggle to put together a trigger for the word, or just plain give up. And let's not get into the "nope, I have no recollection of that..." conversations with Marmy. I am sure its just age, stress, diet, stress but it chills me to the bone when I see these depictions of it.

Two things happen after the diagnosis: he accidentally kills his partner, after having a moment, and his estranged son Miles (James Marsden, Paradise) shows up on his doorstep, covered in blood and panicking. Miles has killed the 30sumthin supremacist who has been sexually assaulting his 16 year old daughter. If anyone knows how to deal with a murder scene, its his father. Knox goes to a close friend and fixer, Xavier Crane (Al Pacino, The Irishman), to build a plan, not just for putting his final affairs in order, but also to remove his son from suspicion forever.

A nice detail that the movie skips the typical hitman / enforcer tropes where its a challenge to get out of the business. Its not like they have a choice, but in other examples, the only way out is death. But Crane presents as a true friend, knowing Knox will not be able to keep on track without help. There isn't a lot of emotion in their relationship, just two criminals saying, "Yep, let's do this." Loyalty. Understanding.

In many ways this is a more thoughtful movie than others of its ilk. Keaton puts a sympathetic hand on Knox but doesn't shy away from exactly how terrible it is to just ... go away. Eventually the disease will not only steal away his memories but also his body's memories on how to function, and he will die. Knox has a lot to do in that short time, in order to clear his son's name, and setup the people he cares for with the money he has made. I still marvel at Keaton compared to how his career started as there is not a hint of funny man here. This is a sobre, focused movie, and while not groundbreaking in any manner (I again repeat, things don't have to be new to be good) it does its job well.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Spiderhead

2022, Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion) -- Netflix

OK, weird; I think I just side-stepped (my head canon for moving between alternate realities in the multiverse) from a reality where The Gorge was done by Kosinski, which was going to lead to a paragraph about directors working with actors they like. Miles Teller was in Kosinski's Top Gun: Maverick (and his wildfire fighting movie Only the Brave -- ohhh, that's why its in My List)and is in this. Buuut, that's not this reality, so Spiderhead is actually his latest flick. That said, three flicks together does warrant that paragraph buuuut I kind of derailed it.

Anywayz.

The original short story called "Escape From Spiderhead" provides the key focus of this movie -- incarcerated criminals participating in drug trials voluntarily, drugs that elicit great emotional responses, and how the doctor administering the trials is manipulating the people so that the outcomes are favourable to his end goals, no matter the damage it causes to the inmates. Kosinski builds a movie around that premise.

Kosinski likes his architectural imagery. Even with Oblivion being a scifi movie set on an post-apocalyptic Earth, the look and feel of the watch posts that Jack and Vic live in, is spectacular, all curved widescreen smooth plastic and glossy white materials. This is not the post where I indulge in the design aesthetics, but Spiderhead establishes that in the initial fly-over of the facility, its incongruity against the isolated rural landscape. Once we are inside, it continues, all wide range concrete and wood but with pristine white observation rooms. Like Kent, I too enjoy this a lot.

Side-note: I have been doing a lot of rewatching of late as my brain gravitates to consuming known-factors. Enough, in fact, that I feel they warrant a "Rewatch Snippets" post.

Via flashbacks, we get that inmate Jeff (Miles Teller, The Gorge) drove drunk and killed his close friend, the younger brother of his girlfriend. It tortures him, but other than that, he is a stable guy. Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth, Extraction) leads the testing with his complicit assistant Mark (Mark Paguio, Lonesome). They appear to be the only two running the experiments, other than a handful of security/orderlies. Its odd, as it is very clear that there are a good number of violent, sociopathic criminals in there. Abnesti is friendly, confident and more than a little detached from the idea he is doing this to people, despite his affability. Alongside Jeff, we meet Lizzie (Jurnee Smollett, Lovecraft Country), who works the kitchens of the facility as well as being an inmate. Jeff and Lizzie connect.

Abnesti's testing is focused on marketable drugs, drugs the company can sell as legal recreationals. But you can tell by the way that he pushes Jeff that there is a darker motive at play. He also constantly plays a rather sinister card that it is not he that is demanding Jeff do the less than pleasant aspects of the testing, but the nameless faceless council running the facility. But Abnesti is not above manipulating everyone, including Mark, to get the results he wants.

Harkening back to the "Stanford prison experiment", where fake guards were asked to psychologically punish/torture fake prisoners, much of the movie focuses on complicity: Abnesti getting Jeff to perform the tests himself, Abnesti guilting Mark into helping him even when his conscience weighs on him. Through coercion and deception, Jeff does some things he is not proud of. Only when he starts to unravel Abnesti's lies does he start to question what is really going on.

The movie could have been darker, but it didn't want to be a horror / torture-porn movie. Its more a play of personalities, with obviously likeable Abnesti being setup to be truly heinous, while Jeff, initially meek and agreeable is understood to have performed a truly dark deed, but... not one we cannot  have sympathy for. I cannot fault the movie for the performances, but... it was all a bit vanilla? For a movie that was mostly about what Abnesti could convince Jeff to do, it never felt as if anything but the expected would happen.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Electric State

2025, The Russo Brothers (Cherry) -- Netflix

I love the artwork of  Simon Stålenhag. A lot of his work gets collected together in art books which pull things together thematically.  If all of his work can be summarized into a single description, it is a merging of mundane landscape, urban, suburban, rural countryside, with distinctly scifi elements. There is often a retro-futuristic feel.

That didn't really describe anything.

OK. Robots, kids, landscapes, big machinery, neon, cyberpunk, ruins, war machines, scifi technology, spaceships, pop culture.

The book for "The Electric State" was a script in the making, scenes of a 1990s run-away and her little yellow, globe-headed robot, walking across an America where something has happened. There is a mixture of giant-robots and war machines, abandoned spaceships (or war ships), all with a 1950s to 80s pop iconography style, as well as people connected to some sort of network via a headset -- they are definitely "jacked in" to something that let's them forget their world. Connecting the imagery are scenes of looming structures on he horizon, something society must depend on, something that has changed it.

While its not a contiguous story, it was just begging to be made into a movie or TV show. And I was just waiting for that to happen.

If anything we got all the imagery right, and the added fun of adding some character to the robots and technology, but what ruined it all for me was the typical Netflix way of homogenising it all into something digestible for the average viewer. And this is coming from me, the guy admittedly more at home with digestive cookies of late.

We start with the background, a retconned history of the world, something seen before, where robots became part of society from early in our technological era. And without even mentioning the separation of AI and automaton robots, we jump right up to the robots demanding rights, which leads to a war between man and machine. Only with the help of Ethan Skate (Musk analog) and his Neurocaster headsets, that allowed people to remote control robots, was the war against machines won. And the "survivors" on the losing side banished to the wilds of the American mid-west, and surrounded by a wall. Neurocasters became the new social media -- an addiction that everyone participated in, separating those that lived inside whatever is inside (utopia?), from those outside in the filthy, messy, breaking down real world. With decades of people having robots do all the messy work for them, I guess we didn't adjust well to going back to doing it ourselves. 

Enter Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown, Damsel), a teenager who lost her family and is doing the typical orphaned teen thing of terrible foster parents, anger, spite and rebellion. Until cartoon robot Cosmo shows up outside and convinces her that he is her long lost brother (Woody Norman, Cobweb), alive and somehow (barely) controlling this robot. And he needs her help. She has to go into the robot Exclusion Zone and find him.

Enter ex-soldier, smuggler Keats (Chris Pratt, The Tomorrow War), who sneaks into the Exclusion Zone to find old, abandoned pop culture items, to be re-sold outside. And his sidekick robot Herman (Anthony Mackie, Elevation). Oh, outside the zone, robots are illegal, so that means a legacy of the war, one Colonel Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito, Far Cry 6), is sent to hunt down Michelle's rogue robot. The two pairs team up to find her brother.

Much of the movie takes place inside the Zone, where all the weird and wonderful robots live. Each one is a sentient, living person, without any doubt. Even the insane ones that scavenge parts of other robots. They are led by Mr Peanut (Woody Harrelson, The Man from Toronto), who negotiated the treaty with Colonel Bradbury, which ended the war. He only wants to keep his people safe, and that is not helped by the introduction of these human interlopers, who bring some else's agenda into their safe haven.

That someone is Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci, Julie & Julia) who wants Cosmo / Michelle's brother. Skate's Neurocaster technology has been running down over the years and its continued existence depends on her brother. He will stop at nothing to recover them. He doesn't care who dies. He's more than a little nuts.

But by the time the movie got to the climactic third act, I just didn't care. Yah yeah, robot rebellion, come-uppance, sacrifice, robot smashy-smashy. Yawn. I know I have been clipping off the tail-ends in my recaps of late, losing steam or whatnot, but this is how my own emotional investment in the movie tapered off. Things happened, I no longer cared.

Primarily, it was the human story that failed me. You know me, I am more than happy with well-used tropes, and I am fine with a cliche story as long as it grips me. This didn't. I just didn't enjoy any of the human performances, and found the light-heartedness a bit grating. I kept on comparing it in my mind to Clooney's Tomorrowland, which I still love. But at least in that movie I really liked Clooney's crotchety coot character, and well... I didn't really like any of the humans here. Maybe I will soften to it with rewatches, but that wasn't the point. I was waiting for this movie, and while I am used to disappointment, I am also somewhat tired of tempered acceptance. I need my next "I really liked that!" and I had really hoped this would be it. Maybe I should just buy the coffee table / art book and be more than satisfied with the source.

I am so "meh" about the movie, I didn't even mention that they wasted Ke Huy Quan as Dr. Amherst, despite him being more fun as his own robot "clone" in the form of a jimmied-together 90s PC.

Rewatch: Inglorious Basterds

2009, Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill) -- Netflix

Kent wrote about it in his mega-QT rewatch. 

I was compelled to rewatch the movie after we (Marmy and me, not Kent and me) semi-binged the British show SAS Rogue Heroes on Amazon. The show is about the formation and deployment of the British 1st Special Air Services (SAS), first in Africa, and then in Italy. The 1st SAS, according to the show, were an infamous group of commandoes tasked with, at first, the destruction of German air bases and equipment, and later as a raiding force ahead of the main forces in Europe. The shows depicts them as reckless, insubordinate and... mad as hatters. It was their distain for authority and normal British warfare style that made them so effective, so much so that Hitler himself learned of them and demanded the Geneva Conventions not apply to them -- they were to be executed on sight, surrender or not.

The "Inglorious Basterds" of the Tarantino movie were an American commando squad made up of Jewish soldiers, and a few German traitors, who were also dropped behind enemy lines to sow chaos and terror among the German forces. Except, and I recall this being a disappointment to me during my first watch, the movie is not really about the actions they perform to gain that reputation. Its about a singular rewrite of history that ends the war, and gets most of them killed.

Tarantino movies are all about conversations, usually across tables, usually about people not fond of each other. There is always at least one scene where someone monologues, in a self-satisfactorily manner, to other people. In my early Tarantino-fan days, it was exactly this that made me love his movies. Dialogue! Words! People with some thoughts between their ears! And the joy of the actor getting into the scene. Col Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz, Spectre) was a horrible person, utterly reprehensible, but this movie put Waltz on the map for English audiences. He was a "joy" to listen to.

But I would almost say that too much of this movie is about these conversations. Maybe my tastes have changed, but I did get the repeat of disappointment that the actual Basterds played such a small part in the movie, and some die far too early before we get to have fun with them. Its almost unfair to them, as long as you ignore that their final mission ends the war and burns down much of the evil with it.

I find myself struggling, almost on the side of being entirely unsatisfied with the movie. I fear my tastes have become more pedestrian, but I am not sure I liked the overall. The individual parts of the movie, the dialogues and the other conversational set pieces are brilliant unto themselves, but the whole is... lacking. The movie is all about the ending, the re-writing of history, a fictional final conflagration that takes down Hitler and all his key leadership, with glorious ultra-violence. The build-up almost seems... incidental. I find much of the movie, and this seems harsh coming from my brain, wasteful and indulgent.

For example, the French basement pub scene. Its a wonderful scene of taught worry and subterfuge. Even when the British spies are caught, there is a lovely tension of, "will they, won't they...." and we wonder who will come out of it all. Well, nobody does. Sure, Bridget von Hammersmark (Dianne Kruger, The Bridge) crawls away with a single leg wound, but then she later dies ignobly at the hands of Landa. And yet the plans, seemingly going awry, carry off as intended. All of Lt Aldo Raine's (Brad Pitt, Fury) men die sacrificial deaths, but he gets away, with Landa, purely so he can disfigure Landa, participating very little in the final acts of the operation. And I am left being not sure why, on many levels.

At a first-experience, a viewing in the cinema, it was a well-executed, beautifully shot, well-spoken Tarantino example. But it didn't hold up to rewatch scrutiny.

KsMIRT: Rewatch - Lost Seasons 4-6

As the legend goes, showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, after the dire response from Lost fandom to the "Jack's Tattoo" episode, approached ABC and requested a commitment to three more seasons at a reduced 16 episodes per season. They didn't want to spin their storytelling wheels anymore, it was unsustainable.

And so Season 3 ended with the abandonment of the flashback motif, and instead initiated a "flash forward", tricking us for an entire episode into thinking we were watching Jack at his lowest point in the past -- a pill-addicted, fake-bearded mess, jeopardizing his medical career much like his father did, and almost jumping off a bridge before fate intervenes -- only to reveal that it's his lowest point in the future. The episode ends with Jack meeting Kate, history clearly having gone on between these two, and Jack bellowing "WE HAVE TO GO BACK!" as Kate drive away.

It was a stone cold stunner, and Season 4 had to pay it off.  It also had to pay off Charlie's death and his warning "NOT PENNY'S BOAT" (I don't recall if, in his haste, Charlie managed an appropriate, possessive, apostrophe-S on "Pennys" there). And so the fourth season jumps back and forth between events on the island, continuing the previous seasons' adventures, and the future, where we learn systematically that Jack, Kate, Sun, Hurley, Sayid and Claire's baby Aaron were designated the "Oceanic 6" and had concocted a story to say they were the only survivors. Oh, that Aaron is Kate's son.  

In the future, back in the real world, nothing is going well for the Oceanic 6. We see why Jack becames such a mess (blame John Locke), Sun is a single mom and gone to a dark place taking control of her father's enterprises, Kate is on trial for murder, Sayid experiences great tragedy and begins working for Benjamin Linus as his assassin, and Hurley's back in the mental health institute. These sequences are also not told in chronological order, so there is a bit of mental gymnastics required each episode to position it in the timeline. I don't know of many other shows that demand as much effort out of the viewers.

On the island, strangers begin appearing, strangers with secret agendas from a boat off-shore. These include ace pilot Lapidus (Jeff Fahey), archeologist Charlotte (Rebecca Mader), twitchy physicist Daniel (Jeremy Davies), and ghost whisperer Miles (Ken Leung). The promise of rescue seems to finally be at hand, except the newcomers are being really cagey about when exactly the rescue will start. But Locke and Jack are once again divided, with Jack's sole focus being the rescue, while Locke believes they're all meant to be on the island and shouldn't leave. And we learn of Jacob, "the man in charge", although we don't really meet him until season 5.

The events on the island in season four move pretty frantically, which is counterpointed with the more laconic flash-forwards. But the lynchpin of the whole thing is Desmond, who leads the show's apex episode, "the constant", where Desmond's consciousness is flitting back and forth in time. It's Daniel who recognizes what is actually happening, and encourages Desmond to seek him out in the past. It's a really fun, and at its core, a romantic tragedy that explores Desmond's past without ever abandoning the present. It deviates from the "flash forward" construct of Season 4, but it's a signal that the show is no longer beholden to its structures (for better or worse).

Season 4 ends with both the rescue of the Oceanic 6, but also the flash forward showing them preparing to return to the island. The season was cut short due to the writer's strike of the time, and so the first third of season 5 spends much of its time concluding the big arc of season 4, up to, and including Jack, Kate, Sayid, Hurley, Sun and Ben's return to the island, with the flashbacks showing how they all agreed to go back.  Things took a turn for those remaining on the island. When Ben "moved" the island at the end of Season 4, it destabilized the newcomers in time. The island would shudder, the sky turn purple and Locke, Sawyer, Juliette and company would bounce around through the island's past. By the time Locke resolves Ben's error, the remaining passengers of Oceanic 815 find themselves stuck in the mid-70's. Three years later, and Sawyer, Miles, and Juliette have established a life in the Dharma Initiative, one that seems to suit them rather well. This is of course disrupted (ultimately violently) by the return of the Oceanic 6.

Season 5 is the most awkward of all of Lost's seasons. As much as I love time travel, the bouncing around time, its effects and its aftereffects (flash of light, nosebleeds, mental breakdowns) begin to tire after a few episodes, particularly when binge watching... but thankfully they don't last too deeply into the season, and I love that the crew wind up in the Dharma Initiative in its early days. As I noted last time, I could watch a whole series on the early days of the Dharma Initiative and Sawyer (excuse me...Lafours) becoming the head of security and being a pillar of the community. That he becomes one of Dharma's most responsible people shows Sawyer's true potential... and his romance with Juliette is just the greatest. And then Kate and Jack and company return and fuck it all up. To be fair, Jack takes a real back seat in the back-half of the season. He's just kind of riding the wave. Sawyer becomes the lead character for the season, and it's Kate, who has her own agenda and can't freaking sit still that sets off the chain reaction that leads to the show's greatest tragedy.

Where Season 4 was steps away from the magical realism of the previous three seasons, and headlong into sci-fi territory, season 5 starts with time travel, jumps into weird retro-futuristic science adventure, and starts to dip its toe into fantasy as it expands upon the mythology of the show, which is where season 6 exists almost completely. 

The back half of season 5 jumps between the 70's Dharma Initiative and the present day on the island, with John Locke somehow having returned from the dead and exploring some of the islands more ancient, non-Dharma locales with Ben, while Sun and Lapidus seem very confused by their surroundings.

Season 5 falters because it keeps the gang apart for so long. In season 1-3 the survivors of Oceanic 815 would break off into sub-groups and go on their own adventures but they would constantly be crossing paths or returning to home base. Season 4 splits the cast into two groups, one on the island, and one off-island... and in those flash-forwards, they're in a completely different time period from the rest of the cast, which means our fast-forwards are limited to a few characters. As such, some of the survivors are kind of forgotten or put to limited use. The new characters - Lapidus, Miles, Charlotte, Daniel - become part of the core cast, and yet, have a hard time escaping the sense that they are stealing time away from the cast we know and love. This only gets worse as the Ajira Airways flight that returns the Oceanic 6 back to the island also brings a new cast of characters who we never settle into caring about.

As noted, season 6 dives headlong into the mythology of the island, exposing the history of the twin brothers Jacob and the unnamed Man in Black, and also explaining who the Others really are, even giving Richard Alpert a stellar tale stepping the viewer through key moments in his unnaturally long life. Jacob is essentially the island's warden, and he's there to keep the Man in Black from leaving, which is all the Man in Black has ever wanted. But the island is, perhaps metaphorically, perhaps literally, the yin and yag of good and evil, a place where one must keep the other in check. At its heart is a reservoir of light (perhaps the secret of eternal life and/or a lazarus pit) that most men would stop at nothing obtain, and the warden must also be the protector of the island.

As our cast learns about the ways of the Others (Hiroyuki Sanada and John Hawkes are both welcome presences in fairly nominal roles that don't quite work and end tersely) and explore the mythos that they are now entangled in, each episode "flashes sideways" into a whole other reality where Oceanic 815 landed safely in L.A. But it's not just a reality without their crash, it a reality without the island at all, and their lives differ somewhat than those we learned of before (such as Jack having a teenage son).

The flash-sideways, I have to say, aren't very exciting, at least at first, as a lot of time is spent reiterating things we already know about these characters, just with a little twist. We had spent a lot of time off-island in season 4 and 5, and spending more time in a whole other reality that doesn't have the one location all the viewers are enamoured with is less than thrilling. But it's the process of these characters coming to an awakening, as they cross paths with one another, or, in some cases, as Desmond (who has once again mentally travelled through different planes of existence) forcibly awakens them, that it starts to lift the veil.  There's a not insubstantial reward when we start to see old friends and faces whom we thought the show had abandoned, and brings them all together. It tells us their experiences on the island, those intense days together, were the most formative and consequential of their lives, and so they all wound up in this purgatory until they were all ready to reunite and go together.

It was, at the time, a controversial ending. People weren't satisfied with all the mythology mumbo-jumbo that explained (sort of) what the island was, and why the survivors of Oceanic 815 wound up where they did. And many people didn't seem to like that the big wrap up was that everyone was dead and they moved on together. I could poke holes in it all day (Sayid winding up in eternity with Shannon instead of Nadja seems more a punishment than reward, but I digress) but it's hard to escape the emotionality of the reunion.  As for the mythology, I get it...it explains a lot, but it also raises a lot of questions as to why Jacob would orchestrate events the way he did. But much in the same way a believer would have to question god's motives for all the pain and suffering we experience, a Lost fan needs to go through this process with its belief system. You can be a zealot, you can be an agnostic questioner, or you can be an atheistic denier, and they're all fine ways to approach it.

There's many reasons seasons 4-6 are lesser than season 1-3. The puzzle box nature of those first three seasons is so compelling and consumable. It's a constant feed of questions and answers with more questions attached. Seasons 4-6 calm down, raising fewer questions, and taking more time and care with answers...and the answers are more and more often posed as revelations. It also winds up being a little less character-driven and a little more story-driven and world-building. 

My biggest complaint is how wantonly it dispenses with all the other survivors of 815, all the no-names and mixed-up background actor faces. There were 48 survivors of the main cabin, and 12 survivors of the tail section, but by mid-way through season 6 there are about 10 left, and the big reunion features none of the "redshirts" that weren't part of the main cast at some point. No Scott or Steve, no Paolo or Nikki, no Frogurt or Arzst.

For as much as the final three seasons are lesser-than, I still like them quite a bit, and I get a beautiful sense of closure from the finale that brings me to tears (but happy tears, unlike the violently angry tears at the end of season 5...IYKYK). The series opens with Jack's eyelid opening as he lays among the bamboo having survived the crash and been thrown from the plane. It was Vincent the dog who rouses him. In the end, a wounded and dying Jack walks back to the bamboo, lays down, and Vincent (the good boy he is) lays down beside Jack, and we close on Jack's eyelid dropping.  The symmetry is gorgeous and the imagery iconic.

This solidified it, I will be a Lost fan now and forever. I absolutely acknowledge its weaknesses but forever embrace its strength and beauty.

Favourite characters (s4-6):
1) Juliette
2) Sawyer
3) Hurley
4) Desmond
5) Lapidus/Ben (Ben becomes a really enjoyable chaos agent)

Least favourite characters (s4-6)
1) Tina Fey
2) The round faced guy
3) John Hawkes (kinda useless and a waste of John Hawkes)
4) Jack
5) Kate/ Keamy (I mean, I love to hate him)

Favourite Arcs/Stories (S1-3):
Dharma Time
"The Constant"
"Ab Aeterno"
"Across the Sea" 

KWIF: Companion (+2)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film.

This Week:
Companion (2025, d. Drew Hancock- rental)
The Poseidon Adventure (1972, d. Ronald Neame - HollywoodSuite)
Juggernaut (1974, d. Richard Lester - Amazonprime)

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Toasty warned me that everything  is a spoiler for Companion. The trailer, the synopsis, the bloody poster. Even saying there is a "spoiler" for Companion is a spoiler. It's kind of impossible to really have a big twist for an audience these days that doesn't give it all away.  Audiences are too story-literate and too savvy, they're going to figure these things out pretty quick.  You can't hang a film on a twist, you've got to have something more going on...and I think Companion never really set out to deceive the audience, well, not in the way you think.  So if you don't want to know anything...stop reading now. Skip past this and head down to The Poseidon Adventure review.

Ready?

There are actually a few twists in Companion, only the first of which I will spoil, because it is the most obvious. We first meet Iris (Sophie Thatcher, Yellowjackets) in the grocery store, she has a meet cute with Josh (Jack Quaid, Star Trek: Lower Decks) and Iris' voice over tells us how much it means to her to fall in love, and also reveals that she's going to kill him by the end of the film. 

this is a spoiler

That's not a spoiler.

We next see Iris waking up in the passenger seat of a self-driving car, Josh beside her, venturing down a long driveway to a modernist forest retreat, the home of Russian businessman Sergey (Rupert Friend). Josh's friend Kat (Megan Suri, Never Have I Ever) is Sergey's mistress, and she has invited him, Iris, and their friend Eli (Harvey Guillén, Blue Beetle) and his boyfriend Patrick (Lukas Gage, Fargo)  for a weekend getaway. Iris is nervous. She doesn't think Josh's friends like her... specifically Kat.

The next morning Iris finds herself alone with Sergey at the lakeside and he propositions her. Next thing we see is Iris in the doorway of the house covered in blood, a knife in her hand, and Josh shuts her down. Yep, Iris is a robot.  Technically a therapy bot ... that you can have sex with. But Iris is unaware that she's a robot until now and it explodes her world.

The twists and tuns here are pretty fun, and thinly allegorical. It's a film that villainizes toxic masculinity and white entitlement for entertainment purposes without really examining its root causes. It's not interested in where this mindset comes from, just that it's awful and needs to go away by violent means if necessary. It also isn't terribly interested in exploring whether the AI's of Companion are sentient or not, and what rights and or freedoms they should have. It's squarely on the side of Iris and she's who we're rooting for. 

The movie tells us who Iris is from very early on. The way Thatcher walks as Iris is very mechanical, very deliberate. There are turns of phrase, like "it's just the way that you're wired", and Josh's pet name for Iris is "Beep-boop".  When they exit the self-driving car, Josh is reminded to thank the car for the drive.  

This isn't M3GAN, or the Terminator or Battlestar Galactica, even. It's a lighthearted romp that plays with the same suspense-horror tropes of "the final girl gets taken to a secluded location and bad things happen" that seems to be a legit subgenre at this point (recent in mind is Blink Twice), as well as the revenge of the abused or manipulated woman (see also Blink Twice). I was also reminded of Fresh, the way it tries to manipulate you into thinking it's a romance, with its opening meet-cute only to give way to its horror tropes  There's no scares to be had. It's not a horror at all, but it is very entertaining, with some stupendous jump cuts that fill in gaps and provide some good gags, and Thatcher is really likeable and easy to root for.  

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It's New Year's Eve. The cruise liner Poseidon is in its final voyage sailing to Italy? Israel? (It's Athens, but you had to look that up).  It is being decommissioned and is on its way to the scrapyard.  It's been delayed a few days, and the representative of the new owners wants full speed ahead, even though the captain (Leslie Nielson) implores him that the ship needs to take on more ballast. But money is burning and the can be replaced.
As the New Year's countdown begins, reports of an earthquake resulting in a tsunami that will, in short time, quite literally flips the ship...because it couldn't take on more ballast.

The captain will have no time for "I told you so" to the corporate overlord. The flip is sudden and violent. The majority of the ship's population was in the ballroom, and they're now Lionel Ritchie-ing it (he means they're now dancing on the ceiling, except, there's no more dancing). There's a battle of the wills as the "rebel Reverend" Scott (Gene Hackman) and the ship's purser plead to the survivors to follow them. The reverend wishes to move the people to the hull ("God wants brave souls, not quitters"), since it's upside down, that is where rescue will come, while the purser implores the people to stay put and wait for rescue.

In the end only a handful of people follow the reverend.  There's the NYC police detective (Ernest Borgnine) and his new bride, a former sex worker (Stella Stevens). There's the elderly married couple on their first vacation since retiring (Shelly Winters and Jack Albertson). There's the teenager and her boat obsessed younger brother (Pamela Sue Martin and Eric Shea).  There's the Scottish waiter (Roddy McDowall), the hippie folk singer (Carol Lynley), and the lifelong confirmed bachelor (Red Buttons). They make their perilous journey, and not everyone is going to survive.

The Poseidon Adventure is an exceptionally well-made but also exceptionally formulaic film. At the time it probably felt pretty fresh, based of the novel of the same name by Paul Gallico, but the conceit of gathering an ensemble and forging through disaster has become so by-the-book that even one of the first ones still seems pretty derivative.

Constant contention between Hackman and Borgnine creates such manufactured and meaningless drama in the face of crises. The weird obsession teen Martin has with forty-something Hackman is illogical. Lynley's hysterical singer and helpless femme is perhaps my least favourite trope in all of cinema, and Button's is at least 30 years older than her and being a gentleman the whole time, but still he's making a move on her.  And poor Winters is really, really not served well here for all her kindness. Plus, Hackman's self-description of himself as a rebel preacher is ..just...a ridiculous moment among many.

And yet, for all its cliches and corny flaws, The Poseidon Adventure remains a cracking adventure that spins its wheels appropriately for the first act, introducing all the players until the disaster hits and then gets moving and only stops to have those quick little motivational heart-to-hearts that these types of movies have to have to deepen the bond between characters.

It's not fine dining, and it's empty calories in the end, but enjoyable in the consumption.

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After The Poseidon Adventure I was looking for another '70's disaster flick, and happened across the alluringly-titled Juggernaut. Unintentionally it turned out to be another cruise liner-centric flick.

In this case, a ship, the Britannic, has sailed out to sea, when its owners receive a call from a man identifying themself as "Juggernaut" notifyies them that many barrels of explosives have been placed on board, timed to explode in 24 hours and booby-trapped in various ways. He demands a ransom, a modest sum of 500,000 pounds, in exchange for which he will give them the designs for deactivating the bombs.  As a show of his skill he sets off two of them.

The story takes place between the ship and land. On the ship we meet many of the crew and passengers (including the captain, Omar Sharif, his mistress Shirley Knight, and the ship's social director played by an absolutely delightful Roy Kinnear, just trying to make lemonade out of lemons) and on land the investigative team from Scotland Yard plus the cruise owners (including Anthony Hopkins and Ian Holm) are dealing with the Juggernaut situation, as he keeps calling with further instructions and taunts.

In a surprisingly visual sequence, the navy air drop a bomb disposal unit into the ocean near the ship, led by Richard Harris. The deactivation sequences are tense, because it's clear the bomb maker is as good, if not better at making bombs than these men are at dismantling them.

It is a film that is two parts procedural and one part civilian drama, and different parts work better at different times. The first act is a little too unassuming, as it sets up the pieces it doesn't really do a great job of providing a hook to the people we're spending time with (there's a seasick mother and her two rambunctious kids who probably could have been largely cut ), and as much as I like the romantic intrigue between Sharif and Knight, it never really makes sense amidst the two more intense aspects of the film.

Even the hunt for Juggernaut is at times underwhelming, in no small part due to the modest direction of Richard Lester (Superman II) and the entire lack of a score. It's a very British film, a bit obsessed with procedure and bureaucracy, and not all that concerned with flash.

But the moment the parachuting sequence happens, Juggernaut announces itself as something much more than a Poseidon Adventure knock-off, and though it is a very deliberate film, it's star-studded cast ultimately delivers a pretty compelling, if subdued thriller.