[KWIF=Kent's Week in Film
10 for 10... that's 10 movies, each written about in 10 minutes. It's an old format I'm dusting off because I have way too much in the backlog.]
This Week:
- They Came Together (2014, d. David Wain - tubi)
- Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary (2024, d. Garrett Price - hbo/crave)
- Streets of Fire (1984, d. Walter Hill - blu-ray)
- Gladiator II aka GladIIator (2024, d. Ridley Scott - in theatre)
- Carry On (2024, d. Jaume Collet-Serra - netflix)
- Drive Away Dolls (2024, d. Ethan Coen - amazonprime)
- Distant aka Long Distance (2024, d. Will Speck and Josh Gordon - amazonprime)
- Polar (2019, d. Jonas Akerlund - netflix)
- Outland (1981, d. Peter Hyams , hollywood suite)
- The Thirteenth Floor (1999, d. Josef Rusnak - hollywood suite)
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I saw the Paul Rudd/ex-Saturday Night Live star (in this case Tina Fey) romcom
Admission a few years back and it was slight but enjoyable-ish in its straightforwardness.
We Came Together has been popping up on Amazon, Netflix and Tubi over the years and I thought, given that it was Paul Rudd paired with an ex-SNL star (in this case Amy Poehler) that it would be much the same.
I hadn't realized it was from writer/director David Wain (of The State/Stella/Wet Hot American Summer), and it was aiming for a Zucker/Abrams/Zucker-style parody of romcoms. It's marginally successful.
If you've watched Wain's work before with the likes of Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter, then you will have an idea of what to expect. Arch, very winking, fourth-wall breaking, and a lot of word play and juvenile humour and visual gags, often in the same beat. The style is very rapid-fire and try-anything. The problem with this style is it's not refined or honed, and it comes off as sloppy and unfocussed more often than it comes off as funny, even if there is much funny to be had.
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Yacht Rock is a musical genre coined by four comedy writers for
a web series that was a satirical reenactment of a specific era and sound of music in the late 70's and early 80's. Yacht Rock, as a term, did not exist before this comedy web series that was both taking the piss out of the dominant personalities of the genre and a loving tribute to them and the music they were making. Sometimes something can be both respectful and disrespectful at the same time.
The men who coined "Yacht Rock" have also been acting as the gatekeepers of what is and isn't "yacht" via podcasts since the mid 2010s where they judge whether user-submitted songs are "yacht or nyacht", but the genre has, since its gestation, gotten out of their control. There are ironic parties playing yacht rock music where everyone wears captains hats and boat shoes, and there are dedicated satellite radio channels just for yacht rock music.
Director Garret Price decided to unpack this retroactively coined "genre" of music with the musicians whose music has been subsumed by the genre. People like Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, and Christopher Cross, and bands like the Doobie Brothers, Toto and Steely Dan. As important, if not moreso, are the people behind the scenes like the session musicians like Steve Lukather, the Pokaro brothers and Jay Graydon.
This is a fun, but hardly robust documentary. It covers all the ground it needs to in pretty expedient time, but there's not a lot of depth. As most of the artists interviewed state, they were just playing the music they liked to play, there was never any concept of a genre beneath it. Some have argued, there is no actual genre there, just the whims of four comedy writers.
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I recall seeing
Streets of Fire in the video store as far back as I can remember going to video stores.
Streets of Fire always seemed like a "video store" movie. I never really knew what it was about, or even what type of movie it was. I guess I just assumed it was a crime drama, something that has never been of great interest.
Recently YouTube essayist Patrick Willems did an extensive video on his love for Streets of Fire, a film he acknowledges has its problems, but he feels has merits that outweigh its problems. What stuck out most to me, having watched that essay, was Willems' insistence that the opening 20 minutes of Streets of Fire are, for lack of a better term, pure fire, and that the ending comes close to reaching the same heights. The middle is a bit mushier.
Willems was right, the opening moments of Streets of Fire are absolutely lit up, with a massively energetic rock opera track in the vein of Meat Loaf or Bonnie Tyler (because the opening and closing songs were written by Jim Steinman, who wrote rock opera hits like "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and "I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)" of which opening track "Nowhere Fast" and closing track "Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young" are easy-fitting siblings of).
Streets of Fire is also a gorgeous-looking film, sweat-soaked streets - like it always just rained - reflect the vibrant neons that light up the backlot of an unnamed city where pillars holding up a skyrail interrupt every street. It's fantasy city, like Gotham, but much more condensed and even grottier.
It's just too bad then that the film's exceptionally weird tone and style of 40's noir, 50's greasers and 80's rock just don't blend, especially when you add a Ry Cooter score that sounds like it belongs on The Dukes of Hazzard and not a semi-dystopian greaser-punk near-musical.
It's a weird one.
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I own a copy of Ridley Scott's
Gladiator on DVD. I'm sure most guys who were 20-something in the year 2000 do. It was like we were mandated to have one. But I haven't watched the film in a very, very long time. I'm sure it's still a good watch, there's just little there to entice me.
So if I don't really have any love or affection for Gladiator, why would I bother with Gladiator II, you might ask? Because I heard there was a scene where they fill the Colosseum with water and shark and the gladiators have a big boat fight. This level of audacious absurdity was really the only direction to go if you wanted to get butts in seats for a nearly-25-years-later sequel to a beloved Oscar-winning hit.
The film is pretty much pure spectacle while pretending to have some sort of anti-monarchy/pro-democracy stance. It has just enough substance to it to not be totally trashy, and Denzel Washington as a behind-the-scenes manipulator carries the movie, though Paul Mezcal's young, hot titular gladiator is appealing enough.
I honestly don't have much to say about Gladiator II, except that if you like this sort of thing, then you will like this sort of thing.
[Toastypost - we agree]
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We haven't had a competent mid-range action-thriller like
Carry-On for a while. A young TSA agent is blackmailed by a high-tech mercenary black-ops team into letting a bag through security screening. The TSA agent clearly believes the threat on the other end of the earpiece he's been handed, but he also just can't let the bad guys get away with whatever it is they're trying to get away with.
What results is a tense, pulpy cat-and-mouse game where the cat is tracking every movement the mouse is making, but the mouse is just sly enough to get away with the occasional movement.
Carry-On is a pretty taut action-thriller that of course feels Die Hard/Die Hard 2 inspired, but also Speed and a dozen other entries in the genre. It is not at any point exceptionally unique, but it does what it does very well. The minimal backstory on our protagonist, played by Taron Egerton (Robin Hood), is just enough that we get the sense of a man who has been coasting, underperforming, and unsure of how to step up in life. Here he finds his moment, and Egerton plays this everyman, and his struggle with confidence but also his determination quite well. The main bad guy is, surprisingly, Jason Bateman. Even more surprising is how effective Bateman is at shedding any sense of being the comedic straight man, and being a damned cold-hearted capitalistic bastard.
It's a really fun watch, one of Netflix's best originals this year.
[Toastypost - we agree-ish]
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Drive-Away Dolls (aka
Drive-Away Dykes) is the first solo directed narrative film from Ethan Coen (one half of the Coen Brothers pairing). Co-written with his wife, editor Tricia Cooke, it follows lesbian friends as they take a "drive-away" gig (wherein you are basically driving a car from one destination to another for compensation) in order to get out of town after Jamie (Margaret Qualley) has a bad break-up with her cop girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein). Unfortunately there's a mix-up at the drive-away agency and they wind up getting the wrong car with the wrong items. They are pursued by the mobsters who want the item recovered, but the women decide to take a series of lesbian-hotspot detours which are effective at throwing the mobsters off their trail.
It's hormone-fuelled (and sex-filled) journey as Jamie is flirty and dirty, while her traveling companion Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) is buttoned-up and reserved. Jamie wants to loosen Marian up, and Marian just wants to read her book.
The mobsters (Joey Slotnick and CJ Wilson) are patented bumbling boobs in the Coen vein. Obviously they have some proficiency, or else they wouldn't be given any job to do other than clean toilets, but their proficiencies are definitely lacking refinement. Coleman Domingo, an always welcome presence, plays their boss, and Bill Camp's Curlie, the drive-away owner, needs a film (at least a short film) of his own.
The film is briskly paced at 84 minutes, and is maybe ever-so-slighly undercooked, in an over-before-it-begins kind of way, but I think I like it more for its lack of overstaying its welcome. The maguffin of the piece is so absurd that once it's revealed it's best it books it for the finale rather than lingering with it too long.
The artsy flourishes, particularly the weird 60's kaleidoscope/lava-lamp LSD-tripping interstitials are so out of place, and yet has its relevance. I recall disliking The Big Lebowski's weird flourishes on first watch too, so maybe they will grow on me.
[Toastypost - we agree]
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I don't tend to go into any film cold anymore. I've always seen a trailer, or read a review, or heard discussion on a podcast. There's always some prior awareness that draws me to a film (or repels me from).
Distant, aka Long Distance, just popped up on AmazonPrime with no fanfare and no promotion (at least, not to me). It featured an image of two people in space suits with an alien-looking-planetary backdrop, something which used to be an immediate interest pique, but these days elicits more of an eye roll as there's so many low-budget sci-fi stranded-in-space movies that pop up on streaming, especially Amazon and Tubi.
I clicked the "trailer" button and the brief clip it started showing (not a trailer) had good enough production values that I just pressed play on the movie.
Starring Anthony Ramos (Transformers: Rise of the Beasts), the film opens with an asteroid colliding with a large bulky cruiser of a space ship. It's passengers are in long-range hibernation when the alarms go off, and they're all ejected in pod into space hurtling towards a nearby planet. Most burn up in the atmosphere. Ramos survives. He's on alien terrain in a space suit low on oxygen and there are hostile creatures stalking him. On his comm, he's talking to another survivor, pinned in her pod, and he must make the "long distance" trek to her while they connect as distant voices.
There is very little original about this film, but it manages to scratch a very satisfying itch. It does what it does inoffensively enough, and with a very healthy production that propels it well past other low budget features that try to do the same thing. It's not an immediate favourite, but I was engaged throughout.
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Despite what I said about
Carry-On above, Netflix's reputation, generally, is that it makes terrible (or, if I'm being generous, not so great) movies.
Polar is a prime example of this, a Netflix original, adapted from a comic book, by a director who is primarily experienced in working with musicians on concert videos, music videos or documentaries. The flash-over-substance of music videos really doesn't translate into feature-length storytelling, even if some of our best directors of the 90's and 2000s came out of music video production (like David Fincher or Spike Jonze).
Polar is an unchecked production, clearly having little oversight from the producers. It is a tonal mess of a movie that looks to capture the frenetic energy of a Crank-like action feature, riddle itself with excessive sex and nudity, and at the same time attempt to have a pensive reflections of later-in-life character looking to retire from his profession as a hitman.
It's an assaulting production (as well as an insulting production) that features an assassin character whose "finishing move" is to get her target into position of her sniper by giving him a blow job. The opening sequence of the film find a just-killed Johnny Knoxville's erect penis going flaccid (beneath his swim trunks I should clarify), which then cuts to a very sombre, sterile medical examination of star Mads Mikkelsen. That's the tonal whiplash of this film in a nutshell.
The thrust of the plot is that the organization Mads has worked for is pruning all their retired-or-retiring assassins to save on their pension. Hell, if this were a smarter, more contemplative movie, they could have really said something about the nature of big business and how they undermine the working class, but it's anything but a smart movie.
I don't even know how, in the time I have left (I'm over time) to talk about the whole subplot featuring Vanessa Hudgens as a traumatized neighbour who Mads befriends. It's like something out of a completely different movie. This was bad.
[Toastypost - we agree]
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It's quite amazing that a film like
Outland exists. Made in the wake of
Star Wars fever, Peter Hyams' stab at a "space" movie is so not interested trying to be
Star Wars. Instead he seemed to take more inspiration from the grimy, industrialized future of
Alien, minus any aliens.
Set at a mining colony on the moon of Jupiter Io, it's a suspense thriller about a newly assigned marshall (Sean Connory) who starts looking into the increasing rash of deaths happening in the colony, only to find drugs and conspiracy.
I had seen Outland a couple decades ago and it stuck with me how low-key the film was, in terms of its sci-fi elements. It could have been a thriller set in any remote mining town at any time, but the choice to set it in space and capitalize upon Star Wars mania was a brilliant stroke. The sets are like a mix of industrial working environments, 1980's near-future technology, and prison-like living conditions. It's a sweaty, unpleasant looking atmosphere, where it seems everyone is just trying to get through their tour.
But Hyams makes sure to put his space environment to good use, adding it as the dangerous x-factor in the whole scenario. The deadly vaccuum of the inhospitable Io environment is made know pretty quick.
The mystery and dangers aren't complex or anything revolutionary, but this remains a hidden gem of 80's sci-fi.
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I wrote about
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's TV mini-series World on a Wire, about 15 months ago, and found it to be an incredibly surprising, engrossing, and far ahead of its time in terms of how it contemplated virtual realities and artificial life, as well as being really sharply made with some brilliant choices that used its budgetary limitations to its storytelling advantage.
The series was based on the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye from 1964, putting these ideas of simulated reality even further ahead of its time. I was surprised to learn that the 1999 flop The Thirteenth Floor was based off the same story, because The Thirteenth Floor left no impact on me whatsoever.
My meagre recollection of the film was merely that I didn't particularly love it nor did it make any cultural dent. It was released in the wake of The Matrix, which, as we all know, had its own take on simulated reality and had the benefit of revolutionizing filmmaking and being a complete visual spectacle, among other things.
The Thirteenth Floor really couldn't help but be seen as a poor man's also-ran.
The film opens with Armin Mueller-Stahl inhabiting a glossy 1930's reality where he's clearly living the high life, only to learn that he's actually from 2024 and was engaging in a very realistic VR. He is killed at a nearby bar and his successor in the tech firm, played by Craig Bierko, investigates his death in two realities while also being suspect number one of police detective Dennis Haysbert. And in walks Gretchen Mol, as the femme fatale of this very noir-styled techno-thriller, who claims to be Mueller-Stahl's daughter, and the rightful heir to the company and claims it was her father's wish to shut it all down.
It's honestly not a bad production. Its 1930's replication looks really amazing, and it's layered realities storytelling is competently handled. It's key problem is the worlds the film inhabits feel pretty claustrophobic. There's really only about five meaningful characters in the whole production, which hems the film in as it tries to tease out a murder mystery. I suppose since I was already familiar with the story's foundations there weren't many surprises to be had anyway. This film is fine if you're, say, bored of the Matrix, or as an exercise after watching World on a Wire if you can track it down.
