3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Samaritan

2012, David Weaver (Christmas Island) -- download

OMG I unintentionally watched a legit movie by one of the directors who does my Hallmarkies.

I have a tag -- "got to it". Its intended to label those movies I need to get around to watching, which include seminal movies I have not seen, for one reason or another (e.g. The Godfather), but also movies that were high on my list to see, but I keep on ... not watching them (e.g. Parasite). My excuse is that I like to have a bunch of movies to watch when everything recent is bringing me down, when I want to watch something that I know will be good. But to be honest, its more often than not just easier to watch things easily digested, than things I have to pay attention to. But there is a third type of movie that gets into this tag -- those that I added to a perpetual draft post in this blog called "Need to Watch". This post was created "back in the day", when the blog was first launched, over a decade ago, and then abandoned a few years later, because it was starting to look more like a stack of books on a bedside table -- more added to it than removed. The movies listed here are "old", but many were added only because they caught my attention for one reason or another. I intend on going through it, to see what I have missed.

I am very glad I added this one. I am glad Ebert suggested it. I am glad I get to go back and read his writing. I am not sure I ever found others writing about movies as compelling since he left this world, and since I have completely given up on writing "reviews" (I leave the proper writing of such to Kent) I can only provide long rambling anecdotes and complaints. And on occasion, try to find something nice to say about something I enjoyed.

I like this neo-noir movie very much, I liked how other it was, as in feeling so different than anything I have watched of late. Its not even from that long ago, to be a different era, but it felt like a work of dark, gritty passion, even going so far down the different road to be shot and set in Toronto. As Ebert said, Toronto is not a city associated often with noir, but they find enough dark alleys, grimy diners and a seedy bar to make it believable.

Foley (Samuel L Jackson, Snakes on a Plane) gets out of prison after 25 years, connects with a parole officer, gets a shitty construction job (which he loses immediately), and finds out that all of his friends are long dead. The Life doesn't promote long lives. That's when he bumps into Ethan (Luke Kirby, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), the son of the man who Foley went to prison for killing, the man who was Foley's best friend and partner in grifting, who Foley was given the option, after a grift went totally wrong, of killing or them both being killed. Foley is honest with Ethan, who is doing OK (runs a night club, but is beholden to a nasty mob boss) because he wants Ethan to know he is out of The Life. Ethan has other plans.

In the same seedy bar where Foley used to hang decades earlier, Foley saves Iris (Ruth Negga, Preacher), a club girl beholden to Ethan, from a shitty date. Two people in terrible situations, with shitty lives, connect. She is OK he is an ex-con convicted of murder, he is OK she's an addict. They "setup house" together, as they say, while Ethan is still doing his best to convince Foley to join him on a con. She even admits that she was sent to him by Ethan, but they move past that.

Until Ethan pulls his ace card, explaining a situation I won't spoil, but suffice to say, it is so much much worse than what they've shared with each other. Foley cuts Iris loose to work with Ethan on the con job against Ethan's (mob) boss -- a grift called "The Samaritan". Things don't go as planned for any of the parties, but there is some redemption to be found.

This movie came out between Captain American: The First Avenger and The Avengers, but I suspect most of the principal shooting was done before either. This is not a polished "Nick Fury" Sam Jackson, as he carries his age and the character's incarceration. Very little of the movie is polished but that lends an air of authenticity. And the commitment to the roles belies any lack of polish.

KsMIRT: Spies and Sci-fis and Missing Guys

KsMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month Kent steps through the TV series he completed watching that month (or the month before, as it were) in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.

This Month:
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (2024, Disney+, 8/8 episodes)
Dune: Prophecy Season 1 (2024, HBOMax, 6/6 episodes)
Black Doves Season 1 (2024, Netflix, 6/6 episodes)
Missing You (2025, Netflix, 5/5 episodes)

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Star Wars: Skeleton Crew
(created by Jon Watts and Christopher Ford)

The What 100: Set shortly after The Mandalorian Season 3, we learn of At Attin (or Aye-Tee-Aye-Tee-Tin if you're nasty) is a 1980's suburb planet hidden from the rest of the Galaxy, unaware of the star war that came and went over the preceding 30 years in continuity. Four pre-teens - Fern, Neel, KB, and Wim find an abandoned ship buried in a culvert, and accidentally trigger it's autopilot, setting off into adventure. They are aided by the pirate robot first mate SM-33 and find a maybe-ally in the maybe-Jedi/definitely pirate Jod Na Nawood. Jod, in aiding the children in a tumultuous Galaxy, has his own objective, to return with them to the mythical At Attin and loot it for all it's worth.  

(1 Great) The original Star Wars was a product of George Lucas's varied interests and obsessions, from samurai films and spaghetti westerns to World War II dogfighting epics (are those even a thing?) and 1930's sci-fi serials. Most Star Wars since the new millennium has felt very...indebted to Star Wars, and has shied away from reverential and referential filmmaking. So something like this, a new Star Wars show that has firmly married its visual and storytelling aesthetics on the films of the 1980s, feels, if not fresh, then definitely loved and lived in. Show creators Jon Watts (Spider-Man Homecoming/Far From Home/No Way Home)  and Christopher Ford leer their eye particularly toward the Spielbergian Amblin Entertainment films like The Goonies and E.T.  but also Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Hook and almost any other junior adventure movie from the era.  The designs (clothes, sets, ships, aliens) in the show ring true to Star Wars, but also feel very retro, and it's all somehow fresh-but-familiar.  Each episode was full of boundless enthusiasm and energy and never seemed to lose sight of what it was aiming for like other Disney+ Star Wars shows have (especially the ones that started out as film ideas and then were stretched to mini-series length). What a delight this was.

(1 Good) I have to admit I was apprehensive when I heard about a Star Wars show that was aimed at a younger audience and whose protagonists were a band of kids led by Jude Law. The fact that Law was involved lended the project some leeway, but still I was worried that Lucasfilm was going to make a juvenile Star Wars (like Lego Star Wars, but live action) with a lot of silly gags. I also have to admit I didn't know how to feel about the first trailer, which prominently displayed it's "Star Wars suburbs" and its young cast. But the kids, each of them, were terrific. Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) is a daydreamer, wishing for adventure. Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) is the tough, rebellious one. KB (Kyriana Kratter) is a cyborg, with special skills but feeling like an outcast. Neel (Robert Timothy Smith) is a gentle, anxious, pacifistic elephant-boy (of the Max Rebo variety). They're all so charming in their own unique ways, and they each have their own arc within the show. The intonation of the first episode is that Wim, the instigator of their adventure, is the show's center, but it balances each of the children very well, such that it's hard to think of any one of them as the single protagonist.  And they're all really, really good actors (and very well directed.  Watts directed the first and final episode, David Lowrey (The Green Knight) on the second and third episode, the Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert, Everything, Everywhere All At Once) episode 4, and Bryce Dallas Howard (The Mandalorian) on episode 5.

(1 Bad) The show does such an amazing job of establishing the adventure it's to set out on in the first episode and then delivering a semi-stand-alone adventure each episode, it's a shame then that the penultimate episode then doesn't quite feel so stand-alone. It feels like the first of two parts, like setup for the finale. It's still enjoyable but it doesn't maintain the same punchy, rollicking spirit of discovery that the episodes before had.  

META: With this, like many other Star Wars shows, I wish there was a "continuous run" feature without the "previously on" or the title cards or the closing credits. I would be more likely to return to them if I could cut through all the streaming noise... like reading through a collected trade paperback of a comic book series.

Do I want and/or need more Skeleton Crew? No, I don't, even though there are answers to be had (Star Wars has always been full of those, and that's what comics and books are for). This holds together as a stand-alone thing so, so well. Would it have worked better as a film? It's possible but then we would have been robbed of some of the adventures they do have, and I think Neel and KB's arcs would probably have been scaled back.  Super fun time.

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Dune: Prophecy
(created by Diane Ademu-John, Alison Schapker)

The What 100: Set in the same universe as Denis Villeneuve's recent duology (Duneology?), Dune: Prophecy takes place 10,000 years earlier, just after the great civil war with artificial intelligence. The monarchy's rule is tenuous, and equally tenuous is the establishment of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood as sacred aides and advisors to all the great houses of the Galaxy. Valya Harkonnen is Mother Superior of the third generation of Bene Gesserit, and the series looks at what got her there, and her upholding and furthering of the slow-burn machinations of the sisterhood for the next 100 centuries. But, from the spice-laden sands of Arrakis comes a warrior who is very much interested in interfering with those plans and burning down the sisterhood altogether.

(1 Great) The production values on Dune: Prophecy are outstanding. Although I'm sure they may have, I wasn't noticing any of the seams where they may have cut corners.  The sets are absolutely stunning, the wardrobes are exceptionally tailored, and the look and feel of the show fits with what Villeneuve and company were doing.  The art direction, anything requiring designs are so expertly crafted as to feel of a place with with Dune and Dune Part 2 but also feel like they're from a time much earlier (maybe they didn't quite succeed at making it feel 10,000 years earlier, but it's more than enough to distinguish itself as another time period).  I loved looking at this show.

(1 Good) There are some warts that give it a bumpy texture, but overall, Prophecy delivers quite a compelling tale about the women behind the power, and in fact are angling to eventually have complete power. This takes perseverance, but also sacrifice, and cold, cold blood in your veins. Emily Watson is superb as Mother Superior Valya whose claim to her title (and the tactics she teaches) is formed from old wounds that have not healed and are threatening to rip right open again. At the same Reverend Mother Tula Harkonnen (Olivia Williams), Valya's sister, and right-hand aide, finds herself at a crossroads between blindly obeying and seeking her own path which threatens to spill the secrets of the sisterhood out wide.  I found all of this intrigue within the sisterhood so, so fascinating... and then the layers of which what was happening within the sisterhood spilled out into their plotting in the greater galaxy just started dogpiling on each other with such intricacy I couldn't help but be impressed how tightly the show weaved together its seemingly disparate elements.

(1 Bad) Even at 6 episodes (six long episodes, most over an hour in length, uninterrupted) Prophecy at times could feel like it was stalling, filling time, spending time with characters and scenarios that were already inferred, or in some cases were just extrapolating on previous information. The flashbacks for Valya and Tula eat up some hefty chunks of screentime, and much of it is covered through exposition or retreaded multiple times over from different vantage points to provide additional nuance or context.  The flashbacks especially impede the pacing of the show, and at one point I was almost completely checked out. That said, it all comes around.

META: I though it was pretty savvy to explore a post-AI world, like immediately following the outlaw of robots and computer-assisted, well, everything.  It doesn't act, really, as a cautionary tale, and, in fact, at times, seems to think it might be an overreaction to completely cut it out of human existence altogether.  It doesn't successfully show us what that transition would look like, what the chaos would be.  But then, this is a reality where the galaxy is ruled by "great houses" with a pretty severe grasp, and a religious sect of witches is making a power play for control of it all, so it's not able to really get into any modern-day analogs (which is probably for the best, yet, it could be soooo easy to do, but would probably age poorly if it tried to be so direct. 

I thought this was going to be a stand-alone mini-series, 6 episodes and done... alas it is not. Although based on the Kevin J. Anderson/Brian Herbert novel "Sisterhood of Dune", which is part of a larger series "the Great Schools of Dune", it's only a loose adaptation (a quick scan of the book reveals they're pretty much two different stories with different characters altogether). I thought because it's so expensive-looking that it would be only this on mini-series in case they had to cut and run, but nope, it's not conclusive in its finale and it was pretty immediately renewed for a second season.

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Black Doves Season 1
(created by Joe Barton [The Lazarus Project])

The What 100: Helen (Keira Knightley), the wife of the UK Secretary of State for Defence, learns that her secret lover, an MI-5 agent, has been killed in the line of duty under mysterious circumstances. Helen herself is a secret agent, but for a neutral, for-profit mercenary organization called the Black Doves.  Helen can't help but think, given her lover's last phone call to her, that his death is connected to her somehow. Her minder, Reed (Sarah Lancashire), calls in Sam (Ben Whishaw), an old friend and fixer, to keep an eye on her. What they find, the more they dig may be fatal for them and take the Doves down with them.

(1 Great) I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting much, but this wound up being a tight and satisfying binge. It adeptly juggled many different narratives that criss-crossed in a way that felt like a savvy mix of your standard espionage series and your standard procedural series, forming an above-average version of either.  I enjoyed the process of discovery within the show where things were rarely as they seemed and the show deftly showed you enough to lead you to certain conclusions.  But also, it never felt like a cheat when they revealed the truth (or something closer to the truth), because the characters were experiencing the same thing. It was hard as the audience to get ahead of the show when it was misdirecting you and the characters at the same time.

(1 Good) I've never been a big fan of Knightley, nor have I ever really disliked her, but she was never a draw for me for any project.  After a few years away from the spotlight she's come back not in a prestige drama, or a "recapturing the past" romcom, or a big paycheck revival of some IP...no, she's come back in a series that lets her do a little bit of everything. There's some rich drama here for her to chew on as an undercover wife but loving mother with emotional ties outside of her job (which has become her life), but she also gets to be funny, quippy and have fun in the role. She gets to do some action set pieces, get all bloodied up, and she genuinely seems to be having a blast in the role.  Helen is often the smartest person in the room, and has to play down that fact, and Knightley manages that trick particularly well.

(1 Bad) Like Dune: Prophecy there are flashbacks here that eat into the runtime of the series, but not quite as egregiously, and they seem to cohere to the story better...probably because they're pretty brief and don't take up so much real estate. I think with Prophecy, the central story is the intriguing part, and the Harkonnen sisters are maybe the standout characters of the ensemble, they're just part of the ensemble. Here, it's a character-driven story, so when we flash back to Helen or Sam's past, as are our lead characters the flashbacks are providing very important and specific context to them. Episode 2 spends a lot of time with Helen's history with the Doves establishing her history with Sam, and then episode 3 fills in some of the gaps of Sam's "London troubles" but leaving a lot open to be explored in the series.

META:  I have to think that this is a response to the success of recent streaming spy series like Slow Horses, The Recruit, and The Diplomat.  It seems to be a genre that is faring well for Netflix and so I imagine we'll be seeing more of these types of shows this year and next, in increasing volume until we get sick of it and Netflix nixes them all.

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Missing You
(developed by Victoria Asare-Archer)

The What 100: Detective Kat Donovan is still reeling from two events in her life: 1) the murder of her father, also a police detective, and 2) the sudden ghosting from her fiancee, Josh, 11 years ago. The man charged with killing her father is dying of cancer and Kat finds out, through illegal means, that he didn't actually kill her dad. And then she matches with Josh on a dating app, only for him to ghost her again.  Meanwhile she's investigating a case of a missing man which may or may not have something to do with either of the above.  Kat can't rest until she figures it all out.

(1 Great) Rosalind Eleazar may be the third or fourth major player on AppleTV+'s Slow Horses but she's an exceptionally engaging presence on that show and I wanted to see how she would handle being the lead. Turns out she's just as exceptionally engaging when she's the primary figure on screen, most of the time. Too bad it's such a dogshit story she's been saddled with.

(1 Good) I really struggle with saying anything good about this show. Midway through episode 2, Lady Kent and I acknowledged that the show was decidedly terrible and actively began hatewatching it by episode 3.  Hatewatching something is its own experience which can be good, especially when you have someone with you on the same wavelength, and we had a good time being outraged by all the horrible aspects of the show... most of which I actively blocked out of my brain a mere 3 weeks later.

(1 Bad) This story is terrible. It overburdens the lead characters with too much drama, much of it in the sphere of highly unbelievable territory, and then starts weaving her active investigation into these two very personal drama's she's involved in (though it only actually connects tangentially to one of them). The more the story starts unravelling it's mystery, the worse it gets.  The show crafts a villain out of Steve Pemberton (who I only know from a recent season of Taskmaster) and he's the dollar store version of a James Bond villian. If you've read or heard at all about Pig Butchering romance scams, this operation Pemberton is running is fucking ludicrous.  The music was noticeably bad and at times the way the camera or the show would deceive the audience through framing, shadows or misrepresentation borders on camp (if only it were camp).  It's a bad, bad show.

META: This is the latest entry (#8!) in Netflix's massive, multi-year, multi-program deal with writer Harlan Coben, adapting his novels into movies and TV shows. Good on Coben for getting that paper...but holy shit was this an awful story, to the point that I'm never watching (or reading) anything with Coben's name associated with it. Just yuk.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Y2K

2024, Kyle Mooney (directorial debut; actor 'Saturday Night Live') -- download

I read an online defense of the movie, on Reddit, that people who giving the movie terrible reviews "didn't understand the movie is supposed to be a horror-comedy." Oh, I am quite QUITE sure everyone knew they were watching a horror-comedy, but I am not sure these people writing in defense of the movie would understand how terrifying terrible this movie was. I did say out loud that the only saving grace of the movie is that it was self-aware of being a "bad movie", but I am not quite sure it was self-aware enough. I have not been a big fan of Saturday Night Live for decades, but even when I was a fan, I acknowledged that most of the sketches were mediocre at best and the show shined for its rare viral-bound bits. This movie would be one of those sketches better left forgotten. I mention SNL because the movie was directed, and even starred, a cast-member.

OK, we all remember that Y2K was a big bust. For those that don't remember, the problem was that a lot of computer systems had two-digit numbering for dates. So, as 1999 became 2000, the system would suddenly think it was 1900. Lots of money was spent to install work-arounds to handle that "glitch" (not really a glitch, more a lack of foresight) but there were still tons of media hype about how it would end the world. A lot of people expected the world to literally end. It didn't. For the most part things just went on as they always did.

But what if it didn't? What if things DID go crazy. This movie posits that machines indeed do go crazy and start killing.

deletes long rambling recap, because nobody, not even me, would care.

So, high school kids go to a New Year's Eve party, dealing with the usual social strata woes and conflicts, when... yup, the machines do go mad.  Anything with electronics is possessed of an evil intelligence that allows it to combine with other parts to become killer bots -- the remote toy has a hairspray blow torch, the CD player shoots shiny shuriken, the microwave zaps your head once something else has tripped you. They're all rather ingenious, working in tandem using wires as prehensile appendages to gather more parts and make themselves more deadly. Outside the party, the world is falling from the skies.

You're recapping again.

So, its presented like a cliche ridden horror movie, and its attempting to go all dark-comedy because things are so utterly ridiculous, but unfortunately, definitely due to Mooney's guidance, its all just so bloody stupid. Sure, there are just enough cute nods to other technology movies of the 90s (Hackers, The Lawnmower Man, Virtuosity, etc.) to make me chuckle, but not enough to actually make me not groan constantly. You might chuckle at the Fred Durst cameo ("Fred Durst, you look like shit!") but end up cringing at him singing George Michael's "Faith". It never tries to make sense, but was not funny enough to accept the lunacy. They waste Julian Dennison (Deadpool 2), and I am not sure why Rachel Zegler (Shazam! Fury of the Gods) ever said yes to this bad bad movie.

3 Sort Paragraphs (Or Not): Kraven the Hunter

2024, JC Chandor (Triple Frontier) -- download

I watched the virally hated movie and ... didn't hate it.

I think I can say I actually liked it. I mean, after admittedly downloading and watching a lot of "dumb action movies", this one came along surprisingly as ... not as dumb? 

Why don't you ever commit ? Either you liked it or you didn't.

It opens with an action-thriller rote-opener, the setup, exciting and tense. Russia, winter, cold, lots of big tattooed Bad Guys in transit to a prison, probably a gulag. Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Godzilla) is put into a cell with a monster (of a man) but defuses the fraught introduction, telling him he will be gone in three days. Next morning, after standing up to other big tattooed bullies on the playground, Kraven is escorted to the Big Bad Guy who runs the jail. Big mistake -- that was why Kraven was there, and he kills the Big Bad Guy with a tooth from a tiger rug. His escape is all enhanced super strength and parkour and a signature animalistic slide on his toes and finger tips. When wolves on the tundra challenge him, he growls at them, and they back off. Kraven exits the scene in a waiting plane; job well done.

Its a default way of setting the main character up but its a solid piece, unless you quibble with the CGI depicting Kraven.

The movie then switches to Back Story -- Sergei Kravinoff, his half-brother Dimitri and their king of toxic masculinity father, Nikolai (Russell Crowe, The Mummy), on a hunt in Ghana. Blah blah blah, boys must become men, blah blah, insult some random background character, blah blah blah brothers protect brothers. Despite my quipping, nothing bothered me about this segment. Sure, Russell Crowe is chewing up each line he gives with a terrible accent, but its a typical Russell Crowe King Bad Guy bad accent, and there are no utterly dumbass utterances like Madam Web's, "...he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died." Then Sergei almost dies, chomped by a man-eating lion when a young girl brings him back from zero hit points with a magic potion. Ohhh, so his enhanced powers are.... magic? Didn't expect that. Anywayz, newly feeling-more-than-just-alive Sergei rejects his father and runs off to hide in the wilds of Northern Russia, a place his late mother loved, leaving his brother behind.

Years later. Kraven is The Hunter, or so he tells everyone, and everyone mentions constantly. He's a mysterious figure who... hunts people? They never really explain the why but you get the idea he hunts down Bad Guys for Money. Or for justice. Kraven is a ... superhero? As I understand it, these non-Marvel Marvel movies were supposed to be setting up an anti-hero or downright villain team-up, including The Vulture, Morbius, Venom and now Kraven, for some sort of Spider-Man related inevitability, that would also involve Madam Web? I mean, that's dead now, making this a sort of stand-alone end of an "era" movie, but isn't making Kraven the Hunter a ... hero (i.e. a NC17 rating hero) gonna piss off someone? I doubt they care. But not sure how it would have fit into the planned continuity.

Anywayz...

Kraven still connects with his brother Dimitri (Fred Hechinger, Gladiator II), always on his birthday. Dimitri is now all grown up, and still under his father's thumb, despite not becoming a villainous right-hand like his brother was expected to be. He runs a night club where he can mimic any other performer. Its a ... life? Anywayz, that night Dimitri is kidnapped. You see, the Russian mobster that Kraven killed in the gulag left a vacuum in the Mob Boss world, and "random background character" is now trying to fill that void. Yes, he's now a crime boss himself. They take Dimitri and attempt to extort money from Daddy Kravinoff but he's not having it -- strong men don't get themselves kidnapped -- so Kraven has to go find his brother. He gets help from Calypso (Ariana DeBose, Argylle), the girl who gave him the potion, who is now a top lawyer in London.

But we know its all a ploy to capture Kraven. Random Background Character,  one Aleksei Sytsevich, sends his own enhanced Bad Guy, The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott, Poor Things), who has weird hypnosis powers. Kraven tracks hsi brother to a mountainside monastery in Turkey, but that's a ploy -- his brother is really back in London, we its revealed that Sytsevich is The Rhino (Alessandro Nivola, Amsterdam), chemically altered but having to suppress his rhino-thick hide via a fanny-pack slash colostomy bag of chemicals. He was weak in the flashback, and now he is strong, but it came with a cost. And really, just wants Kraven out of the way so he can take over all the crime boss territory, including Daddy Kravinoff. They do not capture Kraven.

This all leads to a final confrontation in Kraven's Russian nature reserve, the place his mother left him. The Foreigner's icky hypnosis trick doesn't protect him from an arrow through the eye, by completely wasted character Calypso, the girl with the magic potion, but we do get a brief glimpse of a poisoned Kraven being afraid of spiders (#groan). But the real deal of this finale is to see The Rhino pull out the chemical blocker and go Full Rhino, gnarly hide, super strength and even a HORN !! Kraven fights off him and his goons via a help from buffalo (not bison) in a rather decent CGI fight.

OK, maybe in writing this back to myself, I don't like the movie as much? No, its not that. I can recognize all the faults, the many faults, of the movie, but the experience was fine enough. I enjoyed what I was watching, I liked the performances. I even liked The Rhino's weird silent hissings of impotent rage. I did not notice how much of Calypso was ADR'd while watching the movie --- so much of her dialogue comes while we are looking at the back of her head. I liked the character they created, much more than the ultra-big-game-hunter comic book character (has he changed in the comics?) and I thought the superhero setup battles.

Was it a good movie? No, but we got along well enough.

You are still terrible at writing about things you enjoyed.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Megalopolis

2023, Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now) -- download

Not only have I not seen anything he did since Bram Stoker's Dracula but I haven't even heard of any of those movies. Supernova doesn't count. 

I am only half way through this movie but I feel compelled to start writing. Despite all expectations, and those expectations of mine were that I would love this movie to spite what everyone was saying about it, I really don't like this movie. I am not going to say that this is because the movie is bad, as I honestly don't feel qualified to say whether it is Good or Bad. And part of why I don't like this movie is because it instills that in the viewer -- it presents as so fucking pretentious and full of allegory and metaphor and allusion that the Average Joe cannot hope to comprehend the Great Vision that Coppola put in front of us. And that is why I don't like it.

So, from those more qualified? Perhaps from reading the unfavourable, I will find the more favourable in my own viewing?

I miss Ebert.

But first, the story, what there is of it. The city is New Rome, a reimagining of a world where the Roman Empire never ended. Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito, The Mandalorian) runs the city but is opposed by "The Design Authority" led by arrogant genius (with the ability to manipulate time itself) Cesar (Adam Driver, Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi), known for his invention of "megalon", a revolutionary building material that won him the Nobel Prize. With it he wants to turn New Rome into a utopia, but Cicero claims to be more practical, wanting what is best for the city's people now. 

Cicero's daughter Julia (Natalie Emmanuel, Army of Thieves) falls for Cesar. Cesar's floozy reporter ex-gf Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza, Agatha All Along) schemes to destroy him by marrying the Trump-analog Crassus (ironically played by Jon Voight, Anaconda), head of The Bank.  Cesar's cousin Clodio, grandson of Crassus, the manic on-point Shia LaBeouf (The Peanut Butter Falcon), schemes to bring down his cousin. Cicero has also always wanted to bring down Cesar, after his failed attempts to prosecute Cesar for his wife's death.

Yeah, lots of schemes and machinations. Golden Age of Hollywood style pomp, circumstance and the kind of spectacle I actually wanted more of in Gladiator II. And mad imagery after mad imagery after MAD imagery. If I could turn myself around for the movie, its for the sheer audacity to put together all this shit on the screen and present it with complete sincerity. 

A few interrupted viewings later.

What the fuck was that. No, seriously, WTF. I was hoping that all  the weird little twists and turns it was taking would lead somewhere, that the movie would inevitably say something, say anything, but ... it's over?

So, what are the positive reviews saying? That it is grand, and that it is. So very grand, so very good looking. Do you remember Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow? It was a Jude Law and Angelina Jolie film from the early 2000s, a scifi actioner that was supposed to introduce the world to what could happen when we merged CGI and live acting, for a diesel-punk fantasy. And while it has retconned itself into fond remembrances in the past 20 years, it was widely panned by many, when it came out, for its sheer audacity -- who would want to watch a "live action" movie where most of the sets were digital? Twenty years later, with even extreme examples like Avatar, we consider it the norm. So, be audacious all you want, have grand visions, be true to yourself, but for the love of gawds, have something to say? What was Coppola saying? That with enough money behind it, abject nonsense can be art?

I mean, that is kind of true... Tape a banana to a wall.

Many of the positive reviews are not technically "positive" but ... they admire what he was going for? Admiring that he actually got it made? Not sure that qualified it for the Good Movie category. And yet, as I read them, I find myself oddly in sync with their positions. I do admire what it was doing, what Coppola was doing, I admire sticking to your guns. I just wish I got something out of this movie beyond "wee that looks neat!" Maybe if I had approached it with an expectation of very expensive, very gilded camp then I would be ultimately satisfied? It is my own fault I expected a movie about the grandeur of Big Cities, of megalopolises, of art nouveau, and German expressionism. What I got instead was Shia LaBoef being shot in the ass by a bow & arrow of a size best left to cupid.

Cesar could manipulate time. I would love to forward time and attend a film school classroom presentation of this movie where pretentious professors laud its great achievement and jaded students wonder what shrooms prof took that morning. Cesar could manipulate time but it contributes very little to the movie. Very little of what is presented in the movie actually contributed to the movie. Ideas, monologues, animated allusions, hallucinations, constant speechifying -- all end in a "oh, look the megalopolis is open. The End."

I did not like this movie, but I cannot help but admire the size of Coppola's golden (platinum? wow.) balls.

One last thought. Remember Loki's play in Thor: Ragnarok ? This is how this movie presents itself.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Duchess

2023, Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers) -- download

I always find it odd when I have seen pretty much everything in a director's catalogue but I find myself almost entirely "meh" about them all. Like a lot of people, we loved  the fuck out of Dog Soldiers, an action-horror movie about British soldiers vs Werewolves, but admittedly I haven't seen it since. And many of his movies since have found some way to appeal to me in one way or another, but none of them would get fully favourable reviews. And yet here I am, writing about another one. 

I don't find it odd that the way you write a sentence may be explained by the amount of popular British Victorian literature you read as a kid. Long sentences long to be long.

Amateurish but with a lot of money? Sometimes a lot of money? Sometimes smacking of a sincere lack of budget? Obviously Marshall is not getting top dollar, but he has had success in the past working within the confines of his budget and genre. It wouldn't have been difficult to colour within the lines on this movie but he ... didn't?

OK, I get ahead of myself. Marshall comes to us with his run at a Guy Ritchie Film. That means UK gangsters with colourful accents, freeze frames, explainer dialogue and mega-violence. I mean, that style of action-crime-thriller has been around strongly since the 90s. Did it exist before Ritchie's take on it? Probably. Doesn't matter don't care; its labelled as its labelled now. 

Scarlett (Charlotte Kirk, The Lair) is an accomplished pick pocket who catches the eye of Rob (Philip Winchester, Crusoe), an American ex-military type now caught up in the diamond smuggling world. At first Scarlett resists his charms but eventually she falls for his white knighting, arse over tea kettle. She becomes his girl, his "Duchess".

But almost immediately Rob and his crew find themselves defending themselves against an unknown antagonist. Someone is trying to muscle in on his business just before Rob pulls off the most lucrative score of his career. Rob is cocky, so self-assured in his place in the world, and so enamoured & distracted by Duchess that he doesn't see the betrayers in his midst. His oldest and best friend takes the business from him and sends Rob and Duchess off to the desert to be killed. Except she doesn't get killed.

She comes back from the dead, finds Rob's two remaining loyal friends, a pair of pit bulls from his military days -- no, not literally, but Marshall staple Sean Pertwee (Gotham) as Danny, and Billy Baraka (Hoji Fortuna, Paixão). She teams up with them, makes a quick new crew and takes her most bloody revenge upon those that took Rob from them.

Its not that I dislike the movie, but you can see the seams. When building a scene about a diamond fence who works out of the art world, they could have done a glamorous party, full of posh people that Scarlett would embarrass, but they skirt past the five extras playing party patrons to a humdrum back room scene where Charlie the Fence (Stephanie Beacham, Coronation Street) shows how violent and ruthless she is by doing the whole Columbian necktie. Later, when Ron is visiting the place where he processes his stolen diamonds, one would think it would be filled the brim with armed goons, but the handful of guys in suits die quickly when Rob is betrayed. And speaking of gun fights, I had never seen more ineffective, bloodless gun fights since the A-Team TV show --- surely they could afford a few squibs to put holes in car doors or blow out wind screens? But nope, just bang bang bang bang bang bang duck duck duck, scene end. I mean, Rob's right and left hand are supposed to be seasoned mercenaries, but they can barely shoot better than storm troopers. And finally, for a movie that is supposed to be all about Scarlett becoming the Duchess, a self-made, self-reliant woman, there is not a single line of dialogue or action on her part that would pass the Bechtel Test, even if we don't trust that test to be real. I am not convinced that Marshall can do better, but .. I hoped?

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Absolution

2024, Hans Petter Moland (Cold Pursuit) -- download

I went into this to see another "Liam Neeson as aging ______" (no tag) and, yes, it is that, but it was also something .... more. Not perfectly so, but it at least had the conceit of trying to be more than just its premise, which is, "said aging thug discovers he has ill and will see his memory & functionality drastically fade in less than three years." This is not the first time Neeson has played a version of this character (not literally, but a man of violence with memory issues), but this time, its not as slick, which lent itself to credibility for me. 

Neeson's "Thug" (Liam Neeson, Derry Girls) doesn't even get a name, and he is called just that in the credits, and apparently that was also the original name for the movie. He works for the Conners, one of those low rent gangsters that eke out an existence doing work for other more connected criminal organizations. As we see them, there is just Charlie (Ron Perlman, Poker Face), his son Kyle (Daniel Diemer, Under the Bridge), and Thug, who spends most of his days walking around collecting protection money from business owners who treat him as much as one of the neighbourhood, as anything. He's tough but you can see that he's losing it, forgetting basic things like his boss's name and where he lives. And after seeing specialist, where he learns he has CTE for years of head injuries, he decides to reconnect with his estranged daughter.

Thug is not a good man. He knows he comes from a legacy of angry, abusive men and while he regrets what he let himself become, he also doesn't really try to change it. But his clock is ticking so he takes the gun out of his mouth and does the work to reestablish a relationship with Daisy (Frankie Shaw, SMILF), his daughter, and his grandson. Her life hasn't been much better than his, but everyone seems to be looking for connection no matter how tenuous. This isn't a movie of grand gestures and emotional awareness, but it gets the job done.

Memory loss is all around me these days, as I age, as parents age even more. I see myself going from the guy who could remember the face and name, instantly, of someone he met 20 years ago to doing the "you know, that guy in that movie that came out last year...". Sure, the stress of the past decade has lent itself to that, and its expected to diminish somewhat as you age, but .... it frightens me. I have never been the most lucid guy to begin with, prone to letting my brain go down rabbit holes, staring into space, losing time, but the idea of losing entireties of myself is ... terrifying.

There is now one more "aging hit man" movie to watch, "Knox Goes Away", on Amazon, with Michael Keaton.

Rewatch: 28 Days Later & 28 Weeks Later

2002, Danny Boyle (Shallow Grave) -- download
2007, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Damsel) -- download

Its been more than a decade since I last rewatched either of these movies. But the new one is coming out, and I wanted to remind myself. And also see how I felt about the groundbreaking first one. 

28 Days Later opens with a naked Jim (Cillian Murphy, Peaky Blinders) on the operating table in a hospital. Given he is not aware of any virus, I would imagine he's been hooked up to enough fluids to ride out the entire 28 days? Speculative Fiction always requires a certain amount of forgiveness as to how he would still be alive. But this opening, cribbed only a year later by The Walking Dead ("don't dead, open inside") comic, provides the opportunity to be exposed to an empty London. Well, mostly empty.

Technically it opens with the stupid eco kids ignoring the scientist warning them to not release the monkeys that they have infected with RAGE !!

The "reprieve" in this movie is terribly short. He gets to slurp a few cans of pop and is immediately introduced to a church full of dead bodies, and an infected priest, after which he is rescued and gets an explainer from a couple of crafty survivors -- Mark (Noah Huntley, Snow White and the Huntsman) and Selena (Naomie Harris, Skyfall). Mark dies not long after, cut into bits by a remorseless Selena, after getting bitten.

While fast zombies were not entirely new, nor were "not zombies at all" infected, this movie pulled them out of the B and Z grades into (almost?) mainstream movie focus. The existential dread of the hordes of shambling dead, never stopping, never falling down, was replaced by "OH SHIT RUN RUN RUN RUUUUUN !!" sheer terror. You would exhaust yourself, you would make mistakes, you were so easily infected, while they just came in numbers, not tiring, not easily hurt, a fallen one replaced by three more.

The movie flits from the terror of running to moments of safety and contemplation, even some levity. Despite all of England having fallen, the low budget lends itself to only the occasional crowd of the infected wandering the countryside. The survivors, who eventually include Frank (Brendan Gleeson, In Bruges) and his daughter Hannah, in Frank's trusty (and well stocked) cab, are given a destination, a goal, a light at the end of the tunnel, which no matter how tenuous, they have no choice but to cling to.

Of course, also cribbed by The Walking Dead, but nothing really new, the real challenge turns out to be other humans infected by nothing more than barbarism. They, soldiers camped out in a posh mansion, are thinking about more than just the next meal or surviving the incursions of the infected, but how they choose to deal with the future is far less than savoury. 

Did I find it as "ground breaking" as I did when I saw it in the cinema? No, not at all. It looks like a bad pirate copy. But its a solid story, a journey from A to B, from waking in fear, to finally sleeping with comfort and safety.

28 Weeks Later comes (initially) as a geeky contemplation of the backstory after the rage virus destroys the UK. They are just infected people and people have to eat, and despite us seeing the infected chomping down on necks, we never actually see them eating the people they attack. They either kill them and leave them lying, or infect them. Its more about the virus propagating itself, than nourishment. So then, the infected people will eventually starve, and die. After six months you can assume even the domino effect has burned itself out (a near dead infected bites a well-fed human creating a new cycle) combined with the severely reduced number of living people to actually infect, means ... they are all dead? 

The Americans assume as much, and having survived their own plague (the first movie mentions the virus appearing in NYC), they have come to London to setup a safe zone, and help repatriate British survivors who fled to the mainland. They still have to deal with the city full of dead bodies and the fear of someone being infected always looms, so the entire "safe zone" is one big armed camp full of check points, safety doors, rooftop snipers, patrolling helicopters, etc.

Our main characters come from a refugee camp in Spain, to the Isle of Dogs in London, isolated from the rest of the city by water and guarded bridges. There are homes, beds, food, clothing, water and electricity. They are Tammy (Imogen Poots, Green Room) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton [now THAT is a name], Salem Witch Doll), the children of Don (Robert Carlyle, Ravenous), a facilities manager in this area. The movie opened with Don hiding out with his wife and other survivors in a countryside house, until it falls, and a cowardly Don runs, instead of defending his wife. He carries the guilt of what he did, but does not admit to his children on how their mother died.

Buuuuut, if all the infected are dead, how can this be a sequel? We need the running and chasing! Oh, we have possibilities, like Dr. Scarlet (Rose Byrne, Insidious), an American doctor studying the disease and the measures the US army is putting in place. Don't they always have vials of infected blood stored badly for accidental exposure? No matter, what happens is more insidious. Don's wife Alice (Catherine McCormack, Braveheart) did not die; she was bitten but had natural immunity, and is now a carrier -- a half-mad, starving carrier when they find her. And when her husband comes to see her, barely believing what he is seeing, desperate for forgiveness, she gives him the kiss he wants. We think she knows exactly what she is doing, as seconds later he turns and tears her throat out. Patient 0+1.

What follows is action thriller lunacy. The Americans have measures in place to deal with this, and they activate them. But the doors don't stay closed, the infected spread quickly, and Don seems to have preternatural intent, unlike the infected that came before him. To be honest, I was very annoyed how easily the American security measures fell. They herd all the survivors, some 15000 of them, into ... rooms. They would have probably done better letting them shelter in place while securing the doors to the towers the residents lived in. Or at least started by making stronger doors protected by more soldiers. No matter, all Hell breaks loose and not long after The General (Idris Elba, Luther) issues "code red", i.e. fuck it, kill em all -- infected, survivors, anyone on the ground. Oh, that didn't work either. Fuck it, just firebomb the entire fucking island. Oh, and gas the surrounding city, just to make sure.

Meanwhile, Don's wife is dead, Don is a monster, and his kids are being protected by Dr. Scarlett who has realized the kids might carry the same natural immunity as their mother. And Random Soldier Doyle (Jeremy Renner, Hawkeye) has decided the "kill em all" order is bad, and protects the small group as they escape the city. I know that Robert Carlyle was the Named Name for this movie, and they need him on camera as much as possible, but his Lone Infected act is just ... odd, and never explained. Eventually he catches up to his kids, reasons unknown, probably just Angry Dad Syndrome, and that weeds the survivors down to just the kids... who do escape, much to the detriment of the rest of the world.

Don't get me wrong, the action lunacy is well done. Its non-stop tension and terrible and tragic. But I would have preferred if they had double-down-ed on the geeky backstory contemplation. They could have maintained the "investigate the immunity" concept, highlighted how even the best security measures could be bypassed by foolish behaviour, had The General have emotional reactions to seeing his best laid plans fail, give hints as to why Don was an entirely new breed of raging monster, dealt more with the conflict between "protect the world" vs "save the innocent". Instead, they just all ran in terror and tore everything down.

Obviously, in that we are getting a 28 Years Later movie, the "wait out the starvation effect" factor becomes less reliable. And while it could be just a "the UK was abandoned entirely while the rest of the world recovered", I suspect the movie will be true post-apocalypse, the virus having finally reached everywhere and all measures failing and now.... a few struggling pockets of "civilization". But we know how people treat each other when things are at their worst, don't we?

Kent's recent post about it.

KsMIRT: Why you gotta go and make things so animated

 K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month Kent steps through the TV series he completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.  Although December was dominated by watching Hallmarkies, the work schedule winding down meant more time to catch up ...on cartoons? Superhero cartoons, to be explicit.

This Month:
Young Justice Season 4: Phantoms (2021/2022, Teletoon, 26/26 episodes)
What If Season 3 (2024, Disney+, 8/8 episodes)
The Venture Bros Season 7  (2018, Adult Swim, 10/10 episodes)
The Venture Bros.: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart (2023, d. Jackson Publick - bluray)
Kite Man:Hell Yeah Season 1 (2018, Adult Swim, 5/10 episodes)
Creature Commandos Season 1 (2024, Adult Swim, 7/7 episodes)

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The What 100: Superboy and Miss Martian travel to Mars to get married and get embroiled in the contentious politics and race/class war that is consuming the planet. Superboy apparently dies in the conflict, traumatizing many of his teammates. Meanwhile as the Lords of Chaos accelerate their agenda against the Lords of Order, Orm has a new ploy to become king of Atlantis, and on New Genesis, Rocket attends a summit with the New Gods and Green Lanterns to petition for support against an unseen enemy. General Zod becomes Superboy's saviour in the Phantom Zone and plots his escape.

(1 Great) Of the various story arcs this season, my favourite by far was the Zatanna-led segment. Here she is acting as mentor to a trio of young mages, including Mary Bromfield (who, offscreen, has foregone being Mary Marvel due to being addicted to the power), Khalid Nassur (who in the comics is the current Doctor Fate, but not yet at the start of the show) and Traci Thirteen. They face agents of Chaos, first Klarion, and later face the far more powerful Flaw and Child. They are outmatched and need the help of The Demon and Doctor Fate. It's just rife with deep-cut characters from the DC pantheon, which is some of my favourite things.  I generally don't love magic and/or fantasy unless there are rules to apply and here YJ explores the concepts of the Lords of Order and Chaos in a manner that's both nebulous and still quite clear the way things work. 

(1 Good) I love the Milestone Universe. It was a BIPOC-created superhero universe published by DC in the 1990s, featuring characters of colour as heroes, villains, sidekicks, supporting characters...just generally elevating the prominence of people of colour in comics, as well as creators of colour. Once Milestone ceased publishing, it took over a decade for the characters to return, and when they did, they did so integrated into the DCU. So when Young Justice started expanding its roster in season 2, there was some low-key placement of Milestone heroes like Static, Icon and Rocket in the peripherals of the show. I've been waiting a long time for any Milestone character to get featured play, and Rocket gets a 5-episode arc as the Justice League's emissary to the New Genesis summit, except the arc starts weaving itself tightly into the Connors-in-the-Phantom-Zone story and Racquel gets a bit lost. I wish we had spent even more time with her and Orion, as he teaches her how to embrace her autistic son.

(1 Bad) I'll rant in the meta section, but my least favourite part of season 3 continued to be my least favourite part of season 4. I generally like Beast Boy as a character but the character as presented in this show is constantly aggravating. In the opening episodes on Mars, he was behaving like a totally ignorant Ugly American, and after Connor's "death" he spirals into a sleeping pill addiction and becomes a total asshole to everyone, which is very hard to watch (largely because I can't stand the vocal performance). I miss the happy-go-lucky Beast Boy of the Teen Titans animated series, and I can only hazard that since it's the same voice actor they really tried to push the character on a radically different path.

META: I was frustrated by season 3 because it hyperfocused on a singular storyline I didn't really care too much about, when we knew there was a larger story percolating underneath. I went into season 4 thinking that the larger story, that's been basically teased since season 1, would finally reveal itself and lead to an epic DC-style event story. 

But no, instead we are once again presented with 26(!) episodes that only hint at the major conflict to come while it treads water on a half dozen stories that themselves seem utterly decompressed and at times quite tedious. Four of these story arcs take place on other worlds - Mars, Atlantis, New Genesis, and the Phantom Zone - and the Weisman/Vietti tendency to wallow in the world building made for frustrating viewing. 

This is a show with a cast of dozens, maybe even exceeding 100 active characters, but, just like last season, it spends most of its time developing only a few of these characters. Superboy, Miss Martian, Aqualad, Halo, Forager, Rocket, Beast Boy, Zatanna... and it seems like they should be able to do so much more.  The fact that the end of the season reveals that Mary Marvel has now gone evil and is a new Female Fury should have happened on screen.

Knowing that YJ was cancelled (or "not renewed") I was hoping that we would have some closure. Alas....

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The What 100: Uatu, the Watcher (Jeffrey Wright, Westworld), is an ancient celestial being tasked with observing and recording the events of the Multiverse. He is our guide through the MCU Multiverse as we explore the weird and divergent worlds.

(1 Great) Where the comics version of "What If?" was generally focused on tweaking one plot, story or character element to manufacture an intriguing alternate reality for the Marvel Maniacs out there, this animated series has instead taken great delight in just creating bizarre scenarios that use existing (and newly created) MCU characters in different, darker, or outrageous scenarios. For me, my greatest delight of season 3 was the weird and wild pairings, such as Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) and Kingu (Kumail Nanjiani) as 1930's Hollywood icons,  or Howard the Duck (Seth Green) and Darcy (Kat Dennings) hooking up and the resulting baby egg being the most sought object in the universe.

(1 Good) The voice talent in this series is off the freaking charts. Each episode is a stacked cast of voice talent that's just one mind-blowing name after another.  Like in "What if... the Hulk fought the Mech Avengers", you've got Wright, Anthony Mackie, Mark Ruffalo, Teyonah Parris, Sebastian Stan, David Harbour, Simu Liu, and Oscar Isaac. Or in "What if...Howard the Duck got hitched", it's Wright, Dennigs, Green, Samuel L. Jackson, Christ Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Clark Gregg, Michael Rooker, Rachel House, and Josh Brolin. Insanity. You just kind of forget that all these people have played Marvel characters. 

(1 Bad) Like the comics version, what might appeal to one person may not appeal to the next. I wouldn't say any of these stories are bad, but some of them feel a bit under baked compared to others. I wish "What if...the Emergence destroyed the Earth" had more time to play in the very bizarre sci-fi reality it exists in, as I was less interested in the Riri Williams vs. Quentin Beck conflict than I was about the strange reality of life on an exploded planet.

META: What If...? was always a series for the die-hards, the fans. It's fun to play and explore other ideas with these characters, but ultimately it doesn't mean anything to the larger face of the MCU. It was the same with the comics....they're a lark. There is continuity in What If...? as each season has ended with a two-part wrap up that ties some of the previous episodes and characters into a story where Uatu himself gets involved. Here, Uatu's occasional interference in events in various stories puts him on trial, and it's up to Captain Carter and her allies (including Howard and Darcy's child, Byrdie, now grown up and voiced by Natasha Lyonne) to save him from being erased from existence.  Unlike the previous two seasons, where the climax was threatening reality, this climax brings it to very individual stakes of Uatu's life. It might not be the epic conclusion to this series that some were looking for, but Uatu's appeal to his fellow watcher The Emminence (Jason Isaacs) is kind of a really great moment.

I don't know if I'm sad that there's not going to be more What If...? or not.  They're kind of an amuse bouche, but hardly a meal. I enjoy them but they're not exceptionally memorable...and as I said, they're not really important to the canon of things. But that said, I really want to see Byrdie in live action (and Devery Jacobs' Kahhori too).

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The What 100: The Monarch takes his guise as the new Blue Morpho, scourge of the underworld, to the next level if only to stick it to the Guild of Calamitous Intent, now headed by his wife, Dr. Mrs. The Monarch (nee Dr. Girlfriend). Hank gets left behind as both Dean and his girlfriend head off to college, then gets a concussion in a snowstorm. The Venture building in Manhattan takes on a life of its own. Dr. Venture chairs a peace summit between the Guild and O.S.I. and later builds a teleporter which becomes the hottest contested object between factions. Billy Quizboy gets his first nemesis, and a hundred and one other things occur....

And then in the movie... a new villainous agency, ARCH, starts messing up the treaty between the Guild and O.S.I. The heroes and the villains are going to have to find a way to work together against this new mutual threat. Plus the secret connection between Rusty and the Monarch is finally revealed.

(1 Great) Every episode of The Venture Bros. has its own stand-alone arc and yet is also jam packed with world building, character expansion and jokes galore. The absolute commitment that creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer have to ever-propelling things forward means that nothing is stagnant. Publick and Hammer never get comfortable with a scenario or setting.  The early seasons of The Venture Bros. were far more episodic and self-contained, but as the duo got more comfortable with the idea of exploring the in-world reality of the show, and it's labyrinthine, near-incestuous history, it blossomed as one of the most consistently entertaining shows (despite its radically inconsistent schedule, of seven seasons and a movie over the past 20 years).  Each episode leaves me satiated by the resolution of the adventure-at-hand, and yet there's always a slice of "I need to know more" based on the nuggets of info or teases that were dropped. And I can only imagine, based on where the show (followed by the direct-to-video movie, Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart"), that we would actually see Hank and Dean grow as distinct individuals. I get the sense that Hammer and Publick could keep developing this forever, and they would never run out of ideas on how to fuck with the characters, nor run out of new characters to introduce.  

(1 Good) The animation, the voice acting, the swearing, the violence, the nudity, the pop culture references, the exploration of generational trauma and daddy issues, the exploration of relationships (lovers, family, friends, employee/employer etc), the general weirdness, the twisting of expectations, the striking visual designs, the toying with other Warner Brothers properties... pretty much all of it is good. I never go into watching The Venture Brothers with any expectations, and so everything delivered is always a surprise.

(1 Bad) Despite originally being picked up by HBO for a season 8, the show was prematurely cancelled. WB/HBO threw Venture Bros. fans a bone by letting Hammer and Publick take their in-development Season 8 plans and turn it into a direct-to-video movie.  The "movie" does play like a highly compressed season, and the only thing that separates it from a regular episode of VB is its length and the absolutely thumping updated Venture Bros. theme by the incredible J.G. Thurlwell.  The animation is the same great animation, and the story has the unfortunate task of wrapping up some (a mere few) loose threads while also really propelling things forward even more, and ultimately ending up at a place of familiarity which one might find satisfactory if there weren't so much more left to watch these characters do.  A much as I enjoyed the movie, I feel like we were cheated out of a season rather than gifted a movie.

META: The Venture Bros. has never been readily accessible in Canada. If it ever had a home on Canadian cable broadcast as a first-run show, I'm either not aware or I've forgotten (maybe the early seasons?). For me The Venture Bros. has been primarily consumed on physical media, and the DVD or Blu-Ray releases of the show have been erratic at best.  Availability for the later seasons - especially in the 2010s, when physical media was on the rapid decline and streaming was taking over - was sparse. I'm only just learning that there is in fact a season 7 physical media release in 2019, despite checking numerous times over the past few years.

My point is, I have, pretty much since the show's inception, always been behind the curve, which always meant there was more Venture Bros. for me to watch. There was a comfort in knowing that I always had more ahead of me, and now, having gotten to the end, there's only the emptiness of knowing there is no more to be had.  

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The What 100: The run-down hangout club where Kite Man and Golden Glider spend their "off hours" is going to be spitefully purchased and shut down by Lex Luthor, so the pair run a heist to raise the funds and buy the bar themselves. Bane becomes a regular and Darkseid's daughter Malice, in a desperate position becomes a server at the bar.

(1 Great) It's remarkable that Kite-Man, of all characters, has his own TV show. An also-ran of the also-rans, Kite-Man was always a deep, deep cut character that most comic readers had never actually seen in action. He would have probably been popularized on one of those early 2000s-style websites that would have "25 lame supervillains you've never heard of (for good reason)" following Doctor Bong and the Calculator. He was given a little spike of attention in a semi-recent Batman run by Tom King who seeded the character in as a point-of-view character of a lackey caught in the crossfire of the War of Jokes and Riddles. "Hell yeah" became Kite-Man's catchphrase in that storyline. So, really, what's great, is to see this ridiculous character get his flowers in what is surely a done-in-one season of animated television.

(1 Good) I have to be honest, when I had started writing this I had only seen up to episode 5. I had fallen asleep/sugar-crashed early in the second episode and went in and out of consciousness until the fourth episode, so I didn't really absorb all of what Kite-Man had to offer and I wasn't too enthused by what I had seen. But I returned to it and binged episodes 6-through-10 which, I have to say, built up on each other quite well, increasing the stakes for the characters and beyond. In episode 7 or 8, Darkseid turns up looking for the anti-life equation, which is the maguffin of the entire series, and, as voiced by Keith David, he is a freaking delightful dose of entitled surliness. There is a scene where it's David, the late Lance Reddick as Lex Luthor, and Judith Light as Helen Villigan which is just a joyful sequence of voice acting...not to mention Darkseid always has a Greek chorus following him wherever he goes punctuating everything he says, which is an comedic trope that just keeps on giving.

(1 Bad) It took me a while to get into the show, but, as I said, I zonked out for a few of the early episodes, so it's fair to say I didn't give it a fair shake on my first watch.  Coming out of "viewing" the first half,  I was hoping Noonans, the bar that Kite-Man and Golden Glider buy, would be a hotbed of DC's lowest-tier supervillains, and it's just not scratching that itch for me.  After watching the second half, I enjoyed it a lot more, especially when Kite-Man gets powers and becomes Beast Mode, whose superpower is all about being a conceited dickhead. What Beast Mode did, though, is accentuate Kite-Man's bro-energy, to the point that when he returned to being Kite-Man all I could think about was Alex Moffatt's Guy Who Just Bought A Boat (to the point where I thought Moffatt was Kite-Man all this time, not voice actor Matt Oberg). The amount of times Kite-Man and Golden Glider call each other "babe" drives me insane.

META: Reading the recaps I may have to give, at least episode 3 a (re?)watch.  Episodes 4 through 6 served as a connected story, exploring time travel shenanigans and elaborating on Golden Glider's dark history. I applaud the show for thread building and some really clever plotting to lead to some heavyweight character moments, but the show doesn't capitalize on that weight. With The Venture Bros. fresh in mind, I'm really reminded about how a comedy cartoon can both capture emotional moments while still retaining its offbeat tone. I don't think Kite-Man is successful in doing so (and for that matter, neither is Harley Quinn)... the emotionality tends to be undercut here by the comedy.  It's the kind of thing where I don't think the show cares about its characters as people, and that leads to these more sentimental moments falling flat.

I like it?

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The What 100: In the wake of the events of Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, Amanda Waller is no longer able to use human prisoners as an expendable task force. But they said nothing about inhuman prisoners. Led by Rick Flagg Sr., Waller assembles the Creature Commandos, consisting of The Bride (of Frankenstein), G.I. Robot, The Weasel, Nina Mazurski (a fish lady), and Dr. Phosphorous, tasked with stopping the witch Circe and her squadron of right-wing toxic masculinity from assassinating the royal family of the nation of Pokolistan...only to later be tasked with doing exactly the same thing. Meanwhile Eric Frankenstein (Frankenstein's monster) resumes stalking The Bride.

(1 Great) I watched the first five episodes in a binge, and the latter two week-to-week. The first episode is all setup and it's the usual crackerjack rapid fire comedy, hyperviolence and pathos that we come to expect from James Gunn. I was immediately getting those Venture Bros. vibes I was just mentioning I was missing. The subsequent episodes are sort of Lost-style, where the main plot progresses while diving into one character's backstory (origin stories actually).

(1 Good) The music, as to be expected from any Gunn production, is top notch. He crafts scenes to songs, and here he has chosen a soundtrack filled with the Dresden Dolls and Gogol Bordello, with Clint Mansell and Kevin Kiner returning from Peacemaker and The Doom Patrol to be the key orchestrators of sounds for this new television universe arm of DC.

(1 Bad) The show starts losing steam around episode 5, as it begins to feel like its stretching out the main story in order to provide enough episodes to cover each Commando's "flashback". The fact that episode 7 features both a flashback and concludes the story really does highlight how out of steam that main plot was.  By that point in the show the hyperviolence in both main and flashback story begins to get exhausting, especially as the heaviness of the main story increases (and it seems each flashback just gets progressively darker). Plus [spoiler] at some point G.I. Robot gets exploded and he was such a source of levity for the show, but his joke is pretty one-note, and Gunn probably wisely didn't run it into the ground. I'm also quite a fan of Frankenstein and The Bride in the comics, and I'm not sure how I feel about Gunn turning Frankenstein in to a stalker, and then trying to turn his abhorrent lack of self-awareness into comedy.

META: This was a very bold choice to be the very first product released under the Gunn-headed DC Studio's new DC Universe. Clearly his forthcoming Superman film is an all-ages affair, but this is a hard-R cartoon rife with violence, sex, and the foulest of foul mouthed swearing.  It's clearly right in line with Peacemaker, and not too far off from the R-rated The Suicide Squad (both Gunn-written before taking on the the head of the studio) but it does signal that Gunn is not looking to mirror what Marvel is doing (except that Marvel is now very much in the Deadpool game which is not far off from Gunn's sensibilities).

The voice cast is phenomenal, with recognizable names all throughout. Of course, Viola Davis is back as Amanda Waller, Sean Gunn does double duty as G.I. Robot and making the Weasel's weird squeaks, Indira Varma plays The Bride, David Harbour is Frankenstein, Alan Tudyk hops over from voice work as  the boisterous thespian Clayface on Harley Quinn to be the much more sinister Dr. Phosphorous her, Zoe Chao plays Nina Mazursky, and Frank Grillo rounds out the main cast as Rick Flag Sr.  Guest voice actors include Steve Agee, Stephanie Beatriz, Michael Rooker, Peter Serafinowicz, and Linda Cardellini.

 

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Ah-Ah-Argento #2: The Cat O' Nine Tails

1971, d. Dario Argento - dvd

If I were to guess why I didn't watch (or rent or buy on DVD) The Cat O' Nine Tails when I was first getting into Argento back in the early 2000s, it was likely because it was one of Argento's lower-ranked films. Argento himself has said its his least favourite of his movies (he notes that it's too referential to other films and genres and doesn't establish its own uniqueness).

Despite claiming to love Argento, I'm still a relative neophyte. I still have much to watch and learn about the director and his repertoire. That said, from what I know is coming, I would agree that this is his weakest film (at least until we get into his 2000's-era output).

It is very much in keeping with traditional giallo -- being a detective mystery sans detective. Here, James Franciscus (an actor I only know as Brent, the lead from Beyond the Planet of the Apes) plays a newspaper reporter who, with the help of a blind ex-reporter (Carl Malden) and his young ward, starts to connect the pieces to a break-in at a lab and subsequent murders.

The lab was working on identifying the XYY (ex-double-why) chromosome as a signifier of violent tendencies (it was speculation at the time, but since absolutely debunked). It's only natural to suspect the murderer is someone involved in the project, and it's kind of obvious who it might be.  The only thing is, conceit of the XYY chromosome is only introduced about halfway through the film, so the film relies heavily on learning about what the precipitating incident (the break-in) was about, and thus learning about the project.

Also being very much a giallo neophyte, I don't know if it's common in the genre for the police to aid a civilian detective in their investigation(s). It's something that also happened in The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and it's just so odd. There's a phenomenal moment here were Franciscus is socializing with a police acquaintance who is holding out on him, and Franciscus says "You're a real bastard" to which his police friend says "Naturally, cops are all bastards... we beat confessions out of people, we take bribes, we oppress minorities...." This is 1971, remember.

Argento is clearly experimenting with this film, playing with visuals and pacing and styles. His use of point-of-view (POV) camera work is next level, particularly the early sequence where the killer carries the body of a security guard and tosses it back inside his security booth. I just don't recall anything like that before. Her Argento aslo toys with manufacturing suspense a few times, in sequences that drag on longer than they should, really interrupting the pacing of the film. But he does have livelier sequences as well, such as a car chase sequence which I'm sure is an homage to The Italian Job. It's very well executed and big extra points for the driver being the film's femme fatale, while our protagonist sits in the passenger seat trying not to look panicked. 

I didn't mention that The Bird With The Crystal Plumage's score was by Ennio Morricone, since the master delivers a solid, but rather routine work.  Here, Morricone's score is a complete other level, sound wise, like it skipped a couple generations. Experimenting with repetition (Argento describes it as being like a music box), Morricone establishes themes and patterns and remixes them throughout. "Bold, dissonant and traumatic" he calls it, "I wrote themes that were more simple, nearly childish".  Only someone of Morricone's talent and genius would think that a masterful, controlled score like this were "childish".

One final note, I have to give a lot of respect for Argento's gay and trans representation in this film. At one point Franciscus needs to enter a gay lounge which is all trans, drag and gay men. Franciscus clearly feels out of his element, but he his neither repulsed nor harassed (though it is clear he is seen as the outsider). It is a scene that shows people just having an enjoyable evening out, listening to live music and socializing. Later Franciscus learns of a gay love triangle with some hard feelings that could point to murder, but doesn't.  It treats this very much in the same manner as if he uncovered a straight love triangle. There are just hurt feelings of lovers, and there's nothing sensationalistic about it.

It's by no means a bad movie, but it's not a great mystery, and t.  

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End

2024, Carles Torres (Pet) -- Amazon

Despite not having any evidence to such, I want to say this movie was released because of the trailers for 28 Years Later appearing, with such impactful tension. Not because this movie has the same level of tension or gravitas, but merely because in the world of "zombie" sub-genres, these two share a world. Not literally, just that both "plagues" are people infected with a rage virus. To be clear(er), this is not a movie about the dead rising or walking or shambling. This is about a pandemic that quickly infects people and changes them into running, screaming, biting, tearing, eating monsters.

Oh, and its set just before Xmas, so if I had felt so compelled, I might have included it in the Xmas Leftovers.

So, just before Xmas in Spain, Manel (Francisco Ortiz, Amar es para siempre) is driving home from his sister's place, with his GF, and crashes his car -- she dies. One year later he is a mess, so much so that he just ignores all the news going on about the emerging pandemic. Via said news in the background, and over video call arguments with his sister, we see the pandemic go from "its in Russia" to Spain closing its borders to "shit, its here too". His sister and family, with ties to the government, are evacuated the the Canary Islands and she makes her brother promise to not be sent to any quarantine zones -- "shelter in place" is his best option. Not long after, he and his cat Lúculo are the only ones in his neighbourhood.

My favourite zombie survival movies give me this brief period of reprieve where the survivor can hide away in their home. As long as the water continues to flow, the automated power plants provide some electricity and you have plenty of food stored away, you can go ... for a while. Survival is counted in days, weeks and rarely looks to the future, nor to the reasons as to why you are fighting to survive. I guess, no matter how bleak it is, we always expect things to just "blow over" eventually. Manel has all this, and an additional boon of a side-gig in the solar power business. Even when the power goes down, he can still charge his phone.

Eventually he starts running out of the essentials and has to go outside. And eventually he realizes he has to leave the whole area. Via an elderly neighbour he finds, he learns of boats leaving the coast, bound for the Canaries. While he hasn't heard from his sister, as even with power, cell towers have died, he believes her to be safe. But now he has to find his way to the coast, with his cat.

Zombie flicks are almost always road movies. There are always obstacles and ever present danger, but the point is to get from A to B where maybe there is something better. We know that the 'maybe' is always tenuous. Zombie plagues tell us that, really, there is no where safe. Manel tries to escape by water, but his boat breaks down. He is picked up by Russian sailors, but learns they are more dangerous than the zombies and escapes with one of the less-evil sailors when Manel tells him he knows where a helicopter will be, and the Russian Ukrainian knows how to fly it. I am not sure why Manel thinks the helicopter will just be there, unused, just waiting for them to find it, but sure.... a lot of the movie has Manel acting on faith, an automated belief that safety is around the next corner.

Of course, there are more people at the hospital, and LOTS of zombies (hospital = infected people) and the Russians have followed them... for revenge? They have to make their way quietly through the maze of an abandoned hospital, to the miraculously still-there helicopter, through the hordes, and avoid the Russians. It felt like the end-scenario for a video game, the final chapter in a game where getting onto the chopper precedes the closing credits. And, actually, my favourite zombie game, Left 4 Dead from 2008, had this exact scenario --- get through a hospital, to the roof, to be picked up by a helicopter.

Unfortunately, as the chopper flies over open water, packed with kids, Manel's phone finally connects and.... "DON'T COME TO THE CANARIES !!" The End.

They likely won't get their sequel, but for a generic zombie flick, it was pretty solid. Like in 28 Days Later, they find the balance between survival and the journey and the tension-terror of fighting off the zombies. Most of the thrilling escapades feel plausible, and there is just enough background behind Manel to actually root for him. But it's no Danny Boyle movie. We rewatched that last night and it feels so much like the template for movies, and video games, to come. Obviously this one. Boyle stripped his movie down to the bones, especially with the camera work. The movies that follow will always be bigger, brighter and attempting more, but I hope that this one stands out, in the world of Spanish zombie movies.